Pecked to death by ducks (27 page)

The diamond mine I visited was under a particularly rich mountain called Parai-tepui. The men had set up camp near a small river fed by the falls of Parai-tepui. They had dug a pit on the banks of the river. One man was blasting the sides of the pit with a fire hose. Another held a suction hose to the resultant water and mud at the bottom of the pit, and this muck was carried to a large, vibrating machine called a lavador, which separated sand from heavier minerals. The next day all six men would sift through the heavy stuff with gold pans.

A large, heavily muscled black man who spoke that peculiar stately brand of Guyanese English—nineteenth-century British colonial with a Caribbean lilt—told me the mining equipment cost twenty thousand dollars. The crew had been working the area for six months but had found nothing.

"Nothing at all?"

"Oh no, we are very poor here and shall leave soon."

When word of a big strike leaks out, men come on foot from Canaima, from Ciudad Bolivar, from the depths of the jungle. They come by boat, by chartered plane; they come, and the law is of no avail because the only law is the law of the jungle. Claims are jumped; men are injured; men die. When the army finally arrives to restore order, claims are apportioned among those who are there whether they were one of the original miners or not.

"We have absolutely found nothing here," the man said.

Later, in Santa Elena, I talked with a diamond buyer who knew the miners and who had invested in and worked the mines himself. His name was Floyd, and he was originally from Texas. Floyd's comment about the situation was "Oh God, I hate the taste of anteater."

Miners will spend months prospecting in the bush, and if they are finding anything, they will stay even after their food runs out. No one can be trusted to leave, stock up, and keep his mouth shut. "So each crew has a hunter," Floyd said. "I've eaten every kind of animal there is in the jungle. The deer is good. Sometimes I've been out so long our hunter ran out of bullets. But you don't want to leave, and any river that is coughing up diamonds will spit up a few gold nuggets too. So what we've done—and more

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than once—we've made bullets out of the gold nuggets. Keeps us there another few weeks. And then the son-of-a-bitch hunter goes out and shoots an anteater, which is the most rancid-tasting damn meat on the face of the earth."

Floyd had taken a suction hose to the bottom of the rivers on free dives, with scuba gear, and with a compression rig. "The piranha don't bother you when the water's running fast, but in the dry season, the river will leave isolated holes they call posos, and the piranha in them are hungry little devils." He claimed to have seen an anaconda "thirty feet long and big around as a fifty-five-gallon oil drum. Why, I saw one of those snakes sunning itself on the banks of a river, and it had the horns of a buck deer sticking out of its mouth. That big fellow was just going to have to wait awhile until the deer's head rotted away and he could spit those horns out."

Most of the diamond miners Floyd knew lived like the garimpeiros of Brazil. "Some of these guys, they'll hit a strike, get them some diamonds, and maybe they'll try to save a few of them. Some of them, they get back to Ciudad Bolivar, load up a shotgun, and fire six or seven dozen of them into their ceilings. Doesn't help, of course. Pretty soon they're standing on a chair, digging in their ceilings with pocketknives. They got to be poor before they come back to the jungle, and sooner or later every single one of them is poor again. Being poor is part of being a diamond miner. You can't be a diamond miner—your mind just won't let you go humping through the jungle looking for diamonds—if you own any of the suckers."

Floyd talked a little about a town I had passed on the rutted dirt road into the Gran Sabana, a place so nondescript that it had no name. The settlement was called Kilometer 88 simply because it was 88 kilometers from someplace that did have a name. "You see those scales on the bar there?" Floyd asked. "Those are for measuring out gold or diamonds. Bartender's seen so much gold, so many diamonds, he could be a master jeweler. Anyway, fellow I know, he hit it big, had a bag full of diamonds, and he was up at Kilometer 88 waiting for a ride. Probably figured he'd go to

Caracas, meet some woman, buy her a mink coat straight from New York City, something like that, and the two of them would go riding around in a limousine for a month. . . ."

What actually happened, Floyd said, is that the lucky miner dropped a stone on the scale and bought drinks for everyone in the house while waiting for his ride. There were the usual four or five patrons, but within an hour there seemed to be hundreds. The miner bought more drinks, and everyone, one after the other, proposed toasts to his good fortune. The fellow said he was honored to have such friends, and, as diamond miners will do, he began giving away stones to those colleagues who were less fortunate. The patrons there at the bar in Kilometer 88 stood patiently in line to receive their gift, then scuttled out the back door, and got in line again, so that by the time the Land Cruiser arrived for the Benefactor of Kilometer 88, he had nothing left. Several of the patrons saw that the miner got a meal—it was the least they could do—and then they rented his Land Cruiser, with his diamonds, and took off for Caracas looking for women who might need mink coats for cool tropical evenings.

"That miner was back in the jungle within twenty-four hours," Floyd said, "and it didn't take his pals much longer."

"Well," I said, "somehow that story reminds me of the way they used to test stones to see if they were diamonds down in Brazil. They used to put them on an anvil and whack'em with a big hammer."

"Figures," Floyd said. "Diamond miners got traditions too."

set high on a hill overlooking the ocean. Paved streets plummeted down the hill to the line of restaurants that faced the water. This was not the most elegant of establishments—it was something of a dive—and there were rough-looking men, fishermen and day laborers, drinking heavily at the bar at ten in the morning. They were big men, descendants of the Spanish conquerors, of Italian and German immigrants who came later, and there was little or no visible evidence that any of their people had intermarried with the local Indians.

The men were drinking pisco, a fiery pale brandy made from the first pressing of grapes. The most popular brand was Pisco Control, and the most popular drink was the pisco sour, a blend of two thirds pisco, one third lemon juice, a bit of sugar, and egg white shaken with crushed ice. Five or six of these can drop an untrained drinker to his knees (take my word for it), and, in Castro, should one see a man walking down the street naked, with an ax in his hand, it is a good bet that he is under pisco control. (I never saw such a scene, or anything like it, and was not entirely disappointed that I never had occasion to utter this rather anemic witticism.)

Meanwhile, a waiter wearing a red vest and black bow tie placed my breakfast on the table: grilled sea bass, baked bread still warm from the oven, and freshly squeezed orange juice. I considered the hardworking, hard-drinking men combined with the civilized service and great food and caught the vague odor of San Francisco at the turn of the century.

But there was something else here as well, and I tried to put my finger on it. Umiliana was telling me about her problems with the brujos. In 1956, when her first daughter was born, she had trouble breastfeeding, and the doctors found slivers of wood under her skin. Umiliana pounded her chest to show where they found the wood. And then, every morning, she began finding dogs and cats in the house, though she locked all the doors at night. For nine years she never felt entirely well.

These manifestations suggested magical interference in her life: brujos. Umiliana investigated and discovered that there was, in fact, an association of brujos. There were, she said, initiation

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rites: ceremonies in which men and women went to outlying uninhabited islands and walked naked in the frosty cold of winter. Umiliana raised her eyebrows to indicate the supernatural strangeness of the act. The would-be brujos walked three times around the high-tide line as a way of making deals with the Devil in exchange for power.

Umiliana had stumbled onto a woman who was head of the association of brujos. She was, Umiliana said, a good woman, an atypical brujo, one who wanted to help people. For a certain sum of money Umiliana was given a document insuring her health and that of her family. Neither Umiliana nor anyone in her family had had a single sick day since that document had been signed in 1965.

And yet, Umiliana said, there were still brujos everywhere on the island, in every small village, and sometimes, at night, in the deep, fog-shrouded forests, they danced their ecstatic brujo dances, reconfirming their pacts with the Devil. God help anyone who stumbled onto such a gathering.

And it came to me, then, the odd sense of deja vu these stories of witches and woods and bears in the bed engendered. The Germans had come around the turn of the century, farmers looking for land in the dense forests of Chiloe, men and women familiar with the work of the brothers Grimm, who had collected folktales of the forests of Germany, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands nearly a century earlier. Here, on Chiloe, people still believed those tales or tales very like them, and they told the stories at night, sometimes by the light of kerosene lamps.

Chiloe: the last fairy-tale island in the world.

Chiloe, 157 miles long and 32 miles wide, is the second-largest island in South America (only Tierra del Fuego is bigger). It is separated from the mainland by the narrow Chacao Channel, which is served by a regular and efficient ferry service. When I crossed over on the ferry, dolphins raced the boat, and small penguins porpoised alongside, flying through the cold water with a grace they would never exhibit on land. A cold gray jet of steam rose in the distance: a whale blowing.

Located on the Pacific coast of Chile, the island lies at the 42nd

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degree of south latitude, about the same position south as Coos Bay, Oregon, is north. The weather is also about the same in both places: cool, damp summers; biting cold, sometimes snowy winters moderated by the marine environment.

At 42 degrees south and 42 degrees north, the sea is provident, often shrouded in fog, and the locals take great pride in their rock-ribbed independence. They are fishermen, timber workers, farmers, and shopkeepers. In both places there is a small tourism industry that caters to those looking for solitude and seafood rather than luxury resorts and sophisticated entertainment.

With a population of about 120,000 people spread out in two main towns and dozens of small villages, Chiloe is lightly populated, though Ancud and Castro (the two main towns) are crowded in the summer tourist season (December, January, and February).

Visitors are almost always from mainland Chile, and generally from the capital city of Santiago. Renato Arancibia and his wife, Isobel, for instance, once worked as travel agents in Santiago. After the birth of their two boys, the couple took stock of their situation. It was a two-hour commute to and from work every day. What was the purpose of having children if you had no time to enjoy them?

A few years ago the family visited Chiloe. Recent development had ended the island's endemic power and water shortages. Telephones—in the main cities—worked just fine. The people were, in Renato's words, "simple," by which he meant they were men and women of the land and sea, upright, honest folk, and very shy. The island was "tranquil"—it was a word every Chilean tourist used at least once to describe Chiloe—and a good place to raise children.

Renato and Isobel set up a travel-oriented business across from the market on the waterfront at Castro. His business, Pehuen Expeditions, rents mountain bikes and runs party boats to the small outlying islands where the last vestiges of "old Chiloe" are to be found.

It's a hand-to-mouth business. Tourists, especially foreign tourists, haven't quite caught on yet.

I pedaled my rented bike past the Castro market, where colorful hand-knitted wool sweaters sold for about seven dollars. The road wound down the waterfront, and past the palafitos: homes of fishermen that extend out over the sea on great stilts made of hard local wood. The houses were shingled in weatherbeaten wood and were very picturesque. Indeed, they are best enjoyed in pictures, because it is clear that garbage and perhaps sewage are dumped into the sea from these homes, which are considered one of the tourist attractions of Chiloe.

The homes are a holdover from the old days, when there were no roads on Chiloe, and merchants sold the fishermen of the palafitos sugar and salt through open windows, from boats. Today, there is a paved road bisecting the island from Ancud in the north all the way to Quellon in the south. (Okay, the last ten miles or so aren't paved, but they are negotiable by rental car.) Still, near the historic and photogenic palafitos, there are signs warning that it is unsafe to swim.

The road I was riding cut across a bridge and rose into the steep farmland across from Castro. The sky was several different shades of gray, and a light breeze set numerous brands of wild-flowers swaying in the fields. Pastures, apple orchards, wheat land, and potato fields were set out in square patches. The farmers had left the forest intact at the periphery of their fields, and the undulating, alternating patterns of agriculture—the dark green of the potato fields, the gold of the wheat, the verdant greenery surrounding them—made the island seem softly sculpted.

There were robust dairy cattle in the fields, and they shared the pastures with small island horses. At the fences, on my side of the dirt path, where the animals couldn't get at it, the land literally erupted in vegetation. There were blackberry bushes, bright red drooping flowers that looked a bit like Indian paintbrush, yellow snapdragons, and a kind of purple flowering clover. For a moment the sun bullied its way through the clouds, and several shafts of purely celestial light fell across the landscape so that Chiloe seemed a kind of Eden, complete with birdsong.