Amazons

by Ellen Levy

  Amazon Snapshot #6

  I was a freshman in college when I first took an interest in the disappearing Amazon. I had enrolled in a seminar on U.S.-Latin American history, taught by Professor Gerald Cardoso, a handsome, affable man with the face of a Portuguese explorer. Cardoso had a massive and heroic head, a pale face with a full, black, silky beard, moustache and lustrous hair; he looked like something out of another century, straight off a ship from the age of exploration; his head belonged on a coin, in a history book or on a box of cigars.

  Cardoso had been educated in Rio by Jesuits, who were—he led us to believe—a tough bunch, intellectually rigorous and stingy with their communion wine, which he, as an altar boy, had nonetheless nipped on the side. He had a charming habit, after his Jesuitical tutors I supposed, of pitting his students against history in a sporting debate of fact. Was the Panama Canal an infringement of sovereignty? Did the United States have a Manifest Destiny? Was the overthrow of Arbenz justified? The installation of Somoza? The military occupation of Haiti in 1913? Did the closing of the frontier destroy democracy in America? Had Kennedy?

  Cardoso made history seem like a puzzle we could solve, a riddle whose answer one could discern with effort. The world—which had seemed to me in childhood to be a jumble of baffling sensation—began, marvelously, to make sense. The various habits and conventions that had constituted the better part of my personality until then seemed at last to cohere into some more sincere and significant form in the presence of concentrated effort, a consuming interest to know more. Cardoso was the most demanding professor I had in all my years of schooling, and although in my senior year at Yale we would, in another seminar, excoriate his only book as romantic in its view of Brazilian race relations, it was with him that I learned to learn. (And it was he who suggested that I apply for the fellowship that would eventually take me to the rain forest.)

  When I think back now on that freshman year of college, I recall days defined by blue. The cold aquamarine of the pool I swam in each morning, the midnight blue of the sky outside the library windows where I studied each night. The almost erotic pleasure in the pursuit of understanding. When an answer—the answer—seemed within reach.

  I had read very little growing up, and I was experiencing that autumn and winter the first thrill of literary absorption, discovering a world inside my head to which I could be transported by words. I was not among the ranks of waif-like girls in black or flowing paisleys in thrall to Woolf, Duras, or Plath who populated college campuses in those years (alongside boys with John Lennon glasses and a cultivated pallor who boasted allegiance to Nietzsche, Derrida, DeMan, or Barthes). At eighteen, I was captivated by reports in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and by the Committee on Research Priorities in Tropical Biology of the National Research Council, the Tenth Annual Report of the Council on Environmental Quality. I read these with the fervor with which others (I imagined) approached the works of Austen and Shakespeare. These reports told a tale every bit as compelling as that of any French novel or Greek tragedy, in which a heroine is ruined by an unworthy suitor, a hero robbed of his birthright by unscrupulous foes, false friends, or vengeful gods.

  I remember three things clearly from that first winter in New England:

  First, the vivid image of a human body torn in half, the delicate stem of the spine rising from still-belted pants like some strange flower stalk, cast off by a dusty roadside in an unnamed suburb of Nicaragua circa 1975, when the American-backed Somoza dictatorship still ruled and his sadistic guard left these bodies as a warning to locals, as we sat at a seminar table in soft upholstered chairs, snow falling gently outside the windows onto green pines;

  Second, a few lunches with Cardoso, though there could only have been one or two all term. Still they mattered to me, proof that I might be taken seriously, further evidence of erudition’s pleasures;

  Third, the weighty pleasure of library research late into the night as I sought clues to unravel the Gordian knot that was history, seeking out among the stacks obscure journal articles and legal precedents that I took pleasure in citing, mistakenly imagining it was only knowledge we lacked.

  Amazons

  Stuck in Salvador, I planned how I would get to the Amazon: I’d attend the Federal University in Bahia for the autumn term that would begin in a few weeks’ time, then apply for an internship at INPA for the winter break in June. If all went well, I’d stay on there. I had a letter of recommendation from a man at the Bronx Botanical Garden and planned to write to INPA to inquire about a position.

  Each day I planned to write the letter to INPA, but each day, somehow, I didn’t. Days passed, and still I did not write it. Probably I was afraid of rejection, but I think now that I was equally afraid of acceptance, of having to leave behind the perfect abstract dream of the forest I’d read about—like the dream of romantic love—and step into the messy actual, to see both the forest and the trees.

  Instead, while I waited for the university to begin, my formless blue days took shape around a few familiar figures—Nelci, Isa, Barbara—and the routines I developed to navigate from hour to hour.

  Each morning, from my apartment, I would walk to the corner pharmacy to weigh myself. My weight, like the empty blue sky, was all but invariable. Still I liked the chalky smell of the pharmacy, the glass windows, the ritual; I liked having someplace to go each morning while I waited for school to begin, while I waited to get up the nerve to request an internship in Manaus.

  Like a lot of young women, I was mapping the territory of the body, monitoring its forms, charting the landscape, laying claim to the vast tracts of it—skin and muscle and fat and hair—through diet, weight, relentless measurement. I liked the sherbet green scale. Its blank round face. The way the needle swung round like a clock hand only to shimmy to a stop at 61, 60, at 59 kilos.

  The daily calculation of loss was oddly comforting.

  Boa Gente

  It was largely from loneliness that I agreed to study capoeira when Barbara invited me to take classes with her at a school in town. I was flattered when she phoned one afternoon to ask me to join her.

  Capoeira, she explained, is a Bahian martial art; part dance, part fight, it was first practiced by West Africans who—brought to Brazil as slaves and forbidden to fight—took to disguising their martial training as dance. It was only when their Portuguese captors—at war with Spanish colonial neighbors in Paraguay—sent slaves to the front line to meet the advancing troops and draw off fire that capoeira was revealed to be martial and lethal. Folklore has it that the capoeiristas won that battle, beating back the armed Spaniards with only their feet as weapons.

  Capoeira is an art of inversion in many ways. Because it was developed by slaves whose hands were shackled, because it had to be disguised as a dance, capoeira is fought with the feet alone. Unlike such martial arts as karate and aikido, capoeira uses the hands only ornamentally (to circle the body in a ginga) and for balance (as when holding up the body in a cartwheel). The feet are everything, and if you joga bem—play well—if you are a real capoeirista, your heels are often over your head.

  The secret of capoeira is not balance, as you might think, but the ability to go out of balance and regain it.

  The capoeira school bordered a large, public park that lay halfway between Barra and the city center. The park—named Campo Grande—was the centerpiece of an older elegant neighborhood, once fashionable. At its edges, one could still see mansions of marble and limestone with the ornate facades typical of the turn of the last century tucked in among the more modern apartment buildings, low and squat with balconies suggesting modest elegance. In the course of the twentieth century, the park had become, it appeared, less a destination than a stopover, a weigh station between other points. Now it served mostly as a site for various bus stops for the crowds heading into or out of the center, traveling to or from outlying neighborhoods. In the park, kids played and businessmen sat on benches. Everyone on their way somewhere else.

&nbs
p; We had trouble finding the school. But finally we did. At the far end of the praça, facing the park, it was unprepossessing, a single-story building constructed of cinder block wedged between two others. The side facing the park was open to the street, the roof supported by pillars. The floor was gray cement, the interior walls white. This was Mestre Boa Gente’s capoeira school, where each Saturday morning in the coming ten weeks I would arrive early to embarrass myself.

  Mestre Boa Gente was a small and handsome man, his skin dark as a coffee bean; that first day of class, he was dressed in what I would learn was the uniform of the school—white drawstring pants and white T-shirt on which was printed the school logo (a pair of figures dancing). His body was muscular. Even his face was: he had interesting folds around his mouth from smiling, furrows in his brow. It was impossible to guess his age. His hair was cropped short, close to the head. He had the radiance of the religious, the light saints are said to have and movie stars do. Even with my limited command of Portuguese, I understood that his name meant Master Good Guys. Despite his martial gravity, the name seemed apt.

  Everything about Boa Gente suggested compression, as if a much larger man had been distilled into this small figure. His long, lithe muscles bulged; he seemed to glow. He made me think of coal turned to diamonds, of the density and gravitational pull of black holes. Or rather, he did not make me think of any of these things then, but I do now, recalling him. That was the sort of presence he had as he stood before us that first Saturday morning in February, dressed in his white cotton drawstring pants and the white shirt printed with the logo of the school. He seemed denser than the rest of us, more solid than we; beside him, before him, arrayed around the cool cement floor, waiting for his instructions, we seemed insubstantial as clouds.

  Barbara had not told me that she was a dancer when she proposed I sign up for capoeira class with her. She made it sound anthropological, an outing into Bahian pop culture. To study capoeira in Salvador, she said, would be akin to studying break dancing in Harlem (breakdancing had just come into vogue in 1984). It was a main line to the culture. The A train.

  I had no idea that she could dance, that she had in fact trained as a ballet dancer (though perhaps this was only as a child). As soon as I saw her in class, as soon as anyone did, it was obvious. She was a natural.

  From a raised platform at the front of the long training room, Mestre Boa Gente explained each pose to us, then took us through them, calling out moves we were to execute. He strolled among us. I could hear Boa Gente admiring others’ postures, complimenting their improvement from the year before. I could hear him—indeed, I listened for him to—praise Barbara.

  When Barbara gingaed—the opening moves of capoeira in which one brings the right arm around in front of the body while the right foot drops back, then reverses this, much as a speed skater moves, the torso leaned low to the ground, as close to parallel as possible—it was clear she would surpass me. Had.

  Barbara’s body seemed made for the long graceful arcs that are the constituent elements of capoeira. When she drew her left arm around in front of her, dropping her left foot back—continuing to ginga—she seemed to be gathering water, drawing it to her. When Boa Gente called out meia lua—half moon—Barbara pivoted on her right foot, her torso angled back as if she were reclining on her right side in midair; she raised her left leg, knee bent, foot forward, and then extended her foot, so that she planted a blow to the air in front of her. For a moment she stood there, balanced on a single long leg like an egret or a crane, before drawing her raised foot through a clean arc to the floor.

  By contrast, I was a clod. My hamstrings tight, I could not raise my leg into an elegant arc, could not draw it up to eye level to strike an opponent’s head with a graceful meia lua, tracing a half moon’s curve from midair to floor. My pivot was more like a beleaguered hop. My arc more of a teetering, an effort to keep my balance as I raised a leg into the air, my torso stretched in the opposite direction.

  I had been athletic only once in my life and then fleetingly as a swimmer my first two years of college. With an anorectic’s urgent fervor, I swam one to two miles before breakfast each day of my freshman and sophomore years, after which I ate a bowl of bran cereal with skim milk and a cup of hot lemon water with saccharine. Mine was a brief solitary acquaintance with the bodied, a private fluidity. In public—playing childhood b-ball games or in high school gym, running a cross-country meet, playing volleyball or the dread softball game—I was, indubitably, a clod.

  When Boa Gente reached me, he grabbed my left leg, mid-arc, in one powerful hand and held it. He raised my outstretched leg higher, forcing me to lean back farther. He raised it, raised it. He watched my face. He did not smile. My hamstrings ached; the seams of my drawstring pants strained, then Boa Gente slowly guided my foot through the proper arc before bringing it to the floor.

  By the end of class, I was exhausted and demoralized and relieved it was over. I was accustomed to doing well in classrooms; I had forgotten about gym class. All I could hope for was to get home, take a shower, get a cool suco to drink. I tried to calculate calories burned in the hour-and-a-half class, calculation my only source of consolation, the only pleasure I could take in our morning’s labors.

  I was headed for the doorway where we’d left our shoes when Boa Gente called out from the platform at the far end of the room for us to come over for a moment: he had an announcement to make. The class gathered, sweating, breathing hard, around the platform where Boa Gente stood.

  —We have several new students to welcome, he said. He named two girls and spoke of their past training. Then he introduced a tall, lanky blond, a Paulista. Then he said that two North Americans had come to train here and asked us to give our names.

  —I’m Barbara, Barbara said in her perfect Portuguese.

  —Elena, I said, as if it were now my name.

  Chequinho

  I first met Chequinho on my way home from capoeira that day. I was dressed in the cotton sweatpants and T-shirt still wet with perspiration from the morning’s training. Barbara may have stayed after class that first day or perhaps we took the same bus home and she got off earlier, at Avenida Kennedy, where she lived. I don’t recall how it was that I ended up alone in the street that day, but I was alone, under the bright February sky, sweaty and ridiculous and feeling immense in my thin cotton drawstring pants and T-shirt (an outfit that Barbara managed to make flattering with her tiny waist and slender flexible frame. That first day of class, she had accented her outfit with a red bandana that she tied across her brow. She looked like a bandit, like a street kid, tough and smart. I looked like a blanc mange, a mobile marshmallow).

  I was walking up Avenida Princessa Isabella, halfway to the Rua João Pondé where my apartment was, when I saw him coming toward me on the other side of the street. A small and compact man, tanned and muscular, attractive in an edgy way that I liked then (like those tough boys I dated in high school, playground smokers who came to physics class high on coke or pot but passed their classes anyway). He was wiry, street tough, handsome in the way that cigarette ads promoted then—a slight stubble at his cheek, dark eyes, an angular jaw, tanned with muscular arms. He smiled at me and I reflexively smiled back and thought, as I did, that his was an appreciative glance.

  I was delighted to be subject to even this casual flirtation, to have someone pay attention to me after the hideous class where the only attention I drew was Boa Gente’s evident dismay. In the misguided social calculus of adolescent girls, I equated being liked (especially by boys or men) with being worthy. The man crossed the street to me and asked if I lived around here. I hesitated, said, Not far. He asked if I knew where a certain address was, and I said, apologizing, that I didn’t know it.

  —You’re not from around here, he said. It was not a question.

  —No. It was obvious from my accent I supposed.

  —You practice capoeira? he asked (the name of the school was on my shirt).

  —I’m tr
ying to learn.

  —You’re very beautiful, he said.

  —Hardly, I laughed, gesturing to my outfit, my T-shirt stained with sweat, the ill-fitting sweat pants.

  —I’m Chequinho, he said.

  —Elena, I said. As I started up the street toward my apartment, away from the port he was headed for, I felt cheerful and yelled back to him, Chau, and he said, Chau, Boneca. Bye, Doll. And both of us laughed at that.

  Amazon Snapshot #7

  We have long dreamed of Amazons.

  Apollonius of Rhodes, the third-century BC poet, described them as warrior women; the Greek dramatist Aeschylus called them “the warring Amazons, men-haters.” According to Ovid they were the daughters of the peace-loving nymph Harmony and Ares, god of war, a nation of female warriors who lived in Scythia near the Black Sea in what is now the Ukraine.

  Some say the Amazons cut off their right breast to aid them in throwing the javelin (keeping the left to nurse their children); others say that they removed the hand or leg of sons. Some say they worshipped Artemis, goddess of the moon. Statues and pictures of the Amazons attest to their place in human imagination, but little is written of them. “Familiar though they are to us,” Edith Hamilton writes, “there are few stories about them.”

  The earliest accounts claim that the Amazons of Libya waged war on Atlantis. They are said to have defended Troy against the Greeks under their queen Penthesilea. Achilles is said to have fought them there and to have fallen in love with their leader after having killed her. Still others say that the Amazons were simply warrior women who took power in Themiscyra and assigned domestic duties to men. Their decline began with the expeditions to their land of Heracles and Theseus.