Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Ujñari wore whatever clothes he was given, women's dresses or just
a long shirt, and woke up at dawn to talk to the spirits out loud. His fa-
vorite tools were already archaic for Totobiegosode, rarely found even in
museums: tapir-skin sandals, a little two-handled tension axe, a pungent
hyssop for soaking up honey from tree trunks. He never quite shed the
outcast status of incest with the others. Like the Areguede'urasade, he was
ridiculed for his failure to comprehend and for his proximity to a dirty,
profane life in the forest. But he seemed to tolerate the insults and im-
peratives without rancor.
Ujñari was one of those old Ayoreo who see through you. I ran into
a handful of them, contact survivors who possessed the rarefied gaze of
the unreachable, like they had seen beyond the world. Like they could
never be surprised again. For all of his strangeness, Ujñari was an extraor-
dinarily gentle man. After he told me that he was starving because the
children of powerful families always stole his food, I began to bring him
little packets of beans, fruit, aspirin.
Ujñari was a special attraction for those outsiders who knew his story.
They treated him differently and offered to pay him by the myth. Usu-
ally, Ujñari refused such requests. He had been sick since shortly after
contact, when he eventually was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Years later
he was still weak and carried his bloody phlegm around in a plastic bag.
During my fieldwork the people paid to provide health services to Toto-
biegosode ignored his wasting lung condition. When he said he had been
urinating blood with a high fever, I began taking him to the hospital, to
little effect.
Late one night under the fluorescent glare of a bare hospital room dur-
ing the last trip we made together, he summoned me to his bedside and
thanked me in the old way, a rhythmic
chatai
recitation of the deeds of
certain clan ancestors. He began to narrate the scars stitched across his
body, the puckered gash from an enemy spear in his right arm, and the
self-inflicted ones—the burnt crater covering half of his left forearm,
the jagged lines he had cut across his torso in mourning for the siblings
he had seen murdered.
Then, in a breathy voice barely above a whisper, eyes averted, he be-
gan telling me myths—the story of the vulture spirit, the origins of life
and death. The stories were offered with a shy smile, like gifts of the most
precious kind.
When I left the last time, he was a hunched figure in the rearview
mirror watching long after the others had sat down. He died five months
later of lung failure on his smoky blankets in a small hut on the edge of
the forest. It was death by myth, and I could not forget it.
