The Embedding

EIGHT

The day after he snorted the fungus powder and finally met maka-i, Pierre left the Xemahoa village, filled with a consciousness of what he must do that was as urgent as it was ill-defined.

Kayapi went along with him—he flourished no knives this time, made no threats. All the Indian said was:

“Pee-áir, we got to be back before maka-i is born, okay?”

Pierre nodded absently. He was still caught up in the experience. It was like the first sex experience, but a first sex experience of the whole consciousness. Overwhelmingly so—to the point of ecstasy and terror. He could concentrate on little else.

He had to rely on Kayapi to locate the dugout they’d arrived in. To empty out the rain slops. Clean the outboard. Pile Pierre’s things under some plastic sheeting.

Kayapi assisted without any complaints. He seemed to appreciate this irrational purpose that was urging Pierre to make the journey north to the dam.

He navigated the dugout, while Pierre stared out through the rain into the flooded maze of trees.

The bunches of epiphytic and parasitic plants crowding the terraces of the branches triggered a memory of a city far away—and highrise flats that he vaguely remembered being crowded with people all facing north during some disaster—a planecrash or a fire. Where had it been? Paris? London? Or was it just an image from a movie, that had suddenly woken to life? Saüba ants, driven off the forest floor, made tracks along low branches with leaf segments held over their bodies like columns of refugees protecting themselves with parasols. Macaws fired tracer messages of feather-numbers through the high leaves—numbers that he couldn’t count.

When the pium flies descended on them in bloodsucking, stinging clouds, Kayapi rummaged through Pierre’s things till he found a tube of insect repellent to smear on the Frenchman’s skin, so that his flesh wouldn’t swell up with the dropsy these flies left as their calling card.

At midday, it was Kayapi who pressed dried fish into Pierre’s hand and urged him to eat.

Pierre stared for hours into the dull green chaos of the forest that periodically came aflame with birds and butterflies and blooms.

There was chaos there, to a foreigner’s eyes—but there was no chaos in his mind.

There was a dawn of understanding.

Or rather, it was a memory of the dawn of understanding—which he struggled to hold on to.

His nostrils itched with the memory of maka-i, as though they’d been bitten raw by pium flies.

The day seemed endlessly, timelessly, long, like a long track rising over bleak, lonely mountains from the valley of the previous night, which a mist drifted up from now, to veil—yet without there being any clear line of demarcation between the two zones. He must have emerged from the experience at some particular time, he reasoned. Yet the boundary wasn’t definable. The greater could not be bounded by the lesser. The perception of last night could not be imprisoned in terms of today’s perception, when it was a vaster, more devastating mode of perception. Thus its bounds could not be set. How could a two-dimensional being who had been able to experience three dimensions set up a frontier post anywhere in his flat territory—and say beyond this point lies the Other? For the Other would be everywhere—and nowhere, to him. And as for clock-time, Pierre had let his watch run down and wore it only as a bracelet now. Time seemed like a useless ornament—a distraction. The sense of time he’d possessed the night before hadn’t been time by the calendar or time by the clock. It hadn’t been historic time, but a sense of the spatio-temporal unity out of which space and time are normally separated into an illusory contrast with one another.

In this three-dimensional flatland of ours, words flow forward and only hang fire of their meaning so pitiably short a time, while memories flow hindwards with such a pitiably feeble capacity to hold themselves in full present awareness. Our illusion of the present is like a single dot on a graph we can never get to see the whole of. It is a pingpong ball dancing on a jet of water, unaware of the jet. The jagged inkdrip of a thought recorded by the electroencephalograph pen.

Last night he had understood Roussel’s poem easily, effortlessly, and entirely. He held its embeddings in the forefront of his head. Held and held and continued to hold, while subprogramme after subprogramme started in, deferred to the next subprogramme, and sub-deferred again—and everything fitted together. Visual images of the embedded poem flowed within one another, all held together in a wheeling zodiac that spun round the deepest self-embedded axis in his mind.

Yet there had been terrible danger. He still sweated at the thought of it.

He had tamed the poem—and therefore the experience—only because he knew it so well already in its separate parts. Just as the Xemahoa already knew the separate elements of their coded myths, from childhood.

Throughout the Xemahoa chant-song, that many-part fugue of the Xemahoa B language, he felt his mind was splitting, flying apart, fluttering to pieces. He had feared the birds were all flying out of his head and near to losing their way in endless jungle.

It was Kayapi who netted his birds and herded them together. Kayapi saw what was happening to him and dragged him by the hand to the tape recorder, switched the poem on.

Kayapi knew the track of his lost flock of words.

Now—with the same competence—he piloted Pierre through the drowning jungle where ants fled like refugees, and wild pigs splashed and grunted, where butterflies made clouds of colour, and pium flies descended in searing fogs, while the snouts of caymans nuzzled the waves of their wake.

All these creatures were the tools of Xemahoa thinking. Today, the jungle seemed to be one vast beating brain.

Destroy these tools, and you would destroy the Xemahoa. For then they could not think anymore. They would become Caraiba, foreigners, to themselves.

Through the afternoon the fugue of thoughts faded in Pierre’s head, as he stared at the wet trees. By nightfall, the rainclouds had moved away from moon and stars. The dugout continued on its way through broader and broader channels by moonlight. It passed over flooded acres, through lagoons bristling with drowning vegetation. Pierre knew he would have got the outboard propeller tangled before many miles were up. But Kayapi piloted them through effortlessly and untiringly, sensing the right channels with a dexterity that shamed the Frenchman. Yet, for Kayapi, wasn’t it his own drowning mind that he was navigating?

Finally, hours after nightfall, the Indian did get tired. Abruptly he beached the dugout on an isle of rotten logs, stretched himself out and slept.

Pierre also fell asleep eventually; yet slept more fitfully, haunted by dying images of the embedding dance. In his dream birdfeathers formed into a giant roulette wheel. He rolled round this, his body bunched up into a ball, until the circle of numbered feathers flew apart, took wing in all directions, and lost themselves in the greater wheel of the zodiac of stars—shocked out of interstellar darkness into sunlight only by the dawn booming of a band of howler monkeys migrating through trees across the lagoon.

Kayapi immediately sat up, grinned, and set the boat on course again before producing some more dry piraracu and some pulp cakes.

“Kayapi—”

“Pee-áir?”

“When we get there—”

“Yes, Pee-áir?”

“When we reach the dam—”

But what? What! He didn’t know!

“Kayapi, how soon is maka-i to be born?”

“When we get back.”

“Tell me what tree maka-i lives with in the jungle?”

“The tree called xe-wo-i.”

“What’s that in Portuguese?”

“The Caraiba have no word.”

“Can you point one out to me?”

“Here? No. I said, Pee-áir, there are kai-kai places only.”

He flourished the fingers of one hand.

“Can’t you describe the tree?”

He shrugged.

“It’s small. Has a rough skin like the cayman. You remember eating some soil? The tree was just beside there.”

“What? But I didn’t see any fungus there.”

“Maka-i was asleep. When the waters come and go, he wakes.”

“Oh, I see—the fungus only grows after the ground’s been covered with water. Is that right?”

Kayapi nodded.

Why hadn’t he thought of taking a sample of the soil that day to run a chemical analysis on, instead of just eating it! Why hadn’t Kayapi told him then that that’s where maka-i grew! Instead of just asking him to eat some earth without explaining. But of course the Indian couldn’t have conceived of taking a soil sample to a laboratory. His body was his own laboratory.

Now that Pierre saw the soil-eating incident in perspective, it all seemed like part of a carefully scripted initiation course. Maybe eating the soil had been some sort of necessary biochemical preparation, before the fungus drug could act on him?

The intricacy of the links that held the mental and social life of these people together! Links between tree and soil and fungus; shit and sperm and laughter. Between floodwater and language, myth and incest. Where was the boundary between reality and myth? Between ecology and metaphor? Which elements could safely be left out of the picture? The eating of a handful of soil? The spilling of sperm on the soil? The counting by significant feathers (in whatever way these were ‘significant’)? The tree that the maka-i grew on?

The scientific answer was to take soil samples and specimens of the fungus, and blood samples from the Xemahoa. To analyse, to synthesize, ultimately to market the results in a neat round pill. Twenty-five milligrams of ‘X’. What would they call the drug? ‘Embedol’ or some such name! First the scientific journals, then the dope market.

Undoubtedly some measurable biochemical change took place within the brain—in its ability to process information, to hold vastly greater amounts before the attention than usual. Might it not even be possible that maka-i actually did convey power over Nature—power to intervene and change the world? For what was nature, what was the whole physical world, except information chemically and physically coded—and he who held access to the information symbols in their totality held direct access to reality, held the magician’s legendary powers in his grasp. Even this did not seem totally impossible to Pierre, in the aftermath of his experience—though Logic and Reason fought against this fantastic dream.

At the very least the Xemahoa had a marketable ‘high’ to set beside mescaline and psilocybin and LSD. Their high was more specific in its function than those other psychedelic drugs. Still, it could be made into another commodity for purchase by the freaked-out pissed-off playboys of the Western World!

Twenty-five milligrams of maka-i. Of embedol. With all its messy appurtenances lopped off. The eating of soil. The rotting of the nostrils. It would be one hell of a commodity.

Yet for the Indians it was that very complex of physical and metaphorical events—the soil and sperm and shit and bloody nostrils—that made up life and meaning and existence.

In the tin refugee camp beyond the orange fly-paper set up to trap them they would be shadows, not substances. Shadows whispering bastard Caraiba words as they faded. The birds would have flown out of their heads over a featurless waste of water with no way home…

When Kayapi and he got to the dam, he must—

What? What!

The sun shone again for a while. They passed through clouds of butterflies. Through swarms of flies.

At midday they chewed more of the dry fish and pulp cake. More rain clouds started massing overhead and soon began trailing a grey curtain of water through the drowning forest.

The problem of what he would do when he got to the dam was snatched from his hands in late afternoon.

Their dugout was passing through rainmists between steelwoods, mahoganies and rubber trees—grist to the future timber dredges—when a flat-bottom boat with a powerful outboard came abreast of the dugout. Two men and one woman were sitting in it. Pierre found himself staring at the muzzle of a submachinegun…

“Put your boat over there under cover,” the woman ordered. Her eyes burned into them distrustfully and feverishly. Beneath the smeared dirt and fly bites puffing her flesh she was maybe young and beautiful. Her companions looked tired and on edge, in their dirty grey slacks and shirts. They had a fervent hunted look about them.

So, perhaps, did Pierre.

Both boats were soon guided under the foliage.

The woman tossed her head fretfully.

“Who are you? What are you doing here? Looking for wealth? Prospector?”

“No, senhora. But I’m in a hurry. I’ve something to do.”

“You’re American?” Her eyes hardened. “Your accent sounds strange. You have something to do with the dam?”

Pierre laughed bitterly.

“Something to do with the dam? Oh that’s a joke! Yes, I should indeed like to do something with the dam. Blow it sky-high, to begin with!”

The thin feverish woman watched him contemptuously.

“I suppose you mean to do that with your bare hands.”

“He’s some crazy priest, Iza,” one of her companions said.

“I’m no bloody parasite priest—nor prospector—nor a policeman either!”

These people didn’t look anything like those in the Amazon area who might predictably be armed the way they were. Nothing like the private thugs or prospectors or adventurers. Nor anything like the paramilitary types whom the helicopter had brought to the village. Suddenly, Pierre realized who they might be—and who the men in that helicopter had been searching for. Yet it seemed incredible, so deep in this wet chaos of the Amazon.

“Why do you say policeman? You think we are police?”

Pierre laughed.

“No, my friends. It’s clear what you are. A helicopter landed in the village I was in some days ago. Armed men searched it. They were looking for you. You’re guerrillas. That’s obvious to me. You look like the hunted, not the hunters! They had an easy insolence about them. Particularly their officer. Though they were cowards, too.”

“Paixao…” muttered one of the men, nervously.

“And what did you tell this officer?”

“I told him nothing. I hid in the jungle. Or rather this Indian here pushed me into the jungle to hide me. I thought it was the priests coming back with their nonsense about saving the Indians. Maybe they thought a helicopter would make an impressive Noah’s Ark! You realize the dam is responsible for all this flooding?”

Pierre got a sarcastic look in reply.

“Joam, search him and the boat.”

As the man called Joam made a move to step into their dugout Pierre noticed Kayapi furtively sliding a hand for his knife; and caught his wrist.

“All right Kayapi—they’re friends.”

He told Joam:

“You’ll find I’m a Frenchman. A social anthropologist. I’m studying the Indians they are about to destroy so blindly with their dam.”

Joam pulled the plastic sheeting aside and rummaged through the dried food, medicines, clothing, pulling out the bag containing Pierre’s carbine and tape recorder and his papers.

The dance-chant of the Xemahoa rang out abruptly among the branches, as he touched the playback switch. The other man and the woman hadn’t seen what he was going to do. They brought their guns up.

“Good machine,” Joam grunted, flipping it off.

From the bag he took Pierre’s passport, field notes, and diary.

He handed the passport over to Iza. She read through it carefully.

“So you only entered Brazil a few months ago—but you speak excellent Portuguese. Where did you learn it, Portugal?”

“No, Mozambique.”

“There’s no visa for Mozambique.”

“There’s a visa for Tanzania. I went over the border into the free zone with your comrades in arms, the Frelimo guerrillas.”

“So you say,” muttered the woman, doubtfully. “It may be true. We’ll find out.”

Meanwhile Joam flipped through the pages of Pierre’s notes and diary, reading random passages.

Pierre leaned towards him, urgently.

“These notes are written about a people who are going to be destroyed. Who know it. Who fight back in the only way they can. In terms of their own culture.”

“There are other ways of fighting,” snapped Iza.

“Precisely!” sighed Pierre. “There is the way that you and I can fight. There is the political fight. But for these Indians to adopt a political stance would be meaningless. Ah, it was so different in Africa with the Makonde people!”

“Come along then, Monsieur—tell us about Mozambique and Frelimo. In detail.”

Pierre smiled wryly.

“To establish an alibi for myself?”

“You have nothing to fear if you’re a man of good will.”

So Pierre told about the Makonde people who straddle the frontier of Tanzania and Mozambique—of the independent African republic, and the colony which the government in Lisbon insisted year after year was an integral part of metropolitan Portugal, using, as powerful arguments in their favour, Huey Cobra gunships, Fiat jet bombers, Agent Orange crop defoliants, and napalm raids. In the towns and cities posters of particoloured white soldiers holding particoloured black babies in their arms proclaimed ‘WE ARE ALL PORTUGUESE’. Yet three-fifths of the land had been out of effective Portuguese control for a decade and more. Pierre told how he crossed the river Ruvuma by dugout into Cabo Delgado province on what was by now a guerrilla milkrun, so far from Portuguese control was this free zone of villages and dispensaries and schools. It was guarded by Chinese ground-to-air missiles that made low-level helicopter sorties or jet attacks virtually impossible. The main danger came from high-level bombing raids—spasmodic, meaningless raids that blasted holes in the wild bush and occasionally filled the dispensaries up with broken bodies and the bomas with gutted bellowing cattle. Pierre told them, joyfully, of attacks on the Cabora Bassa dam on the Zambezi which had delayed that project of exploitation for so many years, upping the ante intolerably for that tiny peasant empire Portugal. Told them how he had gone on one such raid.

Finally, they believed Pierre and relaxed and handed his papers and even his carbine back to him.

“Your Indian friend did you a good turn, Monsieur,” Iza said. “That Captain you saw may have been Flores Paixao. That one is a vicious swine—well-trained by the Americans in counter-insurgency techniques. A torturer. A professional sadistic beast. Keep out of his way.”

“Does the fact that you’re here mean you are strong enough to carry the struggle into the whole of Brazil?” Pierre asked her eagerly.

“The whole of Brazil!” Iza echoed his words, sounding sick and sad. “Who can deal with the whole of Brazil? Don’t be foolish. All that our puppet government can do to govern this Amazon is to flood the whole area, so that the problem disappears! We are here to destroy such an illusion. Our government has mortgaged the whole Amazon basin to America. Built roads for Bethlehem Steel and King Ranch of Texas. These ‘Great Lakes’ will split our country in two parts. One part, an American colony looted of its minerals to maintain U.S. technology. The other, a Vichy-style régime for us Brazilians—the passive consumer market.”

Pierre thought sadly: these people are as near to the end of their tether as I am myself. Yet their enemy is my enemy.

“We shall let the world know what real Brazilians think of this ‘civilizing’ venture!” Iza cried passionately. “The tricks are endless. To impoverish us. Drain our resources. Stop us from using our own wealth ourselves. North America needs it desperately. Such are the ironies of so-called aid that in fact Latin America is aiding North America to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars annually! The cash flow is always one way. North! These Amazon dams are the greatest conspiracy and perversion yet. So we strike at them.”

She fell silent, sick and tired. Her energy supply snapped abruptly. Her eyes burnt with fever—not the fever of a sickness, but a terrible exhaustion, mixed up with a fervent despair.

“I know,” said Pierre gently. “The dam has to be destroyed. It is destroying… wonders, in the jungle here. Wonderful people. Washing them away into the concentration camps of priests. Their language is… a wonderful cultural discovery for me. I’m sorry, this might seem like a minor problem to you people. But I assure you it isn’t. And yet—I’m torn two different ways, meeting you.”

“Why were you going North?”

Pierre shivered.

“I don’t know rightly. I had no fixed idea. It frightens me, now I’ve met you, my aimlessness. My instinctiveness. This obsessed journey. Talking to you reminds me of such a different world—one that means nothing here among the Indians. I feel with you, I think with you. But what can be done? Can the dam be destroyed so easily? Surely it must take lorry loads of explosive to destroy such a thing?”

“There’ll be explosives there,” Iza promised. “And the flood pressure will assist us. We shall also kill the American engineers and their lackeys.”

“Other dams will be under attack too,” the second man—Raimundo—added hotly. “Even at Santarém itself. Whatever happens, the lie of this Amazon development will be shown up before the whole world.”

“What sort of weapons have you got?”

Iza hesitated.

“You think of this as suicide in your hearts, don’t you?” Pierre asked flatly.

Joam shrugged.

“The terrain is not so favourable.”

“These attacks are tactically vital!” Iza burned with an end of the tether passion that broke through the crust of her weariness every time that the obsessive pressures built up in her afresh. “We have to make our presence known, in a shocking and symbolic way. Back in the early days of our struggle Carlos Marighella wrote that there was no timetable for us and no deadlines to meet. But the situation has changed. This yanqui scheme for the Amazon is a monstrous distraction from reality. A fire extinguisher that may quench the realities of revolution for years! The Amazon is the pressure point of imperialism, today. It is our job to panic the Americans. Here where they believe themselves safely protected by their flood. Hidden away from the violence of the cities and the coast.”

Kayapi had been sitting idly all this time. Now Pierre turned to him.

“Kayapi?”

“Yes, Pee-áir.”

“These people are going to attack the dam. Shall we go along with them?” he asked in Portuguese.

“If they go, no need for you to go yourself,” replied Kayapi in Xemahoa. “They are your shadows. You, the substance. Maka-i is being born soon. You must be present. These men will work for you.”

“Why is the opinion of this Indian so important?” demanded Joam angrily. “Is this savage to decide what you do, for you?”

Pierre stared at Joam in revulsion. ‘This savage!’ Pierre could have wept—to swell the flood.

“I’m sorry,” Joam apologized. “Naturally Socialism is for all. What I mean is, the Indian isn’t yet qualified to decide.”

You pay your money and you take your choice. Of Marx or Christ. What did the choice matter to the Xemahoa! Whichever gained control over them, they would be destroyed. The birds of their thoughts scattered. Trapped with birdlime in tin huts.

“I’ll wish you luck,” said Pierre, making up his mind abruptly, arriving at the impossible choice. “I love you as comrades, as deeply as I hate the dam. I want you to destroy it. So much. I want you to empty out that yanqui fire extinguisher.”

“Besides,” interrupted Kayapi, “you never hit anything with your gun, Pee-áir. You are the listener and learner, not the warrior. Bruxo knows. Why do you think he let you meet maka-i the other night? Why do you think the girl comes to your hammock? Why do you think I show you how to eat the earth? Your box-that-speaks is your weapon, Pee-áir, not the gun. I do not say you lack courage. You met maka-i. But you are a different man. Your life has a different shape. Consider wisely. Do not let the birds of your thought fly the wrong way.”

‘You let me come this far towards the dam, Kayapi!’

“Your birds had to fly this way. Now they need to return. These people will do your work.”

“Why do you talk two different languages to each other?” demanded Iza. “He understands your Portuguese perfectly well. Can’t he reply in Portuguese?”

“It’s important that he speaks in his native language. A great thing is happening in the minds of the tribe. He wishes to belong.”

Kayapi looked sullen.

“Maka-i will be born, Pee-áir. Hurry up.”

“You said there was time!”

“I was wrong. There’s no time. It happens soon.”

“He says we have to go back,” Pierre told the guerrillas.

The woman gazed disbelievingly at Pierre.

“Why?”

Pierre chose his words carefully.

“What is happening in his village is very important, as a human event. If I’m not present to see what happens, something amazing might be lost. I can’t risk it. Not just on my own account. But, well—for Man.”

“How can you say so, when you have been with Frelimo and seen what they do for Mankind?”

“This tears me apart. Half of me wants to go on with you. Half has to return. I need to be two people at once.”

“An amoeba,” Raimundo sneered. “A shapeless amoeba wants to split in half.”

“When you meet maka-i,” Kayapi whispered, “you are two men, three men, many men. Your mind is great with words. You speak the full language of man.” But was Kayapi his evil genius or true guide?

“Dear people. Comrades. Iza, Joam, Raimundo. I’m going back with him to the village.”

“What made your mind up?” Raimundo jibed. “The sight of guns? The reality of a point-four-five INA sub-machinegun? The thought of it going bang bang? You despicable bourgeois intellectual. No doubt Ford or Rockefeller is paying you to visit this jungle to dredge up this mystification. Who knows who is paying?”

“Shadow and substance, Pee-áir,” hissed Kayapi. “Is it not strange to meet your shadows in the jungle? They meet you to show you how they will go on for you. Do you imagine it is an accident we meet them?”

“I’ll do what you say, Kayapi. You’ve been right before. In my own terms, it’s wrong. But they can’t be my terms if I’m to understand Xemahoa. If I’m wrong then I shall let everyone know it. I promise.”

“Fair promises,” snapped the woman. “We’ve wasted time and energy on you. I suppose we should shoot you both, for security. But we’re not going to. You can have the opportunity to feel like a worm. Perhaps then you may keep your promise! Such as it is. I guess that is public relations if not exactly revolution. Fuck off then, Frenchman.”

Pierre and Kayapi set off southwards again through the flooded creeks and lagoons. To Pierre’s eyes the water already seemed centimetres higher than on their journey north, and it still rained.

As evening fell, Pierre finally asked the Indian.

“Which of the Xemahoa was your father, Kayapi? Is he still alive?”

“Can’t you guess that, Pee-áir?”

“The Bruxo?”

Kayapi nodded.

“He visited my mother’s village. They said they wanted to honour him because of his power and his knowledge. Wanted to steal some of it maybe. But my father was cunning. He insisted on a bleeding girl. The same as for you, Pee-áir. So that there will be no baby from him, and the Xemahoa can stay together. But something happened anyway, he was so powerful a man. The girl made a baby. I am his halfson. It is my grief—and my glory.

You know about being half, Pee-áir. Half of you went north with those men.”

“True, Kayapi.”

Kayapi abruptly swung the dugout towards the bank, drove it deep into the branches, killed the engine…

“You hear?”

Pierre strained against the rainfall of water on leaves. At last he caught the deepening beat of a motor. Kayapi was pointing upwards through the branches at the sky.

Some minutes later, a helicopter passed through the rainmist, following the line of the watercourse—a dark ugly whale lumbering through the wet air.

It shone a spotlight on the waters below, Kayapi pressed Pierre down into the bottom of the dugout, so that his white face and arms wouldn’t show.