by Ellen Levy
AMAZONS
A Love Story
E. J. Levy
UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS
COLUMBIA AND LONDON
Copyright © 2012 by E. J. Levy
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
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Contents
Prologue
Part I: Destino
Part II: Salvador
Part III: Amazons
Epilogue
A modern hero—or anti-hero—[reflects] an extreme external situation within his own extremity. His neurosis becomes diagnosis, not just of himself but of a phase of history.
—STEPHEN SPENDER,
introduction to Under the Volcano
Prologue
The Cartographer of Loss
Imagine the world as flesh.
The southern continents, its meaty flanks. The oceans, its shifting faces. Rivers, veins. Dunes, its soft teats. Like you, it breathes, sighs clouds from steaming rivers, exhales oxygen from the rain forests that gird its distended belly like dispersed lungs. Each leaf, alveolus.
The symbiotic theory of cell evolution maintains that the human body evolved from a composite of relationships of which our organs bear the traces yet; that we are thus not one but many creatures, composed of other unions: symbiotic, parasitic, predator, and prey. This theory (first championed in the nineteenth century and disputed still) maintains that each body carries within it, like the bed of some ancient ocean, a history of microbial cooperation, of species that came together and formed indissoluble bonds. Like the Amazon rain forest, which has evolved slowly over millennia into a complex network of alliance and misalliance, we are each of us a world unto ourselves. Our bodies, like the Amazon, like fate, a built thing.
For a long time I could not think about my tropic life, that year I spent in the Amazon rain forest and in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. I could not think about the women I knew there, about Nelci and Isa and Barbara, that year during which I tried for months to get to the Amazon, which I had come to study and hoped to “save.”
Maybe it was fear that held me back from reflecting until now, stopping me from looking back. Fear informed by the memory of a favorite childhood bedtime story, that of Orpheus and Eurydice, read to me in the optimistic late 1960s by my mother, whose optimism like the nation’s was beginning to wear thin and who sought to instill in us, her three children, in a modest suburb in Minnesota, something of a classical education, the Victorian virtues, by reading to us each night before sleep Greek myths and legends, seeking to pass on to us a faith in gods and mysteries she was no longer able to retain. Weary, without the comforts of cigarettes, which she had given up to give birth to me, without the comforts of her husband who was busy elsewhere, with other women, bored out of her ever-loving brilliant mind, teetering on the brink of suicide, she read to us what seems to me now a fitting tale for her circumstance and for our time—the story of Orpheus seeking to reclaim love from among the ranks of the dead. I learned from my mother and Edith Hamilton never to look back, Orpheus my model for a forward-looking gaze.
It’s a familiar story: Orpheus, the lyre player, loses his beloved Eurydice to snakebite. Grieved by her death, he descends to the underworld determined to bring her back to life with him. There he plays for Hades, the king of the dead, who is so moved by Orpheus’ music that he agrees to release Eurydice on one condition: that Orpheus not look back at her until he reaches the surface of the world. He demands, in effect, an act of faith, a sacrifice to revive what has been lost. Without faith, without sacrifice, Orpheus will lose what he loves. But as he ascends to the surface of the world, Orpheus fails to hear his lover’s footfalls on the path behind him and panics; overcome with anxiety, with the need to know, with the need for certainty, he turns around, sees her there, and loses what he loves forever.
Orpheus was granted what no one can really hope to have—the opportunity to revive what has been lost once already. Still we hope. Live recklessly. Bank on being able to bring back what we so casually squander: species brought to the brink of extinction. A world warmed to the edge of melting. But even Orpheus, who was on a first-name basis with the gods, blew it. If we insist on certainty, on an absence of doubt, we too may lose what we best love.
How do we know the world is warming? How do we know what the effects will be of vastly increased levels of CO2? What happens if we fell most tropical moist forests in the course of a single century? We document, sometimes, at the risk of damage, deliberating instead of doing something. Instead of taking action to stem loss or prevent climate change, holding to a path we know to be right, we are tempted to look death in the face, to know for sure what will happen, more afraid of sacrifice for the sake of uncertain reward than of loss, and so risk losing it all. How do we know human activity is warming the world? When we know for certain, will we say, If only we had known?
When I first returned to the United States from the Amazon, I had lunch with my mother. I was home again on some vacation or other, spring break it must have been, and we were eating as we often did in a restaurant that adjoined a local grocery store. It was one of those boastful American grocery stores, with their vast cornucopias of produce and bread and condiments. This particular grocery chain, Byerly’s, had made its mark by catering to those who hate to shop. It hung crystal chandeliers above the frozen food aisles; it made its aisles as wide as fashionable boulevards; it dedicated an entire shelf of a block-long aisle to hot pepper sauces; another to pickles from around the world; yet another to varieties of chips; each day it tossed the produce that had not been sold. The store’s opulence stood in embarrassing contrast to the place I’d left, Brazil’s impoverished northeast. I don’t know if I noticed. Likely its superfluity was comforting.
It was over that lunch that I told my mother that I’d been raped in Brazil. Sodomized. She took a stab at her salad, looked at her plate. She said she didn’t care what I did, that it was my business, but that she hoped I was using protection. I was not protected against this. I said, “Mom, I just told you I was raped and you’re talking about condoms? I don’t believe this. That’s like my telling you that I tried to slit my wrists and your saying that you hope the blade wasn’t rusty.” We sat in awkward embarrassed silence for a while. When my mother spoke again, she said that she was sorry, she’d thought I was trying to shock her, trying to show her how grown-up I was. I was twenty-two by then, and I was not grown-up. I just knew a lot of things I could not understand yet. A lot of things I rather wished I didn’t know about what people are capable of and what they aren’t.
It would be years before I realized that my mother was merely doing what we all have done, are doing still: she was trying in the face of loss and pain and shock to bring ordinary caution to bear; she was trying to make this reasonable somehow; just as we at the National Institute of Amazonian Research, where I had worked in the Amazon, had done with our maps and charts, our scholarly papers and our studies of rain forest destruction. She was trying to apply the standards of a reasonable discourse to unreasonable acts.
In the face of loss, some document. Christopher Isherwood’s partner drew pictures of him as he lay
dying. The fashion photographer Richard Avedon photographed his father’s last days. I took few notes that year; I retain few reminders outside memory. I did not keep mementos. I have a berimbau—the gourd instrument used to accompany the martial art of capoeira; I have three books in Portuguese. I have a single photo of myself in black and white (in it, my eyes are blank, an attempt to effect the vacuous stare of an American model, achieving instead the demeanor of one who has been mugged.) A handful more in color of me and some capoeiristas on the Island of Itaparica. Guys whose names I don’t know. Disjointed images, which I return to reticently, as I imagine one must approach a corpse in a city morgue. Loath to identify the body. Loath to look at the figure stretched out before me, displayed for dissection. Loath to give this its proper name. To say, “I recognize this face. It’s mine.”
Fifteen years after departing the Amazon, I was living on a high desert mesa working to protect another river—this time the Rio Grande—when I accepted an invitation to write an essay about my stint in the Amazon and the images from that year began to filter back to me the way blades of light will filter through the tannic liquid of a river if you look up from beneath the surface. Filaments of light, a fan, or spines, a shape I had not recognized before came clear and the pointless chaos of that year seemed suddenly patterned and if not beautiful then meaningful at least.
I was amazed to find how much and how vividly I remembered that lost year. Amazed to find how much survived that I’d believed was lost. I found a journal that I’d kept and forgotten, among my few keepsakes, and a few sketches I’d written shortly after my return.
It was at the close of the twentieth century that I began to look back at that year, and perhaps because endings tend to make us think symbolically (in light of an ending, we can see a thing entire, discern the pattern), the people I knew then, the fate of the rain forest, the sacrifices we made and those we unpropitiously failed to make, suddenly seemed emblematic of that American century. I began to see that the logic that endangered the rain forest had endangered me as well. What had happened to the girls I knew then and what happened to the forest seemed connected, the damage done to each recalling the damage done the other, the consequence of ill-conceived development schemes, the dangerous logic of commodities.
When I made it to the Amazon twenty-five years ago, I worked as a cartographer. I spent my days in a cubicle in an office on the grounds of the Instituto Naçional de Pesquisas da Amazônia—the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA, for short)—deep in the forest on the outskirts of that mirage of a city, Manaus.
Now, as then, I face the cartographer’s dilemma: What to map? What territory is worth recording, which aspects merit note, what can be discarded or ignored? I was no more than a flunky at INPA, an intern in the office of a world-renowned researcher and the choice of what to map wasn’t mine to make though it was left to me to connect the dots. It was my job to daily chart the coordinates that marked rates of deforestation.
I was in charge of recording not what was, but what was not. Mapping absence.
I was—perhaps I am again—a cartographer of loss.
PART I
DESTINO
Maps
The map of Salvador that I look at now is unrecognizable, in black and white; Xeroxed from some tourist brochure, it covers two pages, 8 1/2 by 11 inches each. I will tape it together in the middle, trying to make a whole, but even then the image will be wrong.
It bears the names of the neighborhoods I visited and those I was afraid to, not because they were dangerous but because I was afraid then and thought that if I held still I might protect myself. I thought I’d be safe if I didn’t make a move. And I didn’t know, in any case, what move to make.
The map in front of me has names of neighborhoods and streets printed in bold uppercase type: Barra, Vitoria, Canela lie to the left (which is south, on this disoriented map). To the right-hand side, on the northern edge of the peninsula on which Salvador sits, are Ribeira and Bonfim; the city center lies suspended between these, in the curve of the Bay of All Saints, due west; at the bottom of the page, to the east and the interior lie Campinas, Fazenda Grande.
The original map was candy colored, bright and promising. Even in this secondhand Xerox, I can see it was meant to be cheerful, its directions clear. It is decorated with cartoon figures—giant smiling angelfish and sailboats decorate the coastal waters; each beach is marked by an umbrella, beneath which reclines a bikini-clad, long-haired blond. Capoeira schools are indicated by dancing dark-skinned men; terreiros—the sanctuaries of the cult of candomblé—by black women, their heads wrapped in turbaned scarves, bodies encased in bells of cloth, layer on layer of white cotton and lace.
I am not sure what is supposed to be indicated by the black matrons seated by a pot of boiling dendê, palm oil. That this is a black neighborhood? Or is she merely decorative in the mapmaker’s mind? A splash of local color? Picturesque as poverty is said to be by those who needn’t suffer it or sympathize. There are buildings depicted, too, in miniature, caricatures of modern hotels and the lovely confections of the baroque that distinguish the old city neighborhoods of Pelourinho and Bonfim, which perch atop a cliff above the center of town, overlooking the harbor.
I look at Avenida Sete de Setembro that runs north and south along the edge of the spit of land that is Salvador, from the city center—o centro—to the Porto da Barra, past the San Antonio fort to the farol, named for the lighthouse there, and I picture the street, the heat, the sudden interruptible shade of trees, the bus, the stench of exhaust, the school for English, the hotel where I stayed those first few days, the apartment I rented on Rua João Pondé, which later I would share with Nelci, neither of us realizing—till it was far too late—just how much it would cost us.
Development Projects
It was the third of January 1984 when I flew down to Brazil. That morning, in the Minneapolis-St. Paul international airport, I had hugged my parents hurriedly good-bye at the gate where I would board my plane to Miami, where I would in turn board a plane to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. As I hugged my mother, I could see over her shoulder the pale brightness of a Minnesota January day framed by the massive windows that lined the concourse walls; I could see beyond her to the runway covered with plump planes. I did not cry, though I wanted to. I was twenty-one, too old to cry.
What I remember of the airport at Miami is a jumble. I remember the ebbing day, the darkness of the runway, the fear potent, haunting, ever present, that I would miss my connection. I was young then, young even for my age, and I was afraid of failing to make connections.
In those days, I wanted to belong and did not, to anyone, least of all to myself, and this was painful to me. I had had, since I was fifteen, a steady stream of boyfriends and friends but outside my parents I had loved no one, a fact I contemplated often with the extravagant despair of self-despairing youth.
Perhaps as I sat in the Miami airport, looking around at all the people I did not know, many of them speaking Portuguese, a language I was not yet fluent in, I told myself that I loved no one, as if hoping to be proven wrong. I believed then that I hadn’t a clue what it meant to love, because in truth I had not yet been deeply moved by a person as I could be by a painting, a film, a strain of music; I had yet to meet anyone as lovely as a landscape or a work of art.
In the absence of love, I cleaved fervently to justice, to an almost Calvinistic conception of right and wrong, the conviction that one must do right even without hope of success or salvation; mine, a hopeless ardor.
I was the child of what was genteelly known in late twentieth-century America as a “mixed marriage”—the union of Protestant and Jew—and this shaped my sensibility, surely if obscurely, informing, I suspect, the salvific impulse that for years fueled my desire to save the Amazon. My parents had been raised in religious homes—among Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Methodists—but they relinquished their respective faiths before they met and married. My mother converted to Orthodox Jud
aism for the sake of my father’s mother, but they gave up on religious observance. Still the brooding shadows of their gods remained. Although my parents sacrificed the confidence of those who believe that they are chosen or saved, we lived with an oppressive sense of divine judgment. Their youngest child, I was especially susceptible. From an early age, I was on the look out for vocations, wrongs to right. At eighteen, when I first read about the disappearing rain forest, I thought at last I’d found it—my calling.
In those days, I did not want to lose my way, as I do now, but find it. I did not know then—in my twenties, as I’d learn in my thirties—how to appreciate the pleasures of an airport with its promiscuous crush of humanity, its placelessness, its promising dislocation, inviting you to believe that wherever you may have been or be you might begin anew elsewhere, transformed by this simple trinity: a gate, a gangplank, a ticket.
I was halfway through my junior year at Yale that January when I set out for Brazil to spend a year studying the environmental consequences of development projects in the Amazon. As a sophomore, I had applied for and been awarded a generous fellowship from the Rotary Foundation International, which offered fellowships to students, scholars, and journalists to fund international research. These grants typically went to graduate students, not undergrads, and on the East Coast, where I’d applied, competition was fierce. I had been lucky to get the money and I knew it. I wanted to make good use of my time.
In my application, I had proposed to work at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, deep in the jungle, one of the premier institutions for the study of tropical moist forests. I was well versed in the literature, a student of economics and Latin American studies with a specialization in twentieth-century Brazilian economic development.
