By Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz

Perhaps these notes which I have culled from my diary entries from the late Sixties and the Seventies will lead some to understand the Amazonian spiritual path of Loen, my home region, which lies near the Mamore' River, a tributary of the Amazon. In the words of Paa' Antuino, the Loenian chieftain, maybe it'll make Loenians out of some people who are sincere spiritual seekers. That is all he asked: that you be sincere in your path.

Kindly let me know if you are interested in what I am setting down. If there's enough interest I will continue to put it in CALC's homepage. My duties as a full-time teacher don't allow me to write it down all at once, therefore I'll have to do it in installments.

Do excuse the fragmentary manner of narrating the following. I have followed the events as they evolved to show the difficulty of communicating and accepting certain truths that to its practitioner seemed self-evident.

November 17, 1968

I am nominally a Catholic, undergoing, like most spiritual seekers, a persistent crisis of faith. I am no less ambivalent regarding the beliefs of the Loenians with whom I grew up. Hence, I went to Paa's Antuino's house impelled more by nostalgia than curiosity for his religious practices. When I was eight or nine years old he had worked off and on with my father. His reputed magical powers of healing were, even then, widely known.

As I walked down the dusty road to the Cemetery, along which stood the old man's house, I tried to sort out why, besides friendship, I wished to visit him. I was no longer intrigued by the Loenians' affirmation that they can talk to their dead or that the dead have a scrupulous interest in the conflicts and squabbles of the living--as though they had not had enough of them while on Earth!

Passing the Rocas' house, I came upon the unchanged house of the Paa': a motacu' palm thatched-roof hut. He had lived there, as the saying went, since before the world of Loen's population had outnumbered those buried in Loen's cemetery. The house seemed smaller than when I was a child--but then, I've gotten used to the parallax effect of re-memberings.

At my knock the distincly hoarse, hot voice of Paa' Altonio responded.

"Aus jana?"

"It's me, Paa'. Nicomedes Sua'rez, hijo."

"Niquito", I smiled upon hearing the plaintive note of warmth he projected when he liked someone.

"Come in".

I stepped into the sun-streaked twilight of the living room. The split-curi (or Amazonian bamboo) walls filtered rays streaking the large figure of the Paa'. His head, as always, seemed molded in wax which had melted and then cooled down to ashen-colored stone which, nonetheless, echoed its origins in wax. Hardness and smoothness were his corporeal and mental qualities. His high cheekbones entrenched his deep-set and slanted eyes. When he smiled or laughed his eyes appeared indifferent to the joy of his mouth. His straight hair shone even in the darkness, and where the sunrays fell on it I was reassured to see that it had not gone white in the least.

"It's the motacu' oil" my father used to say, "it preserves hair and skin for all eternity. The Loenians smear it all over their body and they end up smelling like inajao."

It took me sometime to realize that it wasn't the smell of ma jao (a dish made with rice, beef jerky and sliced green plantains, cooked with lard) . It came rather from the smoke of their grills which were open faced and even when the driest of woods was burned in them threw "a scandal of smoke", as my Grandma Leticia would say.

The distinct smoky smell was in the air in the Paa's rooms but there was also the smell of jasmine--the flowers of the dead. This white, dense aroma made me feel faint. "It is like carpis" explained to me Raimundo, the Brazilian Amazonian foreman from my father's slaughterhouse. Carpis was a strong local hallucinogenic used ritually by the Loenians.

"It lifts you before it gulps you down into its own world".

"A world of squealing piglets, " said Domingo, a vaquero, suggesting, most likely, both the effect of the carpis and Raimundo's task of slaughtering pigs.

It was reputed that the Paa', who bore his title of chieftain with honor, would never die because he had already been dead. Old age was his lot--he would remain unchanged while the rest of us died. I didn't believe it. I had seen strong men and women die, some very young. For example, during the yellow fever plague or, later, when the hemorraghic fever killed half the population of a neighboring town.

I had gone to the Paa's house precisely because I suspected he was getting very old and was approaching death.

"Paa'. Long time", I said as we embraced. "How are you?"

"You've gotten lost," he said.

"True. I traveled all the way--to the United States."

"People get lost there, I hear."

"Like in the forest."

"No. In the forest you don't get lost. You forget yourself."

That had been his long-standing theme, ever since I could remember.

"Forget what?"

"Life, death, everything that separates and divides and unites."

We exchanged questions about our families. He was alone. His wife, Etelvina, who did not believe in the mosekuse taulna' (pure forgetfulness) had been "taken away", he said. He had tried to pass on to her the ancient learning of the blue sky, but she prefered the yuca, the platano, the palmito, all things of the soil.

"We cannot look down nor up, " he said, "only in. The priest talks about the woman who looked back towards a town of great sin and she was turned to salt. They say that she looked back because she wanted to go back. She liked sinning. I don't think so, she looked back because she had not been taught to look in."

"In what, Paa'?"

"If you want to understand, you come visit me," he said and looked away.

"I'll come see you. I do have to go now. I'll be back soon, Paa."

"You don't believe it."

"There is always something to believe."

"No. You don't believe the mosekuse"s wisdom. If you know that then you don't ask.

"I know of it, Paa'."

"You don't practice."

"Maybe some day."

He kept quiet. He had caught me in the lie.

"But I would like to learn."

"When you do, I'll teach you."

"Come to the Saladero. We'll save you a filet mignon."

"Gracias, niflo, " he said. He hadn't called me child since he used to have his little fun by menacing me with his machete, saying quietly "I'll cut them off."

December 28, 1968 - 3 January, 1969.

Three weeks have passed since I arrived. The December showers have fallen into their set patterns. Sunlight in the mornings then a drenching gush of waters after 2 p.m. and through most of the night. I delighted in my parents' company but felt cloistered. So I started riding to the town and stopped to visit the Paa'. January 1, when the steps on the riverbank in front of our house were disappearing because of the swelling waters, I stopped over to see him. He appeared distant.

"If you want to teach me, I'll listen."

He smiled.

"Maybe you are meant to learn. You know your father has a something of the brujo in him."

"You mean he cures with santiguar."

"To cure with words is not a litte something. Look about you, look at the way the doctorcitos who come to the hospital cure. With the scalpel, and injections, and poisons, and even when they cure the body they hurt the soul."

"How do you cure, Paa'?"

"I don't."

"You're joking, verdad? Many people say you do."

"They don't understand." He began to chop up his tobaccco maso. "When you smoke you have to blow down. You must not darken the blue."

"A little smoke from a cigarrette can't do much to the sky."

"Maria," he said turning to his silent daughter. "Put enough chicken in the locro for the joven. He will stay to have dinner with us."

"But it's only 2 p.m.", I said,"and I do have to go."

"We must talk, nino I am getting old. It isn't true what they say that I'll never die. I have defeated death already, but I am not here to stay. I must go on."

I felt embarassed. He was afraid of death, and he had shown it.

"You must think I am a coward. No. It's not that. My people are losing their language, they are losing their memory. They can't remember where they came from. The few who know will die, the few who know hardly exist anymore. I'll tell you. No, I'll teach you. They say you write. Books. I don't, I never needed to. So one day perhaps you will be like your father, maybe more. Maybe you'll be a true Loeniano".

I resigned myself to a long evening. Many years later sitting next to the inert body of the Paa' in the same living room I would remember the smell of something indeterminate: a blend of jasmine, camphor, soil, frogs, wet leaves. Or perhaps of wind that had gone across the forest and the pampa, and the swamps and lagoons. Most likely it was the aroma brought by the breeze that blew that afternoon after the daily showers. Whatever that smell was, multiple yet unitary in its pungency, it has ascended to a place in my mind where it materializes every time I remember the Paa.

"Have some chive', it'll refresh your memory for years to come ."

The Paa''s furrows shifted into the creased look of delight he assumed when he was on his way to the corral to dance around the

bulls the day of the Patron Saint of Loen. "Drunken to imbecility," my brother Jose' Pedro would say. And yet he was never gored by the five or more Brahma and Cebu' bulls which were forced into the corral and charged rattled by their fury at being enclosed and hassled.

"Hija, give some chive' to Niquito." Maria poured some of the chive' (mandioc which had been grated, fermented, and toasted) into a porcelain mug and then filled it up with water from their well. I took a gulp and the taste of frogs brought to me the image of tangled splayed feet struggling down there in every well of the region. I winced but gulped down.

"The mosekuse' ca be blue and it is from where you look at the world. People think it is outside you. No, it is inside you. Or, it is not inside or outside, it blends the two, like one blends sugar in the water. And the water cannot be seen separated from the sugar, verdad? That sounds simple. And it is that simple.

"If it is that simple, then people can understand it right away."

He laughed.

"Obviously you are not understanding. It is simple for those who have achieved simplicity."

"So it is like faith. Faith in the Virgen, or a particular saint."

"It's like a faith but not for someone or something outside. We said it was simpler than that: there is no outside nor inside."

"But that's impossible, Paa'. You are talking right now about something which is not talking, that is not made of words. Something beyond you and your words, outside of you."

"You see, you did get lost in the United States."

He was a stubborn old man. He didn't want to understand what I was trying to tell him so I changed the subject.

"So Alejo has been married three times. A skirt chaser, nothing like his dad."

"Nothing like me. I was married six times. I outlived all of them...

We spoke about Old Man Napo. The way he died from ingesting creoline (a petroleum-basded desinfectant) . Now that was strange to me. Had he been poisoned? The Paa' laughed, said Don Napo didn't need anybody else to poison him: he drunk creoline almost daily to cure his ulcer.

I left around 11:30 p.m. Maria had fallen asleep sitting up.

January 5, 1969.

At the dining-room table in my home with my mother presiding and ny dad to her left, the subject of my visits to the Paa' was spread across the table as a comic relief to a despairingly hot day.

"If you keep going there," said my brother Rodolfo "You'll end up stinking like him."

"Or like Maria," said my other borther Ito. Rodolfo burst out laughing.

"The Paa' says that you, father, are part brujo."

"He doesn't rattle maracas," my Mother said, "but, 51' senor, he does snore".

"Seriously. You cure with words. I've seen you.

Seen the maggots just drop from the wounds of the cattle as you recited something about them falling."

"It's a secret formula," said Mother, "For every worm let ninety-nine fall, for every two worms let ninety-eight..."

"I know it's a formula. But the Paa' has his own ways."

"He uses majao and smoke, " said Ito.

"How old is he, Papa'?" I said.

"Nobody knows. When he used to come here to work he looked just the same as he does now. I was 36 and I am now 72.

"Doesn't that tell you something?"

"Yes. He's preserved himself in alcohol," said Jose' Pedro.

I felt frustrated. There was a tendency in my family to make light of everything. That night it was the Paa''s turn, and myself, by association.

January 6, 1969.

Celestino, the errand-boy, came running to the house. He always brought gossip from the town and would go straight to the office of my father who would stop anything he was doing or saying to listen to the news and, if he was accompanied, to share them with his guest or guests.

"El joven Ramirez shot himself in the chest. They said he

was in love with Marta, the daughter of the Machorra, you know, the one that has eleven children. Anyway, he..."

"Did he die?" My father said and asked about the young man's mother, "How's Dofla Elvira, my dear comadre?"

"Disculpe, senor," said Celestino, "I didn't mean to be disrespectful, going on like that. No, Carmelo didn't die and that was so strange."

"What was so strange?"

"That the Paa' resurrected him..."

"Bah! Carmelo must've had a little heart attack and he came to," said don Armenio, who was visiting my dad.

"If you can call a big hole right in the heart area a heart attack, then you're right," said Celestino.

"How did he do it?" I asked.

"By doing nothing," Celestino said, "He just stared and stared at the eye of the wound. That's what he called

it. He might've used sangre de grada. That was three days ago, today the kid was telling jokes."

Sangre de grada was the curative sap of the grada tree traditionally used by the natives for all wounds.

***

Odd things do happen and the stranger they are the more likely they'll lead us to generalize. For example: I could conclude that the Paa' has magical powers. Or, more precisely, that he had acquired magical powers. People told of his many miraculous cures, but as far as to snatch someone from death, this was the first time. I went to his house the next day.

"How did you save Carmelo?"

"I didn't," said the Paa', "It was he who saved himself."

"But you did something. They saw you do it."

"They saw me staring at the wound. Carmelo understood what he had to do and he did it. If it had not been his moon, they would've had to call the priest."

"So how did he... what did he understand?"

"I told you I would teach you if you wanted to."

"I do want to, Paa'."

***

January, 18, 1969.

Since January 6, I've been going to the Paa''s house daily. He and and I spoke about many things. We exchanged gossip. We spoke about death and living, about the many pasts of many people, we laughed, we probably ended smelling of the same musky smell of burning hides, of charred meat, of smoked corn, of boiled yuca, of majao. That was the lot of the poor: to smell like their diets. But we also spoke of what by then mattered to me most: the mosekuse' tuina, the forgetfulness from which all creativity and wholeness comes.

So as not to burden the reader with details, I'll summarize. I am reminded of a phrase from a Russian folktale my wife Kristine read many times over to our older son: "It takes many days to ride on horseback to get to that kingdom, but it takes one sentence to tell it." The Paa' would probably say that that was one sentence too many. I would agree but, he was right, I've become lost: I am a mere writer.

As I listened intently to the Paa''s voice, I forgot the discomfort of the hard tacuara bench I was sitting on in his living room . In subsequent days, in a recurrent dream, I heard his voice and couldn't doubt its message: it had the inexorability of the ascent of a flame--an image which seems appropriate to describe his voice. It was like a fire burning in-

side a deep well; like a fire in an enclosed space. It crackled, mesmerized me, and suffocated me. Upon awakening, it seemed to me unreal. I thought of it as a ventriloquist's act: that is, a voice that projected itself elsewhere, even to the unlikely corners of my dreams. Was the Paa' merely a consumate hypnotist.

The first time he told me about the blue sky I swallowed hard in disbelief at seeing myself listening to such apparent nonsense. It was like walking under the jungle's canopy for the first time: a world that smelled of leaves so dried up they felt like the charred bodies of insects and that produced a similar sense of time suspension.

"To understand is to create, " said the Paa'. "If you understand a friend, you are creating friendship. What is outside of you is inside you."

He offered me some of his black tobacco. As a child I had begun smoking "rubios" which I occassionally swiped from my dear grandmother Leticia, only to feel sick with guilt later for my deviousness and nauseous from the cigarrete's rank smell. I shook my head.

"You probably don't like it. But these are not like the Derbys of la seflora Leticia." Said the Paa' and almost broke out laughing. "It's important you smoke this once for acts teach better than explanations."

I accepted a cigarrette he had hand rolled in the brief time it took him to speak the above sentences.

"I said to you before that you must blow down so you don't darken the blue. Try it. But, before, imagine one of our clear skies, those of dry August, when even the clouds get burnt up by the sun. It has no clouds."

I closed my eyes. I saw the open skies of August days. Could've been any day of August, but I imagined one of an August 24th.

"You're probably imagining your birthday," the Paa''s voice penetrated into my nest of concentration.

"How did you know?" I asked.

"No mystery, nino the Paa' said, "we all like our birthday. Even an old man like me. It means more than people think, and it means less."

"Like everything else," I said.

"Like everything else, but not like everything else, also. But, let's leave that, for now. Maybe one day we'll come back to our birthdays," he said and laughed. "Now let's go back to the blue. In front of the sky what passes for real?"

"What do you mean?"

"Things you see, touch, hear."

"Clouds, wind, light, people, I suppose."

"In other words your day. Things that go by, your life."

"My life is what I live."

"Or what you see go by. Your life is someplace else, you'll see if you watch carefully."

I felt the w6od knots against my bottom. I wanted to get up and go. I opened my eyes. He was smiling through the smoke of his cigarrete.

"It's hard to see at first," the Paa' said. "Like when a child walks for the first time into the jungle's canopy in the twilight. He doesn't see anything. But if he becomes a lenatero, a woodcutter, he'll be able to see clearly even in pitch blackness the slithering of a black snake."

"I didn't see black snakes," I said and smiled. The Paa' was trying to divert me with absurd imagery. "I did see the blue sky. I imagined it."

"Bien. In your home, tonight, if you don't go to the

Cemetery," his allusion to the Cemetery been used as a lover's meeting place made me blush. I had been meeting there with Marta, Carmelo's indifferent love, the same Carmelo who tried to commit suicide because of her. "Try to think, tonight, not only in the blue sky but from it."

He seemed tired so I said goodbye and went home.

That afternoon I was restless, resentful at the Paa'. I had promised Marta to meet her. Trying to find respite from the moist heat at dusk I lay on a hammock in our screened-living room which faced the Loe'n river. The only stirrings of air were caused by the hammock's back-and-forth motion. I began to slide slowly into a numbness which, curiously, began at my ankles and slowly moved up. I closed my eyes and imagined the blue sky behind my thoughts.

I realized I was not going anywhere, except sliding into a torpor and perhaps I would sleep until next day. That abandonment of will didn't alarm me in the least. My breath fell into a monotonous, even pattern and as I felt sleep overwhelming me I found myself in the bluest space I had ever seen. But I tried to dismiss it. It was a blatant transposition of the sky out there, brightened up like clothes placed on a clothesline are enlivened by tropical sunrays. That night I was content within myself; I didn't feel like fleeing from my introspection. I didn't go to the cemetery.