“The trail of the devil is wide and flat and easy to walk along,” Rachel Saint said. She was standing at the front of the church. Her ankles were swollen and, when she waved her hands in the air, I could see the flesh of her upper arms sagging. Dayuma was standing next to Rachel, nearly a head shorter than her. She looked at us while Rachel spoke.
“There are some young men in the village, your children and grandchildren, who are being led down the devil’s road,” Rachel said. “These young men are being influenced by the communists!”
She paused. We all looked at her.
The church was packed, though it wasn’t Sunday. The Waorani pastors were sitting at the front, their hair combed neatly to each side. Dad and Mom were standing at the back of the room. I was wedged in the corner with my friends. From the glassless window, I could see up the hill, across the river where Mengatowe lived. I wondered if he could see inside the House of God from his hammock.
“Dayuma knows this,” Rachel said, glancing at her. “She has traveled with me and seen the world. She has frozen her butt off with me in the cold!”
Everyone laughed. I had been shown some pictures of Dayuma traveling, huddled up in many clothes while little bits of white fell from the sky.
“She has seen the tallest buildings and the longest bridges. She has met very powerful cowori, much more powerful than me. Because the world is very big and there are many more cowori than Waorani.”
“The Waorani are warriors!” a man shouted from the front.
Dayuma immediately turned to face the man.
She said: “The cowori have planes that can fly over our village and bomb us with fire. They can destroy all of us and they can even—”
She did not finish because Rachel, her voice raised, cut her off.
“Listen to me! Dayuma and I have met a very good man; he is a Christian like us. He is the head of an oil company. A very powerful man and a believer. He wants to help the Waorani. Now, there are communists out there who will say that he is a bad man, that the oil companies are bad. There are young people in the village who are confused. Because they are being tricked by the communists!
“What I am telling you,” Rachel continued, speaking very loudly now, “is that the world needs oil. And there is a lot of oil beneath Waorani land. Now, there is no way that we can stop the oil companies. They are very powerful. The president of the country supports them. We are fortunate that we have met a good man, a Christian man, who will take the oil from underneath the ground and who will also help the Waorani. But he is going to need help from us too. People from the oil company will come here soon. We will talk with them and make an agreement about how we can be good friends. Does everyone understand?”
“Uuuuuuu, uuuuuu, uuuuu.” A soft chorus of yes, like the sound of flutes, lilted across the room. I didn’t know what a communist was or what this oil beneath the ground was either.
A few days later, down at the river, I heard the word “communists” again. It was shouted gleefully by Nënëcawa.
“I’m being carried to the river by communists! These young communists are taking me away . . . to go fishing!”
“Keuuuuuuuuu!” yelled two village boys, Amo and Moi, as they hoisted barrel-chested Nënë and his wheelchair contraption along a muddy part of the trail. I was happy. Nënë had wanted to go fishing for a long time and now these young men were taking him. The river was low and the bocachicos were running. Nënë carried a wooden harpoon over his shoulder.
At the bank, Amo and Moi lifted him from his wheelchair into a dugout canoe. They were shirtless and their long black hair fell over their muscular backs. I knew Amo because he always brought fish and wild meat over to Nënëcawa’s house. But I didn’t really know much about Moi. He was from a different village and had very long, beautiful hair. He was the leader of the communists, everyone said, and Rachel had told us communists were bad. But he didn’t seem bad to me. He was laughing and joking now.
Nënë almost flipped the canoe as he plunged into the current. Víctor and I shrieked with laughter, jumped into the shallow waters, and then ran up onto the beach on the other side. Nënë couldn’t move his legs, but somehow he was able to thrust his body underwater and then stay down there forever.
“Nënë has gone to live with the catfish!” Amo joked.
When Nënë surfaced, he shouted: “I am faster than a river otter, stronger than a dolphin!” He held his harpoon high in the air and a mota, a sort of catfish with black dots on its silver skin, wriggled at the tip.
Nënë pulled himself up onto the beach, dragging his strange, thin legs behind him. He sat in the shallow water.
“Come on, you communists! They’re getting away!” Nënë cried.
Amo and Moi ran lightly at the edge of the river, and then plunged into its depths.
Nënë turned to me. “You see all these fish, Äwäme? They are heading upriver to spawn.”
“How many fish are there in the river?” I asked.
“There are more fish than stars, Äwäme.”
Moi and Amo returned empty-handed. They sat down next to Nënë in the wet sand.
“The oil companies will contaminate the river and kill the fish,” Moi said. “And then the last fish will be lonely, like shooting stars.”
I didn’t understand. Moi used a word, contaminar, that was not a Waorani word.
“What will happen when all the fish are gone?” I asked.
“Then we will become like the cowori,” Amo said. “We will only eat chicken and rice. And we won’t be funny – we’ll never make jokes again!”
We all turned our heads as the helicopter we had been hearing all morning suddenly got louder. It had been flying about for hours without landing. We listened to it for a moment, then looked away.
“We are the richest people in the world, Äwäme,” Nënë said. “We have everything in our rivers and forest.” Then he hit the mota on the head with a stick and tossed it up close to me and Víctor. “Tell your mother that I’ll take care of her while Tiri is gone. The family will not starve.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “My dad isn’t gone!”
“Your dad left this morning,” Nënë said. “He went walking to the camp downriver, where that helicopter is buzzing. He said your mom didn’t want you kids walking around barefoot anymore and he would bring back shoes.”
My heart sank. I became quiet. Amo came and crouched beside me and said in a kind voice: “Don’t worry, little one. My grandpa Äwä doesn’t want the oil companies here. He will set the jaguars on them. He is a jaguar father, a meñewëmpo.”
I turned downriver towards the whirring and chopping of the helicopters. Mom said Äwä was a sorcerer. She was afraid of him. She said that Mengatowe was a healer but Äwä was a sorcerer, a brujo. Maybe he would cast a spell on the oil company, I thought. I tried to picture my dad with the cowori in the forest, wearing one of those hard hats, cutting down all the trees, making holes in the ground. And all so that we could have shoes? I liked being barefoot.
Now Dad had gone, Mom told us she wanted us to go to school every day, so that we could learn how to talk like the cowori. I didn’t want to talk like them. I knew that it was cowori who had shriveled Nënëcawa’s legs and it was cowori who were cutting down the forest and scaring away the animals. And now they had taken my dad away too.
The classroom was small and muggy. But today something was different. The teacher was smiling instead of shouting or hitting us. Rachel and Dayuma had arrived. They were holding a cardboard box full of papers.
“This is a very special day,” Rachel told us, standing at the front of the class. “We have letters for all of you from the Compassionate Ones; they are nice children who wanted to write to you. And they live in the land I come from!”
I had heard of the Land of Rachel. Although I couldn’t imagine it, I knew that it wasn’t in the sky. And that it was far away. It was not for many years that I discovered its real name was America.
Rachel and Dayuma went from child to child. When it was my turn, Rachel knelt on the ground next to me and unfolded a piece of paper. I looked at her very closely. Her hair was white and gray and coarse. Why did white people get so many wrinkles? Maybe it was because they grew very, very old. In fact, maybe they lived forever!
On the paper was large, loopy writing. Rachel read to me in translation: “Hi, my name is Emily. I am twelve years old. I like to go to the movies with my friends. My family goes to church every Sunday. I’m very happy that you have found God. I heard that you lived without God’s love for a long time, and that your people used to kill each other. But now you don’t anymore. You are saved! Jesus loves you! What do you like to do? Do you go to the beach? Do you play in the river? I pray for you every night. I hope to hear from you. Emily.”
There was a picture too.
“This is the girl who wrote the letter,” Rachel said. “This is Emily.”
I took the picture and stared at it hard. Emily had lots of freckles on her face, her hair was red, and her lips were very red too. I wondered why she had sent me this letter. More than anything, I wondered how her lips got that red. Did they have achiote in the Land of Rachel? We painted achiote across our faces. In the Land of Rachel, were they using it on their lips?
Rachel gave me the letter from Emily and her picture to keep. That afternoon, I showed them to my brother, Opi. He was surrounded by pieces of balsa wood and cables and batteries and wires. He said he was making a helicopter.
I explained that Emily was a Compassionate One.
He didn’t seem to care about it much.
“Did the Compassionate One send any candy?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then what’s the point?”
I could not answer that.
The next day at school, I showed my friend Mimaa the picture of Emily.
“How do you think she makes her lips so red?” I asked.
Mimaa was my age. She was, like Amo, from the Baihua clan. They lived at the far end of the village, away from the river, by the creek and the morete swamp.
“Oh, I know about this, my sister has some,” she said. “It’s achiote – white people’s achiote. They put it on their lips. My sister hides it in a bag hanging in the corner of our oko.”
Of course, now I wanted to see this achiote. Even though I knew that I was not allowed to go to the Baihua compound. Äwä the sorcerer lived there, and Mom was afraid of him. And there was something else, too, about the Baihua family. They were different. They were known as the “downriver people.” They never set foot in church. They never wore clothes, which I knew annoyed Rachel very much. The women walked around the village with their breasts hanging and leaves over their vaginas. The men wore the comé, the penis band. They all had very strong, muscular legs and long hair that went down to their butts. At night, you could hear them chanting.
Most of the other families in our village didn’t chant like that. Rachel wouldn’t allow it. I imagined that’s why the Baihua lived at the edge of the village.
We snuck out of the school room while the teacher wasn’t looking and I hid my bag, with all my pencils, notebooks, and the picture of red-lipped Emily, in the tall grass along the trail to the Baihua compound. I left my school uniform behind too. Now I wore only underwear.
“Follow me closely,” Mimaa said. “Our peccary is not friendly with strangers.”
The peccary clacked its teeth as we walked into the compound, a set of traditional, leaf-roof houses connected by foot-worn paths. The skin of a giant anaconda was hanging between the branches of two trees. Empty tortoise shells were strewn across the yard. The skulls of caimans, deer, peccary, and monkeys littered the outskirts.
Mimaa beckoned me to enter their oko. We pushed our way through the leaf-door into the smoky, dimly lit realm of an elder woman of the Baihua clan. She was sitting by the fire, softly singing, partially obscured by smoke-blackened baskets hanging from the rafters. Her name was Gimawe, which means harpy eagle. She was naked and her earlobes hung down to her jawline. She was eating nontoka fruits.
“Are you the daughter of Tiri?”
“Yes, Grandma,” I said.
“Come, sit down. Let me prepare you a bowl of peneme.”
I noticed that she had long fingernails and that she didn’t wash her hands before kneading the plantain dough into a gourd of water. Mom always rinsed her hands off before serving peneme. Mimaa and I drank the lukewarm, clumpy gruel.
We could hear a strange, guttural chanting nearby, perhaps in the next hut.
“What is that?” I whispered to Mimaa.
“That’s Äwä,” she whispered back. “The jaguar is coming again.”
I remembered how my mother had called Äwä a sorcerer. I walked to the edge of the oko towards the sound.
“No, stay here!” Mimaa said. “We’re not supposed to look when he’s with the jaguar spirit.”
I glanced at Gimawe. The old woman’s eyes were closed and she was mouthing a breathless chant. So I stepped out quietly. Mimaa followed me, looking nervous. A black curassow bird in the middle of the yard startled us, purring and hissing through her orange beak, exposing her iridescent blue chest feathers. We walked silently around the bird and then peered through the leaf thatch of the longhouse.
Äwä was in the far corner, stretched out in a hammock. His body was trembling and it looked like his hands and fingers were cramping. The chanting was strange, just like Mengatowe’s, as though the words were coming from both his chest and from underneath the earth. I could barely understand anything. There were two men kneeling beside the hammock. One of them was Amo, the young man who had taken Nënë to the river in his wheelchair with Moi. The other was Äwä’s son, Bai.
“Father Jaguar,” Bai said. “Tell me where the peccary are hiding. Bring the herd close to the village. I will go where you tell me!”
Äwä began to grunt and clack his teeth, convulsing in the hammock. I shivered and looked away.
I heard Amo say: “Meñewëmpo, tell us about the oil company. Will you drive the cowori away, Father Jaguar?”
Äwä was chanting.
“Father Jaguar,” Amo continued, “I will go to the Toroboro River soon, where the cowori are building oil roads and invading our lands with their cattle. Give me strength to defend our lands.”
Mimaa tugged at my arm and pulled me away into the yard, her face very serious. I wondered about Äwä’s powers, his secret way of speaking with the jaguar spirits. Could he really get them to stop the oil companies?
“We shouldn’t be watching this. Let’s go and look at the white people’s achiote before my sister gets home.”
Back inside the oko, we took Mimaa’s sister’s bag and sat quietly in the corner, hoping Gimawe wouldn’t notice us. We could still hear Äwä’s chanting from the longhouse.
I drew a pink, plastic mirror from the bag and held it up to my face. It wasn’t the first time I had seen myself – I had seen my reflection in the still water of the lagoons downriver, and in the rusted tin roofs next to the church, and on the plastic cases of an outboard canoe motor that once arrived in our village. But I had never seen myself so clearly before.
I stared at my own face. I thought: I look like my mom. I saw how my black hair shone in the smoky light.
“See this?” Mimaa handed me the white people’s achiote. “You twist it and it pops out, like a dog’s penis!”
We both giggled as I took the lipstick and twisted it open and then closed and then open again.
“Where did your sister get this?”
“She works for Dayuma each day in the garden, so Dayuma gave it to her.”
“I’m not going to put it on my lips,” I said defiantly. I thought hard. “What if we mixed it in water?”
“What if we painted our arms with it!”
I twisted the lipstick open until it couldn’t twist anymore. Then I pinched off the red part and we kneaded the red paste in a gourd of water.
“Where is your notebook?” I asked.
Soon we had filled Mimaa’s school notebook with blood-red hand-prints. We took the remaining clumps of lipstick and drew zigzag lines up and down our arms. Then we painted bright-red bands across our eyes. I took a small, wet clump from the gourd and rubbed it lightly on my lips. I looked at myself in the pocket mirror and imagined that I was Emily, from the Land of Rachel.
I knew we could get in trouble for this. And now I noticed that there was silence all around us. Äwä’s jaguar chants had faded away. In the reflection of the mirror, I saw that Gimawe was studying us out of the corner of her eye, looking sharp like a harpy eagle perched in the smoke. I shivered. I closed the pocket mirror quickly and ran off to the creek to wash before anyone else saw me.
A few days later, Mom called for me from our oko. Her voice was very gentle.
“Nemonte, can you come here and help me lift this pot off the fire?”
I walked inside and she approached me quickly. Before I could do anything, she had poured a bowl of liquid into my eyes. At first it was cold but after a moment it started to burn. And then it burned so wildly that I threw myself onto the ground, writhing on the palm-wood floor.
“What have you done!?” she shouted at me. “You stole white man’s achiote from the Baihua family! I told you that Äwä is a sorcerer. He will use his powers against us now!”
I was totally blind. A black and red pain frothed in my eyes, in my brain, on my nose and cheeks. I could feel the footsteps of Opi and Víctor close to me on the floor. They were helpless but I could sense in their breathing that they wanted to help me, that they were scared.
“These are not my people,” she hissed. “Don’t you understand? I am not Waorani. I have different blood.”
Her words were sad and lonely and cold, and I felt them pulsing beneath the burning. I had always known that as a Kichwa she was different. She interpreted dreams differently, she knew different plants and medicines, and she looked different from the other women too: a lot more beautiful, I thought, with high, slanting cheekbones. I didn’t understand why any of that made her so angry.
I was shrieking and sobbing and I couldn’t see. I could hear Mom begin to stoke the fire, as if nothing had happened. Then I heard Aunt Wiamenke’s voice, although her words were drowned by my own yells. Suddenly, there were hands on my eyes, Wiamenke’s hands. She was covering them with plantain peels. She walked me into the yard.
“Chili-pepper water,” she reported to her husband, Nënëcawa, who must have been sitting in his wheelchair somewhere nearby. “Manuela doused her daughter’s eyes with chili-pepper water.”
“Poor thing,” Nënë said aloud. “And the Kichwa call us aucas!”
I was blind for three days. When the burning gradually subsided, I felt a coldness growing in me. I didn’t look at my mom. I tried to stay away from her. Sometimes I sat silently in Nënë’s hut, where my brothers and the older boys gathered around Nënë’s wheelchair, in hammocks, on stumps, on the dirt floor. The hut was full of wires and cables that they had salvaged. They were cutting green and yellow wires into short lengths, all except Opi. He was still making his helicopter out of balsa wood.
“Come here, Äwäme,” Nënë said to me. “Try this on. It’s made for a little kid.”
He took my wrist and tied on a green and yellow bracelet, threaded with black and red petomo seeds.
The bracelet was pretty. Its color was different from any of the forest dyes that I had seen.
“Do your eyes still hurt, little Äwäme?” Nënëcawa asked me.
I shook my head and looked down. I still hurt, but inside. Not my eyes.
Nënë muttered something about the Kichwa under his breath. I sat quietly watching the young men’s busy fingers. Aunt Wiamenke moved among them without disturbing them. She had two pots of stew on the fire, and a peccary head smoking on the grill. I wondered if Äwä’s jaguars had brought the peccary close to the village. I was sure that must be so.
Amo was sitting on the ground next to Opi.
“Nënë,” he said, “when you were a young man, did you ever spear a cow?”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten, young communist,” replied Nënë, “but when I was a warrior, I lived in the forest! We didn’t live near any cows! I was a peccary hunter!”
Amo had a serious look on his face. “All along the oil roads by the Toroboro River, the cowori colonists are invading further and further into our lands. They do not respect our territory. They are cutting down our ancestors’ fruit orchards to grow grass for their cattle.”
The others were murmuring in agreement when Opi interrupted to proudly show off his finished helicopter.
“Wait until Dad sees it!” I said. I loved to think of Dad coming back. I was sure that my mother would not have hurt me with the chili-pepper water if he had been there.
“I saw your father in the woods, little one,” Amo said, softening his tone. “He helped us take this cable.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me there are jaguars everywhere downriver, and the oil workers are afraid.”
“When is he going to come home?” I whispered.
“He said he would come home when the company gave him something to bring back to his little girl.”
I knew for sure then that Amo was my friend. He smiled at me and then said to everyone: “But I’m not going to come back until I spear-kill every cow that is grazing on our lands!”
One morning soon afterwards, before we left for school in our uniforms, Dad came home at last. He just appeared suddenly in the yard.
He looked strange to me, wearing yellow rubber boots and blue jeans. He was skinnier than when he had left. I ran up to him and hugged his leg. He touched the top of my head and said: “I was in the forest with the cowori making trails. They don’t know anything about the forest. Nemonte, have you been helping your mother around the house?”
I didn’t respond. I wanted to cry. Mom was in the oko and I was sure she must have heard Dad’s voice, but she did not come out.
Dad said: “I found a place downriver where we can make a new village.”
I stared at him.
“There are lots of animals in the forest downriver, more than there are here.”
A new village? Was he saying that we would leave Toñampare? This was astonishing but he did not respond to questions. Now he was reaching into a bag and unfolding a bundle of soft green leaves. In it was a baby parrot. He handed it to me.
“The cowori chainsaws ripped right through this little parrot’s home. She can’t fly yet. Go up and get her some ripe plantains, she’s hungry.”
I went to school with my baby parrot. I sat in the back of the classroom, my parrot wrapped in a rag beneath my shirt. I wondered what my dad had seen downriver with the company. I imagined the cowori men smashing bright-blue eggs on the forest floor, the chirping of little abandoned birds everywhere.
I couldn’t understand the teacher as usual so I sat thinking my own thoughts. Had Dad really said that we were going to start a new village? I knew that, before Rachel came, before we lived with her, our people had always moved around the forest from place to place. But that was when my father was a boy. I had never moved. I tried to imagine leaving Toñampare, but I couldn’t.