State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [74]
“It sounds as if the Hummocca may have left Easter for you then and not the Lakashi, assuming they knew you were here.” Marina realized she had made another assumption as soon as it was out of her mouth but this one Dr. Swenson let pass.
“Oh, they knew I was here,” she said, nodding her head. “Everyone knows everything eventually. Upon first consideration a person believes herself to be very isolated in the jungle but it isn’t the case. Word travels between the tribes, although I’ve never figured out how it happens as many of them refuse to communicate with one another. It would make a brilliant dissertation topic if you ever become interested in furthering your education.” (Marina would have mentioned her Ph.D. as well as her M.D. but there was not a glimmer of a break.) “I say it’s the monkeys,” Dr. Swenson said. “But then I tend to blame the monkeys for everything. ‘A white woman is living with the Lakashi.’ News like that goes up and down the river in a matter of hours. Then one afternoon a boy is cutting at a tree with a machete and when his arm goes back he sinks the blade into his sister’s head. Amazing that this sort of thing doesn’t happen every fifteen minutes out here. So I found a needle and some gut in my bag and I sewed the girl up. It was mostly blood, she was a very dramatic bleeder, but one hardly has to go to medical school to sew up a head. It didn’t take many events like this, a snake bite, a breech birth, and suddenly the whole of Brazil knows there is a doctor available off the Negro. Now, you must understand this, Dr. Singh, so few people do: I am not Médecins Sans Frontières. I have not come to the Amazon to be a family practioner. I am simply a person who made certain mistakes at the onset. They didn’t know me as a doctor when I arrived. The Lakashi knew me as a member of Dr. Rapp’s party. They thought I was like Dr. Rapp, that I was there for the flora and not for them. For the first few years I came alone they were forever bringing me mushrooms and various fungi to look at. They lugged so many fallen trunks of enormous, rotted trees back to camp it would have sent any mycological society into a frenzy. The fact that I took their temperature and drew blood samples and measured their children was completely lost on them, they continued to see me as the person they first met—as an extension of Dr. Rapp. And it had been my intention to be like him, to float on their misguided perceptions, but then I sewed up that girl’s head. It was my fatal mistake. The next thing I knew sick people were being paddled up the river to receive my care, and a deaf child had been left off for me to deal with.”
The deaf child had gotten her to town. He had ferried her guest to the restaurant after the opera and loaded the boxes on the boat and steered the boat through the river. The deaf child was not without his uses. “What would the alternative have been?” Marina asked. “Going back to that first girl.”
“The bleeder. The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived. That is how one respects indigenous people. If you pay any attention at all you’ll realize that you could never convert them to your way of life anyway. They are an intractable race. Any progress you advance to them will be undone before your back is turned. You might as well come down here to unbend the river. The point, then, is to observe the life they themselves have put in place and learn from it.”
Marina felt remarkably unmoved by this. “So go back in time, do it again: there is a child standing in front of you with a machete in her head. What do you do?” The farther they went down the river, the fewer boats they saw. From time to time there was still a group of people, mostly very small children, in clusters on the shore but they were thinning out. It felt good to ask a question twice. It was something she could never have managed in the past.
“That’s a dramatic flourish, Dr. Singh. Did