A heavy mood hung over the rest of the audience, despite the requiem’s promise of redemption. Many in the crowd would have had loved ones murdered or disappeared in recent years. They listened, stony-faced, to the choir. A few minutes before the end, a young couple entered. They were in their late teens, about the age of the missing students from Ayotzinapa, and both had their faces painted as skeletons. The young man wore a waistcoat, the woman an ankle-length yellow dress. Down the aisle of the cathedral they came, arms linked like death’s wedding march. They weren’t part of the show, only late arrivals, but all eyes turned towards them. Once they found seats, my eyes kept stealing back to the pair of beautiful young skeletons, who had entered to the blare of brass. The final verses seemed directed to them:
For the trumpet shall sound,
and the dead shall be raised incorruptible,
and we shall be changed…17
My mother-in-law caught me drying my eyes. She smiled.
Three weeks later, back in Mexico City, it was nearly time for us to go home. While we were in Michoacán, the fugitive mayor of Iguala and his wife had been captured in a dramatic 3 am raid, and the capital had been rocked by massive protests. President Peña Nieto was at the G20 summit in my hometown of Brisbane. A local bar owner who posted Facebook photos of himself with the glamorous Mexican First Lady quickly removed them following abuse from Mexican expatriates: ‘Shame on you. Her husband is a fucking murderer. He has blood on his hands.’
Meanwhile, in Mexico, protesters screamed for Peña Nieto’s resignation, and masked men set fire to the 150-year-old wooden door of the National Palace.
Preoccupied with the chaos around us, we’d kept our talk of personal matters light. I hadn’t yet brought up the engagement with R’s parents. On our last night, I finally wrestled control of the kitchen from my mother-in-law, and was able to prepare a special meal.
‘Necesito hablarles de algo importante,’ I said as we sat down before four steaming bowls of Thai red curry. I didn’t buy them fancy tequila or address her father as Estimadísimo señor. Even so, I felt María and Lupe would have approved. I told R’s parents that I was sorry I had caused her pain in the past, that I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. I was committed to her and wanted, with their blessing, to spend my life by her side. The food was cold before any of us ate. My father-in-law replied with a short speech and presented me with a letter for my parents he’d written using Google Translate.
‘Australia…Australia is so far away,’ said my-mother-in-law. But she composed herself and gave us her blessing. They both did.
As I write, more than four years on from the mass disappearance in Iguala, only one of The Forty-Three has been confirmed dead by forensic evidence.
‘I wish they’d left my son dead on the ground so I could fetch him,’ said the young man’s father, Ezequiel Mora. ‘But all they’ve left me is a shard of bone and a molar.’18 The parents of the remaining 42, lacking physical proof, continue the search.
‘I don’t feel that my son is dead,’ María Concepción Tlatempa told journalists. ‘When something happens, you feel it in your heart, and I don’t feel anything.’19
President Peña Nieto, for his part, has warned that Mexico must not ‘remain trapped’ in the tragedy, and has urged its citizens to ‘move on’. But the same lack of closure that has made it impossible for the parents to accept their sons are dead has kept the story alive. The Ayotzinapa case has not only brought unparalleled international attention to corruption, impunity and mass human-rights violations in Mexico, it has broadened protest into less radical sectors of Mexican society.
When R’s parents arrived in Brisbane for our wedding in June 2015, my mother-in-law told me she’d stopped changing from one short course to another and had settled on a two-year diploma in thanatology – the scientific study of the needs of the dying and their families. Since there didn’t seem to be a quiet corner of the country to retire to, they were planning to stay in the capital. They’d recently participated in several protests. Along with tens of thousands of ordinary Mexicans – not radicals, not revolutionaries – they had marched on the Zócalo.
Roraima & Manaus
Man’s real home is not a house, but the Road.1
– Bruce Chatwin
Santa Elena came as a relief after Caracas: a dusty, industrious little outpost on the Venezuelan frontier where the major industries were black-market petrol, diamond mining and tourism. Massive queues of four-wheel drives often formed at the two petrol stations in town, where Brazilians filled up at prices thirty times cheaper than across the border. At a little tourist agency off the main road, Valentina and I joined a group of nine foreigners, all Europeans but for me, with whom we would make the six-day hike to the top of Roraima, a table mountain on the triple frontier between Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana.
‘You’re going to a very special place,’ said the portly, lisping proprietor. He gave us each a world map marked with sites of supernatural energy. The lines connecting Stonehenge, the Bermuda Triangle, Machu Picchu and other ‘mystic’ places all intersected at Roraima.
‘Some people see strange lights in the night sky,’ he said. ‘Some people experience an intense wave of sexual energy. Nobody leaves unchanged.’
He was a hard-headed businessman despite his mysticism. Asking around town, we learned that he kept prices low by underpaying the indigenous porters from the village of Paraitepuy who lugged tourists’ camping and food supplies up the mountain. Many of them were only 14 or 15 years old. Since it wasn’t possible to make the trek with another company that week, we told ourselves, with the adaptable self-righteousness of the young, that the only principled stand was to carry the equipment ourselves. In truth, we were both short of money – especially Valentina. As a result of our high-mindedness, we saved, and the agency still received our business. The porters got nothing.
Once on the move, we forgot our scruples with ruthless swiftness. We staggered out of town with 15 or 20 kilograms on our backs, like penitents in the Easter parades. For me, the ache of legs and arms brought a sense of plenitude and contentment. It felt good to be pushed physically and to burn off energy after a fortnight cooped up in the capital.
For the first two days, we walked through undulating savannah country, the mountain ahead of us mostly wreathed in cloud. We made a couple of river crossings in fast-flowing, waist-high water, our shoes dangling by their laces from our packs, the stones slick and mossy beneath our feet. The water was sweet and clear and perfectly safe to drink. In the afternoons, I would arrive into camp an hour or two ahead of the mostly middle-aged group and would roam about in search of pink mountain orchids, or dash off three or four dreadful poems in my journal before pitching the tent. The simple hearty meals of pasta, bread and beans prepared by our Guyanese guide, Alex, were so delicious that I gobbled double portions and finished off others’ leftovers.
I was in awe of Alex. He was about 40 – which seemed old to me then – but was fitter than any of us. He carried enough weight for three people, and was equally comfortable catego-rising native bromeliads in English, Spanish and Portuguese. When everyone else was popping their blisters and moaning at the end of the day, he single-handedly cooked dinner for ten, refusing even to let us wash up. He had climbed the mountain more than 100 times. Watching how hard he worked, I began to suspect there were deep reserves inside me that I’d rarely tapped. And I started to understand the question the journey was posing: what was I going to do with that energy?
One day, when Alex and I were briefly marching alone at the front of the group, I asked him why he worked so hard.
‘You must get good tips. What are you saving towards?’
He was putting money aside to send his three sons abroad. ‘I don’t want them carrying other people’s shit down the mountain.’
He meant this literally. Park regulations dictated that human waste could not be left on top of Roraima. After the nearly 3-kilometre ascent to the summit on day three,
we were supposed to defecate in a portable pot that would be carried back to town by the teenage porters.
For two days, I held on out of shame.
By the middle of the trek, poor Valentina had begun to struggle under the weight of her baggage.
‘If I take the saucepan and your bed roll, will you stop whingeing?’ I snarled, impatient to scale the mountain. Snatching the gear from her load, I ditched her at the back of the group, and made the ascent with Lena, a German PR consultant in her mid-thirties. A long-legged, athletic blonde with a ponytail, she was halfway through a round-the-world trip with her Irish boyfriend.
‘He’s been carrying a ring around at the bottom of his toiletries bag. I found it in India when I was looking for the Maxolon. He’s going to propose at the top of the mountain, I know it.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
She looked down the rocky, near vertical slope and then upwards into the mist.
‘I don’t think he’s the one.’
The afternoon we finally made the summit, the clouds were so thick we couldn’t see a thing. In drizzling rain, we pitched our tents under a rock ledge amid prehistoric ferns and spiny yellow flowers. That night, in high spirits after the climb, we played an old parlour game around the campfire. Every member of the party had to tell two stories. The rest had to guess which was real and which was invented. It was not true, we discovered, that Anton, our companion from the Czech Republic, had discovered a Second World War grenade in his father’s possessions when he was a boy. But it was true that he used to hitchhike between small-town beer halls in the old Czechoslovakia with his guitar, extending folk songs to 15 or 20 minutes to prolong his time in the warmth.
Soon, Irish William rose to take his turn. He was a skinny, cauliflower-eared redhead, punching well above his weight with Lena.
‘My first contention – and you can doubt me if you like – is that I managed to travel in India from January through March this year without getting a single case of the runs.’
He paused, taking a deep breath of clean mountain air into his lungs.
‘My second contention is that over there in our tent, stashed with my toothbrush and dental floss, I have a 14-carat, white-gold engagement ring with a big, fuck-off diamond in it. And tonight, when we go to bed, I’m gonna ask Lena to be my wife.’
Next morning, we woke with blue skies above, boiling clouds below. We basked like lizards on the sun-warmed stone, peering down through gaps in the low-hanging cumulus: rolling grasslands to the north and south, dense jungle to the east. At that place, in that moment, there seemed to be no limit to the shining earth, or to the people you could be in a lifetime. ‘Brazil’ was painted on a cairn of pebbles, an arrow pointing due south.
‘We’re headed into the Amazon,’ I said to Valentina. ‘Can you believe it?’
‘I can’t believe we have to walk all the way back.’
The mountain-top euphoria wasn’t working for her. She was worn out from carrying so much weight. Nearby, Lena and Anton were excitedly grilling Alex about the geology of the rock formations.
‘Besides, I can’t stop thinking about that poor Irish boy,’ said Valentina. ‘Look at him.’
William sat on his own very near the cliff’s edge.
We disembarked from the bus just south of Santa Elena, in the little town of Pacaraima, better known as ‘the Line’. Here, the Venezuelan and Brazilian flags flew side by side, with a bust of Simón Bolívar to the north and of Don Pedro I to the south. The border officials spoke Portuñol, an improvised amalgam of Spanish and Portuguese. They were more concerned with the long queue of trucks transporting cargo across the border than a pair of down-at-heel foreigners. With a minimum of fuss, they checked our visas and yellow-fever vaccination certificates, and told us the quickest way to cross was to simply walk along the road’s edge, past the banked-up vehicles. The idea of walking across the border appealed to me enormously: the slow pace, the smallness of the human form in the vastness of America, the impression – not so obvious in a bus or plane – that there is no line, really, that our divisions are invented, arbitrary, recent.
I was reading more Bruce Chatwin than was good for me in those days and I’d mistaken a great raconteur and yarn-spinner for a thinker. On the basis of his travels and his amateur anthropological study of nomadic cultures, Chatwin rejected the notion humans are naturally violent. He claimed weapons had only been developed as protection against ancient predators and were turned against other humans due to the stagnation of life in farms and cities. His solution to modern civilisation’s woes was a return to permanent movement: the ‘nomadic alternative’. Four months in, I was having my doubts. It was beginning to look more like a rationalisation of Chatwin’s personal wanderlust than a viable life philosophy. Without family, community, a lover, a home to retreat to, I felt unmoored.
‘Don’t you ever miss home?’ I asked Valentina as we lined up for our entry stamps at Brazilian customs. ‘Don’t you ever miss your family?’
‘My father has a young baby with his second wife. He doesn’t have time for me. My mother just wants me to be a schoolteacher. To get married and be boring. My brother is in a very expensive mental hospital. Personally, I’d rather spend my money on bus tickets.’
We lugged our packs across the spongy grass at the roadside.
‘I was a teacher, back in Australia. I had a job teaching English to refugees.’
I told her about Roy, one of my Sudanese students in Brisbane. Walking across borders held no romance for him. When we’d sat together at a computer and looked up a map of Africa, he didn’t want to retrace the vast wilderness of his homeland that he’d traversed on foot or revisit the borders he’d crossed. He wanted to locate the camp where he’d found safety and zoom in on one particular rooftop.
‘That one. That is my hut. I built it with my hands.’
Valentina and I barely spoke during the 1000-kilometre bus trip south. With her language notebook in her lap, she mouthed Portuguese words like a spell against thoughts of home while I watched the grasslands bake in the hard sunlight for so long I felt as if the landscape was flowing through me. ‘The sky looks big where there are no buildings,’ I wrote in my journal. Then, towering trees swallowed the highway.
Manaus, the jungle metropolis: 2.5 million people at the centre of the largest forest on earth. Here, the sandy-coloured upper river, the Solimões, converges with the dark Rio Negro to form the Amazon, and squirrel monkeys scamper along the powerlines. Still buzzing from the journey, I spent a blissful afternoon alone on the terrace of our hotel, drinking beer in the sun, and strumming Dylan’s ‘Chimes of Freedom’ on the yellow nylon-string guitar I’d bought at the markets for 300 reales. Brightly coloured laundry fluttered on rooftops across town, and huge ocean liners approached the port from the direction of the Atlantic, more than 1500 kilometres to the east. Valentina was arranging our passage on a smaller boat, a jungle cargo ship, that would take us five days down the Madeira River to the Bolivian border, where we would cross over and inch our way back from the deep Amazon to the Andes.
She crashed out early that night, weary from walking all day in the stifling equatorial heat. A little after eight o’clock I stumbled from the hotel, drunk and hungry, to search for dinner. Thunder grumbled in the distance; the air thickened like soup. Sunday night. Many of the places in our immediate neighbourhood were closed. I passed up a couple of well-lit, expensive-looking family restaurants because I didn’t feel like sitting alone at a table.
The downpour caught me wandering, disoriented in a strange neighbourhood. Torrential rain clattered machinegun-fierce on metal rooftops. Taking shelter beneath an awning, I recognised William from the trek locked in a tight embrace with a Brazilian woman in a short skirt. A bottle of cachaça was open on the ground between them, and sweat poured from their bodies; they seemed to be trying to eat each other’s faces. As he lifted his watery blue eyes, recognising me over her shoulder, he shot me a look of shame and hatred that
sent me lurching into the warm rain. All along the avenue, sex workers in doorways hissed at me as I passed, dripping, singing ‘Chimes of Freedom’ softly to myself, letting myself be drenched. I wanted the same thing William wanted, I realised, but couldn’t – not ever – for no reason I could articulate.
After nearly an hour, I stumbled upon Manaus’s magnificent Belle Époque opera house, floodlit and gleaming like a pink gemstone. I’d read it was built during the rubber boom of the 1880s with Italian marble, English steel and French roof tiles. Distant strings and trumpets lured me into the lobby, where I caught a glimpse of my wild beard and matted hair reflected in the ticket seller’s plexiglass screen.
‘Não há bilhetes,’ said the clerk, looking me up and down. No tickets left.
More magnificent even than the opera house was the sight of the barbeque stand just across the street. Two men in t-shirts and thongs sheltered beneath a large umbrella, chatting with the stall owner as he cooked meat skewers over glowing coals.
‘Give me five of those…no, six,’ I said, squeezing beneath the umbrella.
The other two customers fell silent, munching their dinner.
‘Que musica é?’ I asked, pointing at the opera house.
‘E-vag-ner,’ said one of the men, speaking with his mouth full.
‘Wagner?’
And that much was true. I recognised the theme. They were playing ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in the Amazon.
‘We’re in the chorus,’ said the other man, gnawing away. ‘We don’t come on until the second half.’
I laughed so hard at that, I found I couldn’t stop. I had to wipe my nose clean on my bare wrist.
‘Would you sing for me? I’ve come from very far away and I can’t afford a ticket.’
Bless those two perfidious Amazonians, they made a lonesome traveller very happy. They flung their wooden skewers on the ground, wiped their chins clean and sang for me, there beneath the umbrella in the pouring rain. They were no opera singers. From across the plaza, a stray dog barked along with their tone-deaf butchery of the Brazilian anthem. All four of us laughed, even the stall owner.
Requiem with Yellow Butterflies Page 6
