Affliction and the Limits of Becoming - Behold the Black Caiman - page 154

or benzol. Significantly, this paste was known in Ayoreo slang as Puyai , or
“that which is taboo.” Prior to contact, the word Puyai referred to the set
of moral prohibitions established through the originary differentiations
of humans and animals recounted in adode myth narratives. In the af-
termath of world-ending violence and the upheavals of contact, the cat-
egory of Puyai was evacuated. It was later applied to intoxicating drugs as
well as to the domains of the past considered profane and immoral—all
those practices considered to be offensive to the Christian God Dupade .
The mind-altering substance called Puyai delivered as much cocaine to
the bloodstream as crack, along with additional toxic chemicals. It was
just as addictive as crack, and one small envelope cost approximately
fifty cents in 2010. The increasing traction of Puyai among urban Ayoreo
youth was part of a wider regional trend, in which hundreds of thousands
of street children and urban poor in Latin America were transformed into
a consumer market for the waste by-products of cocaine manufacturing. 2
“The first time you try it, you never want to quit,” as one Ayoreo woman
put it. “You just want more, more, more.”
The vice of the Puyedie was not restricted to the drugs. It also included
eating dirt and the bricks that lined the bottom of open sewage ditches:
“It is another of our vices so those bricks taste good to us.” “They had
piled a lot of pieces over there and each time someone passed by that
place they grabbed some of those pieces with the black things, the sew-
age and they ate it.”
One Puye woman said that it was the brick eating that led her to the
coca paste smoking, rather than vice versa. She tried to hide it from
her husband. “Then I would remember and try it again and I liked it
again. . . . I ground the bricks into powder and I ate it, my mouth was full
of it and one day he saw me and spoke to me but I couldn't reply because
my mouth was full of dust. So he beat me.” They said that some of the
women forego any other kind of food and eat so many bricks that they
turn yellow. “When that one defecates,” they laughed, “it is pure brick
that comes out.” The life of the Puyedie is prohibited life.
The Limits of Transformation
The Totobiegosode urusori and the urban Puyedie bracketed the space of
Ayoreo moral life, even as they made it newly eligible for extermination.
For mainstream Ayoreo, such madness and vice marked the limit of trans-
formation, the interruption of moral humanity, its failure to coalesce.
They marked the end of the ideal self.