Blameless, p.6
Blameless, page 6
Luisa too thought she could occasionally smell the odor that had haunted her mother, a whiff, she didn’t know where it came from—maybe from the blast furnace of the Ferriera, the ironworks, the old coruscating steelworks facing the sea, toward Muggia, which manufactured cast iron; from the smoke occasioned by the combustion of carbon coke in contact with iron oxides, which, the newspapers said every so often, had caused the death of more than one worker. The Ferriera was not far from the Risiera. Of course, unlike the latter, those deaths had been a collateral albeit inevitable effect, as was later explained, for the employment and well-being of the city. At times the quickly dispelled stench seemed to come from within herself, a halitosis of the heart. But she had to think about her work. One of the next pieces to be placed was a Chamacoco ax, a small thing compared to an antitank gun or a flamethrower, but when it splits open a head . . .
18.
Room no. 15—A bow and arrow, a catapult for launching sundried mud balls, and a battle-ax, all used by the Chamacoco, an Indian tribe living (had lived, extinct?) in the Gran Chaco, between Paraguay and Bolivia, more Paraguay than Bolivia, as determined by some war; every border is the child of war. The bow varies in length from 1.55 meters to a maximum of 2 meters; the string—a single string, stretched from one end to the other—is entirely of fiber from Ybira, the arrows (of wood) measure an average 1.20 meters in length. Two-thirds of the arrow is made up of a light, rounded wooden shaft, with feathers for wings at the base, arranged in a helix. The tip of the arrow is a very hard, heavy, toothed wooden point, affixed to the shaft. The catapult, used to launch small, very hard balls of mud, is semicircular, flat on the inside—except for a rounded center, seven to eight centimeters—suitable for grasping with the hand. The ends of the cord, double strand, are kept open by two small wooden rods. The green stone ax adorned with feathers, with a handle of Nazareth (Bignonia) wood, probably comes from the Tumanà, another Indian tribe.
A CHAMACOCO IN PRAGUE
Bows and ax belonging to Cherwuish Pioshad Mendoza, the Chamacoco Indian that the famous explorer, ethnologist, anthropologist and botanist Albert Vojtěch Frič (1882–1944) brings to Prague from Paraguay in 1908, to cure him of an unknown illness that was decimating his clan, the Ishira clan, in the region near the fortress of Bahía Negra, where Frič was conducting his research. Ancyclostoma duodenale, the doctors in Prague had discovered, all the fault of that hitherto unknown nematode worm (worms in the ass, he had noted hastily recording the story in notebook no. 67). Slithering through the rain forest of the human body, slinking unseen into the muddy channels of the duodenum, serpents of the night that we carry within us, Oleix Deič, the great aquatic four-headed snake-goddess of the Chamacoco that swims at the bottom of the Pilcomayo. Along the river females mate with animals (äku, they say in Chamacoco)—with the jaguar, with Bosiŕibo the bird, son of the rain that brings storms from the east. Our zoo, Dr. Wedlin had told Frič, when the anthropologist brought Cherwuish to him at the Vlatch hospital, is more extensive and rich . . . Even the most rudimentary microscope reveals the dark jungle that proliferates within us; all you have to do is place the object, a clot of blood or bloody stools, at a distance between the focal length and twice that length and arrange the eyepiece so that the image framed by the lens falls between it and its focus and the virtual image emerges, inverted and magnified. The nematode expands, uncoils, the snake-goddess swims in the blind river of entrails, and mates, she isn’t picky and pays no attention to sex or gender. Everything penetrates everything, the mosquito slips into the cloaca of the caiman, nocturnal gods with many heads and arms sleep in the body’s darkness like Cherwuish’s worm and when they wake they break through the tunnel walls, the banks of the river. In there, under there, everything gives way; microscopic star wars, worlds crumble, a universe, a man, they disintegrate explode and die.
Deep murkiness beneath the skin—white, terracotta or painted uruciú red, like Cherwuish in his forest. The obscurity of bones nerves and mucous membranes under the colorless outer layer, appropriate for a passport photo. In that darkness worms corrupt, penetrate; poisoned blowgun arrows pierce the pancreas, devour, are exterminated by faithful legions of antibodies, the guards die but do not surrender. If the regular troops stationed in remote outposts of the colon or the appendix aren’t enough, special forces step in and bomb—pills burst and are released like torpedoes in the dark waters, blowing up dams, a cathartic flood overflows the levees, the last stopper bursts out and the sticky, yellowish-brown sludge spews out, a million spurts of poison, slaughtered bacilli float unseen in that violent estuary. Calomel and santonin like napalm and Cherwuish is out of danger, cured.
The ax atop the Nazareth wood handle has a sharp bulge in the middle—like the spike on the Prussian helmet in room no. 35, Prussians of the Amazon? He had obtained the ax—one of his notes reads—from a Bohemian relative of his mother, Dr. Huláček, who had bought it for next to nothing in one of those periodic clearance sales, where Frič, always short of money and embroiled in projects that inevitably failed—his uncle Anton Jan, the eminent zoologist, had urged against giving him a cent, inept as he was—had been forced to give away his collections, including the famous cactuses that had made him a celebrated authority throughout Europe, and the crates of plants, animal skins and trophies that he had brought with him from Paraguay. The ax had been left to him in Prague by Cherwuish when he returned to Bahía Negra, where he died a couple of years later, having perhaps perished in the bloody war between Bolivia and Paraguay, in which the Chamacoco, uncertain of and above all indifferent to being Bolivians or Paraguayans, ended up being massacred in greater numbers than Bolivians and Paraguayans.
The head crudely carved on the handle of the ax, squint-eyed and lecherous, was sucking a kind of obscene papaya. A sailor in the Royal Navy had whittled it so he could sell it to someone, bamboozling him with those touches, and Cherwuish might have gotten it from him as he went up the Paraguay River on some boat at the time of the fish migration, maybe hoping to pass it off on someone else for a few pesos, since he obviously must have realized right away that the head was fake. Nevertheless, “a symbolic piece for my Museum, a weapon of war for peace, that has not been used on anyone’s head.”
During the lectures that Frič, to earn some money, gave in Prague on the culture of the Chamacoco, Cherwuish, dancing, would demonstrate how to use the ax, without actually using it. Simulating, making-believe; playing war, so as not to wage war. Popel’s toy soldiers . . . Cherwuish brandished the ax striking blows only at the air; haphazardly, it seemed, and yet it was a precise grammar, established in centuries of forests and clouds of mosquitoes on the Paraguay River, war dance rain dance or mating dance, the ax decrees the fertile downpour that dissolves the spongy clouds or death that splits open a head like a coconut. Frič, though a corresponding member of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in St. Petersburg and author of several books on the Indians of South America and poisonous cactuses, as well as exotic adventure books for children, found it hard to scrape by in Prague, unlike on the Pilcomayo River, which he had been the first to travel from its source to the estuary.
But no one wanted his thirty crates full of feathers, furs, the rotted, dried exotic plants, travel journals and photographs of Mato Grosso. In short, Frič wasn’t doing so well, even though at the Vikárka, more of a wine bar than a brew pub, they gave him all the beer he wanted on credit, and academies from all over Europe conferred honorary degrees on him. So he decided to earn some money by giving public lectures for the Journalists’ Union in Žofín, in which he spoke about how the Chamacoco make war with the Tumraha, about how to use an ax, how to fill the peace pipe, how to perform the war dance and how to sing the death of those who go to join their ancestors, while beside him Cherwuish, the Chamacoco dressed as a Chamacoco, enacted his words as though in a living nativity scene, demonstrating fighting gestures, moves dodges leaps blows, sometimes knocking over the lecturer’s table with its ritual glass of water or grabbing onto the curtains in back of the room, one time causing them to collapse along with the table.
He brandished the ax with lightning thrusts, mortal blows wielded on millions of invisible microorganisms since no Tumraha enemy whose skull he might split was within range, and above all because he was a man of peace who kills only in war and only those enemies on whom war has been ceremoniously declared, the way it was done at one time, at least among them, the civilized peoples of the Old World, except—one of his notes said—in the New World, Cherwuish’s very ancient one. The pipe extinguished, he flourishes the ax or draws the bow with gestures orchestrated for him by an unknown score, recorded in his members like notches carved in the bark of a tree, and executed by his movements, gestures that intersect the air sketching fleeting but regular geometric figures.
A lady or two—there are few in the audience—thinks she should be offended when the rhythmic thrust of his groin exceeds all decency, but it’s much worse when Councilman Wondracek, already generally glowering and pedantic, leaves the room protesting because a mud ball, shot from the bow with unerring precision during the simulated battle, struck the back of the empty chair in front of him, a few centimeters from his eyeglasses and his mustache. “In the language of the Chamacoco, funeral prayers consist not of words, but of gestures,” the speaker, that is, Albert Vojtěch Frič, is meanwhile explaining—but he is clearly out of step with Cherwuish, who is writhing his hips demonstrating the nuptial ceremony and coitus instead.
It is likely that Cherwuish, unsettled by the lights and the marmoreal bust of a Professor Belačik, archaeologist, watching him, scowling, from the back of the room, got flustered and fell out of step with the words of his benefactor and protector, who is now speaking about the language of the Chamacoco which, Ladies and Gentlemen, to express negation uses the future, which belongs to the “non-indicative” mood. To say “he does not love,” Frič explains, they say “he will love.” This is not intended to affirm the certainty or the probability or the hope that something may happen later on—in the example cited, that the person may fall in love tomorrow—but merely to indicate an absence, a negation. Chamacoco, like Ayoreo, which is also part of the Zamuco family of languages, is a tenseless language, it has only one verb tense. On the other hand there are two fourth (and fifth) persons of the personal pronoun—eyok: we, if the we are few; eyok-i-lo: we, if the we are many. Many, so to speak, when you consider that the Chamacoco number about 1,600 all told.
Eyok . . . Cherwuish’s slanting, darting eyes, over-prominent cheekbones, glance around uneasily, like cornered birds. Olak-i-lo, you many, the seated crowd watching him. There must be at most about twenty people, but he doesn’t count them, he just knows that there are many of them; when many are together it is to go hunting or off to war and though those people don’t seem like either hunters or warriors, if they are clapping their hands it is to incite some prey. Indeed they crowd around his friend Frič, they grab his hands, they clutch at him. The first time it happened Cherwuish jumped into their midst and knocked two or three to the ground. Now he knows that it is a way of paying tribute to his friend, but all the same he doesn’t like it, there might always be an ambush; even the Tumraha once pretended to come to celebrate, bearing gifts, and instead they pulled out their axes, in any case he’s watchful. The next time he’ll paint his face blue, a blue that’s almost turquoise. His people paint themselves to show whether they are happy or sad or angry; he’ll put on the color of peaceful serenity, so they won’t be on guard. He knows how to fight, t-a-tskir. He will love, Frič continues meanwhile, that is, he does not love. The future is a great not prefixed to every word, to every thing; it is what is not, nothing.
The future of Cherwuish’s people, Frič knows, is also not-being, negation. The Old World discovered the New World to destroy it. Sixty years after the Europeans’ arrival in the Americas, of the 80 million Indians only ten remained. And the Indians continue to die off even now, like the Chamacoco. They were dying like flies when I was there looking for plants, and no one knew anything about it. Maybe I can save my Cherwuish, that’s why I brought him back with me. Moreover he knows that the young Dr. Wedlin, who studied in Vienna, understood what it was. Maybe when they bring him back there all the others will be dead. One out of 1,600 would be a good result, in any case, when you’re fighting your old friend Hein, as the Germans call Death. Or the Comare Secca, the bony hag, as Boggiani would have said, the only one who may have known even more about the Chamacoco than I do, and who encountered the old crone while he was dallying—at the very marsh of the Chaco River where he would end up forever, having become himself a marsh—with another woman, much younger, plumper, rosy-skinned and less clothed; under those circumstances, you don’t think that the woman may be a precursor of the Comare. They rolled around in the mud and some Indian didn’t like it, so he, the great explorer and photographer, dapper even in the jungle, was hacked to pieces before finding the famous bearded Indians of the forest, who never existed but whom he would certainly have photographed. He became dirt and mud and worms. Like everyone else for that matter.
“It’s not as if these Chamacoco of yours were all that strange and exotic, my dear Frič”—Anastasius Taussig, clerk of the court, applauds him at the end of the talk. “Even without bringing in the Huzuli of Galicia or the Bodoli of the Quarnero—the Bodoli even sing the Gott erhalte, I heard them when I brought some documents to the court of Veglia, Krk, whichever you prefer, but anyway documents having to do with the Hungarians, not our business—and they are more loyal to our proházka, our emperor, God save him, than the Viennese, not to mention the Tyroleans and all those Germans of Austria who are the least Austrian of the entire empire. I mean, does it seem to you that our Polacken, with their violins and hora, are that much less strange than your little worm? Than your Červiček, I mean, as that other bosom buddy of yours, Jindřich Mošna, called him, a writer himself, and how could he not be, who isn’t a writer in Prague . . . Yes, my dear Frič, Červiček may pull through a little, with those pills of his, though there’s no guarantee, poor little worm; the dampness rising up from the Vltava is more mephitic than that of his Pilcomayo, many more corpses have polluted it for centuries without any caimans making them quickly disappear for the benefit of everyone’s wellbeing. We’re used to it; indeed, the damp air of all that death is good for us, our lungs would no longer be able to breathe a dry, pure wind, they’d puff and burst like bellows. However, better the chants that Červiček intones along the streets of Malá Strana, swaying in his colorful blanket, than the Wacht am Rhein sung by certain students whose faces are more scarred than Červiček’s. Those idiots who think they are Germans and want Germany über Alles are fond of slashing each other with sabers; as you see, the world is the same wherever you go, apparently a scar on your face, whether from a saber or an ax, is fine with everyone today . . .”
It seems that Cherwuish actually did raise that ax against someone, twice. Against the gendarmes, when they put their hands on him, thinking he was making fun of them by bowing to their plumed caps, which among the Chamacoco are worn only by chiefs and witch doctors. Even without the ax, which one of them had wrested from him, he had decked three of them in that steep narrow alley in Malá Strana, where it was difficult for them to jump him all together, before they were able to shackle him and take him to the station house, from which Frič had had a hard time getting him released, telling them the whole story and, while he was at it, going on at great length about the Chamacoco’s customs, their religious feasts, about how the women are fierce fighters but are not allowed to eat the venison reserved for the men, that they even eat certain large river fish, putting them in their mouths sideways while still alive and breaking their spines with their teeth. He even tried to pay the fine for the brawl in kind, that is by offering a couple of books he had written about the Indians and snakes of Mato Grosso, until the commander, who was sick and tired of all those stories he didn’t understand anything about, but who regarded Cherwuish kindly because at least he wasn’t a gypsy, threw them both out and they sadly returned home to Via Náplavní, to sleep among the crates and stuffed puma and red wolf heads Frič had accumulated, with Cherwuish continuing to chant Polizei tupurumba, a word that the refined Frič always refused to translate.
With Vlado Šmolka—the guy who earned a few bucks doing silhouettes of people at the Tumovka café—the matter was a bit more serious. Ten krejcary, Vlado asked for each silhouette, but when Cherwuish came in, having come to love the bitter water, as he called Staropramen, the Šmíchov beer, queen of Prague, he didn’t ask for anything, in fact he paid for his beer so that he would pose for him. Cherwuish sits down, he knows that his portrait is being done and he’s proud of it; in fact Král—the famous painter Král himself, the one from the Louvre café—had done one of him a short time ago and he recognized himself in the bark-colored face, in the long mop of hair covering more of him than the colorful blanket with the symmetrical stripes, in the eyes, startled and threatening, staring at something unknown.
