TY - JOUR
AU1 - Wingfield, Andrew
AU2 - Gilmore, Michael P
AB - Day One—Watching Deysi Navarro Ríos is performing magic. She sits on a floor of bare wood planks, leaning forward over a round-bottomed trough that’s about eight feet long. In the middle of this heavy trough, a pile of white yuca flesh steams. Open at each end, the trough is half of a hollowed-out tree trunk. This piece of blackened palisangre wood is an heirloom passed down from Deysi’s grandmother. So is the moledor she holds with both hands, a thick and heavy paddle hewn from dense wood, rounded on the bottom so she can rock it from side to side over the cooked yuca, pressing the white flesh into a soft paste that looks like mashed potatoes. The work is taxing. Deysi’s breath quickens with the rocking; loose strands of black hair fall forward over round cheeks that flush with the exertion. After several strenuous minutes Deysi settles, leans the moledor against the far side of the trough, and dries her forehead with a cloth. She lifts a large spoon and shovels a taste of mashed yuca into the hand of her toddler son, who steadies himself on the rim of the trough. A heaping spoonful then goes into Deysi’s mouth, followed by three spoonsful of water from a small metal bowl. This water is purple, colored by the small yam whose flesh she grated into it before hefting the moledor. Squirrel-cheeked, Deysi works the mixture around in her mouth, eyes down, avoiding the studious gaze of the two gringos who sit on the floor across from her, a pair of visitors who act as if this task, one she has performed weekly every year of the decade since she turned thirteen, is something other than ordinary. The mixture, when she spits it into the trough, flashes up from the heaped yuca like a wash of purple paint. Using the flat lid of a small pot, she folds the purple into the white. And then repeats the process—a dab of yuca into the child’s waiting hand, a spoonful into her mouth, followed by the purple water. Two minutes or so of mastication, then spit, fold, repeat a dozen times, fifteen, eighteen, until the texture is right. Ordinary. Also magical. Yuca (Manihot esculenta) is a bland, starchy root, a humble and quotidian food, an ugly duckling whose inner swan can only be unlocked by a most singular key. The molecules that make yuca flesh are long starches, complex chains of sugars that resist fermentation. To break these chains, and liberate the sugars for a higher purpose, a special enzyme is required—an amylase enzyme present in Deysi’s saliva. Deysi is a member of the Maijuna (pronounced my-hoo-nuh), an indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon. Yuca, the Maijunas’ staple crop, was domesticated in the Amazon basin thousands of years ago. The paste Deysi is masticating and mixing now will be activated by the fermented residue of previous batches prepared in her grandmother’s trough. After a couple of days’ exposure to the wild yeasts that ride the air currents in her kitchen, the mixture will be strained to make masato (muh-sah-toh), the alcoholic beverage Maijuna women have been preparing for millennia. All humans have amylase enzymes in their spit. So why, we gringos want to know, do only Maijuna women make masato? “Men don’t make masato,” says Sebastián Ríos Ochoa, an elder who sits on one of the low wooden benches that line the plank walls of the room where Deysi works. Sebastián is a fount of knowledge about all things Maijuna. Before we entered Deysi’s house, he met us in her kitchen garden and gave us a tutorial on growing and harvesting yuca. He described the traditional ceremony that used to precede the first harvest from a new yuca field and the subsequent gathering of friends and family where everyone drank masato and danced the sacred dance of the white-lipped peccary. If there were an official explanation for why only women make masato, Sebastián would share it. Deysi’s grandfather, Victorino Ríos Torres, lounging on another bench, counters our question with one of his own: “Would you want some guy’s spit in your masato?” This gets a good laugh from all the kids in the room, a collection of three boys and three girls whose ages range from six to thirteen. No one laughs when Sebastián asserts that the typical Maijuna child starts drinking masato at six months. “Just a taste.” These tastes, doled out by adults, get larger as children grow, but to consume a full bowl of masato, the standard portion, a person must first prove their capacity for work. Sebastián points over to Langer, his ten-year-old grandson, who gazes out the window through a pair of borrowed binoculars. Langer recently became a mingero (meen-gair-oh), meaning he regularly joins the adults when they gather for a minga, a work party where masato greases the wheels of reciprocity. When helping to clear a neighbor’s field, or gathering the palm leaves that will roof an uncle’s house, or sitting in the shade weaving those leaves into thatch, Langer drinks masato by the bowl. We gringos are taught to separate work from drink: to work first, then drink off the stress of work. But this sequence was not always standard. Our ancestors in Europe and North America, in agricultural and even early industrial times, consumed fermented beverages throughout the day. In Maijuna lands, the old way still prevails—and functions just fine, for the most part. Booze and tools can sometimes be a volatile combination. One hears stories of mingas where the masato was too potent, where a day of boat-building yielded a botched canoe or a sweaty slog in a yuca field ended with someone bleeding from a machete gash. But in general, the system is sound. The carbohydrates in masato provide essential energy. Ranging from two to about six percent alcohol, this brew is strong enough to stir the spirit but mild enough that folks can quaff it by the bowl and stay on task. Buzzed and cheerful, people talk and laugh while they toil, their many hands making light work. Fields get cleared, houses get built and thatched. Families serve masato to helpful neighbors, knowing they’ll be offered masato when called upon in kind. Bodies do the work. Masato, the fuel that makes these bodies go, is also the Maijuna medium for affirming human bonds, forming the fibers of continuity and resilience. Day Two—Listening We are a pair of faculty friends, a writer and an ethnobiologist, university colleagues about to teach together for the first time as we team up to run a field course in the rainforest. In a few days, sixteen American students will join us here in Maijuna lands, and part of what we’re up to now is finalizing lesson plans. Today, our focus is escuchando—listening. Maijuna men regularly hunt at night, sometimes sitting silently in the dark forest, ready to spring into action when they hear the sounds of game. Most of their favored listening spots are colpas, naturally occurring mineral deposits where animals such as tapirs, peccaries, pacas, red howler monkeys, and deer come to consume salt and other minerals they can’t survive without. But Sebastián has a different explanation for why the animals come. As we ply the brown waters of the Sucusari River in a peque-peque, a slender wooden boat named for the rhythmic racket its small outboard motor makes, Victorino pilots from the stern while Sebastián pivots on the bow bench so he can face us. In a gritty baritone, he spools out the story of Bequitu (bek-eh-too), a traditional Maijuna tale his mother shared with him when he was a boy. Bequitu, a man, was turned into a tapir by the Maijuna creator, Maineno.1 During Bequitu’s transformation, his daughter, who was unaware of what was happening, made masato and brought it to him in the forest. But the tapir-father grew increasingly skittish, and eventually refused to come close when his daughter approached, despite her repeated assurances. The exasperated daughter cast her clay pot of masato on the forest floor, where it shattered. Bequitu later came and licked up the masato, his hooves softening the moist earth, the very first tapir forming the very first mineral lick. In the Maijuna language, the word for masato is ono and the word for place is bi (bulh). A mineral lick, ono bi, is literally the “place of masato,” Sebastián explains, and that’s why all the animals are attracted. Anticipating our own thirst, we stow two liters of water in each of our day packs after pulling the boat up onto the bank. Sebastián and Victorino, who swallowed several bowls of masato before we left the village, will bring no water on this ten-mile hike into the hot, humid forest. Nor will Jairo (high-row), Deysi’s young husband, who has been tapped to lead our small party this evening. We sense that Jairo, who hails from another community in the region, was invited along as a test, Victorino taking this opportunity to assess the acumen of his granddaughter’s mate. Sporting rubber boots and soccer shorts, Jairo totes a machete in his right hand and balances a shotgun on his left shoulder. He sets a brisk pace along the trail, which leads from an abandoned home site back through a series of old farm fields that used to produce food for the family whose house, vacated only a year before, is already being reclaimed by the forest. Through the fallowed fields the going is easy, but soon we enter dense primary forest and Jairo must hack away any vines and branches that impede our company’s progress. He moves forward purposefully, tracking along a path that is to our eyes hardly visible. Aloof but considerate, Jairo delivers a deft machete tap to alert us to any fallen log or buttress root that might trip us up. At each stream crossing, he cuts a slender tree or two, strips away leaves and limbs, and plants these poles in the streambed mud, giving us something solid to grasp as we clamber down the slick banks and slide-step across the thin, slippery logs that act as bridges. Jairo is sinewy and lithe, his waist small, his back and shoulders sculpted by years of canoe paddling and machete work. At five-foot-seven, he stands several inches taller than Sebastián and Victorino, these older men he calls los abuelos, the grandfathers. These grandfathers are short of stature and broadly built in the Maijuna way, thickly muscled through the shoulders, trunk, and legs. Even their heads are large and blockish, with prominent brow lines and strong cheekbones. Still vigorous in their mid-sixties, Sebastián and Victorino are living links to an older Maijuna culture, to a time when this forest-dwelling people lived not in the riverbank villages they occupy now but in isolated houses throughout their forested ancestral lands. The four Maijuna villages house fewer than five hundred individuals who are all that remain of a people whose population prior to European contact numbered in the thousands. That this remnant group persists is itself a minor miracle, considering the potent combination of forces that have assailed the Maijuna and other indigenous peoples since Europeans arrived in the Amazon basin. Those Maijuna spared by European diseases were subjugated by rubber barons who enslaved local people and set them to the task of exploiting the natural resources on their own lands. Multiple waves of missionaries and government officials imposed religious and educational programs that have, over time, eroded traditional beliefs and cultural practices. Today the Maijuna language, Máíhiki (my-hun-kee), is in grave danger of extinction. Only a few dozen living individuals, Sebastián and Victorino among them, spent their earliest years in more traditional forest homes and spoke Máíhiki as their first language. Sebastián, Victorino: these Spanish names, like the polyester soccer jerseys they wear now, mask a much deeper identity. With Victorino, Sebastián answers to Ma Taque (mah tahn-kay), his Maijuna name, which means red capuchin monkey. With Sebastián, Victorino is Ñame Bao (nyah-may bow), Máíhiki for the red titi monkey. Walking into the interior is, for these men, traveling back in personal and cultural time. Jairo is eager to show his wayfinding chops and keen to reach the colpa before dark. We test his patience with regular pauses triggered whenever garrulous Sebastián happens upon a teachable moment. Early on, he beckons us over to discuss a straight-trunked capirona tree with smooth, ochre-yellow bark that stands a few feet off the trail. The tree’s bark starts out coarse and dark, but that outer bark eventually sloughs away to reveal this beautiful honey-colored surface. Sebastián reports that Maineno, the creator, told the first Maijuna people they could have skin that shed this way if they wished. They declined the offer, not knowing at the time that they were passing up a chance to be immortal. Farther along the trail, a few large, cracked-open fruit husks lying empty on the ground trigger another story about Maineno, who once mistook a husk such as this, from the noejojoñi (no-way-ho-ho-nyee) tree, for a vagina and tried to have sex with it, only to wind up with an itchy crotch. A wry and intimate expression plays over Sebastián’s face when he tells such stories, as if Maineno were a colorful uncle he remembers from childhood. Sebastián’s expression grows more grave when we pull up in the midst of a strange stand of slender trees. Here in the Amazon basin, where plant diversity is some of the highest in the world, a half-acre space where a single species of plant dominates is notable. A grove such as this is known in Máíhiki as a mañaco taco (mah-nyah-ko tah-ko). Maijuna people fear the malevolent spirits who rule these copses.2 Children are at particular risk, and Maijuna parents go out of their way to keep a safe distance when traveling through the forest with their offspring. If a child comes too close to a mañaco taco, the spirits who dwell here can steal the child’s soul or even take its life. Once stolen, the child’s soul can only be retrieved with the help of a shaman. There is only one Maijuna shaman left and his knowledge of traditional healing methods and materials is unmatched. Still, elders like Sebastián and Victorino carry an impressive working knowledge of natural pharmacology in their heads. Shortly before we reach the colpa, Sebastián stops to show us a giant oje (oh-hay) tree, which contains a liquid the Maijuna use as a treatment for worms. Above us, a scarred-over gash in the massive trunk marks the place where an ancestor tapped this tree for its curative juice. Another Maijuna word for a mineral lick is tuada (twah-dah). Our destination is called Yao Uti Tuada (yow oo-tee twah-dah), so named for an ancestor who used this mineral lick as his hunting spot. We reach Yao Uti Tuada with scant daylight to spare. Here a steep bank leads down to a narrow flat of soft, exposed earth, a moist and muddy avenue that dead-ends into a shallow cave of clay that is busy with bats. The mud beneath our boots is slick and squishy, like Deysi’s masato paste. Victorino points out the muddy bole of a tall, slender tree that howler monkeys have been using like a firehouse pole to travel between canopy and colpa. We talk in normal voices now, though we approached the colpa in silent stealth a short while ago, a strong odor on the air signaling that a group of white-lipped peccaries had come to lick. Jairo and Victorino carried their guns at the ready, but the peccaries escaped. After inspecting the colpa, we climb the bank and share a bit of food. Then Sebastián cuts a bunch of giant palm leaves and lays them out across a small shelf of earth that commands an elevated view of the colpa. In this spot, where a lone Maijuna hunter will often sit listening all night, two unarmed professors settle in to experience the darkening forest. Nightfall is like a shift change. The birds and bugs that sang all day go quiet as nocturnal creatures start to vocalize and stir. Frogs of many kinds begin to trill. The bats from the colpa cave are wide awake, frenetic, their wings beating all around our heads—truly beating, kicking out thumps like tiny drums. Wavelets of air from those wingbeats break upon one’s neck, cheek, ear. Now and then a bat will crash into a human ear, topple down onto a shoulder, and have to be flicked away. Fireflies, larger and faster than those in North America, arc like orange tracers across the inky air. Above us is a jagged opening through which a puzzle-piece of overcast sky is visible, a small shape that glows pale and gray against the otherwise unbroken black canopy. Occasional flashes of far-off lightning illuminate this scrap of sky. Thunder growls in the distance. As the darkness thickens it gets harder to discern the piece of sky through the canopy. There is no moonlight, no starlight. One can’t make out the shape of one’s companion two feet away nor the fingers of one’s hand held a few inches in front of the eyes. In this intoxicating darkness, more complete than any we can achieve in our light-tainted home-lives, we pivot to look toward the sloped ground behind us. There, glowing upon the leaf litter, an array of dazzling blue-white dots, dabs of phosphorescent fungi that shine like constellations. The hike out begins under light rain which Sebastián says will soon stop. Jairo’s flashlight rides on his head, fixed there with the repurposed waistband of an old pair of shorts. He navigates while we keep our much more powerful lights trained on the ground in front of us. We are sweaty and spent from the miles we’ve already trudged in the tropical heat, digging deep to stay focused and keep ourselves upright. Behind us, the abuelos are chummy and relaxed, chatting lightheartedly in their mother tongue. Victorino is a quiet sort of man, but Sebastián can draw anyone out for a bit of banter. The darkness doesn’t damper Sebastián’s teacherly instincts. At one point he stops the procession to show us a small plant he has spied, the slender stem of which bears a pattern resembling the markings on a highly poisonous fer-de-lance, the snake known locally as jergón (hare-gōn). Sebastián pulls the plant from the ground and shows us how his mother would hold it by the crown and tap him firmly with the stem, starting at his feet and working her way all along his legs and arms, his belly, back, and shoulders. This was her way of protecting him from snakebites. Victorino waves us over and shines his light up some sixty feet into the branches of a nearby tree, revealing two sets of glowing eyes and the tan bodies of a pair of kinkajous, cousins of raccoons that many in these parts believe to be a kind of monkey. We watch the bashful creatures until they obscure themselves on even higher branches, then ask Victorino how he spotted them. While Sebastián was talking, Victorino says, he heard a few drops of water fall onto the understory leaves nearby. Those drops meant animals were moving up in the canopy. As usual, he was listening. Day Three—Tasting This day, our last before the students arrive, begins upriver from the village of Sucusari in a Maijuna family’s agricultural lands, where we spend the morning planning an agroforestry session for the field course. We return to Sucusari after lunch and join Sebastián and Victorino at Deysi’s house. We watched the masato preparation here two days before. Now it is time for a taste. The masato paste, off-white, has sat fermenting in a lidless bucket for forty-eight hours. It smells like bread dough with a hint of alcohol. Deysi scoops several handfuls of the paste into a bowl of water and mixes it well. Next, she transfers the diluted paste into a plastic colander, a modern tool that is replacing sieves some elders still weave by hand from plants. The colander sits over the mouth of a bucket, which catches the liquid as Deysi’s fingers wring it from the soaked paste. Sipped from a plastic bowl, the masato has the texture of a light and creamy soup. Its mellow flavor comes in two parts, the bread dough prelude yielding to the pleasant tang of wild yeast. It carries a mild sweetness as well, for the yeast still has some sugars to consume. Several children are present for the tasting and Sebastián gives each one a swallow before he and Victorino enjoy a couple of bowls apiece. The masato will get stronger, Sebastián says, insisting that we take a jar with us so we can taste it again tomorrow. We are staying in a rustic lodge a few miles downriver from the village of Sucusari. Our students will soon fill this place, but for the past several days we two have been the only guests. Tonight Sebastián and Victorino join us for dinner, the four of us breaking bread at the end of a long table in the deserted dining hall. Sebastián is holding forth, sharing memories of mingas past. There was one time when the mingeros spent the day clearing a new yuca field, piling all the cut brush into several great stacks. At the end of the day, when everyone was sloshed on masato, the brush piles were torched. From three different burning piles long snakes bolted, a trio of venomous jergones slithering wildly about the field and setting off a scene of drunken panic that he can laugh about now. Another time, Sebastián’s in-laws hosted a minga and treated their neighbors and family members to some exceptionally strong masato. That night, needing to relieve himself, Sebastián rose from the hammock where he’d been dozing and staggered toward the door, ignoring his wife’s reminder that he was not at home but in her parents’ house. At home, when heading out to pee, he could hop down a couple of feet from his doorway to the earth next to his house. But the in-laws’ floor rested on stilts as tall as Sebastián. His inebriated hop led to a long fall, a hard landing, and a wounded back that hobbled him for weeks. He tells such stories in a charming, expert, self-deprecating way, pleased to portray himself as foolish when he knows it will hatch a laugh. But not all of his stories are funny. At one of his first mingas, when he was a boy, a riotous fight broke out among a pack of blitzed Maijuna men, which terrified him. “I never wanted to fight,” he explains. “At mingas, I liked to drink some masato, maybe dance a little, and talk to the girls.” Sebastián had three sons with his first wife, who died when their boys were young. With his second wife, he has seven children, the youngest an infant. Both of these marriages began with a bowl of masato. “Say you love a woman,” he says, a sly smile lighting up his craggy face, “and want her to be your wife. Walk up to her at a minga and offer her a bowl of masato. If she drinks it, my friend, then you know.” A peque-peque arrives to ferry the abuelos back to the village. It grows late, and although we’re dragging after several long and active days, we are reluctant to turn in. We sit out on the lodge’s veranda, squeezing the last bit of tranquility from our final pre-course night as we comb back through three days rich in experience. Deysi mixing masato in her grandmother’s trough. Bequitu, the man-turned-tapir, licking up his daughter’s masato from the forest floor. Sebastián and Victorino fortifying themselves with bowls of masato before guiding us into deep forest, their natural neighborhood. And of course Sebastián himself, the teacher, the raconteur, the lover, using his people’s earthy, humble, yet still sacred beverage to signal his intentions to the women he has wed. On day one, when we harvested yuca at Deysi’s house, Sebastián showed us how the planter grows his next crop of yuca by placing in the earth stem segments from harvested plants. Yuca reproduces asexually, meaning that each new generation is genetically identical to the generations before it. When Deysi masticates her yuca, an ancestral variety, she is tasting her people’s remote past. Masato, we gather, is all about nourishing connection—between friends, family, and neighbors; between those living now and the ones who came before; and between the Maijuna people and their place, a landscape stitched together with threads of myth and history and lived experience, layered with meaning. The generator cuts out for the night and we steep in darkness once again, just as lightning begins pulsing over the river, casting the slender courtyard palms in vivid shadow, black vertical stripes that carve the tableau before us. The jar of masato we brought from the village sits nearby on a bedroom shelf, lid open as it continues to ferment. We will taste it again tomorrow and find its mild sweetness replaced by an acidic bite, its texture thickened, the subtlety reduced and the alcohol content increased. But tonight seems like a good time to break the seal on a bottle of single-malt we picked up at the Lima airport on our trip here. We manage to scare up a single clean glass. One of us could of course nip back over to the dining hall for a second vessel. Maybe we’re lazy or maybe we intuit that such an errand would alter the chemistry of a moment that is taking shape here, transforming the flavor and texture of an established friendship that has never, until now, been a true working relationship, despite our decade as colleagues. Tomorrow we will launch a new teaching partnership. In a few weeks’ time, back at our desks, we will work to tease this text from our masato memories, a first coauthored creation. In terms of climate and culture, the whiskey’s source could not be further from where we find ourselves just now. Yet this smoky, peaty spirit, as we sip it in the heady darkness, spreads an inner heat that chimes awfully well with the air out here. As apt a substance as any, we decide, for cementing a new kind of connection. Footnotes 1 The tapir, a Maijuna hunter’s biggest prize, is a hefty ungulate that resembles a pig but is related more closely to the rhinoceros. The Maijuna word for tapir is bequi (bekel). 2 Similar stands of this plant, Duroia hirsuta, appear elsewhere in the Amazon basin and the scientific literature reports that D.hirsuta forests figure into the supernatural belief systems of several indigenous groups in Colombia and Brazil, as well as Peru. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Three Days of Masato
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isz084
DA - 2020-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/three-days-of-masato-LDhs3WiGZV
SP - 406
EP - 415
VL - 27
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -