Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
was, how many turtles I had killed this time, about the people we knew.
Then she was gone.
Sometimes, a little teenage girl dressed for work would find me and
relay a message from her. Iodé was working in the temporary camp of a
group of woodcutters clearing pasture a hundred miles west or she was
fine with her grandfather on a ranch to the north, or she was sick and
needed medicine. The next time I saw her months later, her face was torn
in a jagged raw streak from the right eye to below her ear, and she was
thinner than normal. She was hugging a Nivaclé man and she let him go
when she saw me, flashing a bright smile. When he'd gone, she told me
she was pregnant. She had been worried because the working girls of a
rival group were angry with her, jealous of the baby, she said. They had
beaten her the week before, five or six of them in a group, their husbands
too. They had tried to kick her in the belly, but she had rolled into a ball,
like this, and it turns out that she had fooled them because her baby was
okay. She said she couldn't keep it anyway, she didn't have any money
and the men wouldn't like her anymore. For sure she wouldn't find a
husband with a fatherless child. She wanted me to take it.
No matter how many times I was offered a child, it never failed to take
my breath for a second, and I couldn't bear to look too long at the ones
that no one wanted and everyone ignored. When I hesitated, she offered
it to several of the Totobiegosode women, those wide-hipped matrons
at the age of twenty-five, already so steeped in the details of making
and sustaining life. They gently teased one another, saying it would be
more beautiful than their own brown babies. “It will be so white,” they
laughed. “Like you!”
Most Ayoreo women work as little birds at some time during their
life. I've seen an entire train car full of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old
girls traveling between Santa Cruz and the Brazilian border towns, laugh-
ing and waving at me as they passed so small and brave and electric.
Later I ran into them and their older female relatives who knew the ropes
all fall-down drunk outside of the lowest, loudest bar at midnight in
a backwoods dirt-road town where they still call Ayoreo
Bárbaros
and
where they weren't served in restaurants. Where the dark brutality could
well up and swallow you if you let it or if you weren't careful where you
stepped.
The little birds played hard, lived fast, and often died young. They
were routinely raped and murdered. Shame ran wild in darkened ditches,
patches of thorny brush, plastic seat covers of broken-down trucks. Faced
with several insoluble dilemmas, the little birds also rejected indigeneity
and Ayoreo-ness. They offered their bodies to
Cojñone
but less willingly so
