Wry Martinis (26 page)

The temples are steep. A guide had recently fallen down one of them to his death. In six hours of climbing we did a year’s worth of Stairmaster. Our local guide droned on in an amusing, Victorian English monotone under the hot sun—“We are now in de central acropolis, built on top of de previous structure, obeying de needs of time …”—as he told us what had happened here between 600
B.C
. and
A.D
. 1000. As usual with Mayan temples, sacrifices were the main event. The victims, Luis the guide told us, “were narcotized, then degraded, de arms and leg joints dislocated, then dey were tied over the stone, decapitated, the blood collected and offered and burned with herbs.” One unhappy prisoner was kept for seventeen years of bloodletting rituals before having his head cut off. They played a version of basketball, with a human skull
coated with hard rubber; the losing team ended up on the sacrificial slabs. To date, archeologists have found no evidence of any baseball strikes in Tikal.

It was a society in which you were really better off being a noble. That’s true of 99 percent of civilizations, but given what went on here, being a noble at least kept the scalpel-wielding priests at arm’s length. The Maya had a keen grasp of the advantages of class. If they’d had an airline, it would have been all first-class; coach passengers would have been tied to the wing, with the flight attendants coming by to poke holes in their tongues. The better neighborhoods at Tikal were strictly off-limits to the common folk. The only way you got to the top of one of those temples was if you were building it or depositing your heart on it. The nobles wore lots of jade—Lord Ah Cacao’s robes contained sixteen pounds of jade—and got to eat a special diet containing more protein than the working-class schmoes, as a result of which their skeletons are on average ten centimeters longer than the others. Luis mentioned that they were given to “ritual enemas, with powdered [hallucinogenic] mushrooms.” On hearing this, the Vegans began to murmur among themselves. The nobles wore beautiful headdresses of quetzal feathers and hummingbird wings. According to Luis, “They made themselves cross-eyed as a sign of beauty.” I don’t know how they managed that, but you can see it in the frescoes. They all do look cross.

I remember two things of Tikal. The first was a scratch of Mayan graffiti, perfectly preserved, showing a skull beside two vertical bars and two dots. Each dot represents five, each bar, one; the skull represents death. It means “twelve dead.” Whether from disease, or losing at basketball, or in battle, no one knows, but there it was on the wall, twelve hundred years later.

The second was watching the sunset from the top of Temple IV. Lord Ah Cacao finished Temple IV in
A.D
. 741, a year before Charlemagne was born. We were almost two hundred feet up, above the jungle canopy, looking down over all of Tikal, watching the lengthening shadows and listening to a cacophony of macaws, red-lored parrots, black falcons and howler monkeys. Hurrying back to the Jungle Lodge through the gloaming, Tom and I got briefly lost, which was not a comforting sensation in this vast, tangly agora of bats and ghosts; but soon we were swigging white cane rum with Jaime as two British women swam topless in the dirty pool.

By 1:00
P.M
. the next day we were back in Belize, “civilization,” as our driver smiled once we’d made it across the border. A de Havilland Twin Otter STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) flew us to Gallon Jug, where a bus took us to a miracle of exotic hospitality built on the plaza of a Mayan ruin. Chan Chich Lodge consists of twelve thatched-roof bungalows, very good dining room, very good bar, nature trails, birds, jungle cats, monkeys, unexcavated ruins, a forbidding river, and that’s about it. It was the brainchild of Barry Bowen, who owns the beer and Coca-Cola concession in Belize. When you control the flow of beer and Coke in a hot country, you’re doing very well. He hired two ex—U.S. Special Forces officers, and the wife of one of them, to build and run this sequestered Xanadu. It’s run extremely well. The only complaint I heard in our three days there was from the Vegans, who, apparently, were simply not getting enough protein.

Jimmy Carter had been there recently, with seventeen of his children and grandchildren, and the usual battalion of Secret Service agents. It’s not quite the same as hearing that George Washington had slept there, but in the jungle you take the cachet as it comes.

By now Tom and I had had enough tree lore to last us the nineties, so we mostly lay in our hammocks reading, secure in the knowledge that no phones would ring, the ultimate luxury. There can’t be many places on earth as lovely as the porches at Chan Chich, entangled with hibiscus, bougainvillaea, wisteria, golden shower, wandering Jew, avocado, poinsettia, flame of the woods, ginger and oyster plants. Toward sunset, the birds start to go bonkers. Ornithologists probably have a more precise term for it, but whatever it is, it’s loud, starting out as a crepuscular Vivaldi string quartet, with the
poip-poip
of the tree frogs, and gradually building, with a little help from the ubiquitous oscellated turkeys, to an 1812 Overture. But it is nothing compared with what wakes you up in the middle of the night. The first morning, Tom said to me, somewhat shaken, “Did you
hear
that?” Yes, I shuddered. What was that? It sounded like the Primeval Id, being denied antacid tablets. The answer—Jaime had all the answers—was several hundred very agitated howler monkeys. “It was probably,” he said, “some male dominance issue.” Whatever it was, you would not want to get in the middle of it. No wonder the Maya went into caves and perforated their penises.

In the midmorning heat you could walk to where the real bird-watching action was—at the dump. The smell was a bit high, but the
mounds of ordure were covered with enough feathered delights to keep any birder scribbling happily in his logbook. At night, after dinner, we hung by the bar, listening to Tom and Norman, the two Vietnam-era Green Berets who built Chan Chich, with twenty or so laborers in just twenty months, for $400,000. One story they told was an object lesson on why the omens are not good for the human species.

Some Mennonites and Belizeans and Guatemalans had been illegally logging Guatemalan mahogany and hauling it over the border into Belize, on Barry Bowen’s land. Tom and Norman found a pile of it worth about one million dollars. They told Bowen about it and offered to burn it. No, Bowen said, we need to let the government know about this. Thus did the Belizean government and the Guatemalan government enter in and start a game of diplomatic Ping-Pong. The Guatemalans said, We’ll come and get the lumber. The Belizean government, well aware of Guatemala’s smouldering lust for annexation, said, No, we’ll bring it to you. Oh no, said Guatemala, no Belizean trucks on Guatemala’s sovereign soil. Standoff. So, said Tom, we now have Guatemalan troops in Belize guarding the lumber while Guatemala builds a road through a nature preserve in order to get to it. He shook his head. “The lumber will have rotted by the time they get to it, and squatters will come in on the new road and settle in the biosphere.” Tom and Norman had some perspective on it, anyway, having survived a previous jungle conundrum.

The next day we STOL-ed to Ambergris Cay, on the coast. It rained and was buggy, and the beaches were full of waste. It would be stretching it to call Ambergris Cay “paradise.” Some went scuba diving, and reported great success, some of us hung around San Pedro, shooting pool and eating stone crab claws at Elvi’s. Every time we heard a plane take off, Tom and I would look up longingly, like the people in Rick’s Cafe in
Casablanca
at the flight to Lisbon. It was time to go home. We had half an hour between planes in Miami to call up the Vegans’ airline and cancel their special meals.

—
Forbes FYI
, 1994

On way from Newark (freezing) to Manaus (steambath) aboard Forbes’s Boeing 727,
The Capitalist Tool
, I read aloud to company from Alex Shoumatoff’s remarkable book
The Rivers Amazon
. Contains graphic medical descriptions of various ways Amazon can ruin your entire day—including nose dropping off, blindness from insects crapping in eyeball—and memorable section on toothpick-size catfish with fondess for “mammalian orifices,” which must be surgically removed.

“Unh,” says someone.

About to move on to snakes and furry arachnids, am told to shut up.

We land.
The Highlander
and
The Virginian
are waiting at the dock in Manaus, guarded by men with shotguns. Glenn Ellison,
Highlander’s
second steward, pipes us aboard with bagpipes.

Forbes—hereinafter, Malcolm—gives us the Cook’s tour: The top-most deck is a solarium, as if a
bateau-mouche
had been grafted on top. There are four guest suites in addition to Malcolm’s master suite, with its whirlpool and steambath and Spanish-galleon rear picture window. I draw Burgundy. Others are Blue, White, and Gray. The king of Bulgaria says, “It’s clever. This way no one is offended by being given ‘Cabin Number Four.’ ”

After dinner our omnicompetent guide, Silvio Barros, gives us a brief sketch of what’s ahead. Tomorrow we’ll see the famous Manaus opera house, built by the rubber barons at the turn of the century, when Manaus was booming. Contrary to popular legend, Enrico Caruso did not sing there. Silvio apologizes that no operas are being currently put on.

“It’s the perfect opera house,” observes Kip Forbes. “You can see it but you can’t hear it.”

We bus around Manaus. The public market, built by Eiffel, reeks of putrescent catfish. Vultures swarm over shantytowns. At the opera house we learn that after a military coup in the seventies, the military government decreed that the beautiful rose-colored building be painted—gray, to conform with all official buildings. The kings of Greece and Bulgaria, having extensive experience of the military mind, shake their heads.

A buffet is spread at the Hotel Tropical. We’re given drinks made of
cachača
—napalm-strength sugarcane rum—and passion fruit. Eyeballs poached, we eat grilled local fish,
tucunaré
. For dessert, a manioc pudding with cloves. “Let’s hope the prussic acid has been leached out,” says the king of Bulgaria, diving in.

We cross the Rio Negro, a major Amazonian tributary, and hike a short distance into the jungle to Salvador Lake.

Lucky Roosevelt to Malcolm: “You know, Archie’s grandfather died of his trip to Brazil. He caught a fever and he was never right after that.”

The appearance of a three-foot-long crocodilian inhibits immediate gleeful scampering into the lake, though everyone’s faint with heat and soaked through with sweat. Lucky, Esteban, and Kip gamely jump in.

Archie: “They say alligators only take small pieces out of you.”

Guide: “Yes, but sometimes the wrong pieces.”

Later, during cocktails on the
Highlander
, Pat Kluge appears, stunning in crinkly white cotton shirt, with boa constrictor, Gus, coiled around her arms. Gus belongs to our sous-chef, David, and eats day-old chicks and mice. Mice hard to come by in Manaus. Rats plentiful, but generally too large for Gus to swallow.

Dinner of cold pear soup, tiny lamb chops, rosettes of baked mashed potato. Dessert is piped in by the steward to the tune of “The Green Hills of Tyrol”: three sherbets garnished with mint leaves and candied violets, all inside brass incense pots from Thailand.

Kip explains his father was served petits fours inside these at a hotel in Thailand, with dry ice smoke pluming out the holes. He expresses disappointment because the Manaus dry ice factory was closed until tomorrow afternoon. “We’ll just have to make do.” Guests feel insulted
and complain bitterly. After dinner, Cuban cigars courtesy of Hassan, king of Morocco, via diplomatic pouch, hence not illegal, Malcolm emphasizes.

The
Virginians
are piped ashore to “Auld Lang Syne.” The passengers and crew of the Greek cruiser docked across from us are leaning over the rails to get a glimpse of the Greek king and queen. As Constantine returns their waves, the ship issues three deafening blasts from its stack—“Go with God” in marine signal language. The crowd roars, the scene suddenly charged and cinematic.

The big ship pulls out, eventually becoming a blazing wedding cake of strung lights in the distance. We watch it recede in the darkness.

“It’s interesting,” says Simeon. “Tino (the king) went aboard before dinner to have an ouzo with the crew. But the captain never showed up. So he thinks he must have views.”

Up early for canoe trip into jungle. Malcolm advises us to oil up against mosquito bites—the local variety is chloroquine-resistant—with something made by Avon (Ding-Dong) called Skin-So-Soft. It’s a body lotion made for soft-skinned ladies, but apparently the malarial anopheles mosquitoes detest it.

“Who told you about this?” I ask, skeptical but nonetheless smearing myself all over.

“Nancy Pierpont.”

“Who?”

Kip interjects, as Kip often does: “You know Nancy. She has a
great
sense of humor.”