Prose (56 page)

The Uialapiti are short but well-built, the men almost plump, with smooth muscles, broad shoulders, and smooth broad chests. They are naked except for shell necklaces and strings of beads or shells around the hips; the women wear a symbolic
cache sexe
of palm leaf folded into a little rectangle about an inch and half long, secured by a fine string woven from the same palm. This almost invisible article of dress is important; sometimes they stop and turn their backs to adjust the string. Their hair is very thick and surprisingly fine and glossy; the women wear it long, with bangs; the men in inverted bowl haircuts. They have almost no hair on their bodies; the occasional hair is pulled out. Most of the men had locks of hair or the whole crown of the head smeared with a bright red, sticky paint they make from the
urucum
tree, the only dye, and color, they possess; some of them were powdered with it, ears, necks, or chests, hot red. Their skin is fine and soft, a deep dusky color. Some of the children, girls, had two parallel black lines drawn down the outside of their legs, and one young girl had a bright red forehead, suggestive of a bad headache. Both men and women carry the babies, and besides their own shell beads most of them wear strings of blue and white glass ones. A baby girl, about ten months old, looked fetching in nothing but six strands of big Woolworth pearls. They are sweet-smelling and clean (they go swimming several times a day)—excepting that the children had filthy, muddy faces. However, that didn't stop the Air Force men from plucking the babies (including the pearl-clad one) from the parents' arms and carrying them off. There was an agreeable Old-Home-Week atmosphere. Callado and the pilots knew most of the men; some of them spoke a little Portuguese, and a simple, repetitious conversation started that kept going without ceasing all during our visit. Huxley was introduced as a “great captain,”
um grande capitão,
and allowed himself to be admiringly handled.

It was dusty and very hot; we walked through the cleared path to a big hard-beaten space where four houses stood. A large black sow with baby pigs rushed off when she saw us, and there were many skinny dogs. More Indians kept coming to meet us and stare and hold our hands in their hard hot ones, and sometimes to pat us discreetly to make out whether we were men or women, since the women of the party were in slacks. All the Indians were quite naked except one old man who had on an Army shirt and two young women who wore red and white flowered cotton dresses. One of these, fourteen or fifteen years old, was far advanced in pregnancy, and the other, older one, was a dwarf or hunchback, a queer, sad little figure whom we kept seeing bustling about the village all during our visit, as if she worked more than the others, or wanted to give the impression that she was as active as anyone else.

Suddenly a white man appeared, middle-aged, thin, a week's growth of black beard on his pale face, wearing pants and shirt but in his bare feet. It was the man in charge of the Captain Vasconcelos Post, Claudio Villas Boas, one of three brothers who have all worked for the Indian Protection Service for many years. Because of the broken radio he couldn't have known we were coming until he heard the sound of the plane, but he showed not a trace of surprise until his eyes happened to light on Huxley. Huxley and Laura were introduced. In Portuguese, in a weak voice, Villas Boas exclaimed, “Not the
Huxley? Contraponto?
“and for a moment he actually seemed about to faint. He took Huxley's hand and talked away to him in Portuguese, with his eyes filled with tears. At this moment another clothed white man in his bare feet appeared from nowhere, a tall, handsome, baby-faced boy with a bushy black beard. He, too, exclaimed, but in the accents of upper-class England, “Huxley! I certainly never expected
this!
” He turned out to be a Cambridge graduate student, a historian, who had been at the post for a month. He was working on a thesis on the effects of contact between two different cultures, and also writing a book. “Or I'd better be,” he said, “since I've already sold it.”

With Villas Boas leading we all trooped into the shadowy interior of one of the houses; this one joined another smaller one with walls half-way up and a large table, and a third hut attached to it that served as a sort of kitchen. Huxley got into one of the hammocks and lay back (it became him very well); Villas Boas squatted Indian-style beside him, and with two or three people all helping to interpret, he began talking to Huxley in a rusty, agitated voice as if he had been wanting to talk to him for years. We gathered round to listen and it was a strained, moving little scene: the great shadowy hut, the oddly-assorted, oddly-dressed white people, the ring of naked, smiling Indians, and Huxley, swaying slightly back and forth, his long legs trailing on the ground, passive and attentive. Villas Boas told him that he had read all his books that had been translated into Portuguese, how much they had meant to him, going on to speak of Huxley's grandfather's books, too. Then he told about his years in the Indian service, how hard it is to help the Indians, a losing battle against disease and corruption; how even with the help of Army doctors he lives in dread of infections brought in from outside, the one case of measles, for example, that can wipe out whole villages. The Indians own no land; there are no reservations for them to retreat to if the lands where they live should ever be sold. Even if that will probably not happen for a long time, the land is subject to speculation, and the founding of Brasília has brought the possibility nearer by six hundred miles. In the whole Xingu region he thinks there are now only about thirty-five hundred of them left.

Laura Huxley had wandered outside and was setting up shop with the Polaroid camera; these Indians knew all about cameras and were happy to pose, in rows, with their arms about each other's necks. Those inside pressed up against us, not exactly begging, but certainly eager for the presents they knew we'd have, and half-embarrassed, we handed out our miserable cigarettes, matches, and Life Savers. One woman kept pinching me gently asking
Caramelo? Chocolate? Caramelo?
and I was sorry I hadn't known of this preference in sweets. The hammocks were filling up; the man with the volume labelled
Plato
reclined in one, a pilot was playing with a baby in another, and the gaucho-hat man was in another with another baby, who now wore the hat. I got into a hammock, too, and looked up. The high shadowy roofs are beautifully made, palm leaves folded over horizontal branches, in overlapping layers, and the big dome is braced towards the top with a framework of unpeeled branches. Pigeons roosted there, cooing, and a pair of parakeets. A gorgeous blue and yellow macaw sat on the dining-hut wall eyeing us and talking away in
Nu-aruak,
presumably—the language group to which the Uialapiti belong. Several
mutum,
a kind of turkey, black and shiny, with crests like ball-edged combs and patches of pale green on either side of their chic little heads, strolled about clucking under our legs. The gloom, the gentle voices, the pats and smiles and swaying hammocks, were restful and dreamlike, down-to-earth, even nostalgically back-to-earth, after the three hours in the plane.

I could hear an Indian questioning the Air Force man in the nearest hammock. He asked Huxley's name, which woman was his, and how many children they had. The man answered the questions; the Indian studied Huxley, smiling, asked them all over again, and received the same answers. (Their conversation, I was told, moves rather like a glacier. A simple story can go on for hours, even for days.) As any one who has ever seen photographs of Huxley on his book-jackets knows, he is a very handsome, aristocratic-looking man, but the Indian's final opinion, given in a tactfully lowered voice, was “Homely … homely…” And under the circumstances Huxley did appear, not homely, but exceedingly long, white, refined, and misplaced.

After a while we went outside and down to the river, where some of us went for a swim, the Indians sociably joining in. Usually the villages are as far as a mile inland from the rivers, to get away from the mosquitoes, and the whole village files through the jungle every morning, or morning and evening, to go swimming.

One young Indian was a visitor from the Caiapos, a tribe that has been in contact with white men for only two years. (New tribes are still being met, while there are some who have been known for two hundred years.) The visitor appeared in pants and a shirt, his hair flowing down his back and tied with a white hair-ribbon, and in his lower lip a smooth oval plate of wood, four inches across, the under side dyed red. He was a cheerful, talkative boy (“Nice, but rather foolish,” Callado said); when asked to pose for a photograph he politely removed his clothes. In swimming with us, doing a kind of breast-stroke, he threw water into his mouth with the wooden plate and drank like a duck. The English boy called him “Ronny,” which was fairly close to his vowel-filled Indian name.

Because it was the end of the dry season the little river was only waist deep, but the bottom was clean and sandy, and there were green hummocks, vines, and clumps of delicate palms, all rather like the wood-engravings in old books of exploration. “Ronny's” boat was on the bank, filled with bundles of palm thatch ready to take back to his own village. It had been simply made, by slitting the bark of a tree length-wise and prying it off in one piece with wedges; the bark shell is then pried open with sticks, the ends bent upwards, it is left to dry out, and with very little trouble, you have a very nice light canoe. We dawdled about on the bank, taking more photographs. The Indians loved the Polaroid pictures (in fact a Polaroid camera and a large supply of film should see one through the jungle), almost tearing them apart to see the results; Huxley's pocket was adroitly picked of some unsuccessful ones that Laura had stored in it. A mass of pale yellow Sulphur butterflies settled, quivering, in the wet mud at the river's edge, like the start of a yacht race; a few magnificent ones of a variety unknown to me among them, the closed wings exactly mimicking a big silver-gray dead leaf and when open flashing two bars of pure, startling rose-red velvet. Huxley took great pleasure in these butterflies, leaning far over from his great height to examine them close to with his magnifying glass.

Then we were called to lunch: the sausage we had brought, a pot of brown beans, and two platters of under-cooked rice. (The usual food is manioc; the rice had been a recent present.) “Ronny” put on trousers and helped wait on us, filling tin mugs with water, ladling out the runny beans, and flapping his lip-plate up and down in a friendly way. The blue and yellow macaw was prevented from jumping onto the table and the Indians stood close, watching every bite and smiling hard whenever one caught their eyes. I was wearing small gold earrings and every once in a while the lobe of my ear would be gently pinched. After the beans and rice came more little coffees; we lit cigarettes for the Indians, they painstakingly lit cigarettes for us, and langour settled over us all.

After half an hour's siesta we were invited to see a wrestling match put on for our benefit. Two of the sleekest young men began, with the rest of the population sitting in the strips of shade along the houses to watch. The men crouch almost on all fours, grasp each other's hands in a hard shake, and then grab for the backs of each other's necks and hold on, still bent over and giving loud, hooting grunts—the only sounds we heard them make that could be called “savage.” The object of the match is to throw the opponent over and pin his shoulders to the ground, but as soon as one man senses he is the stronger he rarely forces it to a conclusion. He simply lets go, they stand up, smile, and walk off abruptly, in different directions. The quick, red-bedaubed, naked men, stamping and hooting in the urine-scented dust, resemble fighting-cocks more than anything else.

Then we paid a call at the largest of the houses, thirty-five or forty feet long, dark and sooty. Men were swaying in their hammocks, women messed about with manioc and clay pots on the floor. The men asked for more cigarettes and to please them I lit a cigarette apiece for them with my lighter. The one old man grinned mischievously and I saw, tucked away in the hammock between his tough black feet, four whole packages of cigarettes he had already collected, and several little blue boxes of
Fiat Lux
matches. Across one end of the house was a man-high fence of twigs and palm-leaves. The Cambridge student told us that behind it, in the dark, a young girl was undergoing her puberty initiation. “You can look through the fence; this isn't the really secret part,” he said. Peering into the gloom we could make out a lean-to, perhaps two feet wide at the base, against the far wall. In it, silent and invisible, the girl is supposed to stay for three months, six months in some tribes, only coming out at night to get a little fresh air. When the initiation is over, they are very weak and many shades lighter than their normal color. The dwarf in the scarlet dress scuttled in with a pan of water and another of rice and set them down, in silence. Hanging in the rafters over our heads was an enormous polished black calabash and someone asked the Cambridge man what it was doing there. “Oh, they just happened to like it,” he informed us, and added innocently, “They're human beings too, you know.”

In this region the nights get quite cold. The naked Indians keep warm by building small fires right under their hammocks and, too, the resulting smoke drives away the malarial mosquitoes. One woman was holding a very sick baby, the only sick, and thin, Indian we saw; all its small bones showed and its cough sounded like bronchitis. I believe we all felt the same horror and urge to do something, without being able to do anything at all. The adult Indians were all quite young, the man in the army shirt was the only one with gray hair and without teeth. They are short-lived and have few children, and also high infant mortality keeps the families down to one or two children a couple. I noticed several little vials of the kind used for injections scattered about, and every round dusky behind bore a vaccination mark (their rounded behinds and childishly smooth legs, in both sexes, are remarkably pretty).