‘It was an old Silk Cut packet, crushed flat and muddy, the inked lettering faded but still sharply legible, especially in this alien context. But I didn’t have long to marvel at its incongruous presence, I could already hear the distant whine of chainsaws. I turned to Jane.
‘ “White men?”
‘ “Yes, they’re extending the Pan-American Highway through here. The estimated completion date is June 1985.” She tugged and picked at her hem.
‘ “But aren’t you frightened? Aren’t you concerned? The coming of the road will destroy your entire culture, it may even destroy you.”
‘ “Big deal.”
‘We turned round and started back to the river. That night as Jane and I lay together, her leaden form cutting off my circulation and gradually crushing the life out of my arm, I made a decision …’
There was the sound of the front door closing and my wife came into the room. She was carrying her bicycle lamps and wearing an orange cagoule.
‘What, still talking? Has James been calling, darling?’
‘No, not a peep out of him all evening.’
‘Good, that means he hasn’t done it. I’ll get him up now and then put him down for the night.’ She turned to Janner, ‘James is going through a bed-wetting stage.’
‘Really?’ said Janner. ‘You know, I wet the bed right up until I went to Reigate.’ And they were off again. Janner seemed to sense no incongruity at all in moving directly from relating the high drama of his sojourn with the Ur-Bororo, to discussing the virtues of rubber sheets with my wife. I squeaked back in the vinyl of my armchair and waited for them to wind one another down. I had to hear the rest of Janner’s story, I wouldn’t let him go until he had finished. If necessary I would force him to stay until morning.
‘Well, you must come again. You two seem to have such a lot to catch up on.’
‘We do, but next time you must come over to our place. My wife doesn’t know many people in Purley and she’s trying to get out of the house a bit more now that she’s had the baby.’
I sat upright with a jerk. What was that Janner had said? Wife? Baby? My wife had said goodnight and reminded me to lock up. She was padding quietly up the stairs.
‘Your wife, Janner, is it …?’
‘Jane, yes. Now if you keep quiet I’ll tell you the rest of the story.
‘I courted Jane for three weeks. This involved little more than sitting around with her parents, making small talk. The Ur-Bororo have an almost inexhaustible appetite for small talk. Like the English they preface almost all conversations with a lengthy discussion of the weather, although in their monotonous climate there is far less to talk about. So little in fact, that they are reduced to mulling over the minutiae of temperature, humidity and precipitation. Jane’s parents were affable enough characters. They seemed to have no objection to our marriage, as long as we were seen to observe the customary formalities and rituals. I was packed off to receive instruction from the shaman.
‘The shaman was uncharacteristically interesting for an Ur-Bororo. I suppose it was something to do with his profession. His shed was set slightly apart from those of the rest of the tribe. (You remember the shed I lived in when we were at Reigate. It was almost an exact replica of an Ur-Bororo dwelling shed, except of course that the Amazonian ones have rather rougher clapboarding and no window, only a square opening.)
‘ “Come in my dear boy, do come in,” he said. “So you’re going to marry young Jane and take her away from us are you?” I nodded my assent.
‘ “Well, I expect as an anthropologist that you know a little of our beliefs, don’t you? How we were created inadvertently by the Sky God. How we live our lives. How we practise circumcision and infibulation as cleansing rituals. How our young men undergo rigorous rites of passage and how our initiation rites last for weeks and involve the ingestion of toxic quantities of psychotropic roots; you know all this, don’t you?”
‘ “Well, in outline, yes, but I can’t say that I’ve ever seen any of you ever do any of these things at all.”
‘ “No. Quite right, jolly good, jolly good. That’s the ticket, you seem to have a good head on your shoulders. Of course we don’t actually do any of these things.”
‘ “But why? Surely you’re frightened of all the gods and spirits?”
‘ “Well, we don’t really believe in them in quite that way you know. We believe in their validity as er … examples, metaphors if you will, of the way that things are, but we don’t actually believe in tree spirits, good Lord no!”
‘The shaman chuckled for quite a while at the thought of such excessive religious zeal, and then offered me a cup of coya. Coya is a lukewarm drink made from the powdered root of the coya tree, it looks alarmingly like instant coffee, but the taste is a lot blander. I couldn’t be bothered to argue with this absurd figure. Unlike other tribes who have shamen, the status of the shaman in Ur-Bororo society is ambiguous and somewhat irrelevant. The shaman often sketched out the form of some of the rigorous rituals the Ur-Bororo nominally believe in, but hardly anyone even bothered to attend these mock performances. On the whole he was regarded with a kind of amused disdain. Although it was still thought important to have pale versions of the ceremonies performed for births, marriages and deaths.
‘I saw the shaman a couple more times before our marriage. He went through the tired motions of instructing me in the Ur-Bororo faith and also retailed me a lot of useless advice on how to make marriage work. Stuff about counting to ten when I got angry, giving Jane the opportunity to state her case when we had a disagreement, and all this kind of twaddle, the sort of thing you’d expect from an advice column in a fourth-rate women’s magazine.
‘The ceremony itself was held to be a great success. Twenty or thirty of us gathered outside the shaman’s shed and Jane and I joined hands while we all listened to him irritate us by wittering inanities in a high fluting voice. I can quite honestly say that I’ve never seen a drabber social occasion than that Ur-Bororo wedding ceremony. All of us in our grey tunics, standing in the gloomy clearing being comprehensively bored.
‘After the actual ceremony, the guests disported themselves around the clearing, talking nineteen to the dozen. Jane led me among them and introduced me to aunts, cousins and friends. All of whom I knew too well already. The aunts pinched my cheek and made fatuous comments. There was much ingestion of rather watery manioc beer, which was followed, inevitably, by the kind of turgid flatulence which passes for high spirits among the Ur-Bororo.
‘Jane has a brother, David, and the Ur-Bororo knew that I intended to take both of them back to England with me after the wedding, but they showed little surprise or emotion about it. They also knew that I was convinced that their society was doomed to extinction, but this too failed to exercise them. They had no particular feelings about the coming of civilisation and I found it impossible to rouse them out of their torpor. To be honest, I had long since given up trying.
‘Our departure was an unemotional experience. There were slight hugs, pecks on the cheek and handclasps all round. Jane seemed mildly piqued. As our canoe slid off down river, one of the younger men cried out, “Come back soon, if you can stand the pace!” And then we were gone. In two days we were at the town of Mentzos where we boarded a launch that took us to the mouth of the Amazon. Two days after that we were in Buenos Aires and a day later we arrived in Purley, where we have remained ever since.’