94
MOUNTAINLIFE
WINTER /SPRING2016
Several hours later, when the night’s cacophony
of crickets and birds reached a crescendo,
Alberto’s sister came to summon us. The
Frenchman emerged from his hut, exultant.
He looked at me and asked, “How do you
feel? Do you feel like a champion? Yes, we are
champions!” He had the air of a man about to
jump off a cliff.
We followedAlberto’s sister to an octagonal hut
with a conical thatch roof. It was pitch black
inside except for the beam of a single flashlight
pointing at the ceiling like a light saber. A
number of mats were laid out; Alberto and his
family occupied half the room
—
his wife, three
children, two brothers. A two-litre Coke bottle,
half full of dark medicine, rested on a low table
before Alberto, the medicine man. He gestured
to where the Frenchman and I were to sit. In
front of my mat sat an empty bucket, a roll of
toilet paper, and a bottle of water.
I sat. Alberto poured the ayahuasca into a shot
glass and handed it to the Frenchman, who
downed it and asked for another. Whenmy turn
came I had one shot. The bottle went round
to the rest of Alberto’s family, including the
children. Then everyone lay down, the flashlight
went out andAlberto and his brothers began
to sing.
Their voices were nasal but melodious;
something like a cross between early blues
and Chinese folk music. Every so often a voice
would pause and a match flare, illuminating
a shadow bound face drawing on a cigarette.
The women and children stayed quiet except
for an occasional tinkling of laughter. I felt a
mild swelling of nausea, but nothing like the
Frenchman beside me, who by the sounds of
it would need a second bucket soon. After an
hour or so, Alberto went to him and asked,
¿Estasbien?
The Frenchman croaked out a
Sí.
Alberto bent forward and sang to different
parts of his body, then lit a fresh cigarette and
washed the man in smoke.
My turn came next. All I felt was the slightest
tingling inmy jaw and some mild nausea. The
nausea lessened whenAlberto sang and blew
smoke over me, but I didn’t feel any higher, and
toldAlberto so. He asked if I wanted another
sip. I thought back tomy previous experience.
It was the second sip that had unravelledme.
But… I’d come all this way. Was I now going to
let fear holdme back?
Yes, I was. The price of admission was too high.
I passed on the second sip. Albertomoved
on to his family. An incongruous symphony
of whispering, vomiting, women’s laughter,
children’s cries, andmen singing, lulledme
close to sleep. I might already have been
dreaming when a door opened behindme and
let a cool breeze in. But there was no door
behindme.
I reached back and felt a wooden wall, yet
the breeze persisted. The drug seizedmy eyes
next, made the darkness bloom into geometric
patterns. Then it engulfedmy hearing and the
songs that had beenmerely pretty acquired a
profound, deeply soothing resonance, backed
by the sound of the wind.
Finally, the drug enteredmy mind, and I
duplicated. I slipped out of myself. What had
formerly been I became a separate awareness,
observing what used to be me. When that me
squirmed on his mat, the awareness saw it
as someone else moving on their mat; when I
thought
what anoddsensation
and giggled, the
awareness perceived someone else thinking
what anoddsensation
and heard them giggle.
The awareness comprehended words, yet
existed in a place beyond language. What can
anyone say about that place? We all know
it exists. Every culture on earth has at least
one way to reach it. For a brief period of
timelessness, Alberto’s technique brought me
there in waves, and unlike five years ago, these
were waves I could ride. But the shoreline I
glimpsed, well, nothing escapes from there
but metaphor. At dawn, Alberto walked into
the room. I hadn’t seen him leave, but it was
already time to go. I followed him out into the
grey cool of dawn, once againmyself.
Nothing had changed. Everything was changing.
I was back in the boat that brought me here,
cruising alongside dolphins and sundry river
traffic
toward a city, an airport, a life. I felt like
a raindrop spit from a cloud, descended to
earth and flowing towards the Atlantic, where
all this muddy water escapes the continent to
become an ocean for the sky to feed upon.
