The Amazon matches central Africa, but it is an Indian, not a Negro, region. Its soil is leached by rain and flood and can grow little in the way of crops and, of course, there are no cattle. Fresh meat, milk and vegetables must be flown in for those who cannot dispense with these luxuries. Those who live off the land live on nuts, fruits, beans, mandioca flour spread over tasteless dried meat, a little game and, when they can be had, turtles. The people of the Amazon are thin. The figures of the women are as straight as thin-armed boys. The people are all bone and have the Indian sharpness; yet they seem strong. They split the huge bolas of rubber with a blow of the machete; they load the boats, drive the trucks; they can hold the jaws of the alligators shut as they lever them out of the mud; they can hunt the puma, the peccary; they work in the rubber and jute factories. Near Manaus, oil men have found petroleum and are building a refinery. Along the riverbanks you see the tall sticks of the prospectors and engineers. There is a strong river trade in snakeskins, indeed in all animals. A boy of fourteen caught a black puma on a fishing line last year. His father, an Austrian collector from Bolivia, had to play it as you play a salmon. A hunter’s story? Down at pretty Belém, at the delta, you pass the little shops where the jaguar and the alligator skins are cured.
We stand high up in the Opera House at Manaus and look down on what for forty years has been a dying city. We see the Negro and the Amazon rivers divide, immense melancholy highways through forest that surrounds us for thousands of miles. We are in a kind of mid-ocean. It looks innocent. Hard to believe all the tales of the poison trees, the stinking and the narcotic blossoms, the pools solid with giant toads and heaped with alligators, the terrible processions of ants, the hourly battles between mantis and beetle, the fantastic and disgusting lives of the parasites, the awful breeding and killing that goes on every minute. The hummingbirds rape the passion flowers and when the birds have gone, the huge butterflies—biding their time—follow in flocks to the scene the birds have betrayed to them. Yet, if nature is incredible here, man, too, has been astonishing. He found the secret of the rubber tree and when we see these half-naked men splitting the balls of rubber in some city warehouse, we see an industry that once made millions, now reduced almost to its primitive state once more. He built Manaus in the boom. He imported the city mainly from Portugal, all the cobblestones and black-and-white marble of the pavements, almost all the bricks and tiles. Some marble, especially in the Opera House, came from Italy and England. In a few years he created a spectacular capital; in a few years the boom ended, and now the city rots, the steel rusts, the walls crack.
Yet Manaus is not dead. The Indians trade on the river, the big ships sometimes come up in the nut season, or the jute season. If the town has decayed, it is nonetheless full of life. The airplanes land at the handsome airport. There is a luxury hotel. The modern world has not given up here, even if most of the food has to be flown in at heavy expense to sustain the impudence of modern man. And when we go back to Belém at the Amazon’s mouth and see the shipping there, we once more have that sense of dramatic awakening we feel everywhere in Brazil.
We wait at night at the airport of Belém, listening to the deafening noise of the crickets, for the plane to take us back to New York. We have flown over ten thousand miles in South America. We are standing only a mile or two from the huge red maw of the greatest river in the world. It has been a journey through superlatives of size, through all that Nature is capable of in mountain heights, river, jungle, desert and plain. What can we compare with those thousands of miles over the Peruvian desert or the Andes, or over the jungle of Brazil? What was mere romance to us has now become real memory. We have seen the unparalleled lights of Rio like brooches pinned and pearls strung over the sea. We have seen Cotopaxi in its shirt of snow, the cobbles of the Inca highways, the Cyclopean stone of their temples; we have stood under the rain tree and the ombú and have gazed over harbors sailors have told us of: Valparaiso and Callao, Macao and Pernambuco. We have eaten the mango, drunk the Chilean wine, kicked avocado pears in the streets. We have seen the alligator in his river and seen butterflies the size of handkerchiefs. We have been frozen and breathless at Titicaca and have eaten its wonderful giant trout; we have had the night sit on us like a hot elephant in the tropics. We have talked with Indians, Negroes, mestizos and mulattoes, with all the Spanish and Portuguese mixtures, with great men, with ordinary men and the poor. We have seen the Indian woman trotting down the street shuttling her llama wool; we have seen the wives and daughters of the millionaires of Lima, Buenos Aires and Rio, in their diamonds and emeralds. In Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, in the Argentine, Uruguay and Brazil, we have seen seven versions of Iberian civilization transplanted, some feudal, some ultra-modern, all violently different and continuing that tradition of explosive individuality which they brought from Europe. We have been plunged into a life whose values are often basically distinct from our own, and which is awake and creative. What, we must ask, will this continent become when it is fully opened up and its huge natural resources used? All travelers in South America are staggered by its wealth and its prospects. They are overcome by its beauty. We have had the incredible luck to see a continent at the moment of its awakening.
(1956, 1989)
NOVELS
FROM
Dead Man Leading
CHAPTER X
There was a late moon and the raiment of water, dividing the trees, made a scene of metals. Animals cried out in the forest through the night. There had been laughter about hostile Indians during the day, but now Wright and Phillips watched the yellow flame of a fire, no more than a scratch of yellow, on the distant bend of the river.
They were, they calculated, only a day and a half’s journey from him. They slept uneasily under the white arc of the moon, and, after the usual sullen grumbling from the men, drank their coffee and started soon after sunrise. They sat advancing into the dazzling sun.
There was a monotony in the brief but overwhelming youth of these tropical dawns, when the land lay without shape like a divine breath upon the air. Phillips leaned eagerly forward and Wright stood keen and grey. His beard seemed to stiffen and his eyes, half closed against the new light, glittered like slits of dew. There was the smell of the trees in the water and the smell of the sleep sweat of the crew. There is to an ageing man nothing more cruel than the everlasting youth of the world, and it was not only the need of travelling fast and overtaking Johnson that made Wright stand up in the morning and impatiently urge on the crew, finally getting to work himself with the paddles; the impulse came also from the exquisite pangs of an envy for Johnson’s youth, a desire to reclaim his own. Wright’s temper sharpened and the crew grew sullen.
“Can’t he see that’s not the way to get these fellows to work,” thought Phillips.
Phillips was a man not used to obeying or being obeyed.
As for Phillips, he saw Johnson in his camps and he saw the courage of Johnson. Not in imaginary encounters—there were pictures made for himself by his own fears—but he saw Johnson, still, alone, ordinary, unthinking. The essence of the courageous man’s life is that nothing happens to him. Phillips took the paddle and felt the boat shoot on to Johnson’s courage.
Suddenly Wright stopped paddling and called out.
“There’s someone there,” he pointed to the far bank.
Two figures were moving against the trees.
“It’s Harry.”
They all stopped and stood up in the drifting boat. Phillips put his hands to his mouth and shouted. The shout fell on the water and the forest. The two figures stood still on the shore. They made no sign.
“The police launch then went ashore,” Phillips began.
Wright said, “Shut up. You’re not to say anything like that to him.”
Nearer and nearer the two figures came.
Silva and Johnson were standing there.
They were standing some yards from the water’s edge, when Wright landed and walked up to them, two scrub
bily bearded men with their clothes dirty and torn, the skin on their faces and their arms reddened and spotted and swollen. Johnson murmured something to Silva and they both grinned. They were looking at Phillips and not at Wright. Johnson said:
“Hullo. You know Silva. He’s been fishing.”
“Of course, I remember him,” said Wright genially stretching a hand to Silva.
The crew came ashore and the four pretended to study them. Then Silva came forward and broke the awkward greetings:
“I will make us all some coffee.”
They sat down on the ground and Wright talked of his journey. “It was my fire you saw last night. There are no Indians,” Johnson said.
“We thought it was Indians cooking you,” said Wright.
“There was a nasty smell in the air,” Phillips said.
“Mosquitoes were our only trouble,” Johnson said. He showed his swollen hands.
They gazed at Johnson and felt a deep affection for him in his comical situation, wondering how he would brazen it out, longing for him to do so. They prepared to laugh loudly at him, to heal the strange breach with laughter. But Johnson, like themselves, gave no hint. There was a set expression on his face of an enclosed man who would not explain. Wright’s diplomacy was a diplomacy of suggestion: “You’ve proved your theory about the boat,” or “What do you think about this river? It strikes me as being useful. The wrong river is often the best.”
But all Johnson revealed was that he had no opinion about the river yet, because he had been ill for two days and they would have been much further up but for this.
“Food was getting short,” he said.
He seemed to suggest that but for food they would not have caught him.
But as time passed Wright was beginning to lose interest in the comedy of their situation. Johnson was no longer symbol of youth or courage. The sun was at midday. Wright was a man of forty-nine. He had planned his purpose on the meridian of his life. He said quietly:
“You know we shall have to go back to the big river according to the plan we all agreed upon.”
As he began speaking Phillips got up and called Silva away with him.
Wright continued as they went out of earshot.
“I think your effort was a magnificent one, but we must work as a team and a sideline like this would waste time and we’ve lost too much as it is. I knew of course you were trying the canoe. Calcott got melodramatic about it but Phillips and I didn’t worry. You shifted too! But now we’ve got to get back. We’re a team, Harry.”
Wright waited for Johnson to speak. At last Johnson said:
“I think you’d better send me back.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m sick.”
“What is it?”
Johnson mumbled and then said:
“I’ve lost my nerve.”
“Not sleeping?” said Wright.
“I’ve slept all right,” said Johnson. His heavy shaggy head turned away from Wright. “It’s my nerve.”
“You’ve done too much,” said Wright. “You had a start on us but you got away. You must have paddled like hell. You’re just done in and want a rest.”
Johnson did not answer.
“We’ve got the time,” lied Wright. It is, Wright knew, a common delusion of men who spend their lives in exciting action that their nerve is going. It is an involuntary indecency of the spirit which, Wright knew, cannot be helped. The two men glanced at each other. They had known each other for years. They had climbed together, sailed together. They had described their doings, they had argued into the night. They had laughed at each other. Wright had the faculty of putting the young at their ease, of being merely the man who had lived longer, pretending with a skill they did not notice that this was a disadvantage. He listened. Yet now Johnson and Wright looked at each other with incomprehension. Engrossed in action, they knew each other’s idiosyncrasies only.
“I’ve been looking at the maps to see if we could cut across-country,” said Wright, cunningly trading on Johnson’s passion for action. “When you’re fit we’ll have a look.”
Johnson did not answer. His face was heavy, stubborn and inert. Wright persisted and went into the pros and cons of the journey, knowing it to be impossible. He talked a long time slowly coming to the judgement that it would be better to return to the main river. Johnson lived every moment of the deep humiliation of the return. He felt only the humiliation of being trapped, but how trapped or why trapped he did not know. He watched Silva wandering along the river’s edge and thought of the days of freedom and the chains which Wright’s quiet, even voice put upon him. He struggled to remember why it was he had run away from the expedition and could not remember. He would only remain defiant and enclosed, with a growing barrier of resentment against Wright in his heart.
“He used to flirt with young women under his wife’s nose and make her jealous”—this irrelevant thought came into his head.
“Silva!” called Johnson, “Silva!”
“Yes?”
“Are both paddles in the boat?”
“Yes.” To show Silva was his man.
This interrupted Wright.
“Extra crew will be useful,” Wright said.
Johnson’s resentment grew at this appropriation. He got up and surprised Wright by walking away. He walked out of the camp and then out of sight of it, and at once his gloom lifted. His eyes were alert, his face ready and lifted, his body waking into its extraordinary agility. The mad idea of going on alone, just as he was without food or arms, hovered in his head. Suddenly he stood still and, amazed at himself, broke into tears. They came without feeling and without warning and without meaning and the present moment seemed to melt from him like wax under a flame. Wright’s bearded head appeared and went. His father’s face came. He was, for a powerless moment, a child again and shouting at his father angrily, “The next time you cross the level crossing I hope the train comes along and kills you.” This was a clear memory dislodged from the time when he was six. He had not wept for years and this memory jumped forward with the suddenness of the tears.
The tears were few. It was as if they had confessed; when his lips had been unable to speak they had spoken for him.
An air of embarrassment was in the camp. The idle crew sat under the trees gambling and quarrelling mildly and watching the Englishmen. Wright slept and Phillips tried unavailingly to draw out Johnson. Silva, observing everything, imagined that there was a quarrel about the division of the sale of the gold. Or perhaps about its whereabouts. Silva reckoned that if the expedition split, he would have a half-share with Johnson if he stuck to him. This was in Silva’s imagination. In reality he did not believe the expedition was really going in search of gold but his was a mind whose fantasies never rested. He missed—it was the real hardship of the journey—his cigars. Phillips said to himself, “If Johnson stays, I shall stay.” There was no reason for the expedition if Johnson were out of it. Phillips was depressed by the boredom of the daily camps and of this camp in particular. He could feel the slow turning of the earth, the irretrievable passage of time in his life. He thought chiefly of traffic and hot streets and restaurants. He traced the services of buses across the stream. While the others slept he propped up a mirror and shaved off several days of beard, admiring himself as he did this and sighing at the sleepers. He went over to Silva and nodded to them all.
“Crisis,” he said. “Is Johnson mad?”
Silva shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh no,” Silva said.
For Wright now the incident of the chase was closed and Johnson’s “nerves” were already written off. Brusquer in speech now he was inactive, Wright was also bluntly decisive. Phillips had noted the change from his English manner of quiet, gay courtesy. Wright had the fever of his adventure but he was not one of those who believe in leading and commanding. If he had had twenty men he would have gone on his own way, leaving the others to imitate his diligence and his persistence. His orders
were no more than sly digs, fragments of mockery.
Before sundown he said to Johnson:
“Let’s try your boat and have a shot at something.”
They took their guns and got into the boat.
It was a late afternoon like all the rest, the heat of the sun lessening with every beat, the distant trees softening in tone and hardening in outline. The two paddled with little noise, keeping a look-out for floating trees as they went near the wreckage of the banks. Wright spoke little and Johnson not at all.
Wright discovered one thing: that Johnson had intended going on. With the silver path of light between the deep shadows of the evening trees tranquil before him, broken only by the rising birds, Wright understood Johnson’s wish. He said:
“I don’t blame you for wanting to leave us. And I’m sorry to have to claim you back.”
He spoke frankly for the first time; he felt there was no fear of injuring Johnson by the words.
“It is a good river,” said Johnson.
After a while Wright said:
“Why did you want to leave us?”
Johnson’s heart seemed to ring like a bell at this. He was touched by the delicacy and nearness of Wright, though he resented the intrusion.
“I wanted,” he said, “to try this alone because my father came this way. I wanted to see.”
The Pritchett Century Page 28
