Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

by Glenn Dixon

  Yet Peru had once been a land of great wealth. Before the Spanish arrived, this whole area was rolling in precious metals. Gold to the Inca was known as “the sweat of the sun” (thus the name of Peruvian money — the sol — the sun). Silver for the Inca was called “the tears of the moon.”

  I went down to see the ruins that were left here, to a fantastic place called Qoricancha. It was just off a busy street in the centre of Cusco. It had come to light again only when an earthquake caused a section of the Convent of Santo Domingo to collapse.

  Qoricancha was the Temple of the Sun. It was the most important temple in the Inca world. In its heyday it was covered with more than seven hundred plates of solid gold, each the size of a car door. Qoricancha means “Golden Courtyard,” and in addition to the hundreds of gold panels lining its walls, there were life-size gold figures, solid-gold altars, and a huge golden sun disc. The sun disc reflected the sun into the temple and bathed its dark interior with light. Smaller rooms off to the sides existed for the worship of the lesser gods: the moon, Venus, thunder, lightning, and one little cell for the rainbow god.

  I can only imagine how the conquistadors’ eyes must have bulged when they saw this vast temple of gold. After they kidnapped the Inca ruler, they asked for all the gold plates as a ransom. Then, after the Inca had dutifully taken down the gold and carted it off to the conquistadors, the invaders reneged on their deal and killed Atahualpa, anyway. Then they melted down the gold and shipped it back to Spain. There the coffers of the king and queen overflowed with the riches of the New World and made Spain, for a time, the richest and most powerful nation on the planet.

  The gold is now long gone, and the countries of South America are, for the most part, mired in poverty. The tourists come, as tourists do, to gawk at the old ruins, not only Inca ones but Spanish ones, as well. And so it goes.

  I travelled from Cuzco south to Lake Titicaca, an old name that has been the source of countless jokes in North America. No one really knows where the name originated, but it might be a combination of two words, one from Quechua and another from Aymara, the local language spoken around the shores of the lake.

  I took a boat out to a group of islands known as the Uros. They’re heavily touristed these days, which is unfortunate because these islands hold one of the most unique cultures on Earth. The Uros have literally constructed the islands they live on from reeds. No one knows how long they’ve lived on the lake, floating on their artificial islands, but it’s at least as far back as the time of the Inca some five hundred years ago.

  There are actually only a few hundred people still living on these islands, and from what I saw, that’s largely to take advantage of the tourist boats that come out to snap pictures of their unusual lifestyle. It was very strange stepping off the boat and onto the soft mush of the islands. You feel your feet sink a bit into the reeds, and you get the sensation you’re still floating. Old peasants, bundled in traditional clothing, huddle over blankets spread with homemade jewellery. Reed huts, emerging almost organically from the reed platforms, show where they live, though at least one, I saw, had a satellite dish for a television.

  Apparently, the reed islands rot from the bottom so that the Uros are constantly adding new reeds to the top. They even make their local boats from long sweeps of these totora reeds.

  No one speaks the Uros language anymore. They traded with the Aymara people along the shoreline of the vast lake, and in time they lost their language and adopted Aymara. Across southern Peru and Bolivia there are still about two million Aymara speakers — not an inconsiderable group. They had been subjugated by the Inca, though there’s evidence that the grand Inca architecture might have been based on earlier Aymara civilizations and that the Inca rulers themselves might have been descended from Aymara people.

  At the south end of the lake, on the Bolivian side, a bright little village runs up from the beach. It’s called Copacabana — not to be confused with its better known namesake in Rio de Janeiro. In fact, there’s also a Copacabana in Colombia to the north, another one in Australia, and most confusing of all, a Copacabana in Croatia, just outside Dubrovnik. Go figure.

  Anyway, this little village of Copacabana in Bolivia is full-on Aymara. At the local market you can see old women with bowler hats a couple of sizes too small and neatly pinned to the tops of their shiny black hair. Across their shoulders are shawls of llama wool, brightly died in patterns older even than Inca symbols. And up by the cathedral in the central square I witnessed one of the oddest sights I’ve seen. Tuesday mornings are reserved for the “Blessing of the Automobiles.”

  If you’ve ever bought a new car, or more precisely if you’ve acquired some old piece of junk that is, in fact, new to you, bring it to the cathedral for a blessing before you drive it around. On this morning we saw from the beginning that a long line of cars had been parked in front of the cathedral. Many were decked out with flowers, much like we might decorate a car for a wedding party. They were immaculately scrubbed and polished so that the rust and peeling paint glistened. Their owners stood by proudly and expectantly. Then, at about ten o’clock, a priest came out of the cathedral with a bucket of holy water. One by one, he went down the line of cars. The owners opened the hoods, and the priest paused before the cars’ engines, uttering Latin blessings, dipping a small brush into the pail of holy water, and spashing it across the engines and around the entire car while the owners smiled broadly and snapped photos of their young cars’ Confirmation.

  Copacabana is actually a lovely little town, and I stayed there for several days, relaxing in a place slightly off the tourist trail, a little out of sync with the world, a place where time seemed to slow down and almost come to a complete halt. In fact, the Aymara language itself does the most wonderful thing with time. In English we speak of the past as being behind us and the future, quite logically, in front of us. All this is based on the metaphor we have for time: that life is a journey, a road we travel down.

  In the Aymara language, things are completely reversed. The past, in Aymara, is spoken of as being in front, while the future is thought to be behind. The very word they use to describe the past is nayra, referring to the front. The expression nayra mara — meaning “last year” — is literally translated as “front year.”

  That confused me for a while until it was explained and then it made perfect sense. We already know the past, we have lived it, and therefore we see it in front of us. It’s in full view.

  The future, though, is unknown. It can’t be seen and therefore is behind us, unseen and unknown. The older Aymara people even gesture with their hands, pointing their thumbs behind them when speaking of the future and sweeping their hands forward when talking about the past. The younger Aymara don’t do this. This is believed to be because they’re now bilingual in Spanish where, of course, the metaphor is the same as English. And so the old ways are being eroded.

  To the best of our knowledge, Aymara is the only language on Earth that presents time in this manner. Others — and these include tongues as diverse as Polynesian, Mandarin, and even African Bantu — have been shown in intensive studies to point the arrow of time from back to front. But that doesn’t mean it has to be that way.

  Humans are incredibly flexible creatures. We construct whole cities out of ideas. We erect meanings out of colours, yarn, and rocks. We build new ideas directly on top of old ones, like cathedrals over ruins, and by the sheer fluidity of our minds, we can twist the river of time and turn its very flow.

  10

  The Headwaters of the Amazon

  Quito lies a bare twenty kilometres south of the equator. It, too, was once part of the Inca Empire. Now it’s the capital of Ecuador and is a sprawl of two million people. I’d come by bus through the Avenue of the Volcanoes, some of them still spewing ash and steam. From here, though, I would be venturing east into the headwaters of the Amazon where there are still people who are all but untouched by the outside world.

  From Quito I tagged along on a
series of increasingly smaller propeller planes. By the time I got to Shell, an outpost on the edge of the jungle, I was shuttled onto one final aircraft, an aging Twin Otter held together with piano wire and duct tape. It reeked of leaking diesel fuel, and the propellers whirred unevenly, spinning us crookedly into the air.

  When the plane was aloft, engines whining, windows rattling, we flew over a thick jungle canopy. It stretched to the horizon on all sides like a giant broccoli pizza. There were no roads, no power lines, no signs of anything vaguely smacking of civilization, just the endless green of the Amazon in the borderlands between Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil.

  I was going to see a people called the Achuar, who weren’t “discovered” until the 1970s. Today, not much more than a single generation after first contact, they still live out of reach of the modern world in thatch huts, hunting monkeys with blow darts, cultivating tiny gardens in clearings on the riverbank.

  Their language exists only within a relatively small area of the Amazon River Basin. And that was what I’d been searching for. What sort of language would they construct deep in the rain forest where there were no metal objects, no stones — nothing but roots, fibres, and leaves? What sort of symbolic systems would they create, surrounded as they were by almost endless jungle?

  As I’ve said, languages are socially constructed things. We all agree that a certain symbol, a word, say, has a particular meaning. In Achuar the pronunciation of ensa means “river,” but that doesn’t explain what it signifies for the Achuar — that it’s their central means of transport, that it’s easier to paddle upriver in a dugout than to try to cut through the jungle with a machete. It doesn’t reveal that they orient themselves to the world in terms of upriver and downriver. It doesn’t indicate that they count the seasons by the way the stars move over the river.

  The sky was falling into darkness by the time the plane skidded onto a mud strip cut between the trees. Waiting for me was Philippe, who would be my translator. Born in Quito, he had studied anthropology and had gone through a series of rigorous courses certifying him as a jungle guide. He had been living with the Achuar people for just over a year, long enough to get to know their ways and be reasonably accepted in their community.

  I followed him away from the airstrip down a muddy path through the jungle. A full moon shone above the dark branches. We still had to hike a short way to the river and then paddle up it in a dugout canoe. When we reached the river, it was silver with moonlight, a long strip of light through the dark forest.

  The Kapawi is one of a thousand tributaries that eventually flow into the Amazon. It’s a twelve-day hike from the nearest road. As we slid down its muddy banks toward the dugout floating there, we came face to face with Shakai. His face was painted with thin black lines, and he didn’t look at us or smile. He was short but powerfully built, coming from a stock of often brutal and ruthless warriors.

  Shakai was Achuar and would be our guide for the next five days. He was somewhere around thirty, I guessed, and he would have grown up in a world of green leaves and parrots, of slithering anacondas and unrelenting heat. We climbed awkwardly into the dugout. Shakai got in at the front and remained standing, easily balanced, gazing only at the river without the slightest acknowledgement of our presence.

  I’d already learned that this was part of Achuar culture. Eye contact is seen as aggressive. Through many centuries of almost ritualized warfare with the surrounding peoples of the rain forest, the Achuar had taken on a cautious, wary air. Everything was potentially dangerous. Death hid in the water, in the forest, and even, as I was soon to find out, in their dreams.

  Philippe sat in front of me, hands gripping the edge of the dugout. He spoke some Achuar, and Shakai now uttered a bit of Spanish so that between them they had worked out a sort of understanding that Philippe would then try to translate back to me in English.

  The electric buzz of insects had come up with the setting of the sun. The draping trees on either side of the river swelled with life. We moved through the water slowly, and after a time Shakai began to let out a strange whistle — five descending tones that trailed off sadly, almost eerily. To our right, deep in the forest, a call came back to us: the same five-tone descending scale.

  “What’s that?” I whispered at Philippe.

  “Shakai is calling to one of the birds — the common potoo. This bird only sings during the full moon.”

  Shakai whistled again, mimicking the bird call exactly.

  “It’s one of their myth birds,” Philippe continued. “They call her Aujujai.”

  “And Shakai knows its call?”

  “He can imitate the call of many animals. This bird, though —” Philippe turned to look at me “— is an important one. The Achuar believe Aujujai is in love with the moon. Maybe you’ll hear the story later … when they get up for the telling of their dreams.”

  “Dreams?”

  “Later.” Philippe turned back toward the front of the boat. “In the early morning — that’s when they tell their dreams.”

  Under the full moon the river was now a ribbon of pale, shimmering light. The forest on either side was lost in blackness, and even Shakai had become a silhouette against the starry sky.

  An hour later we approached a grouping of huts set along a swampy lagoon. A few more Achuar men came down to greet us. The Achuar are one of four tribes in this part of the Amazon. Collectively, they’re known as the Jivaro, and they all speak slightly different dialects of the Jivaro language. To the west, slightly closer to civilization (and therefore slightly more habituated to the Western world), are the Shuar, who are famously known as headhunters. They were the ones who shrunk the heads of their enemies in a practice known as tsantsa. The Achuar, even deeper in the forest, don’t believe in such rituals. They think of them as cannibalistic and barbaric. Instead, they simply bash in the heads of their enemies and leave it at that.

  Achuar men are meant to possess kajen, a predisposition toward anger and violence. It’s expected. Until relatively recently an almost endless series of personal and family vendettas ravaged the forest. Today, even, meetings between groups of people, anyone outside one’s own family and friends, are carefully ritualized. Eye contact, as I said, signals aggression. Eye contact between males and females is even more problematic. It signals desire. Desire begets jealousy, and so in a heartbeat, we’re right back to violence again.

  These old ways, though, are already showing the first signs of change. Only a generation ago the Achuar lived in family groupings deep in the forest. Now they’ve started to congregate in larger communities, villages almost. Our plane had bumped down into one of these “new” places. The Achuar there had cleared the landing strip, and an array of huts and tin shacks had sprung up.

  This wasn’t the Achuar way. Already their social constructions were changing. With the arrival of airplanes, and more specifically, cooking pots, machetes, and medicine on these planes, not to mention white adventurers like myself, their world, the very organization of their way of life, was already evolving into something new.

  We had journeyed past that “new” village to a place much farther upriver where the people lived in much the same way as their ancestors had for centuries. Everything they needed came from the forest. They hunted and fished and constructed their huts according to a set of belief structures that were unlike any I’d come across before.

  The next morning Shakai and Philippe took me on a jungle hike. Shakai went first, hacking through the vines with his machete. Philippe trudged behind him, and I trailed in the rear. The canopy was filled with wildlife, and Shakai stopped occasionally to point into the trees and name the animals and birds. To describe the forest only in visual terms, though, is to miss much of it. Whole symphonies of sound swelled and thrummed around us. It was muggy. My clothes, from the first hour there, were never quite dry again. They clung dankly and began to smell — a musty odour not of sweat so much as a sort of earthy scent, like that of wet grass or mushrooms.

&n
bsp; We tramped along slowly. I felt as if I’d spent too long in a hot tub — thoroughly weighted down with the heat of the place. Everything was various shades of green. Even the sky was obscured by the forest canopy. A sort of mulch was underfoot, and if I peered closely enough at the rotting leaves and branches, I quickly discovered they were alive with wriggling things: ants and spiders and creatures I had no name for. Occasionally, butterflies as big as two hands flitted through the trees. They were a shimmering, iridescent blue, and the hue was startling in the midst of all that green.

  Philippe plodded behind Shakai, translating his few words. In the long silences my attention drifted to a square box Philippe had strapped to his back. It was about the size and shape of a hardcover book, and I could see an electrical wire sticking out of the zipper.

  “What’s in the box, Philippe?” I asked.

  “Oh.” He stopped and proudly flipped it opened for me. Two little paddles were in there, and a battery or something.

  “What is it?”

  “A portable defibrillator. Look at this — twenty thousand volts!”

  “Jesus, are you expecting someone to have a heart attack?” I glanced around. There was no one there except me and my companions. The air was as thick as water, and I’d been marching along lethargically, my heart thumping in my ears.

  “No, we don’t use it for that. It’s for snakebites.”

  “What?”

  “Snakebites. It’s pretty new. They’ve just discovered that the jolt of electricity somehow dissolves the venom.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Yeah, twenty thousand volts. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet.”

  “I hope you don’t.”

  Philippe’s English was perfect. To my surprise he’d lived in America and even worked for a time not far from my own home in the Canadian Rockies. He had gone through an intensive training program to become a guide and interpreter with the Achuar, though he fully admitted that his knowledge of the jungle wasn’t even a hundredth, not even a thousandth, of what the Achuar knew.