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C A F E
lic new life abruptly came to an end.
Schneebaum thought he was accom-
panying his friends on a daylong hunt-
ing excursion when, at dusk, they sud-
denly stopped outside a but near a
small clearing.
Without warning, the Harakhambur
charged, slaughtering all the men in
the dwelling, then dismembering the
bodies and roasting them in a celebra-
tory bonfire. Schneebaum ran off to
vomit, but during the subsequent
feast, he felt pressured to eat the small
piece of meat that was placed in his
hands. He swallowed the bites of
human flesh.
Soon thereafter, he slipped away
from the Harakhambut, without say-
ing goodbye. He emerged from the
jungle, a year after his disappearance,.
naked and covered in body paint.
"For 45 years, I had nightmares
about the raid,"
says
Schneebaum,
now a leading
expert on the art-
work of another
headhunting
tribe, the Asmat
of New Guinea.
So he staunchly
refused when the
Shapiros begged
him to return to Peru along with their
camera. He didn't want to relive the
most traumatic night of his life. He
didn't want to learn that his
Harakhambut friends were all dead.
And he was nearly 80, after all. He
had recently been diagnosed with
Parkinson's disease and had received
three hip replacements.
The Shapiros, who maxed out their
credit cards to fund the film, contin-
ued to beg him, however. When
Schneebaum insisted he couldn't
remember where he disappeared into
the rainforest, Laurie combed his
apartment for clues.
Behind a bookshelf, she found a
crinkled slip of paper inscribed with a
single word: Kosnipata. An Internet
search revealed the word referred to a
river in the Amazon forest — and led
the filmmakers to a guide who
believed some of Schneebaum's friends
might still be alive.
The artist's curiosity was peaked. In
June 1999, he flew with the Shapiros
to the Amazon, stepped into a canoe
and began a three-week journey into
his past.
It was the film shoot from hell. In
Peru, David Shapiro and his camera-
man suffered relapses of the malaria
they had contracted while shooting with
Schneebaum in New Guinea, where
they had filmed a touching reunion
with the artist's former male lover.
Laurie endured the 100-degree heat
and drenching rainstorms while bat-
din, severe vomiting and diarrhea.
Mosquitos and sandflies tormented
the crew as they traveled 10 hours a
day down the murky river past forests
that teemed with snakes and sloths.
Every night, Schneebaum's night-
mares seemed to intensify. "He was
screaming at the top of his lungs,"
Laurie Shapiro recalls. 'Jr was the most
bone-chilling thing I have ever heard."
Yet the team pressed on, and after
obtaining directions from the oldest res-
ident of a remote village, they arrived at
an even more isolated outpost in the
middle of an electrical storm.
As Laurie Shapiro attempted to calm
Schneebaum, David and his camera-
Tobias Schneebaum,
left, with filmmakers
Laurie and David
Shapiro: "I came
full circle in a
way that I never
expected," says
Schneebaum.
man used a machete to cut a staircase
in a 20-foot-high clay cliff so the eld-
erly artist could walk up to the settle-
ment. Inside a decrepit gathering hall,
the New Yorkers found a number of
Harakhambut watching Rambo on a
flickering TV set.
Immediately, the old-timers recog-
nized Schneebaum. They laughed as
they remembered his feeble bow-and-
arrow skills and cried when he pro-
duced pictures of their long-dead rela-
tives. "Our children have never seen
their ancestors before," they told him.
"Thank you for coming back to us."
The Harakhambut revealed that
they no longer practiced cannibalism
and were as reticent to discuss their
1956 raid as Schneebaum.
The artist, wiping away tears, felt he
had achieved a closure of sorts. "I
came full circle in a way than I never
expected," he said. "I no longer suffer
from nightmares. David and Laurie
were right to push me." E
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85