Journey of the Pink Dolphins

by Sy Montgomery

  “Cottage,” I said, and let the rain drown my consciousness in a water-dream of sleep.

  By morning, the storm had dissolved into the washing, ticking, clicking sound of rain in a city, mixing with car horns and police whistles. On the wet streets of Manaus, the asphalt shone like a river. Cars slid by like canoes. The roof of the hotel was leaking, and ragged terry-cloth bath mats sopped up water from the tiled floor of the lobby. The rooftop swimming pool overflowed.

  As we planned the chores to prepare for our expedition, from the twelfth-floor restaurant of the Hotel Monaco, we looked down on the Teatro Amazonas’s glittering dome, the Victorian Customs House, and the ingenious floating docks—built by British engineers—that rise and fall thirty-two feet a year as the waters of the Rio Negro swell and empty.

  The idea to create a “Paris of the Tropics” had been the grandiose vision of one man: Eduardo Gonçalves Ribeiro, a black military engineer who, at the unlikely age of thirty, became the youngest governor of the immense state of Amazônia. “I found a village,” he later boasted; “I made of it a modern city.” He was a man of small stature, but large appetites—for gold, for women, for fame. Before he even took office, he began laying plans for his favorite project, the opera house. It bears his name in letters tall as a man on the outside wall of its pink facade.

  Levying a 20 percent tax on all rubber that left the city, he built streets a hundred feet wide and paved them with cobblestones imported from Portugal, bordered with barbered shade trees from Australia and China. He commissioned the designer of the Eiffel Tower to build a municipal market to look like Paris’s Les Halles, and a Palace of Justice that resembled Versailles. Manaus had electricity before London, a telephone system before Rio de Janeiro. While New York and Boston relied on horse-drawn trolleys, Manaus enjoyed the opulence of bottle-green electric streetcars that operated around the clock. Looking down from the rooftop, Dianne and I imagined ladies dressed in Surrah silks, their hair ornamented with the feathers of egrets.

  But as we ventured into the city, we found, instead, women in tight Lycra dresses, their hair decorated with yellow plastic barrettes shaped like Tweety Bird. The cartoon character incongruously accents clothes so suggestive that at first, we thought they were streetwalkers’ garb. But in the casa de câmbio where we changed money, in line at the supermercado, on the bus to the Amazon’s research institute, we noticed almost everyone dresses like this: halter tops in which each breast seems to be riding in a private hammock, stretch pants so clingy you can see the outline of lace on the underwear beneath. Even fat and wrinkled old ladies, even women who are grossly pregnant, wear short, tight dresses or plunging halter tops or jeans popping at the seams—often with the top button unbuttoned to accommodate the overflow.

  Everywhere is a flood of flesh. In the fish market, the big bellies of bare-chested old men spill over the waistbands of their pants like the foaming head on a beer. Manaus revels in the ripeness of flesh and fat—breasts, bellies, buttocks. All these, no matter what shape or age, seem to be greeted with generous approval and enjoyed like public art. The same is true of music. Stores, buses, and restaurants blare samba, rock, and boi-bumbá music, and it spills out into the street, spewing sound like the waters of a public fountain. Even litter is dropped as if this, too, is an act of generosity, performed for the greater good.

  There is a feeling of abundance in Manaus: it seems as if the fullness of the wet season has unleashed a torrent of fecundity. Even the trees that line the street are laden with food—cohi, guava, mangos, avocados—and they release their fruits with lush abandon onto the sidewalks. The streets smell of guava and grease and of the meat roasting on every corner, grilled on wooden skewers laid over coals. One little girl is cooking chicken feet this way. She is heartbreakingly beautiful, with the lush, natty hair of an African, the high cheekbones of an Indian, and the green eyes of a Portuguese. She gives us a brilliant smile.

  We are in the heart of a country that has been described as “the leading producer of human misery.” Every six seconds a Brazilian baby dies of diarrhea; every thirty minutes a Brazilian contracts leprosy and another contracts tuberculosis. There are a million cases a year of malaria, and 10 million of schistosomiasis, a blood fluke that eats through the liver. And yet, in Manaus, where Portuguese sounds like it is spoken through lips numb from kissing, you feel caught up in the sensuous savor of life. In India, they call this rasa: the sweet sap, the juicy life-essence, the core of enjoyment of food, or art, or sex.

  In Manaus, there are two great temples that honor the rasa of its people. One is the opera house; the other is the fish market.

  Beneath the iron roof and stained glass of the Municipal Market, dark men wearing gold necklaces hold fish up proudly for us to photograph. Young men with sweating chests and tensed muscles carry huge sacks from the docks, green eyes glowing in dark faces like emeralds by firelight. Here, at the largest freshwater fish market in the world, some of the strangest fish on earth are for sale, dredged up from the dolphins’ underwater city. Huge slices of silvery pirarucu drape over the counter like tablecloths. Tucunaré with ruby eyes are arrayed like jewels; their tails glow with eyes, too, like the tail feathers of peacocks. These fish are pursuit predators; once they attack, they do not give up until they have swallowed their prey whole. There are piles of fat, black tambaqui, a sweet-fleshed seed-eater who inhabits flooded forests, and pyramids of piranhas, and careful stacks of predatory catfish, some with black armor, some with long, fleshy whiskers like a Chinese emperor, some with erectile, poison-tipped spines.

  Each year some 30,000 to 50,000 tons of river fish, of more than two hundred species, are landed in Manaus. But as the fishing fleet expands—today nine hundred boats can hold a ton or more of fish, and a few can hold fifty—the fish they catch get smaller. In the 1970s, I’d been told, you could often find for sale here pirarucu longer than a canoe. The largest fish we see today is less than three feet long. The species has already been fished out of some of the smaller river systems. Tambaqui was once so prevalent that it was fed to prisoners. Twenty years ago, tambaqui accounted for half the total catch. Today most of the tambaqui for sale are juveniles, sold at prices that rival the choicest cuts of beef. That is one reason so many catfish species are for sale: pirarucu, tambaqui, and tucunaré are now too expensive for the average consumer.

  But in the fish market, we sense no feeling of dwindling commodities, of time running out. There is only the siren song of the strange and the beautiful, the throb of appetite. Dianne and I are voyeurs at a dazzling show of abundance. Fish with tails striped like tigers, fish with eyes flecked with gold, fish with huge scales rough as emery boards, and fish whose tongues the people use to grate their tuberous manioc to make farina—on the market’s aisles of white-tiled tables, each fisherman lays out his catch as lovingly as he would the corpse of a relative. The men rinse the fish regularly with buckets of water that carry away blood and scales in glittering waterfalls to the floor.

  In the meat stalls, the carcasses of pigs, cattle, and lambs hang dripping from meat hooks, hooves and heads still on. The men’s hands are slippery with blood. Behind the vegetable stalls, smiling men and women chat over mountains of produce: softball-sized avocados that smell like hand cream; parsley with its roots still on, gasping for the soil; yellow melons, shiny fragrant limes, and strange fruits with alluring names like genipapo, acerola, maracujá, pitomba. It is impossible here not to think, at once, of sex and death: the dead fish with their big teeth; the fruit, ripe and overripe; the flecks of blood splashing up at you as butchers sling down slabs of flesh, blood reaching for your blood; and you can feel the eyes of men slide over your body like a tongue licking an ice-cream cone. Life, says the market—choose life! A toothless old woman offers us a taste of maracuja: paper-skinned, seed-filled, its flesh is slippery and bitter, like a mouthful of semen. I swallow the seeds.

  The houselights dim. The spotlight rises like a moon, the red velvet curtain parts to a storm of app
lause. We spend our last night in Manaus at the opening of the first opera to be performed in the Teatro Amazonas in nearly a century: the State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre of Minsk’s performance of Verdi’s La Traviata, a belated celebration of the opera house’s centenary.

  Onstage, a sumptuous party gathers. Women in flounced gowns of velvet and satin flutter lace fans and flash jeweled tiaras; men strut in tuxedos and white gloves. It is a party at the home of the courtesan Violetta Valery, where the heroine will meet her future paramour, the handsome nobleman Alfredo Germont. But the staged scene is eerily reminiscent of the gathering of the last patrons of the opera to fill this room, ninety years earlier—before anyone imagined that Asian rubber plantations, grown from seeds smuggled from the Amazon, would bring a total collapse of Manaus’s rubber boom economy.

  In the panic that ensued, women pressed their diamonds into the hands of the cashier at the Booth Steamship Company, to pay for passage to Europe or the United States. In 1912, 140 of Manaus’s finest mansions were sold at auction. People fled in such haste that they left their good-byes to friends in the personal columns of the Jornal do Comercio. The Paris in America fashion store halved the price of its perfumes, its panther-skin rugs, its Steinway grand pianos. Civil servants went without paychecks. Students rioted. Colleges closed. The stage of the opera house went dark, for the curtain had fallen on the Golden Age of Manaus.

  But the ghosts linger. With the violins’ pleading, the rising notes of the soprano and tenor’s duet summon the lost, sweet dreams: They would have been brave, the women and men who came here to seek their fortunes, to live in the jungle when a mosquito or a glass of water could kill you and not all the silks and brocades and champagne in the world could help. Luxury could never buy safety. They may have sent their linens to be laundered in Portugal, but at home, their children still died of fever in their arms.

  Onstage, Violetta’s voluptuary heart has been touched by the love of Alfredo. She knows he is not rich; she knows she will bid good-bye to this house and its gay parties if she goes to live with him. Splendid like a bride in her long white gown, she sings, alone, of the transformation her new love has brought. She now sees all the pleasures of her previous life as hollow. The red velvet curtain closes on her solo.

  I asked Dianne how she liked the opera so far, the first she had ever seen. “I didn’t expect,” she said thoughtfully, “that it would be so loud.” Then she went outside to smoke a cigarette.

  The opera house is lit at night, like some luminous ghost of the past, rising out of the darkness of swallowed memories. The great ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes refused to enter the building when he first visited Manaus in 1944. It was built, he told his Brazilian hosts, “with the blood of Indians.” He knew the twisted appetites of the overseers whom the rubber barons hired to ensure the flow of cheap latex. On a river named Madre de Dios after the Mother of God, one merchant kept 600 Indian girls as slaves he bred like livestock to produce future laborers. Indians were blindfolded and tethered as rubber traders shot off their genitals for diversion. In Peru, to punish workers who fell short of their quota, one overseer ordered a massacre of Indian children and had them cut up for food for the guard dogs. Another celebrated Easter by personally shooting 150 Chontaduras, Ocainas, and Utiguenes. Those his bullets did not immediately kill were heaped into a pile, soaked with kerosene, and burned alive.

  Their ghosts are here, too, in the opera house. The air feels thick with spirits seeking solace. There are ghosts of the Italian musicians and singers who died in epidemics of malaria and yellow fever. It is said that the ghost of the governor, Eduardo Ribeiro, is here as well. He strangled on his own demented desires, and died “in a fit of erotic mania” three months before his beloved opera house would open.

  These ghosts have lingered for a hundred years; but this is the first time in ninety they have heard the music of an opera.

  In the second act of La Traviata, the couple is living at Alfredo’s house near Paris, and Violetta has sold her jewels to meet their expenses. But despite her noble gesture, she is still a former courtesan, and an embarrassment to Alfredo’s family. In a baritone as commanding as a cannon, Alfredo’s father begs her to give up his son; and in notes as yielding as water, Violetta agrees to make the sacrifice, to let Alfredo believe she has left him to return to her life of sin and luxury. She flees to Paris.

  Their songs rise, with the warmth of breath, from the stage to the balconies to the ceiling. My attention drifts, with the music, upward, to the angels on the dome. The frescoes of the Four Great Arts were painted with a nineteenth-century technique employed in many cathedrals: it gives the impression that the eyes of the people in the images are always following you. Those who built this place wanted angels to guard them; but instead of guarding, these angels witnessed. And perhaps the people realized this. Perhaps all the music that has played here has been an offering to these witness-angels—music rising like burned incense. Tonight, they seem to watch the opera and its audience with eyes full of knowing.

  The opera house stands for everything Europe has tried to make of the Amazon; its attempt to turn the brown waters of the Rio Negro blue as the Danube, and change its white latex to gold. This pink confection erected in the jungle was, perhaps, an attempt to cleanse Europe of its guilt, to transform its lust to beauty.

  And this is the transformation played out onstage. In the third act, Violetta, the wealthy courtesan, is now in self-imposed exile, her jewels gone, her health failing from consumption. Her maid brings her a letter— Alfredo’s father has told his son the truth of why she left him. Father and son come racing to her side. Alfredo vows to restore her soiled reputation, to take her back to his country home. She tries to rise from her chair to go with him, but she is dying, still in her dressing gown, clad in white gossamer like the angels. Her spirit slips from her body, and in the soprano notes of her song, her soul is released.

  Nourished by music, the faded figures overhead, the angels of Music and Opera, Dance and Tragedy, the ghosts of divas and Indians, seem to grow vibrant, to come to life. Weightless as swimming dolphins, they seem to dance in the dark, and beckon us into the jungle.

  The Meeting of the Waters

  The morning of our departure for the Meeting of the Waters, only one chore stood between us and the dolphins: the purchase of a frozen chicken.

  Unfortunately, “I would like a frozen chicken” was not on my language tapes. So, as I stood at the counter of the supermercado, I made up a sentence: “Queria um frango gelado, por favor.” But I misused a crucial word: gelado. As Dianne and our guide sweltered in the truck that was waiting to take us to our boat, I was asking the clerk for chicken ice cream. She looked perplexed. I became increasingly nervous.

  To proceed without the frozen chicken was unthinkable. This was the last thing Vera da Silva had told me the night before, in the last of a series of conversations that left me feeling the expedition was falling apart before it ever began.

  Vera was supposed to have accompanied us on this trip. The director of the aquatic mammal laboratory at the Amazon research institute, Instituto National de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA), Vera had studied pink dolphins longer than any other researcher. She was the only scientist who has tracked them with radiotelemetry. We had first met at the marine mammals conference in the States. There she had generously agreed to take us to the pink dolphins at the study site where she had begun her behavioral work eleven years earlier, a floodplain lake called Marchantaria along the Rio Solimões, just past the Meeting of the Waters.

  I had read and admired Vera’s work for months. It had been one of her papers, coauthored with her late husband, Robin Best, a research associate of the Vancouver Aquarium, that had given me the idea of something new I might be able to find out about the animals. “Inia would seem an ideal candidate for inclusion in the Convention on Conservation of Migratory Species,” they had writ ten in 1986. “Cyclic seasonal migrations due to the annual river floods are almost
certain to occur with Inia. . . .” The paper had gone on to list a number of locations where the migrating dolphins surely crossed national boundaries. So I had proposed to try to follow the dolphins on their migration, to see where they go.

  On the strength of that proposal, I had secured the money to finance the trip. So when we’d visited Vera at INPA upon our arrival in Manaus, I was especially eager to seek her advice on how to track the dolphins’ migration.

  “But botos do not migrate,” she said.

  “But I thought I had read this in your paper.”

  “Yes,” she said, “we thought that at one time, but that was before the telemetry. Now we know they do not migrate.”

  Oh.

  Still, to help us learn about the dolphins, Vera would be indispensably illuminating. And besides, we liked her. She made us immediately at home in her small office, where she had covered the walls and plastered the gray metal file cabinets with posters and postcards of manatees, dolphins, whales, seals, and seabirds. One file drawer bore a 1913 quote from Rebecca West, which must have seemed distressingly current to Vera, working in a field dominated by men in macho Brazil: “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”

  Charming, knowledgeable, and supple as a sea creature, in the more than twenty years she has studied these dolphins she has come, in a way, to resemble them: in the curve of her lips when she smiles, and when her dark eyes dance with humor. Her laughter reminded me of bubbles, like those a boto might release beneath a canoe. “If you stop your boat for several hours, they just come over, touching it, releasing bubbles that are coming to the bottom of the boat,” she told us, almost dreamily. “And also you notice when they are coming because they release these bubbles as they swim. It’s beautiful—a beautiful noise, the air bubbles. And they can be just beside your boat and look at you! It’s very amazing. You will see.”