The moons blurred together.
Connie said that I was different. She worried about me, used words like “depressed,” “lonely,” and “confused.” I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t want to talk about the girls. Didn’t want to lie to myself, pretend that I could save them. They were in the clutches of wounded warriors and I had heard that already the missionaries, NGOs, and government ministries were on the Via Maxus trying to negotiate their fate.
“Did you meet someone?” she asked one evening as I stared blankly into the computer screen.
I looked at her, surprised.
“Have you met a man? Tell me about him,” she said.
“I met a cowori man, a white man from far away.”
He had walked me home that night to my hotel, told me that he saw my courage, said that those men were awful. Made jokes about spearing the oil companies. I liked the way he laughed, the way one of his eyes went slightly astray. It made him look wild. He said that he wanted to learn more about what I had seen on the oil roads. He wanted to know if he could help.
“Where is he from?” Connie asked curiously.
I didn’t want to talk about him. I was embarrassed. I didn’t even know him.
“Do you have his phone number?”
“No,” I scoffed, even though I did have his number, even though I looked at it every night, hating myself for wanting to call him and for not having the courage to call him.
“You’re in love!” she exclaimed, giggling. “I can see it in your eyes!”
I scoffed again. I didn’t know anything about love. There was no place for it, especially with a white man. It was impossible.
Soon after that, I left Connie and the computer. I decided that the mountains were too far away from the forest. I wanted to fight for my people, although I didn’t know how. I didn’t know where to begin.
I took a bus down the mountains into the town of Shell. I made sure to bring the crinkled piece of paper with the gringo’s phone number on it. I walked into the muddy outskirts, where my people had been building that small settlement in the foothills. A shantytown at the margins. An in-between place for people like me. And things were progressing: there were dirt roads now. No more ocelot prints. A scattering of humble wood shacks, a few cinder-block houses. No electricity. No water. No sewage systems. Small patches of plantains, manioc, and papayas.
I didn’t think I had enough money left to build a house on my plot but the scruffy mestizo builder said: “You can have a shack for that much. A two-room shack.”
Sacks of nails, wood boards, and floppy sheets of metal piled up. I enjoyed using the hammer. It gave voice to my anger. I hammered hard for less than a moon, and then stared at my little house. No family, no fire, no furniture. It reminded me of the shed where the girls were kept. I knew I couldn’t survive here for long.
And then, one evening, the phone rang.
“Is this Many Stars?” a man’s voice asked.
“Uuuu,” I whispered.
“Nemonte, this is Michi!” His voice was light. “I’ve just met your brother! In fact, I’m with Opi now.” There was laughter and chatter in the background. “He gave me your phone number.”
“Where are you?” I asked the gringo.
“We’re in your old lands . . .” The cell signal was bad, his voice choppy.
“Where?”
“Just off the Auca Road. We’re building water systems with your aunts and uncles!”
My brother suddenly grabbed the phone.
“Sister! Get on the night bus and come out here!”
“Are you drunk?” I asked sharply.
“Michi is my friend,” Opi slurred. “He’s a gringo jaguar!”
“You are drunk.” I was disappointed.
“We are in the shadows of the oil companies, building the resistance!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Like an army of fire ants, building in the midst of destruction!”
The gringo took the phone back.
“Nemonte,” Michi said, “remember when you told me about the women on the Maxus Road?”
“Yes. They had to beg the company for water.”
“Well, I was thinking about you, and . . .”
“And?”
“I thought you might want to learn about the rainwater systems that we’re building out here.”
“Uuuuu,” I said quietly.
“They’re simple but they work.”
“Where are you?”
“We’re going to be in the village of Tobeta,” Michi said, “where your Granduncle Dabo lives. Are you free to come?”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
And then I hung up the phone, abruptly, without even saying goodbye. A Waorani woman never says goodbye, especially when she needs to catch the night bus.
It was dusk when I arrived at my granduncle’s house on the red-earth hill at the end of the oil road. It was a cinder-block maze of tiny rooms, dank hallways, and leaking roofs. It felt like a shack that the oil companies had built, haphazardly, over years. Animal pelts and bird feathers and spears and blowguns and empty soda bottles adorned the walls and littered the floors.
“Your brother is out back,” Dabo said, blowing cobwebs off the HF radio, which was perched in a dimly lit corner. “And there’s another Indio out there too, from some other tribe.”
“What tribe?” I asked curiously.
“I forget what they call themselves. But the oil company killed the man’s children, poisoned all their water. And our water ain’t that good anymore either.”
I followed him into the backyard. The gringo, Michi, was carrying a metal tube over his shoulder. His shirt was drenched with sweat. My brother was crouching over a toolkit, counting with his fingers. The Indigenous man – the father who had lost his children – was standing on a metal structure, fastening tubes together. He was older than Michi. His face was round and quiet, and his eyes were sad and kind.
“Nephew,” my granduncle shouted at Opi, “can you tell me what it is that cowori drink?”
“Coca-Cola!” Opi yelled back, laughing. “They only drink Coca-Cola!”
“That’s exactly right,” my uncle said, in Wao Tededo, gesturing at Michi. “That’s why they sweat so much!”
Opi snorted with laughter.
Michi set the metal tubes on the ground and smiled at me uneasily. He must have understood the words “Coca-Cola” and “cowori.”
“Ba, ba, ba,” he said humorously in Wao Tededo. “No Coca-Cola for me. I only drink chicha! Big gourds of chicha!”
My granduncle erupted in joyous laughter, nearly jumping off the ground with delight.
“Manamaino, manamaino, cowori! That’s the way, white man!”
Opi looked at me, a secret encouraging smile from brother to sister. And I realized something then, a most unexpectedly simple desire, so simple that I was terrified by it: I wanted to make chicha for this gringo. I wanted to make the sweetest chicha in the entire rainforest for a white man.
I was so struck by the clarity of this feeling that my legs went numb and my palms prickled and my neck got hot and I felt afraid suddenly.
“Are you tired from your trip?” Michi asked.
I shook my head. He looked skeptical.
“How many buses did you take to get here?” he asked.
I had taken three buses. The night bus from Shell to Coca; the ranchera from Coca to Dayuma, the little colonist town named after that now legendary woman; and the chicken bus that brought me into the oil fields.
“A Waorani woman doesn’t take buses in her own lands,” I said severely. He was taller than I remembered, and his eyes were bluer. “A Waorani woman walks the trails of her ancestors, like a jaguar.”
The brightest, wildest smile that I had ever seen on a white man flashed across his face.
“Okay, jaguar woman,” he laughed, “did your ancestors know how to build rainwater catchment systems too?”
I shook my head.
“They didn’t need to know. They drank from the freshest creeks on the entire planet.”
He nodded warmly.
“Emergildo,” he called cheerfully to the Indigenous man with the kind face, “I know you’re afraid of Waorani women but I want you to meet Many Stars.”
Emergildo smiled.
“Cosi cosi,” he said to me. “That means ‘good afternoon’ in my language.”
“What language do you speak?” I asked.
“I am A’i Kofan,” he said. “We speak Aingue.”
I wasn’t sure if I had met any Kofan people before. I replied: “Waponi! That means ‘welcome to our land’ in my language.”
A truck clanked up the road. Emergildo gazed at the pink clouds hovering over our forest to the east.
“It looks like your land goes on forever,” he mused. “The oil companies have a way of ending things though. You gotta be careful about that.”
We worked together until just before nightfall. After dark, we camped in my granduncle’s tattered palm-thatch longhouse, which was nestled in the forest a short way from the oil road. I could tell that Dabo hadn’t made a fire here in many moons. The roof leaves were dank and moldy.
“You have made a wonderful home here for bats and tarantulas, Uncle,” I said, fanning the log fire on the damp earth, listening to the soft scratching of tarantulas in the roof leaves.
My granduncle squatted next to me. “I haven’t gone hunting in a full moon.”
Michi and Opi were setting up tents nearby. Emergildo was swaying in a hammock, drinking Coca-Cola from a plastic cup.
“Why, Granduncle?”
“The Taromenane are looking for their girls,” he said quietly. “Their footprints are everywhere.”
I shivered at the thought. I wondered if I should tell my granduncle that I had gone to see them.
“Day and night, day and night,” he continued, standing up suddenly. “They are so angry, they are eating their own spears.”
“What do you mean?”
“The woods have become dangerous,” he said, disappearing up the trail that led to his cinder-block house at the end of the road.
Michi sat down next to me on a stump by the fire. The light flickered on his face. His eyelashes were pretty and, when he smiled, his skin wrinkled next to his right ear.
“What are we all doing here together?” I asked in amazement. “A gringo and a Kofan camping out in a tarantula-infested longhouse at the edge of Waorani territory!”
Michi responded by asking a question. “You know where all this oil goes?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“Most of it gets shipped up to California, right where I was born.”
I looked at Michi curiously. I wanted to trust him.
“All this oil so that the gringos can drive around in cars and fly in planes,” Opi interjected.
Michi nodded, spitting into the ash of the fire. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Why?” I asked, pretending I didn’t understand.
“Because the world where I was born is destroying all of this,” he said, casting his gaze everywhere and then settling his eyes on me.
That night, we slept in small tents on the hard earth. The rain pattered lightly, like a thousand tarantulas scurrying across the leaves. I woke up suddenly. My dream tasted strange on my tongue. I stared from my tent at the low fire, the pulsing embers, until I saw something moving.
What was it?
I turned on my cell phone light. The rain was falling harder.
A snake slithered in the flickering shadows towards Michi’s tent.
“Psshhh, psshhhh,” I hissed, under the rain. “Michi, there’s a snake! Wake up!”
“What is it?” he muttered, his voice hoarse.
“A pit viper outside your tent.”
A rustling sound. The beam of his flashlight. The tent zipper.
I could barely see anything.
“Holy shit.”
“Kill it,” I said.
“No, I’ll just get rid of it.”
“You don’t understand!” I had caught a glimpse of the snake in the wild movement of Michi’s headlamp.
“What?” He was picking up a stick from beside the fire.
“My tongue was bitter when I woke up . . .”
The light blinded me for a moment.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“My dream,” I said. “They sent this snake to get you.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Just kill it.”
He took a short breath and brought the stick down onto the earth like an axe.
“Did you get it?”
“Yeah,” he said, breathing heavily, twisting the wooden tip into the snake’s head, into the earth.
I stepped out of my tent and knelt next to the snake. I felt a wild power coursing through my blood. My mother always burned snakes’ heads: a message to the spirits, to the sorcerers that wanted to do harm.
“You must burn the snake’s head in the fire now,” I told him.
He looked at me with accepting eyes. No judgment, no questions. He just did it.
“The snake is burning violet,” he whispered. “A cold violet.”
“I want to know about you,” I said. My body was trembling. I cupped my hands before the fire. I didn’t know what I meant by that. It had something to do with the chicha and the snake’s head.
“Me too,” he said quietly. “Me too, Many Stars.”
After working on the rainwater harvesting systems together, many moons passed before I saw Michi again. He had said he was going back to the Land of Rachel to raise money to build more rainwater systems. But I didn’t know anything about that. All I knew was that he didn’t answer his phone and that a part of me regretted wanting to know him so badly.
In fact, I wondered if I was betraying my ancestors, if my desire to make chicha for a white man was a betrayal. I stopped calling him.
Then one afternoon he called me.
“There’s been an oil spill. Just upriver from Emergildo’s village.”
“I thought you were dead,” I said bluntly.
“Did that make you sad?” he laughed.
I was quick. “No.”
“Well, I felt like I was dying.”
“Really?”
“I got sick. But I’m okay now. I was calling because . . .”
I put the phone down on the ground. I felt dizzy suddenly. Why did I want to protect this white man? From snakes and sickness and sorcery, from the perils of my world. No cowori had ever protected me. I exhaled deeply, composing myself.
“This oil spill is a fucking nightmare,” he said. “We’re going out tomorrow morning to document the contamination. Will you come?”
“Where?”
“On the Aguarico River,” he said. “Near Lago Agrio.”
I caught the night bus again, and by early morning I was sitting on the bow of a fiber-glass canoe wearing latex gloves to protect my skin from the oil and my mother’s stone face to protect my heart from the white man.
The river was colder and steelier than any river I had ever known. The mountains ranged jagged across the horizon and the oil blackened the water’s surface like dark clouds.
I had seen nothing like this. Our ancestors’ blood was black on the river.
Michi knelt precariously next to a camera. He was skinny and pale. His cheeks were sunken.
“When I was a child, the company told us that oil was good medicine,” Emergildo announced, staring into the camera while picking an oil-caked leaf off a branch that jutted from the clay of the riverbank. “We never knew about contamination. It didn’t exist before the oil companies.”
“What kind of medicine?” Michi asked.
“They said that oil was a salve that we could put on our skin,” Emergildo recalled, “and that if we covered the lodge poles of our huts with the tar, it would keep the insects away.”
“And where did you collect the oil?”
“When there was a spill we would collect the oil from the river. But also from the roads.”
“What do you mean?”
“The oil company sprayed the roads with crude oil to keep the dust down.”
Michi stared out silently at the swirling waters. “Did the companies tell you about the dangers?”
“No,” Emergildo said firmly. “But we learned.”
“How did you learn?”
“We became sick. And our shamans couldn’t heal our bodies anymore.”
The oily water lapped against the edge of the canoe. I had never thought about that, the way the white man’s sicknesses weakened the power of our shamans, of our healers. For us, it was polio that our elders couldn’t heal. For the Kofan, it was oil.
“How could they do this?” I whispered, searching the water’s depths for the moving shadows of the fish. “Are there fish in this river still?”
“Not like when I was a little boy,” Emergildo said.
“Do you eat them?” I asked.
He was silent for a moment.
“Yes. We gut them and clean them and eat them still.”
We floated quietly downriver in the canoe until we reached a bend where the oil had pooled against a tangle of driftwood. The smell of mulch and gasoline made me dizzy. Michi sat next to me. A shiny catfish floated belly-up in an oily cloud of river foam.
“This river is sick,” I said.
Michi nodded in silence. “Tell me about your river. What is it like where you live?”
“Our name for that fish is mota,” I said, staring at its bloated white underbelly glinting in the sun. “Children love this fish because it has hardly any bones.”
“Are you a fisherwoman?” he asked.
I liked his questions. I liked the way he listened to me. My face softened. I was no longer a stone.
“My mom is the fisherwoman of the family,” I said proudly. “When she goes fishing, she always comes home with a basket of fish.”
“I bet your mom is amazing.”
I narrowed my eyes and bit my lip. I hadn’t heard from my mom in many moons. I didn’t know whether she was still in the village or had gone to wash the underwear of the oil workers.
Emergildo handed me a clear plastic container with a blank label, and the camera filmed me as I scooped oily rainbows into the jar.
“What will we do with this?” I asked, carefully placing the jar in a cooler of ice.
“We will take it to the laboratory,” Michi said, “so we have evidence against the companies.”
“The fish . . .” a voice whispered from the end of the canoe.
It was the first time that I heard the elder speak all morning. His name was Delfín Payaguaje. Michi had told me that he was a great healer, a shaman from the Siekopai people. He was barefoot and wore a red tunic and a baseball cap. His grandson, Hernán Payaguaje, sat stoically by his side. He was a quiet man, around my age. Michi told me that Hernán was one of the few Siekopai people to graduate college.
“What’s that, Delfín?” Michi asked now.
“The fish know the story of the river,” the elder said quietly. “More than the laboratory can know.”
Later in the afternoon we walked along an island of gray stones and boulders, stained by crude oil, until we arrived at Emergildo’s village, on the banks of the Aguarico River.
“This is my home,” Emergildo said proudly, walking barefoot through a cluster of sugarcane. “This is where the Kofan people are happy.”
Emergildo’s homestead was idyllic. His house was made of peach palm wood and metal sheet roofing, with a small manioc and plantain garden wrapped around the patio.
“This is my wife, Romelia!”
Romelia appeared in the doorway, wearing a shiny red dress, colorful plastic necklaces, and feathered earrings. Her hair was raven-black and her face was scrunched in a scowl.
I barely understood anything she said, except for the word “company.”
The light drained out of Emergildo’s face. Romelia disappeared into the house and returned to the doorway with a small plastic bag of groceries.
“What is that, Romelia?” Michi asked, in Spanish.
“Company, company,” she said again, enigmatically.
“The company gave that to you?” Michi asked.
“Like dogs they treat us,” she spluttered. “Like animals!”
The plastic bag contained two cans of tuna, a quart of cooking oil, a bag of oatmeal, chocolate powder, and a gallon of water.
Delfín stood with his grandson in the shade of a banana plant, whispering quietly in their own language, Pai’coca. Emergildo spoke with Romelia in their language, Aingue. I wished suddenly that there was someone for me to talk to in my language. I missed Víctor. And where was Opi when I needed him?
“Is that what the company has given the Kofan people as compensation for poisoning the river?” Michi asked Emergildo gravely.
Emergildo’s sigh was painful. “Yes.”
Romelia walked around the side of the house and filled a metal pot with water from the catchment system, the very same system that we had built for Uncle Dabo.
“My wife will make us plantain juice with rainwater,” Emergildo announced, trying to regain his composure. “Without these catchment systems, we wouldn’t have anything to drink today. Except that bottle of water.”
And suddenly I understood how the companies had taken everything and given nothing back. No running water, no medical clinics, no schools.
While the men sat on the palm-wood floor beneath the creaking heat of the metal roof, I went into the kitchen to introduce myself to Romelia.
“I come from far away,” I said.
“Ah,” she said, squatting and mashing the boiled plantains with a stick.
“We drink chocula too,” I said. “We call it peneme.”
She mustered a thin smile until her lips began to quiver. She pressed the stick harder into the pot until her shoulders slouched. Then she hid her eyes with her forearm, and her chest began to heave.
“It’s okay,” I said.
She wiped her eyes, then looked at me. “I’m sorry. I’m so angry.”
“It’s okay to be angry.”
“I didn’t know . . .”
“What didn’t you know?”
“That the water would kill them.”
She covered her eyes again with her forearm.
“I gave them chocula,” she said, sobbing. “They played in the river . . .”
I exhaled deeply. “How long ago was this?”
“A long time ago,” she said. “My children died a long time ago and it still hurts.”
I rubbed her back gently.
“When the company treats us like dogs,” she continued, “when they spill oil in the river and give us little cans of tuna, I remember my children . . . I remember what the company took from us . . . and I get so mad, so mad.”
I stared out into their tiny garden. The banana leaves were bursting bright green in the afternoon sun and, in the distance, oily rainbows sparkled on the river. I thought about my own women, the ones that I had seen on the Via Maxus oil road filling their water jugs from the company hose.
“Your husband is a good man,” I said tenderly. “He built a water system for my uncle and many other Waorani families.”
She nodded quietly, mashing the sweet plantains with the stick.
“Michi is a good man too,” she said. “He is our friend.”