leaving Boa Vista

Getting out of town was seeming increasingly unlikely.   I had spent some of my time in Boa Vista visiting with Catholic priests and lay workers to talk about Indian issues, so I returned to the church offices and wandered into their library.  I may have been in an odd frame of mind, but their books seemed piled like sandbags against the hostile fire of the world.  Or maybe they were just moving the books around.  I was looking for material they had published on the Indian question, though I also noticed a pamphlet about Evelyn Waugh’s visit to Boa Vista with a drawing on the cover of the writer emerging from the jungle in a skirt.  I had an interesting conversation with a lay brother, an Italian who had lived in the country many years and taken a Brasilian wife.  We talked about cultural survival and assimilation.

          I also talked while I was there about the general state of the Catholic Church and about politically active Liberation Theology, which was claimed to address the social reality of the poor, but for which the poor seemed indifferently enthused and there was under way a constant erosion of church attendance as the poor blacks embraced the African religions and poor whites and mixed races embraced evangelical protestantism.  It seemed that the Church’s adoption of political activism might not be speaking to their social reality and I asked one of the priests if this didn’t concern him.  He replied that for 500 years the Church never did any good in Brasil.  And it was true that the Church was not growing in numbers, but it was growing as a conscience.

At length, I heard from my guide that his vehicle would shortly be fixed and so I checked out of my hotel, not because I believed him but because I had resolved that either we actually went somewhere that day or I would take the evening flight back to Manaus.  It was raining outside and in the lobby of the Hotel Euzibio flies were walking over the TV watchers, who ignored them.  

          But alas, our mission must abort, as the car, now reassembled, cannot be started.  And I, a person of tropical patience, finally gave up and told my guide that it was not meant to be and I was going back to Manaus. I paid him 3,000 Cruzados (US$13) for his services to put a dignified end to the thing, though it turned out there was no flight to Manaus that evening and I must return to the hotel for another night.  The nice lady at the desk was happy to see me again so soon and I could have my old room back.

Freed of my guide, I found that Boa Vista was actually a pleasant enough place, or at least easy to get around in on foot.  The rain had stopped and the sun was out and I walked down to a place where I could sit on a balcony in the breeze and look out across the river at sand bars and beaches and forest and fields beneath huge, towering clouds in the eastern sky.  For all the frustration of the trip, I was glad I had come here and, if there was nothing to be accomplished, then I was content with that, and the next evening I flew back to Manaus.

These events took place twenty-five years ago and to judge by what I find on Google Images, almost every place I went has been changed significantly and, in the case of some undeveloped areas, are now essentially beyond recognition.  Much of the world I saw seems no longer to exist.

an afternoon with smugglers

Evelyn Waugh had visited Boa Vista in 1933, coming down from what was then British Guiana, and told the story in his travel book Ninety-two Days.  He described his first encounter with the residents, thus: “The vaqueiros studied us with an air which I came to recognize as characteristic of Boa Vista . . . conveying, as it did, in equal degrees, contempt, suspicion and the suggestion that only listlessness kept them from active insult.”  And later, “[The inhabitants] are naturally homicidal by inclination, and every man, however poor, carries arms; only the universal apathy keeps them from frequent bloodshed . . . The German at the Priory constantly slept with a loaded gun at his bedside and expressed surprise at seeing me go shopping without a revolver.”  It was mainly on the strength of Waugh’s account that I went to Boa Vista and I was not disappointed.

     When Waugh visited the place it was sleepy and retrograde; when I visited it was wild west.  Boa Vista has grown in a few years from a village of 5,000 to a bustling town of over 50,000, fueled by the discovery of gold and diamonds.  In addition to prospectors, the area had attracted landless squatters from the Northeast who are encroaching on the large estates and the substantial Indian lands.  This is in addition to Boa Vista’s traditional industry of smuggling.  If Manaus prices had seemed to be set for Japanese businessmen, Boa Vista prices seemed to be set for successful gold prospectors.

     The Territory of Roraima, the northern-most part of Brasil, is the home of the Yanomami Indians, the largest primitive group in Latin America.  There are perhaps 20,000 Yanomami all told, living in adjoining areas of Brasil, Colombia and Venezuela.  Those living in Brasil number perhaps 9,000.  Their rights to their ancestral lands are allegedly protected by Brasilan law, but the boundaries had never been demarcated and with the urging and support of resident priests the Indians were claiming nine million acres.  Since in other parts of the country squatters are willing to risk death and kill to claim 20 or 30 acres, I asked one of the priests if he thought a claim of 1,000 acres for every man, woman and child was going to be thought reasonable.  He replied that when you are negotiating you have to start by asking for more than you expect to get.

     Old ways are slow to change in Boa Vista.  In the previous year, I was told, at the conclusion of a political dispute between the territorial governor and the mayor of Boa Vista, pistoleiros allegedly in the employ of the governor shot the mayor down in the street in broad daylight.  There were no prosecutions and local folk were said to be more outraged by the style than the substance of the shooting, as most I spoke with agreed that the mayor deserved what he got.

     Proximity to the Guyana and Venezuela borders, currency instability in Brasil and the utter chaos in Guyana’s Marxist economy have fueled an active local smuggling industry.  Most of the players were said to congregate socially at what is called “the Mafia corner,” a short distance up from the river.  They were a colorful bunch, with much gold jewelry.  A number carried large brown paper bags from which they periodically drew thick bundles of banknotes to exchange with other local businessmen also carrying brown paper bags.  They had the contented look of men who did not pay taxes.

     I spent an afternoon waiting for our car to be fixed in the company of a bunch of Guyanese smugglers at Kitty’s Beer Garden.  They were in an expansive mood and telling tales of their exploits.  The only one that had any charm was related by a fellow in a lilting Caribbean accent, thus: “I was going across the border with four kilos of gold bars in my bag and this customs guy comes up and says ‘what you got in that bag, gold bars?’ and I say ‘Yeah,’ and he laughs and goes on.”  I had somehow expected smugglers to have more interesting stories.

a travel book by its cover

In conjunction with a list of a hundred "most celebrated travel books", the travel writing site World Hum included a slide show of “Five Great Travel Book Covers”.
http://www.worldhum.com/photos/slideshow/five-great-travel-book-covers


They are all nice covers, but none of them have the dramatic or evocative impact that we are accustomed to on the dust jacket of a novel.

Looking through my own bookcase, I find a similar situation.  The covers are much too earnest, much too concrete to the traveler and his journey.  Too many are based on photographs taken on the spot and carry the suggestion that what is important in the book is the place visited and not the writing or perhaps not even the travel in getting there.  And if the writer is not someone I know and want to read  --  or he didn’t go someplace that I am currently interested in  --  I am unlikely to pick up the book.

Better is the approach of the Oxford cover for Abroad: British Literary traveling between the wars, by Paul Fussell, with its massive looming black bulk of an ocean liner seen from water level, like one of those 1930s posters.  Or Little, Brown’s cover for Evelyn Waugh’s When the Going Was Good, showing Waugh, tweedy, with a pipe and glass of porter in an armchair, staring out impishly, as if he were thinking of something fiendishly clever and is obviously the sort of person whose stories you would like to hear, wherever he had gone.

Perhaps the cover of a travel book presents some peculiar difficulty, some restraint on the imagination not present in the cover art of a novel.  Some writers, it is said, think about the design of their cover before they even write anything, much as they imagine themselves being interviewed fawningly on NPR, but I confess that I have no idea what a dust jacket for my own writing might look like, though I don't think my subject matter gives itself much to photography.  That's what publishers used to get paid for.

[The link above apparently doesn't work anymore, but you won't miss much by not seeing it, which was pretty much the point I was making.   But look at <worldhum> anyway; it's a nice site.]

this may appear to be a travel blog

I intended this to be primarily a blog about writing.  It may appear to be a travel blog, but only because I am writing primarily about travel, albeit travel broadly understood.

I have several cartons of travel journals accumulated from my trips and I am using this opportunity to see if there is anything of value buried away in their pages.   And since I suspect that some of it may be amusing without being publishable, I am using this blog to share these.  As Evelyn Waugh said, we do not value our friends because they amuse us, but because we are able to amuse them.  I think this a better reason than that given by Lytton Strachey for writing letters: that their fundamental purpose was to express the personality of the writer, though there is certainly some of that, too.

And the absence of illustration on this site does not reflect any stern doctrinal position on the superiority of word over image, but only that my scanner blinks and smiles foolishly at me, as if it had no idea what I was asking it to do.  I suppose I really ought get a new one if I intend to be amusing.

bursts of Association & Digression

A well-known author of interesting books on many subjects visited Oaxaca about the same time I did and published his Journal of his time there, which was favorably reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement: “Mexico past and present emerges from these bursts of association and digression with only a few pages of hard history needed.  Luís, an Oaxacan who has joined the party, explains that the legacy of colonialism is to blame for the extremes of wealth and poverty which unsettle all but the most blinkered visitor to the country.  The hopeless squalor which so many Mexicans appear to accept as their lot has resulted from a loss of self-respect, a condition perpetuated by today’s corrupt officials who have assumed the role of the conquistadors.”
    How fortunate that Luís happened by to supply some of that helpful hard history.  This is probably the point at which I ought quote from Evelyn Waugh’s introduction to his book on Mexico, Robbery Under Law, recently re-issued under the less-inflammatory title Mexico: An Object Lesson:
    “Let me, then, warn the reader that I was a Conservative when I went to Mexico and that everything I saw there strengthened my opinions.”
    Waugh’s observation was that Mexico’s backwardness was a post-Independence phenomenon.  Before Independence, Mexico was culturally and economically a leading nation of the hemisphere and, since that time, it had experimented always with the most modern political arrangements, though always of the continental-left variety, and it is these political experiments  --  not some natural, indigenous backwardness or historical bad luck  --   which had brought Mexico down to its present low estate.  Hence, the Mexican “object lesson”.

But whether Waugh is right or not about Mexico, why does the United States never get to plead its legacy of colonialism, particularly as one of its most intractable problems is clearly traceable to colonialism: the importation of African slaves and the settling of a slave economy on a number of the original colonies, such that their union after Independence required the toleration of the institution even by those who found it abhorrent?

~~~~~
On a happier matter, in an installment of “Nova,” archæologists excavate cliff tombs in Chiapas and find evidence of infant sacrifice to Tlaloc, the rain god.  The practice was known from historical records.  The priest would buy a child to sacrifice from his parents, and if the child cried it was a good sign.  We are reminded that we have to understand the Indians’ practices as they saw them, and cut them more slack than we would Thomas Jefferson.

And while we are still on Chiapas, a bit of Progressive Tourism that I caught on CBC.  The Usual Suspects, young and earnest and politically correct, visit the Zapatistas in the forest of Chiapas. As they waited for permission to meet with the comandantes they were permitted to visit the Zapatista gift shop.  When I was in Chiapas a few years before them, even the shops in town were selling Subcomandante Marcos dolls with their little black ski masks and rifles, as well as Marcos key chains and postcards of rifle-wielding Indians in ski masks. I can only imagine what a line of merchandise is now available.
    The Indians were playing their usual mind games, though their young visitors were so innocent and earnest it seemed almost unfair.  The young people anguished over everything; they feared that the Indians might be offended and refuse the money they had collected back home in Canada, but at length the Indians set them at ease on this point and gave them receipts in triplicate.   A young woman in the group of possibly Maoist leanings recommended that they engage in constant self-criticism of their own motives.

~~~~~
I don't think Mexico is any more failed now than it has ever been, though there have been times when that wasn’t saying much.  When I was in Oaxaca in the late ‘Nineties there was a demonstration every day at noon in the square in front of the city offices.  Such stability as the country had seemed to come either from corruption so extensive and institutionalized that almost everyone got  --  or thought they were getting  --  something, or the profound, conservative inertia of the Indians who thought any day you weren't murdered was a good day.  Even when the Indians are bestirred to get guns things don't go very far, as the revolt in Chiapas has been simmering for as long as anyone can remember and a knowledgeable fellow in Oaxaca told me this was simply the latest manifestation of the Cristeros uprising of the 1920s. The Caste War, the Indian revolt in the Yucatán, kept going from 1847 to 1901.  Maybe this time it is worse, but I have been warned about applying gringo logic to these things.