the wreckage is you / & the jungle chickens,
[When I had journeyed half of our life's way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear:
so bitter-death is hardly more severe!
But to retell the good discovered there,
I'll also tell the other things I saw.
I cannot clearly say how I had entered
the wood; I was so full of sleep just at
the point where I abandoned the true path.]
I told him my secrets. That I missed the feeling of being held. He ran beside me, with his tongue hanging out. It had began to feel like forever, but it was nothing new. I had known many forevers. He told me his secrets in turn. That he would rather be free with the threat of snakes than under lock and key. That all the reptiles in the world didn't scare him one iota.
It was six months after docking on the north east coast of Brazil and the long road down to the very southern tip of the continent – one hundred and twenty days of roads, robberies, mangos and guanacos.
The sun had been an instrument playing upon my skin, walking, walking. Nothing but taxis go by. The jungle grows darker and deeper while the sun remains sewn to the centre point of the sky. And then, from nowhere, there is a gunshot and the sun collapses and it's night just like that.
My friend suddenly veers off into the trees, the sound of a monkey scrambling away after him. Never seen my toes so dark before – of dust and the loss of sun. And then: that feeling that you know so well, turning round, indicating to the road and knowing with guts, with the arms of the world that this particular vehicle will stop. It does, a little ways past me and I approach it cautiously awaiting a price to be yelled – the majority of jungle vehicles transport as a taxi – licensed or not. Nada. Just a silent nod.
Three occupants : two men, and an older woman riding shotgun. We approach corners beeping the horn, climbing up into the clouds. The road is so thin that we could easily crash into another car each time we turn. The vines that wrap around the trees, the sound of the birds who have throats from another existence. We go higher, higher at a pace that I could walk at. Hairpin turns. This is the main route through the centre of the country and it's no more than a dirt road. Every so often the woman turns around to stare at me and sneers. “Gringo, gringo, gringo...que sucio son...” She turns to the driver. “Hijo mío, we should have left him rot there with the jaguares. But we don't stoop so low. We still have humility. Unlike him. Look at the way he's staring out the window, like he owns it all. Well I have news for him. The land is free. Nobody ever owns anything in this world. It's all just a loan. We can only own our actions”... ---and on and on of the robbery of the land, the gringo contribution to the economic crisis, my own meddling in politics here.
The man beside me, clad in a suit, shudders and covers his face. He's quiet for hours, until, on one of the more tricky turns where we can see right down into the canyon, he begins to mutter words low. Sounds, if they are coming more from his belly or knees than from his throat. He breaths deep and breathes out sounding like the wind.
“Desaparecido...desaparecido...”, he says, over and over. We drive for hours more and it's all he says. I try to imagine what it is that he's speaking about that has disappeared. He's sobbing, now. A lover. A family member. A pet, even, perhaps.
When we pull up, finally reaching a town, he gets out, throws money at the driver and then runs, turning to gaze over his shoulder at something beyond the car, imminent, gaining ground upon him.
The mother and son get out and approach a fast food stall. On the seat where the man had been sitting is a folder that he'd left behind. Inside are aerial photos of the jungle and mass logging sites. Photos of wildlife washing up from the river, dead. One legged monkeys. Rubber exploitation. He was fleeing from a civilisation that cannot stop filling its belly. He's still running by the time they get their food. I've never seen someone run so fast to nowhere before. As if he were running in two directions at the same time.
“El es un puto”, she mutters under her breath, glaring at me, climbing back in with some giant root covered in salsa. - “He's come to take the rest of our gold. Like the rest of them. Un achorado. And a spy sent to bring the Junkies into power. ¡Que roche! And we're driving him! What is someone like him doing on the road like this, eh hijo? He doesn't have his limousine with him so he's coming with us...”
She begins to cackle. We inch on back up on the mountain, my voyage of doom. She turns back and eyes me angrily.
“¡Por las puras! Eres monse, eh gringo? ¡Un calabaza! Asu!”
Her hatred of me fills the car. Projections. A myriad of lifetimes dragging them along by my side. In relationships, with strangers in the street, with family. To be seen as other than myself. Sometimes I can channel it. Bounce it off me. Other times it sinks deep, I forget myself, become the other. Words that come out of me that aren't mine.
“I once met a Gringo”...she begins again. “He wanted to buy me. I let him. Turns out he was just a crudo, un puta blancón de nuestra país. and didn't have any money anyhow. Those dirty-good-for-nothing-gringos...”
We stop, suddenly. They get out, parking on a turn where there'd be no more room to pass for another vehicle. I get out too. If there's a time for a gun, it'd be now. Wreckages scattered down at the bottom of the cliffs caught by moonlight. The wreckage is you, I breathe to myself. The wreckage is inside you and this is your life awaiting the final drop to the ground.
The son points at a car down there.
“Mi papa”, he says, making the sign of the cross. He points out a pickup truck on its side, burnt to a skeleton. With that we climb back in and continue on the way without skipping a beat though my heart is acting funky. It's been several hours now that we've been inching along the roads. This jungle that goes on infinitely. I fall asleep at some point with exhaustion, but wake every now and then with her words still ringing strong. Sometimes snakes come out of her mouth, sometimes I swear we're riding inside a giant coconut.
“Gringo! ¡Vamos!” she cries, as we pull up to house, lifetimes later. I ask how far we are from the city where the host I'd be staying with lives. 10km, she laughs. It was long past midnight.
“You can sleep at our place”, the woman says. “Like a dog.” She makes a snarling sound, but she sounds more like a jaguar. “With the chickens. Like the filth you are”. She laughs again, that strange laugh of a frog which has a sugar cane wedged down its throat. She indicates a place in the dirt full of feathers and chicken shit and disappears into the house. I put up my tent and feel the humiliation that she yearned upon me, and feel the comfort of my home which is my tent feeling like a ghost and wonder briefly if I am and this is what the dead do, they continue thinking that they're alive until they realise they're not and then fall back into a slumber of dreams of crimes they didn't commit. I'm before a judge with the dead, beside a large river and I'm being sentenced for an atrocity so obvious that nobody can speak of it. Everyone knows. Everyone but I.
I'm disturbed from my court case by the feeling of my tent beginning to rock back and forth. It's light out. I presume the chickens have come to wake me in force. But no. It's a hand pulling on the tent.
“Gringo. Desayuno. Ahora. Ven.”
I don't understand why she invites me. I enter the house. It has little light inside. Wooden.
They serve me a plate. The breakfasts in Peru are wonderful : maca and different grains, fruits, juices. I sit at a large wooden table. I eat hungrily and the woman and her son peer at me curiously. I thank her. I thank she who had passed the night cursing me till her tongue wore away. She serves me coffee, strong and full bodied.
“Where are you from?”, the son asks, perhaps gazing at me for the first time. I tell him. I tell him of my journey, collecting stories, searching deepenings. He looks at me surprised, his eyes squinting. He looks at me earnessly for a long while, seemingly contemplating on revealing something.
“We've been transporting blanca”, he says. “If the police would have stopped us, or the military, we would have been shot dead”. He gazes at me intently, gauging my expression. “You too”, he grins.
I pause, contemplating my realities. I had thought it was them that were going to be the most likely to execute me last night. That or the fall from the cliff.
His face becomes serious.
“We're artisans. We make everything. We built our house. We sell things in the street. But it's not enough to eat. Should we starve?”
He picks out a beautiful knife carved with a snake onto the handle.
“This is what we make. But everything is cheaper now from China. Nobody buys this, or if they do, they pay little. So one day we began transporting. Where we were coming from yesterday was a red zone. Not even police can enter. They know there'd be bloodshed. If a tourist walked in, or even someone from Lima, bang bang. Nobody unknown can cross that line. The government are scared of us, but it's a different matter outside. They can get us at a any point. Sometimes we transport the leaves. Sometimes la blanca...what would you do, if you couldn't eat?”
“One friend I even saw shot right next to me and I drove on with him on the ground. I never found out what happened to him. Sometimes people just disappear. Sometimes they shoot even before they know."
The woman looks at me and asks of my occupation. She begins to laugh again, but this time it changes. This time the laughter is warmer, the feeling of it ceasing to be something that attacks me.
“We're Charapas”, she says, softly. “We have nothing else. Nada de nada. Just the things we make...and now, this white dust that the gringos desire so much.”
She pauses, clearing up the dishes.
“Who do you write stories about?”
“People that I meet and their lost stories”.
“Tell them this : we don't choose this. Tell them this: this is an act of desperation. And tell them this: one day they will know their slaves by the anger in their eyes.”
She presses a bus ticket into my hands, gives me instructions to the city and pushes me out of the door. I didn't get their names, but there was a fifty percent chance of it being Juan and Maria. For months those chicken feathers will stick to my tent, unable to be set free. Once I was a dog sleeping with chickens. Once I knew the other side,
Picture - Richard Muller, 1918
