an ordinary day on the boat

In the heat of the tropical afternoon a pretty young mother of two girls stopped by my hammock to chat, her voice in those soft, graceful sibilants by which the Portuguese justify the conceit that their speech is the Language of the Angels.  As usual, I understood about twenty percent of what was being said, but I smiled amicably and agreed with everything and as she left she touched my wrist and said “ciao”.  An interesting word, as it is a short form of schiavo, meaning “I am your slave”, which, while today it has no servile connotation, was in those tropical surroundings, redolent in my mind of plantation and patriarchy, still a bemusing association, one of the little pleasures of my largely useless education.

There are large boats on the river.  Barges loaded with semi-trailers and cattle boats and ocean-going container ships on their way upriver to Manaus.  The river, unimproved, is navigable almost to the Andes.  The huge catchment basin of the forest constantly fed by tropical rain, the flow of the River so strong that it has no delta but sweeps all its sediments out to sea. 

I was told that ocean-going vessels may navigate the River as far as the city of Iquitos, in Peru, and that a 300-mile plume of fresh water extends from its mouth into the Atlantic, and that the River tears loose great mats of floating vegetation that carry off  men and large animals and the unbelievable volumes of fresh water that each day the River washes down to the sea, and on and on . . ..  Or that hidden in its vast, dark waters there are catfish large enough to swallow a human or along its jungle banks fishermen have mated with dolphins who then gave birth to creatures stranger still.  What is interesting to me is not whether these stories are true, but that the presence of the River inspires such awe that these stories seem plausible.

A woman had come on board at Santarém.  She was from Itaituba, a town up the Rio Tapajós.  She said she had to leave because her husband had been killed in retaliation for a killing by his brother and important people were involved and so the police were not interested in the matter.  I have no idea how much of that was so, but it was widely believed that this was how things were done in the Amazon.  As with other stories about the River, the vastness of jungle and the remoteness of settlements and widespread sense of the law’s unreliability makes plausible other stories, as that on remote plantations poor whites are still held as slaves, but there are wonders here enough without trafficking in hearsay.

Past Óbidos the land along the north bank is more and more cleared.  There is almost no forest and some signs of erosion.  It is tame, agricultural land.  The south bank, which I can see only from a distance, seems more forested, though even there I see more small dwellings.  There seems so much empty land in the Amazon.  It is easy to see how it could be thought to be “a Land without Men for Men without Land.”

     At six that evening we came to Juruti, a small, pleasant-looking framing community.  There was a circus in town.  The barkeeper on the upper deck asked my opinion of a hundred-dollar bill. He assumed that an American must know this sort of thing, though I don’t know that I have ever seen a bogus dollar, but I went over it with a hand lens and said it looked fine to me.  Broad patches of vegetation torn loose from the bank and trunks of large trees float past us down stream.  

     There are large, red-hooded carrion birds along the river and white, heron-like birds and black birds that look to have a three-foot wingspan.  I am sure this would all be hugely fascinating if I cared about birds, but I do not.

     An ordinary day on the boat.

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.

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.