NECKLACE OF PINK DOLPHIN TEETH

(EP)

Working, living, loving, and dying in the third world - FIELD NOTES from November 12, 2009.

Walking into the small house with the dirt floors, I shouted my presence. The house faced west and was at the town's edge on the south side of a sandy, red dirt road. A female voice answered from another part of the house. She was 41 years old and had three children. Some years earlier, the local police declared her husband's death an accident. I never thought his death was an accident, and I will always believe that someone murdered him. He was someone I knew well and liked immensely. While in the United States, I heard of his death.

I frequently stayed in the City of Punchana, which is the capital of the Punchana District in the Maynas Province of the Loreto Region in northeastern Peru. Located in the Peruvian Amazon Jungle, this neighborhood is in the suburb of Iquitos, Peru. It is located on the fork of the Amazon and the Nanay Rivers. The house I stay in is typical of native homes. It is a large open building as most native houses are, except that smaller rooms were made by using woven palm frond dividers to separate the open space. Once inside and straight ahead of the front door, a divider opened into a small front bedroom. The open doorway was private only by a hanging bed sheet. The living room area is the main part of the house and can be accessed through a second door on the right. This room and the kitchen area all ran together. A small propane-powered cooking stove is set against the south wall of the kitchen area. On the east side of the room were six small white stools, and a wooden table. A five-gallon bucket full of clean water and a large, blue, plastic bowl used to wash dishes sat atop a small wooden table. A palm frond divider also divided this room. Two beds, one facing the other along with a cardboard box used for storing clothes, were the only furnishings. Large gossamer mosquito tents, looking like woven cobwebs, hung from bamboo stringers over each bed. There was a small bedroom outside this room, where the two youngest boys slept. A storage structure with three single shelves set against one wall of the kitchen. It held a dozen mismatched plates, an array of different size drinking glasses, and at least one fork, knife, and spoon for each member of the family. The guest was always given the best of the eating utensils, with younger members of the family having to eat later.      

The back door was reached by a clay step and a split-level back room. At the far end of the house was a bedroom with a single bed against the north wall. The divider was made of palm fronds and split wooden slats. A single cloth door divided this room from the main house. A heavy wooden back door opened onto a shed-type porch where a worn wooden bench was attached to the saw lumber and slat boards that made up the outside back wall of the house.      

A couple of wash basins and a bar of soap set atop the thick wooden shelf. Toothbrushes hung from nails hammered into the wall. Clean rainwater ran directly off the tin roof of the house and spilled into a rusting 55-gallon barrel. This water was used for personal hygiene. I always found pouring cool water over your body with a metal water dipper from the barrel most stimulating. The water always felt frigid for a moment. There was no indoor sanitary plumbing as a well-worn path led out across the backyard. A small, falling hovel that served as an outhouse.      

Entering the house, I shouted out for Mamita, whom I hoped was home. I used the most endearing term Mamita for Mother. She answered in Spanish, indicating that she was in the kitchen area. Upon walking through the house, I found her seated at the dinner table with three people. Two men were both eating. The man appeared to be in his mid-twenties, with a young woman beside him who looked like she was in her late teens or early twenties. A small stainless steel frying pan set atop the propane stove’s open flame, and a piece of chicken sizzling in the greased pan while a small amount of rice that I assumed had been left over from breakfast heated in another dish. Mamita introduced me to the elderly gentleman, but not the two young ones. The man, her father, was a shaman from Requena, a city 130 miles down the Amazon River from Iquitos. Mamita said the older man was her father and had come to visit for the day. I had heard of the man numerous times, but I had never met him. I spoke to him and was surprised that he knew who I was. He was a short, stocky man of medium weight and looked young for his age. A full head of curly dark-colored hair. He wore a pair of long pants, a checked blue and white short-sleeve shirt, sandals, and necklaces made up of beads, teeth, plant seeds, and a few assorted feathers.

Mamita said he had taught her all she knew of plant medicines and the healing effects of the rainforest. She was known in the community as a “Bruja” (brew-ha) or witch. Being referred to as a Bruja is not a bad name, as she processes powers that I sometimes find hard to explain. She has a vast knowledge of leaves, plants, trees, and other medicinal herbs that abound in the jungle.      

I left and went to the bedroom, where I retrieved four cheap pocket knives from my backpack before returning to the kitchen. I placed the knives on the tabletop and sat across from her father. I knew his last name was “Aguila” in Spanish, which meant “Eagle” in English.      

I had purchased a couple of dozen small, inexpensive single-bladed folding pocket knives made in China before leaving the United States. Half of the knives had an eagle embossed into the plastic handle scales. I asked him if he wanted one of the knives, and he quickly picked out a folder with an eagle’s effigy on the handle. I asked him with a smile if he'd like a few more knives to gift to someone else. His face lit up, and he immediately handed one to each of the two young people seated at the table. He thanked me again, putting a second Eagle folder into his pants pocket. We sat and talked before I went to a nearby small store to buy a local soft drink called Inca Kola.      

I poured everyone a glass of Inca Kola, sat at the table, and listened to the conversation. The visitors enjoyed plates of recooked chicken and rice. Night fell swiftly as we discussed the jungle, his family's origin, and their tribe. He told me that he was from a tribe that called themselves Colombianos. Colombianos Indians or people who the country of Colombia was named after, he added.        

Before they left for the night, I watched her father talking to his daughter before walking over to me. He had a gift for me but needed to caution me about its powers before I accepted it. He removed a necklace from around his neck. He placed the toothy adornment around my neck in what seemed to bring much amazement to his young proteges that were traveling with him.      

Mamita looked surprised and covered her mouth. His instructions were solemn and straightforward about wearing a necklace of pink dolphin teeth. He turned toward his daughter and quickly admonished her to impress upon me the gravity of this talisman of Pink Dolphin teeth that now hung around my neck before leaving the house with the others.      

After a few minutes, I examined the teeth on the necklace. They reminded me of jaw teeth from a dog or coyote, but more delicate.      

While Mamita was watching them, her younger niece entered. Her name was Illiana, and she was my girlfriend. She came to the table, spoke to her aunt, and reached over and kissed her on the cheek. Mamita explained to her niece that her father gave me a necklace of pink dolphin teeth. Her niece, who was in her mid-twenties, became very nervous and began speaking rapidly in Spanish to her aunt. I caught only a few words like 'peligrosos and mortales' which meant dangerous and deadly in English. The two women sat across the table from me and began telling me a story. They claimed that the necklace could only be worn constantly by someone with strong spiritual or magical abilities, like the renowned shaman. Mamita related that he had told her to make sure that I did not wear the necklace when I slept. Both of them knew the legend. There was a benevolent spirit that was in the necklace and it would kill me if I fell asleep with it around my neck. I smiled and laughed slightly at their superstition.  

Both women became solemn and concerned about my attitude. “Do not go to sleep with the necklace on,” they both scolded me emotionally.   

“Please, do not go to sleep with the necklace on,” my girlfriend begged. “It is very powerful medicine, and you do not understand ---- the spirit, it will kill you if you go to sleep with it around your neck.”    

I hunched my shoulders and shook my head with an off-hand promise to remove the necklace before bed. Thinking back, I believe I made that promise more to placate their superstition than anything else. It was nearing eight o’clock at night and with the sun down, the air cooled to a sweltering eighty-five or ninety. It was a beautiful evening, late summer, hot, humid, and oh-so-romantic along the promenade that laced itself along the riverfront.

The three of us took a jungle taxi to go out for dinner. We rode the taxi downtown, where we were going to eat dinner. We stopped at a small restaurant whose chairs and tables flowed out onto the white marble walkway. The breeze off the Amazon River was refreshing; the beer was cold and Mamita’s niece kept telling me what a great kisser I was. Life was good. What more could one ask for?      

We returned home and, I explained I was tired and going to bed. In reality, I think I had too much beer and the heat got to me. The Amazon Rain Forest has a unique combination of heat and humidity. I love it, but it takes about thirty days to acclimate to the heat. My bed was at the back of the house, close to the porch. I had purchased an electric fan at the market downtown when I arrived a few days earlier, and my mother always made sure that it was in my room when I slept. In the front bedroom, the women watched TV as the boys were out. I lay down stripped to my sleeping shorts, pulled the mosquito netting over my bed, and tucked the loose edges under my mattress; you learn the tricks quickly to keep the bloodsuckers out. I had turned the fan on the lowest setting, and it moved the silken sheets of finely woven cotton in repetitive folds like a flag in a stiff breeze.      

Darkness filled my dreams as I slowly woke up. It was as if I were paralyzed as I watched a boiling cloud of black soot forming above my bed. I saw my body on the mattress and sensed a presence in the room. I was jolted back into my body when I turned to see what was behind me. Something was tightening around my neck, choking me every so slowly, like a snake coiling around my chest. It constricted every so tightly around my neck. I tried to call out, to scream for help. I am not sure if I am dreaming, but I am unable to wake up, shout out or move. Something massive, powerful, and terrifying was pushing me into the bed and squeezing the life from my chest. My heart began to burn; I felt hot; sweat poured from every pore, soaking the sheet and mattress I lay on. Terrified at what was happening, once more I tried to shout out. I knew I was yelling, but I could not hear my voice. I was becoming desperate for a breath; I thrash about before feeling the tightness around my neck loosened so very slightly. After a pause, it crushed me again. That split instant was all I needed. I scream, I think, or maybe I cried out in udder anguish for something, someone, anyone, to help me.      

I began to fade in and out, as breathing became even more challenging; I heard distant voices shouting. It was the voices of women, wailing, screaming out to someone, or something. Then I felt hands on my body as they clawed and pulled at my arms that crossed my chest as I clenched my hands around my neck. Pulling my hands down from my throat, my mother grabbed the cord that hung loosely around my neck and pulled on it hard, breaking the cord that held the teeth. The necklace gave way from around my head, and instantly I was awake, gasping for breath. Confused, I pushed myself up on one elbow and took a deep breath. It was then I realized how truly wet the sheets, mattress, and my body were from perpetration.      

My mother and my girlfriend were both shouting at me. Mamita held the pieces of the necklace in her hand, shaking it wildly at me all the time, speaking in Spanish so rapidly I could not understand. Lilly also joined in on the Newt bashing as she seemed to be repeating some of the same rhetoric as her aunt. The Spanish word ‘idiota’ was being thrown around quite loosely in more than one sentence.

Mamita’s eyes were tear-filled as she shouted. "Remember when I told you not to wear that necklace to bed?" she asked. “It will kill you, my son,” she scolded in a harsh voice before quickly turning and rushing from the room with the necklace in her hand.    

Lilly came back into the room with a wet washcloth and began to wipe the cold, damp rag over my forehead and chest, cooling me down. Once I was calm and cool, she crawled under the mosquito net with me, and I whispered, “Thank you,” before kissing her.    

She spoke only one word. “Rico.”    

~Newt Livesay

I still don't know if there's a curse on wearing Pink Dolphin teeth while sleeping. However, I have never laced them around my neck again. They're boxed and stored, never to see the sun again.

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