Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

by Tim Cahill

  “Ahorita y no más,” he giggles. “Madre de Dios, hoy.”

  Mañana, of course, is the feast of San Fermín, or somebody, and then there is the weekend, and the mechanic does not work on Saturday or Sunday. The men of his family, he explains, live long and well. To rush about with a red face and shaking hands, this is bad for the heart … for the soul. The mechanic would be honored if the gringo would forget about his skid plate and join him and his family for the feast celebrating the birth of San Fermín.

  The mechanic lives in a wood-frame house with a dirt floor and a tin roof. There are 857 people in his family, all of whom have lit votive candles, which give the house an air of elegance, like the altar of a cathedral on Easter morning. The gringo will please stand here, in the place of honor, so that all 1,923 members of the mechanic’s family may meet him. The entire family is very proud of one man, a young fellow wearing a cardigan sweater from Lima. He is smiling in a sick, terrified manner, pushed forward by a lava flow of humanity.

  “Goo-by berry mush,” he says, extending a shaking hand.

  “Goo-by,” shout dozens of children.

  “How is ju nome?” the young man asks in a quavering voice. All 2,429 members of the family stand in silence, swollen with pride.

  “My name is Tim,” the gringo says. “Timoteo.”

  “Timoteo,” the young man repeats. There is some strange plea in his eyes, and he seems near tears.

  The mechanic can bear it no longer. In Spanish, he explains that the young man is his brother, a teacher. He learned English in Lima, and English is one of the subjects he teaches the village children. That is why the children of the village speak English, just as they do in Lima or Cajamarca.

  “Goo-by, gringo,” the children shout.

  “El habla perfecto,” the gringo says, in his bad Spanish.

  “Perfecto,” the mechanic announces to the assembled multitudes. He points to the young man in the cardigan. “Perfecto.”

  The young man squares his shoulders, as if a great weight has been lifted from them. He smiles broadly, but there are tears in his eyes. “Sank ju berry mush,” he says, his voice thick with emotion. He grabs the gringo, squeezing him mightily in a strong Latin embrace. Everyone cheers and laughs. The gringo is rather embarrassed, and he stands facing the 3,768 members of the mechanic’s family, smiling in a fixed manner and thumping the English teacher’s back. The young man is facing the wall. He is thumping the gringo’s back with one hand and wiping the tears from his face with the other.

  The steady drizzle outside has turned into a tropical thunderstorm. Water pounds down onto the tin roof with a deafening clatter. Everyone is shouting now, and there is much jugo de caña, fermented sugar cane juice, to be consumed before dinner. It is sweet, rather like weak orangeade, this jugo, with just the vaguest yeasty hint of alcohol. Everyone drinks quite a lot if it, and the noise works its way up to jackhammer levels.

  Dinner is served. Women and children, as is the custom, sit on the floor and watch the men eat. The gringo is seated next to the mechanic’s brother, so that they may speak English together. No one is listening to them now; so the two converse in a kind of Spanglish.

  The mechanic’s brother did indeed study in Lima, and he did have his teaching degree, but he had never studied English there or anywhere else. There had been five applicants for the job he now held—a prestigious position—and he had lied about the English because it set him apart from the other men. He was really trying to learn from books, and he taught the children to read, not speak. No one who spoke English had ever stopped in his village, and when he first met the gringo, he had been so frightened that he had said “goo-by,” though he knew perfectly well that the proper greeting was “jello.”

  Dinner consists of a boiled, stringy, tasteless substance that turns out to be yucca root, and a porklike substance in yellow gravy poured over rice. The meat is cuy, “guinea pig,” a source of Peruvian protein since the time of the Incas.

  The mechanic sees to it that the gringo’s cup of jugo is never empty, and toward the end of the meal, he finds himself singing Paul Simon’s version of El Condor Pasa. The brother translates the English words for all 4,239 members of the family, clearly winging it, and there is much laughter and applause. Later there is some pogo-type dancing to rhythmic clapping, and after the rain lets up, the men step outside to be near the huge vat of jugo.

  The toasts range from the gringo’s “Here’s mud in your eye,” to “Salud,” to those of a more ribald nature. The gringo is particularly enchanted with one that translates: “To fifty women and one hundred breasts.” The last thing the gringo remembers, he is shouting loudly, and in English, “Saint Fermín is the best goddamn saint there ever was, and anyone who says different can kiss my ass.”

  He wakes up on a wooden pallet with a tin roof over it. He is wrapped in several warm Peruvian blankets. It is late—the sun has been up for several hours—and there are coffee beans drying all around him. The mechanic is there with a hot cup of coffee, heavily laced with sugar. The gringo considers his performance the previous evening and wonders why the mechanic seems to be treating him with respect, even awe.

  The gringo has a great deal of difficulty achieving coherence and feels as though he is trying to swim his way up from the bottom of a vat of thick custard. The mechanic is speaking rapidly, and though the gringo can’t make out all the words, the gist of it seems to be apology of the most abject sort. The two men are walking toward the garage, and the mechanic says the gringo should have told him about the work—the mechanic whispers in a conspiratorial manner, though there is no one in sight—the secret work, the very secret work he is doing for the government of Peru.

  The gringo can only mutter that he doesn’t understand, and the mechanic smiles and says he understands why one doesn’t understand. After all, the work is secret, and for the government. There was too much jugo last night, the mechanic says, and the gringo told this secret thing to his brother, who spoke English so perfecto.

  And there is the car, sitting beside the rutted dirt road, the skid plate newly bolted to the frame. It has been cleaned inside and out.

  The mechanic explains that his brother woke him early and told him it was muy importante that the gringo leave the village ahorita y no más, this very day.

  The gringo pays his bill and drives on toward Brazil, offering up a little prayer of thanks to San Fermín, who, he supposes, must be the patron saint of stranded gringos and unilingual Peruvian English teachers.

  The Lost World

  To understand what happened, you have to see it the way the soldiers did.

  It was near midnight, and the swollen jungle river called Río Cuyuní lay leaden under a full moon. At the southern end of the bridge spanning the Cuyuní, the Venezuelan National Guard had established a checkpoint. Earlier that week, a kidnapped American businessman named William Niehous had been rescued from a nearby jungle campsite, but in the confusion, his kidnappers, members of a Marxist group calling itself the Argimiro Gabaldón Revolutionary Command, had all eluded capture. So there were still guerrillas out there in the dense Venezuelan jungle, and the troops manning the Guardia checkpoint were acutely aware of it.

  What they saw on the night of the full moon was undeniably ominous. Two Land Cruisers pulled up side by side on the bridge, bright lights glaring. Five men, shadowy figures behind headlights, clambered out onto the bridge. The soldiers leveled their weapons and trained a spotlight on the cars.

  At that, the newcomers climbed back into their Land Cruisers and rolled slowly to the checkpoint. The soldiers kept their automatic weapons trained on the occupants. One of the drivers, a big American with a shaggy brown beard, opened his door and started to get out again. As he did so, he lurched awkwardly toward one of the soldiers. The Guardsman jammed the muzzle of his rifle squarely into the American’s stomach.

  The gringo was sweating in the humid heat, and he began babbling in incoherent Spanish. He had not meant to attack the sold
ier; he had only lost his footing. While he mumbled on, the other four men stepped from the cars, their hands in the air.

  Two of the men, Pedro Benet and Luis Carnicero, were employees of Venezuela’s Ministry of Youth, a government agency in Caracas that sometimes concerns itself with the exploration of remote areas of the country. Trying his best to keep the conversation light and fast, Pedro Benet began to explain the situation, and as he spoke, the soldiers gradually lowered their rifles. The three gringos he was shepherding, Pedro told the soldiers, were all obsessed with a book written many years ago by an Englishman. A boys’ book it was, called The Lost World, and it was full of improbable adventures and dinosaurs. The dinosaurs in the book lived on top of Mount Roraima, and the gringos had put an expedition together in order to climb that mountain. First, though, they wanted to explore the plateau, see Angel Falls, swim in the rivers.…

  One of the soldiers interrupted Pedro.

  “They want to climb Mount Roraima?” he asked.

  “Yes, yes.”

  “In the rainy season?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Wouldn’t it be more clever,” the soldier asked, “for them to climb it in the dry season?”

  “Yes, clearly, but that is just the point,” Pedro said. “No one has ever climbed the mountain in the rainy season. The gringos want to be the first. They want to see all the waterfalls and things no one has ever seen before up there.”

  “They want to climb that mountain in the rainy season because of a book about dinosaurs?” the soldier asked in a level voice. Then he checked the gringos’ passports very carefully.

  What the passports showed was that the tall gringo laden down with cameras was a photographer named Nick Nichols. The mustachioed one was a geologist called Mark Stock. As for the big one with the beard, he was a writer named Tim Cahill.

  “They thought we wanted to blow up the bridge,” Pedro said later. “They say to me that in one-half more minute, they shoot us.”

  “They almost shot us,” I said, incredulous.

  “When you slipped, the soldier thought you were fighting with him. He said he was going to pull on the trigger.”

  “They almost shot us,” I said again.

  It was a bad twenty-four hours for guns.

  Not far from the Guardia checkpoint, there is an unmarked road that leads to the infamous El Dorado prison. This jungle work farm, which figures in the works of Henri Charrière, who called himself Papillon, was once a symbol of inhumane treatment. It was a hellhole where prisoners suffered all the maladies of the lowland jungle, where the mind became warped in the rain and the heat, where the soul rotted inside a man. It has been closed for well over a decade now.

  Though the ruins of the prison are off limits to civilians—and especially to foreigners—the soldiers said we could camp there for the night because we had letters from the Ministry of Youth requesting cooperation from the military. As we entered the prison, we passed a low fence flanked by rickety wooden guard towers standing ghostly in the moonlight. There was a clearing in front of what appeared to be the administration building, and there we set up our tents.

  It was hot: so hot that the minor exertion of pitching a tent drenched a man in sweat. I lay there for some time in my underwear, a pair of black competition swimming trunks that are handy for traveling because they dry quickly and can be washed every day. Presently, a light rain began to fall, and I stepped out of the tent, hoping to cool off. Nick and Luis joined me, and we began walking down the swampy road, deeper into the ruins of the deserted prison.

  To our left was a high, whitewashed cement wall, and at one corner there was a circular guard tower. We found a doorway, flicked on our flashlights, and started climbing a spiral cement stairway to the top. About halfway up those dark, wet stairs, we came across a lone vampire bat hanging from the ceiling. It was about three inches long and weighed perhaps an ounce.

  Vampires like to feed on the blood of sleeping mammals. The bite itself is all but painless, and few human victims are awakened by it. The bat licks up a small portion of the blood and departs. But there is, in the bite, an anticoagulant, so the victim bleeds merrily on long after the bat is gone.

  Vampires tend to strike humans on the toes, elbows, and the tip of the nose. This last can be a ghastly experience: imagine looking into the mirror in the morning and finding your face caked with dried blood.

  We ducked under the bat and climbed to the circular observation deck. Moonlight shone silver on the overgrown prison yard below. When we came back down from the tower, the bat was gone, but off in the distant jungle, there was a disturbing sound amid the usual barks and shrieks and whistles of the night. It was the revving engine of a car or a truck.

  Long before we saw the headlights, I had thought it out. Since it was illegal for civilians to come to the prison, our visitors were either guerrillas or soldiers. And what would either guerrillas or soldiers think about a man walking around in these ruins clad, as I was, in what must appear to be black silk panties? Just then the headlights caught us, and I raised my hands over my head. My major emotion, I was startled to find, was not fear but a terrible sense of embarrassment.

  The car came to a skidding stop inches from where we stood. It was a Land Cruiser, like the ones we were driving. The door burst open, and out stepped Pedro, laughing. Was it not a funny thing, Pedro asked, to have a car come screeching up on one so? Had we been very frightened? It was funny to see us all with our hands in the air. Were we not laughing now?

  Yes, we told Pedro, ho-ho, it was to laugh, such a trick of humor. And, ha-ha, perhaps now it was time to play a trick on Pedro. We would, ho-ho, just stake him down on those slimy stairs in the tower and, ha-ha, let the goddamn vampires bleed him for a week or two.

  I am frightened by the jungle. I am frightened by the sickly sweet odors, by the moist darkness, by the dank fecundity. I am frightened by the chaos: green things lash about in slow motion, choke off lesser plants, rise toward the sun like those subconscious horrors that sometimes bubble up into the conscious mind.

  I have been in the jungle many times over the past few years. I was in Guyana, at Jonestown, a week after that danse macabre of suicide and murder choreographed by Jim Jones. There were soldiers there, too, and they poked at the reporters with their rifles as we moved through the debris. We found letters from the residents in the home of Jim Jones. In them, people admitted to aberrant sexual desires, to visceral and murderous hatreds.

  Now, standing in the early-morning light by the administration building of El Dorado, I found myself sorting through records of infractions committed by inmates while in prison. This one made for himself the “blouse of a woman,” another had committed “open carnal acts,” another had pushed a sharpened board through the body of his cellmate.

  A short walk from the main buildings, past the row of tiny solitary-confinement cells, I came upon a statue of Simón Bolívar, the great liberator of much of South America. An inscription at the base of the statue read “El Padre de la Patria” and was dated September 24, 1956. In twenty-three years, the statue had become a grotesque and ghastly thing, covered with a beige claylike substance that had begun to rot away, revealing a coarse, dark stone underneath. The convex orbs of the eyes, especially, had suffered this rot, and they stared blindly out toward the empty prison. Great dark gouts, like ebony tears, ran from the eyes.

  Later, while breaking camp, Pedro and Luis told us about the gun. In one room of a remote building, they had found a drawer containing a 9-mm pistol. They had never thought of taking the gun. To be caught with such a weapon in this part of Venezuela is like admitting to being a guerrilla. Pedro and Luis said that they wished they had never even seen the damn thing.

  Still, Mark Stock was curious. Had there been only one gun, or more? Was it in working order or was it junk, abandoned when the prison was closed? Pedro said he didn’t know. Mark got directions and went off to look by himself. He came back on the run.

  The room was the
re, just as Pedro and Luis had described it. It was a wet morning, and there was a cement floor. A set of bare footprints led across the floor to the drawer. The gun was missing.

  All around were the sounds of birds and insects. Off on the river, two waterfowl squabbled, sounding like children at play. Someone was watching us from the darkness of the jungle—someone with no shoes and a 9-mm pistol.

  We were in the cars in an instant, and we splashed through the swamp at top speed. I never knew what to make of the incident. It was just one of those dark and inexplicable things that happen in the jungle.

  South of El Dorado, the red clay road rises out of lowland jungles, finally emerging onto the vast plateau known as el Mundo Perdido, the Lost World. The plateau, sometimes called the Guiana Highlands, is about the size of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma combined. It accounts for almost half the area of Venezuela and spreads out into Guyana, Brazil, and Colombia. There are some jungles near the rivers and on the slopes of the mountains, but for the most part, the Lost World we saw is a treeless, virtually unpopulated rolling grassland that looks something like the wind-whipped high plains of Wyoming.

  Scattered about the plateau are dozens of foreboding, flat-topped mountains whose vertical walls seem to rise directly out of the grassland. These mountains, called tepuis by local Indians, rise as high as nine thousand feet. Geologists say the great mesalike formations are composed of sedimentary rock, sandstone laid down 2 billion years ago. About 70 million years ago, a series of uplifts cracked the sandstone monoliths vertically, giving the tepuis their strange, blocklike appearance.

  Unexplored until shortly before the turn of the century, this is the area that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World—and his fantasy, in turn, was so compelling that it gave the area its name. It appears that Conan Doyle based his book specifically on reports he had read about Mount Roraima, a nine-thousand-foot-high tepui whose summit covers over twenty-five square miles. Roraima lies where the borders of Venezuela, Guyana, and Brazil come together. It has been climbed many times over the years, and though no dinosaurs have been found, there are strange marshes, stunted forests, and rivers that flow over beds of milky-white quartzite crystals.