The gold machine, p.33
The Gold Machine, page 33
The healer gives suck from a bladder of rum. The invaders have to wait while the King recovers his health.
We made daily excursions into the forest, with increasing interest and admiration… After a weary wait of eight days the royal patient began to show signs of recovery, his subjects coming in crowds to call upon him, bringing presents, generally large white maggots, about three inches long, which the King greedily ate.
Just as we were held for a few days at Marankiari, acclimatising to the dissolution of our received methods of measuring time, so Arthur passed his temporal quarantine, lost to the comforting presence of mules, those familiars of the road. He was a plantsman, not an anthropologist, although he remained as open as ever to strange customs, behaviour that might energise his commissioned task: the duty of portraying the Ashaninka as primitive, forest-dwelling innocents.
My great-grandfather’s late-Victorian satire, almost as eccentric as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Perené not Thames, demanded a comic ‘King’ and a pantomime court – as if the only valid account of the riverside settlement was a heavy-handed parody of the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas at Windsor. Ross treats human encounters of the forest with cooler precision, but a similar set of engrained prejudices. These bearded outsiders, with their maps and cameras, have been adequately rewarded, and issued with a gold card for the botanical larceny otherwise known as ‘progress’.
‘During our stay we were visited frequently by Campas Indians of the lower Pangoa districts, who, leaving their balsas at this place, cross the hills to, and return from, the Cerro de la Sal with their supplies of salt,’ Ross said. ‘Nearly all of them, on noticing us, came to shake hands, exchanging with us the salutation, “Añyee”, signifying “friend”. These Indians are dark, copper-coloured, of middle stature, muscular, and wiry; many, too, are not unpleasant-looking, though the features of some plainly indicate that one should beware of them. They are greedy, inquisitive, and laugh continually at everything or nothing. Raimondi says, “They are very hostile, and no friendly relations can be entered into with them.” Mr Clements Markham describes them as “a barbarously cruel tribe of untameable savages.”
‘Thanks to the introduction of Padre Sala to Kinchoquiri, one of their chiefs, who had numerous friends along the banks of the river, we suffered no molestation, and I found, from my experience of them, though at times morose, sullen, suspicious, and shy, they are not without intelligence and humour, nor would it, in my opinion, be difficult, with tact, to civilise and make them useful. Kinchoquiri had resided near La Merced, and was, therefore, not altogether ignorant of the outer world.’
‘Kinchoquiri’, the punt Ross takes at the name of the chief of the Perené settlement, is a more useful approximation than Arthur’s comic appropriation of royalty. There were no kings in this territory, before the coffee enclosures. There was an established Ashaninka chief called Kinchori who was photographed when he visited Lima in 1914. Arthur’s Kodak portrait might be the same person as a young man. But the biography of their host remains obscure and unrecorded. He is outside written sources. ‘Kinchori’ is a name associated with places further downriver.
An Ashaninka woman called Elena Nestor de Capurro talked to Farne’s contact, Elena Mihas, about the ‘Masters of the Hills’. And about a mysterious being known to hang from trees, disguised among vines, having the general appearance of a crop of wavering threads. This entity overturns river craft and seizes the passengers.
When the canoe returns to its upright position, the passengers will walk along the river called the Salt River. When the kiatsi hears us, he will seize us… The Macaw Hill is over there. The one who is watching will make us disappear. So it was in the past, when the masters of this place were created. This is a story of my deceased husband, and my father-in-law, called Manuel Mayor Kinchori, from this pueblo, who was Chieftain Kinchori. He is dead already. Here my story ends.
Arthur’s camera portraits of plants have the ambition of becoming paintings. There is a teasingly sexual orchid from the banks of the Perené, almost ready to be transported to Paddington by Lucian Freud. Trumpet-mouthed orchids are more confrontational than the modest capture of the bearded surveyor himself, gun at the ready, perched on his balsa raft. The portraits of King Chokery and his young Queen still burn through time: native people who are not yet prisoners of gifts. Not yet inducted into the labyrinth of debt peonage. It is an obligation, when it comes to the moment of our own departure from the village, and exchange of tributes, to show these photographs to the men and women of Marankiari. And to gloss over our connection with the expedition that enclosed this land.
Mariscal Cáceres
‘All those who enter the green hell looking for black gold are ultimately damned. The jungle seduces them, the jungle retains them, and if they try to escape, the jungle brings them back.’
– José Eustasio Rivera, The Vortex
So much to remember and more to forget. Things left undone and things that can never be undone. Families. Histories. His story. My story. Mystery. In the improvised kitchen zone under the trees beside the river, the women chattered as they prepared breakfast on the morning of our departure, Farne’s birthday: 7 July 2019. Velisa, her mother and her daughter, would be travelling with us, back to Santa Ana, on the other side of the Perené, and up the tortuous road on which Arthur spent his scorn, to the Adventist settlement at Mariscal Cáceres. And to the conclusion, we hoped, of one part of our quest. The shrine or cave of Juan Santos Atahualpa. Apinka of the forest.
Our departure is something to be marked, where our arrival had been an infliction to be endured: the sudden appearance of strangers carried an afterglow of residual melancholy. The empty watchtower was a symbol, an architectural feature fit for photographs. And a coign of vantage from which it was possible to get a good shot of the river on which no invaders could be expected.
There was a white cloth on the breakfast table. When I came back from my walk, Farne was already in her place. She was dressed, hair tied back, shining, before Lucho arrived. This was her day, to be enjoyed in the certain knowledge that she had made the fiction of a Peruvian journey real. The essential recordings had been achieved and now we were easing into the final stages, heading for river and rapids, and traces of the coffee plantations: she could afford to think of home and family.
I handed over the package entrusted to me, before we left London, by Toby. There was a necklace and a pair of self-made and decorated cards from the kids. It was too much, this abrupt visitation from elsewhere. The requirement to be present in two places at one time: preordained duty against the pull of the heart. She ran from the table, back to her hut, in tears.
But Lucho was in excellent spirits. Today was the apotheosis of ‘come-on-let’s-go-vamos’: there would be a feast at Mariscal Cáceres, a challenge we had to fulfil, and then, if all went well, an excursion to find the cave of Juan Santos Atahualpa, local champion of the indigenous and dispossessed.
While we waited at the pristine table, Lucho took his accustomed seat with no reference to what the women were doing or the collective excitement that seemed to be building. Our guide laid out his private collection of cups and potions.
‘I tell you, there is a cure for cancer. I could market a cure.’
Lucho indulged my interest in these morning concoctions. The bowls and spoons and packages. He lifted a forefinger for emphasis.
‘I get up, middle of the night, drink baking soda and squeezed lemon. Always. To scour the guts. No mercy. Every night. Wherever I am sleeping. Baking soda and lemon. Burn out the dirty tubes.’
While he talked, eyes blazing, of this radical Trumpist alchemy, our guide stirred a thick glue of mushroom powder, with some additions of his own, to set him up for the day ahead. He had little screws of paper in every pocket of his fisherman’s waistcoat. Silver wrappings and a big knife. He looks around, claps his hands. And I register, with some surprise, that our guide has taken onboard the date of Farne’s birthday. He has ordered a presentation suitable to the occasion. He is waiting, impatiently, for my daughter’s return.
As she approaches, repaired and recovered, with a bundle of neatly wrapped packages, the gifts we will make to our hosts, the village women emerge with flower-pattern plates held high, deep dishes of golden promise. It is like some Indiana Jones jungle sequence from Spielberg, enacted and made extraordinary by laughing humans. Some of them wear long orange cushmas, overalls for the roofless kitchen, and some wear the deep-blue scrubs of a surgical team. The four plates, set down and meticulously positioned, are heaped with geometric arrangements of sliced fruit: colour co-ordinated and glistening in a syrupy lacquer. A freshness you can anticipate before ruining the display with a spoon. An outer ring has been balanced against the steep lip, halved orange slices, thicker than split thumbs. Then chunks of mango and melon and banana, graded and set off with shining buttons of black grapes and red grapes.
Food that Farne can and will eat! The women have met the challenge. And they press around as she signals her delight – as much at their courtesy as at the avoidance of more yucca and plantain. Velisa’s mother, draped in a dark brown cushma, sits with us at the table, lifting her bowl close to her lips and sucking every choice segment from a spoon that darts into the fruit and is then held, while she sniffs and swallows. Working the spoon with extreme rapidity, like chopsticks, the wise old lady looks Chinese. With that kind of fatalistic, world-knowing humour. But that’s not the end of our shocks, because Lucho has also arranged for cups of coffee to be brought out: bitter, black and steaming, the spurned concoction of the Perené Colony overseers was never touched by the people of Marankiari. The women press forward to watch Farne as she tastes and rinses and offers heartfelt thanks for this, the very best of gifts. In the madness of London, her shared-desk labours, her home, her husband, her children, boxes of interesting coffee selections, arriving every month, keep her fired. And afloat.
Gathered around to witness their triumph, my daughter eating and drinking with only a little more measured consideration than the rest, the women applaud, before breaking, spontaneously, into a breathtaking act of cultural appropriation: a dignified and tuneful performance of ‘Happy Birthday to You’ in Ashaninka. Farne has the presence of mind to record it on her iPhone. There will never be a birthday to match it. The laughter! The light! The colours! Vlaminck blue of the aprons. Burnt orange cushmas. The glowing brown of the old lady’s complexion. She belongs as much to the sediment of the river as to the gardens and the forest.
But was it an appropriation by the Ashaninka or by the Adventists who inflicted the song on them? And what about copyright for unauthorised public performance? Warner Chappell Music thought they had secured the rights to song and lyrics attributed to two American sisters for twenty-five million dollars. The jingle became the highest earner in history. There are a lot of birthdays: think Marilyn Monroe serenading Jack Kennedy. With her specially tailored lyrics. And a figure barely contained in a dress stitched from bright lights and the defiance of gravity. In 2015, a federal judge ruled the copyright claim illegal. The Ashaninka were clear.
Farne is such a favourite with the women. They like the way she stands her ground and keeps control of the cash. And the way she shows the portraits she has taken to the subject children. One young girl, about nine or ten years old, never smiles. When the women clap the birthday song, she remains quite still, dignified and alert, with unblinking eyes. Then she moves back to her place beside Shima-Shima: dutiful, sad. He lifts an arm, as if to envelop her in an invisible cloak. She has been taken into his household, as property, servant or student of secrets. It is not clear. She is a watcher. If I lie in the hammock, she will come close and wait, but she will not rush to engage like the others. There is a tradition, we were told, of the authorised jalador de niños, the plucker (and supplier) of children.
Fernando Santos-Granero said that ‘white people had for years stolen Ashaninka children either directly or through the mediation of their indigenous partners.’ Children were regarded as a renewable resource. ‘The capture and removal of children and young women, plus the killing of the adults that resisted or could not escape in time, was a constant drain of Ashaninka vitality.’
Confronted by a camera, Shima-Shima’s adopted daughter, in red football T-shirt, with ink-black hair and long eyelashes, has an inward expression; the reluctant acceptance of the fact that her portrait has been committed to a machine. Taken from her. And carried away. The young girl has, as Farne points out, in producing the print we have brought with us, precisely the look of King Chokery’s Queen when she was photographed by my great-grandfather. Hair falls over the forehead. The lips are pursed. The women of Marankiari are excited to confirm the resemblance, holding up Arthur’s capture and pointing at Shima-Shima’s new jungle-acquired daughter. Shima-Shima himself is vastly amused. It is agreed that the people of Chokery’s village are indeed their fellow men, brothers and sisters, cousins across the river of time.
The village chief, Osbaldo Rosas, now appears: a man with a duty to perform before he returns to his office and more urgent business. Osbaldo arrives at the moment when we are producing our gifts. Someone has alerted him. The chief takes his position at the head of the table, to give us a formal blessing and to let us know how we can help to publicise available facilities. How we can contribute funds required for a tourist centre.
The first gift, a choice selection of English jams and marmalades, chosen by Farne at Heathrow, with the notion that she was reprising Arthur’s experience on the river with King Chokery, was accepted with no great show of enthusiasm. The pots were distributed among the women. Lucho said that he could see how fruits of the jungle, imaginatively processed and promoted, with commissioned designs, could be a winner: Atahualpa’s Golden Shred. Farne quoted a couple of lines from Arthur’s book.
My own gift, not taking account of Adventist sensibilities, fared no better: a bottle of malt whisky from the Scottish Highlands. There were no convenient priests to snatch it away. It began to feel as if we must make an unregretted departure. But the chief was delighted by the final gift, one I was embarrassed to produce: a plus size black T-shirt, embellished with LON/DON in upper case lettering, red and blue, inset with schematic versions of Big Ben and Tower Bridge. Osbaldo laughed, holding the cellophane-smelling garment against his chest. He called for a round of applause. The T-shirt was then folded, returned to its packet and removed by an attendant.
Then we came to the tricky part: the revelation of Farne’s photocopied documents. The confession of our ancestor’s devastating intervention in their tribal history.
There had already been some animated discussion among the women over the portrait of King Chokery’s wife. It could have been a mugshot for a Twitter account. A promotion for the Ashaninka brand. They recognised the markings on the face and the status of the necklace and bodily adornments. But it was the copy of the original contract between the Lima government and the Peruvian Corporation on which Osbaldo swooped. He had no idea that such a thing existed. Along with Arthur’s Perené photographs, this legal document was received as a valuable contribution to the archives of the village. Osbaldo removed all the papers, at once, to be scanned in his well-equipped hut (and business office). Every page would be put on record as evidence for the prosecution.
We depart on the best of terms. Beyond the dangling key ring of coffee beans and gold-veined orange stones, the object from the trinket table originally chosen as a suitable exchange, Osbaldo brought me a woven shoulder bag. It was very strong and I have used it constantly, on walks around London and elsewhere. We also received a crate of bananas, a jar of some fermented liquor and the salutes and embraces of all the villagers. Waving and calling, we bumped off on the road to Mariscal Cáceres and the golden cave.
——
It is a twisting and dusty progress and the only incident of note is when Velisa calls a sudden halt, darting away into an unfenced plantation and straight up a tree with no convenient lower branches. Perched comfortably, as if born in a nest, she strips the greenish balls of fruit. I don’t know what they are called. There is no sense of private property, the fruits of the earth are available to all who recognise their virtues. Velisa fills the pockets of her waistcoat and packs the rest into a lifted skirt. Lucho says these things are good for dyeing the hair and for dissolving the bones of infamous fish that violate unwary swimmers through anus or penis. The fruit also breaks up kidney stones. Velisa, happy with her bounty, harvests everything that has fallen to the ground.
Arthur’s catalogue, ‘Flora of Peru’, is comprehensive. It is the most useful dividend of his Peruvian journey. He speaks of ‘undescribed varieties’ of walnuts growing on the Perené. Of grapes from the same location that were ‘a pretty deception’. He notices ‘bitterwood’ and Xanthoxylon, ‘sometimes called the toothache-tree’. He admires the Tabernaemontana: ‘A very remarkable tree growing about 40 feet high, yielding good fibre, also good milk.’ He investigates parasites ‘unique in Peruvian vegetation’. He enquires, he observes. But does he ask the right questions of the right people? And will they tell him? I wish I could bring my great-grandfather back, to travel alongside us, so that he could tap the botanical and herbal knowledge of Lucho and Velisa. And Shima-Shima.
‘The wildest savages I ever saw appreciated their plantains,’ Arthur wrote. He could not step around the rebarbative preconceptions of his period and his culture. The bearded Scottish colonist has been admitted to the Garden of Origin: he is ‘alive with excitement’ and lost in wonder at its immoral fecundity. ‘The question here naturally arises, Why has this rich country been allowed to remain, from the creation to the present day, in a wild and desolate condition?’
