A View from the Banks of the Giant of Rivers¹

The Amazon, with its cortege of tributaries, forms an enormous brown continent in the middle of the Americas. During the long rainy months, all of the water courses increase in volume in such a way that the river invades the jungle, turning it into the home of creatures of the water and the air. Beasts of the earth seek refuge on the spots of land that emerge from the water on the brown savannah. Alligators and piranhas (or caneros) are the new, dangerous guests of the Tronda, replacing the ocelots, jaguars and peccaries in the task of preventing human beings from setting up camp in the jungle.

Ever since that time long ago when the fearful and famished hosts of Orellana looked upon this muddy sea and in their makeshift boats followed it to the sea, millions of conjectures have been made about the exact birthplace of the giant. For a long time, the Marañón was considered the true source of the river, but modern research has erred toward the other powerful tributary, the Ucayali. By patiently tracing its banks and dividing it up into ever smaller affluents, the researchers came to a tiny lake high in the Andes that feeds the Apurimac, at first a tinkling stream and then a powerful voice of the mountain, thus justifying its Quechua name apurimac, which means the “great roarer.” This is the birthplace of the Amazon.

But who remembers the pure mountain streams here, where the river has become so colossal and its vast silence increases the mystery of the jungle night? We are in San Pablo, a colony of patients suffering from Hansen’s disease [leprosy] that the Peruvian government maintains at the margins of its territory and which we are using as a base of operations to enter the heart of the forest.

In all the images of the jungle, whether Hudson’s polychrome paradises or José E. Rivera’s somber tones, the smallest and most terrible of enemies, the mosquito, doesn’t feature. In the evening, a shifting cloud floats over the water of the rivers and launches itself at whatever living thing happens to be passing. It’s far more dangerous to enter the jungle without a mosquito net than without a weapon. The fierce carnivores won’t readily attack a human being; not all of the swamps one must wade through are inhabited by alligators or piranhas; nor do the snakes fling themselves on travelers to inject them with their venom or strangle them in a mortal embrace. But the mosquitoes will most certainly attack. They will bite you inexorably all over your body and, in exchange for your blood, they leave troublesome welts and maybe yellow fever or, more frequently, the malaria parasite.

You have to look down at a micro level to see the enemy. Another powerful and invisible one is the anchylostorna, a parasite whose larvae bore their way through the skin of your bare feet and then travel throughout your body to settle in your digestive tract, sucking your blood and causing the very serious anemia from which nearly all the inhabitants of this region suffer to a greater or lesser extent.

We walk through the jungle, following the meandering of an Indian path, heading for the huts of the Yaguas, the indigenous people of the region. The forest is huge and terrifying; its sounds and silences, its furrows of dark water and the clear drops that drip from the leaves—all its so well-orchestrated contradictions— eventually reduce anyone walking to an infinitesimal speck with no thought of their own. To escape from its powerful influence, you have to fix your gaze on the broad, sweaty neck of your guide or on the footprints on the floor of the forest that indicate the presence of humans and recall the strength of the community. When all our clothes were stuck to our bodies and several streams had poured from our foreheads, we reached the settlement. A small number of huts built on posts in a clearing in the jungle and a thicket of yucca, are its wealth—an ephemeral wealth that must be abandoned when the rain swells the veins of the jungle and the water pushes people toward higher ground. The harvest of yucca and palm nuts, the basis of the Indian diet, will enable them to survive.

During the day, the Yaguas live in open-sided houses with palm-frond roofs and a platform that raises them from the humidity of the soil, but, at nightfall, the plague of mosquitoes is stronger than their stoical hides and the evil-smelling oil they smear on their bodies, and they have to seek refuge in huts made of palm fronds, which they close hermetically with a door made of the same material. As long as it is dark, all the members of the tribe remain in their refuge. The promiscuity in which the night is spent doesn’t bother them, because the moral codes that govern us don’t mean anything in their tribal world. I approached the door of a hut, and a stench of strange oils and sweaty bodies immediately repelled me.

The life of these people is reduced to meekly following the orders that nature imparts by means of the rain.

In the winter, they eat yucca and the potatoes they have harvested in the summer, and they go out in their dugout canoes to fish among the thickets of the jungle. It is fascinating to see them: They have a vigilant immobility that nothing disturbs, small harpoons poised in their right hands. The dark water obscures everything, until suddenly there’s a quick movement, and the harpoon is plunged into the deep; the water is agitated for a moment, and then you can see only the tiny buoy at the end of the harpoon, tied to the rod by one or two meters of line. Powerful strokes of the paddle keep the canoe close to the float until the fish becomes too exhausted to struggle.

They also hunt, when the period is favorable. Sometimes they use an old shotgun obtained through who knows what strange transaction to bring down a large animal, but in general, they prefer to use silent blow-pipes. When bands of monkeys pass through the foliage, a small arrow whose point is smeared with curare wounds one of the monkeys. Without even a cry, the monkey extracts the arrow and continues on its way for a few meters, until the poison takes effect and it falls from the trees— alive, but unable to emit a sound. As long as the noisy troop of monkeys is passing, the blow-pipes are used constantly, and the hunters note the points in the foliage where the wounded animals have fallen. When the last monkey has departed the scene of the tragedy, the hunters retrieve all the wounded animals and take their contribution of food back to the community.

Celebrating the arrival of their white visitors, they presented us with one of the monkeys they had killed. We prepared the animal on an improvised spit in the way it is done on our Argentine pampas and tried its meat, which was tough and bitter but had an agreeable, wild taste. The Indians were enthusiastic about our method of preparing the dish.

To reciprocate, we gave them two bottles of a soft drink we had brought with us. The Indians drank the contents excitedly and saved the caps with religious fervor in the pouches of woven fibers that they wear around their necks, which is where they keep their most prized possessions: an amulet, some shotgun cartridges, a seed necklace, a Peruvian sol, etc.

On our return, somewhat anxious about the approaching night, one of them led us along shortcuts that enabled us to reach the safe refuge of the metal roofs of the colony before night fell. We said good-bye with a handshake, in the European style, and the guide gave me a present of one of the fibers from his skirt, the only clothing worn by the Yaguas.

The dangers and tragedies of the wild have often been exaggerated, but we had an experience that shows how valid the warnings are. People always say that it’s dangerous to wander away from the path when you’re in the jungle, and that is certainly true. One day, while relatively close to our base, we suddenly looked at each other in consternation because the path we had hoped to return by seemed to have vanished. We carefully retraced our steps, but it was all in vain.

While one of us stood in a fixed spot, another walked straight ahead and then returned, guided by shouts. We did this in every direction without success. Fortunately, we had been told what to do in case we found ourselves in such a situation. We looked for a special kind of tree, whose roots form partitions a few centimeters thick, which sometimes rise to heights of several meters from the earth and seem to give extra support to the tree.

With an ordinary stick, we began to strike those partitions as hard as we could. This produced a deep sound which, although not very loud, could be heard at a great distance and is much more effective than shooting off a firearm, for the foliage deadens the sound of shots. After a while, an Indian with a mocking smile appeared with his shotgun and, with signals, led us to the path and showed us the direction we should take. Somehow, we had strayed off course about 500 meters from the path.

It is generally imagined that the jungle is a lush paradise full of food, but that is not true. A knowledgeable local will never die of hunger, but, if others carelessly get lost in the forest, they will have serious problems finding food to eat. None of the kinds of tropical fruits that we know grow spontaneously there. To sustain oneself on wild plants, you have to resort to certain roots and palm fruits that only an experienced person can differentiate from others that look the same but are poisonous. Hunting is extremely difficult for someone who can’t identify a broken twig as the trail of a boar or deer, who doesn’t know the watering places and who doesn’t know how to move through the jungle without making a sound. Fishing in a place where the density of aquatic animals is so great is still a very complex art, since the possibility of a fish biting the hook is remote, and it is far from easy to harpoon them. But, when the soil is cultivated, what enormous pineapples, papayas and bananas! A little work is rewarded with tremendous results.

And yet the spirit of the jungle seems to overpower its inhabitants and merge them with itself. Nobody works, unless it is necessary in order to eat. Like the monkeys that seek their daily sustenance in the branches without thinking about tomorrow, or the wild cats that kill only to satisfy their hunger, the colony works only enough to keep themselves from starving.

The days sped by, filled with scientific work, excursions and hunting. The night before we were to leave, two canoes filled with leprosy patients drew close to the pier in the healthy part of the colony to express their affection for us. Their leonine faces in the torchlight were an impressive spectacle in the Amazonian night. A blind singer sang some huaynitos and marineras, while the motley orchestra did wonders to accompany him. One of the patients gave a farewell speech to thank us; his simple words conveyed a deep emotion that enhanced the impact of the night. For those simple souls, the mere fact that we had come to visit them, even out of curiosity, made us deserving of their gratitude. The serenade and farewell ended with embarrassing grimaces as they attempted to express their affection without shaking hands because the health laws categorically forbid physical contact between the patients and the healthy. The music and the farewell cemented our commitment to them.

The small raft on which we continued our river journey was crammed with gifts of food from both the members of the colony and from the sick, who competed in giving us the most food, the sweetest papaya and the fattest chicken. Then a little push toward the middle of the river, and we were talking to the river alone.

The song of the jungle

and the pain that is there

come over the river

on the rafts that arrive.

The hardened boatmen

come drowning their sorrow

over the bloody routes

of the spiraling river.

We drifted down the river for two days, waiting for the moment when we would see Leticia, the Colombian city we wanted to reach, but there was a serious drawback—we couldn’t steer the hulk. Everything was fine as long as we were in the middle of the river, but whenever we tried to draw close to the bank, we had a furious battle with the current—which always emerged victorious, keeping us in the middle until, at a whim, we were allowed to reach whichever shore the river chose for us.

On the night of the third day, we finally saw the lights of the town—but the raft continued on its way unperturbed, in spite of every effort we made. Whenever it seemed as if we were about to win, the logs of the raft would make a pirouette and head once more toward the middle of the current.

We struggled until we could no longer see the lights upstream and were about to take refuge under the mosquito net, abandoning the guard duty we did occasionally, when the last chicken—the tasty dinner we were longing for—took fright and fell into the water. The current carried it a little faster than it carried us. I stripped off my clothes and was about to jump in after it—one or two strokes would take me to it, and then all I’d have to do would be to wait for the raft to catch up—but I hesitated. I don’t really know why; it may have been the enigmatic river or the subconscious thought of an alligator. But, in any case, the chicken sailed on down the river, while I, raging inwardly, kept promising myself that I would jump in and then holding off again, until I gave up. Frankly, the nocturnal river scared me; I was a coward in the face of nature. Later, both of us were extremely hypocritical, consoling each other about the poor chicken’s terrible fate.

When we woke up, we were aground on the Brazilian side, many paddling hours from Leticia. But we did manage to get back there, thanks to the proverbial kindness of the people living along the gigantic river.

When we flew out in the Colombian Armed Forces Catalina, we looked down on the immense jungle. From above, it seemed like an enormous green cauliflower barely broken by the brown thread of a narrow river, extending for thousands of kilometers and hours of flying time. We saw that our months-long intimate friendship had been with only an infinitesimal part of the gigantic Amazonian continent, and this realization had us lowering our heads in reverence.

Far below, the spirit of Canaima, God of the Jungle, emerging from the foliage and floating on the rivers, raised his hand in a gesture of farewell.

Published in the Panamá-América Sunday supplement, November 22, 1953.

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1. This article narrates some of his experiences during his first journey, in 1952, described in The Motorcycle Diaries.