God's Middle Finger by Grant Richard

Author:Grant, Richard [Grant, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2008-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

MY FIRST ATTEMPTS to communicate with the Guarijios were a comprehensive failure. The schoolchildren avoided my eyes and curled in on themselves with discomfort and embarrassment when I tried to talk to them. Sometimes I could raise a smile with a flippant comment but all my conversation-starters—what’s your name? how old are you?—were met with cringing silence. Walking around the village, wending my way on dusty goat paths past their scattered huts, I greeted everyone with a polite nod and a buenas tardes and got nothing back except suspicious glances. Even the drunks wanted nothing to do with me.

On the banks of the river, women were digging holes and using gourds to scoop the sand-filtered water into ten gallon plastic paint buckets. When I approached, they all turned to give me their backs. I remembered Lumholtz’s initial difficulties with the Tarahumara: “Wherever I came I was abhorred as the man who subsisted on babies and green corn, and the prospect of my ever gaining the confidence of the Indians was exceedingly discouraging.”

Finally, toward the end of the second day, I managed a brief exchange with a young man called Juan, who was wearing a grubby AK-47 cap and had a sour boozy smell. He stood there staring at me by the school gates so I introduced myself and said I came from Inglaterra. He looked at me blankly.

“It’s a country a long way away, across the sea in Europe,” I said. No response. “Near Spain,” I added hopefully.

“Do they smoke mota there?”

“Oh yes. I think they smoke mota in nearly all countries in the world.”

“I don’t smoke it. I only sell it. I like to get drunk.”

“I like to get drunk also. It is a very popular custom in my country.”

“Do you want to buy some mota? Eight hundred pesos [eighty U.S. dollars] a kilo.”

“No thanks, I don’t need any.”

“Eight hundred. Buena mota. You want it?”

“No thank you.”

He walked off without saying another word but it felt like a breakthrough. My first conversation with a Guarijio! I waited until he was gone and transcribed it eagerly into my notebook.

Walking around with Angel, who had lived and taught here five days a week for seven years, it was still astonishingly difficult to engage anyone in conversation, especially if they were female. Women whose sons he taught, whose husbands he counted as friends, would give us their backs when we approached their cookfires and Angel assured me that it wasn’t my presence, that this was normal behavior. When we encountered his pupils on the trails, they would usually put their heads down and pass by without a word or glance of recognition. As one of them walked alongside us, Angel pointed to me and said, “Let’s cut the balls off this filthy gringo pig. What do you say? Do you have a knife?” The boy cracked a sheepish smile but when Angel asked him if he was on the way home, his face turned into a mask and he veered away on another path.

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