Feuilletton: A Broken Novel
Chapter 1
Ehy do you have Mambe? I call into a natural shop with a locked iron gate painted in crumbly white. There is a guy sitting on the floor inside, he is working on his laptop. ¿Tu quieres mambear? He asks while he’s looking at me. I nod and I stop my group of friends that had kept walking. We have been looking for Mambe for a while, not the main focus of our research-- actually we don’t have any research at all-- but it is not easy to find. It’s been suggested to ask around at universities, at least in big cities, as Mambe is something ancestral but quite new for the people that live outside of the Amazon. The guy stands up from the floor and starts talking with someone in the other room. Yeah I think we have some left, he says before disappearing into a second room. Did you find it? My friends are asking me while walking back towards my location. I think so, I answer. None of us are actually looking for Mambe, but it is one of these little missions you put into a trip where no one knows exactly what to do. Mambe is something too far out for people like us that are used to chuck fatty lines. Someone else appears in the shop, an old lady that invites us to enter. She opens the gate with a long key. I have some left, who told you about Mambe? She asks gently. The four of us enter the shop and we look at the various products that are on the shelf. All kinds of medicine coming from the Amazon and the rest of the world. A friend, I explain, said it is very good for talking, that it makes your words more clear, it sounds very interesting. Very well, she nods showing her gratitude. Then take a seat, you are young, you can just sit on the floor, I have to sit on the chair, I’m old, my legs are not holding any more. We sit in front of her, we feel like we are in school, some students and a spiritual teacher, she drops a pound of a green powder on the desk. That green powder reminds me of kratom, a substance that I only saw in the US in between fentanyl addiction. So that’s the Mambe, she is showing us the bag, I don’t know much about it but I will tell you everything I know. We sat there for about an hour, and she explained to us that Mambe is a mixture of cocaine leaf and the ash of other plants ground together. She explained how to use it, when and where, how she found her way to Amazon medicine, how she fought a very bad cancer with it, where we should go, who we should visit down there and how we should organize our quest. We are all wondering about the price of it. We don’t want the whole thing, it seems too much, the idea was to have a little try and go somewhere else to appreciate the different qualities of the substance. The price is cheap, something like twenty dollars for the pound, but we are not interested in such a quantity so we ask her if we can get a little to try together. She smiles saying no, Mambe is not for her right now. Normally she doesn’t break the bag, you cannot get less than a pound of that powder, but she understood our intentions and she decided to help us, we decided on half and half and she kept the other part for herself. It’s good if you make a little profit from the medicine, she says, to pay your cost, to protect your family, it is wrong when you put chemicals on it and you try to make the most profit you can. She invited us to try a liquid rape that she just received from Putumayo, she sprayed our hands with it and we spent about a minute in circle smelling it. It is effective, a mellow spike is hitting the brain and the headache I had from the previous four days of constant party went away. One of us buys one of these bottles and we get out of the shop after an hour and a half. We feel good, we just had a real experience with a real person that showed us some open love and we already feel more close to the Amazon. Actually it will just be me who keeps going down there, the others will go to the Pacific coast in the next few days, and eventually keep traveling south after some weeks. Me and my girlfriend are sad to separate, but I have a shit reason to be here, and I have to accomplish it. I have to meet with my freaky brother again. Is better if that happens with no other interaction.
ABAC
Feuilletton is an episodic novel that speaks to the situation of modern tourism and neo cults.
