Sad Song of the Javarí
In the Javarí River basin, one of the most remote areas of the Brazilian Amazon, ancient customs clash with modern ailments. The payé José Marubo sings to heal, his voice cracked by the fate that haunts his forest in the form of hepatitis and malaria.
José Marubo, on the right, watches as his son-in-law pounds the ayahuasca vines. In the background, the Marubo maloca near the town of Atalaia.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 170 of Cáñamo magazine, February 2012.
The mestizos arrive noisily: jokes, shouts, loud laughter. They are mestizos from the nearby city of Benjamin Constant, twenty kilometers away along the recently built road. With familiarity, they enter the maloca and settle in the reception area, on the logs arranged like benches perpendicular to the door, and chat with old Santiago and with José, the payé, the doctor of the Marubo people, whom one of them has come to see. For half an hour they exchange jungle stories: dangers, exploits, incredible events.
Meanwhile, with apparent indifference, José has taken out his rome-rechti, his small rapé inhaler, and has administered several snuffs, seeking the precise inspiration. The others leave the maloca, leaving doctor and patient alone, who, close together, outline the nature of the illness in an intimate whisper. José asks his patient to take off his shirt and lie down on the bench. He kneels beside him, places his mouth on the patient’s belly, and inhales noisily. He rises, regurgitates dramatically, and pulls a viscous, elongated body from his mouth, which could well be a worm. He repeats the operation, but this time he holds the extracted body up against the faint evening light coming through the door. Yes, it is a slimy, black, elongated worm, writhing.
The payé José Marubo inhales rapé in the moments before a healing session.
not dead
Before, while the visitors shared their anecdotes, José had stepped out a couple of times; it's possible that during that time, anticipating the intervention to be performed, he had searched for a couple of worms in the vicinity and put them in his pants pocket. The custom of extracting solid bodies from patients (worms, thorns, spiders) as material proof of the cured illness has always been regarded with skepticism by chroniclers and researchers: a special effect that no Amazonian healer can do without; it is materially impossible for an ailment to be extracted from inside the body converted into a worm, they argue.
Perhaps due to this improbable skill, José Marubo's maloca has become a health center frequented by whites, mestizos, and indigenous people, in this remote region of the Brazilian Amazon where state services, those that should guarantee materially possible treatments, are insufficient and deficient. José knows this well: his eldest daughter, who went to give birth at the hospital in the nearby town of Atalaia, died after a sad accumulation of mishaps; his fellow Marubos, who occupy the Javarí basin and several of its main tributaries, are subjected to an endemic of hepatitis and malaria that has caused hundreds of deaths in recent years. The plagues of the whites have established themselves among the Yavarí Indians; not so their remedies.
Earlier, when José stepped out (perhaps in search of his worms), he had conversed with two women with afflicted countenances who were waiting outside. Having dispatched the first patient, he invites them in. The middle-aged one represents in her features the Indian, white, and black of Brazil; the young woman wears a tight top, jeans, and a profusion of necklaces and bracelets. They also come from Benjamin Constant. They settle on the logs of the reception area, which now, with the arrival of night, has become a healing space. Around them, half a dozen indigenous men take the ayahuasca, which they keep in a two-liter soda bottle, with walls stained by repeated storage, and which they serve in a small bowl made from the hard bark of a fruit. Calm, respectful, for a good while no one speaks.
At José's indication, his assistant begins to blow tobacco snuff to the participants with the rome-rewe, the large blower reserved for healing and divination ceremonies like the one about to begin. Then he closes the door of the maloca and between the two posts that flank it hangs a hammock woven with plant fibers. José sits in it, dominating the occupants of the benches. The women attend with something akin to dread the successive blowings of snuff, the ingestion of ayahuasca, and the ceremonious tension. They don't understand what's happening; on their faces one can see the superstitious fear of witchcraft.
No one addresses them until the assistant asks about the reason for the consultation. The mature woman explains between sobs: last week her brother, who was working in a distant town, crossed the river by canoe at night and disappeared; some witnesses told her he was drunk. She fears he has drowned and, afflicted by uncertainty, wants to know. The assistant, kind and attentive, asks questions that help the woman explain herself more precisely. When she finishes, silence returns, accentuated by the blowings of snuff and the ingestion of ayahuasca. José remains lying in the hammock, with his eyes closed, motionless. The women remain silent in a strange respect for the prolonged silence. The children have not yet gone to bed and run here and there. On the other side of the maloca, the feminine side, the family women eat, seated on the ground by the fire. A low-consumption bulb, in the center, dimly illuminates the scene.
Suddenly José enters convulsion: the spirits take him. After a while he sits up, sits in the hammock with his eyes practically closed and begins to speak in Marubo, with a thick voice, to no one in particular. Later he switches to Portuguese and only one word is needed to make the woman cry; one word and a gesture: "He sank," and his arm falling in a dive. But the woman's crying, the needed relief, is interrupted by the assistant. "He's not dead, he's not dead," he says consolingly. Beside me, old Santiago, José's father-in-law and the only one present who speaks Spanish in addition to Marubo and Portuguese, translates what his son-in-law has seen in the trance. "The man sank. The water beings took him and carried him to their world," he explains seriously. "They're not going to return him, he's going to stay there. He's alive, but he can't get out." The assistant elaborates: "He already has his family, his wife, his child. He's fine." She breathes relieved, and tells of a recent dream in which she saw her brother alive, dressed in white, coming to meet her. The assistant nods and insists again and again: "He's not dead." The exchange continues for several minutes, and although the woman leaves with the idea that her brother is well, I'm not very clear that she understood the existential dimension to which José was referring. Before leaving, the woman apologizes for not being able to pay. The men vehemently reject any compensation. "No, no, no." She assures them that when she can, she will bring a gratuity: a kilo of sugar. They bid her farewell satisfied, pleased, effusively.
José, on the right, receives a blast of snuff with the rome-rewe, a snuff inhaler.
According to José's conception, the patient's ailments become slugs, and people who drown in the river only transit to another world: there is no clear distinction between what is materially possible and what is materially impossible, that is, between what can be perceived by the five senses and what, perhaps, remains in that indeterminable beyond.
Old Santiago remembers that a nephew of his disappeared in a tributary of the Yavarí, and a payé from the family, after taking ayahuasca, learned that the young man had been taken by the Boa to the Water World. "It's a world that has everything: market, food, chairs, everything... In that world people wear clothes made of fish scales." There the nephew married a mermaid and had two children; according to the law, having created his family he could never return to our world, but he was determined to do so and for that he was forced to kill his family. When he was about to leave, the chiefs caught him; from here, the payé tried to help him escape, an attempt that nearly cost him his life. The nephew never returned.
While Santiago tells me this, a hunched old woman enters the maloca, who has great difficulty moving, sick, accompanied by two women who could be her daughter and granddaughter; they settle near where we are. Then José abandons the hammock and gives it to his son, approximately ten or eleven years old. The assistant again offers ayahuasca and snuff to all present, and the little boy receives the same amount as the adults. The rounds follow one another with increasing frequency, between silences and relaxed conversations. Soon the child is clearly intoxicated, with half-closed, glassy, swollen eyes. He too is assailed by convulsions: lying in the hammock he doubles over himself in rapid and repetitive movements. Then he falls into a lethargy that he only abandons to inhale more snuff and drink more ayahuasca. And then he speaks or, more properly, the spirits speak through his body. The adults listen in respectful silence, and laconically nod, legitimizing the little boy's discourse, half-sitting up, raising his arms above his head, with aplomb, eyes closed, thick voice... And the sung litany begins, and he no longer seems like a child, due to the strength of his voice, the harshness of his throat. And he is no longer a child but a vehicle of healing forces, and is not master of himself when staggering he leans over the baby and applies a poultice of crushed plants and, mouth on the belly, absorbs and regurgitates, and the baby screams, and the child payé goes outside to vomit and enters and collapses in the stupor of the hammock.
José demands a new dose of ayahuasca and snuff. Now it's the old woman's turn, who rests in a nearby hammock. He sits next to her, applies the same poultice to her, seeks her belly with his mouth, absorbs and regurgitates the slug onto his hand, which he shows us with triumphant calm. Then the old men sit around the sick woman and sing. I retreat to the hammock and dream about the four melodies that interweave in an unprecedented way; their hoarse voices direct my intoxication. The child, with a timbre that now seems childish, by contrast, returns to his litany. Time stretches and contracts; the rooster announces the morning. Everyone has retired except José, who remains seated next to the old woman, medium of the spirits' music.
José Marubo, relaxing in the peaceful afternoon, inside his maloca.
chants and hospitals
In this world of freedom and heterodoxy that is the Amazon, in few areas is greater creativity manifested than in shamanism. The ritual that the Marubo ethnic group has developed for ayahuasca consumption is exceptional for several reasons. The infusion is lightly concentrated and leads to intoxication very gradually, which favors conversation: myths are exchanged, which acquire their deep meaning at that other level of consciousness; songs are taught; everyday problems and social illnesses are analyzed. The pieces of the magic vine are cooked without their usual companion, the chacruna leaves, which in theory limits the visionary effects, although the payés assure that it is the snuff that guarantees the vision. Be that as it may, the process culminates in the song which, it must be emphasized again and again, is the medicine: it is through song that the sick are cured. Ayahuasca allows the doctor to make tangible the healing songs that the spirits of nature deliver. Religion, music, health.
In José Marubo's biography that proverbial Amazonian freedom also stands out. No one in his family was a payé. "Not my dad, not my brothers, no one... But I had another spirit." A vocation, an inexplicable calling to become what he now is. Before, he wandered a lot: the land of his ancestors, on the distant Ituí river; Cruzeiro do Sul and the army, the whites, various jobs; return to his land; new exodus, to the town of Atalaia, at the mouth of the Yavarí river, on the border of the ethnic territory; and finally the maloca in which, despite the proximity of cities and the preponderance of money, people still eat with their hands from shared plates, sleep in a large common house, without divisions, converse animatedly while children run around happily, the old men gather at night to drink ayahuasca and sing. Although that large communal house, the maloca of old, begins to disintegrate; around it, a ring of small single-family dwellings delimit new individual spaces, bounded from the other members of the large family. An indiscreet glimpse inside reveals, unexpectedly, a DVD player, a television, and Hollywood slogans loudly laughed at and enjoyed, of course, in petit comité. And only ten meters away the door of the maloca whose penumbra transports us to another dimension, another world.
Old Casimiro has arrived, sick. Seventy, eighty years old, he can barely get up from the hammock. He is accompanied by his son who is not a payé but who in this healing process also has something to offer his parent: love, care, attention. The nights are endless vigils in which José, his assistant and the patient's son sing, sing and sing, seated next to the sick man's hammock. In the morning, when José goes out to the city, the son does not cease: he inhales snuff, drinks ayahuasca and sings more to his weakened father. The old man sometimes mutters something, and the son listens attentively; then he continues singing, in the darkness of the solitary midday maloca, when its inhabitants are busy with their daily occupations.
In the afternoon the maloca begins to fill again, with family and strangers, with mestizos and indigenous people. José converses indolently, he is tired, three nights without sleep; seeking energy he inhales snuff, while lovingly caressing the little ones of the large family, an example of love as moving as that which that son demonstrates for his sick father, who tries to leave the maloca to urinate and his strength fails him: his muscles weakened, his belly flaccid, his strength escaping at the edges of death. With night, again the assistant who arrives, the young people who participate in the first part of the session, the women and children who fall into sleep in nearby hammocks. Ayahuasca, snuff, songs.
The next morning a car from the Atalaia health center comes to pick up the sick man, where they will provide him with conventional treatment: the doctor will make a diagnosis; the nurse will make rounds every two hours. Intricate jumble of Portuguese and Marubo, money and solidarity, hospitals and malocas, local and global, material and spiritual.
