“No, you didn’t tell me.”
“I did, sweetheart.”
“I think I would have remembered you telling me that you were leaving for the Amazon on Monday.” D slides her hand free from mine in the back of the cab. There have been a lot of logistical conversations lately and maybe this one slipped through the cracks.
“You just got back from Patagonia this morning,” D says, and turns to look out the window. We’re in gridlock on Eighth Avenue.
It started as a family trip—D, the two kids, and myself, going down the Amazon. It was D’s idea, or more correctly, it was our daughter’s idea. She was sitting on my lap while I looked at photos someone had sent me—an elegant, wood and steel, luxury Amazonian riverboat chugging downriver under a blue sky, pink river dolphins, and large purple butterflies.
“I want to go on that boat, Daddy,” my daughter said. “I want to see those dolphins.”
D walked over to have a look. “Me too.”
The next day when I came home, mother and daughter were looking at the photos again. And then later, when my son saw them—“Oh, yeah, Dad.” I knew that the Amazon was in our future.
I obtained an assignment to write about it. Plans were set in motion. Departure was scheduled around school vacation, plane reservations made. Then someone mentioned mosquitoes. And malaria. After some intense scanning of the Internet, D ascertained that the section of Peru to which we were headed had the highest instance of malaria in the Amazon, perhaps the highest in the world. “I’m not giving the kids that medication,” she declared, “it’s completely toxic. It makes people insane.”
There went the family trip—but by then I was committed. The plan to head upriver, deep into the Amazon with the kids, was in line with both D’s and my desire to raise them to be comfortable out in the world. That there would be other travelers on the boat mattered little; I could easily imagine us carving out our own little universe on board. But the idea of going alone, trapped with a dozen strangers on a small boat, fell right into the kind of travel, and the kind of situations, I have spent a lifetime avoiding.
The week I’m home is spent digging out from things that didn’t get handled while I was in Patagonia. D spends her evenings going out with friends—“When you’re not here, I have to hunker down. Now I’ve got to go out or I’ll go nuts.”
On the afternoon of the third day I brush the small of her back as I walk past her in the bedroom. D turns and we look at one another. Her eyes well up. She puts her arms over my shoulders, linking her fingers behind my neck. “I know you’ve got to go, and that you’re a travel writer and it’s your job and all, but this is a lot. We need you.”
D’s willingness to emotionally invest in others and make herself vulnerable allows her to inhabit her humanity to a degree that still baffles me. Why would anyone who is so strong-willed, so self-sufficient, want to make herself vulnerable to someone else? D would say that what is most important in life is family, connection, and community. Loving someone, she will say, is the only thing that matters and is worth the price of relinquishing control.
“It’s a dirty trick life plays,” I once said to her, “what loving someone does. It’s a horrible feeling, caring so much about someone. How vulnerable it makes you. I hate you for how much I love you.”
“Thanks, luv. That makes me feel great.”
“And the kids—all the things that could happen . . . It’s completely ridiculous to love someone so much. I hate it.”
“You might not want to mention that to them.”
“I’m telling you, it’s a dirty trick life plays. And once you’re in, you can’t get out.”
We sit down on the edge of the bed and D tells me about the wedding plans that are taking shape in her mind.
“I think the picnic idea is fun. Dartmouth Square will work great, and whoever wants to come can just come,” she says.
To believe that any social event that D is involved in planning might ever be this simple is to be willfully naïve. She grew up in a family that ran a hotel. They planned and carried off elaborate banquets, weddings, and large events on a weekly basis. D is most comfortable in a swarming and chaotic crowd. That her own wedding will be a simple picnic is an idea I greet with skepticism.
“What if it rains?”
D looks at me.
I shrug. “I mean, it is Ireland.”
“Really?”
“Not if you stay positive.”
“So it’s up to me?”
“Kinda, yeah,” she says.
“And what about the people who come from New York, how are we going to deal with them? It’s a long way to bring a sandwich.”
“I’ll assign them each an Irish buddy, to look after them.”
“So your two worlds can finally come together.”
“Exactly.” She leans over and kisses me. “And what do you think about Shelly marrying us?”
Shelly is a friend of D’s from Ireland. She’s a very funny woman, with a typically sarcastic Irish wit, but not someone who jumps to mind as the person who should, or even could, marry us.
“Shelly? Is she a priest or a minister or something?”
“No.”
“Then how could she marry us?” I ask.
“It’ll be a spiritual ceremony.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we have to legally get married in the registrar’s office anyway.”
“We do?”
“Since you’re divorced, we can’t get married in a church—not that we’d want to—and in Ireland you can’t get married anywhere but a church or at a civil hall.”
I sense an opening. Perhaps we can simply get married in the presence of a few witnesses and get away with a small celebratory lunch. “So then why are we talking about getting married in the park with lots of people, if it doesn’t count?”
“Don’t say that. Of course it counts.”
“But you just said—”
D glares at me. “Are you deliberately being like this?”
“Like what?”
D begins to speak very slowly. Her diction becomes very clear. “Because, I would like to have a spiritual ceremony, with our family and our friends present, to celebrate our marriage. Is that a problem?”
This is a battle I won’t win. “Where is everyone going to go to the bathroom in the park, darling?”
My bag is by the door, D is on the phone, and I’m sitting in the large, overstuffed armchair in the living room. It’s the most comfortable chair in our home, the one every visitor sits in when they come over. My son loves to snuggle up underneath the large cushions in the morning after he stumbles from bed. Our daughter lines up her dolls on it. I bought the chair years ago, long before D and I met. When we got together, she had it reupholstered from the ugly red pattern it had to the soft pastel green it is now. Still, she hates it and has been trying to get rid of it for years. I can’t really understand why, except perhaps because it represents my world before her. Some of our other furnishings predate our seven-year relationship, but fewer and fewer over time.
When D gets off the phone, she squishes down into the chair beside me, something she does often. The seat is not quite large enough to accommodate both of us comfortably and I’m forced up on one hip, cramped.
“See, if we got rid of this chair then we couldn’t sit all cozy like this,” I say.
D groans. She has just heard about a friend of hers who is getting a divorce, and earlier in the day we learned of an acquaintance who is having an affair.
“Are you sure you want to get married?” I ask.
“We’re different,” she says.
“Everyone’s different.”
D ignores me. “I told my parents this afternoon. They wanted to call tomorrow and congratulate you, but I told them you were leaving tonight.”
I nod.
“Mum was like, ‘Didn’t he just get back?’ ” Here it comes, just as I’m about to walk out the door. D goes on. “All I can say is that when I talk to you tomorrow I better hear the sound of mosquitoes buzzing around. And is malaria contagious? If you give me malaria . . .”
We sit for a while and watch it grow fully dark outside. We haven’t turned on any lights; only the glow from the street fills the room. “When you get back we can tell other people.” D’s voice is quiet, detached.
I nod again.
“I told Lou and Karen.” Louise and Karen are D’s oldest friends.
“Oh, what did they say?”
D shrugs. “Lou was excited, Karen was good.”
“Then why do you sound so down?”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“I don’t want to go either.”
“Don’t lie. I can see that smirk on your face. It’ll be amazing.”
“It should be pretty cool,” I confess.
“Don’t,” D says. “Don’t talk about it. I’m truly jealous. I’m not usually jealous of your trips, but this one, my stomach is starting to churn.”
“Mine too,” I say. “But I think it’s the malaria medication.”
When I land in Lima twelve hours later I have an e-mail from D. She has attached a photo she took of a mosquito lying dead on the sheets of our bed in New York. The insect bit her during the night. It’s early April; there hasn’t been a mosquito in New York in six months. D has taken this mosquito’s mysterious appearance as a sign that she was right in not taking the kids to the Amazon. Where others might see a curious coincidence, D will read deep meaning.
Often, I struggle to follow the chain of thoughts that leads to her conclusions, yet I try to make an effort to support her reasoning, even when it has only the most tenuous connection to the reality that I live in. But the idea that a mosquito was sent by the Universe to confirm her decision not to come to the Amazon—I get behind this immediately. I call her from the food court in the Lima airport while eating my Papa John’s quatro queso pizza at six thirty in the morning.
“Thank God you stayed home,” I shout into the phone when she answers, cheese hanging from my mouth.
“Can you believe it? I heard this buzzing in the middle of the night; I thought it was in my dream.” For D, the interpretation and significance of dreams plays nearly as important a role in understanding life’s directions as does the metaphorical significance of waking events, such as the mosquito’s appearance.
“Well, if ever there was a sign . . . ,” I say.
“Oh, shut up.” She’s laughing.
I can feel myself relax. I’m wired from lack of sleep and with food slowly filling my stomach, my spirits become buoyant. I love D deeply in this moment, and tell her so.
“You just love me because you’re far away.”
“No, I don’t.”
“But it’s easier,” she says. I can hear the smile and an acceptance in her voice that isn’t always there.
Our four-year-old daughter, who has just woken up, squawks for the phone. When I tell her I’m having pizza for breakfast she tells me she wants to move to Peru.
During a very bumpy one-hour flight to Iquitos, in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, I try to focus on an elegant brochure of the vessel I will travel on. It’s an old riverboat converted for luxury cruising; up to twenty-four passengers are housed in twelve deluxe cabins with king-size beds and large picture windows that look out onto the passing river. Twenty-four attendants pamper the guests. The brochure has photos of an elegant dining area with crisp white linen tablecloths and of a glass-encased lounge with deep couches and a bar. In one photo, a captain in white uniform stands chatting with a guest while a barman mixes what must be a pisco sour—Peru’s contribution to the world’s libations. The boat is all shining metal and rich mahogany.
My examination of the brochure serves two purposes: first, it helps to distract me from the incessant turbulence, and second, I’m searching for a phone number. The prospect of such luxury has made an idiot of me. Because I knew I was simply getting on a boat and heading upriver, with all the day-to-day decisions taken out of my hands, I have done none of my usual preparations. I can’t even remember what Peruvian money is called. And the thought has occurred to me that if the car arranged by the boat to pick me up at the airport isn’t there, I have no idea where I need to go or who I could contact for assistance. I will be—quite literally—up the river without a paddle. The only phone number on the brochure is for reservations—it’s a U.S. number. Perhaps I should have headed into the Amazon more prepared.
“Are you going on that boat?” the man across the aisle asks. He is a lean, well-tanned, and casually elegant man with dark hair and a confident manner.
“I am,” I answer. As is often the case when I travel, my vulnerability—like not knowing what the hell I’m going to do upon arrival—makes me more open to outside interactions than I might be when I’m at home and think I know best what needs to be done. On the road, serendipity is given space to enter my life.
“That’s my boat,” he says.
“This is?” I ask, holding up the brochure.
He nods.
“Oh, good, then you can give me a ride.”
“Pleasure,” he says, extending his hand and smiling. His white teeth are in a perfect line. Crow’s-feet wrinkle beside his green eyes.
Francesco Galli Zugaro is a citizen of the world. The son of an American mother and an Italian father, he grew up in Switzerland, was educated in the U.S., married a Peruvian woman of Ecuadorian parents, and lives in Lima, after running boats in the Galápagos for six years. He is on his way to Iquitos to check up on his second Amazonian boat—which he has plans to put in the water in a few weeks’ time.
“Come have a look at it with me,” Francesco says, “then maybe we can eat some lunch, before your boat launches in the evening.”
Iquitos is, in essence, jungle-locked. There is one road that stretches for sixty miles into the rain forest, only to taper out at a small village. Other than that, you need to travel upriver for three days to get anywhere that has a road leading to anywhere else. Most people arrive, and leave, by plane. Yet when we land, I see an old DC-8 sitting just off the lone runway, rusting badly, a not-so-subtle reminder that so much of what takes the trouble to get into the Amazon doesn’t make it back out.
Francesco’s driver is waiting for us in the stultifying heat and humidity. On the way into town, I see few other cars on Avenida José Abelardo Quinones. In fact, there are hardly any cars at all in Iquitos. But there is no shortage of motorized transport. A strange hybrid called a motokar—a bastardized motorcycle modified into glorified tricycle, with a bench to seat three in the back and a plastic cover to protect passengers from the afternoon showers—owns the city streets. The motokars produce a loud, high-pitched buzz that keeps Iquitos humming in a constant state of heat-induced laconic frenzy. Along with open-air buses, they are how most of the five hundred thousand locals maneuver around the riverfront city.
We funnel onto Avenida Grau and are engulfed in a swarming chaos of the weaving and darting motokars. Horns tap-tap out a thin “meee-meee,” much like the sound made by the Road Runner from the Looney Tunes cartoons. Francesco says something to the driver in rapid-fire Spanish—of which I understand nothing—and we turn onto Putumayo Street.
An abandoned eight-story construction site dominates the sky. “That was supposed to be the tallest building in Iquitos, the Social Security Administration building, but the soil was sandy so it was going to be too unstable,” Francesco explains. There are no plans to take down the aborted project. The rest of Iquitos has a similarly unimpressive appearance; unfinished cinder block and raw cement seem to suffice for most newer structures.
Then we approach an open green square where the buildings have a sense of permanence and a faded charm. Blue and white Portuguese tiles adorn facades of tired mansions. “This is the Plaza de Armas,” Francesco turns and shouts to me over the incessant din of the motokars. “It’s really the only sight we have in Iquitos.” Then he points to a two-story silver building with a cast-iron balcony dominating the second floor. The building looks strangely familiar.
“It’s from Paris,” Francesco says. “It was built by Gustave Eiffel.”
It turns out that during the Universal Exposition of Paris in 1889, rubber baron Anselmo del Aguila saw two structures built by the French architect—a tall tower and a two-story iron building. The tower was too large to move, but he bought the smaller building, had it dismantled piece by piece, and shipped it across the Atlantic, steamed two thousand two hundred miles up the Amazon, carried through the jungle by hundreds of men, and rebuilt beside the Plaza de Armas. It still stands, a testament to the glorious and fleeting moment of global significance Iquitos enjoyed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the nearby rain forest was plundered for its rubber to meet the global demand created after Charles Goodyear’s invention of vulcanization. Iquitos’s brief moment in the sun ended as quickly as it began when rubber seeds were snuck out of the country and orderly plantations were set up in Malaya, plunging the town back into Amazonian oblivion, where it has remained ever since.
“Our industry now is oil, illegal logging, logging, and tourism, in that order,” Francesco explains as we walk the once-fashionable Malecon Tarapaca promenade, which stretches for just a couple of blocks above the river. A few more vestiges of Iquitos’s glory days line Próspero Street, but there is little else to point toward any immediate appeal. Despite this, the hanging heat and dense folds of humidity, there’s a shaggy-dog charm to Iquitos. There is nothing here that is remotely reminiscent of my life back home—none of the threadbare shops, or primitive advertising, or restaurants have a familiar or even recognizable feeling about them. Such an alien sensation is increasingly rare in a world heading toward homogenization. The only thing familiar in this environment is me; consequently, I am acutely aware of my own thoughts, which in moments like this run toward a feeling of possibility. I wish I were staying in town for longer, possibly much longer.
“I’m glad you see it,” Francesco says when I express my immediate affection for Iquitos. “It’s not always obvious. I like it, too,” and then we’re back in his jeep and headed out Avenida 28 de Julio to see his boat.
In short order the road is filled with puddles, and soon it is too flooded to continue. The level of the Amazon fluctuates up to thirty feet per year, depending on the rains, and a tributary of the river has begun to flood the area. We hop out and walk along planks placed just above the rising tide.
“Last year the river was the highest in recorded history, and this year the water is already higher, and the rains aren’t finished yet,” Francesco tells me. Several vendors have set themselves up beside the water. An old woman is grilling something on sticks over an open fire. Francesco lifts a twig off the grill that’s holding half a dozen large maggots. He offers it to me. “Loaded with protein.”
We climb into a long and narrow skiff and head out across the water to the boatyard. A hulking shell of steel is swarming with men. The boat is already booked full for its maiden voyage in a month’s time. There is much to do. Francesco walks me through the still-raw vessel. “The toilets are from Kentucky, and I had to DHL the engine from China to get it here in time. It cost more to ship than the engine itself, but I have to be ready.” It will take one hundred men and three tugboats twelve days to set the boat in the water. “If you told me twelve years ago that I’d be running boats in the Amazon, I’d have laughed in your face,” Francesco says, shaking his head.
His comment makes me consider my own course over the past dozen years. Twelve years ago, I was drifting, still trying intermittently to capture a version of pop stardom I had run from when it was on offer a decade earlier. The accidental second career as a travel writer, which would revitalize my creative trajectory, was nowhere on the horizon. A dozen years ago, I had no children. Nor had I been through a divorce—and while it was one of the more amicable dissolutions of a marriage, I was still deeply grieved.
The failure of my first marriage nearly eight years ago hovered over and fatigued me for much longer than I admitted, even to myself. That I was still mourning that relationship when I plunged deep into another one was probably ill advised. A feeling of sadness permeated the early period of discovery and excitement with D; it is a regret we share, albeit one she has been gracious enough to move beyond. Why these thoughts come to me now, while I’m walking belowdecks, looking at exposed piping, I have no idea. But travel does this: it creates space that allows thoughts and memories to intrude and assert themselves with impunity. Smells and sights, the quality of light, the honk of a horn—can all act as touchstones when least expected.
Francesco takes me to lunch on a floating island in the middle of the Amazon that looks back toward the scruffy riverbanks of Iquitos. The river is littered with all sizes and varieties of boat, transporting all shapes and types of cargo. There are long boats and squat ones, open barges and dugout canoes, most jammed full with people. One, with the name Titanic painted in red, sits particularly low as it chugs upriver, the faces of scores of cramped passengers peering out the small glassless portholes. Another battered boat boasts a herd of goats walking around on deck, and dozens of others, loaded with bananas or palm fronds or lumber, float past. “It is very informal on the river, people will transport anything, anywhere,” Francesco tells me.
Rarely do I take the time to marvel at how fast one can get so far from home, but in this instant it’s not lost on me that just last night I was eating a cheeseburger for dinner in a still-chilly New York City, and I am now sitting in the middle of the steamy Amazon River eating fresh dorado for lunch.
Francesco has to return to work and suggests I visit the manatee rescue center.
“I was thinking I’d head over to the market.”
“Belen?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t really recommend it for tourists. It’s not that it’s not safe, but you have to be very careful.”
I smile at him. I’m always warned against local street markets. That they invariably reveal a town for what it is, with all its unguarded voraciousness, is something locals are often shy to expose about themselves.
At a cluster of stalls on Calle 9 de Diciembre, small women grind up fresh fruit for juices, chambira and papaya, camu-camu and mango, and others I don’t recognize. The high-pitched hum of the blenders competes with the more insistent buzz of the passing motokars.
I turn a corner and see an armadillo, sliced open upon a table, beside a dozen butchered turtles. Farther on there are bananas, carrots, beans and potatoes, monkey skulls and chickens, and a stall with dozens of long machetes hanging like wind chimes. A jaguar skin is stretched taut—selling for twenty dollars. Tables support scores of different types of fish, including dorado and piranha, zungaro, and giant paiche. There’s an entire dusty street dedicated to charcoal, and farther on snails the size of grapefruits; butcher blocks with bloody, dripping cuts of meat; huge mounds of loose tobacco leaves; barrels filled with olives, sneakers, and pig parts; coca leaves and anaconda skins; caiman tails and masato (jungle beer) in glass bottles; and there is the hallucinogen ayahuasca, in plastic bags, and yucca root is everywhere. Anyone with anything to sell sells it here.
The market sprawls over a dozen city blocks and tumbles down to the river, where it continues on boats. I squeeze between the wooden homemade stalls, from one aisle to the next. Rain begins to pour down and primitive tarp roofs overhead displace water until they’re too full and collapse. The rain stops as suddenly as it began and the sun comes back out and the ground steams. Then it’s raining again, then the sun is out. It makes no difference; the market continues unabated.
I turn right down a narrow lane. It’s quieter than most. The small stalls, one after the next, are lined with different herbs in bags or bottles. There are wooden bowls filled with roots and twigs. There’s abuta bark, for menstrual cramps; the vine of una del gato, for cancer; hearts of palm root for the kidneys; cassia for hepatitis; patchouli for baldness; and a jar of cream-of-anaconda for sore muscles, as well as the aphrodisiac maca root, to be boiled and made into tea. “Muy efectivo,” the creased woman on a stool beside the display assures me.
A little farther on I come upon a man beside shelves of bottles filled with a golden-brown, syrupy liquid. ROMPA CALZONES—“underwear breaker”—the label reads. “Good for honeymooners,” the small man with the wispy mustache promises. I pick up a bottle. I hold it up to the light, tilting it first one way and then the other. The thick goo oozes slowly from side to side. The small man smiles at me. He’s nodding and grinning. His eyes are dancing. He knows something that I don’t yet know. He wants me to have this, he wants me to be happy. I put the bottle down and thank him. He holds up a finger.
“Espera”—wait, he says.
He lifts a mostly empty bottle down from the shelf and pours half an inch into a dirty plastic cup and offers it to me.
I once drank shark-liver oil on Montserrat, in the Caribbean. It tasted like what I imagine motor oil must taste like, but this, despite the not-dissimilar texture, has a deep bouquet, an oozing, clinging, pungent quality. I have no way of knowing what’s in it, all I know is that when I put down the empty cup, I want more.
“Mmmm,” I say. And now we’re both nodding our heads. Up and down. And grinning.
The thought of trying to explain what Rompa Calzones is to a customs officer at JFK flashes into my mind. I tell my new friend that I’m alone—“Soy solo,” I explain—and shrug. He nods some more, this time knowingly. He shakes my hand a little sadly, and, still nodding, he pats my back and sends me on my way.
I don’t know if it’s a placebo effect or if there really is something to the elixir, but my senses are now on high alert, my vision is more acute, everything is intensified. The smells around me are stronger, the colors brighter, the noises more intense. When I look at the fish laid out on tables, I not only see heads and fins and tails, but I sense what it must have been like for the fish on their journey to this spot. My feelings make no sense, yet I’m invested in them. I want to reach out and caress those fish. And the fruit I pass. It all appears so plump. I want to fondle a swollen orange, and do. I imagine the juices oozing out through the skin and onto my fingers and dripping over my hand and down my arm. I want this. I walk past a woman in a black tank top and a red apron tied snug around her thin waist. She’s slowly pouring water from a blue plastic bucket over a countertop of fish, making them glisten. I don’t look away as she raises her gaze toward me when I strut past. A little farther on, a buxom woman with her hair tightly pulled back is scaling a silver fish, about six inches long, that lies across her palm. She’s rhythmically thrusting the knife over the fish, back and forth, again and again. The fish and her hands have a smattering of blood; her nipples are erect beneath her low-slung, gray T-shirt. A bead of sweat rolls down between her ample breasts. Whatever the reason, I haven’t felt this kind of unapologetic sexual potency in some time.
As a teenager, I was the close friend and confidant when all I wanted to be was the boyfriend. It was my sudden success in movies, several years later, that gave me the sexual currency I craved. My overt sensitivity, previously not potent bait for the opposite sex, suddenly manifested as a draw and instilled in me a power I welcomed. It’s unlikely that young women would have wanted to follow me into public bathrooms had I not been in the movies they were going to see, but whatever the reason, my ability to attract women became a core part of who I was to become as a man, a strong component of my identity. It fueled my self-esteem. Even as I started to be monogamous, I still maintained a flirt-first rapport with every woman I met. Only with my first marriage did I begin to make an active effort to alter my by then automatic response.
When an old man offers me a ride in his wooden plank canoe to go out into the floating portion of the market, I get on board and a thought begins to dance at the edge of my mind. My investment in my sexual desirability has always been linked with my attachment to my youthful success. From a distance, they are separate issues having nothing to do with each other, but in my experience, they were interwoven. After all, I became sexually viable because I became successful. So if I no longer seek that kind of sexual confirmation, perhaps I’m also letting go of an attachment to that success—a success that defined much of my adult life. Getting married would be an acknowledgement of who I am rather than clinging to what I had. On the other hand, I’m an accumulation of all my past, and if in getting married I leave it behind, I don’t know what I take forward. If I let go of my past, I’m uncertain what I have to offer. If I’m not that person, then who am I?
While my mind struggles with this notion I’m suddenly jabbed in the back. I turn around and the old man is pointing directly in front of us. I spin back and prostrate myself just in time to duck under a very low plank, functioning as a bridge over the swollen river. Everywhere, row upon row of shanty homes have been flooded out of their first floors, and temporary walkways and bridges have been constructed from any wood that could be found. Daily life continues in this improvised, third-world Venice as we drift past.
Ahead, a dugout canoe is billowing smoke. We paddle toward it. The most beautiful woman I have yet seen in Iquitos is sitting before a small charcoal fire in a bowl in her boat, selling juane—a chicken and rice concoction wrapped up in a banana leaf. I smile stupidly at her as she ladles out a pile of rice and ties the bundle. Our fingers touch when I give her ten soles. I hand the banana leaf to the old man and he hands me a small plastic cup. It’s only then that I notice that my feet are wet. Our canoe is filling with water. I shrug at the beautiful woman and she laughs at me as I begin to scrape the cup along the bottom of the boat and bail.
Late in the day I leave Iquitos and catch a ride sixty miles to the end of the only road out of the city, to Nauta, a bustling little river town with deeply rutted dirt lanes along the northern bank of the Río Marañón, the main tributary of Peru’s Upper Amazon basin. The day is dying quickly. Francesco’s 130-foot riverboat is anchored among the reeds on the far bank, several hundred yards downriver. Its clean and sleek lines stand out in contrast to the raw contours of the riverbank. The lights from the boat’s large windows appear golden in the twilight and reflect off the water, giving the vessel the appearance of a hovering spacecraft in the fading light.
A small and silent man beside the river gestures out toward the boat and when I nod he points toward a wobbly skiff tied fast in the rushing current. The twenty-five-horsepower outboard grinds and we drive directly across the brown water. The current is strong and pushes us hard downstream. The small man judges the drive vs. slide of the current perfectly and we ease up abreast the larger boat. Without a word, he passes me my bag. I extend my hand in thanks, offer him a few soles, and climb aboard. There is no one there to greet me when I board. The riverboat seems deserted.
Night has fallen fast, like it always does at the equator. Only a few lights burn dimly across the river in Nauta, including the red glow of a looming cell phone tower, blinking on and off, high in the sky—a jarring totem of contemporary life in an underdeveloped backwater. Otherwise, the sky is suddenly very black.
There are no stars. The air is humid and close. Then it begins to rain. Hard. The river boils under the assault. The rain crashing into the forest is thunderous. The downpour feels violent, like it must be causing harm, although I know it isn’t. I go belowdecks and come across a young man sweeping. When I tell him my name he disappears and returns a few minutes later with a key and points me to my cabin, one of three along each side of the corridor that runs the length of the boat. When I open my door I’m confronted with an almost floor-to-ceiling window. I laugh at the image reflected back at me. In my dark city clothes I look comically out of place. I have a bemused, excited, and slightly apprehensive look on my face. I strip down and jump into a lukewarm shower. The boat is listing to port, the drain is on the starboard side of the shower basin, and the water puddles at my feet. While I dry off I can hear others coming on board.
The engines start up; the boat slides into the current and begins to chug upriver. Quickly, I begin to dress. I want to run up on deck to watch our progress but hear voices in the hall and, not for the first time in my life, choose to remain alone instead. I can’t see anything out my window, only my own self-conscious reflection staring back in the night.
Before the boat is out of range of the cell tower, I call D to say good-bye.
“See any mosquitoes?” she asks hopefully.
“Not yet, but it’s raining, so maybe after it stops.”
“What are the other people like? I bet it’s a really interesting mix.”
“Haven’t met them yet.” I groan. “Can’t wait.”
I can hear some of the other passengers scurrying back and forth outside my door. A message on the chalkboard on deck, written in a swirling hand with a smiley face dotting the “i,” mentioned “welcome drinks” in the deck lounge. Communal meals, group adventures, bathroom breaks—the realization of the shared experience with enforced intimates settles down around me as we speak.
“That’s your dream, baby,” she laughs. “Surrounded by strangers, with no exit.”
“Yeah. Kind of forgot about this with all our mosquito talk.”
My initial reaction to nearly every social situation is to shy away. That in the end I often come out of such encounters energized and excited is something I’ve been slow to acknowledge. What stays with me is that I often stumble away anxious and fatigued, my internal monologue running parallel to each outward discussion. Add to this my acute barometer for shame—both my own and the one I perceive in others: when I see people behaving in ways that betray insecurity, masked with bravado, I feel embarrassed for them. I’m always shocked they don’t. I judge them, harshly, and run for the exit.
In my early twenties, when I suddenly became recognizable as an actor, I was utterly unaware of how to handle the beam of attention directed toward me (unless it was sexual attention). The mask of casual disinterest I had begun to develop as a child grew into a defining personality trait of defensive aloofness.
That ambivalence about my success didn’t help my reaction to it. No doubt I was masking anxiety and insecurity—part of me certainly believed that my present good fortune might be fleeting, and so I convinced myself I didn’t really want it. My ambivalence guarded me against disappointment—a stable position from which to operate. A position I struggle now to shirk.
Add to this the lingering doubt I harbor as a result of my failed first marriage. My ex-wife is a doting mother and a loving woman who gave herself fully in marriage and had the right to expect the same in return. That she may have gotten less than that from me speaks to my own limitations and lack of self-knowledge at the time and not any lacking of hers. It is partly out of respect for the grief I caused her that I’m endeavoring to discover and overcome my limitations of character that might prevent me from giving myself more completely to D. The rain stops as suddenly as it began, and I finally make my way up on deck to the lounge. Most of my fellow passengers are already assembled.
An older man with an unapologetic Louisiana accent approaches me right away.
“I’m Ken. And you’re from Baton Rouge,” he declares, extending his hand.
“Uh, no, Ken. Actually, I’ve never been to Baton Rouge.”
“Are you sure? Your face looks very familiar.”
Two women, one stout and blond, the other tall and with chestnut hair, step up. They are cousins from Cornwall, England. The tall one, Stella, is a librarian. Catherine, the blonde, works in finance and tells me quickly that she has exiled herself to the Isle of Man, “for tax reasons.” Stella arches her eyebrows at this comment.
“Oh,” is all I can think to say.
While on the road I have frequently heard deep personal revelations from people I’ve just met, often I don’t even know their names. Just a few weeks earlier, in Patagonia, I met a couple at a restaurant in El Calafate—when the man went to the bathroom, his wife confessed to me she had met another man and was going to leave her husband. She had told no one else, she said. Perhaps she was just floating the idea, seeing how it felt to say it aloud, or perhaps she really was about to act on her declaration. Her husband came back from the bathroom before I had a chance to find out. The episode did nothing to ease my mind on the subject of marriage but served to remind me that the near invisibility of the solo traveler far from home allows for exploitation in any number of ways.
The English cousins travel together often and don’t like to waste time. “We did China in nine days, saw it all,” Catherine says. They’ve been to Africa (one week) and Australia (six days), “Opera House, Great Barrier Reef, the big rock in the middle, all of it,” Catherine assures me.
There are also two couples from Canada traveling together, and a pair of German ladies—travel agents, and a family of three with a gangly teenage boy. “We live in the wine country, above San Francisco,” the flush-cheeked teen tells me.
Then there’s a Russian couple who keep to themselves and, after a curt hello, speak to no one until the end of the trip.
A large man with black hair and dark skin, wearing a white uniform with bars on his shoulders, calls us to order. His name is Emanuel and he will be in charge of our needs during the voyage. “I will see to everything, and make sure you are comfortable,” he says in thickly accented English. His manner seems brusque for a concierge, but perhaps it’s just that his English is not very good. He explains a few things about the boat, and before he introduces us to the three guides who will be leading us on our daily small boat excursions to look for wildlife, Emanuel asks if there are any questions.
“I’ve run out of toothpaste,” Ken calls out. “Can I get some?”
“We don’t have that,” Emanuel replies. “I will get you some bug spray.”
Before Ken can protest, one of the Canadian women speaks up. “I have some you can borrow, Ken.”
We retire for dinner in the stern of the boat. Beyond the glass wall, the Amazon rolls out behind us. There’s a brief period of awkward shuffling of feet and chairs until people take seats in what will establish itself as a self-imposed seating map. I’m beside the cousins from Cornwall and across from one of the German travel agents, called Ruth. During the five-course tasting menu the discussion focuses mainly on travel, as the cousins and Ruth volley back and forth all the destinations they’ve checked off their lists.
Another person, namely D, would find this kind of ever-evolving social petri dish a fascinating study, worthy of hours of discussion, dissection, and analyzing. I find it slightly nerve-wracking, and it prevents me from more solitary pleasures. The idea of eating my next eighteen meals with these strangers fills me with dread. During dessert I slip silently away to my room.
At some point during the night, we leave the Río Marañón, join the Ucayali, and chug farther upriver. I wake before dawn and watch the day creep into being as the brown water and the dense green of the rain forest roll past my window. I’m nervous and restless this morning. I pace around my cramped cabin, unpack my bag, inspect my teeth in the mirror. I try to sit still and can’t. Knowing I have no Internet connection, I check my e-mail anyway.
After breakfast we head down to the loading area, where we are split into three groups and hurried aboard twenty-four-foot skiffs with sixty-horsepower engines that will take us zipping out into black-water tributaries of the larger river. The family from Napa Valley, the cousins from Cornwall, and I are on a boat with Ricardo, one of three guides, who are all small, black haired, olive skinned, with round cherubic faces and perky demeanors.
Within minutes of leaving the larger river and entering a narrower tributary, our boat slows and we’re peering into the dense foliage when Ricardo starts shouting. He is pointing, nearly jumping out of the boat.
“Shoot it! Shoot it! Shoot it!” Half a dozen spider monkeys are leaping from one tree to the next, bending branches as they leap. “Shoot it with the camera!” Everyone pulls out their cameras and begins to snap away.
Ricardo loudly kisses the back of his hand, making a sucking, snapping sound. The monkeys begin to shout back. “They’re laughing at us. Ha, ha. Shoot it, shoot it, quick!”
Eventually everyone is snapped out, the monkeys disappear deeper into the jungle, the driver slams the throttle down, and we’re off, looking for more.
And the pattern is set. We zip along; Ricardo stands in the back of the boat, eyeing the passing rain forest through his binoculars, and when he sees something, anything, he motions for the driver to slow and we try to spot whatever it is that has caught his eye—scarlet macaws; a massive wasp nest; a great black hawk perched high in a cecropia tree, draping his wings to appear even larger; toucans flying overhead; a crimson-crested woodpecker on the twig of an acacia. At the sight of a red howler monkey in a ficus tree, I think Ricardo might faint. “Oh my God, I’m gonna die!” he shouts. “This is unbelievable. Shoot it! Shoot it! Shoot it quick!”
As the others click away, I turn back to Ricardo and ask quietly, “When was the last time you saw one?”
He stops pointing and leans in close to me. “Two days ago,” he says softly, and shrugs.
If it weren’t for an innate innocence, Ricardo’s hard sell might be off-putting. He comes from “five hours down the river,” from a village called Indiana. “The missionary who came there last century was from Indiana. He was very proud of his home. When he died, they named the village to honor him.”
A few hours later, the skiff returns to the boat. “There it is,” Ricardo says when we reemerge into the main river and see the riverboat glistening in the sun, “Da cutest little boat in da Amazon.” Emanuel greets everyone solemnly as we board, and when the heat of the day passes, we load up into the skiffs and do it again.
After dinner, during dessert, Ken comes over and joins our table. Ruth asks Ken to explain “what exactly is this thing called ‘gumbo.’ ” And while everyone is living up to stereotype, I’m able to slip away once again, without having to spend too much time plotting my exit. Just when I think I’ve made a clean getaway, I hear Catherine say behind me, “There he goes again.”
I make my way toward the bow. This is the first moment of solitude I’ve had on the boat without having to resort to hiding in my cabin.
The writer Paul Theroux was a great early influence on how I chose to travel, and he has always made a strong point for going alone. Only in the “lucidity of loneliness,” as he calls it, can we see what we came to see and learn what it is we came to this spot to learn.
The humid air has the beginnings of a chill as the boat’s movement creates a breeze that doesn’t otherwise exist. The sky on the river is vast, even the night sky. Clouds gather on the horizon where lightning bursts like a cluster of flashbulbs popping. Another front is far off to my left, where distinct and jagged bolts silently slash open the sky at regular intervals. The Southern Cross hangs low to my right, and the canopy of the rain forest is a dark mass spreading out on either side of me. Occasionally the small orange glow of kerosene lamps from the dark shoreline can be seen—the only proof of villages whose names I’ll never know. When the moon comes clear, the Amazon shimmers as it rolls under the boat.
The following days pass in similar fashion, two daily excursions in small boats to spot giant Aztec ant nests and three-toed sloths, and to hunt for anaconda. “Remember,” Ricardo warns us, “if an anaconda attacks you, the best defense is to bite it.” When we pull up close beside one of the other skiffs they are looking at a four-foot-long iguana sunning itself on the limb of a dead tree.
“I’ve seen them before,” Ken says from the back of the other boat.
“Where?” Ricardo asks. “Costa Rica?”
“My backyard.” Ken yawns.
Often, in the evenings, we go out hunting for predators. “There are thousands and thousands of eyes on us, and we don’t see them,” Ricardo whispers, his sense of melodrama heightened in the dark. He shines a strong spotlight along the edges of the river in the darkness. When we see a pair of shining red marbles we zero in and suddenly Ricardo is lunging over the side of the small boat, rocking us badly in the water, and comes back with a three-foot juvenile caiman in his hands. Then we head deep into a close cluster of trees until we find a goliath tarantula the size of my fist, clinging to the trunk of a cecropia.
Over dinner one evening, Catherine scolds me for always leaving early. So I make an active effort to connect more with my fellow travelers. I mention my stargazing spot on the rail and linger longer than usual at the dinner table. I chat with Ken long after the others have gone.
I’ve come to enjoy Ken’s company; he is decidedly himself. His wife died several years ago and he has been traveling the world extensively ever since. Having never left Louisiana for the first sixty-seven years of this life, Ken has now seen all seven continents and been on all seven seas. He’s lonely but content.
“There’s something about the moving that I like,” he says. “You know what I mean, An-drew?”
Ken says my name in a lazy southern singsong that makes it sound like two words. I know he’s not really asking me a question, but I answer him anyway. “I do, Ken.”
After Ken heads off to bed, I pass the lounge on the way to my spot on the rail. Suddenly one of the Canadians, a retired engineer named Bob, whom I haven’t spoken to at all, corners me in a conversation on immigration. He’s lamenting a Royal Canadian Mountie of Indian origins who sued the government so that he could wear the traditional garb of his homeland.
“If he’s gonna come live in Canada,” my traveling companion complains, “then he can act like a Canadian.”
I wonder to myself what exactly that might mean.
“In the end, they let him have his turban, but they wouldn’t let him carry his knife.”
“Well,” I say, “at least that’s something.”
“I guess I don’t like change,” Bob says, and goes to the bar for another pisco sour.
By the time I get to my usual spot on the rail, the ladies are already there. I curse myself for mentioning it at dinner—serves me right for trying to be social. Ruth is trying to point out the Southern Cross to Catherine and Stella. They’ve never seen it before and are not sure what to look for in the night sky.
“There, see?” The German woman points to a spot not far above the horizon. Because the moon is out, the constellation is not as bright as it might be, but it’s clearly visible, the dominant sight in the western sky.
“No,” say the cousins in unison.
“There.” Ruth thrusts her finger with more authority toward the stars. “There are three bright ones, and the one at the bottom is dimmer. And there’s the one on the side.” The cousins still don’t see it. The German woman is becoming frustrated. “There.” She jabs her finger into the air again.
Eventually one of the cousins exclaims, “Oh, there it is.”
The other quickly follows suit. “Oh, yes, there it is. Lovely.”
Satisfied, the travel agent marches away.
“Do you see it?” the librarian whispers.
“No, I do not,” the other replies.
Without contact with D—the intermittent phone calls, e-mails, and texts throughout the days that would anchor me to my familiar reality—I lose rhythm and time lunges forward through spots of deadness that would otherwise be filled with the news of life’s daily micro-dramas coming across the line or over the web. I feel the void; my spirits sag. But as the days wear on, I become aware that my thoughts and observations pass without any desire on my part for communication. I pay attention only to the solitary processing of my own reaction to them. My internal world grows smaller, more self-contained and self-involved, reminiscent of my life before children.
Then, one afternoon, we’re out on a tributary of the Pacaya River. We’ve already stopped for all the requisite monkeys and birds.
“Now we’ll go to a village,” Ricardo announces. A buzz comes over the skiff. A village visit, to see how the “natives” live, is one of the highlights of the trip. The three skiffs pull close together. The two couples from Canada prepare the pencils that they’ve brought along to give to the local children. The boats are alive with anticipation. I wish I could jump overboard.
The village we draw up to consists of ten to fifteen wooden huts with palm-frond roofs built on stilts above the river. We are days away from electricity and running water. A hole in the floor over the river serves as toilet. Despite the huts being built on stilts fifteen feet off the ground, many of the homes are flooded and empty. We float past a few deserted shacks; filthy, threadbare clothes hang from lines in the damp breeze. A lone white dog hunches on the edge of a platform, watching our progress. His coat is matted and wet and clings taut over his jutting ribs. We drift on. The skiffs are silent. We come to a platform that’s nearly a foot above the still-rising water. The village has gathered here. Two dozen children and half that many adult women stand behind rows of beads laid out on display, strung together in an effort at jewelry. A few of the children hold simple carvings, offering them up to us as we arrive.
The guides all step out onto the deck. They playfully shoo the children into the dugout canoes tied nearby and invite the passengers up to get a closer look. No one moves. The self-conscious resistance and the fear of filth of my fellow travelers make me nervous, and I’m self-conscious before the humbly eager and defiant looks from the deck. I stand with a lurch. The boat rocks back and forth. I stumble over the two cousins from Cornwall and climb quickly up on the platform. I pick up the first two red and white necklaces I see, thrust twenty soles into the hand of the closest woman, and climb back into the skiff.
Soon everyone is out on the deck, trying to chat and barter, pushing pencils into the hands of children who have no paper. Everyone is happy. Both locals and travelers are laughing and smiling. The children orbit around, between and beneath the adults, smiling, playing. I remain in the back of the skiff.
To my right, alone in a dugout canoe is a young girl, facing away from the others. She’s my daughter’s size and build. She wears a dirty pink T-shirt and aqua sweatpants. Her hair is tied back in two braids, like my daughter often wears hers. She turns to get a peek at the goings-on. There’s something sticking out of her mouth—she’s eating something or sucking on something. She turns away again and then turns back once more. Whatever she is sucking on is the size of a large banana, but it’s pinkish and has a black tip. Her jaw is extended as far open as it will go. And then I realize that what is sticking out of her mouth is her tongue. And the black on the end of it is a rotting infection. The mangy white dog swims over and climbs into the canoe with her, rocking her boat only slightly as he slips aboard. The girl swallows often and her swollen tongue rides only marginally in, still protruding hugely, and then juts back out completely. The girl turns her back on the proceedings.
I’ve seen poverty and starvation in Africa, I’ve been silenced by squalor in Asia, but suddenly I’m crying behind my sunglasses. The singularity of her shame punctures my detachment.
The medic who travels with the boat quietly searches for the girl’s mother. He hands the exhausted-looking woman a few white pills. She receives them without comment.
When we return to the riverboat, the medic tells me the girl has a clot so the blood can’t drain. The tip of her tongue has begun to rot, similar to frostbite. She can no longer eat properly. She will die soon, he tells me, without a ninety-minute operation in Lima.
I hover on deck, aimless, long after the other passengers have gone back to their cabins to shower for cocktails. I hear a splash and then voices, shouting and calling. One of the skiff drivers has fallen overboard while climbing back onto the boat. He can’t swim. The current is strong in this part of the river and the boat is driving hard against it. Quickly, there is a good deal of distance between the driver and us. There’s more shouting, a buoy is tossed to him, and he’s able to grab it. His T-shirt and jeans cling to his body as he’s hoisted back on deck, confused. Someone gives him a hand towel, the kind usually doused in cool, perfumed water and offered by Emanuel to guests returning from excursions. Nervous laughter follows, and then backslapping, and then the half dozen men are silent. Some look out over the water, others stare at their shoes. I watch them, unseen, from the deck above, with the growing realization that life on the river is cheap.
It no longer feels like a game that I’m not in contact with D. I’m far from home, and to what end? My son and daughter are reading their bedtime stories while I am thousands of miles away, heading deeper into the Amazon. I feel foolish and selfish.
At dinner, I mention the young girl with the infection. None of the passengers had noticed her. People seem relieved when the subject is changed to the downloading and sharing of photos. Then one of the cousins from Cornwall, Stella, the librarian, asks me again about the girl. We talk quietly between ourselves, but soon the table can feel the weight of our conversation and they fall silent.
I’ve often kept important moments in life to myself, fearing they would be received as mere anecdotes, without the significance they held for me. As with the first time I acted, I worry that my experiences might be diluted and diminished, their import minimized. I don’t know why I brought up the little girl. I’m surprised at myself but also somehow relieved that I have.
Back in my cabin, the Amazon keeps rolling past my window. I’ve felt alone for most of my life and never minded. I’ve considered it my natural state. I’ve longed for that solitude, sought it out, and lamented its absence. Yet it’s not the life I’ve chosen. I have two children I love and miss; I have a partner who stirs me. They all affect me the way no solitary pleasure can, and yet I continue to leave. The push-pull of my decisions strains any kind of stability I’ve created.
The next few days feel much the same. We gawk at water lilies seven feet around and at a one-hundred-and-forty-pound rat. I take copious notes for the story I must report, all the while feeling increasingly detached. The joy I now take in the small boat excursions is limited to the thrill of racing along with the wind ripping loud through my ears, not in the endless stream of monkeys we stop to photograph. Only when we come upon a cluster of pink river dolphins in a tranquil pool am I brought back from my private thoughts. Their strange humped shape and peculiar color, coupled with their elusive movements, give them a prehistoric appearance and ethereal feel. I can understand my daughter’s attraction to them.
“People believe the river dolphins can take on human form, your mother, your sister. For this reason, people don’t hunt them,” Ricardo explains.
And in a tributary of the Yanallpa River we round a bend and come upon a half dozen young men standing atop a cluster of felled mahogany trees tied together and floating downstream. They eye us with suspicion as they slowly drift past in silence.
“That didn’t look very legal,” I say quietly to Ricardo as the men recede.
“The farther downriver they get, the more legal it becomes.”
On the last evening on the boat, dinner is an elaborate tasting menu and drags on longer than usual. Over coffee, the two Canadian men, as well as Ken, pull up their chairs beside me.
Each gives me his business card. “We want to do something for that girl you saw,” Bob, one of the Canadians, tells me. No one has mentioned the girl since I spoke of her several nights prior.
“You said you met the owner of the boat, right, An-drew?” Ken says.
“Yeah.”
“Well, you tell him what you saw and if he can arrange the logistics, we’d like to help,” Bob says, then points to his card. “That’s how you find us.”
Suddenly tears are burning in my eyes; quickly I excuse myself. I’m not sure if it’s their concern or the feeling of unwitting connection with these strangers that has snuck up on me that has taken me so off guard.
When I return to the dining room, the two cousins from Cornwall have also written their numbers down, and as the Russians pass on their way out of the dining room, the man drops his card on the table, points at me, and nods. I didn’t even know they were aware of our conversation.*
The meal breaks up and I make my way to my spot on the rail, but after just a few minutes I find myself returning to the dining room. Ken is still there, alone, finishing his coffee. He tells me that he’ll spend a few days in Iquitos.
“I hear there’s not much to see,” he says. “I’ll have to give my travel agent some hell.”
I tell him of my experience and that I think he too might recognize some of Iquitos’s more subtle charms.
“I am glad to hear that, An-drew. Now I’m looking forward to it.”
“And, Ken, when you go to Belen market, make sure you pick up a bottle of Rompa Calzones.”