The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe Read Free Book Online Page B

six months’ recuperation in her parents’ home. Then she headed right back to the Pirahã and Everett.
    Everett tells that story early in the book…then doesn’t hesitate to turn to such matters as experiments on Pirahã numerosity, i.e., linguistic and psychological expression and control of numerical concepts. He weaves these dissertations throughout Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes …and it is hard to come away from the book without feeling they were just as important to him as the story of his life. And they probably were. They gave his saga some very necessary gravity…even as the story became more intense. The most intense was the night of the cachaça madness. This was three years into the Everetts’ life among the Pirahã.
    Cachaça is a liquor distilled from sugarcane. Brazilians had warned Everett about cachaça, but he had never actually had to deal with the problem before. Everett and his entire family—Keren, Shannon, Kristene, and Caleb—lived in one of the very few structures that rated the designation house in the Pirahã area of the jungles along the Maici River. It was built atop a four-foot-high platform. In the middle of the house was a storeroom. One night about nine o’clock the whole family was asleep when Everett heard loud talk and laughter on the riverbank. Drunken talk and laughter, if he knew anything about it. So he got up and went down to check it out. A boat such as Brazilian river traders use, a big one, had pulled into shore, and ten or twelve Pirahã were on the deck laughing and carrying on. They fell silent when they saw Everett approaching. There was no visual evidence of anybody drinking. So Everett settled for giving the captain, a Brazilian, a little lecture in Portuguese about how selling alcohol in this part of the Amazon was illegal and punishable by heavy fines and two years in jail. It occurred to him later that he must have sounded terribly officious, since technically he was nothing but a nosy American with a visa, commander of nothing. By the time he went back to bed, the noise had resumed; but he managed to fall asleep, only to be awakened an hour or so later by two men speaking in Pirahã inside a small house the Catholic missionary, by then departed, had built no more than a hundred feet away.
    One Pirahã said, “I am not afraid. I kill the Americans. We kill them, the Brazilian gives us a new shotgun. He told me that.”
    “You kill them, then?” said the other.
    “Yes. They go to sleep. I shoot them.”
    A bolt of panic through the solar plexus. Everett can tell they’re merely waiting to work up the nerve or the cachaça blood level to do it. What earthly chance do he and Keren and the three children have? Exactly one, Everett concludes. He leaves the house immediately, as is, in his shorts and flip-flops. God, it’s dark out here, blacker than black, and he didn’t dare bring a flashlight because they might see him coming. Very odd!—no campfires such as the Pirahã keep lit out in front of their huts and lean-tos at night. (He would learn later that all the Pirahã women had put out the fires and fled deep into the jungle the moment they heard the word “cachaça.”) Everett bursts into the drunk Pirahã’s little hideaway next door with a big grin and, in Pirahã, gives them the merriest, liveliest “Hey guys! What’s up!” any walking dead man ever exclaimed to his executioners. Without any pause at all he continues drenching them with the most hyperexuberant happy patter-blather imaginable, as if there had never been any closer comrades on this earth. Oh, the times we’ve had together! The drunk Pirahã stare at him without a word, utterly, boozily stupefied…as he gathers up all the weapons, two shotguns, two machetes, bows and arrows, and leaves chundering still more ebullient, chummy-honey-rummy talk all over them, flashing still more inexplicably ecstatic grins, even warbling bird words so sublimely that the most lyrical nightingale would