Brazil on the Move (15 page)

In the next set of huts a tall man with an aquiline nose rises to greet us. With a dignified gesture he invites us to sit on a bench under his thatch. He offers bananas. He’s somewhat oddly dressed. He wears what looks like a woman’s boudoir cap on his curly gray head and an assortment of blazerlike garments over a weird striped shirt. A man of means. There’s an outboard motor in the yard and a shiny new piano accordion on one of the beds. A bottle of Italian vermouth stands among grimy glasses on the table. Mrs. Becker explains that he’s the best hunter in the region, the father of twentyfour children out of two wives. His womenfolk raise guineapigs in a little corral. We pass the time of day with him in formal Spanish.

In other huts scattered under the trees we find the women working on pottery. Since they have no wheel even the largest pots are built up by hand out of long snakes of kneaded clay coiled in a spiral. Firing them on the embers without an oven is long and tedious and highly expert work. Then they are painted with handsome geometric designs and glazed and fired again. “Lazy things,” says Mrs. Becker, “they’ll only work when they feel like it.”

A bonanza came to this whole part-Indian, part-halfbreed settlement a few nights ago when a herd of peccary swam the river and invaded their manioc plantation. The villagers turned out with clubs and guns and killed fiftysix. That means fresh and smoked meat for weeks. They proudly show us the
skins—which bring a good price in Iquitos—stretched and salted for drying and several peccary shoats they captured for pets.

This happygolucky life is not without a certain enchantment. In another hut we find a group of men celebrating over a bottle of some kind of rotgut. More European blood here. You can tell by the stubbly beards. They swarm about us to offer us drinks. The stuff in the bottle smells like wood alcohol. We refuse as politely as possible. It’s already dusk and they really are too drunk.

The man with the bottle latches onto my arm. “Doctor, you must have a drink”—in these parts anybody who can read and write is addressed as Doctor—“Mr. Engineer,” he pleads, “please take a drink with us.” How can a man refuse?

One gulp does it. We break away and hurry down the slippery riverbank to the waiting canoe.

The other tourist entrepreneur is the local photographer, a genial and hospitable gentleman named Antonio Wong, who set up a hunting camp on the Rio Manaté, some fifty miles downstream from Iquitos, years ago before tourists were dreamed of, for his own pleasure, so he tells us. An enthusiastic hunter, he never hunts without a couple of Yagua Indians to find him the game. He whisks us downstream in a speedboat.

After lunch at his thatched and mosquito-netted camp set high on stilts on the bank of a narrow winding tributary river, we visit his private tribe of Indians. A large launch load of French tourists has come in ahead of us. The Indians—Yaguas of Mr. Wong’s pet tribe—have come down specially from their settlement three and a half hours’ walk back in the forest. They have dressed in their best grass skirts and grass headdresses to be shown off to the tourists. After the French depart
Mr. Wong has us distribute cigarettes to the men and marshmallow candies to the ladies. He makes each of us hand out one item to each member of the tribe. In return the Indians present us with the little crowns of palm leaves they are wearing on their heads.

They are lightolive healthylooking people with mellow brown eyes. Their faces are daubed with ochre. Only a few of the women and children have the puffed-up bellies that come from eating too much cassava. They seem to be enormously amused by the tourists. Though they can’t understand Spanish they laugh and laugh at the slightest thing anyone says. Perhaps it’s embarrassment but more likely it is frank entertainment at the strange creatures that have appeared from the outer world. We get to laughing too. We look into each other’s faces and laugh and laugh.

The curaca is a very young man but the witch doctor is old with a crinkled parchment skin. He stands hesitantly off by himself as if he weren’t quite sure what his attitude should be.

After a while a flute and drum start playing a simple but not at all outlandish little tune and Mr. Wong and the oldest of the women, an old lady with numbers of rubber tires round her waist, dance a sort of twostep with incredible solemnity. It’s a sight worth coming three thousand miles to see.

A Swiss gentleman has been bringing the house down by giving extra cigarettes to the Indians who have traces of whiskers. This proves an enormous joke because it’s well-known that the forest Indians have very little hair on their bodies. Everybody roars. After giggling with them for a while more in their palmleaf shelter set high on stilts, where the women are smoking a few fish over a smoldering fire, we part amid fresh gales of laughter and return to our speedboat.

How come, we ask Mr. Wong, when we have him alone, that some of the Yagua women have permanent waves? Mr.
Wong explains with a show of annoyance that it’s these Syrian traders. The Turkos, as they are known, scour the rivers in motorboats buying wild animal and reptile skins. To avoid paying in money they give the Indian women permanents in return for valuable pelts. Disgusting, says Mr. Wong.

From Iquitos to Manaus there’s only one flight a week. The plane is a Catalina flying boat of the amphibian type known to the U. S. Navy in the Pacific war as a P.B.Y. Most of the sixteen seats are already taken so we have to crawl through the narrow waist to places scrunched up against the radio man’s little table. Wicker seats have been set in the hull but otherwise very little has been done for the comfort of the passengers. There’s a reek of gasoline. The only ventilation comes when the pilots open their side windows.

The seaplane rattles like a truckload of scrap as it takes off. We fly out over the river and cut across its windings in the early haze. The mist rises from the great trees in thin wisps like cotton batting twisted between thumb and forefinger. We cruise at a couple of thousand feet above the rainforest. In every direction the treetops stretch to the horizon.

Things are pleasantly informal aboard. The prettily gotten up Brazilian girl in the front seat must be the pilot’s ladyfriend because before long she is sitting on his lap. So that the other passengers shan’t feel neglected he invites us in rotation to climb into the copilot’s seat where the air is fresh and the view magnificent. The steward, crawling among the packages that obstruct the seaplane’s narrow waist, keeps plying us with gummy sandwiches and sicksweet
guaraná
. Guaraná, which can be quite good, is the national soft drink of Brazil. The Peruvian lady sitting next to my wife asks her if she minds the smell of the package she holds on her lap: it is fresh turtle meat she is carrying to a friend in Manaus.

After a couple of hours we were trundling down the landing strip at Letícia. Having dim memories of a noisy border dispute years ago between Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, which was settled, if I remember right, by Rondón’s border commission awarding the place to Peru, I expected to find frontier guards, customs officers, and the like. There must be a village, but we saw no sign of it. We found the tiny new airport completely deserted except for a large crate of green parakeets. Inside were cartons and cartons full of plastic bags of tropical fish waiting for shipment. Out back a single dilapidated stationwagon stood waiting on the rutted road that wound off into the jungle.

Letícia is situated on the north bank of the Peruvian Amazon near the point where the borders of the three republics meet. If there were any internal trade between them the place should be an important riverport. Outside of the freight carried overseas by the Booth Line boats from Iquitos, the only largescale shipments we could hear of in these upper reaches of the river were the bargeloads of crude oil that go down from the Peruvian oilfields to the Brazilian government refinery near Manaus. The young man who managed one of the Bata shoestores in Iquitos had recently made a trip downstream to try to arrange some way of selling his product in the Brazilian settlements. He had come back discouraged. Bureaucratic complications made it impossible.

At Benjamin Constant, named for the Brazilian positivist who, as one of Pedro II’s ministers, helped negotiate his abdication and became known to history as the father of the republic, we alight on the sleek brown surface of a river. This is the first Brazilian outpost, on the Rio Yavarí just above its junction with the main stream of the Amazon. The seaplane is pulled in to a landing by hawsers and a Negro boy and a white boy start working a twohanded pump to suck
the gasoline out of drums scattered on the steep sticky clay bank.

While we are lounging around the float in the punishing sun, waiting for the boys to pump the tanks full, we find ourselves looking into a canoe which contains an unmistakably American portable refrigerator, a picnic basket with a thermos, a little blond boy in jumper and shorts, and a young American couple in straw hats. Just the group you would see in a national park in the States. Before we have a chance to attract their attention the man has started the outboard and they go gliding away up the river.

Later we learned that these were missionaries who had started a school, just the two of them, to teach reading and writing and some simple hygiene to the river dwellers, and that the fame of their school had spread far and wide.

On the takeoff the water roars about the hull, and surges olivecolored over the ports. The old amphibian, shaking and creaking, hitches itself above the treetops. The treetops spread to the horizon in every direction. As we soar, from the copilot’s seat we can look out over the forest for ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred miles. Beyond those miles the same rivers the same treetops spread for a thousand miles to the north, to the south, to the west, and eastward for two thousand and more. The trees hide tiny settlements. In the open stretches of water between them you might see fishermen in canoes, or a lost gunboat with washing hung out to dry on the forward deck, showing the flag that flaunts the sovereignty of one of the three sovereign states. Hunters and fishermen, a few families collecting fruits and nuts, logging crews, now and then a sawmill. Thatched huts of halfbreeds who collect chicle and latex. The Weeping Wood, the romancers called it, the Green Hell. Outside of Antarctica it is the largest extension of terrain in the world that the human race has left unoccupied.

After Benjamin Constant the Catalina skims downstream, often following the river for many miles. We stop at occasional collections of thatched huts. At each stop the shape of the canoes that come alongside is a little different and the heartshaped paddles have a different design. The birds change; in some places herons predominate, in others flocks of small white gulls. Only the buzzards remain the same and the big cheerful yellowbellied bird you find all over Brazil, named from his call,
Bem-ti-ví
- (I see you). At one stop the only passenger to come aboard, along with a tiny package of mail, is a large scarlet macaw consigned to Manaus.

As we fly east the fine morning turns into a murky noon. It’s bumpy going amid the boiling clouds. Whenever there’s an opening below, a new river seems to be joining the main stream. Never the glimpse of a steamboat. Even canoes are rare. You can’t tell which is the main river among the many parallel channels boiling through the coppery glare. Below everything is hurrying water, dark islands seen through slanting stripes of rain, a flash of silver beyond a dark elbow of densepacked trees, a bilious khakitinted channel where some muddy confluent has poured in. A landscape like Gustave Doré’s dreams of hell.

At last we break out of the overcast and glide through sunlight over the lake of Tefé. The water is the color of clear weak coffee. The town of Tefé has an oddly civilized look, with one small row of houses that might be on the banks of the Seine. The air is clear as the water. The sky is full of gulls. There’s a cool breeze blowing. The passengers troop up the steep duckboards to the local boardinghouse where lunch is laid out on long tables. Turkey and rice and black beans and baked bananas all sprinkled with cassava flour. At the grocery next door you can buy cold beer.

From Tefé to Manaus is four long hours through turbulent clouds. In spite of cotton stuffed in our ears the motors are
deafening. Legs are cramped. By the time the old Catalina goes slambanging down the runway at the Manaus airport the sudden night of the tropics is closing down.

Manaus, the capital of the vastest and least populated of the states that make up the Brazilian union, climbs a group of hills behind a bluff some ten miles above the junction of the Rio Negro with the Rio Solimoes to form the oceanlike flood of muddy fresh water the Brazilians call the Rio Mar, their Amazon. It is a city beset with nostalgia.

The opera house on the hill, now restored to all its gaudy splendor, testifies not only to the exuberant bad taste of the late nineteenth century but to a certain enthusiasm of the grand era of capitalist promotion which can never be recaptured. The fortunes of the rubber barons who put up the money to build it have long since been spent and forgotten, but ghosts of old bonanzas linger in the fetid streets which lead up to the wide square the building fronts on, which is paved in wavy mosaic like the famous Rocio in Lisbon.

The enormous steel pontoons of the floating wharves so ingeniously arranged to rise and fall with the stages of the Rio Negro are monuments not only to the nineteenth century’s engineering skill, but also to its faith in the inevitable benefits of world commerce linking the nations. The crowding steamers from every European port that kept the central conveyor railroad so busy sank to the bottom during the First World War and were never replaced, but impressive traces of steamship offices and freight agencies still remain in the downtown buildings.

The wide ruined avenues with their broken pavements, dark at night because there is not enough electric power to light them, the scarfaced public buildings designed at the Paris Beaux-Arts, the neglected parks where rampant trees
have invaded the footpaths, the dilapidated European trolley-cars, the empty aviary and the gay little clock tower that’s lost its clock in the waterfront square which is the center of the city’s traffic, all still echo memories of mighty projects that have failed.