aí trees, wrapped like a mummy, sweating, and hardly able to turn over. He would remain this way for the next thirteen or fourteen hours.
26.
The Brazilian city of Manaus is surrounded on all sides by the Amazon jungle, although on its eastern border the forest is kept at bay some miles by the Negro and Amazon rivers that sideswipe each other, creating a broad stretch of unique waterway traversing the continent from northeastern Brazil to the western coast of Peru. In the summer months when the water is low, standing on a massive granite wall looking thirty feet down one sees an expanse of bog covered with filthy sewage, pop bottles, old tires, junk of all sorts. A gangplank leads across this smelly muck to the brown water and a ragtag fleet of passenger, fishing, and cargo boats headed off to places like Tabatinga and Leticia.
Day and night, there is a bustle of commerce here: heavy sacks of strange-looking fish, some of them huge, pulled from the river to feed the swelling city; other sacks are loaded with pineapples or a coarse flour called fainha, a staple in Brazil; also filthy bags of charcoal are coming ashore from the rickety boats. The wild jungle nurtures this city, which is an island. It also gives Manaus an urgency you can feel, particularly in the sultry night air.
Coming off the boats, mixed in with the produce, there is a stream of exhausted men, small, wiry men, for the most part, some suffering with malaria, who are back from the gold mines in the south. There is also a sprinkling of beautiful women, strikingly beautiful. A stranger could wonder what they had been doing in the jungle. Although the girls had been traveling for a week or longer, sleeping outside on deck in the slow-moving riverboats, beset with mosquitoes, torrential rain, and sick workers seeking favors, they look lovely coming ashore and they smile at the men sitting on the granite wall.
* * *
In 1980, when Jim returned to Manaus from his first visit to the putrid mining camp half-buried in the rain forest, he discovered in himself unlimited energy for a new way of life. Of course, it was the excitement of first experiencing the jungle, dining on anteater and maggots while dreaming of gold, but also, Manaus itself was exotic and deeply inviting. Anything was possible in this city. Fortunes were won and lost here in a month or a violent day. It was a perfect place for a gambling man who was trying to come back from ruin and heartbreak.
Like Jim himself, his new city had a gaudy history of glory and calamitous defeat. In the early part of the last century, the rubber trade was born in the Amazon and Manaus quickly became the hub of the industry. The city’s downtown area was lavishly fashioned after Paris and Lisbon; even a world-class opera house came to the Amazon. Rubber barons made kingly fortunes at the expense of thousands of poor workers who died in the jungle from disease and animals. But soon the rubber business in Brazil was outmoded, as agricultural farming techniques and better soil brought the trade to Malaysia. Manaus went into a lengthy depression; the palatial residences of new millionaires became chalky and cracked from the sun. Some rubber barons committed suicide while others lived hand to mouth as peasants.
By 1980, Manaus was back on top due in part to the government’s decision to make the city a free-trade zone. This encouraged multinational industries to come to the city as well as shoppers from all over Brazil, who could save as much as 40 percent buying appliances. But probably the most intoxicating inducement to travel to the Amazon was gold. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, if a man dreamed of striking it rich prospecting for gold Manaus was the place to come. It was where you set up your operation, did your shopping, hired the people you needed, and came back from the jungle to rest and party.
Nothing was a sure bet in Manaus. The artifacts of victory and ruin were everywhere. Driving north through the downtown area, you saw fancy new hotels and skyscrapers going up, business burgeoning in each shop and spilling out onto broad, new well-lit streets. But when you crossed one of many small bridges and looked to the right or left there were impoverished towns of rotting shacks on the muddy banks of creeks that reeked of human waste. Prosperity in Manaus was running perpendicular to heartbreak and misery. People in the city were inflamed by chance. They lived fast and did whatever was necessary to slide through before the door slammed shut.
* * *
When Jim told me his stories about Brazil, he often referred to Luis Carlos. Luis was a short, thin man in his late forties with a dark, Indian complexion, yet his skin had an odd transparency, particularly on his cheeks and below his eyes, where purple veins showed through, giving him the aspect of a fragile or sickly person. On a daily basis Luis worried about his blood pressure and other diseases, but it wasn’t clear to Jim if there was any real problem, as this very bright, nervous man avoided doctors and the bad news they might convey. I could have a heart attack making love, he’d say out of the blue. His anxieties arose from a dense web of musings about his several lovers, his lists of appointments to keep when he returned to Manaus from the mining camp in the jungle, a thousand phone numbers jiggling in his head because he didn’t carry a book. For all his worry, he could walk in the jungle at a brisk pace for a week.
Luis was a man of unusual resources and he was at Jim’s side practically from his first day in Manaus. Jim hired Luis as a translator and guide, but his responsibilities quickly broadened and he became Jim’s right-hand man. Jim couldn’t have said where they met or who introduced them. Yet he knew how he’d made contact with most of his friends and business associates in Manaus—merchants, gold buyers, cardplayers, airplane pilots, mechanics, gunmen, beautiful women—because it was almost always Luis who made the introductions. Jim, I know someone, he would say. I have a man who could do this. He will be perfect. Don’t worry.
In this city where people typically arrived late for appointments, very late, or they didn’t show up at all, Luis always seemed to know someone who could track down the phone number or street address.
When Jim returned to Manaus, from his first visit to the campsite, he was exhausted and elated. It would be more than five weeks before the second trip and all the while he had to restrain himself from rushing back into the jungle. He wanted to touch the gold again with his fingers. He was beset with anxiety because he would never get another chance like this. Someone could steal what he had discovered. Gold would be Jim’s redemption. Even Marvin Gesler could never hope to achieve the wealth that Jim would soon dig up from the fetid mud. His fears and dreams were so compelling that it became physically painful to focus on practical details. In Manaus, Jim felt trapped in a quicksand of impediments, red tape, permits, and broken appointments.
Luis counseled patience. There was no point tramping back into the jungle without a crew, without machinery to build a functioning camp, and without a master plan. Jim needed to find a safe house for the city part of his business, and he must hire armed guards to look after the gold in Manaus until he sold it for the best price. Luis warned Jim he must travel everywhere with several gunmen or he’d be murdered or kidnapped for ransom. He needed to learn a whole new way of life.
* * *
This one is much too large, Jim said to Luis the first afternoon they looked for a house. Jim’s yellow sun-bleached Mercedes sedan was parked outside an imposing gate. Through iron bars he could see a sprawling house set back about three hundred yards from the road. Much too large, he said.
Probably, Luis agreed with a world-weary expression, but please have a look anyway, since we’ve come so far to get here. They had driven on the only road leading north out of Manaus for about twenty minutes to the extreme edge of the city limits, the very point at which Manaus was stymied by the rain forest. Luis got out of the car, mopped his brow in the afternoon heat. He suffered greatly from the humidity, and when Luis was in the city he liked to shower four or five times a day. He said a few words to one of the men working on the property and the heavy gate swung open.
The main house was handsomely built with dark, aromatic native wood, Angelim rajado, that is resistant to rotting in the wet climate. This wonderful name seemed to evoke the grand house itself, which had fifteen generous-sized rooms, newly painted white shutters, and a large wood-paneled office that reminded Jim of his office in the house on Lake Ontario where Jim’s new wife, Phyllis, was now living with his cook and chauffeur. Looking out the window from the office, Jim saw tiered gardens, and beyond that there were several connected man-made lakes, strung together by waterfalls and raised walking trails; the lakes had many strange-looking Amazonian fish, and ducks swimming around, and there were a few small baby black caimans that would someday reach twenty feet but now lay harmless, sunning on the bank of the lake closest to the main house. All around the lakes there were apple, orange, coconut, and cashew trees and lovely flowering plants called inga.
Jim stood on the back porch for a time, breathing the jungle air and considering the sharp turn his life had taken from a tremendously successful business life and from everyone he’d ever cared about. Yet he didn’t feel at all lost or lonely. He felt impatient, hungry. Jim turned back to the big house. Through the open shutters to the kitchen he noticed a young woman with dark peasant features and a lovely smile. She was Caboclo, a mixture of indigenous and European ancestry. She was cooking something and the smell made his mouth water.
The house was situated on twenty acres of property, all of it encircled by a ten-foot concrete wall painted light green to blend into the foliage. On the east side of the estate, just over the wall, Manaus approached with its open sewers and glistening corporate headquarters. The most intriguing facet of the estate was its western vista: behind the house, servants’ quarters, and past the lakes, the wall braced against the dense jungle that played out unabated for nearly four hundred miles. If you walked along the west wall at night you might hear the growl of a jaguar. The estate, presently owned by the wife of a diseased Mafia capo now living in France, was a buffer zone between conflicting realities.
The property was much more than Jim required but was very special, as Luis had said. Jim found himself lingering. From the front side of the house he looked out across a field of fruit trees, and the same kitchen girl was now taking a walk. She was very young, eighteen or nineteen, with long black curly hair. The girl was laughing and picking fruit. She was wearing red shorts and was moving slowly across the dusty property alongside a boy of about twenty, one of a half-dozen workers who maintained the property; they walked through a stretch of cashew and guariguara trees, close, in rhythm with each other but not touching. The girl looked toward the house and saw that Jim was watching, but this didn’t make her self-conscious. Jim wondered if she and the boy were lovers and decided they must be. The girl’s walk was slow and rhythmic, as though drawing purpose from the earth.
Jim was about to leave with Luis when the girl came back on the porch holding a knife and a piece of fruit. Jim didn’t know what it was, but she was offering him a cashew. He cut off a slice and ate the tasty fruit from the skin like a mango. Then he looked around for a place to put the rind. The girl smiled at him and offered her hand. She won him on the spot. She was intoxicating but utterly from another world, and much too young.
At the start of their drive back to town, Luis looked amused, but his mind quickly turned to something else. The following afternoon, Jim bought the property from the owner’s widow for $140,000, nearly one-third of what he’d brought to Brazil for his new business venture. It was much more than he wanted to pay, but he reasoned, impractically, it was only a tiny fraction of what such a place would cost in the States or Canada.
When Jim returned to the estate two days later as the new owner, the Indian girl didn’t seem surprised.
* * *
Jim had never built a business without Marvin Gesler’s vision and prodding. He wasn’t a business genius like his partner, nor was he a detail guy. Marvin’s vulgarity and raunchy deceits had always cast Jim in a favorable light, and Jim had relished being the good guy. Now he wasn’t sure who he was or needed to be. Marvin had always known the rules, or he made the rules while Jim brokered their deals. Jim felt Marvin’s absence, to be sure, but he had found gold near the Rio Novo four hundred kilometers south of Manaus. This simple fact quickened and thrilled him more than any lust he had ever known, more than any previous worldly success, perhaps more even than his desire for Ava, or at least it was enough to make him forget. The grains of gold in the batilla kept Jim on course. If it was the right course was a much larger question than Jim could resolve, not that he ever cared for abstract inquiry. Jim had no Marvin, limited cash, and scant knowledge of finance, but he had gold, or the chance for it, and he had Luis Carlos with his considerable quirkiness and personal magic. Jim had no desire to return to Toronto and the Quonset shed business. He didn’t miss it or even want to know what was going on.
Luis guided Jim to a street lined with cantinas, maybe fifty cantinas housed in a four-block stretch of Spanish colonial buildings from eighty and ninety years earlier, when rubber barons had imported renowned architects from Europe to design the most daring, opulent residences on the entire continent. By 1980, they were long ruined from neglect and water damage. There were jungle plants sprouting through cracks in the floors as if the rain forest were trying to reclaim the land. The venerable houses smelled from hardworking girls and the sweat of an army of lusty garimpeiros back from the gold mines. Jim needed to learn about such places, counseled Luis while he mopped his brow and took Jim to see the tiny cheerless cubicles where girls worked on soiled mattresses for next to nothing. Most of them were very young; some were attractive, others fat; they did their work with dead eyes. Jim found these places depressing, but Luis urged him to stay awhile and take a look around.
During the next month, Luis introduced Jim to gold buyers, airplane pilots, gorgeous women. Luis introduced working girls with a touch of nostalgia or regret. Jim, he explained as a longtime connoisseur, many of these girls are sincere people, believe me. But on other occasions, Luis referred to them dismissively as bitches. He introduced the owner of a gun shop who sold Jim an arsenal of weapons, at a fair price, and then, within an hour, the white-haired shop owner had assembled a militia of thirty gunmen, each of them willing to risk his life for ten dollars a day. Luis drove Jim to meet Martha, a plump woman with an endearing smile who was a good cook and didn’t mind working in the deep jungle; Luis brought the pilot Ramon Vega to Jim’s estate.
Ramon ran his own jungle operation eighty miles east of Jim’s camp. He was a handsome, powerful guy about Jim’s height with a coffee-colored complexion and a contagious smile. Men and women were drawn to Ramon, who was nearly Jim’s equal in terms of charisma and affability. He rented a turbopropped helicopter to Jim for two weeks to fly heavy equipment into the camp; after that, Jim bought two older planes from his new friend. When the two men were in Manaus they went to clubs with Ramon’s knockout girlfriend, Iliana, who had studied geology in college and was presently working in the gift shop of one of the local hotels. Ramon entertained his friends with stories about the jungle life, ambushes, murders, animal attacks. He had a talent for finding the attractive or socially acceptable side of cruelty. Listening to Ramon was like going to the movies. His girl had a pleasant polished manner that you could almost take for softness, but she could turn on a dime. Iliana wanted a lot of money and would do almost anything to get it.
Jim questioned Iliana about rock formations that might offer clues to concentrations of gold on his property. She was attracted to Jim, even though he was twice her age. They were always fooling around, probing and tempting each other. Ramon didn’t seem to mind. He had this manner: what’s mine is yours. Jim enjoyed Ramon’s largess and extravagant convictions about women and the predatory rules of the jungle, which he enunciated with deeply felt pleasure.
Whenever Luis saw Ramon and Jim together, he smiled, as if he’d known all along they’d become friends.
Luis seemed to grow in stature at the prospect of bringing people to meet Jim. These were Luis’s Broadway moments. During the initial starburst of making introductions he was charming and well versed, verbally nimble about subjects one would not expect him to know about. He got people talking. He knew how to break the ice. But then he lost interest. Once he was past the stage of facilitating, Luis’s observations became shallow or seemed ill-informed. The deepening levels of a subject didn’t interest him. After fifteen or twenty minutes, he was looking off to the future, and he would say to Jim, I am like Cinderella. I have to leave now.
* * *
Over time Jim grew confident about his assistant’s suggestions, even though it wasn’t always apparent, with the language difficulty, where the quality of Luis’s many acquaintances might diverge from his own considerable enthusiasm and charm. Luis became Jim’s Jim. Of course, in their hardworking thirty-month history Luis would make some terrible choices. He’d wipe the perspiration off his face and make up for disasters with more matchmaking that was nothing less than astonishing.
He introduced Jim to Ribamar, a short, powerfully built man of about sixty with thirty years in gold mines south of Manaus. He had spent the past eight months living in the city with his young wife, Lu, and their new baby. No one understands the jungle better than Ribamar, said Luis, who became melancholic when he spoke of the older man. You’ll need Ribamar to survive; you’ll need him like clean water.
It was a hard moment for Luis and surely a reflection of his affection for Jim that he brought this new man into their world, because including Ribamar meant that Luis had to sacrifice some of himself, maybe the best part; whenever he was around Ribamar, Luis seemed undressed, cheapened, largely irrelevant.
Ribamar was a calm and serious man who filled a room without speaking. He sensed keenly, like the animals he knew so much about, and he trusted himself beyond all else. In their first meeting, Ribamar admitted to missing the jungle greatly. He had been away too long and was very pleased to hear about this new mining operation. Also, with a young family, he needed money.
Jim voiced his many concerns about the large task ahead while Ribamar listened patiently but also with a hint of irony or dawning conviction. His judgments were deeply held and he almost never shared them fully. Jim kept returning to the threat of jaguars because he’d heard that the area around his camp was infested with big cats. In the history of the camp, many workers looking for gold had been killed. How could they survive and run a business with jaguars slaughtering the workers? For some reason this grim question tickled both men and they began to laugh.
Finally, Ribamar answered that jaguars don’t attack unless a man is alone in the jungle or the cat feels threatened. The jungle is safe, Jim, if you know what to do. Garimpeiros are attacked because they are reckless people. They think they can do anything they like. They feel tired and go to sleep under a tree. You must learn where you cannot sleep. The jungle is healthy. It can be your friend as well as your enemy. It will provide for you when you are sick. Men make the forest dangerous by stupidity.
Jim had many questions for Ribamar about gold mining, jungle animals, malaria, the right and wrong foods to eat, where to get drinking water. Is it true, he asked, there is a tiny fish that swims up a man’s penis? It was an extensive list of concerns that Ribamar found burdensome. He put a strong arm on Jim’s shoulder. Jim, the job for you is to know two things. The first is only to focus on small things, one at a time. The second is that all things are small things. Then he added, enigmatically, Listen to the sounds of the jungle at night, Jim. It’s a great music. You need to pause and listen to the music or you are wasting your time here.
Jim nodded. He was greatly drawn to Ribamar.
* * *
At first, Jim felt uncomfortable being with the girl who was only eighteen and dressed for the heat in shorts and T-shirts or skimpy dresses that showed a lot. When they drove to Manaus in his Jeep or walked on the cobbled streets of the city holding hands, he looked like her grandfather and worried about being taken for a dirty old man. That passed quickly in this city where anything goes. No one cared about Jim and the girl.
During the first several months, because of the language, Jim never knew what Angela was thinking. He tried to imagine what she said to him or what was in her mind. In his pidgin Portuguese, he tried to convey that she should try to imagine what he was saying, that’s how they would become friends, by guessing and making things up. They would create each other in their imaginations. They tried to do it and laughed. This was an appealing idea, to be utterly new and special and perhaps even invented for one other person in the world. And it was true that they never really learned many basic things about each other. But the girl was better at their game than Jim. She didn’t mind not knowing.
The guessing sometimes heightened Jim’s pleasure, but it was also frustrating. He wondered what she was making up. He would find himself listening for clues when she spoke Portuguese to one of the other workers on the property. Jim could tell that the girl was self-possessed and had much to say.
In their imagined language she seemed too good to be true. But he wondered sometimes if she had ever worked in a cantina, because sex was so comfortable for her and she knew a lot for her age; how would he ever know for sure? He decided it didn’t matter. But then he couldn’t leave it alone and he pressed her about the men she had known. He thought that she said he was her third or fourth; it seemed important at the time, which, three or four.
Oddly enough, the peasant girl did not seem to have large expectations or needs. When he took trips into the jungle, she wouldn’t ask when he was coming back. She worked in the kitchen and in the gardens for the same modest wages Jim paid other workers on the property, and Angela seemed satisfied with her lot. When he was in the mining camp, he didn’t think about her so much, because the jungle was a huge passion. Also, the girl had trained him. When he came back, she would be there, waiting, like the large rooms of the house made of fragrant wood. The girl never once asked Jim for extra money or presents. When he once brought her expensive red sandals from one of the hotel gift shops she accepted them without fanfare and put them away in her little closet, preferring to go in bare feet or in cheap native slippers. She didn’t have aspirations like all the other women Jim had known. At first, he was suspicious about this and wondered if she had secret motivations, some devious plan, but eventually he took for granted her graciousness and lack of guile; it was part of his new life in Brazil.
Since Ava left him, it was over a year now, Jim had had trouble making love. For a week or so in Canada, before he met Phyllis, he had dated a beauty queen, Miss Alaska, and he couldn’t have sex with her. It wouldn’t work whatever she tried. With Phyllis, there were stretches of time when he was impotent. He never knew when it would happen. With the Indian girl, this problem disappeared.
He loved the taste of her, which was like sweet mango or cashew. He couldn’t get enough of kissing her. The girl had great patience for this, but eventually she giggled and bit him gently on the lips, urged him with her voluptuous body and sweet manner.
When he began to have difficulty, she brought him back, patiently; she had a few ways that surprised him and he tried not to think about how she had learned. Finally, they’d fuck, very hard and fast; she had spirit and hunger that came from the jungle, where she had grown up—at least Jim fancied that was the explanation—until finally all of his life flooded out of him; it felt that way. He was empty and almost desperate afterwards, as if he couldn’t reclaim himself. She offered him a piece of melon in the canopied bed, but he couldn’t move. She laughed and fed him.
Angela didn’t sleep the night in Jim’s bed, although he invited her. When he asked, she smiled, as though she might, but in the morning she’d always gone back to her own little room. It had been her place for nearly a half year, since the day she’d come from the jungle to work in the large house. In her parents’ small thatched hut, on the bank of the Igapo-Acu River, Angela had shared a tiny doorless room with three younger sisters. Having a room of her own was very important.
She was an unusual girl, Jim decided. She would fall into a trance listening to nonsense on the radio, jingles and such, and when he bought a television, she watched the soap operas. All of this was a revelation to her, a new universe. She didn’t know much and yet she seemed to understand a great deal. Angela was very young, and though Jim lured her with his great salesmanship and a touch of the Manaus high life, she kept a big part for herself.
The first evening back in the camp, when it was only a small clearing, pitiful really, without so much as a hut or lean-to, Jim swathed himself in netting and climbed into the hammock. The air was warm and sluggish, laborious to breath. Jim hung between two skinny aaí trees, wrapped like a mummy, sweating, and hardly able to turn over. He would remain this way for the next thirteen or fourteen hours.
The night fell quickly and was darker than anything he had ever imagined. He could not see the hand in front of his face, nothing, and yet the jungle filled Jim’s head with an ocean roar of insects heaped upon the bleating and screaming of parrots and monkeys, birds in crisis, predators and prey, that infernal racket drowning out logic and even conviction. There were menacing crashes beyond the clearing, calls and cries that were inexplicable and savage.
In time (but how much time? Hammock nights were restless and without end) the bedlam blended to a more predictable buzzing and chirping; it took on a rhythm that pulsed in Jim’s head, as if there were a greater sense to it. He even found it appealing and it gave him something to lean against. Jim fell into the sultry mix of jungle sounds, memories, and sweating, gulping water, wondering, vaguely, if he had malaria. He went off into the night with his father, Nathan, searching for the farmer’s cows, or tracked game with Ribamar. Sometime later (but when? Three hours? Was it almost dawn?) Jim dreamed about the girl in Manaus, or he thought of Ava. She wanted him again and Jim’s desire spread into the jungle’s mysterious urging.
The two camp dogs barked whenever something approached the edge of the clearing. Jim woke with a start. He could see the glow of Ribamar’s cigarette. He was sitting nearby on a log, and he nodded solemnly. Or some nights Jim would hear Ribamar’s soothing voice and he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming or remembering yesterday when they walked together in the forest; many days they went hunting for game. Jim loved to watch Ribamar move quietly through the dense bush, with his elbow pushing aside vines and drooping fronds, letting them flow back in place as though they’d never been touched. He moved without a trace.
Jim, you mustn’t wear deodorant, Ribamar reminded him gently. But Jim slathered it on every night because he couldn’t stand the smell of himself for thirteen hours in the hammock. Jim, when you are in the jungle you want to smell like an animal, Ribamar cautioned. Deodorant is for the cantina, for the girls. If you wear it in the jungle, you make the jaguar curious. He wants to see who you are. Ribamar knew so much that he could say anything at all and it might be true; he could make it true with his will, his gravity, his amused and lordly conviction. In the hammock, it seemed as though Ribamar created the jungle. Still, Jim tried to guess what was really true and what was part of their gamesmanship. He decided it wasn’t true about the deodorant.
* * *
When Jim sat up to ask Ribamar, the older man was lying on the dirt a few feet away, dozing. And yet when Ribamar had set up Jim’s hammock he’d been careful not to allow it to even touch the ground lest ants and other bugs crawl into it and torture Jim through the night. Jungle insects didn’t bother Ribamar.
In an hour, or three hours, when Jim looked up again, Ribamar was sitting on the log, smoking a cigarette. What about the snakes, Ribamar? Can you hear the cobra in your sleep? Ribamar nodded yes. Once or twice a week, a cobra, coral snake, or pit viper would crawl into the clearing. Ribamar, or one of the other men, would kill the snake with a machete or smack it with a log, and kick it back into the trees. With his ear on the ground, Ribamar could hear a snake coming out of the bush. He could hear a man approaching. Even without dogs, he could sometimes hear the jaguar.
What does it sound like, Ribamar?
Your body starts to tell you when a jaguar is near, the older man said. Sometimes you hear it moving through the vegetation, but usually it’s nothing specific. You feel your death arriving.
Ribamar was smiling a little, but Jim decided he was telling the truth.
Go to sleep, Jim.
* * *
In the early light, Jim awoke with the conviction that he was saving his family. It was the remnant of a dream and he didn’t stay with it for long. Jim rarely thought about the past, and when he did he felt impatient. Every morning he was newly born in hot rancid water. It still wasn’t time to leave the hammock, another couple of hours before the mosquitoes mostly disappeared around mid-morning and Ribamar released Jim from this hanging hell where he ached and scratched his legs and belly drenched from sweat or from pissing on himself when he couldn’t find the bottle in the dark.
Jim listened to the squeal of parrots and thought about his plans for the day. He had flown in a dozen laborers from Manaus. There were four gunmen hanging around the clearing and more were coming. There were about a dozen garimpeiros living near the camp, beginning to dig for gold. Jim’s tiny community was growing. There were no barracks yet and all of the laborers slept in hammocks slung between trees. In another hour they’d be working on the runway, hacking through the trees south of the clearing. It was so exciting. Big things were happening and mistakes were often not tolerated. Two days earlier a worker bathing in the river had been eaten by piranhas. There were many deadly creatures, and yet, besides the insects that teemed everywhere, you didn’t see them. They were hiding in the trees or inside your hammock or boot, biding their time, protecting themselves, or waiting to pounce.
Jim didn’t worry about animals or sickness. Ribamar watched over him, made Jim feel untouchable. More, the violence of this habitat excited him. He knew that he could win here. He saw it clearly while lying in the hammock. He could stay in the fire longer than the next guy. He loved constructing an empire from a puny clearing in the forest. He wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. Many afternoons he dug in the mud with garimpeiros or swung a machete, clearing trees and vines. Jim knew a few words of Portuguese and gestured expressively, what he wanted and where. He urged his gunmen to lend a hand, though they were lazy men who resented labor, but eventually they also grabbed machetes and cut back the bush. Jim’s enthusiasm was infectious and his men loved him. He gave them a hug. He knew just the right words to keep them going. He told them a little about the future. They were like his children. He knew the men would follow him and do whatever was necessary.
Garimpeiros were finding traces of gold, nothing to speak of. But the word was now on everyone’s lips. More of these wiry little men showed up every day. Soon they would begin to build Jim’s enormous sluice box. Each day, gushing wealth would wash down into his hands. Gold was the drummer’s beat. Jim could hear it from the hammock.
* * *
After a few weeks the morning sounds had evolved to hammering and chain saws and you could no longer hear the parrots and monkeys. The rudimentary dorm and cantina were going up. The men were nearly finished cutting a landing strip into the tall trees. Ramon Vega’s helicopter flew in each morning with a two-thousand-pound load slung beneath its belly. The Caterpillar had arrived in pieces and the mechanic was assembling it in the small clearing. Then two big diesel generators arrived. Soon there would be power. Lights and musica were on the way. They were creating a little civilization.
Some days Ramon Vega stayed awhile and looked over the camp while it came together. His own garimpo was eighty miles to the east. There was no gold on his land, he sighed audibly, but he had a cantina with six working girls and miners from nearby garimpos came to visit. Ramon cleared the equivalent of eighty thousand dollars a month from the cantina. He explained to Jim that once he began to export gold the most beautiful girls in all of Brazil would find their way to this impossibly remote place. They would walk out of the jungle smelling of French perfume. They would gladly give their gifts in the heat, amidst the poisonous frogs, snakes, and disease. Ramon and Jim bantered back and forth. They shared the language of gaudy deals and success.
Ramon explained to his friend, once the tractor had cleared the land and they were flying out the gold, Jim would need to roll heavy logs across his runway unless one of Jim’s planes was taking off or landing, because bandits would try to take over the garimpo. This was another part of the life here. Gold meant bandits along with beautiful women. Jim should expect armed men to approach through the forest unless they tried to land in planes. There was no law here besides money, no police, no recourse other than fighting it out.
Maybe they’ll come to you on a beautiful morning, Ramon said with a playful smile, a perfect blue sky when your men are feeling warm and lazy from a night with the girls. Jim, this is the moment to worry. When the jungle is golden from the sun and you feel relaxed. Ramon stretched like a cat. He relished these little firefights in the jungle, full-fledged hostile takeover attempts that were common in the region. In the gold business, camps such as Jim’s were often overrun and there were terrible slaughters; but Ramon made treachery sound like manly fun, our guys against their guys. Ramon didn’t worry. This was the life we were made for, Jim, and Ramon shook his fist. We’ll beat them unless they beat us. Another laugh. So what! We’ll live the life until someone takes it away. In the jungle, power was the soul of morality as well as the key to surviving. The two men pledged to help each other like blood brothers.
Jim had enormous appetite for this new flagrant life. It fired him like nothing he had ever known.
* * *
Every five or six weeks Jim brought the Indian girl with him. While the camp was still in its construction phase, Angela hauled water and timber like one of the men. She was comfortable here. She had grown up in a tiny village only sixty kilometers from Jim’s camp. At night, in front of the fire, she told Jim, Ribamar, and Luis about her life in the small village on the banks of the Igapo-Acu River. She spoke rapidly, while Luis translated with a melancholic or agitated expression that seemed to mirror some internal musing of his own.
Angela’s community of forty Indians was a world unto itself. The men fished in the river and did a little hunting. The Indians didn’t need anything more than what they could harvest from the river or nearby fields and gardens. There was always enough to eat. The villagers considered themselves blessed to live their lives here. Their children fed fish to pink dolphins that appeared like magic in the brown water. The gentle mammals whirled around the legs of the children and their mothers washing clothes in the river.
On the south end of the village, the natives had cut a clearing where a small plane could land in an emergency, but this rarely happened. Most of them lived and died among their family and friends without ever once visiting Manaus. Angela’s migration to the city had been a great surprise to everyone.
Angela had learned about farming from her mom, who grew pineapples in a clearing at the top of a steep hill about two miles from their thatched hut. Sometimes Angela helped her mom plant seedlings or haul the burlap sacks, but on most days she worked by herself. She liked working alone, feeling the cool afternoon rain on her wrinkled face, and when she was in the mood she took a swig from a bottle of whiskey and enjoyed a snooze.
Angela’s mom was nearly sixty by the time her daughter left for the city. She was a small old woman with the muscled back of a man. For hours she hauled eighty-pound sacks of pineapples. Every night she walked home by herself along a little path through the forest. She had to be inside before dark or she could be killed by the cats. One evening, the old woman came across a jaguar on the path. She dropped the sack and held her machete in her right hand. She watched the animal while it paced to the left and right, back and forth, eyeing the old woman. There was only one way to save herself. She mustn’t drop her guard for an instant. This went on for nearly twenty minutes, staring at the pacing cat, waiting for the moment to defend herself. Almost always, such confrontations turn out badly for a native holding a machete. The tension of watching the swift-moving cat while holding the heavy blade wears a man out and he needs to rest his arm, shake the pain out. Then, he is lost. But Angela’s mother was fearless and her arm was powerful from working with the machete her whole life. Eventually the cat drifted back into the jungle and the old woman walked home with her sack of pineapples.
Angela’s family and neighbors had learned to navigate the considerable dangers of their neighborhood. Mothers stayed close to their infants so they wouldn’t be carried off the riverbank by a Royal Eagle. When one of these tremendous birds swooped down for fish, it casts a shadow like a plane. Mothers kept their kids out of the water during the dry season when thousands of starved red-bellied piranhas gathered in deep pools. Once the rains began in November, the vicious little fish glutted themselves on berries and swimming in the river was fairly safe for the next few months.
The locals stayed inside after dark. Nonetheless, the work of the cats was readily visible. South of Angela’s tiny community, there was a narrow walking trail, leading hundreds of kilometers toward Pôrto Velho and the gold mines in the south. Beside the path locals found bodies of garimpeiros who had been trying to make it to the mines. The men had been killed by jaguars. Usually the local people would put up a simple marker without a name. Ribamar shook his head and reflected, once more, that garimpeiros were valiant but stupid men. They couldn’t get it through their heads that a single man cannot survive in the jungle.
Angela and Jim slept together in his hammock. She shook her head, no, and smiled at him, yes. She pretended to be shy at first; it was her endearing affectation. She liked him to take her clothes off like gift wrapping. The night fell quickly and she fed him her youthful breasts and tousled his thinning hair. They made love, though Ribamar was always a few yards away, dozing or listening to the droning insects and jungle shrieks, or suddenly the forest lapsed into inexplicable and daunting silence but for their heavy breathing. Jim was inside her for hours as though humping the moist sultry jungle, her smell suffusing him, into his hair and fingernails. When it wouldn’t work anymore he pushed his fingers into her and kissed her neck. Angela, sweet laughing Angela, what did she really know and think about? What was in her mind those rapturous nights? Did she think it would never end? How would it end?
In the morning he felt like a lion and headed off into the jungle with Ribamar. Jim promised that he’d take her to visit her parents and little sisters. Once Jim’s runway was complete, they’d fly into her village and taxi up to Angela’s tiny shack. She’d step out of Jim’s plane like a princess bearing gifts; he promised her, but then he forgot. The camp, this great endeavor of his life, obsessed him.