When the Xemahoa laughed at the priests, those good men were offended by their reception. Hostility, martyrdom, poisoned arrows—that is acceptable, excellent. Straight off to the Pearly Gates. But laughter? They ought to have realized that there is laughter—and laughter. They should have had more experience of the moods of these people than myself. I only understood when Kayapi explained the distinction his people make between types of laughter.
A useful man, Kayapi—but one thing he certainly isn’t is ‘my faithful Kayapi’ or ‘my man Friday’ as that priest Pomar seemed to think. The secret of his devotion is presumably the tape recorder. I guess he follows me round and answers my questions mainly because of the machine. In its own crude way it apes the drugged speech of the Bruxo that Chris Sole would have called ‘embedded speech’. By leaping back and forth along the tapespool it transmutes what I call Xemahoa A into Xemahoa B—or something like it. If I didn’t have longlife batteries in the machine and it was running down and wheezing to a halt, my faithful Kayapi might be off soon enough.
Yet maybe not. I guess it’s also his own curious relationship to the Xemahoa tribe that keeps him here with me. The fact that he’s of the tribe and also of another. He’s a bastard birth. They tolerate him here, but do not allow him into any close intimacy with them. They let him circle eternally round his ‘home’ like a moth round a candle, which he can’t burn his wings on nor escape from. And how he wishes to burn his wings!
The Bruxo has been the brightest candle drawing him here—since he was a boy old enough to travel on his own from his mother’s village. I think he yearns, in his heart of hearts, to be the Bruxo’s apprentice. Yet it is clearly impossible. This is one social role he can never hope to ape amongst the Xemahoa, as a half-Xemahoa himself. Anyway, the Bruxo already has an apprentice—a weedy adolescent—and Kayapi must be in his twenties now and too old to start.
Still, it’s hard to tell people’s ages here. They get old swiftly in the jungle. Forty-five years is quite an achievement. The Bruxo must be much older than that. His skin as wizened as a mummy’s. He’s tough, this old Bruxo. All the dancing and chanting he does. And, my God, the drugs. But he’s an old man nevertheless—and burning himself at both ends in these desperate days. I’d give him another few months at the present rate, that’s all.
Kayapi, on the other hand, has smoother sleeker skin than the apprentice boy’s—milk chocolate skin like a young woman’s. Good flashing teeth, too—though that isn’t so odd in tribes that haven’t been ‘civilized’ yet. Soft almond eyes with a shade of the sadness of the exile in them. The bulging well-fleshed bum of the Indian male, which looks more like our idea of a woman’s. He’s in his prime—but soon he will be past it. Not that this stops him from longing—or from plotting.
So much for Pomar’s ‘Man Friday’ notion, however. A blend of obsession and self-interest is more like it.
“You know why the Xemahoa laugh at the Caraiba?”
“Tell me, Kayapi.”
“There are two Laughters, Pee-áir.”
“And what are they?”
“There is the Soul Laugh. And there is Profane Gaiety. Profane Gaiety is stupid. Profane Gaiety is children’s. And old men’s whose minds are rotted. And women’s. Xemahoa despise that laughter.”
“So that was why they laughed at the priests? Because they despised them?”
“No!”
“What then, Kayapi? Tell me—I’m a Caraiba too. I do not know.”
“But there is much you do know, Pee-áir. Your box that talks words within words, tells you.”
“Tell me so I may know some more, Kayapi.”
“All right. That was Soul Laughter, not Profane Gaiety, we Xemahoa pointed at the Caraiba. There is much to understand about laughter, Pee-áir. When a man opens his mouth, he must take care not only what goes out, but what comes in. Something bad might creep in past Profane Gaiety. Profane Gaiety is weak. Nothing dares creep in past Soul Laughter. Soul Laughter is strong-as-strong. That’s why Man does not laugh idly.”
“What exactly is this Soul Laughter?”
However Kayapi lost interest. It all seemed obvious to him, I guess. So off he wandered to paddle through the floodwater. I would say splash ‘like a child’. The priests certainly would. If I hadn’t learnt a little of the subtlety these Indians are capable of.
A note on social relations among the Xemahoa. As far as kinship rules are concerned, there is a total lack of incest prohibition. Quite the opposite in fact. They are incestuous—in the widest cultural sense. The Xemahoa always marry within the tribe, and the husband moves into the wife’s hut upon getting married. If he marries two wives, the second wife generally moves in with the first. They are really one great extended family, with most marriages being incestuous to some degree or another. Presumably they have some social machinery—raiding and capture?—for bringing outside blood into the tribe from time to time.
Unfortunately for Kayapi, he is the product of an exogamous union—a mating outside the incestuous kinship group of the Xemahoa—and, just as in some other cultures a child of incest would be a child of shame, so here the child of exogamy comes in for stigma. And this is what really buggers up his ambitions.
I wonder which of the Xemahoa was Kayapi’s father, though. Must ask him.
And I wonder what relation, if any, there is between this inbred social structure—and the ‘embedded’ speech of Xemahoa B, the language of the drug ritual?
…Day by day I learn more about this remarkable doomed people. When I wrote that letter to England in rage and anguish, I knew so little of the true situation here!
Each day there are more clues as to the nature of this unique language, Xemahoa B. Only a drug-tranced Bruxo can fully articulate it. Only a drug-tranced people dancing through the firelight can grasp the gist of it.
Their myths are coded in this language and left in safe-keeping with the Bruxo. The Deep Speech and the Drug-Dance free these myths as living realities for all the people in a great euphoric act of tribal celebration—to such a degree that they are all firmly convinced that the flood is only a detail in the fulfilment of their own myth cycle, and that the Bruxo, and the child embedded in the woman’s womb in the taboo hut, will in some as yet inexplicable way be the Answer.
Kayapi is pretty well convinced that the Bruxo has the answer too.
“Why are you staying here despite the water?”
He shrugs. He spits moisture at the flooded soil with a show of bravado—or indifference.
“See, I wet it some more. I give water to the already-wet. Shall I piss on it? That is how much I care for this water.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I’ve heard Bruxo’s words, haven’t you heard them? You keep them in that box. Don’t you think them in your head?”
“I haven’t joined the Drug-Dance. Maybe that’s why I don’t think them yet. Could I join it? Could I take the drug?”
“I don’t know. You have to talk Xemahoa, and be Xemahoa. Otherwise it is a flight of birds bursting out of your brain, flying to all four directions, getting lost, never finding their way back.”
We are still talking Portuguese, Kayapi and me. (Alone amongst the Xemahoa—because of his bastard birth—Kayapi has been outside, has travelled and speaks a foreign language.) Nevertheless, more and more Xemahoa words and phrases are creeping into our conversation.