Contemplating the Trees

Nobody works every day on the Y pa’û islands: we take turns, working one month in three. When it’s our turn, we make sure our cows don’t sink into the tuju and if they do start to sink everyone helps out: we keep watch so the floods don’t take us by surprise. It all takes time, corralling the cows onto the wampos, putting out grass and water for them, calming them down so that they stand still enough to keep their balance, getting up there with them and patting them so that their breath is as slow and even as though they were in a meadow full of tender shoots of grass. Our plants are also up on wampos: these ones are enormous rafts with walls along the sides to keep everything in and they’re full of earth, not so much that they can’t float, but just enough for the roots of the plants to spread. For those of us not working the day goes by contemplating the trees, we never get tired of lying on the ground watching the play of light and shadow between the waving branches, their edges are bathed in a splendour which in Great Britain – Liz isn’t really British anymore but she can still remember – you only see in the haloes around saints’ heads in churches. Our leaves – those of our yvyra, our whole jungle – give off an aura of wondrous vegetable sanctity.

If we wake up early we greet the dawn from inside a cloud, one that descends from the sky and rises from the rivers and streams in the early hours, the Paraná’s tatatina: a cloud that prevents us from seeing anything except its insides which are luminous and opaque at the same time. An impossible cloud; how can something luminous be opaque? London lives in a cloud like that for a good part of the year, but its cloud is pinkish from all the smoke from the engines of the machines and ours is white like a bone from Our Lord God. The tatatina imposes a kind of peace: we just boil water to make mate and tea or grill some corn for the children, our mitã, they usually know who their parents are but they live with everyone, we all look after them and they come and go from ruka to ruka even though they keep their things in one hut in particular. We do the same. I share one with Kauka, but I can sleep and wake up in any other, wherever I am when I get drowsy and succumb to sleep; if not next to my warrior lady it might be beside Liz, who welcomes me of an evening for her curries and her stories, and some nights into her bed too. Sometimes I stay with Rosa who teaches the mitã the knack of breaking in horses, and sometimes I stay at Fierro’s with his children and mine, where both of us have taken to writing. I sleep with my loves, I leave with Estreya after listening to songs, after playing games, after smoking or drinking the herbs we grow, that’s a year-round undertaking, testing their flavour and their effects at the same time as mixing and grafting them together to create new plants.

As a result, we have an angel’s trumpet that tastes of narã orange and berry, its fruit grow like weeds in Y pa’û; a tea that first blinds you, then takes you deep into your soul, a tea that transports you to the centre of the divine light and from there allows you to see that the whole world is a single animal, us and the ypyra leaves and the surubí catfish and the chajá screamer bird, and the giraffes and the praying mantis mamboretá and the passion flower mburucuyá, and the jaguar and the dragons and the micuré possum, and the camuatí bee, and the mountains and the elephants and the Paraná and even the British railways and the huge swathes of land cleared by the Argentines. We also have a herb that you smoke that tastes of itself, of its own sweet and rough flower, and also of warm bread and cheese rolls and marmalade made from lemon and narã, the bitter orange from the deltas, a happy herb called vy’aty that takes away pain and fills our eyes with warmth, that makes the world more friendly and other people companions we can laugh with. We have mushrooms that we’ve been enriching with flavours to make them less bitter: quince, tararira, different types of water hyacinth, fresh wild lettuce, pure Paraná river water, merõ melons and curry. Mushrooms are important to us, they’re for eating during ceremonies, never alone, because mushrooms are are gifts to us from the very belly of the earth, and life and death are in that tyeguy, all mixed up together, one producing the other. Mushrooms can make gods appear, it can happen that you stretch out your body and then find you can’t see your feet let alone touch them, it can happen that the thing that normally separates you from everyone else vanishes, it can happen that the devil sticks out his tail and you fall into hell. You emerge changed from mushrooms, the same but different, mushrooms give people divine perspectives and these perspectives from beyond life and death can be terrifying. Or liberating. You need to have a machi wise woman nearby when you take mushrooms. We have special rukas and wampos for eating them, we have machis ready to guide the journeys of visitors who are new to all this. We also have a plant that we don’t really like but that we cultivate because we need it: we chew its leaves during hard times, when floods or wars mean we have to work all day and all night. These are the times when we need women and men to lead us: we always have a few chiefs, they take it in turns and don’t usually have to do anything, but in times of crisis they’re in charge and you have to put up with that until it’s all over. Kauka’s one of them, she leads a group along with an Englishman called Air, who spends his time fishing without much success and reciting limericks. In my nation, women have the same power as men. We don’t care about the vote because we all vote and because we can have as many chieftesses as chieftains and we can also have two-spirits in charge. Even Fierro, who here on the islands has become a she and taken the name Kurusu – which is a woman’s or kuña’s name in Guaraní and a homage to the person who made her female, that’s right, Cruz – even Kurusu Fierro has been a chieftess in periods of war with the Guaranís. That was in the beginning when they didn’t want to accept us as neighbours, and when they hadn’t yet come to any of our vy’aty ceremonies or tried our mushrooms, which they call marangatú. Even I, who can be woman and man, have had to lead the charge during a terrible flood and a skirmish with the Argentines, who feared we wouldn’t let them transport their grain and hides down our Paraná. Kauka, who is one of our bravest and wisest warriors, has led terrible battles, the kind that fill the ysyry with bodies that the water then hurries to carry out to sea, wanting those to be pearls that were their eyes.

Otherwise, our time is our own apart from that one month in each season when it’s our turn to work. During the other two we have fun competing at tree climbing, spearing leaping dorado fish, making dolls and gods with braided reeds, telling stories and singing songs about love and war, and rowing. Liz, Rosa and I are the fastest: travelling these waterways together is something we really love, the three of us, our canoes strapped together, rowing through its ysyry travelling as one, and we win all the weighted wampo races in Y pa’ û. We train nearly every morning when we don’t have to work, provided it’s not raining too much, but even sometimes in torrential rain, when we compete in wet laden wampos. We’re unbeaten and that’s why we’re the ones who carry the animals and plants when we migrate: the three of us bringing up the rear, each in our own kayak, the rukas on a small wampo at night, Rosa calming the cows and the dear oxen who no longer have to carry anything and can enjoy the same unencumbered life as the rest of us, they are Iñchiñ too. Oscar and Kauka lead the way, they command the flotilla of kayaks covered in branches that are at the vanguard of our migration, those that go ahead, making sure no nasty surprises lie in store. We make our way slowly, waiting for favourable currents, lingering on the islands where we find fruit trees, or where dorados and other pira jump enthusiastically in the rippling streams, or when we see bees hovering in the air. We meet up with our other loves, we sleep with them on those calm nights. During storms the three of us with Estreya tether ourselves to the strongest tree trunks, and caress the animals to reassure them as we steady ourselves against the currents.