The river was creamy brown, soup-like, and slow-moving beneath the scorching blue sky. Sandy yellow clumps of foam floated on the water. Swirling oily rainbows glinted on the surface. Rusty barges churned white water and belched black smoke. An old man sat in a canoe at the river’s edge, bobbing in the wakes.
“She is insisting,” the soldier said loudly into his radio, leaning against the idling military vehicle. “She says that she is from the village of Yarentaro. Over.”
“Copy that. Tell her that no one is allowed in. Her people are fucking crazy. They’re threatening to kill anyone who enters.”
“Copy that,” the soldier said, raising his eyebrows.
“That is my land,” I said fiercely, pointing across the river. “My grandmother is buried in that forest.”
“You heard the orders,” the soldier said. “Everything is paralyzed. Not even the oil companies are operating right now. Your people are threatening war against the companies, the government, everyone!”
I stared at the soldier coldly. He eyed me through his glasses, a leer forming on his face.
“We’ve got some time to kill now,” he whispered. “I like me a feisty auca girl.”
He made kissing sounds. I turned away in disgust.
The market was dusty at the river’s edge. A rusty, hulking barge clanked and scraped against the concrete slab of the port. I walked down the banks towards the old man in the canoe. He was busy gutting fish.
“How much to take me across the river?”
He looked up at me. His eyes were glassy-wet, like an old hunting dog’s.
“Two dollars.”
I stepped onto the bow of the canoe.
“Downriver,” I said. “Away from the soldiers.”
The old man glanced at me strangely.
“Who is your family?” he asked in Kichwa.
I shook my head. I understood Kichwa, but I couldn’t speak it.
“You’re not Kichwa?”
“No. I’m Waorani.”
The old man yanked the cord to start the outboard motor.
“Ah,” he said, backing the canoe into the river’s current. “Fire in your blood.”
I sat on the bow, gazing downriver. The canoe cut through the water, bouncing softly.
“There aren’t many fish anymore,” the old man shouted over the drone of the outboard. “Those fucking barges!”
I nodded distractedly. The river’s current swirled, bubbled, and lapped against the wood. My ancestors knew this river as the Toroboro, the Mighty River. But now it was known as the Napo River. I pictured my warrior ancestors crossing it, bundles of chonta palm spears on their shoulders, their long black hair floating on the surface.
The canoe glided into the muddy banks. The forest was a thick wall above red clay. I handed the old man two dollars.
“How do I get to the road?” I asked.
The old man looked at me with surprise. “You’ve never been here before?”
I shook my head. It was strange, even to me. For the first time, I was about to enter the forest of my ancestors, where my grandmother was buried, where our stories were born long ago.
“I thought you were a Waorani from these parts.”
“No, I’m from another village, far away.”
“Ah,” the man sighed. “You look like you’re about to get into some trouble, young girl.”
I shook my head, avoiding his eyes, and started up the muddy banks into the forest.
“Seems to be some problems out in those villages at the end of the road,” he shouted after me. “Better stay away from there.”
“That’s where I’m going,” I shouted back, pushing through the stiff cane into the cool green woods.
There was no trail that I could see. I walked a short way, then stopped. The forest was trilling and pulsing. I noticed the faint, days-old tracks of an ocelot. A line of leaf-cutter ants. A wasps’ nest. I felt lightheaded. Maybe it was the fumes from the port, or the rocking waters. Or was I feeling the spirits of my ancestors?
I crumpled a wild garlic leaf in my hands and inhaled deeply.
A truck rattled in the distance upriver. I walked towards the sound. A white blanket of light illuminated a patch of the forest. I stood in the shadows and a white truck rumbled around a bend in a cloud of dust. I scrambled up the edge of the road and waved my hand. The truck slowed.
“Beautiful butterfly, where are you going?” the driver said. He was an oil worker, an Ecuadorian from the coast; I could tell by his accent. He wore black shades, a white helmet, and a blue uniform.
“I’m not a butterfly,” I hissed. “I’m a Taromenane!”
The man laughed and rested his arm out the window.
“Then take off your clothes, butterfly.”
I glared at him in silence.
“Where do you want to go, beautiful one?” he asked.
“To the village of Yarentaro.”
“No, no, no! We can’t go there! That’s the end of the road.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, butterfly. You Waorani, your people are acting like savages right now. They’re fucking crazy.”
“Then I’ll walk.”
I started down the hot, dusty road. The man idled the truck forward.
“Hop in the flatbed,” he said.
I jumped in the back of the truck.
“I can’t have you sit inside with me,” he shouted, leaning out the window. “It’s against company policy.”
The tires spit dust as the truck rolled forward.
“The boss likes all the pretty girls for himself,” he shouted again, over the sound of crunching rocks.
Soon the forest was a blur and my body was shaking against the metal. A pipeline snaked in the trenches. A gas flare hissed. We crossed a metal bridge. The creek water was foamy and gleaming with oil.
A group of Waorani women stood on the edge of the road before a chain-link fence adorned with barbed wire. What were they doing there at the gates of the oil company? They had ripped clothes, bare feet, long earlobes, and empty water jugs.
Surely it wasn’t possible?
But it was. The women were collecting water from the oil company. And I could guess why. Contamination. Once I had not known that word, but now I did. The fresh water of the creeks the women would normally depend on had been poisoned.
An oil company security guard shoved a hose through the fence. The water poured out milky-white into the women’s empty jugs.
We picked up speed again and disappeared around the bend.
The company was taking the oil from our forests and contaminating our water sources. The oil was taken to the cities so that the white people could drive cars and fly planes while Waorani women were degraded in the dusty shadows of the barbed wire, left to beg for water.
I spit onto the road, spit on the long finger of the white man’s world curling and curving and cutting into our forests. Spit on the boa’s tongue of civilization that turned my people from hunters and harvesters and shamans into barefoot beggars in our own lands.
I knew how this all had come to be. It was, in large part, Rachel Saint’s doing.
I had been just a little girl in the village of Toñampare when the helicopter had landed that day. Distracted by the shiny earrings some important woman had worn! Shiny earrings! I had no idea that inside the longhouse Rachel Saint was orchestrating her final act: facilitating the delivery of these forests to the blue-eyed, Bible-carrying boss of the oil company, Maxus Energy.
That was twenty years ago.
And now my women were begging the oil company for water. And there was war between my people and the Taromenane, a war between what we were and what we had become.
I saw everything all at once. Smelled everything all at once. Heard everything all at once.
The truck was gone and I was alone. The village was unwell; I could feel it in my bones. It was too quiet, too still. The forest hung tightly over the gravel road behind me. I walked slowly towards the palm-thatch longhouse. I smelled blood, rust, salt, woodsmoke, and gasoline.
I saw the dogs rousing themselves in the shadows, a glimpse of a woman’s face looking out through the door of the longhouse, and, behind her, a man peering out at me from the dark.
The dogs, then the woman, then the man, then the girls. That’s how it will be.
The dogs were ribcage-bony, growling, and mad in the machete-scraped yard. I raised a stick at them. Watched them recoil into the shadows.
The woman’s eyes were wild with pain. Her shirt was stained and sun-bleached. She pushed through the leaf-door into the sunlight.
“Who are you?” she screamed, her machete flailing and glinting in the dust.
I stopped at the edge of the yard, standing beside a pair of dog-bitten rubber boots and an empty oil drum.
“I am Nemonte,” I said severely. “Daughter of Tiri, granddaughter of Piyemo. I have come in peace.”
“There is no peace!” the woman shouted. “You will find no peace here!”
I walked towards her. She threw a rock at me. I didn’t blink.
“No one is allowed here,” she screamed again. “My husband will kill you! Get out!”
“I’ve come to see the girls,” I said softly. “I’ve come to bring peace.”
A man’s voice yelled from inside: “Take another step and I will kill you.”
“I am not afraid of you,” I said, trying to train my eyes on everything all at once.
“Who sent you here?” the man’s voice shouted.
I said: “I have come alone. I had a vision. I saw the girls.”
“You are a liar! Leave now or I will spear you.”
I heard whispers in the clapboard shack beside the longhouse: the little girls. I saw their eyes peering through the slats.
“Are you Kaguime, the son of Ömpure and Bogenëi?” I asked the invisible voice.
The man pushed through the leaf-door of the longhouse. His eyes were blood-red and faraway. He held several spears at his side. They weren’t Waorani spears – they were longer and thicker; they were the spears of the uncontacted, adorned with red and yellow feathers.
“Who sent you?” he asked again. His voice was tired, wounded, sick. “The government? The missionaries? The NGOs?”
I shook my head.
“No one has sent me. I haven’t come to betray you. I have come in peace.”
“Leave now or I will kill you,” he barked, hoisting the spear above his shoulders.
“Only a coward will kill a woman who has come in peace.”
He plucked a red feather from the spear, held it up to the light. I knew what it meant: red is war.
“The oil companies killed your mother and father,” I hissed. “It was not the Taromenane.”
He wailed an awful cry and heaved the spear at me. It was a warning. The spear arched into the sunlight. I didn’t flinch. It pierced the earth between my legs.
Kaguime grabbed a second spear.
“If you are a warrior,” I said, stepping towards him, “you will spear the oil workers. The ones who steal from our forest.”
He ran his hand along the spear. He was trembling.
“What have the oil companies given you?” I shouted. “They’ve poisoned the creeks! Scared away the animals! Angered our relatives!”
“The blood is fresh on the land,” he said, quivering. His lips were cracked.
I stood a spear’s-length away.
“Kill me now!” I said. “Or let me see the girls!”
He couldn’t look at me. His eyes were fidgety. Mine were unblinking.
I heard a voice in my head. The old woman’s voice from a long time ago, the sleepwalking jaguar that hunted me in her dreams.
“Manamaino, manamaino,” the voice said. “That’s it. That’s it. Just like that.”
Kaguime plucked a yellow feather off the spear and flicked it into the air. I watched it twirl in the dusty light. Yellow is peace.
“The girls are in there,” he said, dropping the spear and nodding at the windowless shack.
I heard them breathing, heard their footsteps as they backed away from the door. It was dark and musty in the shack. Oil cans and chainsaws and fishing nets and cables littered the ground.
Kaguime’s wife stood next to me.
“We are keeping them in here until their nerves calm,” she whispered. “They are like wild animals.”
She unlocked the latch of the door.
“They’re scared of my husband.”
“Your husband killed their parents,” I replied.
She glared at me.
“The little one mimics the animals,” she whispered, walking away.
I stood at the door, calming my breath. The Taromenane had been ghosts before. Stories by the fire. Footprints in the woods. Blow darts and macaw feathers on the trails. And now they were here. Little girls ripped from the woods.
I breathed deeply and opened the door.
“Da-da-da-da-da-da!”
The youngest child leapt from the corner of the room, flapping her arms like a bird. She wasn’t more than four years old. Her bangs were cut straight across her forehead. She had no eyebrows.
“Da-da-da-da-da-da!” she squawked at me.
The older sister was the one I had seen in the window. She squatted silently in the corner, watching me from the side of her eyes. She was around six years old. She was naked, her skin the color of a sandy creek bed.
I knelt at a distance.
“I am Nemonte,” I said, nodding tenderly at the smallest child. “What is your name?”
“Da-da-da-da-da-da.”
Her words were like petomo seeds clacking in the gullet of a toucan. Was this the sound of the bullets that killed her parents?
I looked up at the older sister.
“My name is Nemonte,” I said gently. “My ancestors are your ancestors. We have the same blood. I have not come to hurt you.”
The girl trembled. “Take us away from here. That man is a bad man. He killed our parents.”
I wanted to save them, to take them both with me and raise them, be their mother. Or I could free them in the woods. But where would they go? Was there anyone left?
“Tell me what happened,” I whispered.
“They had lightning and thunder.”
“Did your family survive? Did they escape?”
“Everyone fell.”
“Your mother?”
“We held onto her legs. She didn’t run.”
“What did she do?”
“She spoke to the bad man. He threw lightning at her body.”
I opened my arms towards both of them.
“Poye, poye,” I whispered. “Come, come.”
The older child tensed her body. What was she feeling? What did she see in me? She leaned closer. She sniffed at me.
“I am wearing the clothes of the cowori,” I said, my voice tinged with shame. “But I am from the forest, like you.”
Suddenly, I realized that I was the smell that surrounded them. That my sweat and my breath and my clothes reeked of Civilization: of sugar and fried fish and soap and gasoline.
But it didn’t matter.
The girl sprang into my lap desperately and buried her head in my chest. I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around her. She wasn’t crying. She was jittering and shaking. Her body was taut and stringy like a vine. I rested my head on the top of her back.
She smelled just like the forest. Like the mulch of leaves. Like parrot feathers. Like my ancestors.
We cried together. The crying song that was in all of us. Like a wind stirring and aching at the roots of trees.
I wanted to hold her forever, but the dogs were yelping in the yard. Kaguime cussed and shouted. His voice was stormy.
“Da-da-da-da-da-da!” the younger girl shouted in distress again.
“What does she say?” I whispered.
Her sister pulled away from me. She didn’t sit on the floor, as I did. She squatted. Her sister crouched next to her.
“She flies away,” explained the older child.
I nodded at the little girl. I tried to keep my eyes bright.
“You are near to my spirit,” I whispered.
There were footsteps outside. Then a violent rapping on the wallboards.
“You need to leave now,” Kaguime said. “Or else . . .”
I reached my hand out to the girls. My eyes filled with tears. That’s all I had to give them. It wasn’t enough.
“I will go now,” I whispered.
Kaguime rapped on the wall again, harder.
“The butterflies are still licking up the blood in the woods,” he said.
“I will come back,” I whispered to the little girls.
But deep down, I didn’t know how to help them beyond just being with them – just showing them, for as long as I could, kindness, love.
Kaguime’s face was flooded with a faraway pain, an untrustworthy rage. He flashed his machete across his chest menacingly.
“Let the little girls go,” I said.
He shook his head, then tears filled his eyes. His parents had been spear-killed. He had sought revenge. And now he was trapped too, in a different way, by his own actions. I was the first to come to the village to be with the little girls and there was nothing I could do to change his mind. But soon Kaguime would be dealing with the soldiers, the police, the ministries, the missionaries, the media, the NGOs. They would all be here.
I woke up startled and sweating on the fourth floor of the Hotel Don Wilson in the oil town of Coca. The clouds were blood-red over the city, like cotton over a throat wound.
What was I doing there? How long had I been asleep? What had I been dreaming?
There was a violent, rapping knock at the door.
“Inés, I know you’re in there,” a man’s voice said. “You’ve been sleeping all day!”
I lay silent and motionless on the bed.
“There’s a cowori at the Hotel Auca who wants to buy us beer!” the man continued.
“Go away,” I shouted.
“You owe me,” the man said, in Wao Tededo. “I saved you!”
I heaved myself up from the bed, enraged and confused, and opened the door.
Boya stood in the hallway. His face was oily. He looked like an armadillo.
“What do you want?” I asked, annoyed.
“You would be dead if it wasn’t for me.” He grinned. “The vultures would be picking at you now.”
Boya had honked his horn at the end of the road when I came out of the shack in Yarentaro. Kaguime was shouting at me, and I jumped in the back of the truck. Boya drove me from the village into town. We arrived in the late hours of the night. Had I really been sleeping so long, until dusk the next day?
“Leave me alone,” I said, shutting the door in his face.
“Don’t worry about those two little girls,” he jeered. “They will be wearing clothes, eating candy, and drinking Coca-Cola before you know it.”
“Shut your mouth,” I said through the door.
Boya disgusted me. He was one of the most well-known Waorani oil workers. He wasn’t just a machete-wielding wage laborer; he was in much deeper than that. He was the community relations officer for Repsol YPF, the Spanish oil company that had taken over from Maxus Energy many years ago. If it was true that the company had given the war party the weapons to kill the Taromenane, then I thought it could have been Boya who had made it happen.
I lay back down on the bed and closed my eyes. Boya knocked for a while longer and then disappeared. I ran my fingers over my right forearm: it was scratched. The older sister had written a story in my skin with her nails: Don’t leave us.
But I left. What else could I have done? I left them in that shed.
I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I wanted to take a cold shower, but then I smelled the girls in my hair. Like puma cubs rolling around in forest mulch. I didn’t want to wash them away.
Soon the moon rose over the city and I ventured out into the streets. I felt strange and invisible, like a forest spirit spying on Civilization.
When was the last time that I’d eaten something?
The Hotel Auca stood imposingly on the city’s main drag, only a few blocks from the waterfront. The hotel was named after our people, the aucas, the savages. It was the fanciest hotel in the city, decorated with murals and statues of our ancestors. It was the last place that I wanted to go, yet I walked through the front door and into the courtyard garden as if I had no choice.
The cowori man was sitting alone at a table in the courtyard. He was writing in a journal, whispering to himself as he wrote.
Boya was pacing around the hotel garden, talking on his cell phone. He noticed me and his eyes brightened.
“Inés,” he shouted, covering his cell phone with one hand, “the gringo is there at the table! Tell him to pour you a beer!”
Gringo was a word for a different kind of cowori: not just people from outside the forest but rather white people from the Land of Rachel. The gringo stood up now. His eyes were striking, like a wild cat’s.
“Waponi,” he said, smiling brightly.
I felt nervous and timid. I was no longer invisible.
“I’m Mitch,” he said, extending his hand to me. I was glad that he didn’t kiss my cheek, like some white people do.
“I’m Nemonte,” I whispered.
He smiled at me and then gazed into the tiny tropical garden, where Boya was pacing around on the phone.
“I think your friend misses the forest . . .”
“He’s not my friend,” I said.
We sat down at the table. He poured me a beer in a small glass. I didn’t like the way it smelled. I wanted to smell the girls, but they were fading.
“Salud,” he said, raising his glass.
His eyes distracted me. I couldn’t tell if they were green or blue.
We sat in silence for a moment. The city throbbed around us. There were parrots and squirrel monkeys in the garden.
“What does your name mean?” he asked.
“Many stars,” I said. “It was my grandmother’s name.”
“Names don’t really have much meaning where I come from,” he said.
I had never thought about that: Rachel, Steve, Stephanie, Barbara, Connie. Did their names have any meaning?
“Michi?” I asked. “Is that your name?”
“Yeah. Like how you call to a cat! Michi, michi, michi.”
I laughed and reached for my beer glass. I hadn’t expected to be sitting alone drinking beer with a gringo cowori.
“Are you a tourist?” I asked.
He smiled curiously at me.
“What a strange existence that would be . . .”
“What do you mean?”
He sipped beer. “To just exist in the world as a tourist . . . kind of pitiful, right?”
I laughed. I liked that.
“So, then, what are you?” I asked. “A missionary? An oil worker?”
“Are those all the categories of white people?” he asked, laughing. “Tourists, missionaries, and oil workers?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“What would you do if I said I was a missionary?”
“I wouldn’t believe you.”
“Why?”
“Because the missionaries don’t drink beer.”
“And if I said I was an oil worker?”
“I’d spear you,” I said brightly.
“Keuuuuu!” he exclaimed, raising his glass towards mine. “Cheers to spearing the oil companies!”
I clinked his glass.
He glanced over at Boya, who was still pacing around the courtyard.
“That’s Boya, right? He works for Repsol?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because,” he said quietly, “I come from the world that is invading your forest, your people, your relatives, and I—”
“Gringo!” Boya shouted suddenly, striding onto the deck and slamming his empty glass loudly onto the table. “I don’t trust whispers, and I definitely don’t tolerate gringos flirting with my women!”
The gringo glanced at me, raising his eyebrows humorously.
“Apokene!” I hissed at Boya, in Wao Tededo. “Shut your mouth and don’t ever call me your woman again!”
Boya ignored me and filled his glass with beer.
“So, gringo, tell me your story,” he said arrogantly. “Are you a journalist or a spy?”
The gringo turned to me. “Two more categories of white people,” he whispered.
“What are you?” Boya pressed.
“I’m not a spy,” he said, “but I am a writer.”
He reached for his notebook instinctively, like it gave some sort of protection.
“And I’m an activist,” he continued, training his eyes on Boya.
“An environmentalist!” Boya guffawed, swigging his beer sloppily. “Keep the trees standing and the Indians in poverty!”
“Clean water,” the gringo said softly. “The oil companies have poisoned the rivers—”
“An environmentalist! If you weren’t buying the beer, I’d kick you right out of this hotel!”
The gringo shook his head, mystified.
“More beer,” Boya shouted at the waitress, disappearing back into the courtyard garden.
The gringo arched his back over the chair, exhaling deeply and running his hands through his hair. I was curious about him. I thought about my barefoot women in the shadows of the oil company, begging for water.
“Clean water?” I asked him. “Is that what you said?”
He nodded.
“I’ve been living out in Lago Agrio,” he said, “where all the creeks and rivers have been poisoned by the oil industry. For the last few years, I’ve been working with the Kofan, Siona, and Siekopai peoples, building rain-water catchment systems.”
I didn’t understand what he meant. I had heard the names of these tribes, but I didn’t really know where they lived. I had never been to Lago Agrio. And I didn’t understand the words “system” and “catchment.”
“But now I’m starting to work with your people,” he continued, “along the oil roads across the river.”
“Where?”
“Just off the Auca Road, where the Chinese oil company is destroying your lands.”
My chest felt like bursting suddenly, with rage and excitement. That’s where many of my family members lived, my aunties, uncles, and cousins. I took a big sip of beer.
“I was just on a different oil road yesterday,” I said. “The Maxus Road. My women were begging the oil company for water.”
“Is that where you are from?”
I felt buzzed from the beer. I hadn’t eaten anything. The alcohol was going straight to my head.
“No,” I said. “Well, actually, my grandmother is buried there, but I am from far away, where there are no oil companies.”
“Then what were you doing there?” He poured me another glass of beer. “I heard that road was closed off.”
“I went to see the girls . . .” I whispered painfully, my voice cracking.
“The Taromenane girls?”
I nodded.
His eyes became curious. They held mine for a moment. I looked away. There was something about him, something that stirred me. A gringo cowori named Michi with feline eyes. I didn’t even know him but suddenly I wanted to tell him everything. About how the girls were trapped in a shed, and how my mom wanted to work for the oil company, and how my people signed papers that they understood nothing about. And how I felt alone in the world, and angry.
“How are they?” he asked.
“They were . . . they were . . .”
“Scared?”
“They pleaded for me to take them with me.” My voice quivered.
I began to cry, covering my eyes. He reached out to touch my shoulder. I pulled away.
“This here is my good friend Mendoza!” Boya shouted, emerging from the floodlit garden with a mustachioed man. There was a slight slur to his voice. I wanted to disappear.
“Are you okay?” Michi whispered.
I nodded. I felt dizzy.
“Gringo,” Boya said, slapping Michi on the back, “Mendoza here knows more about the Waorani people than any other cowori on the planet.”
“Good to meet you,” Michi said calmly.
Mendoza was slimy. I knew him. He was an anthropologist on the oil company payroll. I had met him when I was a schoolteacher on the Auca Road.
What was he doing here? Why were any of us here? I wiped my eyes with my shirt sleeves.
“Boya says you’re a spy,” Mendoza jeered at the gringo, “which I guess means you’re a journalist?”
Michi opened his notepad and set his phone beside the beer bottle on the table.
“I am a writer, yes. Do you mind if I record this?”
“No,” Mendoza said, slightly startled.
“As long as you keep buying the beer!” Boya chimed in.
Michi pressed record on his cell phone.
“I went walking in the forest with a Waorani elder the other day,” he began, “and I saw the footprints of the Taromenane.”
“Here we go!” Boya exclaimed. “Are you one of those hippies that like to play Indian, walking around naked and barefoot?”
Michi laughed, shaking his head.
“No,” he said. “I’ve been working with your people to build rainwater harvesting systems out along the Auca Road.”
“And?”
“We saw the footprints, and the elder told me that the Taromenane were trapped between the roads,” he continued, “and that if the oil companies keep drilling wells, then there will be more and more bloodshed in the forest.”
“That’s a lie!” Boya scoffed.
“Let me put the gringo straight,” Mendoza interrupted. “It was all about a can of tuna! A rotten can of tuna that fell from the sky.”
Michi looked at me, eyebrow raised, and then turned back to Mendoza.
“The capuchins, the Spanish monks, such meddlesome people. They did a flyover a couple weeks ago, just like the evangelicals used to do. And they dropped a rotten can of tuna into the forest. One of the Taromenane elders got food poisoning and died. So . . . they took revenge against poor old Ömpure and Bogenëi.”
“He’s lying,” I whispered out of the side of my mouth.
“What was that?” Mendoza said to me.
“You’re a liar,” I hissed.
Suddenly, I felt like I was losing control of my emotions, of my mind, of my words.
“Inés, Inés, Inés,” Boya said, exasperated. “Calm down! No more beer for you. Mendoza is a friend of the Waorani.”
Mendoza said: “I love the fire of Waorani women.”
“Wanna hear a story about this young woman here?” Boya asked.
“I’m all ears!”
Boya said: “Well, I saved her life yesterday! Can you believe that?”
“Apokene!” I hissed. “Shut your mouth.”
“When she was a kid back in Toñampare, we all knew her as Inés. She was Inés, the evangelical missionary!”
Michi was listening carefully now. I could see him out of the corner of my eye.
“My name isn’t Inés,” I said. “It’s Nemonte.”
“Okay, you see, so Inés left the mission and got into all kinds of trouble. Then yesterday, I pulled up at the village of Yarentaro in the Repsol truck to drop off food for the grieving families, and I saw her about to get spear-killed by the great warrior Kaguime!”
I gazed emptily into the courtyard. I felt like I was being raped by a story.
“She was delirious on the drive back to town,” he laughed, “and all she could talk about was how the oil companies are to blame for everything!”
I could feel the gringo’s eyes on me. They were full of wonder. And once again, I saw everything simultaneously. The table littered with beers and cell phones. The men sitting around it. The little girls in the shed at the end of the road.
“We are at war with ourselves,” I said. “Our ancestors are at war with us.”
“You’re crazy!” Boya laughed.
The city throbbed and clanked around us.
“Where is the bathroom?” I whispered.
Michi pointed. “Through there. Are you okay?”
I hurried through the floodlit courtyard garden into the fluorescent lights of the hotel bathroom. I gripped the counter as the room spun. Maybe I was drunk. I turned on the faucet and cold water streamed into my hands.
“Da-da-da-da-da-da,” I whispered, staring into the mirror, waiting for the girls to appear.
The bathroom was silent except for the low hum of electricity.
“I don’t know,” I said into the mirror. “I don’t know what to do.”