This was the season of rains that thundered down from the Andes.
“Senora,” said Sandoval, bowing in the doorway of the hut, “buenos dias. How have you dawned?”
I hadn’t dawned too well. In fact, it seemed to me that I’d been dawning all night. An unidentified number of mosquitoes in my camp cot had kept me as active as they had been for several hours. But since it is my iron-bound policy never to talk of unpleasant things before breakfast, I refrained from any mention of the insect life in my Paotoshiari home. A charming little home it was, too—a thatched hut on stilts with one tiny room and a large, open verandah.
Besides, in the face of such exquisite Spanish manners, no one but a boor could do anything but return the courtly greeting which implies that you and the sun have risen rosily to shed light and sweetness over the land. So I got out of my cot and smoothed out the slacks in which I had slept (the river was muddy, and I couldn’t get the laundry done very well), put on my Peruvian silver hoop earrings, and was ready for whatever the day might bring.
As I walked the fifty yards or so to the bathroom for my pre-breakfast ablutions (the bath was a very pretty jungle stream which I shared with various wild life, including, sometimes, a shy little green snake), I reflected upon the matter of Spanish courtesy and speech. It occurred to me that it was very democratic, because everybody from top to bottom had a title.
When you said your prayers for breakfast, you could include the wish for toast: you could say“O Señor Dios … O Mister God, I like the jungles you have created, but I wish you hadn’t left out the buttered toast for breakfast.” Likewise, my Indian guide Sandoval was Senor Esteban Sandoval y Garrazatua, and any ragged Indian or peon you met and bowed to was Señor, also. And everybody was Your Grace, by reason of the King’s Spanish. That is, everybody except those listed in an old Spanish grammar I have. Those not entitled to a title are: children, servants, animals, and members of your own family. They rate the informal tu, rather than the austere vuestra merced.
Sandoval has picked me out of the mud many times where I have been catapulted by a mule, to inquire anxiously whether My Grace had been injured. Very often my pride had been, to say nothing of more strategic and solid parts of me. And once when we were traveling a dangerous river in a dug-out canoe guided by the painted forest Indians, we struck a whirlpool that sent the Indian in the bow headlong into the river, and Sandoval over the side. I was somewhat somnolent from the effect of the tropic mid-day sun, and I didn’t realize, until I heard Sandoval shouting, “Jump, Your Grace, jump,” that we were really in a rather tight spot. Her Grace did jump, rather gracefully, into the river, from which she was hauled by divers Indians. But not before I had found the unbleached muslin bag in which I carried my passport and money.
The Indians rescued the canoe, dragging it to safety on a little sandy beach, with the loss of only part of a roast chicken—which was, however, a rather serious loss, because the chicken was practically all we had to eat until we should reach a settlement by nightfall. And I thought … if the canoe had been wrecked in the whirlpool, leaving us in the middle of a trackless jungle where the river was the only means of travel, how smart of me to have thought of a passport instead of the precious chicken! Food, I discovered, can be an absorbing topic for thought in a jungle.
So, after pondering the exquisite manners that you find even in the remotest of South American jungles, I began to think about breakfast as I walked back from the bathroom to the house on stilts. The kitchen was not on stilts; it was a thatch mounted on poles beside the little perched-up hut that swayed even in the slightest breeze. The floors of the hut were made of palm bark, and the effect of walking on them was something like walking on bed springs. The kitchen was solidly on earth because the stove consisted of three or four logs on the ground, the burning points touching to hold a cooking pot. Sandoval had been to the river and had water boiling for coffee.
“Now,” I said, “what would Your Grace like for breakfast?” as he poured a generous amount of black native coffee, which was always good, into the pot. I surveyed the wire line which Sandoval had rigged up under the thatch, and which was hung with various small muslin bags I had made to contain the food. This line was part of my strategic generalship, as warfare was incessant and bitter, for my enemies were diabolically clever. And legion.
All manner of little rodents—and some South American rodents are not so little—came in the night to forage. One was the anuje, about the size of a rabbit, which our Indians hunted with bow and arrow, and which we made into a stew when they were successful. This was to be prized, as the meat was delicate, rather like a cross between chicken and rabbit. There are several species of middle-sized rodents, and also the ronsoco, which grows to be bigger than a very big pig, and is hunted for its skin, which now replaces chamois. Ronsoco makes excellent steaks, chops, and roasts.
And there were little wildcats that liked our food … the tigrillos, small, but exceeding brave, and there were bats—vampires and otherwise. When the vampires couldn’t find fresh victims, they ate whatever fruit we might have. Sandoval came back once from a distant village with a little red hen tied in the pack on his back; and as it was near Thanksgiving, I thought she would make a fine feast. To protect the precious bird, I tethered her that night to the leg of my camp cot in the cane-walled hut. However, the house was innocent of doors; and when I woke in the morning the little red hen was limp on the floor, victim of a vampire, her poor little body having been almost drained of blood.
Sandoval and I promptly administered aguardiente, which revived her, and afterward, as she gained strength, fed her liberally on whatever we had. She survived, but as a member of the household, for after her harrowing experience an dbrave struggle for existence in the jungle, we thought she deserved the Purple Heart rather than the cooking pot.
But it was really the insect life against which we wage the bitterest and most cunning of the battles. The wire from which hung the bags of food was my answer to the fascist ants. I tied little bits of cotton soaked in kerosene at each end to stop their long lines of marching armies. Apparently the commanding general sat down and thought that one over, for the next night they ascended the thatch and dropped down on our precious food supplies. Although I didn't see them, I suspect they used parachutes made of leaves with spider web strands instead of nylon ropes.
So, surveying the line of food bags, I said to Sandoval, “For breakfast we can have beans.” There always seemed to be beans. “Or rice. Or spaghetti.” (It's astonishing what you can do with spaghetti when there's nothing else in the larder.) One of the bags had a little flour left in it, and another, two eggs.
“We might,” I said, “have pancakes.” When Sandoval had brought the little red hen, he had in his pack another item almost as exciting … a tin of baking powder which he had discovered in the village bodega. It was very ancient and rusty, and apparently the only one they’d ever had; it had been there for years, since no one knew just what it was for. I had used it sparingly a few times, and decided this was the morning we might use a little more.
Of course, anything you say about the rapid growth an decay of life below the equator is bound to be cliché, or platitude; but if man bit vampire bat, I'm sure the news would have been no more startling to me than what was revealed when I opened the baking powder tin in the process of making pancakes. For the powder had grown. Instead of just half a tin, it was so full that the lettering on the top of the can was in reverse on the powder.
Sandoval courteously tried to explain what had happened chemically, but the technical Spanish was too hard to follow; so I went to the bench to get our frying pan, which I knew would have to be washed before I could use it. This was because I never cared to go to the Stream in the dark to wash the supper dishes. The little green snake may have been friendly in daytime, but. …
“Oh,”I said,“I think you'll have to take care of this.”
“Of what?”he asked.
In the frying pan was a rather large centipede which had committed suicide in cold fat. Sandoval obligingly took the pan to the stream where he washed it and thoroughly scoured it with sand.
It must have been about mid-morning that we finished the last mugs of black coffee. Our painted Indians had consumed enormous quantities of yuca an green bananas roasted in ashes; now they tucked up their long skirts about their knees and, taking bows and arrows, went off with Sandoval on expedition business. Sandoval was just then making a collection of rare butterflies and insects (in an entomologist's paradise), as well as keeping an eye open for the unknown species of silver-grey bear which was my particular interest.
At that point of our expedition in the deep Peruvian jungles, I seemed to have been, by tacit agreement, elected cook. As there was little else to do in the long, sun-drenched tropic days, Her Grace was usually to be found crouched over the cooking fire on the kitchen floor, keeping the home fires burning—inventing new and sometimes astonishing dishes. I became rather expert at regulating the logs to the right temperature, balancing even two cooking pots on them at the same time without spilling.
On that particular morning I made soup, bean soup. Our larder always contained dried beans of various sorts, as well as the inevitable fideos, which were spaghetti of divers shapes and sizes. The night before, I had put to soak the kin of beans known as paillares, which are something like our Limas, but bigger. I painstakingly removed all the skins, an put them to boil with onion and some dried mutton bones which had a little smoky meat on them.
They cooked till about mid-afternoon, when I lunched sparingly on them an then cast about for a method of straining to make a sort of pureed soup. For I am of the school that holds texture of food to be as important as flavor. The cooking utensils were somewhat limited, being restricted to what could be carried in one- pocket of a saddle bag; so naturally there was no colander. Sandoval had made me a grater by opening flat a tin can an punching minute holes in it with my out- sized darning needle, but a colander he had been unable to devise.
However, I unearthed from a duffle bag a spare butterfly net, which I washe in the stream and then proceeded to strain the soup through it. Perhaps this sounds simple, but it required a goo deal of acrobatic ability (yoga training would have been very useful) and engineering ingenuity to arrange the contraption on a bench—the handle weighed down by heavy stones while the net itself hung over the pot on the ground. It also required more than a modicum of back- bending energy to stir the stuff through. It finally emerged; and seasoned with coarse, grey rock salt and a little of the explosive abi, which is a diabolical species of red pepper, it was triumphant.
A little unexpected luck came later in the afternoon, just as I was returning from the stream where I'd bathed to make myself presentable for dinner. The matter of being presentable might have been problematical, however, as my mirror was two inches by three, so I never really knew.
An Indian woman was waiting for me in the kitchen—my nearest neighbor, who lived some distance down the river and had come to borrow fire. Since hers had gone out and she had no matches, it was easier to go a considerable distance than to start one laboriously with flint. She expertly snatched up live coals in her bare hands, wrapping them in green banana leaves. She smiled shyly, and from somewhere in her skirt produced two little squashes which she gave me an then trotted off.
So far, so good: soup and squash.
It was at the hour when shadows are long over the tangled green forests an great flocks of blue and gold parrots fly screaming to settle in their favorite dead trees for the night, that Sandoval came back to Camp, followed by his painte salvajes. Tzongiri handed me a leaf- wrapped package, and then with his companions proceeded to roast more yuca an bananas from their pile in the kitchen.
“What is this?”I asked Sandoval as I saw large pieces of a delicate-looking white meat.
“Sacba-vaca,”he replied.
“Sacba-vaca,”I mused.“Vaca is Spanish for cow, but what is sacha?”
“Sacba is the Quechua word for mountain. Mountain cow,”smiled Sandoval. That left me as much in the dark as ever, because I'd never heard of wild cattle in the jungle.
“Which is to say, tapir,”he explained.
Their tracks I'd seen many times across jungle trails, and once had seen dimly a large, dark form which Sandoval had said was tapir. A large animal, long- snouted for root grubbing, and much prized by the natives as food.
“I wounded it this morning, an Tzongiri finished it off with one of his spear arrows,”he told me.“Then we took most of the meat to his family. They hadn't had any in a long time.”
While Sandoval went to bathe in the river, and the salvajes cooked their supper. I prepared the tapir meat. I considered several methods, and then decide that, cut into thin slices, seasoned with salt and pepper and a little abo, or garlic, it should be baked in ashes. The best jungle method for this is to wrap the pieces in fresh banana leaves and bury them in the ashes, but not too near the flames. The first time I tried this, after having seen the Indians do it, I met with ignominious failure, as the leaves all cracked and the contents were burned and ash filled. Sandoval smiled and said,“But you must do this first.”He cut fresh leaves and toasted them carefully over the flames, after which they folded without cracking.
Sandoval came back from the river, his black hair gleaming wet and his dark face glistening from scrubbing, as darkness was complete. It was an established custom in camp to let our uncivilized Indian friends cook and eat first; we usually played rummy by the fire until they had finished. Sandoval went up the ladder of the stilted hut to get the cards and, returning, said,“Look what I found in the bottom of my duffle bag.”He held up a bottle of the cheap red wine which they call corriente.
“Bueno,”I said.“Then the menu for tonight seems to be red wine, soup, squash, sacba-vaca, and coffee.”
The tapir was as succulent as anything I have ever eaten … delicate, tender, but with a flavor which still eludes description. I'd had many an expensive dinner in New York and in other places in the world, with all the trappings of china, linen, and service, which I hadn't relished half so much.
A little breeze down from the Andes whispered in the palms that grew over the kitchen thatch; night was black an velvet. An owl hunting for his supper booted close to the hut and all the forest seemed alive around us.
But under the frail thatch there was a bright cooking fire, food, and companionship. If there was a definite lack of the thing called civilization with its encumbrances of iceboxes, white enamel stoves, and electrical gadgets, it wasn't much noticed.