Making the first contacts had been very difficult for the Schneils. A full year after these first attempts had gone by before he, and only he, had succeeded in being received by a Machiguenga family. He told us what a touch-and-go experience it had been, how anxious and hopeful he had been that morning, at one of the headwaters of the Timpía river, as, stark-naked, he had approached the solitary hut, made of strips of bark and roofed with straw, which he had already visited on three occasions, leaving presents — without meeting anybody, but feeling behind his back the eyes of Machiguengas watching him from the forest — and seen that this time the half dozen people who lived there did not run away.
From then on, the Schneils had spent brief periods — either one of them at a time or the two of them together — with that family of Machiguengas or others living along the Alto Urubamba and its tributaries. They had accompanied groups of them when they went fishing or hunting in the dry season, and had made recordings that they played for us. An odd crackling sound with sudden sharp notes and, now and again, a guttural outpouring that they informed us were songs. They had a transcription and translation of one of these songs, made by a Dominican missionary in the thirties; the Schneils had heard it again, a quarter of a century later, in a ravine of the Sepahua River. The text admirably illustrated the state of mind of the community as it had been described to us. So much so that I copied it out. Since then I have always carried it with me, folded in four in a corner of my billfold, as a charm. It can still be deciphered:
Opampogyakyena shinoshinonkarintsi
Sadness is looking at me
opampogyakyena shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness is looking at me
ogakyena kabako shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness is looking hard at me
ogakyena kabako shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness is looking hard at me
okisabintsatana shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness troubles me very much
okisabintsatana shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness troubles me very much
amakyena tampia tampia tampia
air, wind has brought me
ogaratinganaa tampia tampia
air has borne me away
okisabintsatana shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness troubles me very much
okisabintsatana shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness troubles me very much
amaanatyomba tampia tampia
air, wind has brought me
onkisabintsatenatyo shinonka
sadness troubles me very much
shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness
amakyena popyenti pogyentima pogyenti
the little worm, the little worm has brought me
tampia tampia tampia
air, wind, air
Though they had a working knowledge of the Machiguenga language, the Schneils were still a long way from mastering the secrets of its structure. It was an archaic tongue, vibrantly resonant and agglutinative, in which a single word made up of many others could express a great overarching thought.
Mrs. Schneil was pregnant, which was the reason the two of them had returned to the base at Yarinacocha. As soon as their first child was born, the couple would return to the Urubamba. Their son or daughter, they said, would be brought up there and would master Machiguenga more thoroughly, and perhaps sooner, than they would.
The Schneils, like all the other linguists, had degrees from the University of Oklahoma, but they and their colleagues were motivated above all by a spiritual goaclass="underline" spreading the Glad Tidings of the Bible. I don’t know what their precise religious affiliation was, since there were members of a number of different churches among the linguists of the Institute. The ultimate purpose that had led them to study primitive cultures was religious: translating the Bible into the tribes’ own languages so that those peoples could hear God’s word in the rhythms and inflections of their own tongue. This was the aim that had led Dr. Peter Townsend to found the Institute. He was an interesting person, half evangelist and half pioneer, a friend of the Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas and the author of a book about him. The goal set by Dr. Townsend still motivates the linguists to continue the patient labor they have undertaken. I have always been both moved and frightened by the strong, unshakable faith that leads men to dedicate their lives to that faith and accept any sacrifice in its name; for heroism and fanaticism, selfless acts and crimes alike can spring from this attitude. But as far as I could gather in the course of that journey, the faith of the linguists from the Institute seemed benign enough. I still remember that woman, little more than a girl, who had lived for years among the Shapras of the Morona, and that family settled among the Huambisas, whose children — little redheaded gringos — splashed about naked along the banks of the river together with the copper-colored children of the village, talking and spitting in the very same way they did. (The Huambisas spit as they talk, to prove they’re telling the truth. As they see it, a man who doesn’t spit as he talks is a liar.)
They lived, admittedly, in primitive conditions among the tribes, but at the same time they could rely on an infrastructure that protected them: planes, radio, doctors, medicines. Even so, their profound conviction and their ability to adapt were exceptional. Save for the fact that they wore clothes, while their hosts went around nearly naked, the linguists we visited who had settled in with the tribes lived in much the same way they did: in identical huts or virtually in the open air, in the most precarious of shelters, sharing the frugal diet and Spartan ways of the Indians. All of them had that taste for adventure — the pull of the frontier — that is so frequent an American trait, shared by people of the most diverse backgrounds and occupations. The Schneils were very young, their married life was just beginning, and as we gathered from our conversation with them, they did not regard their coming to Amazonia as something temporary but, rather, as a vital, long-term commitment.
What they told us of the Machiguengas kept running through my mind all during our travels through the Alto Marañón. It was something I wanted to talk over with Saúclass="underline" I needed to hear his criticisms and comments on what the Schneils reported. And, besides, I had a surprise for him: I had learned the words of that song by heart and would recite it to him in Machiguenga. I could imagine his astonishment and his great burst of friendly laughter…
The tribes we visited in the Alto Marañón and Moronacocha were very different from those of the Urubamba and the Madre de Dios. The Aguarunas had contact with the rest of Peru and some of their villages were undergoing a process of outbreeding whose results were visible at first glance. The Shapras were more isolated, and until recently — chiefly because they were headhunters — they had had a reputation for violence; but one did not find among them any of those symptoms of depression or moral disintegration that the Schneils had described in the Machiguengas.
When we returned to Yarinacocha on our way back to Lima, we spent one last night with the linguists. It was a working session, during which they questioned Matos Mar and Juan Comas as to their impressions. At the end of the meeting I asked Edwin Schneil if he was willing to talk with me a while longer. He took me to his house, where his wife made us a cup of tea. They lived in one of the last cabins, where the Institute ended and the jungle began. The regular, harmonious, rhythmical chirring of insects served as background music to our chat, which went on for a long time, with Mrs. Schneil occasionally joining in. It was she who told me of the river cosmogony of the Machiguengas, in which the Milky Way is the river Meshiareni, plied by innumerable great and minor gods in their descent from their pantheon to the earth, and by the souls of the dead as they mount to paradise. I asked them whether they had photographs of the families they had lived with. They said they didn’t, but showed me many Machiguenga artifacts. Large and small monkey-skin drums, cane flutes and a sort of panpipe, made of reeds of graduated lengths bound together with vegetable fibers, which, when placed against the lower lip and blown across, produced a rich scale of sounds ranging from a shrill high note to a deep bass one. Sieves made of cane leaves cut in strips and braided, like little baskets, to filter the cassava used to make masato. Necklaces and bangles of seeds, teeth, and bones. Anklets, bracelets. Headpieces of parrot, macaw, toucan, and cockatoo feathers set into circlets of wood. Bows, arrowheads of chipped stone, horns used to store the curare used for poisoning their arrows and the dyes for their tattooing. The Schneils had made a number of drawings on cardboard, copying the designs the Machiguengas painted on their faces and bodies. They were geometrical; some very simple, others like complicated labyrinths. They explained that they were used according to the circumstances and the social status of a person. Their function was to attract good luck and ward off bad luck. These were for bachelors, these for married men, these for going hunting, and as for others, they weren’t quite sure yet. Machiguenga symbolism was extremely subtle. There was one design, an X-shape like a Saint Andrew’s Cross inscribed in a half circle, which, apparently, they painted on themselves when they were going to die.