At Play in the Fields of the Lord

by Peter Matthiessen

  He worked quickly to free himself. Then he was hanging from the harness by his hands. He raised his knees in order to strike the ground with his legs bent, winced in advance, and dropped. He hit and rolled in the soft humus of the forest floor, clambering to his feet in the same instant and pitching toward a shelter of high buttressed roots. He crouched there, his heart pounding, the revolver in his hand.

  In the first awareness of the object in his hand, he came close to panic. Far from reassuring him, the revolver reminded him of his helplessness; its cold touch had broken through some vague protective spell. He pressed back against the roots. Alone in this darkness, with nowhere to hide, nowhere to flee, he felt like a creature fallen down a well; his fear would strangle him or stop his heart. Even now the Niaruna, bows taut, on quick silent feet, were circling in upon him, and though he raged at himself that the Indians must not find him helpless, he could not move.

  Be frightened then, but keep your mouth shut. Sinking back, he let his limbs splay drunkenly. In a few minutes the terror subsided and he was able to breathe freely and stand up.

  He peeped over the root walls; for all he knew, a Niaruna warrior might be crouched on the far side of his own tree. Then he straightened and shoved the revolver back into his belt. He must not crouch or peep again, but must brazen it out like an immortal.

  Except in rain, the great force in this nether world was silence; his first footsteps did not make a sound. The forest was still as quiet as it had been since the explosion. There was no air to stir the leaves, and no bird called. Filtered through the tiers of branches and the white silk of the parachute above, the morning light was vague and luminous, sepulchral, like the light in a dark cathedral; the brown-greeniness of the atmosphere was so tactile that he could rub it between his fingertips. The forest life went on far overhead, in the green galleries; it was only in the sun space cleared by death and fall that new life could rise out of the forest floor. Beneath his feet the ground was not ground at all, but a dark compost of slow seepings and rotted leaves which, starved of sun, reared nothing but low fungi; it gave off a thick, bitter smell of acid.

  He sensed that he was still alone, but this feeling he did not trust, nor did he cling to it as a good omen. Possibly the explosion had put the Indians to flight, but he could not count on this. Any movement he made might be provocative and therefore dangerous, but he had the initiative and he must keep it. He started toward the village.

  Ahead of him a dog was barking; there was no sound of human voice. He moved slowly, picking his way around the monstrous root masses of fallen trees, climbing over the dead trunks. Far over his head, at the edge of light, loomed strange parasitic ropes and shapes, and hanging air plants and lianas, red bromelia, huge ant nests like excrescences on the high columns. The enormous tree trunks, smooth and pale, disappeared into this riotous world, supporting it.

  The bark of the dog, tentative at first, was now turned toward him, and was steady. He was filled with rage against this dog, whose outcry tore his nerves; no matter how he chose to meet the Indians, its mindless yapping might weaken the aura of the supernatural that could save his life. Perhaps he should signal his arrival by shooting it down with the revolver, but this thought was scarcely concluded when its barking rose to a high fit of shrieks and then subsided. The silence sifted down again, like shifting vapor.

  He was too tense now to reflect on this event, which only reminded him of human presence; at least one Indian had not run off in panic. His hand strayed wistfully toward the revolver. But except as a last resort, this was not his weapon: he had already gauged his arsenal, which consisted of—in order of importance—the Descent from the Sky, the Explosion and the Initiative. The first two were already spent, and the last was risky.

  The quality of light had changed, and lianas entwined the lower trunks, and undergrowth, a wall of leaves—the jungle edge. He was right on top of the Niaruna village. He dropped to his hands and knees, then slid forward and a little to the right; he moved by inches, careful not to commit his hands without checking first for biting ants or worse. There was a passage through the leaves, and a broken glimpse of the Indian clearing. Through the coarse odors of the foliage, he caught faint smells of human excrement and wood smoke. He wriggled forward, stretched close to the ground; a hunting wasp, night-blue in color, flicked back and forth before his face, then fretted, hard wings clicking, on a leaf.

  A high-peaked maloca, perhaps eighty feet by twenty, occupied the back of the clearing, parallel to the river, with several round huts placed at random on the two remaining sides; the round huts were dilapidated, their doorways rank with weeds. All of these structures were thatched with palm fronds, and camouflaged by ground and forest, like huge oven nests of birds. Each had a single entry facing eastward. The clearing itself was a bare ground littered with small fires and half-burned logs, rotting palm-leaf baskets, old torn matting, broken clay pots, wood mortars and pestles, an old dugout canoe used as a trough, a half-completed dugout, and near one of the fires, some coils of fresh clay for new pottery. A vegetable patch half overgrown with passion-flower vines was visible behind the maloca, and behind this patch the manioc plantations, rude broken clearings of burned tree trunks and piled undergrowth, stretched inland from the river.

  At the near edge of the clearing, not ten yards from his face, an orange dog lay in the sunlight, flanks twitching and dirt clotted on its tongue. A long cane arrow with bright blue-and-yellow feathering protruded from its body just behind the upper forelegs.

  To the left of the dog, on a stump beside a hut, sat a blue-and-yellow macaw; the bird’s wings and tail were virtually denuded. Its head was cocked, and it rolled its white eyelid up and down in a slow heavy blinking that was almost audible, as if to bring its bald eye into better focus; it shifted white fleshy feet upon the stump, but did not cry out. In the silence the bird uttered one soft gargle of apprehension and was still.

  The macaw saw him. Because this was so, the savages across the clearing, though they could not see him through his screen of leaves, knew exactly where he was. There were three of them in view. The nearest, a powerful Indian with broad heavy features, was older than the other two. All three were staring at the point of his concealment, and all three were on their knees, unarmed. All three—there was no mistake about it—had their palms pressed together at their chins as if in prayer, though one man kept dropping his left hand to scratch uneasily at his groin.

  He blinked and stared again, so powerfully did this scene affect him: the passion flowers and the bird, the green walls climbing to bright sky, the painted men, the ringing silence of the morning, strangely intensified by fear, by sun and death. The same light that spun from the live feathers of the bird caught its dead feathers on the arrow. Except for the execution of the dog, this tableau must have been intact for the near hour since he dropped out of the sky.

  The Indians awaited him. He backed up slowly, inch by inch, to a point where he could stand.

  So elated was he, so sure once more of the inevitability of his coming, that he had to caution himself against some idiotic act of glee. He felt omnipotent, as if by stepping forth into this sunlight he might transcend the past, and future too. Wasn’t that the talent of a god?

  But in the daylight, gods were mortal and took mortal forms. He stripped himself of all his clothes, all but his belt, which he used to strap himself in the manner of the Indians. With his right hand he held the revolver and with his left clutched the wadded clothes behind his back. He filled the air with loud strange whistlings that savages might associate with the supernatural; then he stamped forward, hurting his bare feet, and crashed out of the darkness into the light.

  The macaw shrieked. One Indian threw himself backward and ran for the cover of the forest, but the other two held their ground. The older man seemed to shrink into himself, prepared for death, but the young warrior thrust out his jaw, face muscles quivering.

  Moon stood there rigid beneath the sun, like something sprun
g out of the earth. The terror of the Indians was so vibrant that he felt foolish standing over them. He decided to sit down, not only because his penis band was slipping, but because, since his legs would no longer support him, it was the most sensible thing to do. In an effort to look godlike, or at least ritualistic, he sat down cross-legged, one arm akimbo.

  The man who had fled at his approach scrambled back out of the jungle and took his place with the others; he moved bent over, almost on all fours, to indicate that he had not really abandoned his position, had perhaps never been absent at all. The feathers in this man’s headband were askew, and his wide mangy belt of monkey fur made him look shorter than he was. His face was live and ugly, and he muttered over his shoulder at someone in the bushes; Moon heard the giggle of a girl. The other two frowned, but they did not take their eyes off Moon; the younger one looked restless, on the point of action, as if at any moment he might take Moon’s initiative away from him. Moon raised his fingers to his mouth, then dropped his hand, raised it again and dropped it, after which he rubbed his stomach. He then looked pointedly at the oldest of the three men. This man had long hair to his shoulders and a broad face with lines as deep as scars; he wore a simple headband without feathers and the curved incisors of a jaguar in a pendant on his chest. Except for a thin bellyband, he was naked. He rose slowly and came toward Moon, his face a mask of pride and terror; he stopped a few feet away. The other two rose also, but remained in place. Their gaze was so rigid that Moon could not support it; he fell once more to rubbing his stomach and putting his fingers to his lips.

  The headman turned and called out to the jungle, and a girl came forward. Though uneasy, she did not seem afraid; she moved with a kind of saunter. Her wide smile, because it eased his tension, seemed to him beautiful. The girl continued to smile even when the headman spoke to her angrily; she raised both hands to her mouth and peeked at Moon around the Indian’s shoulder.

  The headman took her by the arm. He pointed at the girl, then with both hands made a motion away from his own chest toward Moon and said, “Pindi tai’ nunu kisu.” Moon guessed that the girl had been placed at his disposal; if so, for the moment he was safe. The girl went off toward the fires and came back in a little while with cakes of manioc and a calabash of masato. Behind the headman, for Moon’s benefit, she pantomimed drinking the masato; she staggered, rolled her eyes, and touched her throat, as if about to vomit.

  Encouraged by her boldness, the rest of the band came slowly from the forest; small children ran forward, slowing suddenly as they neared. They edged in, one by one, dragging one leg around the other. There were forty or more people now in view, of which sixteen—he counted them—were men; there were few old people, and few children. All, from a distance, watched him eat and drink.

  The sun was higher now and the birds silent; the sound of his feeding was the only sound in all the world. He did not want to look the Indians in the face lest they perceive his utter helplessness; around him the brown legs moved closer. He felt pale and foolish and hemmed in, like a nude in a thorn bush, and the warm grassy smell of their crowding bodies brought on another fit of fear. He wished that he had not removed his clothes, he wished that he had brought presents for the tribe, he wished that he was in Barbados. He was exhausted from lack of sleep, from nerves, from the withdrawal of the ayahuasca. His mouth was so dry that the rancid manioc turned to chalk; yet he could not spit it out, for fear of giving insult. The suspense among the savages was so intense that he felt claustrophobic; they awaited him. He had come to them out of the sky, a god, a spirit, and now he sat here, weak and naked, head bowed. They moved closer.

  On impulse he threw his arms out wide and scowled vilely at the sun. Like deer surprised, the Indians froze for a moment where they stood, and a low gasp and exclamation—h-chuh!—was lost in a dismal moan of fright as they broke and fled. In a matter of seconds he was alone in the jungle clearing. He held his pose for a few moments to let them feast their eyes upon him from the bushes. Then he took up Quarrier’s notebook and found the words for “come” and “friend.” Huben had discovered that a makeshift verb without tense or declension could be formed simply by adding wuta to a noun; a note in the margin said, “Wuta: cannot really be spelled phonetically, sounds like spitting out grapeskins, thspoota.” Another note read, “Yoyo says the headman to the east is called Boronai.” He put the notebook away and called out, “Marai-wuta,” but his voice cracked so badly that he had to start all over again.

  “Marai-wuta!” He beat himself upon the chest. “Mori! Mori!”

  Behind him he heard a speculative grunt, and whirled to face the young warrior who had awaited him in the clearing; this man stood at the jungle edge behind him. In the anger of surprise Moon waved him foward to join the others; though the man obeyed him, he did so casually. The band convened behind him. For a Niaruna, this warrior was tall—his slim body and small shoulders made him appear as tall as Moon himself—and like the headman, he wore his hair long. The mouth in a lean jutting face was held perpetually half open, as if about to lick its chops, and the nostrils, too, were ravenous. The hair was held back by two long feathered wooden needles which pierced his ears, and his face was framed by two broad lines of black which, starting from the point of a large V between his eyes, zigzagged around his eye sockets and down the sides of his face. The bright eyes and bold clear structure of his face, with the black marks like sideburns, gave him the fierce aspect of a falcon.

  This man had stalked him successfully from behind, and he himself had demonstrated anger; some sort of confrontation must take place. Moon tapped his own chest and repeated his name, then reached across—and now the Indian flinched—and tapped the other. The Indian, if he understood, affected not to, and was silent. After several failures, Moon knew that he had lost face. He pointed suddenly at the headman. “Boronai,” he said aloud, and the Indians sighed in astonishment. Boronai himself looked surprised and angry at hearing his name pronounced, but he said nothing.

  The young Indian now tapped himself slowly. “Aeore,” he said, pronouncing it syllable by syllable, AY-o-ray, and the other Indians giggled covertly. Then he pointed at the heavy-set warrior in the monkey-fur belt: “Tukanu,” he said, and the Indians laughed again, all but Tukanu. Aeore pointed at Moon. “Moon,” Moon said encouragingly.

  “Kisu.” In an odd flat accusatory tone, a tone mixed with fear and suspicion, Aeore contradicted him.

  Moon nodded vigorously. Pointing at each of the three men who had awaited him in the clearing, he said, “Boronai. Aeore. Tukanu.” Then he tapped himself. “Kisu-Moon,” he said: it seemed best to retain his name, having already stated it. “Kisu-Moon. Mori. Mori.”

  “Kisu-Mu,” Aeore said, unsmiling.

  This is him, Moon thought, this hungry one. This is the man who shot the arrow at the sky.

  14

  IN HIS FIRST DAYS, THE DREAD IN HIS LUNGS LAY HEAVY AS COLD MUD; he was never certain when he went to sleep that he would awake at all, and often, awaking, he would try to pretend, by keeping his eyes shut and backing into sleep again, that he was elsewhere. But now he had lost track of the days and could rest peacefully, and he slept a great deal, as if years of fatigue had overtaken him.

  He was at a beginning and at an end. He had thrown away his bearings, like a man who treks at night into a wilderness and hurls his map into the wind and drops his compass to the bottom of an unknown river.

  Though the air was hot, his body had turned cold in the gloom of the maloca; he drew his knees up to his chest and clutched them to him, then opened one eye, like a peephole. To judge from the light it was midafternoon. About him, the hammocks were empty, but he sensed a presence and turned his head to see the smooth, dusty back of the girl Pindi. She was squatting by the embers of the fire, threading black polished nuts and bits of river mussel on fine strings of silk grass, her breasts with their large dark nipples swaying, her cropped hair touching the bold bones of her face. She wore a loincloth woven from soft fibers of
wild bark, a bracelet of armadillo shell, and a beetle-wing necklace, iridescent. Now and then she paused to spin the bast upon her thigh.

  Moon studied her with pleasure: the wide young mouth hung open in absorption, the swelling of her thighs and hips which rested on her heels, the dusty skin which merged with the soft earth, the sun-born colors of her ornaments. Beyond her, their heads silhouetted by the hard glare of the clearing, a row of children peered in at him from outside, and beyond them some figures passed, truncated by the hairy fringe of thatch. A soft clamor of activity drifted from the far side of the clearing; there the men, laughing and hooting, were working on a new dugout.

  The enthusiasm of these people for their new friend knew no bounds. Even on that first morning they had smiled more widely than he had thought men could smile. The Niaruna were still touched by sun.

  The women had stood behind their men, arms around their waists, and the girl had laughed aloud. “Kisu-Mu mori Pindi,” she had said, giggling so violently, both hands to her face, that finally, unnerved by her own boldness, she had hid behind some of the other women. Boronai had dragged her back to Kisu-Mu. “Boronai puwa Pindi,” he said, using both hands to indicate his own forceful techniques of copulation. “Naki Kisu-Mu puwa Pindi.”

  “Kin-wee,” Moon said: Good. He tried smiling at Boronai, and Boronai smiled back.

  “Wai’lua.” Boronai placed both hands gently on the ground and gazed about his clearing. “Wai’lua.”

  My earth, my earth—could that be it?

  “Wai’lua Niaruna,” Moon hazarded; there was a certain risk in this, since the white man’s name for a savage tribe was often a derogatory one provided by its enemies. But at his words the People smiled—all but Aeore of the falcon face, who yelled contemptuously. At this, the warrior named Tukanu stepped away from Aeore and pointed at him. “Yuri Maha!” Tukanu exclaimed, as if thereby distinguishing Aeore from the rest of them, for now all the people near this Indian moved back a little. Aeore gazed at Moon without expression.