Connie lived in a two-storey cement house in the valley outside Quito. A place called Cumbaya. It was where all the rich people lived, the light-skinned Ecuadorians.
“The secret is to chop up the garlic and the onions very fine,” she said, pressing the knife down vigorously on the cutting board. I stood by her side, watching.
“What is the dish called again?”
“The Italians call it spaghetti Bolognese. But the Americans, we just call it . . . um . . . spaghetti and meatballs.”
“I want to learn,” I said.
I took her place beside the sink, near the kitchen window. The sun was dipping behind the mountains. Cars rattled down the road beneath the fluttering branches of the eucalyptus trees.
“My God!” she exclaimed. “Where did a Waorani woman learn how to chop onions like that?”
“With the missionaries,” I said proudly, immediately regretting my tone. “I was in a mission near here when I was about seventeen, and they made us chop them every day.”
Connie uncorked a wine bottle. Soon, the sun fell hard behind the mountains and it was dark outside. A soft orange streetlight glared through the kitchen window. The wine warmed my chest.
“Let me ask you something,” Connie said, swirling her wine glass in the air. “How many words do you think there are in your language?”
I had never even thought about it.
“I don’t know. A hundred? A thousand?”
“No, no, no!” Connie burst out passionately. “That’s what the missionaries would have you think! But that’s rubbish. The missionaries only needed enough Waorani words to tell the story of Jesus!”
I took another sip of wine. My forehead was warm now too.
“There are no jaguars in the Bible!” Connie continued. “No hunting trails. No forest medicines. No harpy eagles. The missionaries discarded whole parts of your culture, your identity, your universe! I mean, Rachel Saint. I just don’t understand why your people would listen to her.”
That was the question at the heart of everything. Why hadn’t my elders speared Rachel Saint? Why hadn’t Äwä and Mengatowe cast a spell on her? Why had my dad flown wherever Rachel told him to go? Why did we keep praying to a God who never responded?
“Because . . .” I said cautiously, “because of the things . . .”
“Things?”
“Yes, the things . . . and . . . the stories. It was something about the way the stories were written down. The white people’s stories must be true if their God gave them all these things, right?”
“Incredible,” Connie whispered. Her accent was so silly that it made me feel giggly. “First the missionaries and now the oil companies. Those bastards!”
I didn’t know what to say or do about the oil companies. My own mother wanted to work for them. My anger felt useless. It had made me run straight into a glass window earlier that day.
“Do you have the interview with my father here?” I asked.
She showed me upstairs. There was a computer on a desk by a window.
“What do you think about your brother’s idea?” she asked, passing me some headphones. “That if you lose your stories, the forest will fall?”
I put on the headphones in silence. I didn’t know how to answer that question. It was too much. Why did the cowori feel they could ask these things, questions without answers? I had promised myself that I wouldn’t trust them anymore, that I would keep them at a distance. Yet here I was in Connie’s house.
She said: “I’ll be down in the kitchen if you need me.”
The forest was pulsing and the fire was crackling just beyond the static of the digital recorder. Yes, it was my brother: I could hear his voice. While I had been trying to sleep, my stomach rumbling from the turtle eggs, he had changed the recorder’s batteries and been interviewing my father in the longhouse.
“What do our ancestors think of us now?” my brother asked my father.
“They wonder why we wear clothes. Why we smell like the cowori. Why we have become so weak.”
“Why do you think?”
“Because we went to live with Rachel Saint.”
“She made us weak?”
“What happens, son, when you take a baby macaw from its nest and feed it bread?”
“That’s all it wants to eat,” my brother replied in a hushed whisper.
My dad yawned. I could hear the hammock-swinging creak of the crossbeams.
“What will happen to the Taromenane?” my brother asked.
“There will be war soon. They are like jaguars. They are who we used to be.”
“Connie,” I said, going back downstairs, “what is the work that you have for me?”
“Well, your brother said it was a great interview with your father, but of course I couldn’t understand anything!”
“So what do you need me to do?”
“To listen to your people’s stories,” she said sincerely, “and then to write them down.”
“What will you do with them?” I knew I sounded suspicious.
“Make a dictionary. With all the words in your language.”
“For my people?”
“Exactly.” She smiled. “You can trust me, Nemonte.”
“And the stories?”
“They are also for your people,” she said. “Recorded so they don’t get lost.”
I looked down at the floor of the kitchen. Maybe this was what I needed. To just listen to my people’s stories again, like I had when I was a child. Maybe there would be answers for me, for us.
“I would like to work with you,” I said, my voice serious and confident.
I was amazed at how many stories my brother had already recorded. Stories that were saved on Connie’s computer. Stories that made me remember what I had forgotten. I stayed at Connie’s house and each morning I put the headphones on and closed my eyes. I listened first, before transcribing anything, all the way until the end of the recording. I let my elders’ voices carry me.
Nënëcawa spoke from his wheelchair in the village straight into my headphones. He was a young healthy man when the plane first circled above the forest and things started falling from the sky. There was a strange bag on the forest floor, he remembered. A creature squawking inside the bag. What was it? Nënëcawa and the others gathered around. Kept their distance. Could be witchcraft, a sickness, or a trap. They had never seen a chicken before, so they killed it and fed it to their pet harpy eagle. Oh, how I loved Nënëcawa’s laughter, the way he belly-laughed at the early days of the conquest!
The plane dropped a bag of sugar from the sky too. The warriors thought the sugar was sand from the white man’s beach. Maybe they could use it to polish the insides of their blowguns? How funny then that it dissolved in water and summoned the ants from beneath the ground. And how later the sugar would rot their teeth. Keuuuuu!
One afternoon, I put my headphones on and heard Mincaye laughing in the forest. He said that spears have their stories too. I imagined his hawk’s nose lit by firelight as he spoke. The ancestors made a pact with the peach palm trees. Take us as far as your legs can go, the peach palms said to the ancestors. Plant us upriver and downriver. Along ridges and valleys, and we will give you spears, for they are our sons and daughters.
On another morning, while the clouds shifted across the Andes mountains, Dayuma told how she had floated down the Ewongono River out of the forest. She didn’t know that years later she would fly back like a bird with the name of God on her tongue.
“If I had never left the forest, I would not have known anything at all,” she said.
She had told me that when I was a child, I recalled now. Perhaps it was Dayuma who had helped me understand that the forest was not enough for me and that I would have to leave it one day.
“Did you see the video?” Opi asked. The cell signal was choppy.
“Where are you?”
“Did you see what happened to the elders?” he continued urgently. “Dad was right. The war has begun!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look on Facebook! Before they take the video down.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m on a night bus. I’ll be at Connie’s in the morning.”
He hung up and I typed in my Facebook password: menera, mother jaguar.
And there it was. A grainy video of the elders on the trail.
A grandmother named Bogenëi was writhing in agony. A dark-brown peach palm spear jutted from her torso. She was leaning against a log. The grandpa was motionless beside her. His name was Ömpure. Spears had been plunged through his chest and neck and stomach. Spears with red feathers. He was dead. I couldn’t make out what the people were saying, a crowd of frantic villagers. Urgent shouts. Hushed whispers.
“The Taromenane, the Taromenane,” the grandma wailed. “They ambushed us.”
The video was taken down before I could watch it again.
I tried to call Opi back but his phone was dead.
It was hard for me to fall asleep that night. For my entire life, I had fantasized about the Taromenane. Long before I was born, they were our family, our relatives, our blood. We shared a language. We made our spears from the same peach palm tree. But then, for us, they became ghosts, shadows, stories by the fire. They went into hiding. They hid from the planes, from the roads, from the sickness. We called them the “trail walkers” because all they left behind were their footprints, or their spears crossed on the trails, or their spears lodged into the bodies of the oil workers and the loggers.
We knew that they were taller and stronger and faster than us. That their skin was pale because they lived in the shadows of the canopy. That their spears were bigger and heavier than ours. We were afraid of them. We knew that they watched us from the forest, raided our gardens, stole our machetes. Laughed at our rubber boots, our clothes, and our potbellies. Scoffed at what we were becoming.
But why would they kill us?
In the morning, Connie made scrambled eggs with tomatoes and onions. Opi had arrived and he was hungry. He looked disheveled, bleary-eyed.
“I’m still investigating,” Opi said, “but I’m pretty sure I know what happened. Ömpure and Bogenëi were the only Waorani elders in contact with the Taromenane. For many moons, the Taromenane visited them in their tiny hut in the forest.”
“And . . .?”
“The Taromenane made demands of the elders. At first, simple things they could easily get from the company: machetes, axes, pots and pans. Then they demanded that the elders turn off the oil company.”
“Turn off the noise?”
“Yes, the Taromenane wanted these two elders to flick a switch and end industrial civilization,” Opi said gravely. “But that was too much to ask.”
I took a bite of eggs and gazed out the window. Many years ago, after I’d left the mission, I had been unwell in my mind and my spirit. My stories had rotted inside me. In that village at the end of the oil road, I used pills, plant poisons, knives to stop my stories. And there was a creek. I bathed there before sunset. I liked going alone. I liked the way the forest pulsed all around me. Sometimes, I felt them watching and I would call to the Taromenane, tell them my name. Ask them to take me with them, to take me away from the oil road.
“Will the Taromenane go into hiding?” I asked.
“It’s going to be terrible. No rainbows.”
A cold shiver ran up my spine. Ömpure and Bogenëi were traditional elders. They lived simply in the heart of the forest. But their children and their grandchildren were oil workers, living along the Maxus Oil Road, the road that the Maxus oil company built with Rachel Saint’s blessing. In the old times, rainbows were omens of peace. Messages from the forest that it was time to put the spears down, to stop shedding blood. That it was time for planting gardens, making babies, and gathering fruits.
“There will be storms in the old lands,” Opi continued. “The oil company wants to get rid of the Taromenane and this is their chance.”
My mouth was dry. I reached for orange juice.
“The company will give Ömpure and Bogenëi’s children weapons to seek revenge against the Taromenane,” he said darkly. “It’s going to be a massacre.”
I felt lightheaded. My people were about to go to war against our uncontacted relatives – and all because of the oil company. I had never met the Taromenane people, but I loved them. They were a part of me. The part that hadn’t been corrupted, hadn’t been abused, hadn’t been weakened by the white man’s world.
“There’s nothing to be done,” Opi whispered.
Later that day, he left without saying goodbye. I knew I wouldn’t hear from him again until something happened. Until he needed me.
I still put the headphones on each morning but now I couldn’t concentrate. The stories felt far away suddenly, stray echoes across a river, like something destined to disappear.
Facebook told me the latest news.
The war party had been in the forest with weapons that the oil company had likely given them. They had been looking for traces of the trail walkers. Today they had found nothing – they had gotten lost in the woods and become hungry, had returned to the village on the oil road.
But they would set out again soon.
One evening, heavy rainclouds darkened the sky above Connie’s house. I lit a candle and closed my eyes.
When I gazed at my reflection in the window, I saw again that I looked like my mother, my wide face chiseled from stone. My chest soured with anger. What was it between her and me? The wound cut deeper than anything the oil companies could do. I thought of her snake’s tongue. The blinding pain of chili peppers in my eyes.
The chanting started in my chest, like the tiny vibrations of a butterfly. Then it came faster, in my throat, like a hummingbird’s wings. The candle flickered brightly and my body disappeared and a vision appeared in the window. A little girl. She had a wide face and black bangs cut jagged across her forehead. No eyebrows at all. Her eyes were bright black seeds. She stared at me while I chanted. Her skin was light, the color of dried leaves.
I reached for her in the window. At once she disappeared. And all I could see was myself in the reflection now, my mother’s daughter. Heavy beads of rain streamed down the glass.
When I awoke in the morning, the sheets were damp and my phone was ringing. I rolled over in bed. There was a glass of water and a plate of fruit on the bedside table.
“You haven’t seen Facebook?”
I sat up in bed, squinting, vaguely remembering the night before. Was that a dream?
“No, brother.”
“They found them, the Taromenane. Their longhouse. They killed them all.”
I dropped the phone and clutched the sheets. I began to weep. It was a song inside me. A song that needed to be cried.
“Sister, sister,” Opi said.
His voice was small and distant from the corner of the bed. I folded my arms across my chest and rocked back and forth.
“They captured two little girls,” he said.
I picked up the phone.
“What little girls?”
“The Waorani warriors killed everyone. But they took two little Taromenane girls from the forest and they have them in the village at the end of the Maxus Oil Road.
I gasped. “I saw one of them.”
“What?”
“I saw one of them,” I whispered again. “Her bangs were cut straight across. She didn’t have eyebrows.”
Opi was breathing heavily now.
“Sister . . .” he whispered fearfully.
“Brother,” I said, “I’m going to see the little girls.”
His voice was stern. “No. You can’t go there.”
“The girl visited me.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Last night in the storm, I saw one of the girls in the window. She wasn’t more than six years old.”
“You can’t go to that village! It’s too dangerous. The military are everywhere after the massacre and they won’t let you cross the river. Neither will the oil companies.”
“I’m not afraid, brother.”
“Even if you get in there, the Waorani men are filled with blood-rage. They will kill you.”
I said: “A Waorani woman is never afraid.”
I ended the call and stared at the window.
For most of my life, I had been running away, escaping. But not anymore.
“Who are you?” I whispered, imitating the voice of the jaguar. I wanted to see the girl again in the window, but all I saw was my reflection.