Tsantsa

By Ted Sabine

TED SABINE is a retired English and creative writing teacher who taught for twelve years at Cairo American College in Egypt and has traveled the world extensively with his wife, Margaret (Mogie). The author has prospected for diamonds in Guyana, collected numerous species of insects from Africa, South America, New Guinea, and Borneo, and became known as the Bug Man by students during his time in Cairo for his ardent storytelling abilities. Still, his initial excursions were along the Pan American Highway in Ecuador, ending up in the province of El Oriente where he received his inspiration for Tsantsa. Mr. Sabines science fiction novel, The Soulsucker, was published in 1976. Today, his hobbies include fly fishing, travel photography, weight training, and insect collecting.

Cover art by Bill Chapman

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465386588

Ted Sabine

TED SABINE is a retired English and creative writing teacher who taught for twelve years at Cairo American College in Egypt and has traveled the world extensively with his wife, Margaret (Mogie). The author has prospected for diamonds in Guyana, collected numerous species of insects from Africa, South America, New Guinea, and Borneo, and became known as the “Bug Man” by students during his time in Cairo for his ardent storytelling abilities. Still, his initial excursions were along the Pan American Highway in Ecuador, ending up in the province of El Oriente where he received his inspiration for Tsantsa. Mr. Sabine’s science fiction novel, The Soulsucker, was published in 1976. Today, his hobbies include fly fishing, travel photography, weight training, and insect collecting. Cover art by Bill Chapman

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Copyright © 2011 by Ted Sabine.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011919038

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4653-8657-1

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4653-8656-4

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4653-8658-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the names and characters in this book and any real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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102474

To Mogie, who has been very patient

Contents

Introduction

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Introduction

El Oriente, Ecuador, a region of flaring sunlight and shadowy gloom. I first beheld it while leafing through my grandmother’s eighth grade geography book published sometime in the 1890s. Grandma gave it to me when, at age five, I picked up an ailment that the Sabine family physician, Doc Brown, diagnosed as rheumatic fever. Its symptoms: a wheezy cough, leg aches, and an irregular, absent-minded heartbeat.

A sort of quiet and desperate consternation ruled the Sabine household as I became a receptacle for all kinds of medicine, including a bitter, brownish phlegm-like syrup that encouraged me to throw up frequently. Then there were the red pills about the size of mothballs that dyed my urine the color of raspberry Kool-Aid. My poor mother. She fluttered about, wearing a surgical mask and dosing me at regular intervals.

Poor Doc Brown. He made regular house calls, prodding and poking, making me say ahhh, and listening to the strange code my heart broadcast through his stethoscope. World War Two was raging at the time, so Doc Brown abandoned his conflict with my condition, joined the medical corps, and went off to fight a less sinister foe: Nazi Germany.

Anyway, back to El Oriente. At that time it was part of a big yellow blob labeled unexplored territory smeared across the map of South America in Grandma’s geography book. Immediately preceding the map were several drawings of exotic animals rending and tearing each other in a most remarkable fashion. There was, for example, the drawing of an anaconda constricting a capybara while, in turn, being gnawed on by an alligator that had a jaguar feeding on its tail. What an incredible food chain. With my heart clunking and my breath wheezing I vowed to visit those yellow places and see those strange creatures for myself.

Fast forward from 1942 to 1961. Fully recovered from a catalogue of childhood ailments, I left my hometown of Zion, Illinois to go bouncing and rattling in an old 1946 Chevy down the Pan American Highway. Destination: the diamond fields of Venezuela. As a result of perverse fortune, however, I wound up in El Oriente, Ecuador sharing a lean-to shelter and a smoky campfire with Klaus Oheim, an ex-Wehrmacht infantryman turned animal collector and inveterate teller of tales.

With smoke tingling my eyes and nostrils, and the roar of alligators and howler monkeys booming through the misty night, I became a student of jungle lore. How it is possible, providing you don’t lose your nerve, to kill a jaguar with a spear. How you can use blue cloth to capture the illusive blue morpho butterfly. And, most intriguing, how one goes about shrinking a human head. Beginning with that exotic recipe, Klaus gave me the idea for Tsantsa, which is based on what he claimed to be a true tale of love and hate, joy and rage, forgiveness and revenge combined with a conflict between two religions—one commanding, Thou shalt not kill, and another crying out in a spirit voice, Thou must.

Like some animistic spirit, Tsantsa invaded a part of my soul, first as a tale I repeated orally, sometimes at parties, sometimes around other smoky campfires. Then, after scratching on the doorway of my brain for a few years, it slouched forth as a short story, a sort of personal Heart of Darkness tale.

In the meantime, I’d gone on to further adventures and endeavors: another bumpy trip down the Pan American Highway, a diamond prospecting venture in British Guyana, a teaching assignment with my wife, Mogie, in American Samoa, then ten relatively tame but fruitful years spent teaching at Saint George’s School in Spokane, Washington. Along the way I published a science fiction novel as well.

During those years, Tsantsa evolved into an often-revised novel manuscript. For a while it resided in the office of a large New York literary agency. First accepted, then rejected, it slunk back to Spokane where it spent time lurking, beady-eyed and muttering, at the bottom of my underwear drawer. Then, in 1986, Mogie and I signed up to do a teaching stint at Cairo American College in Cairo, Egypt. Before leaving the States, I addressed ten envelopes to ten different literary agents and inserted ten copies of the first four chapters of Tsantsa.

Tsantsa and I boarded separate planes, thus beginning our separate, yet concurrent journeys. Tsantsa found an advocate, and I was thrilled. I had an agent, a real, live agent. For twelve years Tsantsa scurried about, getting rejected, sometimes with praise, by just about every publishing house in the known universe.

They tell me that it’s very well written, but doesn’t fit in any genre, my agent lamented. Like Doc Brown sixty years ago, he eventually gave up and moved on to handle other projects. Meanwhile, Mogie and I taught at CAC and traveled to some more places that used to be yellow blotches in Grandma’s geography book. Bird watching in the Galapagos, gorilla trekking in Uganda, animal safaris in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Botswana, as well as butterfly collecting in Madagascar, Borneo, Thailand, South America, and India soaked up our spare time.

So now it’s 2007. Mogie and I have retired. I’m seventy years old with two artificial hips, a variegated flower garden of memories, and a manuscript titled Tsantsa, which I have pulled one more time, blinking and snarling, from my underwear drawer. What the heck, I thought as I hefted the physical weight of it in my hands; this is an experience worth sharing, a tale worth being born. So let’s give it another go. Then as I revised it one last time, memories of the sun-and-shadow journey I experienced in the writing of it rushed back. There was the time, for example, that I got so stoked up over the ideas and images boiling up in my mind and spattering across the page that I leaped up and rammed my fist against the wall. Now I’m not really hoping that Tsantsa’s readers wind up with sore knuckles. But I’m hoping to share the discovery that in a flickering, sunlight-and-shadow world, one man’s tragedy can be another man’s joy. And also, the good and evil spirits that glide and skulk through the dappled jungle can exist in a single human mind as well.

And here is an added reflection. I have come to believe that Tsantsa is relevant to what is happening in 2007. The issue of moral equivalence between animistic beliefs and Catholicism closely parallels the clash between Western culture and Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalism. For example, one of the characters in Tsantsa, The Old One, is very similar to the strangely and totally committed fundamentalist Islamic imams. Every other main character in the novel has moments of doubt and spells of agonized soul searching. Not so The Old One. Like a rabid Islamic fundamentalist, he is totally and unwaveringly committed to the infallibility of his beliefs. That is what makes him such a powerful adversary, in spite of his waning physical prowess.

1

Yaak! Phoot! The old Jivaro warrior spat cantankerously into the Rio Tigre from his dugout canoe. A piranha struck at the spittle, making a fluttering, red-and-silver splash before disappearing beneath the sun-polished current.

Hah. The old man laughed and spat again. Behind him the Ecuadorian Andes gleamed, snow-frosted across the jungle-framed rim of the earth.

About a mile downstream, the rusty mission bell at Archedona village began to ring Tong—tong—tong— The clink of billiard balls ceased at the La Floridad Pool Parlor as Pablo Martinez and Emil Horvath shouldered their pool cues and crossed themselves.

Upstream the old Indian adjusted his loincloth and urinated into the stream. Hah hah, he laughed at the wildly surging piranhas. Good for me you can only swim.

Tong—Tong—Tong— The bell notes boomed up the river, bounced off its surface and struck the old man in the face.

Pah! Changing position, he urinated in the direction of the mission bell.

Ah ha. The old man bent his knees slightly as the river dragged his dugout from a quiet pool. Aiii. Standing upright, feeling the river beneath him, he balanced artfully on the bucking, wrenching canoe. Aiii! Ha ha! Faster now. Yellow sunlight on his back. Silver spray against his face and chest. Taunting the river’s mindless fury as it flung him downstream and gnashed its frothy teeth against grey rocks. His jaguar-claw necklace clattered against his bony chest as he fended off the grey rocks with a long pole.

Downstream from the fast water, Rosita Mendoza and four or five other women washed clothes. Jiggling breasts. Faded calico dresses. The slap-slap of wet clothes against grey rocks. About a dozen children splashed all around them: round-tummied, naked, throwing sand at ruby dragonflies sparking in the sun.

A little boy named Ernesto first saw the old Jivaro bumping down the last stretch of white water and coasting around the bend. Thumb in mouth. Ernesto stared, then grinned. "Hola! Hola!" He waved.

The visitor nodded. He did not wave.

Sssssssss. Ernesto’s mother looked up from her washing and sucked air through her teeth. "Indio salvaje," she hissed.

Ernesto felt his head jerk back as his mother yanked him out of the water, then pulled him close. He cringed as her fingernails gouged little half-moon indentations in his wrist.

Aii. Jivaro.

"Hombre loco tambien."

The women formed a whispering and huddled knot, pillowing their children’s faces against pendant breasts.

The old Indian rammed his canoe into the beach. He leaped ashore as yellow butterflies darted up from the wet sand. A battleground of scars, he moved lightly, like a young man. Seemingly, a kind of supernatural willpower kept his movements supple and light. But if the willpower were to relax for an instant, the body would fall, clattering, like a bone necklace cast to earth.

The old man strode up the beach, hitching with a slight limp. Then the limp vanished, and he seemed to walk so lightly that Rosita would later cross herself and claim that no footprints appeared in the wet sand.

The Jivaro turned, grinned evilly, then continued up the beach. One gnarled fist gripped an antique shotgun, double barreled, its cracked stock bound with cord made from coconut husks. Over his bony shoulder slanted a long spear made from the iron-hard stem of a chonta palm. Aged and polished where calloused fists gripped its shaft, the lance was black with tooth-like barbs edging its fire-hardened point.

Just up the trail from the riverbank, Pico Gonzalaz and his two cousins, Che and Rodrigo, were having fun. Hard-eyed, mean-drunk, slightly staggering, they had the reek of aguardente on their breaths.

Heeeee-yooooo. Pico aimed his double-barreled shotgun at a green hummingbird hovering in the sunlight about ten feet away. KA-BOOM. Ha Ha. Pico clenched a macho fist as green feather puffs drifted sadly to earth.

KA-BOOM . . . KA-BOOM. Che and Rodrigo fired simultaneously at a pair of yellow swallowtail butterflies perched fluttering in the trail. Whoo-eee. Nothing left but yellow dust and a water-filled crater in the mud.

"Hey, amigos. Vamanose." Pico nodded toward the women down by the river . . . then grabbed his crotch.

Just then, the old Indian came up over the top of the riverbank. Suddenly. As if sprung from the earth.

Oh-oh. Collision course. Straight toward the jeering trio he stalked. They stopped. Held their ground. Then a pair of glittering eyes cut into their souls and the dry taste of fear wadded up like cotton in their mouths. They edged aside. Watched the old man pass. Jesucristo, Pico muttered under his boozy breath.

Carlos Emch also came to Archedona that afternoon. Weaving maniacally down the mud-puddled airstrip in his orange jeep, he tried to run down a mob of dogs and chickens that scattered and fled under the wing of an old DC-3 stranded among weeds at the airfield’s edge. Yaaaaaah-haaaaaa. Emch whipped out the .38 pistol he kept in his jeep and blazed away. Missing the chicken he was aiming at, he bullet-holed one of the tires of the DC-3. With a tired hiss, the old airplane settled down to squat at an angle like a wounded bird.

Moments later, Emch laughed and cursed his way into El Bufo’s saloon, found Maria the whore and took her upstairs. A big, beefy man with short-cropped, reddish hair and flushed skin. Emch wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over a pair of ape-like arms. The owner of a banana and pineapple plantation, he enjoyed intimidating his workers with curses and clenched fists.

Maria began to giggle as Emch fondled her with his big, hairy-knuckled hands. Downstairs, El Bufo, the fat saloon keeper, smiled and winked at his customers as the giggles increased. The metal bed frame upstairs walked back and forth across the room.

Then Maria stopped giggling. El Bufo and his customers heard small, pleading gasps.

Thwack! Thwack! Then the splat of bare skin struck by an open hand . . . perhaps a leather belt.

Pig. El Bufo cursed into a glass of Oso Negro beer half raised to his lips.

Pablo Martinez got an erection and ordered another glass of rum.

Stairs and floorboards groaned as Emch lurched downstairs and bullied his way through the saloon. Fresh sweat patches ringed the armpits of his white shirt. His alligator skin belt hissed as he slid it back through the loops of his pants. Upstairs, Maria lay curled up and sobbing on the iron bed, one hand clutching a ten-sucre note.

Outside the saloon, Emch swaggered to a hitching post and untied a big, buff-colored canine named Monstro, whom he liked to call his Indian-eating dog. Then, big bellied, half-drunk, Emch stood with his legs apart while looking about in the hot sun.

Hah hah! How wonderful to feel fifty kilos of leg-gnawing, testicle-tearing fury tugging against the chain wrapped several times around his big, freckled fist. Yes, yes, he thought. First a good lay, and then . . . what do we have here?

An old Indian had appeared: skinny, knobby-kneed, with big feet and gnarled toes. Ha, Monstro. Ha!

Snarling, Monstro edged forward, tail erect. Ha-ha. Emch laughed, feeling the beginning of an erection between his legs as he reeled out additional feet of chain. A pair of frigid blue eyes had embedded themselves joyfully in his flushed face.

But what is this? The scrawny Indian kept coming, making no attempt to get out of Monstro’s way. A claw necklace chittered like gnashing teeth around the Indian’s neck. And he grinned, showing long, wolfish teeth.

Monstro’s tail dropped between his legs. He whined, then yelped as the old Indian kicked him swiftly and expertly in the flank.

Hey! Emch tried to lunge forward, but he nearly tripped over Monstro who was pressed whining against his thighs.

"Hijo de la gran puta," roared Emch.

The old man stopped and stared snake-like at Emch. The lance slid off his shoulder and aimed itself at Emch’s throat.

What the fucking shit! Emch swore again, trembling and looking down at his feet. His .38 pistol? In the goddamned jeep parked just a few yards away. Christ. Even if he did have the damn gun he’d still be afraid.

Goddamn it, Emch felt his curses gargle through the saliva in his throat, then melt to joyful sobs as the old Indian edged away. With the loose folds of his chain, Emch flailed Monstro across the snout. Bitch-like, the huge dog spread his legs and urinated on the toe of one of his master’s boots.

Moments later, El Bufo celebrated the event with free beer all around. Holy shit, he crowed, I’ll say a thousand Hail Marys if that damned dog didn’t sniff the smell of death on that skinny old son of a bitch.

Father Usigli, the local priest, was killing pests in the mission garden the day the old Indian appeared. "Maldito." Father Usigli back-handed a yellow striped tomato worm off a leaf, then crushed it with his boot. There was sweat, along with humming bugs. Macaws shrieked overhead. Blue veins writhed on the back of Usigli’s white hands as he reached among snake-like vines.

Ahh. Father Usigli stood up stiffly and pressed both hands against the small of his back. Getting old, he thought. Forty years in the Garden of Eden. Forty years of prayers, insects and snakes. Forty years of my Bible’s leather cover sprouting green mold.

But, ahh, how he loved the jungle. Hated it too. Butterflies, and flowers, shrill, colorful birds, along with creatures that stung and bit. Twisted green patterns—humming and creeping—an embodiment of all that was beautiful yet evil upon the earth.

Blowing sweat off the tip of his nose, he dropped among the vines again. Ugh. His knee had landed on the crushed tomato worm, causing him to shiver as clammy viscera soaked through his cassock and stuck to his skin.

A breeze rustled across the garden, ruffling a three-foot-diameter spider web as it went. In the web’s center a black and yellow spider with a six-inch leg span was feeding on a still-fluttering moth.

A few feet away, Father Usigli’s protégé, a young Jivaro named Moises, stared into the web. Aiiee, Moises thought. There is Father Usigli visible through the web. And when you shut one eye it looks as if the spider is chewing on his head. Oh. And now la arania IS the Padre’s head, with a halo of squiggly legs radiating out. Ugh. Shaking his head, Moises changed position until la Arania finally let go of the priest. Now, however, Father Usigli began to look like a bird, a big black one, with his cassock sleeves flapping as he thrashed among the vines.

"Ah, chica," El Padre crooned.

Moises felt a smile crinkle the sun-chapped corners of his mouth. Silly old man. He was talking to his fruits and vegetables again, fondling the tomatoes, patting the melons on their bald heads, thumping the yellow tummies of pumpkins and squash.

Hot sun. Buzzing insect sounds. Silver sweat beads crawling into his eyes. And suddenly the spider was eating Father Usigli’s face again. Then came a voice that seemed to hiss and thrum out of the bulging black-and-yellow creature covering Father Usigli’s face. So, Moises, the priest-spider said, you would like to be a priest?

Well, I— He palmed sweat from his eyes, then blinked.

Ha-ha. You a priest? As if in a spasm of laughter the web trembled in the heat. Nearer and larger it grew. Insect corpses dangled in front of his eyes.

"Father Usigli says that I . . . "

"Pah! What does Father Usigli know? What does he know about Jivaro blood? What does he know of those screams along with the wet, chopping sounds in your head? And the machete gash, a toothless, bleeding mouth, spitting out . . . "

Moises lunged forward and back-handed the web. The bulging spider-face vanished, leaving Father Usigli hunkered among the vines.

Ish-ka-wa. Another voice began to speak, a voice with a shadow. Not a normal sliding-across-the ground shadow, but an oozing-up-from-the-ground-like-blood shadow. A magic shadow. Ish-ka-wa’s son? it asked.

Yes, Moises whispered. Yes. Looking up, he saw the old Jivaro warrior standing like a single dragon’s tooth sprung from the earth. With a barbed spear point, the old warrior was scratching at a blood-ringed scab decorating one of his shins.

The scab tore loose. Blood trickled down the old warrior’s leg. Large and muscular, with gnarled toes, his feet seemed as if they could suck power from the earth. One of Father Usigli’s tomatoes had burst beneath the old Indian’s feet, its pulp and seeds already attracting what would soon be squadrons of yellow wasps. I am The Old One, the scarred visitor said.

The Old One, Moises repeated. Yes. How long had it been? Nine years? Ten? Yes, you are The Old One, he said again.

And you are Ish-ka-wa’s son. A black deer fly landed on The Old One’s thigh. His skin twitched like a beast’s flank.

Yes. Ish-ka-wa’s son.

And Ish-ka-wa’s spirit still wanders and moans for vengeance in the night.

Aiii. Those eyes. The eyes of a snake. Moises tried to struggle from his hunkered-down position, but the mission bell tolled again. Each vibrating, metallic groan hammered him into the ground. Parrots shrieked in a nearby mango tree.

Padre, Padre. PAAADRE! He called to Father Usigil who was still muttering to his melons and tomatoes on hands and knees.

Padre, he pleaded again.

Padre Usigli looked up, blinking, one forearm raised against the throbbing sun. Blinking more rapidly, he lowered his forearm, wiped it across his eyes. A miracle. He spoke slowly, tasting each word. After ten years God’s work begins again. Momentarily the priest’s pale skin acquired the texture of ivory while his dark cassock hardened to basaltic rock. A fly landed on Father Usigli’s cheek. He remained still, gaping at the old Indian standing lizard-like among the tomato vines.

Moises felt his heart hammering in his ears. He turned back to The Old One, a motionless, satanic idol of carved wood. Sunlight shimmered, freezing everything in its heat. The rusty mission bell tolled another note that vibrated for endless seconds overhead.

Pah! Then time rushed forward again as the old Indian spat on the ground.

Moises, Father Usigli cried. We are blessed.

Moises shook his head. He blinked sweat from his eyes. Oh, Padre mio, he murmured softly, don’t you know? Can’t you see?

Pah. The Old One hawked up another saliva gob that clung like an amoeba to one of the tomato vines as the padre rose joyously from his knees.

With his lance-tip, the old warrior knocked a tomato from its vine and stabbed it against the ground.

Moises bit his lip. The spider was back, clambering over the impaled tomato and ominously fingering the barbed head of The Old One’s spear.

"Tong . . . Tong . . . Tong . . . " The mission bell began ringing again, a giant hammer in the heat.

2

Sweat.

Blazing sun.

The Rio Tigre swirling, ominous and cold.

Moises felt his groin muscles draw his testicles into his body as he stood crotch deep in the water next to The Old One’s canoe.

" . . . and finally, dear Lord, bless this canoe. Wavering, Father Usigli’s voice drifted toward him from the riverbank. And bless those who guide it, bestowing upon them the faith and courage to deliver their people from the dark purgatory of vengeance and hate."

Moises looked shoreward. Yes, there was the priest, with his head bowed and his hands pressed palm-to-palm beneath a fervently trembling chin.

Behind Father Usigli a curious crowd of Archedona’s