The Eternal War
He tried to renounce the perilous mission of healing, but the “plant” wouldn’t allow it: combating illness is his fate. He says he was a natural born doctor in a previous life; in this one, he was reborn with the gift. A solemn professional, Bides devotes his life to this “infinite medicine,” ever vigilant against the constant threat of sorcery and satanic forces.
During a ceremony in Atalaia, a young man from the Kanamary ethnic group drinks the dose of ayahuasca given by the maestro.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 171 of Cáñamo magazine, March 2012.
The man had been working for the boss clearing jungle, in the land of fierce Indians. Sometimes he saw them peering through the thicket, with their peculiar haircut and their scant attire. One morning, upon arriving, he found two sticks stuck in an X formation; a warning to which the boss, whom he informed with anxiety, gave no credence. He continued working and fell ill, victim of a spell? Bides Guerra remembers that when he first saw him he seemed devoured by leprosy. "I don't want anything anymore," he lamented. "I'm waiting for death now, because no man, no doctor, no churches, have cured me." Bides responded: "No, you still haven't been treated by nature, by pure remedies."
They had met at the ceremony of another ayahuasca maestro from the town of Tabatinga, with whom Bides had begun taking ayahuasca, back in the seventies. To be exact, according to Bides that night was the first time he took it "in this life," the night he discovered his innate knowledge: when the intoxication overcame him he identified the illness that afflicted the sick man and the treatment he would have to follow. "When did I know how to cure and do nothing? And the other maestro said: 'Oh, Bides is a natural maestro.' I formerly, spiritually, I was part of ayahuasca. I was already a maestro in a past life. It's the second time I'm here and I have signs for the third generation."
Bides claims an ancestry of "troncos": paternal ancestors with great knowledge of healing, personified medicines: "My own body is already good energy. Just by making a gesture to a child: 'I'm well now, I'm cured.' They're called troncos because it's already a remedy, the remedy is totally ingrained." Bides affirms that he didn't learn from anyone. "The healing that comes from naciencia [birth] is what you're seeing now. An apprentice [one who obtains his knowledge from another person] doesn't have that same mastery. In this field, you're born to be a nature doctor, no one taught me. When I went to take the 'vegetal,' the same maestro of the 'elemental' [the spirit of ayahuasca] taught me. My maestro is the 'vegetal'; not the human being."
Bides's discourse suggests a shamanic world of tenacious confrontation, of hatreds mounted on envies that unleash spiritual wars with material consequences. Those first takings with that first maestro (who was not his maestro) and the circle of collaborators, ended badly because, according to Bides, patients preferred him. "Me talking so many discourses, intoxicated. 'That man speaks so cool about life. What's coming in the future, what's going to happen.' People began to go with me: tourists, oof!, in other words... Italians, a hundred tourists, a hundred and fifty... and I earned three or four thousand reais per night. There the maestro began to have rivalry with me."
Patients, prestige, money... His colleagues, he assures, didn't know how to assimilate it. One night, during the ceremony, when the relationship was beginning to crack, he maintained a spiritual combat with one of the maestro's assistants, his brother-in-law. "He had learned with a Peruvian, a sorcerer. He took ayahuasca condemning ayahuasca. So when I was treating the tourist, I heard that something came like a vulture that comes down to eat rotten meat. And my protection was: 'Watch out!' But imagine: a club hits me on the neck. My protection was very quick: it hit him in the same spot. I saw him when he fell in a ditch, and the 'vegetal' told him: 'Why do you want to offend a person who isn't doing anything? Who are you? You think you're a great maestro but this one is a born maestro?' That vision I saw in the 'vegetal'."
Bides asserts that this conduct "of satanisms" took its toll on the aggressor, who days later, when working in his plantation: "He was clearing when he felt as if it were a stone or an insect to his eyes... buafhh...". He immediately went to the hospital, but the doctors couldn't do anything: the eye had burst.
Bides Guerra is 54 years old and lives in the town of São Paulo de Olivença, in northwestern Brazil, but travels to the nearby town of Atalaia at the request of some patients.
itinerant MAESTRO
Entering the world of ayahuasca shamanism involves confronting a network of cross-accusations, woven with needles of suspicion and threads of intransigence. It is difficult to find a maestro who is conciliatory with his counterparts: if he doesn't brand them as sorcerers, he despises their knowledge as meager: "it's diabolic," "he doesn't know," "I taught him," "I cured him." Sometimes the enmity acquires extraordinary dimensions: the death of a baby at birth, a snake bite, or a fatal fall from a tree can be attributed to the malignant arts of envious shamans belonging to other family or clan groups and trigger bloody confrontations that perpetuate for generations. "I am against sorcery," Bides distances himself. "The mission I fulfill is to leave every human being well; we're going to cure the sick but not do things that shouldn't be done."
Bides doesn't lack patients. Certain circumstances allow me to verify this in the small Brazilian town of Atalaia, shortly before where the Javarí River flows into the Amazon. His place of residence is São Paulo de Olivença, a day by boat down the Amazon, but a woman has brought him "by contract," as Bides likes to say with pride. The woman is called Elaida, belongs to the Kanamary ethnic group, and was cured of some serious illness by the maestro some time ago. Since then, once a year, she pays his passage and lodges him in her house, in a neighborhood on the outskirts of town, where Bides can attend to sick people who come with the most varied problems.
We are conversing in the kitchen of the house, where he spends the day preparing remedies, when he receives a visit from don Carlitos, fifty years old, accompanied by his daughter; the man complains of joint and back pain. Bides explains to him with gravity, with great confidence in the benefits of natural remedies. "Ayahuasca serves to remove all the weeds, to cleanse; it's a purgatory." The young woman asks about vomiting. "Vomiting is intestinal therapy. Expelling all the liquids, altered uric acid, salt, high blood pressure... You, when taking ayahuasca, when defecating, you are throwing out all that, that evil, that bad energy." He proposes that the man participate in the night's ceremony, where he will give him ayahuasca and "bodily attention," that is, a massage. He also offers him a bath with medicinal plants and a remedy he must take for his joints. He informs him of the prices: taking ayahuasca costs thirty reais (12 euros), the bath forty (16 euros), the remedy fifty (20 euros). Don Carlitos is convinced: he will come at night.
Some of Bides Guerra's patients at the beginning of a ceremony.
Bides is fifty-four years old, though he appears younger, due to his black hair and his thin and fibrous torso, with smooth skin. The account he offers of his childhood and youth is somewhat confusing: indigenous and mestizo blood, family in Peru and Brazil, jungle pilgrimage in pursuit of rubber plantations, military service, various jobs. His biography becomes clear thirty years ago, when he began (for the second time) to take ayahuasca. Since then his life has revolved around natural remedies.
He is not simply a server of ayahuasca; of course he offers the "purge" to his patients as a starting point for healing, but each person's illness must be fought with a specific remedy, prepared from plants that are indicated to Bides by the "plant spirit." Ayahuasca is not only a cleansing for patients but "a mother who comes teaching" the doctor. He tells that sometimes, when he passes near a plant, he feels how it communicates with him: "'I am medicine,' it tells me. And I already feel... Pac! I look and I already know that this is remedy... We already have contact, the presentiment. It's an intellectualism that we have, a way of making contact."
He tells me this while walking decisively to the outskirts of town, in a pasture, accompanied by his "servant" (besides hiring her, Elaida is learning from Bides, and helps him), unearthing roots, stripping bark, harvesting leaves, which Elaida keeps in a plastic bag. Also in walking Bides shows himself resolute: large and quick strides, without hesitation, stern expression that contrasts with his expansive talkativeness.
Back at the house, he harvests some more plants in the garden (which he himself has cultivated since he began coming seven years ago, to be surrounded by "good energy"), and asks the woman to wash them. He crushes roots, separates leaves, chops bark and in separate pots cooks two compounds. He receives visits from neighbors of the humble neighborhood who want to take the remedy, among them a pretty young mestiza with curly hair, wearing shorts, who displays on her forearms a golden fuzz of which she is proud. "I always drink ayahuasca," she confesses shyly, "since I was a child." Bides gives her a remedy for "the lung and gastritis," which she has to keep in the refrigerator, "don't freeze," and take four times a day. The girl announces her participation in the night's ceremony and Bides nods, "but without child because it's going to be a strong concentration."
On the stove, two large pots with the plants collected in the morning: one contains what will be a remedy for kidney stones, commissioned by an anthropologist; the other is prepared for don Carlitos's joint pains. The unmistakable ringtone sounds: "The cell phone doesn't stop," he says bringing his hand to his own. He talks for a few minutes. "When are you going to come, when are you coming," he mimics a call from São Paulo. "They adapt," he boasts of his success among the neighbors of his current town. There many of the patients are "addicts" who want to redeem themselves. "The addict carries a spirit that confuses his mentality, that confuses his life. You take ayahuasca and see how the spirit follows him from behind. The drunk is so perfect, very social, a conversational man, diplomatic, but nevertheless when he's drunk... And in the 'plant spirit' he is cured. If you're an alcoholic when you take it ten times alcohol no longer enters."
Bides is abstinent, and maintains a dietary regimen without intending to, avoiding fatty foods, pork, industrial foods. "The medicine itself takes care of us. If it's some strong food I don't receive it." He boasts of his health and his sexual potency. "I am very rooster. With the first woman I had ten children and I have more children around. Women want to get pregnant by me. There are women who have husbands and tell me: 'I want to get pregnant by you and my husband will recognize it.' The woman feels that energy, there are women who want to grab me." He attributes to his shamanic songs, during ceremonies, the power of attraction: "They remain emotionally... They feel that force, the energy that vibrates and pulls like a magnet."
Walking in the outskirts of Atalaia, looking for plants to prepare his remedies.
CHANTS, WORDS
For the night the kitchen has been cleaned and prepared: a room of fifteen square meters, carpeted with blankets on which about ten women recline, friends and family of Elaida who chatter cheerfully in their language. Don Carlitos and his daughter have also appeared, Juan Carlos (a Colombian anthropologist enthusiastic about ayahuasca), and the pretty young woman from the morning, accompanied by a friend.
We sit in a circle; Bides occupies the center. It's seven o'clock and the complete exterior darkness is here defeated by a central bulb that pours a white and sad light; later I impose an orange candlelight to take photographs. The ceremony is about to begin. The master asks each participant if they want half a cup or a whole one, and hands it to them. When everyone has taken it he orders the children who are making noise on the other side of the door to be quieted, turns off the light, and prays: "Glorious Lord Beloved Father. In this moment we give you thanks for everything. We ask all things of nature to be with us, through that mystery worked by the Greater Throne. We ask that all these creatures be for our benefit, remove the bad energies from us, eliminate illnesses, make the paths open. Health, in the name of the Most Holy Almighty Creator in this moment that you authorize us, all that is force of nature, so that these creatures, for this night, be illuminated by divine light."
The darkness is total; the silence is accentuated by slight murmurs from the participants; on the other side of the room Bides inquires about someone's ailments. With the dissolution of material reality the songs open. It's the Kanamary women who whisper them in their language, for half an hour, until Bides's turn comes. He had warned before beginning the ceremony: "I only enter when the 'elemental' enters me and I am already with her. I don't even know what songs I'm going to sing. With me there are no rehearsed or practiced songs. It's a mystery: the plant spirit brings us rituals from the plants of the trees. There are thousands of songs and they keep appearing all the time." Unpredictable the spirits that will visit him in each ceremony, Bides feels himself a medium of a "most elevated mystery."
The rattle of dry leaves (the chacapa) sounds, a soft humming and finally a torrent of rhythm and word.
Medicine, medicine,
nature, nature.
Let's go, let's go healing.
Medicine, medicine,
ayahuasca, chacrunita,
chacruna, chacruna...
Rising up, rising up
creatures of nature.
Let's go healing him.
Taking medicine
we're going to go healing.
Bides is an exceptional singer, both for the beautiful execution and for the intensity with which he lets himself be used by spiritual forces: he chains one song after another for hours, invoking dozens of plants and animals in litanies that acquire their meaning beyond the semantic dimension; it's the vibration that acts and heals, that harmonizes and tunes who knows what strings of our interior.
When the intoxication subsides, momentarily, it's time for counsel. "When one comes to this concentration of this science of nature, one must come consciously. To play is bad. Listen very clearly: to play we are bad. Accepting: yes I want to. We cannot have doubt with nature. First: it is perfect. Yes? Nature: where all human beings live. We sustain ourselves from her. Who left this? The Supreme. He has made medicines sprout. Why does it heal, who is the healer? Our Lord has healed. Then He is the healer."
And still resonate in my imagination the words with which he closes the ceremony. "You have to learn everything that is goodness; share with companionship; be neighbors of good appearances; walk as brothers, as neighbors. Then creatures, thus we must balance ourselves on the scale of life. Balance yourselves on your path, don't follow evils so as not to acquire illnesses. You must be strong, you must be intelligent, try to throw that evil out from inside your body. For this we have this purgatory; it's a bit bitter. Bitter at first, sweet at the end. Don't be afraid of me; I am medicine. Don't be afraid of me; I am your little friend."
