A thousand miles up the Amazon River, in the middle of the world’s largest rain forest, an opera house rises from the jungle.
By steamship, the building crossed the ocean piece by piece. Its iron framework came from Glasgow, marble from Verona and Carrara, crystal from Venice, cedar from Lebanon, silk from China. One hundred crates of ornately carved furniture, upholstered in velvet, were imported from London. Only the wood of the parquet floor—12,000 pieces of oak, brazilwood, and jacaranda—originated in Brazil. Even this was hand-worked in Europe before Portuguese craftsmen, themselves ferried across the ocean, mounted each piece in place without the use of nails or glue.
The walls inside were painted by Italy’s leading creator of sacred murals, Dominico de Angelis, in the style of the grand cathedrals of Europe. Ceiling frescoes decorated with cherubs and angels depict the four great arts: to stage right, Dance; to stage left, Music; at back, Tragedy; and in front, the supreme art, Opera, which combines all three. A mosaic of 36,000 vitrified ceramic tiles from Alsace-Lorraine crowns the theater’s cupola in glittering blue, gold, and green. The dome rests atop a neoclassical confection of twisting, balustraded stairs and columned porticoes, bordered in white, like icing piped on a wedding cake. In this city amid the jungle, the building’s pastel hue, refined and delicate, seems as lurid as an orchid. The facade is pink—the color of the dolphins who inhabit the waters that brought this city its impossible wealth.
It took more than fifteen years and $2 million to construct the Teatro Amazonas. Inaugurated in 1896, it was lauded as the most beautiful opera house in the world. It is said it was built to attract Enrico Caruso. But he never came. An epidemic of yellow fever killed 16 members of the Italian opera company performing at the time the great tenor was invited. Some 300 of the city’s citizens died of malaria each year. Newspapers advertised potions to counteract the snakebite from bushmasters. Like a Wild West frontier town, the city had to enact an ordinance (largely ignored) forbidding the firing of guns and arrows on the streets.
Yet in the opera house’s harp-shaped theater, audiences of 1,600 gathered, dressed in diamonds and silks. In turn-of-the-century Manaus, diamonds were the unofficial currency of the bank of rubber. At the height of the motoring world’s demand for tires, rubber, the milky lifeblood of the rain forest’s seringueira tree, was ferried here from the Amazon’s thousand tributaries to drench Manaus in opulence. The citizens of Manaus became the highest per capita consumers of diamonds in the world. Some women set their teeth with them, diamonds glinting behind the flutter of black lace fans. A waitress serving a sandwich to a lunchtime customer might receive a diamond as a tip. A top prostitute could expect a diamond necklace as payment. Prices in Manaus were four times those of New York, and druggists could charge two British pounds for a shilling’s worth of quinine. Yet rubber barons slaked their horses’ thirst with French champagne. Bathroom faucets were set in solid gold. Housewives sent the linens to Portugal to be laundered.
But some stains would never come clean. To gather and process the latex, the Amazon’s Indians were captured in chains, tortured into submission. In the twelve-year reign of a single Manaus-based rubber baron, Júlio César Arana, his 4,000 tons of latex shipped down the Amazon fetched $7.5 million on the London market and cost the lives of 30,000 forest Indians. “In truth,” writes historian Richard Collier, “the latex barons built their wealthy wicked city on the bones of Indians—and the people’s frenzied way of life hinted that they knew it.”
So, like penitents to church, they flocked to the opera house, to sit beneath the arts and angels and surround themselves with the names of Europe’s greatest artists. On the twenty-two marble columns in front of the noble boxes are masks of Greek Tragedy, bearing plaster scrolls inscribed Goethe, Rossini, Molière, Shakespeare, Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven, Lessing, Verdi. . . .
The masks of Tragedy faced the Amazon of Europe’s longing imagination. The centerpiece of the opera house is the painting on its stage drop curtain, The Meeting of the Waters. It was created by a Brazilian living in Paris, the Comédie Française’s scenic artist, Crispim do Amaral. The curtain rises to the dome in one fluid motion, without folding or rolling, to protect the image. The pale-skinned, naked goddess Amazon floats on a bed of gossamer, supine and pliant. She leans back, one knee raised, as if about to open her thighs to the two bearded river gods on her opposite sides, the Solimões and the Negro. They rise around her like dolphins. They bring her garlands of flowers. Their waters are as blue as the Danube.
The real Meeting of the Waters is six miles from here. The waters are not blue, but an extraordinary mix of light and dark. Here the cream-colored, white-water Solimões and the coffee-colored, black-water Rio Negro join to form the Amazon as it runs its final thousand miles to the Atlantic. The Meeting of the Waters is a confluence of opposites. The dark waters of the Negro are born in the ancient Brazilian highlands, whose sediments leached away millions of years ago. Because these sandy soils are too poor to break down organic chemicals, the Negro is laced with acids and stained with tannins. Its waters are nearly sterile. The muddy water of the Solimões owes its light color to huge quantities of nutrient-rich silt gathered from headwaters in the geologically youthful Andes. It teems with piranhas and electric eels, fish with bony tongues and bulging eyes. Pink river dolphins come to hunt here, at the Meeting of the Waters, where the fish, confused by the sudden collision of waters, make easy prey.
For nearly four miles, the two rivers, because of their different densities, meet but do not mix. Side by side they flow, little fingers of dark and light clutching at one another like lovers who cannot marry. The Amazon is born of such a union: a confluence of separate histories, of opposite identities, a meeting of beauty and cruelty, desperation and passion, life and death.
Tomorrow night, I will sleep at the Meeting of the Waters, on the floor of a wooden house that floats on logs of assacú, tethered to a three-boled taro matue tree. But at the moment, as mosquitoes chew my ankles, I gaze over a red velvet rail, eye level with a French chandelier of gold and crystal, surrounded by Molière and Mozart, flanked by Dance and Tragedy.
The drop curtain has been raised, showing only the bottom of the painting. The waters of the Amazon seem to pour over its painted gilt frame, out into the audience. The orchestra is tuning up. The kettle drums sound like thunder.
Thunder woke me my first night in Brazil. Its explosion swept through my skeleton. Lightning flooded the room, so bright I could see it through closed eyelids. The rain pounded at the walls and roof like some frantic jungle demon. I could not get up to look out the window; the rain held me motionless with its force.
Dianne Taylor-Snow lay in the room’s other bed, the tip of her cigarette glowing orange. “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” came her voice in the darkness.
As usual, she’d been lying awake for hours. Insomnia is but one of Dianne’s talents—she can also pee off the back of a moving boat and swear in Indonesian—but her sleeplessness makes her a uniquely stimulating traveling companion. Five years ago, on assignment in Bangladesh, she woke me up at three in the morning to point out a spider in the room—one of her few fears. The spider, about the size of a fist, was sitting on the mirror. But when she shined her flashlight on it, its hugely magnified shadow covered the opposite wall, its head the size of a melon, its hairy legs stretching for twelve feet.
In Bangladesh, looking for tigers, we had seen our first river dolphins. By boat, we were exploring the muddy waters of Sundarbans, the greatest mangrove swamp on earth, the home of the world’s largest population of tigers. Yet Sundarbans’s tangled mangroves and thick brown rivers, it seemed, connived to conceal everything from us.
One day the muddy waters parted for an instant. Breaking the surface, the curves of three large pink-gray forms rose and rolled, like the play of sunset on water—yet it was midday, the sun bright. We stared after them. Again the forms rose and sank, smooth as silk. Finally, I realized what we had seen: dolphins!
For me, the sight of dolphins anywhere has always carried the shock of recognition—like seeing my own reflection in the water. I had seen wild dolphins in U.S., U.K., and New Zealand waters, and of course in many aquaria, and yet they always surprise. They are shaped more like fish than mammals, and they inhabit what to us terrestrial creatures is a foreign universe—but still, both species seem to know we are in many ways alike. John Lilly, a medical researcher whose studies of how people think and communicate led him to study communication between people and dolphins, calls dolphins “Humans of the Sea.” To see a dolphin emerge from the water feels to me like glimpsing a lost twin.
That dolphins could inhabit such muddy waters as Sundarbans’s seemed impossible. But then I remembered having read about them: early explorers had been astonished, too, by these river-dwelling whales, and judged (incorrectly) that in waters so opaque, the dolphins must be blind. Later researchers found that the dolphins can see, but navigate mainly by a sonar system that even by dolphin standards is almost unimaginably refined.
After only seconds, they sank from sight like a dream. Yet for a long time afterward, their image glowed in my mind. It was as if the river had opened, for just a moment, and revealed to me some promise.
Three times after that, I returned to Sundarbans. I saw dolphins every time. In each instance, the glimpses were fleeting, unexpected, revelatory—and then they were gone. I never saw a face, or even a flipper—just the top of a head or the low curve of a dorsal fin. I never was able to find much on them in the scientific literature. Almost nothing is known about them. There are, in fact, four species of river dolphins around the world—a fifth, a Chinese species, went extinct in the early 2000s—and none of them is well understood.
Yet the image of the river dolphins stayed with me. Back home in New Hampshire, pink dolphins swam seductively through my dreams. Years later, at a marine mammals conference, I met a man who told me why: pink dolphins capture souls.
Half a world away from Sundarbans, in the Amazon, he told me, lives a different species of pink dolphin, Inia geoffrensis—inia is the Guarayo Indian word for “dolphin”—named for Geoffrey St. Hilaire, who plundered the first zoological specimens from Portugal for Napoleon Bonaparte. Unlike the Sundarbans dolphins, they are bold and abundant. But they are equally mysterious.
Photographs of the pink river dolphins looked eerily familiar. They resembled no other dolphin I had ever seen, with their melonlike foreheads and long tubular snouts. Yet they reminded me of something. Then I realized: It’s us they look like, but in another form. This pink dolphin looks like a fetal human, a person in a watery beginning.
A number of researchers at the conference were trying to study Inia, but with limited success. Few scientists claimed to know the number of dolphins in their study area, or to understand the social structure of groups, or to know whether they migrate or hold territories. They did not even know for sure why these dolphins are pink: some said only old animals are pink and that the young ones are always gray; others said the dolphins flush pink with excitement. In fact, even after many years of study, most researchers confess they cannot even recognize individuals on sight.
To local river people, this confusion is no surprise, my informant told me. The people say these dolphins are shape-shifters. In the guise of human desire, they can claim your soul, they carry you away, and they take you to the Encante, an enchanted world beneath the river.
In fact, the pink river dolphins do inhabit an enchanted world: the Amazon. I had always longed to go there. In the western imagination, it has invoked an El Dorado, a Last Frontier, a Green Hell, a mythical race of woman warriors, an earthly Paradise, a Paradise Lost. To the people whose villages ring its waters, the Amazon is the source of renewal and destruction, of powers and inspirations. The scientists tell us that the Amazon holds one-half of the world’s river water and that its leafy basin supplies a tenth of the world’s oxygen; our connection to it is as close as breath. And yet, like the dolphins, the Amazon remains a great mystery, from which we seek to satisfy dizzying desires, to extract livelihoods and longings, and onto which we project our deepest fears, our darkest appetites.
I knew, at that conference, what I must do next. I would follow the dolphins. Dianne eagerly volunteered to come with me.
And now, at the start of our expedition, already they had led us to this impossible city: this Paris in the jungle, where the water that becomes the river fills even the sky. At the Meeting of the Waters, we were told, we would find dolphins. We didn’t know where they would lead us.
But we knew, from that first soaking storm in Brazil, that wherever it was, it would be wet.
“My poncho smells like cheese,” I said to Dianne, as a second wave of thunder rolled through our bones. I was hoping that another poncho numbered among the contents of her suitcases; she always traveled well provisioned. Once, on a trip to Cameroon, when she and her companion had to stay in a tiny hotel with filthy linens, she pulled from her luggage, to her companion’s amazement, a set of satin pillowcases. Another time, after she’d picked me up at the L.A. airport on a book tour, I was rummaging in the glove compartment for a map and found instead a Colt .380 semiautomatic pistol. “There is a handgun in your glove compartment,” I reported in alarm, as if it had somehow appeared there by mistake. “Oh, that’s just my friend Fluffy,” she said. Her familiar tone made clear she knew well how to use it.
On this trip, I noted thankfully, Fluffy had stayed at home. As usual, Dianne had spread the contents of her luggage all over the room, like some sumptuous buffet: the miniature hair dryer with its new adapter; a hammock that balls up to the size of a grapefruit; the inflatable travel pillow (from her days as an airline stewardess); the four clear plastic, zippered cases of lip gloss and eyelash curlers and eyebrow pencils and shampoos (from her days as a fashion model); baby bottles and nipples and Esbilac in case we encountered orphaned baby animals (from her days as an orangutan rehabilitator); packs of hermetically sealed portions of raisins, peanuts, and powdered Gatorade; pills to kill intestinal worms; creams to soothe scabies; Ziploc bags of underwear and khaki pants and silk shirts; a heated styling brush; the surgical kit with its scalpels and disposable syringes; the $400 Katadyn water filter that screens out viruses; buck knives and lighters as presents to villagers; a stretchable laundry line; a device to suction snakebite; and clothes for the opera.
But Dianne’s mind was on breakfast. “What kind of cheese?” she asked me. “Feta, Gorgonzola . . .?”
“Cottage,” I said, and let the rain drown my consciousness in a water-dream of sleep.
By morning, the storm had dissolved into the washing, ticking, clicking sound of rain in a city, mixing with car horns and police whistles. On the wet streets of Manaus, the asphalt shone like a river. Cars slid by like canoes. The roof of the hotel was leaking, and ragged terry-cloth bath mats sopped up water from the tiled floor of the lobby. The rooftop swimming pool overflowed.
As we planned the chores to prepare for our expedition, from the twelfth-floor restaurant of the Hotel Monaco, we looked down on the Teatro Amazonas’s glittering dome, the Victorian Customs House, and the ingenious floating docks—built by British engineers—that rise and fall thirty-two feet a year as the waters of the Rio Negro swell and empty.
The idea to create a “Paris of the Tropics” had been the grandiose vision of one man: Eduardo Gonçalves Ribeiro, a black military engineer who, at the unlikely age of thirty, became the youngest governor of the immense state of Amazônia. “I found a village,” he later boasted; “I made of it a modern city.” He was a man of small stature, but large appetites—for gold, for women, for fame. Before he even took office, he began laying plans for his favorite project, the opera house. It bears his name in letters tall as a man on the outside wall of its pink facade.
Levying a 20 percent tax on all rubber that left the city, he built streets a hundred feet wide and paved them with cobblestones imported from Portugal, bordered with barbered shade trees from Australia and China. He commissioned the designer of the Eiffel Tower to build a municipal market to look like Paris’s Les Halles, and a Palace of Justice that resembled Versailles. Manaus had electricity before London, a telephone system before Rio de Janeiro. While New York and Boston relied on horse-drawn trolleys, Manaus enjoyed the opulence of bottle-green electric streetcars that operated around the clock. Looking down from the rooftop, Dianne and I imagined ladies dressed in Surrah silks, their hair ornamented with the feathers of egrets.
But as we ventured into the city, we found, instead, women in tight Lycra dresses, their hair decorated with yellow plastic barrettes shaped like Tweety Bird. The cartoon character incongruously accents clothes so suggestive that at first, we thought they were streetwalkers’ garb. But in the casa de câmbio where we changed money, in line at the supermercado, on the bus to the Amazon’s research institute, we noticed almost everyone dresses like this: halter tops in which each breast seems to be riding in a private hammock, stretch pants so clingy you can see the outline of lace on the underwear beneath. Even fat and wrinkled old ladies, even women who are grossly pregnant, wear short, tight dresses or plunging halter tops or jeans popping at the seams—often with the top button unbuttoned to accommodate the overflow.
Everywhere is a flood of flesh. In the fish market, the big bellies of bare-chested old men spill over the waistbands of their pants like the foaming head on a beer. Manaus revels in the ripeness of flesh and fat—breasts, bellies, buttocks. All these, no matter what shape or age, seem to be greeted with generous approval and enjoyed like public art. The same is true of music. Stores, buses, and restaurants blare samba, rock, and boi-bumbá music, and it spills out into the street, spewing sound like the waters of a public fountain. Even litter is dropped as if this, too, is an act of generosity, performed for the greater good.
There is a feeling of abundance in Manaus: it seems as if the fullness of the wet season has unleashed a torrent of fecundity. Even the trees that line the street are laden with food—cohi, guava, mangos, avocados—and they release their fruits with lush abandon onto the sidewalks. The streets smell of guava and grease and of the meat roasting on every corner, grilled on wooden skewers laid over coals. One little girl is cooking chicken feet this way. She is heartbreakingly beautiful, with the lush, natty hair of an African, the high cheekbones of an Indian, and the green eyes of a Portuguese. She gives us a brilliant smile.
We are in the heart of a country that has been described as “the leading producer of human misery.” Every six seconds a Brazilian baby dies of diarrhea; every thirty minutes a Brazilian contracts leprosy and another contracts tuberculosis. There are a million cases a year of malaria, and 10 million of schistosomiasis, a blood fluke that eats through the liver. And yet, in Manaus, where Portuguese sounds like it is spoken through lips numb from kissing, you feel caught up in the sensuous savor of life. In India, they call this rasa: the sweet sap, the juicy life-essence, the core of enjoyment of food, or art, or sex.
In Manaus, there are two great temples that honor the rasa of its people. One is the opera house; the other is the fish market.
Beneath the iron roof and stained glass of the Municipal Market, dark men wearing gold necklaces hold fish up proudly for us to photograph. Young men with sweating chests and tensed muscles carry huge sacks from the docks, green eyes glowing in dark faces like emeralds by firelight. Here, at the largest freshwater fish market in the world, some of the strangest fish on earth are for sale, dredged up from the dolphins’ underwater city. Huge slices of silvery pirarucu drape over the counter like tablecloths. Tucunaré with ruby eyes are arrayed like jewels; their tails glow with eyes, too, like the tail feathers of peacocks. These fish are pursuit predators; once they attack, they do not give up until they have swallowed their prey whole. There are piles of fat, black tambaqui, a sweet-fleshed seed-eater who inhabits flooded forests, and pyramids of piranhas, and careful stacks of predatory catfish, some with black armor, some with long, fleshy whiskers like a Chinese emperor, some with erectile, poison-tipped spines.
Each year some 30,000 to 50,000 tons of river fish, of more than two hundred species, are landed in Manaus. But as the fishing fleet expands—today nine hundred boats can hold a ton or more of fish, and a few can hold fifty—the fish they catch get smaller. In the 1970s, I’d been told, you could often find for sale here pirarucu longer than a canoe. The largest fish we see today is less than three feet long. The species has already been fished out of some of the smaller river systems. Tambaqui was once so prevalent that it was fed to prisoners. Twenty years ago, tambaqui accounted for half the total catch. Today most of the tambaqui for sale are juveniles, sold at prices that rival the choicest cuts of beef. That is one reason so many catfish species are for sale: pirarucu, tambaqui, and tucunaré are now too expensive for the average consumer.
But in the fish market, we sense no feeling of dwindling commodities, of time running out. There is only the siren song of the strange and the beautiful, the throb of appetite. Dianne and I are voyeurs at a dazzling show of abundance. Fish with tails striped like tigers, fish with eyes flecked with gold, fish with huge scales rough as emery boards, and fish whose tongues the people use to grate their tuberous manioc to make farina—on the market’s aisles of white-tiled tables, each fisherman lays out his catch as lovingly as he would the corpse of a relative. The men rinse the fish regularly with buckets of water that carry away blood and scales in glittering waterfalls to the floor.
In the meat stalls, the carcasses of pigs, cattle, and lambs hang dripping from meat hooks, hooves and heads still on. The men’s hands are slippery with blood. Behind the vegetable stalls, smiling men and women chat over mountains of produce: softball-sized avocados that smell like hand cream; parsley with its roots still on, gasping for the soil; yellow melons, shiny fragrant limes, and strange fruits with alluring names like genipapo, acerola, maracujá, pitomba. It is impossible here not to think, at once, of sex and death: the dead fish with their big teeth; the fruit, ripe and overripe; the flecks of blood splashing up at you as butchers sling down slabs of flesh, blood reaching for your blood; and you can feel the eyes of men slide over your body like a tongue licking an ice-cream cone. Life, says the market—choose life! A toothless old woman offers us a taste of maracuja: paper-skinned, seed-filled, its flesh is slippery and bitter, like a mouthful of semen. I swallow the seeds.
The houselights dim. The spotlight rises like a moon, the red velvet curtain parts to a storm of applause. We spend our last night in Manaus at the opening of the first opera to be performed in the Teatro Amazonas in nearly a century: the State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre of Minsk’s performance of Verdi’s La Traviata, a belated celebration of the opera house’s centenary.
Onstage, a sumptuous party gathers. Women in flounced gowns of velvet and satin flutter lace fans and flash jeweled tiaras; men strut in tuxedos and white gloves. It is a party at the home of the courtesan Violetta Valery, where the heroine will meet her future paramour, the handsome nobleman Alfredo Germont. But the staged scene is eerily reminiscent of the gathering of the last patrons of the opera to fill this room, ninety years earlier—before anyone imagined that Asian rubber plantations, grown from seeds smuggled from the Amazon, would bring a total collapse of Manaus’s rubber boom economy.
In the panic that ensued, women pressed their diamonds into the hands of the cashier at the Booth Steamship Company, to pay for passage to Europe or the United States. In 1912, 140 of Manaus’s finest mansions were sold at auction. People fled in such haste that they left their good-byes to friends in the personal columns of the Jornal do Comercio. The Paris in America fashion store halved the price of its perfumes, its panther-skin rugs, its Steinway grand pianos. Civil servants went without paychecks. Students rioted. Colleges closed. The stage of the opera house went dark, for the curtain had fallen on the Golden Age of Manaus.
But the ghosts linger. With the violins’ pleading, the rising notes of the soprano and tenor’s duet summon the lost, sweet dreams: They would have been brave, the women and men who came here to seek their fortunes, to live in the jungle when a mosquito or a glass of water could kill you and not all the silks and brocades and champagne in the world could help. Luxury could never buy safety. They may have sent their linens to be laundered in Portugal, but at home, their children still died of fever in their arms.
Onstage, Violetta’s voluptuary heart has been touched by the love of Alfredo. She knows he is not rich; she knows she will bid good-bye to this house and its gay parties if she goes to live with him. Splendid like a bride in her long white gown, she sings, alone, of the transformation her new love has brought. She now sees all the pleasures of her previous life as hollow. The red velvet curtain closes on her solo.
I asked Dianne how she liked the opera so far, the first she had ever seen. “I didn’t expect,” she said thoughtfully, “that it would be so loud.” Then she went outside to smoke a cigarette.
The opera house is lit at night, like some luminous ghost of the past, rising out of the darkness of swallowed memories. The great ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes refused to enter the building when he first visited Manaus in 1944. It was built, he told his Brazilian hosts, “with the blood of Indians.” He knew the twisted appetites of the overseers whom the rubber barons hired to ensure the flow of cheap latex. On a river named Madre de Dios after the Mother of God, one merchant kept 600 Indian girls as slaves he bred like livestock to produce future laborers. Indians were blindfolded and tethered as rubber traders shot off their genitals for diversion. In Peru, to punish workers who fell short of their quota, one overseer ordered a massacre of Indian children and had them cut up for food for the guard dogs. Another celebrated Easter by personally shooting 150 Chontaduras, Ocainas, and Utiguenes. Those his bullets did not immediately kill were heaped into a pile, soaked with kerosene, and burned alive.
Their ghosts are here, too, in the opera house. The air feels thick with spirits seeking solace. There are ghosts of the Italian musicians and singers who died in epidemics of malaria and yellow fever. It is said that the ghost of the governor, Eduardo Ribeiro, is here as well. He strangled on his own demented desires, and died “in a fit of erotic mania” three months before his beloved opera house would open.
These ghosts have lingered for a hundred years; but this is the first time in ninety they have heard the music of an opera.
In the second act of La Traviata, the couple is living at Alfredo’s house near Paris, and Violetta has sold her jewels to meet their expenses. But despite her noble gesture, she is still a former courtesan, and an embarrassment to Alfredo’s family. In a baritone as commanding as a cannon, Alfredo’s father begs her to give up his son; and in notes as yielding as water, Violetta agrees to make the sacrifice, to let Alfredo believe she has left him to return to her life of sin and luxury. She flees to Paris.
Their songs rise, with the warmth of breath, from the stage to the balconies to the ceiling. My attention drifts, with the music, upward, to the angels on the dome. The frescoes of the Four Great Arts were painted with a nineteenth-century technique employed in many cathedrals: it gives the impression that the eyes of the people in the images are always following you. Those who built this place wanted angels to guard them; but instead of guarding, these angels witnessed. And perhaps the people realized this. Perhaps all the music that has played here has been an offering to these witness-angels—music rising like burned incense. Tonight, they seem to watch the opera and its audience with eyes full of knowing.
The opera house stands for everything Europe has tried to make of the Amazon; its attempt to turn the brown waters of the Rio Negro blue as the Danube, and change its white latex to gold. This pink confection erected in the jungle was, perhaps, an attempt to cleanse Europe of its guilt, to transform its lust to beauty.
And this is the transformation played out onstage. In the third act, Violetta, the wealthy courtesan, is now in self-imposed exile, her jewels gone, her health failing from consumption. Her maid brings her a letter— Alfredo’s father has told his son the truth of why she left him. Father and son come racing to her side. Alfredo vows to restore her soiled reputation, to take her back to his country home. She tries to rise from her chair to go with him, but she is dying, still in her dressing gown, clad in white gossamer like the angels. Her spirit slips from her body, and in the soprano notes of her song, her soul is released.
Nourished by music, the faded figures overhead, the angels of Music and Opera, Dance and Tragedy, the ghosts of divas and Indians, seem to grow vibrant, to come to life. Weightless as swimming dolphins, they seem to dance in the dark, and beckon us into the jungle.