from Santarém to Óbidos

Our boat stayed close to the northern bank to avoid the downstream current and the River was so wide that we only had a near view of this one side.  Once past the few settlements, there are vast stretches of forest with only the occasional open pasture land and only here and there a flimsy structure of cane and matting and plank came out on stilts from the muddy bank, where families quietly and expressionlessly watched us pass.  There were husbands and wives and sometimes an old parent, and many young children, but almost no one who looked like a teenager or young adult, as if when the children reached a certain age they leave and go somewhere else, though I have lost track of the days of the week and perhaps it was only that some of them were at school, but I saw this everywhere along the length of the River.

We saw fires on the far bank.  In several places thick smoke came up from a broad stretch the forest, though the fires seemed separated, as if only certain tracts were being burnt, probably being cleared for cattle.  Brasilian land owners have a problem with forest, for if they do not clear it and put it into use they fear they will be accused of holding idle land and threatened with expropriation.  This insecurity of property makes it very hard to develop a farm, let alone manage a forest.  This policy, ostensibly hostile to latifundia,  in fact favors large enterprises with the capital to immediately put their land into use and makes it difficult for small ranchers who would grow their operation over time to hold contiguous undeveloped land until their herd has grown to need use of it.  

At dawn on the 15th we were back in the main channel, headed for the town of Óbidos.  The River is brownish-white again, colored by sediment of upstream runoff.  As I had feared, my hammock at the railing, fine a view as it provided, proved a bit of a problem when it rained, but a small adjustment brought me under shelter and tropical rain is very good about falling straight down.

The packs of children  --  I would guess them about eight to twelve years old and all of them well-behaved  --  who roam the boat have made my hammock one of their regular stops and I entertain them with the low-tech wonders from my shoulder bag.  An odd thing I noticed was that they didn’t seem to know how how to use a magnifying glass, insisting on holding it up to their eye like a monocle.  Or perhaps they simply found the idea of a monocle more interesting than a magnifying glass.  Though we had plenty of sun there were no ants at hand, so I had no occasion to teach them that childhood staple.  The idea of adjusting binoculars also seemed uncongenial to them.  They are very considerate children who, when they found me in my hammock writing or concentrating on something they would not disturb me but just pass by and some of them gently touch my shoulder.  At Óbidos, a little girl woke me from a nap so that I could see the town.

I get hot when I put on even my sunglasses.  How did Indiana Jones do it in a felt hat and leather jacket?  I discover that the fellow from San Francisco who runs the bar also sells bathroom tissue, something which the ship owners had apparently not considered part of our passage.  Also I discover that in the morning the soft drinks and beer are actually cold, which is not the case later in the day.

On a crowded boat there is of course a great deal of litter produced and I discovered that there were only two ways to dispose of it.  I could throw it into the river myself, or I could put it in one of the two small trash receptacles I have found on our deck and a member of the crew will throw it into the river on my behalf.  Embracing the ethical defense of an intervening moral agency, I chose the second of these.  It could be argued that there is a third option: to carry my trash with me when I leave the boat; but I suspect I would need to go quite some distance inland to be confident that it wouldn’t wind up back in the river, and futile actions are not ethically required.

As we sprawled about, perspiring, in our T-shirts, a German fellow showed me a glossy advertisement from our shipping line that showed a dapper traveler in a pith helmet and a text promising that a trip up the Amazon on one of their boats would be a real adventure.  He thought the ad was quite amusing.

     I am constantly moving about, trying to find a breeze or at least someplace less hot.  Even moving with tropical economy, I perspire continually.  Quite a few got off at Santarém, but there still seem almost as many on board as before.  In the constant press of people there is privacy only in my dreams.  And constant noise. A hard place for the spirit.  But on board the ship is the brown man’s tropics, not the white man’s tropics of verandahs and porters and servants with iced lemonade and long naps in the shade.  There are a few people on board who do not have hammocks and they sleep on life vests spread on the deck like a mattress , which however adequate it may be is less so when the deck is awash with rainwater, which they gamely ignore.  On board our boat it is not the tropics of those insulated by money and race and class.  Not some literary tropics where expats sip rum and write novels.  Despite all this, I am actually finding it interesting, as if there were some pleasure in the discomfort.  This was something new for me.

entering the main channel

We passed the confluence of the Rio Xingú and the river seemed to widen.  The Italian sailors invited me topside to a video interview with an old fellow who had a camcorder and we jabbered away for a while in a mish-mosh of Italian and English and Spanish and seemed amazingly enough to understand each other.  I watched the playback and did not appear a complete fool, even with the red bandana around my forehead that I had forgotten I was wearing.

Dawn of the third day oozes over the horizon directly astern of our boat.  I can lie in my hammock and watch it come up over the River.  We are a few minutes south of the Equator and the Amazon runs east and west and the morning sun enfilades our boat, briefly lighting up the open stalls of the deep interior where families have piled their bundles and hung their hammocks and set up temporary home.  A wake-up call to be up and in line for breakfast before they return to their hammocks for another day of doing nothing because, of course, on the boat there is nothing to do.  All  things considered, I think the children are remarkably well behaved.

The river had changed from brown to black.  We must have finally passed Marajó and entered the main channel of the Amazon.  Breakfast on the third morning was a half-cup of coffee with sugar and cream and all the stale crackers you wanted.  At 7:30 we stopped at Monte Alegre and food sellers came on board.  For about thirty cents I bought a slab of white cheese, dry and slightly sharp, from a little boy.  It was quite good.  He said his mother made it.  I took a few perfunctory photographs of the town in case anyone should later demand proof that I had been to Monte Alegre and wondered why anyone of their own volition would come here.

Floating masses of vegetation like small islands drift past our boat, giving the impression of movement, though we are still tied up.  At length, we are underway again.

Our first trouble: a man rushes down from the upper deck with a small child limp in his arms.  As they pass me the child opens her eyes and looks at me, them closed them again.  With four or five hundred people on a six-day voyage, I suppose the demographic contingencies of birth and death might catch up with us.  I never heard what happened to her.

In mid-morning the clouds part and the sun turns my hammock into an oven and I flee into the interior of the boat.  Topside, I discover that the surly bartender not only speaks English, but is from San Francisco.  I also find that the bar has no salt, which I had been looking for as I was beginning to worry about salt loss from perspiration.

Eventually, I find salt: a cafezinho-cup full, which I put into a plastic bag to carry, while keeping in mind that since the local salt is powdered rather than crystal, that a plastic bag of white powder might look to the authorities less innocent than it in fact was.

Approaching Santarém, we pass into the wide Rio Tapajós and within sight of the town I noticed that the river changed from muddy to dark and clear.  Later that day I heard the first argument.  Some raised voices, but soon settled.  There was not much opportunity to get drunk on the boat.  

I noticed a rainbow and wondered for a moment if I should have expected them to be upside-down in the Southern Hemisphere, or, as we were at the Equator, if it ought to be straight.  In Rio, I had remembered several times to watch water go down a drain to see if it really did go clockwise, as I had long been told the Coriolis Effect required, but thought my results inconclusive.

passing the island of Marajó

As our boat passes settled areas people come out in small craft, often very small children by themselves.  I was at first told that this is for the fish we stir up in our wake, but later someone says it is for the litter constantly being thrown overboard, any sort of container or manufactured material being useful in these remote homesteads. I have watched the small boats, sometimes in danger of being swamped by our wake, and cannot tell which is the truth, other than that at a very young age children go out unattended onto the River. 

Sometime in the torpid afternoon of our first full day on the River we come to Breves on the island of Marajó, our first stop.  Here small canoes come out, some of them actual dugouts, rowed by women and children who beg for money.  People at the railing throw ten-Cruzado notes (about 5 cents, US) into the water where they are scooped up by the children. 

By the end of the first day I had fallen in with a bunch of Italian sailors who invite me to share supper with them.  Already it appears that private arrangements are being made for meals and in fact an independent kitchen has been set up by some women on the lower deck to offer faster service and more selection than the ship’s galley (and the ship, having been paid up front in our fare, seems to have no quarrel with the arrangement).  

The second night I moved my hammock a few inches and found it made all the difference, as no one bumped me and I got a passable night’s sleep.  It helped, of course, that the novelty of the boat had worn off on the children and they no longer ran wild around the deck.  

     By the following day I realized I was on the sun’s schedule, rising at the first hint of light in the eastern sky and retiring to my hammock when it got dark, as did almost everyone else, and in the time between I moved with the shade and lounged in my hammock when there seemed nothing else worth doing.  I left my wristwatch in my pack and forgot about it.  Ship life was becoming more regular and familiar, if rather less sanitary.  The odor of urine from the latrines, rank even before we started, now makes its way back to the stern.  This is all, I suppose, what the lady at the boat office meant by “mais tipica”.

My boatmates gradually begin to emerge as recognizable individuals.  There was a pudgy little man with a mustache in a rumpled suit who carried a briefcase that he never allowed out of his grip, even when he was sleeping in his hammock.  He spoke to no one and I imagined him to be a fleeing embezzler escaping upriver to hide out in a Somerset Maugham short story.

In contrast to this furtive little fellow there was The Gaucho.  Proud of bearing and rugged of appearance, a dense mane of black curls and a d’Artagnan beard, his dress and gear cried out “pampas” and even standing still he seemed to be on horseback.  So impressive was he that I didn’t even consider trying to speak to him, lest he turn out to be just a cowboy.

The people on the boat are wonderfully patient.  They stand uncomplainingly in long lines for each meal.  They are packed in, densely overcrowded, and the ship’s crew  --  surly and seldom-seen  --  pay no attention to them. When they are not waiting in line they doze in their hammock or sit quietly or laugh and joke and seem to be enjoying themselves.  There is no fighting or even harsh words or any “misunderstandings” that need to be soothed over, though I suppose to be completely objective I ought to note that this is only the second day of the trip.

Far from my imagined white suits on the promenade deck, I have given up on wearing a shirt unless I am in direct sun and, not being a sun person at home, was white as flesh-colored snow, which may be why the little dark children found me so curious.

My binoculars seemed to have wandered off and I discover that they were last with a young fellow called Heitor, who remembered that he had given them to some cute girls and goes off to recover them.  I am sure that everyone on board had already met Heitor, as he was charming and insubstantial and innocent of any seriousness, the sort of person who even had he lost my binoculars I could not hold it against him as he was plainly a flake and I ought to have recognized that and not let him borrow the glasses in the first place, so I thanked him when he brought back my property that he had given to the cute girls and resolved never to let him borrow anything else, fairly sure that if I refused it wouldn’t bother him all that much.  Later, finding me writing in my hammock, he told me that I really ought to get myself a girl “to pass the time with”.  He seemed to have several at the moment and I am sure would have been happy to share.   Heitor will probably have a nice enough life, if no one shoots him.

under way

I was comfortable in my perch at the stern rail, only occasionally bothered by trash thrown down from the deck above.  If I can sleep and eat the food and stay out of the rain and not come down with some chiropractic affliction from sleeping six days in a hammock, this could be a pleasant trip.  So I curled up among my fellow bats.

Our hammocks, however widely spaced they might have appeared when they were strung up, once they had a person’s weight in them they hung down and bumped against their neighbor and someone's twitching six spaces away was transmitted from one hammock to another.  But, as there was nothing to be done about it, no one bothered with “desculpa” and everyone seemed to take on faith that we were all doing our best and soon enough we seemed to find some sort of tonic stasis that made it bearable.  The bat to my right was smoking, but there were also some pretty lady bats hanging not far away, and what is adventure but inconvenience rightly understood?

Later, I wandered to the upper deck where I found the bar and bought a bottle of water.  The bartender was short and mustachioed and snarled at his customers and barked out prices as if they were a challenge.  I wondered if he could keep that up for six days.

The nice lady at the boat office had told me that we would depart at seven in the evening; we got underway at 11:30.  It made no difference to me and apparently to no one else.

I slept little that first night, with dreams about awful things happening to little children, though this may simply have been from all the little children running past and bumping against my hammock.  I got up at 5 a.m. when there was just a touch of color in the eastern sky.  I ate a cracker and drank a bit of water and wondered when I should face the ship’s food.  I had seen some of it the evening before and it looked like Dickensian gruel.

Breakfast was interesting.  The four or five hundred people on board reduced down to a single line (actually two lines: there was a separate one for women and children) with some junior crew member in charge, the first person in authority I had seen.  The process took over an hour.

We are ladled an eight-ounce cup of sweet, creamy coffee from an iron pot large enough to cook a missionary in and forked a crushed piece of sweetish bread and then spewed out of the line, with no place to sit.  I wandered back upstairs and sat on the deck with my back against a vibrating bulkhead.  I assumed I would figure this out as the trip progressed.

Though it is said that Belém is at the mouth of the Amazon, this is true only in a general sort of way, as the main channel lies to the north, on the other side of the island of Marajó, a huge riverine island the size of Switzerland which we must pass along narrow channels in order to reach the main course of the River.  These tight, winding passages looks like a place where someone on their own could get lost.  There are few settlements and now and then a flimsy house perched along the bank on stilts, its back to the jungle.

Most of my fellow passengers seemed to be wearing tee-shirts with something written on them.  A sweet old lady was wearing one that said “Oh, Shit”.  I choose to assume she does not understand English.

taking ship

The nice lady at the boat office had said my vessel, the Rondônia, would be “mais tipica”, which I took to mean something like “very traditional”.  I had encountered the word “tipica” several times earlier in the trip, where it had been used on menus to describe dishes that had proven something of a challenge to my taste, but I did want an authentic Amazonian experience and the lady went on to explain that this meant that passengers were to supply their own hammock, which sounded simple enough, so I bought my ticket and asked directions to where I might find the hammock district of Belém and was sent back to Ver o Peso Market where I found a fine selection of inexpensive hammocks.  Since I would need some rope to put up my hammock the fellow cut a length of hemp rope for me with a quick blow of his machete which not only cut the rope cleanly but also took off about an inch of the corner of his counter.  As this did not seem to bother him I assumed he must replace his counter regularly and this was but another small illustration of that great truth that in other countries they do things differently. 

Taking Ship

I arrived at the pier at six p.m., when the nice lady at the boat office had told me boarding would begin.  I passed through a turnstile and saw a handsome vessel with a few passengers lounging at the rail and asked a porter if that fine ship might be the Rondônia.  He shook his head and indicated the next ship down.

I will not trouble Gentle Reader with my romantic expectations regarding the M/V Rondônia, its passengers and appointments, as they were none of them to be.  There would be no white suits on the promenade deck as we watched a glorious tropical sunset.

Oh, there would no doubt be glorious tropical sunsets, but of the Rondônia itself, alas, it resembled nothing so much as a floating Black Hole of Calcutta.  A waterborne sauna crammed to the roof (or bulkhead or whatever they call them on boats) with a steaming mass of humanity packed into open stalls and passageways and hanging bat-like in hammocks.

  I stood there draped in my impedimenta, aghast.  There were jostling people everywhere.  I looked about in vain for a steward or purser or anyone in apparent authority, but there seemed to be no one in charge.

I stumbled into the crowd, making my way down passageways, over bundles of belongings and under hammocks seemingly hung wherever there was an open space.

I had signed on for six days of this.  The twenty-five dollars I had paid for my passage suddenly seemed less a bargain than I had at first thought.

As I stood there, dazed, an old fellow saw my distress and took me in hand and led me to the stern rail and found me a place to hang my hammock and showed me how to put it up and smiled and nodded and disappeared.  My hammock hung on the outside at the exact height to allow me to lie in my hammock and look out onto the river.  It seemed to me the perfect place to be, though I remembered that I should probably withhold judgment until I saw what happened when it rained, as it would once or twice a day.  I bought exorbitantly-priced oranges from a shipboard peddler.  As this would be a water journey, I looked for the nearest flotation device: I did not see any.  I settled back into my hammock out of the way of the roiling crowds and thought about Third World disasters, of ferries sinking within sight of land with extravagant loss of life.

panthers and catfish in Belém do Pará

There is a nice zoo in Belém do Pará and there one afternoon two young girls practiced their English on me and we were later joined by their mother.  They had been to Europe, but though they lived on the banks of the Amazon they had never gone up river.  In my two weeks or so in the South I had watched quite a bit of television in the futile hope that it would help me with the language, but during that time I saw no nature programs and was coming to the suspicion that we foreigners were more impressed with the Amazon than the Brasilians were.  A fellow in the South had told me that three days looking at trees would be more than enough.

I enjoyed the Zoo.  I am usually not an eel person, but electric eels have such sweet faces, little round eyes set wide in a featureless oval face.  A spotted panther with large, light blue eyes looked at me as if I were supposed to say something and large cats greedily watched the large, slow mammals on the other side of the bars, remembering the old ways.

In preparing for the trip I had seen photographs of pirarucú, an Amazonian catfish that once grew to the size of a family sedan, but in recent years has been fished down.  So when I saw it on the menu one evening at the Círculo Militar I of course had to try it.  Which was a mistake.  The flesh was unpleasantly gamey, even with a liberal application of lime juice.  I worried that it was going to make me sick.  

I had already discovered that the only people at work between the hours of noon and two o’clock are those whose job it is to tell you that the office will not be open until two, and so at two o’clock I went to the boat office to arrange my passage up the Amazon to Manaus and determined that I would depart day after the next at eight the evening aboard the M/V Rondônia on a six-day, thousand-mile river journey that would cost approximately $25, all meals included.  My alternative was a vessel of the middling class, which would cost about $10 and take about the same time, so I decided that at those rates I ought treat myself.  The lady at the boat office, smiling and friendly, told me quite a bit about what I should expect, though as she was speaking Portuguese I apparently missed some details, but the phrase “mais tipica” stuck in my mind.

in Belém

For the first time on this trip I felt no need to be doing something and so I settled down to enjoy being in Brasil, in a town on the banks of the Amazon.  I felt time open out before me.  It was May and I was told that since it was now the dry season that it would rain only once a day.

I write a lot of letters so I picked up some envelopes while I was out and had a bit of trouble finding them with gummed flaps and the stationery lady acted as if this were an unusual request.  I had scarcely gotten a block from the shop when I noticed that in the high Amazonian humidity my envelopes were already sticking together. After that, I bought them ungummed, as God apparently intended, and a small tube of glue to seal them when the time came.  I bought these at a different stationer, lest I receive a knowing look from the sales lady.

The town gets a breeze off the Atlantic and in the shade it can be pleasant enough.  I was sitting on a bench in the park collecting my thoughts on the state of the Church in Latin America when a pretty young woman sat down beside me and, after some non-communication in Portuguese, indicated a desire to go to bed with me.  What in the world is going on down here?  Why was I not warned of this in the tourist literature?  There was no hint of money involved.  Had this been in the Soviet Union I would have assumed she was KGB.

The next morning there was rain.  The pattern seems to be a light rain about four or five in the afternoon, then something heavier in the early morning, gone by the time the day starts.  There was an army barracks across the park from my hotel and military music in the morning.  It made me nostalgic for those jolly little wars, like the Falklands or Grenada.  As it was with the Roman and the Britannic Peace, the tranquility of the center is achieved through constant little wars on the periphery.

The newspapers have been playing up the story of a bicheiro (which I take to be a fellow who runs a gambling operation something like the numbers game in Chicago, but with animals) who claims he has been paying off people in government and, one gathers, not getting value for his money.  He now announces that he will publish his list of “donations”.  The drama of public life, though I doubt that much will come of it.

Should I ever amount to anything, I would like an equestrian statue in Napoleonic uniform on a rearing horse with a cape swirling behind me.  Statues of defunct politicians in business suits and spectacles are ludicrous.  

I walked along the embankment looking for something to take a picture of, but found not much picturesque.  There were little boys playing all over the place.  I apparently did something they thought clever with my Swiss Army knife and they started calling me MacGyver.  Then some black kids showed up and things got rowdy and a concessionaire chased them all away, except for a fair-haired little boy who stayed back, watching me.  I gave him thirty-cents-worth of Cruzados.  He knew I was going to give him something.  Kids and beggars spot me for a soft touch.

As it seemed to rain a lot I asked when the dry season was, but got conflicting opinions, which I took to mean that there might not be all that much difference.  Later, I was told more authoritatively that it runs hereabouts from April to September, though the river remains high for the first two months. 

I had supper that first evening at the nice restaurant in the Círculo Militar.  I had a peppery fish soup, a bit much to my taste, though tamed with a little lime juice.  A fine slab of Brasilian beef, which at the moment for some reason or another could not be imported into the United States.  From my table I watched an Amazonian sunset.  Huge cumulus clouds, golden in the sun, with lightning in the distance. Vast planes of cloud above and broad river below.  I watched small boats heading upriver into the darkness.  In a few days I will be going myself.  For the first time in this trip I am enjoying myself and was in no hurry to move on.

It was a little after eight when I walked back to my hotel.  There were a fair number of people out in the street and some stalls were still open.  There was only one light on in the Archbishop’s Palace and I could look in to see an old-fashioned high-ceilinged room with an iron railing across the open window.  There was a parrot sitting on the railing.