Journey of the Pink Dolphins

by Sy Montgomery

  As the days are full of water, the nights are full of sound. It is as if all that is revealed by daylight—trees veiled like brides in lianas, leaves the size of canoe paddles, the nests of birds, ants, and termites hanging like tumors, like goiters, like breasts—is transformed, by the dark, into sound. From tree and ground and water, voices rise like little bells and tiny flutes: trills, screams, warnings, laments. They speak in the language of water. In the wet season, the sun grebe’s nighttime call sounds like water falling into a tin cup. A ladder-tailed nightjar cries out the name of the river: “Too-WHY-you! Too-WHY-you!” Jewel-eyed tree frogs sing in voices like bubbles rising up from the water, breaking its surface like breath.

  The river is the looking glass into another world. By day, the water is a perfect mirror of trees and sky—and yet its glassy surface moves so quickly that if you enter the water without a lifejacket, the current will sweep you under. The river people speak of the Encante, an enchanted city beneath the water, ruled by beings they call Encantados. Those who visit never want to leave, because everything is more beautiful there.

  At night, even the stars seem brighter in the water than in the sky. The constellations shine above, their starry reflections below, and from the trees, the glowing eyes of wolf spiders, tree boas, tree frogs. In your canoe, you feel like you are traveling through the timeless starscape of space.

  But if you stop and wait, the Encantados will come. At first you may feel a sizzle of bubbles rising beneath the craft, an effusion of pearls cast up from below like a net of enchantment. If the night is moonless, you will only know their breath. But if the moon is full, you may see a form rising from the water, gathering into the shape of a dolphin. Inches from your canoe, a face may break the surface—a face at once other-worldly and eerily familiar. The forehead is clearly defined, like a person’s. The long beak sticks out like a nose. The skin is delicate, like ours. Sometimes it is grayish, or white—and sometimes dazzlingly, impossibly pink. The creature turns its neck and looks at you, and opening the top of its head, gasps, “Chaaahhhhh!”

  In Brazil, they call this dolphin “boto.” They say the boto can turn into a person, that it shows up at festas to seduce men and women. They say you must be careful, or it will take you away forever to the Encante, the enchanted city beneath the water. In Peru, they call the creature “bufeo colorado”—the ruddy dolphin. Shamans say its very breath has power, and that the sound it utters when it gasps can send poisoned darts flying, as from a blowgun. Scientists call it by the species name: Inia geoffrensis. They say it represents an ancient lineage of toothed whales—a freshwater dolphin, caught in a Miocene time warp since the era when alligators bigger than Tyrannosaurus rex lurked in the shallows, when flightless, carnivorous terror birds six feet tall seized prey with three-fingered, saber-tipped hands.

  Each person who encounters an Encantado is touched by its enchantment. Each comes away from the encounter speaking a different truth, informed by dreams and ghosts and the hot, whispered breath of rain on the river. For here in the Amazon, where unfathomable tragedies collide with unquenchable desires, the most preposterous of impossibilities come true.

  Meeting of the Waters

  Manaus: The Curtain Rises

  A thousand miles up the Amazon River, in the middle of the world’s largest rain forest, an opera house rises from the jungle.

  By steamship, the building crossed the ocean piece by piece. Its iron framework came from Glasgow, marble from Verona and Carrara, crystal from Venice, cedar from Lebanon, silk from China. One hundred crates of ornately carved furniture, upholstered in velvet, were imported from London. Only the wood of the parquet floor—12,000 pieces of oak, brazilwood, and jacaranda—originated in Brazil. Even this was hand-worked in Europe before Portuguese craftsmen, themselves ferried across the ocean, mounted each piece in place without the use of nails or glue.

  The walls inside were painted by Italy’s leading creator of sacred murals, Dominico de Angelis, in the style of the grand cathedrals of Europe. Ceiling frescoes decorated with cherubs and angels depict the four great arts: to stage right, Dance; to stage left, Music; at back, Tragedy; and in front, the supreme art, Opera, which combines all three. A mosaic of 36,000 vitrified ceramic tiles from Alsace-Lorraine crowns the theater’s cupola in glittering blue, gold, and green. The dome rests atop a neoclassical confection of twisting, balustraded stairs and columned porticoes, bordered in white, like icing piped on a wedding cake. In this city amid the jungle, the building’s pastel hue, refined and delicate, seems as lurid as an orchid. The facade is pink—the color of the dolphins who inhabit the waters that brought this city its impossible wealth.

  It took more than fifteen years and $2 million to construct the Teatro Amazonas. Inaugurated in 1896, it was lauded as the most beautiful opera house in the world. It is said it was built to attract Enrico Caruso. But he never came. An epidemic of yellow fever killed 16 members of the Italian opera company performing at the time the great tenor was invited. Some 300 of the city’s citizens died of malaria each year. Newspapers advertised potions to counteract the snakebite from bushmasters. Like a Wild West frontier town, the city had to enact an ordinance (largely ignored) forbidding the firing of guns and arrows on the streets.

  Yet in the opera house’s harp-shaped theater, audiences of 1,600 gathered, dressed in diamonds and silks. In turn-of-the-century Manaus, diamonds were the unofficial currency of the bank of rubber. At the height of the motoring world’s demand for tires, rubber, the milky lifeblood of the rain forest’s seringueira tree, was ferried here from the Amazon’s thousand tributaries to drench Manaus in opulence. The citizens of Manaus became the highest per capita consumers of diamonds in the world. Some women set their teeth with them, diamonds glinting behind the flutter of black lace fans. A waitress serving a sandwich to a lunchtime customer might receive a diamond as a tip. A top prostitute could expect a diamond necklace as payment. Prices in Manaus were four times those of New York, and druggists could charge two British pounds for a shilling’s worth of quinine. Yet rubber barons slaked their horses’ thirst with French champagne. Bathroom faucets were set in solid gold. Housewives sent the linens to Portugal to be laundered.

  But some stains would never come clean. To gather and process the latex, the Amazon’s Indians were captured in chains, tortured into submission. In the twelve-year reign of a single Manaus-based rubber baron, Júlio César Arana, his 4,000 tons of latex shipped down the Amazon fetched $7.5 million on the London market and cost the lives of 30,000 forest Indians. “In truth,” writes historian Richard Collier, “the latex barons built their wealthy wicked city on the bones of Indians—and the people’s frenzied way of life hinted that they knew it.”

  So, like penitents to church, they flocked to the opera house, to sit beneath the arts and angels and surround themselves with the names of Europe’s greatest artists. On the twenty-two marble columns in front of the noble boxes are masks of Greek Tragedy, bearing plaster scrolls inscribed Goethe, Rossini, Molière, Shakespeare, Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven, Lessing, Verdi. . . .

  The masks of Tragedy faced the Amazon of Europe’s longing imagination. The centerpiece of the opera house is the painting on its stage drop curtain, The Meeting of the Waters. It was created by a Brazilian living in Paris, the Comédie Française’s scenic artist, Crispim do Amaral. The curtain rises to the dome in one fluid motion, without folding or rolling, to protect the image. The pale-skinned, naked goddess Amazon floats on a bed of gossamer, supine and pliant. She leans back, one knee raised, as if about to open her thighs to the two bearded river gods on her opposite sides, the Solimões and the Negro. They rise around her like dolphins. They bring her garlands of flowers. Their waters are as blue as the Danube.

  The real Meeting of the Waters is six miles from here. The waters are not blue, but an extraordinary mix of light and dark. Here the cream-colored, white-water Solimões and the coffee-colored, black-water Rio Negro join to form the Amazon as it runs its final thousand mil
es to the Atlantic. The Meeting of the Waters is a confluence of opposites. The dark waters of the Negro are born in the ancient Brazilian highlands, whose sediments leached away millions of years ago. Because these sandy soils are too poor to break down organic chemicals, the Negro is laced with acids and stained with tannins. Its waters are nearly sterile. The muddy water of the Solimões owes its light color to huge quantities of nutrient-rich silt gathered from headwaters in the geologically youthful Andes. It teems with piranhas and electric eels, fish with bony tongues and bulging eyes. Pink river dolphins come to hunt here, at the Meeting of the Waters, where the fish, confused by the sudden collision of waters, make easy prey.

  For nearly four miles, the two rivers, because of their different densities, meet but do not mix. Side by side they flow, little fingers of dark and light clutching at one another like lovers who cannot marry. The Amazon is born of such a union: a confluence of separate histories, of opposite identities, a meeting of beauty and cruelty, desperation and passion, life and death.

  Tomorrow night, I will sleep at the Meeting of the Waters, on the floor of a wooden house that floats on logs of assacú, tethered to a three-boled taro matue tree. But at the moment, as mosquitoes chew my ankles, I gaze over a red velvet rail, eye level with a French chandelier of gold and crystal, surrounded by Molière and Mozart, flanked by Dance and Tragedy.

  The drop curtain has been raised, showing only the bottom of the painting. The waters of the Amazon seem to pour over its painted gilt frame, out into the audience. The orchestra is tuning up. The kettle drums sound like thunder.

  Thunder woke me my first night in Brazil. Its explosion swept through my skeleton. Lightning flooded the room, so bright I could see it through closed eyelids. The rain pounded at the walls and roof like some frantic jungle demon. I could not get up to look out the window; the rain held me motionless with its force.

  Dianne Taylor-Snow lay in the room’s other bed, the tip of her cigarette glowing orange. “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” came her voice in the darkness.

  As usual, she’d been lying awake for hours. Insomnia is but one of Dianne’s talents—she can also pee off the back of a moving boat and swear in Indonesian—but her sleeplessness makes her a uniquely stimulating traveling companion. Five years ago, on assignment in Bangladesh, she woke me up at three in the morning to point out a spider in the room—one of her few fears. The spider, about the size of a fist, was sitting on the mirror. But when she shined her flashlight on it, its hugely magnified shadow covered the opposite wall, its head the size of a melon, its hairy legs stretching for twelve feet.

  In Bangladesh, looking for tigers, we had seen our first river dolphins. By boat, we were exploring the muddy waters of Sundarbans, the greatest mangrove swamp on earth, the home of the world’s largest population of tigers. Yet Sundarbans’s tangled mangroves and thick brown rivers, it seemed, connived to conceal everything from us.

  One day the muddy waters parted for an instant. Breaking the surface, the curves of three large pink-gray forms rose and rolled, like the play of sunset on water—yet it was midday, the sun bright. We stared after them. Again the forms rose and sank, smooth as silk. Finally, I realized what we had seen: dolphins!

  For me, the sight of dolphins anywhere has always carried the shock of recognition—like seeing my own reflection in the water. I had seen wild dolphins in U.S., U.K., and New Zealand waters, and of course in many aquaria, and yet they always surprise. They are shaped more like fish than mammals, and they inhabit what to us terrestrial creatures is a foreign universe—but still, both species seem to know we are in many ways alike. John Lilly, a medical researcher whose studies of how people think and communicate led him to study communication between people and dolphins, calls dolphins “Humans of the Sea.” To see a dolphin emerge from the water feels to me like glimpsing a lost twin.

  That dolphins could inhabit such muddy waters as Sundarbans’s seemed impossible. But then I remembered having read about them: early explorers had been astonished, too, by these river-dwelling whales, and judged (incorrectly) that in waters so opaque, the dolphins must be blind. Later researchers found that the dolphins can see, but navigate mainly by a sonar system that even by dolphin standards is almost unimaginably refined.

  After only seconds, they sank from sight like a dream. Yet for a long time afterward, their image glowed in my mind. It was as if the river had opened, for just a moment, and revealed to me some promise.

  Three times after that, I returned to Sundarbans. I saw dolphins every time. In each instance, the glimpses were fleeting, unexpected, revelatory—and then they were gone. I never saw a face, or even a flipper—just the top of a head or the low curve of a dorsal fin. I never was able to find much on them in the scientific literature. Almost nothing is known about them. There are, in fact, four species of river dolphins around the world—a fifth, a Chinese species, went extinct in the early 2000s—and none of them is well understood.

  Yet the image of the river dolphins stayed with me. Back home in New Hampshire, pink dolphins swam seductively through my dreams. Years later, at a marine mammals conference, I met a man who told me why: pink dolphins capture souls.

  Half a world away from Sundarbans, in the Amazon, he told me, lives a different species of pink dolphin, Inia geoffrensis—inia is the Guarayo Indian word for “dolphin”—named for Geoffrey St. Hilaire, who plundered the first zoological specimens from Portugal for Napoleon Bonaparte. Unlike the Sundarbans dolphins, they are bold and abundant. But they are equally mysterious.

  Photographs of the pink river dolphins looked eerily familiar. They resembled no other dolphin I had ever seen, with their melonlike foreheads and long tubular snouts. Yet they reminded me of something. Then I realized: It’s us they look like, but in another form. This pink dolphin looks like a fetal human, a person in a watery beginning.

  A number of researchers at the conference were trying to study Inia, but with limited success. Few scientists claimed to know the number of dolphins in their study area, or to understand the social structure of groups, or to know whether they migrate or hold territories. They did not even know for sure why these dolphins are pink: some said only old animals are pink and that the young ones are always gray; others said the dolphins flush pink with excitement. In fact, even after many years of study, most researchers confess they cannot even recognize individuals on sight.

  To local river people, this confusion is no surprise, my informant told me. The people say these dolphins are shape-shifters. In the guise of human desire, they can claim your soul, they carry you away, and they take you to the Encante, an enchanted world beneath the river.

  In fact, the pink river dolphins do inhabit an enchanted world: the Amazon. I had always longed to go there. In the western imagination, it has invoked an El Dorado, a Last Frontier, a Green Hell, a mythical race of woman warriors, an earthly Paradise, a Paradise Lost. To the people whose villages ring its waters, the Amazon is the source of renewal and destruction, of powers and inspirations. The scientists tell us that the Amazon holds one-half of the world’s river water and that its leafy basin supplies a tenth of the world’s oxygen; our connection to it is as close as breath. And yet, like the dolphins, the Amazon remains a great mystery, from which we seek to satisfy dizzying desires, to extract livelihoods and longings, and onto which we project our deepest fears, our darkest appetites.

  I knew, at that conference, what I must do next. I would follow the dolphins. Dianne eagerly volunteered to come with me.

  And now, at the start of our expedition, already they had led us to this impossible city: this Paris in the jungle, where the water that becomes the river fills even the sky. At the Meeting of the Waters, we were told, we would find dolphins. We didn’t know where they would lead us.

  But we knew, from that first soaking storm in Brazil, that wherever it was, it would be wet.

  “My poncho smells like cheese,” I said to Dianne, as a second wave of thunder rolled thro
ugh our bones. I was hoping that another poncho numbered among the contents of her suitcases; she always traveled well provisioned. Once, on a trip to Cameroon, when she and her companion had to stay in a tiny hotel with filthy linens, she pulled from her luggage, to her companion’s amazement, a set of satin pillowcases. Another time, after she’d picked me up at the L.A. airport on a book tour, I was rummaging in the glove compartment for a map and found instead a Colt .380 semiautomatic pistol. “There is a handgun in your glove compartment,” I reported in alarm, as if it had somehow appeared there by mistake. “Oh, that’s just my friend Fluffy,” she said. Her familiar tone made clear she knew well how to use it.

  On this trip, I noted thankfully, Fluffy had stayed at home. As usual, Dianne had spread the contents of her luggage all over the room, like some sumptuous buffet: the miniature hair dryer with its new adapter; a hammock that balls up to the size of a grapefruit; the inflatable travel pillow (from her days as an airline stewardess); the four clear plastic, zippered cases of lip gloss and eyelash curlers and eyebrow pencils and shampoos (from her days as a fashion model); baby bottles and nipples and Esbilac in case we encountered orphaned baby animals (from her days as an orangutan rehabilitator); packs of hermetically sealed portions of raisins, peanuts, and powdered Gatorade; pills to kill intestinal worms; creams to soothe scabies; Ziploc bags of underwear and khaki pants and silk shirts; a heated styling brush; the surgical kit with its scalpels and disposable syringes; the $400 Katadyn water filter that screens out viruses; buck knives and lighters as presents to villagers; a stretchable laundry line; a device to suction snakebite; and clothes for the opera.

  But Dianne’s mind was on breakfast. “What kind of cheese?” she asked me. “Feta, Gorgonzola . . .?”