The Magic of a Kiss
To tell you the truth, men of the jungle do not know how to do anything but hunt. The enslaved women have it all; they spend their day, as the saying goes, from the bed to the kitchen and from the kitchen to the bed. Thank goodness everything is at hand around the small bonfire located in the center of the hut. In one angle, the bedroom; in another, the living room; yet in another angle, the store room and the exit to the restroom. Raising the arms, the pantry. On the ground is the dining room. At the entrance of the hut, the canoe; everywhere, the dog and the weapons.
One morning, when the sun was hot like never before, I left the hut to clean the vegetable garden nearby. Nanky, a beautiful young girl, had her hair and eyes as black as the nights of the jungle, glowing from the sun rays that caressed all her body and ignited her springlike smiles. Seeing her close by, her big, bright eyes were hypnotized just by looking at her.
So, with her beauty, she cleaned the garden chakra. Suddenly, a young, slender, and good-looking man appeared. He was tall and strong, with the cinnamon color unmistakable among those who live in the jungle. They stared at each other. The young girl was about to run, but she stopped. Why should she run? If he was so handsome and attractive… When she thought like that, her cheeks turned red. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and intensively felt the aroma of the flowers she had in her hands. She smiled, and she felt happy. Then, she approached the curious admirer and stayed together for a long time; they spoke about many things in the jungle, about their tribes, and played with the sand at the river edge. He kissed her hands, and all of a sudden, she felt a rare ability in her hands. She took a bit of clay and, as she played with it, gave form to the head and body of the handsome young man who so admired her, and then she modeled the clay as herself. Spontaneously, attracted by mutual love, they joined in a tight hug and kissed each other.
Later, he said, “Nanky, since love has joined our souls, let’s join our bodies in the blue bed of the river,” and immediately, as pressed by a mysterious force, they dove into the smooth waters that flowed at their feet and got lost there, in a corner of the meandric waters.
The next day, the tribal people searching for the young lady only found on the beach the two small clay figures that, because of the shaman’s advice, were buried at the foot of a corpulent Ceiba buttress, surrounded by a handful of wild flowers. After many moons, when the parents of the beautiful young woman and other tribal youngsters approached the beach in remembering pilgrimage—the cult that jungle people pay to their dead—they were shocked to find, in the same place that they buried the clay figures, two slender bushes: one of a spiny chonta palm and the other of ishpingu cinnamon, whose flowering branches intertwined like loving arms.
The souls of the lovers, who joined their bodies in the blue bed of the river, had been transformed into the sap of the two trees, symbols of Amazonia. Since then, most of the food (chuntaduru) and weapons like blow guns and knives were made from him, and the tasteful spices and aromatic remedies were made from her. Currently, and after the coming of the white men, the entire area is known as the “country of cinnamon” or “el país de la canela.”
Cultural Significance
The spiny trunk of the Chunta palm (Bactris gasipaes) has an annular segmentation of long spines reaching to the frond, where abundant clusters of starch-rich fruits wait to be harvested to feed the people of the jungle in an annual masting that mobilizes all tribes of the Amazonian territory. This harvest has become a staple foodstuff throughout Amazonia and other tropical forest areas in Central America and Mexico, where they know it as Peje or Pejevalle.
The chunta’s seed is known to be hard to disseminate and can only be dispersed by large mammals, including humans. As a matter of fact, no wild specimen of Chunta has been collected in the forest but only in abandoned chakras, and all living palms exhibit genetic markers that confirm domestication and anthropogenic distribution only in areas where ancient clearings have given place to secondary succession and later a disclimax jungle community.
Therefore, it is not a coincidence to find the chunta palm growing closely to a canelo ishpinku tree (Ocotea quixos) or sometimes to a warumo tree (Cecropia obtusifolia), because those are easier to climb in a vertical ascent facilitated by the watu of liana vine (Bignonia alliaceae) securing the entangled feet of the climber, who reaches the top stratum of the forest and then uses a long spear or even a blowgun to cut down the loaded frutescent clusters of the palm. Explaining the presence of these species together in the forest creates the biocultural heritage of local knowledge transmitted by oral history from time immemorial.
