DWIGHT THOMPSON
Jimani heard something thrashing in the fishpot. It flailed so viciously it cracked the bamboo sticks, and Jimani almost pitied it. But he’d caught something! It had been so long since he’d had a big catch that’d make his mother and sister proud as he did back when he was an excellent fisher, and still had his sight. He inched forward, feeling the smooth rocks, wondering if he’d caught a baracutey — by the powerful sound of it — that had swum through Liguanea’s estuary. When he stretched his hand towards the rattling basket, a sharp pain shot through his sole and jolted his whole body. He screamed, falling on the riverbank.
From the curtains of dusk stepped a spirit that had come with the wind of the day’s changing fortune, like daylight clinging to the evening’s thighs its grasp slipping, falling away. Jimani could feel all these subtle changes like a fish’s scales responding to invisible currents. He fancied he could smell the spirit’s lust too. He gently pulled the arrowhead piercing his flesh, but it wouldn’t budge. His head also bled where it’d been cut by a rock. He felt faint, breathing in slow trembling jerks.
Jimani.
“Yes,” he replied.
Do you know why I’m here?
The spirit stepped closer, licked Jimani’s ear.
Jimani flinched; it might’ve been the breeze tickling his skin.
Look at you, trapped, miserable like that fish. Look at me, commanded the voice.
“I — I can’t see,” Jimani stammered.
Is that right . . .?
It was half-question, half-challenge.
Now I know how the agouti feels in the caiman’s powerful jaws, thought Jimani.
Then everything was darkness.
***
“I’ll give Jimani some of this salve,” said Tamu.
“What does he do all day?” asked Dwele, the acolyte.
“He sleeps like the dead an’ his face is so pale,” said Tamu, pulping guanaboa with the skill of a woman.
Just then Jimani hobbled out of his room.
The two priest-healers stayed quiet, watchful.
In a corner of the caney, Jimani dipped the calabash for water. “Who’s there?”
Dwele coughed.
“Dwele?”
Tamu cleared his throat too.
“An’ you Tamu,” said Jimani. “When did you return?”
“You were sleepin’ when I got back so I didn’t wake you. You’re still sick.”
“No no,” Jimani said hastily. “Just fatigued from heat. I’ll be fine.”
“It’s a fever,” said Dwele, approaching the boy. “The arrowhead the fishermen pulled from your big toe is poisoned. It’s a Kalinago arrowhead from the raid.”
Mention of the war caused Jimani to involuntarily bite the chew stick he was cleaning his teeth with. That was the day he lost both his sight and his mother. The irony! To be physically wounded by the enemy’s weapon long after they’d assailed him mentally.
But under Tamu’s tutelage he had channeled his pain through music.
Never had their tribe produced a savant like Jimani.
Jimani suddenly remembered the stranger who’d confronted him.
He knelt before Tamu, listening to the old man’s fingers squeezing fibrous pulp to frothy milk, making its own soothing music in the stone pot.
“Guanaboa juice will suck the poison from you,” rasped Tamu, “lower your fever.”
“I felt the enemy,” Jimani blurted out. “He touched me the moment the arrowhead pierced my flesh. He put that fish in my fishpot — to trap me!”
“This was before or after you fell an’ bust your head?” Dwele scoffed. He gripped Jimani’s shoulder, gently steering him back towards the straw mat. “Lie down.”
“No,” Jimani protested. “I felt sum’n, Dwele . . . it spoke to me.”
The bohiques exchanged glances. The boy could be stubborn, but very intuitive.
“Nothin’ has been the same since the raid,” Tamu grunted, in his tabaco-ruined voice. “We’re a changed people.”
Tamu poulticed Jimani’s toe, re-wrapped his head wound in crushed digo leaves and fed him warm mamajuana to drink.
The incense haze had cleared up; and as Tamu danced and swished a palm frond to drive away maboya, his incantation lulled Jimani back to sleep.
***
The next morning Jimani rose early. When Dwele found him, he was fetching water. Sunlight sheened the yard, turning leaves yellow green.
“There you are,” said Dwele, “be careful not to fall in the spring. Feelin’ better?”
“Yes . . .” said Jimani absently. “They put pearly shell teeth in the zemi’s wooden mouth, yet he still can’t eat,” he sang, his fingers groping blindly — hungrily for his mayohuacán.
Dwele smiled admiringly, “Such a beautiful line, are you workin’ on a new areíto?”
“Dwele, is my fate to wander an’ never arrive?”
“What do you mean?”
With a sudden attack of impotence, Jimani wondered about his own hunger. “Never mind.”
“Tamu wants you to look after things, they just asked us to lead a wake at Arari’s.”
“Yes,” repeated Jimani, gently setting down the water-tight basket.
“There’s some papaya inside, eat it while it’s cool. An’ go easy on that foot.”
Jimani continued laboriously drawing water as the priests left.
The priest-healers smiled at children bouncing a rubber ball in the batey.
“I urged him to be careful,” Dwele said, stopping to inspect wriggling iguanas and jujo strung up by their tails. Flocks of tame yaguasa quacked about their legs.
Tamu watched mothers strolling the marketplace, carrying babies on their backs on padded boards secured to the babies’ foreheads. He thought of his affection for Jimani. “He’s finding himself, children with the flattest foreheads sometimes give the most trouble,” he joked.
“He tossed in his sleep las’ night . . . had such a strange look . . . like a dream was runnin’ backwards on his twisted face.”
Tamu stayed silent.
“An’ he was talkin’ to someone,” Dwele pressed, “he said — ”
“Don’t repeat it,” Tamu warned his assistant, “it’s not your place.”
“Yes, master . . . I’m sorry.”
“You’re a savvier medicine-man than me, Dwele, what do you think of the poison?”
“From the way it gives him hallucinations, it might be manchineel poison; if that’s the case, then arrowroot might be better medicine.”
“We’ll wait an’ see.”
The priests took a detour by instinct; they ascended packed-earth steps and entered a shrine filled with the bones of war dead. They prayed with feeling to Yúcahu, not understanding their sudden agitation, as if a precious life were at death’s door. A lizard slithered slowly over the zemi’s angry stone face; Tamu thought he heard the words:
The next contact with the enemy is crucial.
Meanwhile, Jimani sat enjoying his papaya. The wind died, the day grew darker. The boy walked about, fanning himself but was disturbed by strange noises in the yard, like zemis gurgling, like someone drowning. He walked to the shrine where Tamu and Dwele had visited; it was quiet and still inside but the noise slowly returned, as if Guayaba were howling in the temple, gathering bones to take with him to Coaybey Cave. Closing the temple’s shutter, Jimani said, “Who’s there?” He grew afraid wandering alone, so he returned to the caney.
“Tamu, have you returned?” he called. He sat on the porch, burning incense in a bronze bowl. His palm leaf fan fell; he didn’t bother picking it up. He brought his mayohuacán out to play. The gurgling sound came back, like a body escaping weight that had it trapped. Nobody would visit the priests at this hour. Maybe it’s my imagination. He started playing.
Jimani, came the voice.
Jimani ignored it.
The figure approached, stood a few yards off and called stronger, Jimani!
“Yes!” Jimani jumped. “Who’s there? I’m blind an’ haven’t been stayin’ here long. I thought somebody was out on the grounds. I’ve been impolite, forgive me.” He bowed.
There’s nothing to fear, said the voice, My lord, a man of very high rank is staying in Batabanó with his attendants, he wanted to see the battle site of Liguanea so he went there today.
“I see . . .”
Since childhood you’ve had an uncanny ability of reciting the battle, they say you even surpass Tamu. My lord wishes to hear your performance. Take your mayohuacán and come with me at once.
“That’s very gracious of him,” smiled Jimani, “but I’m hardly worthy of such attention.”
The voice grew stern. You wouldn’t disobey his command would you?
So the figure led Jimani away by hand, walking in a measured way so Jimani didn’t have to hobble on his injured foot. “You said your lord is of high rank. He mus’ be a great man.”
Yes, you’d normally not be allowed in his presence.
“I don’t deserve such good fortune,” replied Jimani, slapping his cane against road pebbles.
The figure led him through reeds and tall grass. In his mind’s eyes, Jimani saw a great blue thatched caney. Open the gate! the guide shouted. The misty gate slowly opened; inside was lit with torches on grandstands. He led Jimani through blue bamboo pillars and up stone steps and more columns carved with emblems of Maketaori Guayaba, the god of the dead, and even more columns made of jagged bloody shards of bamboo. You there! said the guide to someone behind a door, I brought Jimani!
Jimani felt the same wooziness as on the riverbank as the inner sanctum opened.
The great warrior, lord of the caney, stepped out between kneeling servants.
Take off your beads, commanded the guide roughly.
“Y-yes,” stammered Jimani, kneeling, the caney in his mind’s eye had no walls, was all blue sky, as if floating. Jimani wondered if his guide were a bohique, like Tamu, with power to speak to the dead.
I want you to feel at home, Jimani, said the warrior.
“Thank you. What do you want me to play?”
I’d love to hear the Battle of Liguanea . . . especially the death of Tamasa.
Jimani adjusted his mayohuacán strung on his neck and played his best areíto:
It was in the third year of Daguaco, the great cacique,
after the second migration of Arahuacan-speaking peoples,
that the Kalinago and Ciboney clashed at Liguanea Straits.
This was the last of the great sea battles between
the kingdoms of Taínos and Caribs.
Jimani’s voice soared with feeling.
Tamasa the great warrior knows it’s his last battle,
can feel death under his skin. The Caribs are no match for him,
he wants to cross clubs with Pauro, the Kalinago commander
who’d been his captive some cycles ago before escaping.
So, he stands on the prow and slashes through all comers,
ducking arrows, deflecting spears, looking for his enemy,
he’ll not die till he sees him . . .
‘Come on Pauro!’ Tamasa yells.
Tamasa sees him finally, can taste the fight in his mouth,
he slashes, dispatches eight Carib guards with his macana
on his way to the general, hopping from boat to boat
and injured bodies filling the Liguanea with blood.
Pauro won’t face him; he doesn’t consider Tamasa to be a ‘man’ much less a warrior.
‘We’ve heard about you, Tamasa,’ says Pauro bitterly, ‘the great boy lover!’
Tamasa rips off his shell amulet and strikes a pose of anguish
as the enemy’s arrows fill him. He’s dying with a grimace,
his eyes red from tears of frustration. It’s this bitterness that floods
his heart, not the poison arrows filling his body like a cajaya’s teeth.
Still, he struggles towards Pauro screaming, ‘Fight me like a man!’
Someone comes up behind Tamasa and cuts his throat — one of his own comrades who’d never liked his ungodly lust. Pauro is also wounded
with an arrow through his face that will remind him
permanently of Tamasa’s dishonorable death.
Jimani played rousingly. Curtains of darkness inside him, the loneliness, lifted. Fires were being lit in the huts of his yucayeque. Jimani played even louder, sweeter. The world was reduced to sound, spirit. His soul climbed trees like an iguana. The dusk became his seeing eyes. Twittering birds became his voice.
Jimani … introduce your music to a new world . . . to new appreciation! said the warrior.
That’s when Jimani felt his spirit recoil a bit, fall back into the dark with trepidation. The eyes in the sky of his mind’s eye proliferated and he was suddenly a many-headed, many-eyed monster with a forbidden appetite, grotesque to himself. Or was that his fear, his withering conscience being shed like a maja’s skin, him having one last wicked laugh at his . . . entrapment? Wind howled in his ears, eyes swirled in the singing sky. He was lost without having moved an inch, he collapsed inwardly, fell on his face to his own self-searching caustic music, searching for courage. The wind cried so much it took over his fingers and dared him to play the truth: like a challenge to the zemis. Dared him to play what he felt, to improvise, he struck the mayohuacán with harsh discordant notes and screeched:
The boat left his spirit on the other side of the river,
it was no day for swimming. He was lost in the Juracán,
till he plucked up courage and braved wind
and rain and walked on searching blindly for refuge!
At the height of his anguish, for a split second, Tamasa stood there as plain as day. Jimani gasped, and nearly lost his composure. Have my inner eyes seen this? Have I been playing to Tamasa’s ghost all along?!
Tamasa bore down with arrows filling his body like a straw zemi’s, his feet dripping water. Jimani tilted his head as strange dark eyes bore into him; Tamasa opened his mouth as if for . . . a kiss? But then withdrew.
Not yet . . . unless you want to, said Tamasa.
To Jimani’s surprise, his mouth was open — he was dying for a taste!
A taste of death? Freedom?
I could kill you, smirked Tamasa, but you’re already dead, living a lie, so I pity you instead. Because you’re so young and beautiful, I won’t harm you, play.
But Jimani couldn’t. He tried to hold back tears. Can Tamasa see this too?
Tamasa frowned. If you ever tell anybody about what you saw tonight . . .
“See? I’m blind!” Jimani shuddered.
Anyone, I’ll know, even your sister.
The door to Jimani’s soul slammed shut.
Tamasa stood. Remember what I told you.
Jimani heard a waterfall — crashing waves — as if he’d wandered to the cliff’s edge at Liguanea Straits.
***
Jimani lay stiff on the banana leaf mat as Itiato, his twin, prepared turtle soup. She brought the gourd. “Eat.” But he couldn’t. “I’m goin’ to chop some wood, we need it to barter. Your soup’s gettin’ cold.” She prepared to leave. “Don’t play that mayohuacán or dream bad dreams,” she said knowingly, “otherwise the fever will get you, as if the blood had been sucked outta you. If this should happen again you won’t survive. You listenin’?” But Jimani lay perfectly still, ignoring her. “Ever since Mother’s death, you hardly say a word no matter what I say,” Itiato reproached him, putting on a shell necklace Jimani had lovingly made for her.
“You’re lyin’,” Jimani hissed, “you’re goin’ to see Sibani, that boy you’re courtin’ — I can hear the giddiness in your footsteps.” He envied her happiness.
Itiato left quietly.
He dreamt. In the dream, he passed a woman on a ridge; her large brown eyes, with faint shadows underneath, watched him sidelong as he walked by — injury-free. He realized he could see. The sky was sea-foam green. He wondered if he was remembering the colors of things properly. When he was a few yards away, he turned and looked her way. “Where you goin’ so late in the day?”
“Camagüey.”
“Now?”
“Yes,” she smiled.
Her apron was a washed-out purple. When he looked at anani blossoms falling by his feet they were the same color. The mountains throbbed then seemed fluid like molten lava. The sun spewed yellow shards of fire. Is this passion? He walked with her a ways, she a few yards behind, moving with the sound of a snake.
“I lost some companions,” she confessed, “in battle.”
Jimani didn’t answer.
“I’m hoping to find the rest in Camagüey.”
“You’ve a husband?”
“No, I travel alone.”
“I hope you find your companions.”
“Without them my journey will be in vain.”
“Better to marry, a woman as beautiful as yourself.”
“Are you in love?”
Eyes opened in the sky again, like zemis watching them. The landscape changed color with Jimani’s bashful grin. Everything suddenly blushed red, even water swelling below the stone bridge. He hopped across with vague courage.
She hesitated. “Do you believe in fate?”
“I believe we control our lives, that’s what we’re doin’ now.” He stretched his hand. “Come!”
She crossed tentatively, when she was almost over, she stumbled into his arms. The river changed to blood. They kissed passionately. When Jimani opened his eyes, she was Tamasa. He jumped awake.
“I brought him into this life,” he thought, ruefully, “with my corruption.”
On Liguanea’s beach, Ocotumax the lookout ran to call the others, the silt going splat splat between his toes, his nagua tight between his buttocks. The fishermen approached tentatively, the body appeared like a sea beast with crooked limbs. His face was twisted with a suspended scream. They knelt and untangled his body from seagrass and his soul from sea spirits.
“It’s Dwele’s brother,” said a fisherman, “he’s been missing three days now.”
“Yayro’s body washed up!” heralded Ocotumax, running ahead.
When women heard the lookout’s cry they jumped, overturning weaving baskets, and ululated.
They laid Yayro in his bohío; his wife and children shrieked when they saw him.
“Look at his face. Sea ghosts did this,” mourned his mother, “vengeful spirits of the Kalinago.”
***
After Yayro’s funeral, Tamu walked home with Dwele. “Jimani?”
“He’s not back,” Dwele replied, looking around.
“Did you see him leave las’ night?”
Dwele thought. “I felt he’d gone to bed.”
“He’s been leavin’ here secretly four days now.”
Tamu searched the yard and found Jimani’s staff near the doorway.
Ocotumax knelt before Tamu as he entered. “Another body washed up this morning. Are there ghosts on the seas? We’ve been getting bad omens.”
But Tamu’s mind was on Jimani. “Find him, his fever isn’t better, he shouldn’t be out.” After they left, Tamu fell like a ragged old man before zemi sculptures. “I’m a proxy for this boy. Show me what to do.”
It rained terribly that evening, with gale force winds. Ocotumax ran to the caney and knocked fiercely. “Tamu!”
Puffing his cohoba pipe, Tamu rose from his narcotic prayer. “What is it?”
“It’s Jimani, he’s gone out in the storm!”
“Follow him. Take Dwele. But don’t let him detect you. Hurry!”
***
You play the mayohuacán beautifully and every night you perform with relish.
“Thanks,” said Jimani, kneeling before Tamasa, “besides the main areíto there’re five esoteric pieces. Tonight I’ll recite whichever you wish.”
The straits battle, said Tamasa predictably (his own death on a constant loop in his bitter memory — like a diseased emotion), that’s the most moving part.
Indeed, the final part, echoed the guide.
So Jimani sang,
They shoot arrows at each other for a time
the kanoas move in rapid current. Friends mix with foe,
like dead leaves carpeting the waves.
Tamasa stands: ‘Listen men, the fate of our tribe rests on this battle.
Why begrudge losing your lives? Fight well, that’s all I ask!’”
In his head, Jimani saw warriors as monuments in freeze-frame before engaging in battle. Red and yellow fires burn behind them, their eyes bloodshot, then it’s smoky and they’re dead — strewn about with arrows in their flesh, only a few stand, struggling ineluctably against time, cheating oblivion through his music, staring intensely at him.
A personal memory intervened, of the Kalinago raid on their cacicazgo, his last visual memory was of his mother — who hadn’t wanted children or a husband, who herself secretly had been a lover of women — being raped by Kalinago Caribs. They made Jimani watch, then put out his eyes to burn it in his mind. His sweet voice couldn’t drown her screams as she was mounted by another Carib who slit her throat and raped her corpse. He sang, instinctively making her the heroine of his epic:
Though you were born a queen
your fortune has run out. Atabey will
welcome you to the Water-Mother’s cave.
Hurry and invoke her sacred name.
Beneath the waves another pure world awaits.
Jimani heard Tamasa rise from his dujo and approach. He leaned in and rested his head on Jimani’s leg like a small meek hutia; Jimani felt himself rising for him. Tamasa wanted to stroke the boy’s back but said, Play Jimani . . . don’t stop . . . I’ve forgotten my sorrow, I feel as if this were a dream.
“So do I.”
And so it was their souls intertwined, that Jimani treasured the happiness of true feeling. But he felt someone tug him. He felt raindrops as for the first time.
Ocotumax shook him roughly. “Jimani!”
“How dare you interrupt me before noble company?” Jimani yelled.
“What company? This is a graveyard. You were talkin’ to yourself!”
“He’s possessed,” Dwele said summarily, “help him up.”
“Lemme go!” Jimani struggled between them.
“Home for you,” Dwele said. “Tamu’s orders.”
The next day, the high sky was pink and the lower sky sunlit like the tall grass as the woman ran away from him. He chased her as she laughed her high-pitched laugh, wind blowing her straight hair about her coppery skin, till he caught her and threw her down in delight. Clouds danced like the inner swirl of a shark-eye seashell. She pulled her feet slowly through the grass like a snake uncoiling, he stroked her sharp cheekbones, looked into her large dark eyes, shifted her beads and sucked her breast, then lay his head on her chest; he heard no heartbeat, he remembered she was not a woman but a spirit; he woke and felt semen on his thighs with disgust and rising shame. He wanted to run out of the caney but his muscles ached.
“What’s happening to me, am I going mad?” Jimani moaned miserably.
Tamu, smoking in a corner, had an inkling of the boy’s struggle.
“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner? Now you’re in great danger. You’ve imagined the whole thing. It’s all an illusion. Except the visits of the dead. Once you do what a spirit tells you, you put yourself in its power. If you continue to obey you’ll be possessed, perhaps even killed. In either case you’ll be dead sooner or later.”
“Tamu, can I tell you something? All that time I was playing I felt my soul being transformed, my feeling had never been so intense! It was his touch, Tamu . . . ”
Tamu had always known that though the boy had courted girls, he had a stronger attraction to males, he was at that age of sexual ripening — he knew the day would come sooner or later. He slammed the earthen floor.
“But look how you suffered!”
Jimani was quiet. If Tamu could’ve read the boy’s mind — and he almost could — he would’ve seen Jimani’s untrammeled ambition to return to the depths of suffering. He would’ve seen his determination to ‘see’ the spirit he was sure could save him.
“What am I, Tamu? What’s my purpose? To keep playing in the courtyard like the cacique’s monkey? To play at the foot of his bed while he makes love to five wives? Do you know when he’s constipated, his nitaínos summon me and I’ve to sit at his feet while he shits, playing to encourage his bowel movement? I might as well wipe his ass.”
“Hush! There’s no higher honor than serving your cacique. He’s a god among men. Has my teaching been wasted?”
“But what about me? Why can’t I find my own release?”
“The gift you have is just that, it was given and can be taken. Just like your eyes were. It’s the gods’ whims.”
“Oh how cruel are their favors! I wish I was never born!”
Tamu sprang at him with the pipe. Jimani folded himself and took the blows. Tamu hit him till they both cried.
“Jimani,” said Tamu, “Jimani.” Tamu sympathized — he too had denied himself. He’d never taken a wife. Men like him and Jimani could only find satisfaction in religious duty, a sort of self-burial. But change was in the wind. If not for them personally then for the cacicazgo. You could hear the danger and rebellion in Jimani’s playing, a disturbing timbre, a jangling, that brought with it tremors of upheaval. There were the mysterious sea deaths, rumors of boiling bloody waters and dead fish in once fertile fishing holes. “If they find out what you are you’ll be put to death.”
“I’m already dead . . .” As if reading his master’s thoughts Jimani asked quietly, “Tamu, what does it truly mean for a soul to be set free? Are we free, men like us?”
“Oh Jimani,” said Tamu grinding his gum. “We must be satisfied with the favors the gods have given us. Evil must be purged from the body. So too evil thoughts, temptations.”
Jimani went quiet, facing the wall. The darkness in his head was like cotton rope strangling him. He wanted to play his mayohuacán but had no inspiration. The glands in his throat thickened, he could feel fever knotting his body. Yet something slowly awakened in the back of his skull — the thirst to live!
***
Outside, the teenage girls measured annatto seeds into the mortar and pestled them to red paste.
“Jimani must be gettin’ married,” one gossiped.
“To who, Sibani?” another girl wisecracked. “He has more eyes for beautiful boys than girls.”
“Blind eyes.”
They laughed.
“Fuck Jimani, he acts like he’s better than everybody.”
“Itiato told me one time she caught him kissing —”
Dwele emerged from the caney and they fell quiet, offering the dye with downturned eyes.
Tamu and Dwele painted Jimani’s body with sacred symbols. They covered every inch of him, his eyelids, his foreskin. They painted the ⍦ in the middle of his back because that was the most vulnerable spot. They put him on his stomach and painted his legs and the backs of his kneecaps. The procedure took the whole day. They painted the ⍨ in his palms and forehead while other bohiques inhaled cohoba and chanted. Tamu knelt on the wooden dais, Jimani knelt before him, his hands clasped. Dwele squatted beside them. Tamu marveled at the handiwork — yet the undercurrent of his feeling was he was binding up the boy’s heart, imprisoning him with religious symbols.
“There, now your body is completely protected. After we leave for the wake wait on the porch, the spirit will surely come for you. But whatever happens, don’t answer. Don’t move. Say nothin’ an’ sit still. As if in meditation.”
“Yes, Tamu.” A tear rolled down Jimani’s cheek.
“Understand?” echoed Dwele.
“If you stir or make a sound, you’ll be torn to pieces,” said Tamu. “To escape his wrath, control your fear. An’ don’t even think of callin’ for help. Even if you cry out there’s no one who can help you. Remain absolutely silent, is that clear?”
“Don’t speak or move an’ you will make it through alive,” Dwele said.
“I won’t move, I won’t make a sound.”
“Dwele, you’ve covered every inch of his body?”
“Yes, Tamu.”
“Good. Now we’ll leave.”
“Tamu,” Jimani called as they left. “. . . Who is my enemy?”
When Tamasa came at dusk and called, Jimani didn’t move an inch.
Jimani . . .?
Jimani could hear the longing and sadness in the spirit’s mouth, like bitter honey.
His voice quavered with emotion as if he were disintegrating. Jimani where are you?
Jimani all this time trembled, sweated. The suffering was inside him too. The fever had never truly broken, only subsided, his true nature — his passion resurfaced, and he was in equal torment. His fingers trembled for his mayohuacán, just to release his pent-up bitterness, anger and sexual rage. Not so much for the spirit — he realized — but for his own survival.
Jimani . . . ! shrieked Tamasa. He started howling as if being cut down, as if dying on the battlefield again, a lonely man. Play for me one last time, show yourself, coward!
The painted characters pulsed on Jimani’s skin, as if threatening to melt. He all but opened his mouth and yelled, “Here am I!”
Something knifed Dwele’s heart, he stopped dead in his tracks, grabbing Tamu’s arm. “Tamu,” he whispered in horrific realization, “I covered Jimani completely but forgot to mark his soles . . . surely he’ll be discovered!”
They raced back home. Something in Tamu’s head clanged dully — telling him this had been inevitable. When they found him, Jimani was writhing on the floor, the fever having spiked and given him a seizure. “Call the bohiques,” Dwele shouted at gawkers. “Tell them to bring medicine!”
Tamu held Jimani to his bosom and wailed like a woman. Tamu cried and cried. Tamu cried so much that even the women whose job it was to wail without feeling when random tragedy struck felt cheated by Tamu’s outpouring. Tamu bawled his eyes out, stroking the boy’s warm face, cooing to him, “Jimani, I’m sorry, I’m sorry my love, my child. Oh my Jimani . . . my child. I was wrong. Forgive me.”
But Jimani couldn’t hear him.
“Look,” said a girl pointing. They looked. Jimani’s soles were as red as clay and warm to the touch. “Maboya suck him toe!”
Tamu kissed Jimani’s face. “You’re free my child, taken up by the wind of change.” Tamu thought he saw the faint trace of a smile on his face.
Just then the boy came running back, not with the bohiques but a message. “The cacique has called an emergency council!”
When they hurried to the courtyard, Ocotumax was kneeling. He looked as if he’d been surprised by bad weather, or worse. “What is it? Have you seen the sea spirits?” they inquired, because he looked ghost-stricken.
He panted, pointing towards the coast, “I’ve been running since before sundown, vessels . . . on the sea . . .”
The cacique and sub-caciques flew up from their dujos. “Have the Kalinago returned?”
“No, bigger vessels . . . ” panted Ocotumax, “. . . with white-skinned men!”
All images taken at the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum.
