Llama for Lunch (31 page)
At lunch time the next day I returned to the cafe near the market and the river. For three reals I had fresh juice and a ‘plato dias’, plate of the day – it was actually several plates of tasty fried fish. I know it was fresh because I saw the cafe owner return from the market carrying huge silver fish strung on a wire.
National elections were to be held this month and, in all the towns from Porto Velho onwards, I had seen walls plastered with slogans and the names of candidates. A terrible assault on the eardrums had been following me from vans that crept along the gutters blasting out propaganda. In Surre I saw one of these vans with a bullet hole through its windscreen. Courtesy of a rival? Surre even staged a rally. Attended mainly by dogs and small boys on bicycles, a van paraded through the town; the racket from its loudspeakers was enhanced by exploding firecrackers.
On another beautiful morning a rooster and cheeping chickens woke me. Outside, a cool breeze was gently moving the fronds of the palm tree and in the courtyard a mare with foal at foot quietly cropped the grass. The courtyard gate was shut so the horses must have used the guests’ entrance, clattering in over the tiled floor.
Deciding to take a ride out to a beach I had heard about I walked to the market corner where the motorbike taxis wait for custom. The riders all wore red waistcoats as well as helmets, the first I’d seen so far. There was even a spare one on the handlebars for the passenger. I didn’t see the helmet at first and wasn’t offered it, so I felt that I might look a wimp if I insisted on wearing it later. I hired a woman rider, hoping for a more sedate journey. I’d ridden with men who should have been doing car chases in movies. This girl was a big, butch female – she would have fitted right in at Hell’s Angels – but she drove exceedingly carefully.
The bitumen that graced a small strip of the main road soon ended, then we were riding on a one-wheel dirt track that wound round lanes and among village houses until it came to open country. Here we passed horses, goats, chooks and lots of water that lay about in the fields – buffalo wallowed here and white egrets fossicked. We glided through glades of trees and acres of thick grass. Then we came to a wider dirt road and, going through a big wooden gate and many water puddles, slid to a stop at a river beside the remains of a wooden bridge. Behind a spit of land I could see the beach I had come to visit. A ferryman paddled me across the river in a canoe. He told me that I could pay on the way back. That figured – after all, I had no other way to return. The bikie had asked me when she should come back for me and, finding myself on a beautiful, sandy, but utterly deserted beach, I was now glad that I had arranged a time.
I walked around the corner of this beach that I had been left abandoned on. A long, empty shoreline stretched as far as I could see. It seemed like a good spot to get robbed and murdered in. Waves pounded onto the sand on which I saw horse and buffalo prints as well as those of one man and one dog. Mangroves stood sentinel behind the beach so tall and thick that I was unable to see into them. There wasn’t much shade and I wondered what on earth I could do to amuse myself for the three hours until the bike returned. I started to read my book, and then I felt a presence. Looking up I saw a barefoot man who wore only shorts, as many men did in Surre. He had passed by me a few metres away but utterly soundlessly. He disappeared into the mangroves after telling me, I think, that there was something further up the beach. I decamped and, walking a kilometre or so, found five rough, thatched huts on stilts on the sand. The biggest one had an open verandah that faced the sea and looked to be offering some kind of hospitality. There was no sign of life around it except for an enormous black dog that allowed me to ascend the four steps up to the verandah before it got up to inspect the beach out the front. I sat in a chair and looked around – there was no one in sight.
Immediately behind the huts grew thick jungle, mostly very tall mangrove trees. No sign of land was visible across the other side of the sea of river. A boat chugged past away in the distance, leaving only the sound of the waves hitting the shore. The cool breeze was great but what was better was that I had this beach all to myself. I watched the vultures and other birds wading and an old work-horse of a boat with a blue sail come in close to shore. Further out a sailing boat showed only as a dark triangle of sail against the horizon.
A man arrived from the opposite direction that I had come from. He carried a large sack of ice, which he put in the freezer. I guessed that there was no electricity. Another man carried in two big, shining fish. This was a stroke of luck for both me and the cat that had come to look me over. This beast was a perfect miniature of the jaguar that I had been enraptured of in the Belem zoo. It had short, dense, jet-black fur and a square head with large, yellow-green eyes. A man with a gun walked past and the dog barked at him frantically. ‘Bom dia,’ he called to me.
In the meantime the owner of the hut had appeared and provided me with a drink and I had ordered fish for lunch. It arrived, and I was monumentally disappointed. He had turned that beautiful, silver fish into four slabs of tastelessness coated with sawdust. My second mistake had been making friends with the cat. Now I felt a tap on my knee. I could tell from the firmness of it that there would be no argument. Never mind, there was plenty to share.
I left to meet my motorbike after using the toilet. At least I hope that’s what it was. A topless square wooden box on stilts nearby, it had a hole cut in one corner of its wooden floor that seemed to be suitable for the purpose.
Walking back along the shore I thought that the water seemed higher. Could this be a tidal beach? You bet your bippy it was. I arrived at the beach to find it had disappeared. No sandy crescent remained where I had left it – it had done a bunk.
As I stood there wondering what to do, a man came up behind me. ‘This way, follow me,’ he said, and headed off into the jungle. I followed. The foliage of the trees met overhead, shading the path, which was hung about with lianas and vines. The ground was carpeted with white convolvulus flowers. A trail led through to the other side and there was the river, now running a torrent with the tide pouring in. The man kept walking and I tagged along. We continued along the river’s edge until we came to where the canoe was anchored out from the bank. The ferryman appeared and waded out chest-high to retrieve the canoe and paddle it around the bend where the waves were not so strong and it was possible to beach it. On the other side of the river Ms Hell’s Angel waited. I had no small money, so she paid the ferryman for me and we had a pleasant ride back to the town past the wallowing buffalo.
During my two-hour siesta that day I dreamed that I was in a sinking ship. I hoped it wasn’t an omen – I still had to get back to the mainland from here. At sundown I ambled along the esplanade to look over the weekly boat from Belem that had already arrived and would now wait at the wharf until departure on Sunday. It was not too flash, but it did have lifeboats.
I sat on a garden bench that overlooked the river and, fanned by a zephyr, watched the sun go down. Small boats pottered about their business and the car ferry clanged its iron maw shut and chugged across and back again. Lights gradually came on as the river darkened and the clouds turned grey. The sky reddened and then was dark enough to show the sickle moon. People came to occupy other seats or rode horses into the river for their daily bath from the landing barge’s ramp.
The next morning, Sunday, I bought my ticket for the evening boat back to Belem. As I was the first customer, the ticket-seller allocated me pride of place directly in front of the TV and was amazed to hear I didn’t want it. Then I took a motorbike taxi out to see Surre’s other beach, which was thirteen kilometres away on a track that consisted entirely of potholes. But the scenery was idyllic. After leaving the edge of town, we passed through a series of villages with houses of mud-brick or wooden planks and straw roofs. Later there were goats and buffaloes wallowing in mud. I decided that this looked a thoroughly enjoyable occupation and that I should try it one hot day. The vegetation cascading onto the track was lush – creepers with big blue or white flowers like convolvulus, bushes with clusters of dark pink blossoms and crowded palm trees that gave way to mangroves as we reached the beach.
This beach was also deserted; only the waves breaking on the shore disturbed the long white stretch of sand. Opensided, round, wooden huts with conical thatched roofs paraded in a line along the shore. Behind them was a shack that offered beer and sustenance. I ordered lunch, I thought. It never came, so maybe I didn’t. But after an hour my taxi did, so I left still hungry. Back at the edge of town my driver, a lithe and handsome young fellow, stopped and looked both ways, twice. Beats me why. I hadn’t seen a vehicle the whole thirteen kilometres out or back. As this was Sunday, the traffic, except for an occasional bike, was nil.
Boarding the boat for the trip back to Belem I paid two real extra and this princely sum bought me the privilege of riding in the air-conditioned saloon on the top deck. But at first I sat outside with the hoi polloi, because I could see better and the breeze was refreshing. After we left the shelter of the island, however, the weather became cold and I retreated inside. On a lower deck you could buy toasted sandwiches from the galley, outside which a girl stood with a tray of lollies for sale. It was an agreeable four-and-a-half hour trip. The trauma lay in dismounting. Our boat tied up alongside another, across which I had to fight, dragging my bag through a shoving crowd, and then negotiate my way up a steep metal ladder and leap across onto the wharf.
At the Hotel Central I was reunited with the desk clerk, who greeted me effusively and gave me a bright, spacious room that overlooked the main street from the second floor. On a corner of the building and triangular shaped, it had French doors that opened onto a balcony that was engulfed by one of the huge mango trees that lined the street. I slept with the shutters open and in the morning was awakened by thousands of birds. Padding barefoot on the wooden parquet floor between the wash basin and marble-topped dressing table, I prepared for the marathon bus ride to Rio that commenced at eleven.
Ready early, I decided I might as well rock on out to the bus station. I had been having trouble with my door lock, which, each time I had used it, had become more recalcitrant and now utterly refused to budge. I wrestled with it, banged it and swore at it. Then I had a moment of panic. Several actually. I could miss my bus. My room was on the extreme end of the building and pretty isolated. I could go out onto the balcony and scream blue murder and no one would hear me for the traffic. Even if they did hear me, they probably wouldn’t understand what I was carrying on about. Eyeing the three-and-a-half metre high door into the corridor, I decided that to be heard through it I would have to climb up onto the wardrobe and break its glass top – and a leg or two into the bargain, most likely. There was no one out there anyway. Struggling with the door again, I shouted and banged, sweating and swearing something shocking. After about twenty minutes more of this unseemly behaviour, the bloody door finally flew open. What a relief.
The bus left an obligatory ten minutes late – did the bus companies adhere to dinner party rules around here? But I was delighted with this vehicle. At its rear there was a decent loo and a cooler containing cold drinks and chocolate milk. And there was no video or music blaring. The bus had only one flaw. The metal armrests between the seats wouldn’t completely retract, so that even though the bus was only partly filled and I got two seats to myself, the armrest stuck in my back if I tried to lie down.
We drove out of Belem, heading more or less due south, on a one-car-wide strip of potholed, bumpy bitumen. The country either side was covered in thick jungle, scarred every so often by a patch of cleared land. I saw few villages. They were widely spaced and plainer and poorer the further we got from Belem. Although Brazil occupies almost half the South American continent, its interior is largely undeveloped.
Later there were massive expanses of cleared land. In places nothing had been left, not even the odd tree, and it seemed to me that soon there would be no rainforest at all. But some of the undulating expanses of green sward, dotted with white cows, looked very pretty. Then there were occasional big faciendas – coffee plantations – where kilometres of coffee trees marched in formation to the horizon. And sometimes I spied a grand house surrounded by workers’ cottages and coffee-drying kilns belching smoke. Brazil is still the world’s biggest coffee grower.
A few hours further south we stopped for a meal. I had been waiting for this for some time, as it was by then half past three. The cafe provided a well-stocked buffet for five real, and I did it justice, thinking that it might be the last food I got my hands on for some time. After this, however, we stopped frequently. The Brazilians all charged off the bus clutching towels and toothbrushes and washed and showered at every opportunity, but there was litter absolutely everywhere I looked in the villages and around the roadhouses.