Benigno is Benign
The village healer Benigno Dahua tends to neighbors with problems "that the hospital doesn’t know how to cure" and hopes to open his own retreat center for tourists. He says “little friend, correctly, little friend,” like a little genius of the forest, laughs all the time, and never says no. “I’m not stingy about what I have learned. God has given it to me with love, and with that love I give it to the people who want to learn.”
Benigno, always smoking his mapacho, in the ceremonial hut of his son-in-law Guido Rimache, in Santa María del Ojeal, where he is living temporarily.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 198 of Cáñamo magazine, June 2014.
He is small and thin, almost fragile, and hides behind large dark glasses an eye damaged by an evil sorcerer, hired by some jealous person. Benigno Dahua Yaicate now lives in his son-in-law’s house in Santa María del Ojeal, a village near Iquitos on the Amazon River, but perhaps tomorrow he will return to his home in Yanashe, a day away by boat. He is as itinerant as the river that saw him grow up. He was born in Quito, his father’s city, but at six years old his family moved to the Peruvian jungle, his mother’s land: “I liked living in the jungle because everything was at hand, the food. You no longer had to take money out of your pocket to buy two or three kilos of meat or fish.” The jungle of abundance is a thing of the past: Benigno offers me a lunch of rice, noodles, and chicken; nothing was produced in the jungle, everything bought with money. What does Benigno do to fill his pocket? “Shamanism,” he says for us to understand, although he clarifies that the term shaman is “scientific” (Western), and that they have always been known as “curanderos” (healers) or “curiosos” (curious people).
Current shamanism surpasses the scope of traditional healing when at four in the afternoon a certain agitation in a foreign language surprises us: tourists from a nearby hotel come to receive a brief explanation of natural remedies. And since his son-in-law, Guido Rimache, the main healer, is in Chile giving ayahuasca to Chileans (very interested indeed), it is Benigno who takes a large wooden chair in the ceremonial hut and offers an explanation in his chatty, impressionistic style about the “magical botanical plants.” “The most important is Doctor Ayahuasca,” he says, brandishing a piece of the “liliana” (sic) above his head. “And this Doctor Ayahuasca cures fifty percent of diseases. We start with the brain, then the heart, kidneys, liver, and the rest inside the body. Marrow. Bones. And other diseases.” When the hospital cannot find the illness, “we use ayahuasca to focus and analyze where the sickness is.” Then he passes around a little bottle with the remedy and lets them smell it. Then he raises a twig with chacruna leaves: “And these leaves are the mixtures of the ayahuasca. It’s like sugar, sweet. Pure ayahuasca is bitter. And this plant is the sugar to sweeten it, it leaves you like you were drinking your little Coca-Cola.”
He lights another mapacho cigarette and, amidst clouds of smoke, explains that tobacco serves “to make a connection with the ayahuasca” and to drive away “bad spirits.” “It’s natural, not like a cigarette that has many contents and can affect your lungs, but this mapacho when shamans know how to handle it, they live strong, they don’t feel anything smoking this cigarette because it is ayahuasca’s companion.” He shows about ten roots, barks, and leaves on his work table, explaining properties and preparation methods. Facing his enthusiasm is a group of tourists to whom what this eccentric old man says is about as interesting as their next excursion or activity on their packed Amazon jungle tourist schedule, eager to discover the wonders and nonsense of the tourism business.
One of the new dimensions of shamanism in the Amazon: explaining to tourists the mysteries of the “magical botanical plants.”
shamanism for gringos
Benigno knows well the world of shamanism for foreigners. For years he worked in lodges dedicated to spiritual healing, which are abundant in Iquitos and its surroundings. He didn’t like them because “I couldn’t talk to any of the patients, nor to the cooks either; everything was private, as if I were imprisoned.” He claims that, knowing how much each guest paid per day, the amount that actually reached the shamans was insignificant.
In reality, it’s not that he dislikes the lodges themselves, but rather the lodges run by others. In fact, he is setting up one with his nephew Medardo in Tamshiyacu, a town abundant in these establishments. Then he makes me a sudden proposal: “I want to work with you. You bring the guests, I do the shaman work. Half and half. We put in our money: you put in your money, I put in mine, bah, and we get back even more. So we’re no longer poor.” “Ayahuasca is business,” he states, not disdainfully but proudly. What he regrets is that he hasn’t gotten rich like other maestros who have “palaces in several cities around the world.” “Whoever knows how to take advantage of it, good. I only know how to lead my ceremonies, give my patients their ‘mareación’ (spiritual state), and sing.”
Benigno does the tourist shamanism that travel agencies demand and then later, when the sun goes down, he fulfills the role of a traditional healer for the neighbors. A woman and a young man arrive; the young man sits at Benigno’s feet. The healer takes the “chacapa barredora [a leaf rattle], which sweeps away all kinds of ailments and bad spirits,” and shakes it overhead while blowing the smoke of a mapacho (traditional tobacco cigar) on the young man’s head and singing to the power of nature, medicinal plants, God, and the angels that show the way. Then he asks the mother if she has brought the water; she nods and hands him a glass full and a pill. Benigno sings over both and gives them to the young man, who swallows the pill. Benigno tells him he must follow a strict diet in the coming weeks: no milk, no pork, no certain fish. He also can’t exercise under the sun. When they leave, the woman gives him a twenty soles bill, the equivalent of a day’s wage, the price of the consultation.
After they leave, he explains to me that the young man suffers from epilepsy, and that the pill doctors give only calms, does not cure, but that he knows the remedies, because although he is poor and only completed a year and a half of primary school, he had Doctor Ayahuasca as a teacher, who gave him so much knowledge that we could be talking for months and never finish telling it. We smoke and talk until another patient appears, with whom he talks. I write in my diary but I can’t avoid overhearing words like “live peacefully,” “family,” “revenge”… It seems like a psychological consultation. Later, Benigno explains that the man’s wife has left him and left him with the children; he is depressed. He’s going to give him ayahuasca and the plant will expel the negative spirit that has damaged the family, so that unity will return. Because besides allowing the ayahuasquero to diagnose the sick and decide on treatment, ayahuasca is frequently used to find a partner or consolidate a family, as well as to get a good job, money, or combat “saladera,” bad luck.
A consultation with Benigno Dahua always includes singing, blowing tobacco smoke, the chacapa, and perfume.
harvesting with "grandpa"
When the morning is a gathering of leaden clouds at ground level, we set out, blowing with the wind, threatening rain, in search of a young man who is going to sell us ayahuasca and chacruna to prepare the remedy. The houses of Santa María spread out cautiously separated from each other, surrounded by fruit trees, crowning steep hills. We leave the houses behind and walk for an hour deep into the forest until we reach where our supplier has his plants; he barely has two or three but is thinking of planting a hectare of ayahuasca, which sells at a good price in Iquitos. We stop now and then to wait for the “grandfather,” as the young man has decided to call him. And yes, he is. Benigno walks with difficulty, slowly and carefully; on one occasion he slips on the muddy ground and falls.
I dream of a thick ayahuasca vine, worthy of a great photograph, but we find a thin little vine barely a year old. The young man pulls it and then cuts it into pieces, which he places neatly on the ground. Then he bundles them up and we continue to the chacruna plant, from which he harvests two hundred leaves. The “grandfather” falls behind again and again, and when we get home, he’s in a bad mood because the man has insisted on calling him grandfather, even though he is, and at that very moment he indulges his grandchildren by buying gasoline so the generator can power the omnipresent and all-powerful screen, and everyone sits in the one-room house, attentive to what the Hollywood intellectuals have to say.
Benigno, despite being seventy years old and frail, has a well-built young wife, and everyone knows what they say about ayahuasca: it makes you like a rooster, that is, with great sexual energy. And he is lively, always moving, weaving a spiderweb in which you will have a good time. The brewing of the ayahuasca is an example of his extraordinary spirit. I hear voices in the street early the next morning and when I go up to snoop, I find Benigno surrounded by men, passing them a drink to “warm the bones.” Here, bones are warmed with aguardiente, so I fear the worst: that they’ll get drunk and neither the remedy will be brewed nor will there be a ceremony at night, as I had conveniently planned in my hurried little ethnographic researcher schedule. But I hadn’t counted on the world revolving around Benigno’s good humor, and between drinks of “seven roots” and “correctly little friend,” one of them will bring him firewood, already split, and another will take care of crushing the “liliana” and watching the brewing, a task that requires effort Benigno prefers not to do because what he likes is talking. We spend hours in Benigno’s chaotic kitchen, among many friends coming and going, grabbing a shot of “seven roots,” which besides warming the bones is considered a remedy “to raise the dead,” a “panty breaker,” that is, an aphrodisiac, and this time it will help the brewers to give more strength to the ayahuasca.
In the center of the image, Segundo pounds the lilianas. On the left, the village’s Catholic church “entertainer,” and on the right, Benigno, deep in conversation.
ceremony
It is Segundo, a neighbor who occasionally helps Guido Rimache, the son-in-law, with shamanic work, who prepares the remedy following Benigno’s instructions. Segundo recalls in vivid detail his first mareación (ayahuasca experience): “From the tip of my finger, something like electricity rises. Damn! I feel kind of bad. A sound: rrrrrrroar!, that’s how ayahuasca grabs you, puash!! It’s like there’s a bee in your ear. I was starting to get worried, and suddenly, like a TV screen. I open my eyes: same. I close them, and I still see everything. Uohh! Uahhh! Shaahhhh!”
That night, he intended to see whether a girlfriend who had left Iquitos still loved him, so he could go find her. “I see a bunch of women, Black women, lining up, men with spiky hair. I saw a multitude of things. I bend down, look, and I see the girl. She’s washing her dishes—she used to work as a waitress, serving. Damn, I got so anxious, watching her after so long, alone. I swear I calmed down just by seeing her.” And he made up his mind: “I’m going.” But he didn’t go, and when Guido proposed he learn and become his assistant, he agreed.
He went on a diet (no sex, no alcohol, no many kinds of food), and once he was clean, beings began to appear in his mareaciones. “An old man comes with his little cane, comes to offer me a bowl full of thorns. No, I passed.” He passed, because thorns are used by brujos (sorcerers) to cause harm. “Another one comes, with a roll of arrows, sharp points. I didn’t extend my hand”—same thing. “Women come with flowers. I did accept them. Every time you receive a flower or a garment, that’s a song from a plant.” Then came a little man. Sha, sha! Right here in my ear. That’s when they want to give you a melody. “How beautiful!” That’s how Segundo received four icaros—four songs, four tools, four medicines—to treat spiritual illnesses during ceremonies.
The Catholic church’s “entertainer” joins the conversation. He says a parishioner has come down with an illness for which hospitals have found no cure. “We’ve got a little money saved, and if you could treat her…,” he asks Benigno, who agrees: “We need to do an ayahuasca ceremony, and in that concentration, see what medicine to give her. She’ll be healed, she will.” Mr. Julio, a Catholic, doesn’t believe Benigno practices witchcraft (as the churches often claim). “All plants were created by God,” Julio says, “and if there’s someone curious, like you, who knows how to use medicine, then welcome. You’re working under the fear of God.” Benigno nods: “All good healers must mention God, because God is good. God created the natural plants, and those plants have spirit. And we must call those spirits, so they reintegrate into our bodies and tell us: this patient has this issue in this part, and it can be cured with this medicine.”
Benigno Dahua sings an icaro to the ayahuasca shortly before distributing it; the little house then becomes charged with a certain solemnity.
god is the owner
Of course, the priestly hierarchy has no interest in the flock having a direct experience of the spiritual world: they would lose their monopoly on intermediation. In the Amazon, Christian churches have fiercely fought against these traditions. Benigno recalls that the missionaries who came to Yanashe warned the population that ayahuasca was “very poisonous,” that “devils take those medicines,” that whoever drank it would be a “sinner and would burn in hell.” Nothing could be further from Benigno's view: “Natural plants are born of God, because God has blessed them. So, why do we say God is the owner? Because He has blessed them, He has given them spirit, like us humans, so that poor people who have no money or work can use the plant to heal themselves. And the shamans use this and are also protected by God.” And while the remedy finishes cooking, Benigno devotes himself to a peculiar hermeneutics of biblical texts: that Adam put “his cock” into Eve; that the Wise Men found their way to Bethlehem by taking ayahuasca; that the Virgin actually got pregnant because one of the Magi “banged her.” The seven roots pass around in a frankly relaxed atmosphere. Thank God, by noon, Benigno has turned off the tap, hasn't gone overboard, and the remedy is ready for the ceremony.
Shortly after six in the evening, several neighbors arrive to drink. One of them is Diego, a relative of Benigno in some degree, who is learning to heal from his “uncle.” He looks skinny, as a result of the diet, and when I make this observation, he seems proud. Benigno is sitting cross-legged in his large chair, happy as can be. I ask him whether he too followed a diet under a relative’s care, but he strongly denies it: no one taught him, nor did he need the diet. “There are many shamans who take roots and natural barks and go into the forest to receive the strength of the natural plants, but in my case it was God himself who gave me the blessing, and with that I was born, already protected.” He claims his knowledge is innate, and that already at nine years old people would line up at his door needing healing.
At eight, Segundo arrives accompanied by a young man. One can hear the distant generators, their humming noise, and the sounds of the jungle around the house. Benigno sits cross-legged on the floor, and with great flexibility leans forward to whistle a protective melody over the bottle of ayahuasca. The night takes on a solemn tone when the maestro distributes the ayahuasca. The candles are put out. With the silence, the noise of the generator and music becomes more noticeable, but when Benigno chants his first icaro and the effects of the mareación intensify, a magical bubble seems to block out the outside noise. For hours, all external stimuli are reduced to the rustling of the chacapa, the singing, and occasionally the perfume Benigno blows in every direction. Vomiting. And when the mareación begins to decline, the maestro summons us to his feet and gently massages our heads with perfume, soaks our hands with it for us to inhale, and sings an icaro to each of us, long and generously. That’s how the ceremony ends, in whispered conversations from which, still dizzy, I can only catch, now and then, little friend, little friend.
