The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  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 poi
nts 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 t
hey’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!”