"Mexícatl!" I repeated several times, in loud vexation. He only nodded, and we left off talking with either our hands or mouths, using them instead to feed hungrily on the tender broiled meat.
* * *
Guaguey-bo was situated in another of the spectacularly vast chasms of that country, and it was a village in the sense that it housed some twenties of families—perhaps three hundred persons all together—but it contained only one visible residence, a small house neatly built of wood, in which lived the Si-riame. That word means chief, sorcerer, physician, and judge, but it does not mean four persons; in a Rarámuri community all those offices are vested in one individual. The Si-riame's house and various other structures—some dome-shaped clay steam houses, several open-sided storage sheds, a slate-floor platform for communal ceremonies—those sat in the canyon bottom, along the bank of the white-water river streaming through. The rest of Guaguey-bo's population lived in caves, either natural or hollowed out from the walls rising on both sides of that immense ravine.
That they inhabit caves does not mean that the Rarámuri are either primitive or lazy, merely that they are practical. If they wished, they could all have houses as neat as that one of the Si-riame. But the caves are available or are easily dug, and their occupants make them cozily habitable. They are partitioned by interior rock walls into several rooms apiece, and every room has an opening to the outside to admit light and air. They are carpeted with spicy-smelling pine needles, swept out and renewed every day or so. Their exterior openings are curtained and their walls are decorated with deerskins painted in lively designs. The cave dwellings are rather more comfortable, commodious, and well-appointed than many a city house I have been in.
Tes-disora and I arrived in the village moving as rapidly as we could with the burden slung on a pole we carried between us. Incredible as it may sound, in the early morning of that day he had run down and killed a buck deer, a doe, and a good-sized wild boar. We gutted and dismembered the animals, and hurried to get the meat to Guaguey-bo while the morning was still cool. The village was being plentifully stocked with food by all its hunters and gatherers because, Tes-disora informed me, a tes-guinapuri festival was just about to begin. I silently congratulated myself on my good fortune in having encountered the Rarámuri when they were in a mood to be hospitable. But I later realized that only by ill chance could I ever have found any Rarámuri not enjoying some festivity, or preparing for it, or resting after it. Their religious ceremonies are not somber but frolicsome—the word tes-guinapuri can be translated as "Let us now get drunk"—and in total those celebrations occupy fully a third of the Rarámuri's year.
Since their forests and rivers so freely give them game and other foods, hides and skins, firewood and water, the Rarámuri do not, like most people, have to labor just to keep themselves supplied with the necessities of life. The only crop they cultivate is maize, but most of that is not for eating. It is for the making of tesguino, a fermented beverage somewhat more drunk-making than the octli of us Mexíca and somewhat less so than the chápari honey liquor of the Purémpecha. From the lower lands east of the mountains, the Rarámuri also gather a chewable and potent little cactus which they call the jipuri—meaning "the god-light," for reasons I shall explain. What with having so little work and so much free time on their hands, those people have good cause to spend a third of the year merrily drunk on tesguino or blissfully drugged with jipuri and joyfully thanking their gods for their bounty.
On the way to the village, I had learned from Tes-disora some fragments of his language, and he and I were communicating more freely. So I will cease mentioning gestures and grimaces, and will report only the content of subsequent conversations. When he and I had given our load of venison to some elderly crones tending great cooking fires beside the river, he suggested that we sweat ourselves clean in one of the steam baths. He also suggested, with nice tact, that after we had bathed he could provide me with clean garments if I cared to throw my old rags into one of the fires. I was all too willing to comply.
When we undressed at the entrance to the clay steam house, I got a small surprise. Seeing Tes-disora nude, I saw that he had small bushes of hair growing from his armpits and another between his legs, and I made some comment on that unexpected sight. Tes-disora only shrugged, pointed to his hairiness, and said, "Rarámurime," then pointed to my hairless crotch and said, "Chichimecame." What he meant was that he was no rarity; the Rarámuri grew abundant ymáxtli around their genitals and under their arms; the Chichimeca did not.
"I am not of the Chichimeca," I said yet again, but I said it absently, for I was thinking. Of all the peoples I had known, only the Rarámuri grew that superfluous hair. I supposed that it was induced by the extremely cold weather they endured during part of each year, though I could not see that a growth of hair in those places was any useful protection against the cold. Another thought occurred to me, and I asked Tes-disora:
"Do your women grow similar little bushes?"
He laughed and said that of course they did. He explained that a sprouting of ymáxtli fuzz was one of the first signs of a child's approaching manhood or womanhood. On males and females alike, the fuzz gradually became hair—not very long hair, and no nuisance or impediment, but undeniably hair. I had already noticed, in the very brief time I had been in the village, that many of the Rarámuri women, though well muscled, were also well shaped and exceedingly fair of face. Which is to say that I found them attractive even before I knew of that distinctive peculiarity, which set me wondering: how would it feel, to couple with a woman whose tipíli was not forthrightly visible, or faintly veiled by only a fine down, but darkly and tantalizingly screened by hair like that on her head?
"You can easily find out," said Tes-disora, as if he had divined my unspoken thought. "During the tes-guinapuri games, simply chase a woman and run her down and verify the fact."
When I had first entered Guaguey-bo, I had been the object of some understandably wary and derisive glances from the villagers. But when I was clean, combed, and clad in loincloth and sleeved mantle of supple deerskin, I was no longer eyed with disdain. From then on, except for the occasional giggle when I made an outrageous mistake in speaking their language, the Rarámuri were courteous and friendly to me. And my exceptional size, if nothing else about me, attracted some speculative, even admiring looks from the village girls and unattached women. It seemed there were more than a few of them who would gladly run for me to chase.
They were almost always running, anyway—all the Rarámuri, male and female, old and young. If they were beyond the age of mere toddling and not yet at the age of doddering, they ran. At all times of day, except for those intervals of immobility when they were occupied with some task, or were sodden with tesguino, or dazzled by the godlight jipuri, they ran. If they were not racing each other in pairs or in groups, they ran alone, back and forth along the floor of the canyon or up and down the slanting canyon walls. The men usually ran while kicking a ball ahead of them, a carved and carefully smoothed round ball of hard wood as big as a man's head. The females usually ran chasing a small hoop of woven straw, each woman carrying a little stick with which she scooped up the circlet on the run and threw it farther on, and the other women ran competing to catch up to it first and throw it next. All that frenetic and incessant commotion appeared purposeless to me, but Tes-disora explained:
"It is partly high spirits and animal energy, but it is more than that. It is an unceasing ceremony in which, through the exertion and sweat expended, we pay homage to our gods Tatevari and Kalaumari and Matinieri."