Amazons

by Ellen Levy

  Until that time—it was clear—I was on my own.

  I was still struggling to formulate the proper phrase in Portuguese to explain that I needed my funds now to depart for the Amazon, when he left. Leaving me in the lobby of the Praia do Sol, with the dull recognition that the only person I knew in Salvador, the only person I knew for 5,000 miles in any direction, did not like me.

  Had I been one who read, the ensuing solitude might have been easier to bear, but I didn’t then, so it wasn’t. By the time I’d graduated from high school, I could count on one hand all the books I’d read, excluding those assigned for classes or read before the first grade. Once books lost their pictures, I couldn’t see their point and, betrayed, had given them up. Besides, I couldn’t concentrate; I often felt a nervous rapping in my brain that I was needed somewhere else. I preferred the impersonal realm of numbers, which had calmed me as a kid, when I raced through math textbooks after school, completing problems as another child might practice shooting basketball hoops. Only the tranquil aesthetic of numbers could hold my attention for long in childhood and youth, which is no doubt why I’d ended up studying economics, which seemed for a time to offer the possibility of a moral application of numeracy. It seemed a perfect marriage: enduring numerical order applied to a human realm.

  Now I have forgotten the figures. How many hectares, how many species per day, lost to the ravages of deforestation. I had them memorized then as others might memorize a poem. A catalog of loss. An elegy. In those days I thought everything could be rendered in numbers. After that year, I would realize that the beautiful, comforting symmetry of numbers is sometimes a lie, that things do not always add up.

  A porter in a dull brown uniform watched me openly, unsmiling, as we rode the elevator up to my room, as if I were a thing to watch. He opened the door to my room, brought in the bag, and I followed him in. The door fell closed behind us; I heard the lock catch. He crossed to the window and pulled back the curtains with a tearing sound of metal scraping metal, then he clicked on the air conditioner. It roared and blew lukewarm air. He walked over to the small waist-high refrigerator on the far side of the room and opened it to show me the small bottles and wrapped sweets and bags of nuts it contained. He closed the refrigerator door and crossed to the bed. Then he stood there. He looked at me. He leaned over and tested the bed with his palm. He seemed disinclined to go. I went to the door and opened it. Obrigado, I said, thanking him. He waited. ‘Brigado, I said again. He stared at me. I began to feel uneasy. There seemed to be no one else on this floor of the hotel. Just him and me. Then I got it. I pulled out an American dollar. Handed it to him. He put the key on the bedside table. Left without a word.

  I crossed the room to stand at the window, looking down at the street two stories below. It was an unpromising view of a gray and ugly street. I saw no point in palm trees and sunny skies. I had always dreaded vacations, especially summer’s cheerful vacuity. I had no appreciation for the sensual then. It seemed a distraction from the more serious business of setting history straight. As long as I had a map, a goal, a destination, I was fine, but I was marooned in time, lost when steeped in it, forced to linger there.

  I sat on the bed, backing myself against the headboard for support, my knees pulled to my chest. The room was grim. A murky unsavory orange light filtered through the brown curtains, the carpet was short and brown. Across the room, a dresser was set beneath a large rectangular mirror which reflected the brown quilt of the bed on which I sat. I looked at myself in the mirror.

  You might expect the girl to cry, to shower, to masturbate, to read a book, smoke a cigarette, go for a walk, get a cup of coffee or a drink or a meal, but she does none of those things, that girl I once was. They don’t occur to her. She knows how to analyze a passage from one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, how to calculate the marginal rate of return or utility for a given set of variables, how to acquit herself well in a three-hour essay exam on the subject of Stalinist Russia, El Cid, or the codification of social mores concomitant with the rise of the European nation state in the twelfth century, how to identify forty slides of Renaissance art and discuss an Edda.

  The girl in that room (it is shocking to realize this) has never had an orgasm, never touched herself, would not—if you suggested it—have known how. Which is not to say she is a virgin. She has in fact slept with a number of young men, fallen hard with two—her first high school boyfriend and a Brazilian she met as an exchange student four years ago in Porto Alegre, the capitol of Brazil’s southernmost state—both of whom proposed marriage in earnest, which she in earnest declined.

  She keeps a tally of these—proposals of marriage and boys she has bedded. By the time she stops counting at the age of twenty-five, she will be four for seven, which she will consider good odds. Though what they are good for she can’t imagine. Though she can’t recall the surnames of some of these boys she goes to bed with, she feels the count is important to keep. She relies on numbers, though they do not tell her much. On the whole, the territory of her body is foreign ground.

  Instead the girl I once was stretches out on the bed and sleeps and when she wakes hungry from bad dreams in the early evening in a foreign city in a foreign country in a foreign language she forages in the minibar so she will not have to leave this room.

  She squats by the little refrigerator, with the door open, letting the cool foggy air and the light spill out onto her face and chest, and balancing on the balls of her bare feet, squatting, she eats unfamiliar sweets indiscriminately. She unwraps from its crunchy thin cellophane something reddish and fleshy, tastes it with the tip of her tongue. It is grainy and tart, floral smelling (it will be weeks before she learns this is goiaba—guava paste). She tears open a foil package of cashews, pours them in her palm and covers her mouth with it.

  Later, she will worry that the hotel staff will notice all the candy she has eaten. This shame is eventually what will drive her out into the street a day from now. The fear, the shame, of being found out, discovered to be hungry.

  Amazon Snapshot #1

  I first heard the Amazon described in numbers. In volume of water. Acres of land. In measurable loss. The statistics on rates of species loss, of hectares of “virgin” forest converted to ranchland or silviculture or farmland or cut through by logging roads were a litany both impressive and appalling, frightening and compelling. It was the sort of clear moral challenge certain people cleave to in their twenties, or at least to which I cleaved. The Brazilian Amazon was a forest under siege. I wanted to defend it against ravishment.

  It’s easy now to question my motives. To wonder if my concern for the forest’s survival was merely misplaced fear for myself.

  My family was not an emotional lot. History, politics, science, and art were the only subjects worthy of emotion in our house; the personal we did not bother with, or rather, my mother, who was the standard bearer, our paragon, did not evince emotion, and so we tried to follow suit; she did not cry out when, by accident, she plunged a knitting needle clean through her palm; she spoke equanimously: “Call 911,” she said.

  We did not tell stories over dinner, tell jokes, laugh or cry; we debated politics and history and the relative merits of films; we discussed the lamentable loss of precision in the English language (irregardless substituted for irrespective or regardless of, comprised used to mean composed, impacted used as adjective or verb to refer to other than teeth).

  It would be easy to imagine that my feelings for the forest were merely displacement then, as I sometimes thought my mother’s increased interest in PBS nature shows were. After I, their youngest, left home for college I noticed that my mother watched more and more programs on extinction, and that when we spoke she often spoke of these. Perhaps it was simply an increase in public awareness of the issue in the 1980s, but I could not help but wonder—as my mother recited her litany of loss (the black rhino, the African elephant)—if this were not simply how she suffered loss, by proxy.

  Cruel Dilemmas of Dev
elopment

  It was a full forty-eight hours before I got up the nerve to leave my hotel room and even then I left with regret. I imagine that I was driven out by hunger, but loneliness may have overtaken me instead. I was alone after all, and knew no one for 5,000 miles in any direction. I did not know how to make an international call; I did not know the language well enough.

  More likely I was afraid the hotel staff were beginning to suspect me of eccentricity or worse. It was a small hotel with few guests at the time and I was conspicuous as a young woman alone will be. I imagined that my disinclination to leave my room was the subject of discussion at the front desk and among the maids who tried, unsuccessfully, to gain access to the room that morning in order to change the linens. The prospect that I might be considered odd, talked about by hotel staff, would have terrified, inspired rash action.

  Then again, maybe I was merely practical. My cash would not last long. I needed to find an apartment before I could call Pinheiro and open a bank account. I could not even read the want ads. I needed to learn Portuguese; I needed help; I needed to find some.

  Had I been able to learn the language from bad TV, I might have stayed in my hotel room for days, but I couldn’t understand even that. It was a babble of sounds and then laugh track, interrupted by the sonorous voice of the announcer proclaiming—as if he were heralding the Rapture—Rede Globo, the station’s identification.

  My Fodor’s included a section on language schools, which listed one on Sete de Setembro, where my hotel was. The school’s address was not much different from the hotel’s; it appeared to be right up the street. I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled out the pulpy phone directory from the bedside table and looked up the school in its pages.

  I needed in those days a clear destination, a reason to move, or I wouldn’t. I was paralyzed by my faith in utility. I wouldn’t get out of bed unless I had a place to go, something that needed doing. Truth was, I was afraid of making a wrong move, wanting the wrong thing, and so had given up on instinct and desire, weaned myself, and operated solely—or so I hoped—by reason.

  In college, my rational planning had been effective. I made lists and stuck to them: I kept lists of foods I could eat and list of those I couldn’t; lists of calories and class assignments and library book call numbers, distances swum or run, my weight, the titles of articles I wanted to read and the volume numbers for the scientific journals in which I could find them. I was accustomed to lectures, to bells that told me when a class began and ended, to gymnasium tracks with their measured distances, pools in 50-meter lengths, calorie counting, scales, grades, exams, IQs.

  I had to tell myself to shower, brush my teeth. To rise for the simple pleasure of rising into another day was beyond me then. So I welcomed the excuse the language school provided to get out.

  I flipped through the phone book, located the name and number of the school. I wrote the number on a pad of paper by the phone. Below this I scribbled down a phrase in Portuguese, writing out each word, erasing, rewriting, correcting the line, working out the sequence, repeating it a few times aloud (whispering so as not to risk being overheard by a passing bellhop or maid, who might think I was talking to myself, as I was), before risking the call.

  Then I dialed.

  I heard an angry buzz at the other end of the line. A burr of sound. It sounded like a busy signal and I considered hanging up.

  —Pronto, someone said on the other end of the line. Or maybe I misremember and she said, Diga, Speak.

  I would have been caught off guard, whatever she said. It is one of the disappointments of the international traveler that people in life do not speak as they do on language tapes. No one ever asks you, Where is the municipal pool? or Where is Robert? They do not answer the phone by saying, Allo, Como vai voce? They bark. They say, Diga, Speak. And you must, and I did.

  —Is it that this is the school for languages? I must have asked, in my most convoluted Portuguese. I mistook convolution for a sign of good breeding then, recognizing (though not consciously) that indirection is a luxury, an option only for those to whom need is remote, for whom there is no urgency, those who can afford to be misunderstood or whom others are obliged to understand.

  —Não falo ingles, she said, no doubt recognizing my accent.

  —Quero saber, I pressed on, a hora de fechar, por favor. What time do you close?

  She got the gist and told me, Dezasseis.

  —Repete, por favor?

  —Dez-e-seis, she said.

  I broke the word down: Ten and six. Sixteen. Four o’clock.

  —Obrigada, I said.

  —De nada, she drawled, It’s nothing. Her tone suggested that I, not it, was nothing.

  It was about two in the afternoon, when I set out for the English school, hoping to find someone there who could help me.

  The hotel clerk in his tan uniform behind the registration desk may have raised a hand and called out, gently, Senhorita, as I passed. He may have waved to me and said, Por favor, momento, Please, a minute with you. He would have been a small man, with dark hair and brown face, perhaps a pencil-thin mustache; he would, I am sure of it, have been tiny (Bahians were—their heads came to my shoulders, their bodies seemed child-sized, or rather I—among them—seemed a hypothalamic freak, a giantess).

  He would have been easy to miss, in any case. And I did. If the desk clerk waved to me, I did not note it. If he tried to signal to me to leave my key, to keep my valuables and documents in the hotel safe, if he tried, in short, to warn me, I missed it, as I so often missed the warning signs in those days, as we tend to miss such things when we feel ourselves insulated from consequences, remote from harm. When we do not feel we will suffer from our ignorance, it is easy—convenient even—to remain so.

  I pushed out through the double doors of the Praia do Sol into the brilliant too-brilliant light of a tropical Brazilian January day. I experienced a sudden flashbulb blindness and then the world around me began to take shape. A cobblestone sidewalk lay directly in front of me; beyond it lay the street; the hotel awning spread over my head. Along the sidewalk were palms, and flame trees, and oitizeiro. The broad two-lane boulevard of Avenida Sete de Setembro, the main thoroughfare through town that traced the coastline like a black magic marker from the city center to the beachside suburb of Barra, was clogged with cars.

  Across the street stood cement buildings of a modest height and boxy modern design that once had been called modular and thought a sign of progress. By the 1980s, when I saw them, they had a grim hard cast, sooty and worn, reminding passersby that the hope that prompted their construction had faded now, worn thin.

  The street reeked of diesel, city smells. I could not smell the sea, could not glimpse it from here. From where I stood, I wouldn’t have known it was there, that vastness, just the other side of the buildings I faced, just beyond those tired structures.

  In 1967, five years after I was born, Thomas Skidmore had written of Brazilians’ abiding faith that their nation would become a first-world power, a status they sought to secure in part through development of the Amazon. In 1980, shortly before I arrived in Bahia, Sylvia Ann Hewlett published Cruel Dilemmas of Development, describing the process by which the developing nations of Latin America, in the twentieth century, had ravaged their citizenry and land in order to industrialize. Hewlett argued that capital is a necessary prerequisite for industrialization. For the empires of Europe, industrializing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the necessary capital had come from wealth shipped back from colonies abroad. Raw materials, plundered treasures, and the slave trade made it possible to industrialize the capitals of Europe. For the United States, which lacked colonies to exploit, that necessary capital had come from the American frontier and the forced labor of slaves.

  For Latin American nations trying to industrialize in the late twentieth century, Hewlett claimed, the only way to capitalize was at the expense of their own people, to siphon off surplus from an already impoverished populac
e, and by borrowing from international banks. If the necessary surplus could not be stolen abroad, extracted from colonies or slaves, it would come from the citizens themselves. A nation ambitious of industrialization and development would sell whatever it had to sell—a forest, a generation, its people, the future.

  But I wasn’t thinking about Hewlett or history then. I was thinking about getting a snack, a late lunch. But first I would go to the language school, where I hoped to find someone who spoke enough English to help me arrange for a tutor in Portuguese, and maybe a newspaper, and, with any luck, a restaurant catering to tourists like me.

  Language Lessons

  As I walked north along Avenida Sete de Setembro toward the city center, the late afternoon breeze was hot in my face and stained with diesel exhaust. The wind was flecked with soot and grit that got under my contacts, so that I had to blink and then stop and blink some more. I could hear cars and trucks driving by in the street and the slap of palm fronds overhead.

  When I could see clearly again, I walked on, passing under the dangling leaves of the oitizeiros and the red floral streamers of the flamboyant, through the cool darkness pooling beneath them and into brightness again. Around me, people talked and called to one another, but I did not understand them.

  I should have known the language better. I had been to southern Brazil three years earlier as an exchange student on a brief summer program after high school. My interest in Brazil, which in time would give rise to my study of the Amazon, had been forged that first stay, where I’d lived with a fatherless, educated, middle-class family—a widowed mother, grandparents, daughter, son—in a three-bedroom flat in Porto Alegre, the capital city of Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande de Sul.

  The Simões family, with whom I’d stayed, were kind, devout, intellectual, dry, and though I’d liked them, I felt in their midst the loneliness of one who is among strangers intimate with one another. I discovered there the loneliness of those who do not know or like themselves. Solitude is tolerable only for those who enjoy their own company, which I did not yet. I was treated with the courtesy shown a guest; I was not beloved; I was not known. I did not know myself.