In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon by Redmond O'Hanlon

Author:Redmond O'Hanlon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Travel, Essays & Travelogues
ISBN: 9780241963722
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2012-04-11T23:00:00+00:00

After dark, when we had distributed the last of our tapir meat to every family in the village, we held a party in Culimacaré’s house. The biggest hut, it had an extra room for receiving guests, bare and bleak, with a table in one corner and benches round the walls. I lined up our bottles of aguardiente, according to Chimo’s instructions, in the middle of the table: they gleamed evilly in the light of our paraffin-wick lamp, their labels proclaiming CANINHA TATUZINHO, red on yellow, beneath a black, stylized coatimundi, who was winking, and sticking his snout into a clump of sugar cane.

The Curipaco slipped into the room, out of the darkness, the men sitting on the bench nearest the door, the women beside the entrance to the inner room. I filled our mugs with aguardiente and the Indians passed them from hand to hand, everyone, including the women, taking urgent gulps at the clear spirit. Chimo, huge, stately, benign, the pipe I had given him clamped between his gums, sat in the centre of the main bench, his legs apart, his left hand retaining a cup for his own use, his right passing on the communal mugs, from which he also drank.

Culimacaré fetched the enormous cassette player which he had bought in the Colombian shop with his advance payment for the journey, and inserted his only tape, a Venezuelan pop song. To its rhythms, Galvis and Culimacaré’s youngest sister led the room in a jigging waltz-shuffle dance. Chimo, pulling two spoons out of his pocket, stood up, put one leg on the bench, opposed the spoons in one hand and beat time between his knee and his free palm. I danced first with the old woman who had passed me with her crushing load of firewood. Her back bent even when at rest, her hands, in mine, as rough and ridged and callused as a cayman’s skin, she glanced up, once, a great grin cracking across her wrinkles.

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