The World Without Us

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ONE JUNE MORNING in 2004, Ana María Santi sat against a post beneath a large palm-thatched canopy, frowning as she watched a gathering of her people in Mazáraka, their hamlet on the Río Conambu, an Ecuadoran tributary of the upper Amazon. Except for Ana María’s hair, still thick and black after seven decades, everything about her recalled a dried legume pod. Her gray eyes resembled two pale fish trapped in the dark eddies of her face. In a patois of Quichua and a nearly vanished language, Zápara, she scolded her nieces and granddaughters. An hour past dawn, they and everyone in the village except Ana María were already drunk.

The occasion was a minga, the Amazonian equivalent of a barn raising. Forty barefoot Zápara Indians, several in face paint, sat jammed in a circle on log benches. To prime the men for going out to slash and burn the forest to clear a new cassava patch for Ana María’s brother, they were drinking chicha—gallons of it. Even the children slurped ceramic bowls full of the milky, sour beer brewed from cassava pulp, fermented with the saliva of Zápara women who chew wads of it all day. Two girls with grass braided in their hair passed among the throng, refilling chicha bowls and serving dishes of catfish gruel. To the elders and guests, they offered hunks of boiled meat, dark as chocolate. But Ana María Santi, the oldest person present, wasn’t having any.

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