Authors: Christopher Buckley
Above us we see a half-dozen monkeys of the “smelly” macaque variety, but our nostrils are filled with the sweetness of
damas de noche
blossoms.
Back to the ship for Malcolm’s press conference. He enters with Gus wrapped around his arm and assures twenty reporters that Brazil’s $100 billion foreign debt will just have to be “restructured.” (He does not add, “because your government is inept.” We are guests here.) The press greatly relieved. Front-page headline next day: “Forbes: No Crisis in Brazil.”
We (finally) shove off. Ten miles downriver we pass from the cola-red of the Rio Negro into the café-au-lait of the Solimões, the river that will carry us the twelve hundred miles to Iquitos, with some help from the twin GM 900-horsepower diesel engines. The meeting of the two waters is dramatic. They don’t mix for a long stretch, owing to differing density, speed, and coloration.
Glenn the bagpiper appears in full regalia at the bow to pipe us through to the tune, naturally, of “The Meeting of the Waters.”
“Know why the waters don’t mix?” asks Dr. Nunez. He is a young and friendly Brazilian specialist in tropical diseases who Malcolm thought it prudent to have along.
“Speed, density—”
“Racism,” he smiles.
After lunch Kip and I inflate the wading pool we bought in the market at Manaus and splash about. The only thing the designer left out was a pool. We are three degrees under the equator, and the sun blazes hot—about 105 degrees at midday. After no more than fifteen minutes, skin turns pink. After thirty minutes, precancerous.
Later that afternoon, sitting in the fantail salon with the wonderful dioramas of whaling scenes and shipbuilding, I hear a bang-bang-BANG underneath. Should I tell the captain? Minutes later the crew are pulling up the floorboards and frowning. Half an hour later they’re donning wet suits. Dr. Nunez, who has a bit of the perverse about him, watches them while calling out the names of various things they are apt to run into down there.
“Pirarucu!” he trills. These get up to ten feet, two hundred fifty pounds.
“
Piraiba!
” Six feet, three hundred pounds.
“Piranha!” Small, but massively inconvenient.
We tender over for dinner with the
Virginians
, Lucky not altogether happy about bats diving in and out of flashlight beams. Kip clutches a catalog on the Forbes collection of Victoriana. “I thought King Constantine might be interested, since he’s Victoria’s great-great-grandson.” Simeon is related as well. My eyes fasten on a photograph of a huge pair of bloomers. Item number 44: “Personally Hers.” I suppress the temptation to ask Kip what a pair of imperial bloomers goes for.
John Kluge shows us around. The
Virginian
used to be the
Highlander IV
, so Kip is familiar. John, like Malcolm, collects. An entire wall of beautiful and rare seashells. Also, various early U.S. Navy dirks and cutlasses; an arrow from the
Mary Rose
, Henry VIII’s flagship; a letter from Nelson; a hammock hook from the USS
Constitution
. His other interests, past and present:
Cats
(22 percent); Ice Capades; Harlem Globetrotters; a collection of seventy-two carriages; serious quantities of art, including a personally financed ten-year project of “narrative art” entitled “Seven Lagoons”; Democratic party politics. John is the only Democrat I know worth $4 billion. Come to think of it, he is the only
person
I know worth $4 billion.
Kip talks about Trinchera Ranch, his father’s place in Colorado. Originally 170,000 acres. “It was nice, because everything you could see from the house was ours. Then Pa bought an additional eighty-seven thousand acres and it was even nicer, because everything you saw from the plane was ours.” I like Kip.
It dawns on me uneasily that I am the only one calling the king of Bulgaria Simeon.
Malcolm helicopters in from meeting with President Sarney.
“How was he?”
“In better shape than he should be.” I take this as a reference to Brazil’s foreign debt, now over $100 billion.
He showers and changes into a pair of extremely loud WASP-psychedelic-pink slacks with smiling lions heads and plays bridge with the Roosevelts and Kip.
I read Jacques Cousteau’s enthralling book on his Amazon expedition. The river we are on has ten tributaries longer than the Mississippi, produces twelve times its outflow, and could fill Lake Ontario in three hours.
The current here is swift, five knots, bringing huge trees that crash against the hull at night, starting you awake. At first I wondered why the ship swerved so sharply at night; now I know why. The current also carries floating islands of
canarana
grass, which King Constantine and Lord Romsey shoot at with deer rifles.
Silvio arrives as we dive into butterscotch sundaes and says the
Virginian
has radioed. Some of them are planning to spend the night in the jungle.
“Why?” asks Malcolm. A
wise
question.
“They want to hear the sounds of the jungle,” says Silvio.
Malcolm ponders this. “We’ll supply them with a tape.”
Kip and I volunteer to go along. Rather, Kip volunteers and I go along. Comfortable trips make the worst stories. Best to have something to complain about.
Tonight is Archie’s sixty-ninth birthday. Some of us learn for the first time that he was in the CIA from 1947 to 1974 and that he will publish his memoirs this year. Lucky reveals he speaks “about twenty” languages.
After dinner we watch rest of Cousteau documentary, in which Amazonians tell him about pink dolphins seducing women and getting them pregnant.
We go ashore and hack our way several hundred yards into the jungle to get flavor of it. After three minutes Malcolm, dripping in sweat, tells Silvio, “I think we’ve got the point.” Hearty agreement all around, but we are urged on by the guides and press on, providing a banquet for ants and mosquitoes.
At lunch Simeon recounts the story of being driven out of Bulgaria by the Communists at age ten, after the Soviets murdered his father, King Boris, and his uncle, the regent. His mother was convinced they were never going to be allowed to leave. When the train carrying him and his mother mysteriously stopped just short of the Turkish border, his mother thought their “Varennes” was at hand: a summary firing squad against the siding. But it was the engineer who had stopped the train, refusing to go any farther. “I will not be the one to drive the king out of Bulgaria!” It was probably his death warrant. A Turkish engineer was sent for, and Simeon and his mother made it safely out of their country.
Halfway through this much more detailed and spellbinding story, he stops and says, “I think I must be boring you.”
“My God,” sputters Malcolm. “Most of us have to read history. We don’t get the chance every day to talk to it.”
Simeon is a remarkable man: scholarly, pious, a natural raconteur. That night I start calling him “Your Majesty.” He is amused by this and starts calling me “Your Excellency.”
We’re about half the way to Iquitos, six hundred miles from Manaus.
Breakfast conversation fixes on the enormous black beetle that has affixed itself to our upper deck during the night. I do not join in the excitement over the errant coleoptera because Kip and I are preparing to helicopter forty-five miles upriver to join up with the
Virginians
for our night in the jungle.
We land in a soccer field in the town of Fonte Boa, and are swarmed by small children—one of whom I see is wearing a Banana Republic T-shirt—and the king of Greece. Furious preparations are underway aboard the
Virginian
for our expedition. Lord Romsey is packing a Walther PPK, the king has a .38 tucked into his waistband.
Two very hot and unpleasant hours later we are paddling in dugout canoes through the
varzea
, the flooded forest. Piranhas dimple the surface and larger things splash behind half-submerged rubber trees. Vines droop like snakes. The Cutter mosquito repellent—God bless you, Mr. Cutter—burns like acid on our sweat-drenched faces.
The king and Lord Romsey go off to shoot deer—or anything furry or feathery that moves. We sit miserably in the dugouts, provender for ectoparasites, chiggers, mosquitoes, and protozoans. (As I write this two weeks later, I scratch at a bubbly rash that has turned my body from head to toe into a Rand McNally relief map.)
After a series of loud shotgun explosions, the king of Greece hoves up in a dugout, looking content and smoking a cigarette. “We had a very nice wander through the forest,” he says. “Shot a few trees. One of these fellows,” he grins, thumbing back toward the native guides, “was told who I am. He’d never heard of the term. He said to me, ‘How do you get to be one of those?’ ” He laughs. “He said, ‘Is it like the ones in the Bible? Why don’t you have your crown?’ I told him, ‘Well, it’s a bit hot.’ Then he asked me if I knew any pharaohs.”
Kip and I end up in a native hut politely but firmly declining the gracious offer of a shared meal of catfish—with head and guts—boiled in Amazon water and poured on manioc.
Hundreds of thousands of fireflies. The guides paddle silently through the forest making a
“Whoaan! Whoaan!”
sound to attract jacares—the Amazonian crocodilians. Enormous insects flit in and out of flashlight beams. Something the size of a bird—but not a bird—lands on my face.
Hours later, back at camp, the king, Pat, and Norton arrive with two small crocs, speared but still alive and looking distinctly pissed off.
We eat a dinner of tomato soup, fruit, and chocolate. Dripping with sweat, reeking, and eyes and cuts stinging with Cutter’s, we spend a fitful night in hammocks covered in mosquito netting, listening to the sounds of the guides in the distance hunting jaguar.
A hard rain falls as we paddle back to the
Highlander
, which to these itchy eyes looks like Paris. Breakfast of eggs, bacon, muffins, juice, coffee. It turns out the others went crocodile hunting last night as well. My sense is everyone greatly relieved not to have seen any. While sitting in the back of a dugout, our helicopter pilot, Chuck Dixson, was backed into a termite nest. Chuck is reportedly not in a good mood this morning.
John Kluge arrives to play a few rubbers of bridge. I turn the thermostat to forty below and go to bed between clean sheets.
Kluge is an interesting guy: He made $7,000 playing poker while a scholarship student at Columbia—he was a classmate of Thomas Merton’s, whom he remembers as a “playboy.” To judge from lunch conversation, he has creamed the
Highlander
crowd at bridge, though he
says
he hasn’t played it in fifteen years. Malcolm abdicates his seat to Kip. One must consider before sitting down to cards with the second-wealthiest man in America—the man started with zilch.
That night I start out of my sleep at 3:00
A.M
. when a huge log
thunnngs
into our hull. I walk forward in the hailstorm of insects and stand awhile as the
Highlander
’s searchlight sweeps back and forth across the water. No lights on either shore. The
Virginian
is behind us, slaloming through the logs.
Nearing Peru now, the river getting narrower, more interesting. Instead of a solid wall of green at river’s edge, the jungle opens here and there,
revealing emerald pastures and cavernous hollows with liana vines for stalactites. Another new sight: Natives paddle out in their dugouts, waving, to surf in our wake. A strange, but not unwelcome, absence of vultures.
Malcolm announces that the
Virginian
s will be coming over and there will be skeet off the aft deck before lunch. We practice with the 12-gauge pump guns we have aboard to repel terrorists. Simeon and Margarita, veterans of many Spanish shoots, knock the clay birds down one after another.
Unfortunately, their king and their lord beat our king and our queen. Checkmate.
“The last thing I shot was Germans,” grins Malcolm, declining a turn.
Dinner aboard
Virginian
. The Kluges lay on another fine spread: slices of beef rolled around horseradish cream on fried toast, caviar atop blue cheese, a dripping Brie
en croute
, fresh cakes, and a beautiful split of icy-cold German dessert wine.
Lots of congratulations on having made it through our night in the jungle. “Hold on,” I demur, “and see if two months from now we’re all covered with scarlet blotches and our noses fall off.” (Prescient, that.)
Glenn the steward/bagpiper says he gets up every morning before dawn to practice his bagpiping on the top deck. He says the villagers come down to the water’s edge and clap and dance. “It’s really something.” The crew is, without exception, exceptional.
We visit an Indian village a mile up an estuary, guided by Chuck above in the helo. I crouch in the high-speed Donzi as we make our approach to the village, figuring: Here are two high-speed boats and a helicopter in an area way off the beaten path. If I were the local coke baron, I’d guess I was under attack by a bunch of gringo drug agents disguised as rich WASPs.
But the villagers are welcoming. We exchange gifts and poke around. Everyone wears a little wooden cross around the neck, even the babies.
Later this afternoon we arrive at the junction of Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. As various officials of all three countries amuse themselves with the ship’s copier, we go ashore.
Leticia is, you might say, a freebase-port. They assemble untaxed electronics components here, but the city’s economy essentially runs on cocaine, brought down from the nearby mountains in paste form, called
pasta básica
. It’s sent on from here for further processing into cocaine hydrochloride, the alkaloid that has done so much to improve the quality of life in the United States and elsewhere.
We motor past a flotilla of boats and seaplanes confiscated from drug runners. Carlos, the guide aboard
Virginian
, keeps up a running monologue as we walk through the streets.