Amazons: A Love Story

Part III - Amazons

PART III AMAZONS � The Amazon Some halfway up the Amazon River in the tropical moist forests of the Brazilian Amazon is the capitol city of Manaus. It has been more than twenty years since I lived there, and a great deal has changed, but then as now Manaus was a kind of urban mirage. A construct of myth as much as of stone, a fantasy of a city. An imperial dream. Manaus was as close to a mirage as a city could be, because it was a projection of urbanity as much as an embodiment of it. Many of its most prominent buildings had been built in the cities of Europe and then dismantled, brick by brick, to be brought whole from England or France. The fish market beside the river was designed by Eiffel; the customs house was English, each yellow sandstone block numbered so it might be disassembled to be reassembled here. When I think of the Amazon now, what I recall is not the forest or the cry of howler monkeys, not the figures I once knew by heart nor the hours spent mapping loss at a small desk in the corner of an office on the grounds of the National Institute of Amazonian Research; I recall strange disconnected images. A bus ride through back streets of the city, and how—stopped for a moment in traffic—I glanced up and met the eyes of a man whose face had been ravaged by leprosy or leishmaniasis, a gape where his nose should have been. How I watched a mob of workers on the grounds of the National Institute of Amazonian Research slowly beat to death with sticks the dazzled figure of a three-toed sloth because its slow and unhurried movements had amused or annoyed them. I recall conversations with scientists from Australia , England, the U.S., who spoke over beers and plates of fish about the discoveries they had made of species, few of which were expected to last the decade, exciting nevertheless in a technical and professional way. An American man who invited me to join his team in catching bats in a valley that was to be flooded by a new dam, the construction of which had been funded by banks from our country. A drawer full of taxidermied birds. I recall how little it seemed any of us could do to prevent this loss. I arrived in Belem at the mouth of the Amazon River at dawn on Friday the thirteenth of July, having traveled thirty-six hours by bus from Salvador. There were only two viable ways to get to Manaus in those days: boat or plane. I had originally planned to go by boat, considering it a romantic mode � 123 124 E. J. Levy of travel. I’d read in Fodor’s that one might catch a ride on a supply steamer in the waterfront at Belem and travel cheaply the 930 miles upriver to Manaus that way. Many of the local peasants—caboclos—traveled like this. So, for that matter, did all the livestock and much of the dry goods destined for Manaus. In Salvador, where I’d lived for the last six months, I’d met a couple from Indiana who’d made the trip by boat. During the day, they’d told me, you squeezed on deck and squinted at the green thread of shoreline in the distance and prayed for a breeze. At night, you went below with the cargo and strung your hammock between beams. With hardly any space between the hammocks, you slept with your arms tight to your sides, swaying into your neighbor with each rock of the boat, the smell of chickens and pigs and humans constant through the long night. I found the prospect of the five-day trip romantic; it sounded wonderful. But in July, as I prepared to leave Salvador for the Amazon, several supply steamers sank on their way from Belem to Manaus, overloaded with cargo and passengers, and I bought a plane ticket. What I remember of Belem is the airport: a cement, two-story terminal with a runway edged by billows of forest, dense as cumulus clouds, a seemingly impenetrable green. On the airport’s upper terrace, I stood leaning on a railing, staring out across the runway where a few small planes were parked. American pop music from the 1970s came over a loudspeaker...