As Vajuvi pulled in his line, he pointed to the shore and said, “Up that way is where the bones were dug up. But they were not Fawcett's bones-they were my grandfather's.”
“Your grandfather's?” I asked.
“Yes. Mugika-that was his name. He was dead when Orlando Villas Boas began to ask about Fawcett. Orlando wanted to protect us from all the white people coming in, and he told the Kalapalo people, ‘If you find a tall skeleton, I will give each of you a rifle.' My grandfather was one of the tallest men in the village. So several people in the village decide to dig up his bones and bury them out here by the lagoon and say they are Fawcett's.”
As he spoke, his son's line went taut. He helped the boy pull it in, and a silvery white fish burst out of the water, flapping wildly on the hook. I leaned in to inspect it, but Vajuvi jerked me out of the way and began to club it with a stick.
“Piranha,” he said.
I looked down at the fish, with its low-hung jaw, lying on the aluminum floor of the boat. Vajuvi opened its mouth with a knife, revealing a set of sharp interlocking teeth-teeth that the Indians sometimes used to scrape their flesh in purification rituals. After he removed the hook, he continued, “My father, Tadjui, was away at the time, and he was furious when he found out what the people did. But the bones had already been taken away.”
Other evidence seemed to corroborate his story. As Brian Fawcett had noted at the time, many of the Kalapalos told contradictory versions of how the explorers had actually been killed: some said they were clubbed, others maintained that they were shot with arrows from afar. In addition, the Kalapalos insisted that Fawcett had been murdered because he had not brought any gifts and had slapped a young Kalapalo boy, yet this was at odds with Fawcett's long history of gentle behavior toward Indians. More significant, I later found an internal memo in the archives of the Royal Anthropological Institute, in London, which had examined the bones. It stated:
The upper jaw provides the clearest possible evidence that these human remains were not those of Colonel Fawcett, whose spare upper denture is fortunately available for comparison… Colonel Fawcett is stated to have been six feet, one and a half inches tall. The height of the man whose remains have been brought to England is estimated at about five feet, seven inches.
“I would like to get the bones back and bury them where they belong,” Vajuvi said.
After catching half a dozen piranhas, we glided to shore. Vajuvi gathered several sticks and built a fire. Without skinning the piranhas, he laid them on the wood, grilling one side, then the other. He put the blackened fish on a bed of leaves and tore several pieces off the bone. He wrapped the fish in beiju, a kind of pancake bread made from manioc flour, handing each of us a sandwich. As we ate, he said, “I will tell you what my parents told me really happened to the Englishmen. It is true that they were here. There were three of them, and no one knew who they were or why they had come. They had no animals and carried packs on their backs. One, who was the chief, was old, and the two others were young. They were hungry and tired from marching for so long, and the people in the village gave them fish and beiju. In return for their help, the Englishmen offered them fishhooks, which no one had seen before. And knives. Finally, the old man said, ‘We must be going now.' The people asked them, ‘Where are you going?' And they said, ‘That way. To the east.' We said, ‘Nobody goes that way. That's where the hostile Indians are. They will kill you.' But the old man insisted. And so they went.” Vajuvi pointed eastward and shook his head. “In those days, nobody went that way,” he said. For several days, he continued, the Kalapalos could see smoke above the trees-Fawcett's campfire-but on the fifth day it disappeared. Vajuvi said that a group of Kalapalos, fearing that something bad had happened to them, tried to find their camp. But there was no trace of the Englishmen.
I subsequently learned that what his parents had shared with him was an oral history, which had been passed down for generations with remarkable consistency. In 1931, Vincenzo Petrullo, an anthropologist who worked for the Pennsylvania University Museum, in Philadelphia, and who was one of the first whites to enter the Xingu, reported hearing a similar account, though amid all the sensationalist tales few had paid much attention to it. Some fifty years later, Ellen Basso, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, recorded a more detailed version from a Kalapalo named Kambe, who was a boy when Fawcett and his party arrived in the village. She translated his account directly from the Kalapalo language, maintaining the epic rhythms of the tribe's oral histories:
One of them remained by himself.
While he sang, he played a musical instrument.
His musical instrument worked like this, like this…
He sang and sang.
He put his arm around me this way.
While he was playing we watched the Christians.
While he was playing.
Father and the others.
Then, “I'll have to be going,” he said.
Kambe also recounted how they could see their fire:
“There's the Christians' fire,” we said to one another.
That was going on as the sun set.
The next day as the sun set, again their fire rose up.
The following day again, just a little smoke, spread out in the sky.
On this day, mbouk, their fire had gone out…
It looked as if the Englishmen's fire was no longer alive, as if it had been put out.
“What a shame! Why did he keep insisting they go away?”
When Vajuvi finished his version of the oral history, he said, “People always say the Kalapalos killed the Englishmen. But we did not. We tried to save them.”
24
The room was dark. Nina Fawcett sat on one side of a table; on the other was a woman peering into a crystal ball. Nina, after years of searching for her husband and son in this world, had begun to look in another dimension.
She surrounded herself with psychics and soothsayers, many of whom sent her long letters detailing their attempts to contact the explorers. One medium told her that she was conscious of a presence in the room and, looking up, saw Fawcett standing by the window. The medium said that she asked him, “Are you alive or dead?” and Fawcett laughed and replied, “Can't you see that I am alive?” He added, “Give my love to Nina and tell her we are all right.”
On another occasion, a medium reported that a young figure with a long beard floated before her. It was Jack. “We shall see you someday,” he said. Then he vanished, leaving “a most beautiful scent behind.”
Fawcett's brother, Edward, told the RGS of Nina's descent into the occult, “Her life flows more easily thus.”
She was not the only one who turned to psychics to find answers to what the visible world stubbornly refused to reveal. Toward the end of his life, Reeves, Fawcett's mentor at the RGS, had shocked his colleagues by becoming a spiritualist-or what was sometimes called a “spiritual surveyor.” In the 1930s, he attended séances, searching for clues to Fawcett's fate. So did Fawcett's friend Sir Ralph Paget, the former Brazilian ambassador. In the early 1940s, while attending a gathering in Seaford, England, at the house of the psychic Nell Montague, Paget placed a letter from Fawcett on the medium's crystal ball. Montague said that she saw three flickering white figures. One lay motionless on the ground. Another, who was older, was struggling to breathe and was clutching at a man with long hair and a beard. The crystal ball suddenly turned red, as if it were drenched in blood. Then Montague said she saw Indians with spears and arrows carrying off the three white men. The people in the room gasped. For the first time, Paget felt that his friend was dead.