Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of human kinds. In doing so, they are masked and given new power to
loop back into the very ontological senses of being in the world that they
purport to describe.
Such incomplete images exerted their scorching force on retired mis-
sionaries too, who, after years of hunting Indian souls in the Chaco, went
back to the middle-class suburbs and megachurches of South Carolina,
Florida, California, Minnesota, and Ontario. I heard that one missionary
named Asi'guede was so powerful he could make machines move with his
spirit. And I heard he wept when he last returned to Paraguay as an old
man and saw the squalor and disease of the Ayoreo camp on the outskirts
of Filadelifa.
Surely he was no less haunted than Bill Pencille. I found him four years
before his death in an assisted living home beside a rushing highway in
Rochester, Minnesota. The three-story building was made up in faux co-
lonial style, complete with pillars and synthetic white siding stretching
out into two impersonal wings like a budget commuter hotel.
He answered the door like he had been waiting, a tiny nonagenarian in
worn slippers and a shirt stained with green Jell-O. The room smelled like
chemical air fresheners and urine and the plastic of its generic furnish-
ings. There was no trace of his past, nothing to indicate the outsized role
this shrunken man had played in setting the course of Ayoreo history. I
tried to interview him, but he tired easily and his memories had faded.
He initially mistook me for a young missionary, asking for advice
about how to work with the Ayoreo.
“Oh man,” he replied. “I haven't thought about that for a long, long
time.”
He said he had dragged the Ayoreo from the Stone Age to the modern
world. His most vivid memories were of his fear at being speared, his af-
fection for the slave boy that he had acquired, and his meeting with the
great Guidaigosode chief Uejnai.
“I'm not a tall man but I was just the right man. I was God's chosen
man to do that.”
I couldn't quit staring at the interchangeable and sterile surround-
ings. Struck by the frailty of human designs, the list of probing questions
died on my lips. Without thinking, I impulsively offered the old mission-
ary my woven
guipe
bag. At this, his face changed. He lit up, slung the
bag around his chest, and then, to my astonishment, recited John 3:16
in perfect rapid-fire Ayoreo: “For God so loved the world that he gave his
only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal
life.”
