Voyage By Dhow

by Norman Lewis

  In other directions the irresistible bait of trade-goods, of fish-hooks, hunting-knives, axes and aluminum bowls has done its work, for the old nomadic expeditions in search of fresh hunting grounds have become fewer and fewer, and this in turn has wiped out stocks of game and fish in the vicinity of Colorado. This being the case, the Panare are always on the lookout for someone with transport who may be cajoled into giving them a lift on a hunting trip to an area which can no longer be reached on foot in a single day.

  We took six Indians in the back of the Toyota Land Cruiser deep into the endless park of the savannah in search of mangoes. The fruit-bearing trees could be picked out in the little spinneys dotted about the grassland by the almost artificial brilliance of their foliage among the delicate lavenders and greys of savannah trees. When the Indians spotted them they jumped down, cut bamboos and stirred the branches to dislodge fruit, touching off explosions of toucans and parakeets which streaked away squawking into the sky.

  An inclination to keep on the best possible terms with the Panare, with the hope of the ‘for nothing’ in mind, compelled us to agree with the suggestion they next put up, which was a major fishing expedition which would involve poisoning a stretch of river. This would be done by the use of enerima, a liana growing in the mountains which is pounded up and added to the water. The whole idea is a little repellent from the viewpoint of the West, but sporting restraints are meaningless in the context of primitive food-gathering realities, where no one kills for the fun of it but simply to eat. Fishing for pleasure is unknown in the outback of such countries as Venezuela, and insofar as the town-dweller eats fish at all, it is frozen and imported. Consequently the rivers remain stocked, probably to capacity, and when the flow virtually ceases in the dry season, pools form in which stranded fish are confined in an ever-shrinking volume of water, where they are preyed upon by fishing eagles and otters. In this season alone, the Indian uses his poison. His evolution has made a conservationist of him, although he remains unaware of the fact.

  It took a day to find and cut the enerima and next morning we set out for the Tortuga River, a tributary of the Orinoco, at its nearest point about thirty miles away. The Toyota was crammed, as before, with Panare, but a large number had set out before us on veteran bicycles purchased through the missionaries, with the message ‘Christ is coming’ painted on the mudguards. On these, pedalling furiously across the savannah, their arrival coincided roughly with ours.

  The pool chosen was some 100 yards long by 20 in width. Shoals of kingfishers as big as starlings were splashing into the water when we arrived. Some fifty Panare lined both banks while the poison was being pounded up and put into baskets which were rinsed into the water.

  Within five minutes of a milk whiteness spreading into the pool a greater subaqueous commotion began, a spinning Catherine wheel of tin-plate reflections just beneath the surface, from which a big fish sometimes spun away then shot off in a straight line, dorsal fin cutting the water, making for the shallows. Occasionally one broke surface, launched itself into the air, thumped down on the bank, then propelled itself in a series of leaps a dozen feet across dry land. The Panare waited for the fish to slow down then speared them phlegmatically and without obvious effort, striking home with their barbed lances at thirty feet or more, and always clean through the head.

  Fishing, Stone Age style, was sensationally productive. In less than two hours several hundred fish had been taken, among them 25-pounders, and the total weight of the catch was in the neighbourhood of a ton. A few remained in the pool twisting and turning beyond easy reach, and the Panare said that these would recover in about four hours. Enerima seems to be a nerve poison of a sort, for it has no effect upon edibility. The fish were cleaned on the spot, and the first caracara—a spruce and elegant hawk that stands in here for the vulture—dropped from the sky to attend to the clearing-up. The only problem remaining was to get the fish back to the village, where it would immediately be smoked on the many frames already prepared, after which it could be kept some weeks before consumption. It was a highly successful occasion. And the Panare showed pleasure in their usual restrained way. One convert triumphantly produced a tract from the folds of his loincloth—although he was clearly muddled as to the nature of its message, headed, ‘Has life nothing better to offer than this?’

  The missionaries, with whom it might have been enlightening if not useful to discuss the matter of a ‘for nothing’, and of a reported ban on photography, were not at home to callers during our first two days in Colorado, and on the third day a plane came and carried them away. Thereafter the mission remained empty, but there was little doubt that evangelical interests were entrusted to their trainee ‘deacons’ who would report on all happenings.

  We had never felt over-optimistic about the ‘for nothing’ and were resigned now on being told that it could not be arranged after all. The excuse given was that a number of essential participants were about to leave on a trip to the mountains to collect tonka beans, for sale to the whites who used them to add fragrance to tobacco.

  Following this setback there was nothing further to keep us at Colorado, and we set out on our return to Caracas. On the way we made a side trip to a diamond-mining camp, attracted there by its name, Tiro Loco (Crazy Shot), and by the news of a recent settlement on its outskirts by Panare who had come down from their forests to taste what was to be had of the joys of civilization in the form of trade-goods.

  Tiro Loco prided itself on being tough. It was straight out of Chaplin’s Gold Rush, a shanty town built on a stratum of crushed beer cans, full of hatchet-faced villains in big hats and spectacular whores. In Tiro Loco you could actually see the swing-doors of a bar fly open and an unwanted customer pitched through them head first into the street.

  The mild, calm Panare newcomers had built their round-houses (the best examples seen) on a hillock above this dynamic scene, and the hard men of our times and the peaceful ones representing the distant past had got together to establish an easy-going and mutually satisfactory relationship. Food for the miners, apart from what the Panare had to offer, had to be flown in at great cost, most of it not worth eating when it arrived. The Panare grew excellent vegetables which they were very happy to offer in exchange for gardening tools from the store, or made up easily enough by the miners, if necessary, from the wrecked machinery and devastated cars cluttering Tiro Loco’s waste spaces.

  This Panare village was one of the few as yet unreached by the New Tribes Mission, and here the Indians lived happily under the protection and patronage of as hard-bitten a selection of humanity as it would have been possible to find. The miners supplied them with all they needed, with no strings attached. In Tiro Loco the Panare could drink, dance, paint themselves and perform their ceremonies to their hearts’ content.

  The Congressional committee investigating the New Tribes Mission failed to reach any positive conclusion, nor amazingly was its report ever made public. Inevitably the born-again Christian general had described them as a geopolitical necessity, by which he meant it was useful for Indians in remote jungle areas to be under the control of people who were so far politically to the right that they classified all their opponents, archaeologists, journalists, army officers, the Apostolic Vicar of Puerto Ayacucho alike, as communists, but this carried no weight with public opinion. Charges of espionage were held to be unproven. The Mission hardly bothered to defend itself against those of ethnocide, since in its doctrinal statement and its literature it made it abundantly clear that—presented under another name—this was precisely its goal.

  Venezuela, since the passing of the dictatorship, has the best human rights record of the countries of South America, and it is inconceivable that a country which accords the right of the freedom of religious beliefs to its white citizens should deny this primal right to its Indians. In April 1982, a missionary couple—the husband had been arrested and charged with illegal actions on two previous occasions—were told to pack up and go. Then in July of last y
ear Brown Gold announced that the Department of Justice had stated that no fresh visas would be granted to evangelical missionaries.

  If, as seems possible, this means that the end of the New Tribes Mission’s domination of the Indians is in sight, the Venezuelan Department of Justice will undoubtedly pay close attention to the fact that the Mission has prepared the ground for just such an emergency, leaving native evangelists implanted in every tribe whose task it will be to carry on the ethnocidal work.

  1983

  SURVIVING WITH SPIRIT

  OF ALL THE GREAT cities Naples has suffered least at the hands of that destroyer of human monuments, the dark angel of Development. Pliny himself, who once stood on a headland there to watch the great eruption of Vesuvius ‘shaped like a many-branching tree’ in the moment of the obliteration of Pompeii, would have little difficulty in picking out the landmarks of our times. Nor would Nelson and his Emma, who chose roughly the same viewpoint to watch the eruption of their day—nor, certainly, Casanova looking down from his gambling house over the layered roofs and the soft-yellow walls of volcanic tufa which hoard and dispense the special Naples sunshine. Hardly a stone of Santa Lucia has been disturbed (except by air-bombardment) since its celebration in the ballad of the 1890s. When the traveller of the last century was adjured to ‘See Naples and Die’, it was notwithstanding the competition offered by so many glittering rivals. How much more valid and enticing is the invitation now that so many of them have withdrawn into their shells of concrete.

  Naples is a once-capital city, glutted with the palaces and churches of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Seen from the heights above it, it is a golden honeycomb of buildings curved into a sea which, beyond a bordering of intense pollution, is as brilliant and translucent as any in the world. It is built on ancient lava fields, and has been threatened by numerous eruptions—only one of which, in 1855, came near to engulfing it: it was saved by the miraculous intervention of a statue of its patron saint, San Gennaro, on the Maddaloni Bridge, spreading its marble arms to halt the passage of the lava. Its history abounds with similar marvels, all of them attested to and recorded by responsible citizens of the day: a plague of mermaids, figures in Giotto’s frescos in the Castel dell’Ovo, so marvellously drawn that they were actually seen to move and, more recently, the prodigies performed by Padre Pio, the flying monk, who flew from an outer suburb to the rescue of Italian pilots shot down in combat with Allied planes, bearing them safely to earth in his arms. Dependably in March of every year the dried blood of San Gennaro liquifies in its ampoule in the Cathedral—the most hallucinatory of spectacles surviving from the Middle Ages.

  It is characteristic of Naples, described by Scarfoglio as ‘the only Oriental city having no resident European quarter’, that one of its kings, Ferdinand I, should not only have delighted to play the hurdy-gurdy but have commissioned Haydn to compose six nocturnes on the instrument. He was the ruler of a people infatuated with music, and there is music still, everywhere in the Neapolitan air. There can be few more poetic experiences in the local manner than to visit the Parco della Rimembranza, where the young of the city go to make love in their cars, and to clamber down the cliff to the point where, the passing fishing boats still out of sight, they can be tracked by the trail of their mandolin music on their way out to sea.

  Naples has been taken by a long succession of foreign conquerors, the cruellest of them Lord Nelson, who collaborated in the fearsome slaughter of the city’s liberals; and possibly the most corrupt the Allies in the last war, who virtually handed over civic control to the American gangster Vito Genovese, in the guise of adviser to the Allied Military Government—an experience from which the city has never wholly recovered. A continuing resistance to so many alien conquerors has sharpened the native capacity for self-defence, and, since few of the laws Neapolitans are subjected to are of their own making, they have a tendency to mistrust law in general. They are gregarious and gay, with a frank devotion to the pleasures of the table and bed. In the last war, Naples was almost certainly the only city in a theatre of warlike operations where civilian employees of our armed forces could apply for transport facilities to their homes at noon, to enable them to fulfil their marital obligations.

  Cities remain as wonderfully unchanged as Naples is, not from any compunction aroused by their charms in the breasts of the developers but because, for one or another reason, they see no hope of a return on their money. The economy of Naples is chronically ailing and slides from one crisis to another. It is generally accepted that an expanded tourist industry could be its salvation, but the tourists do not come. Some of the reasons why it fails to entice foreigners to break their journey on their way to Sorrento or Amalfi and spend a night or two in its half-empty hotels were listed in Il Mattino last year.

  Sorrowfully the newspaper admitted that Naples had become the home-town of petty criminality. In the past twelve months, 77,290 minor crimes had been reported, but in only 1,300 cases had arrests been made or the criminals even been identified. During this period 29,000 cars had been stolen in the city—possibly a world record taking into account the number of vehicles registered. The Vespa-mounted scippatori, the Black Knights of the alleyways, buzzing in and out of the crowds in search of a camera or handbag to snatch, had become so commonplace a sight as hardly to evoke notice, interest or comment.

  From a glance at the newspaper’s statistics it seemed, too, that an evening meal out was to be recommended neither to the native citizen nor the visitor to Naples, since fourteen leading restaurants had been raided by bandits in the past twelve months. It was the kind of experience most of us would want to avoid, but a Neapolitan friend involved in a hold-up had been stimulated rather than alarmed. He had been invited to Da Pina’s for a christening celebration. A nice party, he said. The best of everything, with the wine flowing like water. But about half-way through the proceedings three hooded men carrying sawn-off shotguns had walked in and ordered the guests to lie face down on the floor. He was impressed with their courtesy, their correct use of the language, and by the way they addressed their victims using the polite lei rather than the familiar tu. All in all, it was a bit of an adventure, he said, and well worth the trifling £4 or so he had been obliged to part with. His only fear had been that by some incredible mischance the police might show up and start a battle, as they had done at Lombardi’s Pizzeria last June, when fifteen customers were wounded.

  But most of the coups pulled off by the organized gangs, the Camorra, which imitate the Mafia of Sicily, are theatrical rather than violent. Three robbers who succeeded in sealing off Parker’s Hotel from the outside world, and who took two hours to ransack it from top to bottom, prepared and consumed a leisurely meal before departing.

  The recent capture of the Ischia ferry-boat was another episode that might have been modelled on a film; having despoiled the passengers with the now familiar show of civility and regret, the bandits leapt to the deck of a following motor-launch waving farewells and blowing kisses to the girls before vanishing into the night.

  If one has an affection for such movies as The French Connection, this is an environment not wholly without its own brand of attraction. What in its way can be more pleasant than to draw a chair out on to the balcony of a room in the Hotel Excelsior overlooking the exquisite small harbour of Santa Lucia, and there, glass in hand and without the slightest risk to one’s safety and comfort, play the part of an extra in such a film? The view is of the majestic fortress of the Castel dell’Ovo, dominating a port scene by a naïve painter: simple fishermen’s houses that have become restaurants, painted boats, tiny, foreshortened maritime figures, going nowhere in particular, a quayside stacked with the pleasant litter of the sea.

  There is less innocence in the prospect than at first meets the eye, because a corner of the port has been taken over by a fleet of some forty large motor-launches, painted the darkest of marine blues, devoid of all trappings, and having about them an air of sinister functionalism. From time to time
one starts up with a tremendous chuckle of twin 230 Mercury engines, is manoeuvred in swaggering fashion round the other boats and out of the port before, a moment later, trailing a wake like a destroyer, it heads for the horizon.

  This is the fleet of the best-organized and most successful contrabandisti in southern Italy, and in these launches (which give the impression of having been specially designed for the trade) are smuggled in the cigarettes and who knows what else picked up in incessant rendezvous with the ships steaming out from the ports of Tunisia. Smuggling is hardly the word to describe these operations, all stages of which, taking place in Italian waters, are on open display. The boats come and go throughout the day, unload their cargoes without concealment and cut a few jubilant capers in the harbour before tying up. There are no signs of the law in the harbour area, and motor-cycle policemen passing through Santa Lucia do so hurriedly with eyes averted. Understandings have clearly been reached at high levels. Customs launches lack the speed to catch the contrabandisti at sea, and rarely dare to enter the port. Occasional disagreements among the smugglers themselves can, however, be explosive: hotel guests a week or so before our arrival had a ringside seat at a brief battle, followed by a spectacular incineration of boats.

  It is a situation viewed by Neapolitans with tacit approval if not with enthusiasm, and the benefits of the direct trade with north Africa to the man in the street are immediately visible. There is hardly a street without a small boy seated at a table to offer Marlboro cigarettes, made in Tunis (only the government health-warning is missing), at less than 500 lire as opposed to the 800 lire charged in the shops. The authorities seem to regard the traffic as hardly more than an inevitable evil. ‘I refuse to admit that this is a crime,’ said Maurizio Valenzi, the communist Mayor of Naples. ‘For me it is an illegal solution.’ The mayor shared the frequently voiced Neapolitan view that his city is the victim of a calumnious outside world. ‘If you are looking for crime on a big scale, go to Rome or Milan,’ he said. ‘The worst thing that can happen to you here is to have your pocket picked. Nobody gets mugged in Naples and we treat women with respect. Whoever heard of a Neapolitan being pulled in for knocking a child about? Even the Red Brigade don’t operate here.’