Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [32]
Every once in a while Baba would look at him and smile, a twinkle in his eye.
Toward nightfall Ram Dass realized this was his answer. The powerful drug had no effect whatsoever on Baba; to him it was absolutely nothing.
Kate’s first session with Grandmother had been seven hours long. She’d lifted the “brick,” which was more like a scale on the side of a very large reptile, and gotten inside the world where Grandmother lived. It was as if Grandmother had been waiting thousands of years to take her onto her lap. The teaching had begun immediately.
But underneath the palapa in the jungle the same dose of yagé left her unmoved; she’d sat out the entire session wondering when it would begin for her. Other people were clearly on their trips. Armando and his apprentice shaman, Cosmi, were busy with their songs and rattles and fans and agua florida. She watched it all as if it were a play.
Lalika was holding herself rigidly, as if sitting in a runaway train, when Kate looked at her. The white woman next to her, short and slender with light brown braids wound around her head, was tossing about in her seat, eyes closed, moaning and crying. She had been incested from the time she could barely crawl. She had never been able to own this until she worked with Anunu. Now she owned it at every opportunity and had discussed it quite calmly in the dugout canoe that brought them to the camp. There was a deeper layer of suffering to be explored though, apparently, and she, already battered, was resisting it.
Kate was moved by the tenderness with which Armando and Cosmi held everyone. She thought about how, five hundred years before, the Spanish conquistadors might have encountered this same scene, almost exactly, as they hacked through the jungle looking for gold. Except all the participants would have been Indians, not just the shaman and his helpers. How surprised they’d be, she thought, if they could peek up at us from hell. She was certain that’s where they were because that is what they had believed in. Coming upon the Indians prayerfully attempting to heal themselves, their healers as patient and loving as mothers, the smelly, unwashed, metal-plated, unwanted desperadoes of medieval Spain had set upon them with swords and dogs, killing them in the name of God. How many shamans, perhaps even more gifted than Armando, had the Spanish slain? How many had they taken captive, pressed into slavery? How many had died in the gold and silver mines?
And yet, here they were, tending the sick descendents of the people who’d almost destroyed them. Even their bodies, for hundreds of years, had not belonged to them. Armando and Cosmi carried the Indian spirit of their ancestors, but their bodies showed traces of the long Spanish domination, as did their last names.
A sick person has no history and no nationality, said Armando when they were discussing the past.
If you cannot feel that way there is no possibility of becoming a curandero.
Kate pondered this. She was still plagued by those ancestors of hers who’d lived and died miserably. They wanted her to rectify their wrongs, she felt. There were weeks when they seemed to visit her every night. For instance, there was the man with no teeth. A bloody mouth. He’d appeared to her in dreams but even more in wakeful visions.
Oh, no, she’d groaned, catching a glimpse of him the first time.
But there he was. Eventually she had to look.
And when you did look, asked Armando, gazing warmly into her eyes, what did you see?
Kate was quiet. Finally she said: I saw someone with a story to tell. Someone with a story to tell and someone who chose me, or was trying to choose me, to tell it.
The problem was, she continued, I did not want to relay any more sad messages from the other side.
L’otro lado? asked Armando.
You know, the Other World. Ancestor territory.
Oh, he said, and laughed. We do not get to decide something like that!
I know, she said, with a sigh.
He wanted me to know, especially, how good-looking