Grief strikes Lara’ Nation like a band of rabid monkeys. It’s so big, so loud that I shrink from the cluster of our people. Yeah, it’s how they feel to me: our people. They’ve accepted us as equals and tribesmen. They’ve allowed us into their laughter and their struggles.
It’s Tujy this time. I know it’s not uncommon for warriors to lose the fight against their prey. With still-primitive weapons, it’s man against beast, and sometimes man loses.
Tujy returns prone, held high on the arms of his warrior friends. Silent, they parade him into the uneven village square, and frozen, I observe death firsthand, not on a lit-de-parade in a church, not in my mind while I think I could have stopped it. This was unavoidable. This is life in the Amazon, life between the Lara’ where they live it as it’s supposed to be lived.
I bow my head.
“Baby.” Luka’s sigh at my ear. The compassion. His endearment. This isn’t about me, not at all, but his support softens a knot in my chest. I’m thankful that he doesn’t tell me it will be all right.
I die inside looking at Tujy’s wife. Raka was the sunniest of them all. I haven’t seen her without a smile on her face and their baby on her hip. He’s on her hip now, eyes larger than their future ahead.
I’m an anthropologist, and this is exactly what I’m here for. To study her, describe what happens in the Lara’ society when something like this happens. But this is Raka. It was Tujy. I don’t know the name of their baby, but that baby just became fatherless.
My mind is ruthless, an objective scientist’s brain that insists I pull out my camera to document, but I don’t, because above it all, I am human.
I wish I didn’t know what will happen to her next.
My fiancé died. I didn’t hurt anyone by wishing I had my notebook at his wake. Maybe I wouldn’t hurt Raka by filming her, but the thing is, it doesn’t feel right.
“It might not happen,” I whisper to Luka. “It’s been decades. Plenty of tribes have evolved beyond customs that hurt their villagers.”
Luka doesn’t speak as he pulls me in, thick arms drowning my face and shielding my head. He covers my view of villagers lamenting their jaguar god. He hides my view of Tujy’s wife at their center, on her knees, naked except for a string of leaves circling her hips and tracing the ridge between her buttocks.
“So alone,” I whisper.
“I’m sorry.”
It does start, the ritual I learned of when I connected with the Lara’s story back when I was thirteen. It slams me in the chest, but Luka is there to catch me when my knees buckle.
I’m the scientist, but I’m not good at this after all, this balance between compassion and description.
I lose all pretenses when they do what I knew they would, dig a hole between the head warrior’s and the chief’s house, at the center of the village square where everyone walks. I turn into Luka and let him hold me tighter than I’ve let anyone hold me since Julian.
“It’s okay. It’s what they do, baby. They do it because it’s right for them.”
“I know.”
Behind Levari, I catch the silhouette of a tribesman arching his neck in a wolf-like howl.
“Please, keep translating,” Luka murmurs to Levari, and grief-stricken gratitude bolts up my chest; I need to observe, but my emotions are in the way right now. I’d miss out on it all if it weren’t for Luka.
They strip Tujy of his loin cloth. It’s so he can meet the king jaguar man to man, predator to predator. I’m from a different place and a different time. A stab of pain smacks me in the stomach when they fold him in a way you don’t fold humans.
They stuff Tujy into the ground like we do garbage in the West. But he’s not garbage as they pack dirt on top of him, chanting prayers and well-wishes and thank-yous. He’s not garbage when they recount the story of every prey he caught, every meal he put on the table for the chief of the Lara’, for the shaman, and for his family.
Raka sobs. How old is she? So young. She wails the despair I never did. Now, I wish that I’d cried too.
They support her husband, while she’s just the mother of his son. It’s not easy to be an objective observer when all I want is for Tujy’s wife to have a word. I had the support she does not, but despite it all, Raka is lucky to know how to mourn.
I’m not cut out for this. Luka knows it even before I start to cry. My lungs contort with sadness and wheeze with the air I push out through my sobs. This isn’t about me. I shouldn’t fall apart right now. It’s them, all of them. The Lara’ people just lost one of their best warriors, and there’s a wife out there, one whose sunny eye-glint kept me scrubbing my shorts in the river even as I cursed inside over the lack of everything.
Tradition made the tribesmen jump on top of Tujy’s grave in a stark display of sacrilegious. When I couldn’t keep it together, Luka brought me back to our hut.
“You have to let it go.” Luka’s voice is firm. His hands squeeze my shoulders as I curve into my sorrow. I want to howl too, a shadow-howl directed inward. I want to scream over the unfairness of the loss of a twenty-year-old warrior with a baby and a wife who loved him. I want to rage over the loss of a flawed, dependent, sweet man whose secrets I didn’t learn until he was gone. It’s mixing in my head and in my eyes, which brim with it all, too much.
Luka jerks me to reality and swings me around. Grabs my cheeks harder than I expect, so I gasp, gasp through my tears and he hisses, “You’re losing it. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. I know what you’re doing.”
I stutter syllables that break.
“In your head, you’re mixing Julian into what they’re doing. Geneva!”
“Wha-at?” I shout my reply.
He shakes my shoulders, rattling the now I’m in. “This isn’t it!”
“Then what is?”
He draws me against him, a big, tall wall of comfort. Dusk takes over, and our flimsy palm-leaf door can’t keep the village’s panic out. Because that is what it is out there. Panic. They were two hundred and fifty-three inhabitants. Now they are two hundred and fifty-two. That’s not enough when a big bread-winner just left.
“You want to know what is?” Luka rumbles against the length of my body. Pressed together, we stand on top of our haphazard sleeping bags, the would-be yoga mats, the would-be pillows.
“Yeah.”
“What is, is you. How you treat what’s happening right now. Why did you come to the Lara’ in the first place?”
“To...” I choke on an inward breath. “To study and describe the women and their grief.”
“Did you want to fix something for them by doing that?”
“Why are we talking about this? I... think I want to go home.”
“Did you?” Luka insists.
“No. We don’t do that. We just.... describe.”
“For who though? For yourselves?” he asks.
My hiccough takes over, but I know what I need to tell him, exactly what has the potential of making this situation bearable. “I want to... share what happens here. Make the world understand they’re complicated. That their customs and beliefs are intricate and... humane... and there is a complex system beyond what seem like barbaric rites.”
“And is that what you’re doing right now? Are you helping the world understand one of the last primitive tribes on the planet?”
I inhale, but the air doesn’t hit my lungs.
“Why. Are. You. Bugging me?” I feel so small. Here I am, the second western female ever to reside with the Lara’ people, bound for failure because I’m not ready to absorb and describe. No, no, I’m dying to let my own right-and-wrongs guide me to the chief of the Lara’ and shout how things should be done at him.
In one desperate instance, I want to dig up the naked remains of Tujy, swathe him in white cotton, and put him to rest in a coffin that’s expensive and beautiful and solid and has golden inscriptions like... Julian’s.
My face feels drenched. Luka’s hands go around it and angle me upward until I stare into pure compassion.
“Geneva. Listen. We’ll sleep, okay? According to Levari, nothing more will happen tonight. They’re waiting for far-away relatives to arrive before the funeral feast commences. You’ll see, baby. After some sleep, things will look brighter.”
Luka’s eyes shine in the darkness. “Then, you need to do what you’re here for. What happened to Tujy is horrific, but you have a job to do. You’re here to document. To write so later you can spread the word. You want to tell their story in a way no one else has before. Maybe you’re the one person who can do them justice.”
Lightness seeps into my grey, a sensation I shouldn’t allow. Still, I rise on my toes, craving more of this feeling. I tip my nose high so I can burrow into the nook behind Luka’s ear, and I allow his hair to veil me from reality. He smells like bonfire and insecticide and man. He smells like harbor. I kiss his neck, and for a moment, Luka stops breathing.
I turn his face to me, then, and kiss his mouth. I lick the straight, stubborn line of his bottom lip. Close my mouth over the twin arc of his upper lip. He lets me. Luka hikes me off the dirt floor and stands still in our hut until my arms wrap around his neck and he understands that I’m where I need to be.
“It’s surreal,” I whisper to him as he sinks to his knees with me like he’s some knight. He pulls his armor off, an old wet, bonfire-stained t-shirt, and his damp body is all I need.
An oversized black caiman claimed Tujy’s life. The beast ripped his leg off before his friends could bring him back to the riverbank.
“Why were they in the water?” I ask Levari.
“A group of capybaras were drinking and bathing in the river, and the warriors were hunting them.”
The morning is serene, saturating our clearing with a spring-green shine. Legs crisscrossed, the Lara’ women are gathered under the chief’s thatched-roof gazebo, rocking their bodies and lamenting quietly. Raka is not here.
“Is Raka with her grandmother?” I ask Levari.
“No, no, Raka lives beyond now, in the king jaguar’s kingdom.” She juts her chin toward the jungle. I shoot a glance at the hut that housed Raka and Tujy’s family. Levari guesses my thoughts. “She can’t be with her family now. Raka has been unlucky, and that can’t stick to the walls of their home. She needs to be cleansed first.”
“What about the baby?”
“He’s with Raka’s sister.”
The thought of him without her upsets me. Like all Lara’ babies, he was attached to his mother’s body while she worked. He’d hang there contentedly and reach for a nipple whenever he was hungry. When he was full, he’d let the movement of her body rock him to sleep. “Does he eat solid food?”
“No, he’s too young for that. His aunt will feed both babies.”
“What about Raka? What does she eat while she’s out there? Is there a hut for her to live in?”
“We bring her food a few times a day. She needs to think about her life with Tujy now, so that she can cleanse herself and live on without him. And we don’t have huts for the grieving widows. It would defeat the purpose. Some...” She swallows. “Some of them don’t overcome their grief.”
“What do you mean?”
“If they succumb to their grief, the king jaguar takes them.”
I’m stunned. Emotions war with my brain, but then Luka’s hand is at the small of my back, calming me.
“What purpose would it defeat to give her a place to live out there?” I ask.
“The purpose of surviving her own grief and becoming human again.”
“She’s not human now?”
Levari shakes her head. “We believe she’s part specter, part human. Raka’s grief keeps her with one leg in Tujy’s grave. He pulls on her, wanting her to join him at the feet of the king jaguar’s throne, and she has to fight that fight alone. It’s why she doesn’t have a hut now. Raka is not to be protected against the king jaguar or her feelings. She’s to fight them both and survive. The village roots for her.”
Even as tears burn for my soul sister, my heart sister, the objective side of me sees the newness of her legend. As far as I know, these words have never been uttered to an anthropological team before. I understand now. I do. This is it.
Luka and I go with Chief Pap’s wife when she ducks into the jungle in search of Raka. She carries gifts of grilled capybara, passion fruit, and camu camu. I bring fresh water. For a wild second, I want to mix in lemonade powder, add some flavor to the widow’s darkness. I don’t, of course; I’m not here to tinker with rites.
We find her there, in the thickest of the woods. On the forest floor, she sits amidst rotting leaves and balding tree roots. She’s on the hard dirt, knees like starving knobs poking against her cheeks. She’s rocking, like the women in the chief’s front yard, only Raka rocks alone. Before I can stop it, her seclusion hits me straight in the abdomen, and for a second, it knocks the wind out of me.
“Can we talk with her?” I whisper to Levari, who shakes her head.
“She’s taboo for the women now.”
Oh no. “But not for the men?”
“Not for the men. After the feast tonight, their time with Raka will begin.”
I have my notebook. I open it and write down the things Levari tells me. Despite the pain, I do what I need to do: I ask Luka to take a picture of the woman on the ground. Woven from palm-tree leaves, a hammock sways from the accidental brush of a branch behind her.
“Is that where she sleeps?” I whisper to Levari while we position the meal in front of her. Raka is inside herself, not acknowledging the food or our presence. I suppress the need to connect with her and say, “Someday you’ll feel better.” I want to urge her to eat, say that no one has ever sustained themselves on a diet of despair.
We leave without a greeting. Neither the chief’s wife nor Levari makes the girl aware of the food waiting. I have a feeling she won’t eat it, but I’ll be on all food trips so I can document her passage out on the other side. I need this journey to end well. I need her to be strong and survive what lies ahead.
“It’s not your job to be afraid for her.” I suck in a sharp breath at Julian’s voice, so real at my ear. It’s what he would have said, light-hearted and with a smile on his face. I miss him. I miss my fiancé, my husband-to-be gone wrong.
“Here.” Luka opens his hand, readying it for mine, and again, I see no reason to say no.