A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi

for explanations with gestures. Wasit in the direction that he was pointing to on the horizon? And the distance? Finally he loaded a knapsack of dried meat on his back, took his bow and arrows, and set off barefoot, rapid and silent, with the undulating gait of the Siriono. Achtiti made solemn gestures with his head, as if to say that they could have confidence in Uiuna: Goldbaum and Wilkins looked at one another in bewilderment. It was the first time that a Siriono had traveled so far from the village and gone to a city, in so far as Candelaria, with its five thousand inhabitants, could be considered a city.
    Achtiti had food brought to them: shrimp from the river, raw, four each, two japara nuts, and a big fruit with watery, tasteless juice.
    Goldbaum said, “Maybe they’ll be hospitable, and take care of us even if we don’t work. In that case, which would be the most fortunate, they will give us the same ration as theirs, in quality and quantity, and it won’t be easy. Or they may ask us to work with them, and we don’t know how to hunt or plow. We have almost nothing left to give them. If Uiuna returns without the boat, or doesn’t return at all, things will go badly. They’ll throw us out, and then we’ll die in the swamp; or they’ll kill us themselves, as they do with their old people.”
    â€œWithout warning?”
    â€œI don’t think so, and they won’t be violent. They’ll ask us to follow their custom.”
    Wilkins was silent for a few minutes, and then he said, “We have two days’ worth of provisions, two watches, two ballpoint pens, a lot of useless money, and the tape recorder. Everything in the camp has been destroyed, but we might be able to retemper the knife blades. Ah, yes, we also have two boxes of matches—maybe that’s the item that will interest them most. We ought to pay our keep, right?”
    The negotiations with Achtiti were laborious. He paid scant attention to the watches, was interested in neither the pens nor the money, and was frightened when he heard his voice come out of the tape recorder. He was fascinated by the matches: after a few failed attempts he was able to light one, but he wasn’t convinced that it was a real flame until he held a finger over it and got burned. He lighted another, and declared with evident satisfaction that if he brought it close to the straw it would catch fire. Then he stretched out one hand with a questioning air: could he take all the matches? Goldbaum quickly retrieved them: he showed Achtiti that the box was already partly used up and that the other, though full, was small. He made a gesture that indicated the two of them. He showed Achtiti a match, and then the sun, and the sun’s path through the sky: he would give him a match for every day of sustenance. For a long time Achtiti remained in doubt, squatting on his heels, humming in a nasal singsong; then he went into a hut, and came out holding an earthenware bowl and a bow. He placed the bowl on the ground; he picked up some claylike earth, mixed it with water, showed the two men that the paste could be modeled into the shape of the bowl, and, finally, pointed to himself. Then he took the bow and caressed it affectionately along its length: it wassmooth, symmetrical, strong. He showed the two a bundle of long, straight branches that were lying a little distance away, and had them observe that the quality and the fiber of the wood were the same. He returned to the hut, and this time came out with two obsidian scrapers, one big and one small, and a rough block of obsidian.
    The two observed him with curiosity and bewilderment. Achtiti picked up a flint stone, and showed them that, if he struck with precisely aimed small blows along particular contours of the block, it flaked cleanly, without breaking; in a few minutes of work, he had made a scraper, maybe still needing to be refined, but already usable. Then Achtiti took two