Amazons

by Ellen Levy

  For a moment Nel stood quietly watching the car go. Then we walked into the praça. She was quiet for what seemed a long time.

  —I have to apologize to you, Elena, she said. I thought she was going to say something about our bickering, her criticisms of me, but she did not. I lied to you.

  —About what?

  —There wasn’t an abortion, she said.

  It seemed a strange thing to invent. I waited for her to say more.

  —Valeria and I were lovers, she said. Do you understand? Here they call them sapatonas, big shoes. Lesbians. Understand?

  I nodded.

  —My father found out. He threatened to cut me off if I didn’t move out. I refused.

  —What happened with you and Valeria?

  She shrugged.

  —It didn’t work out. I couldn’t afford to stay after a while. When I met Isa, I moved into the boarding house.

  Though I’d never met a lesbian before as far as I knew, it did not surprise me to learn this. It was as if Nel were telling me something I’d known all along; all along this possibility had been there with us. I was impressed that she’d had the courage to love her friend, another woman. How, I wondered, had it begun between them? Who had initiated it? How did it start? Were people born knowing who to love?

  The irony did not strike me then; only later would it occur to me that Nel had confessed to an abortion rather than tell the truth about love. Love was more difficult to admit to than loss.

  But perhaps I misremember this.

  Perhaps I only want love to be the secret that Nelci finally revealed. I know, for certain, that we met Valeria in a praça in those last days together. I know that Nel addressed her in a formal manner, curt, the way one is sometimes with an ex. I know it was Valeria we met that day and that Nel was affected by the meeting.

  But my mother, when I speak of Nelci now, recalls another story. She says that I told her then that Nel was estranged from her father because he’d taken a mistress of Nelci’s age. She recalls that Nel was outraged, protective of her mother, maybe jealous.

  We each have a different story. And our stories are telling, whether or not they tell the truth. My mother (who was betrayed by my father) recalls a mother betrayed. I (who will fall in love with a woman at twenty-five) recall a secret Sapphic love affair.

  Our stories differ but they have this in common: in both my mother’s memory and mine, love’s a dirty secret, a thing we try to hide.

  In June, people began to leave. Barbara returned to the United States to complete a PhD at Yale. Rogeirio departed for Texas. Linda went, as did her friend Michael. In less than a month, I would leave for the Amazon at last.

  My days were occupied with farewell parties and classes at the cooking school. After Rogeirio left for the States, I became enamored of the handsome young man at the cooking school, the one who resembled the Giotto madonna. Yvette made fun of me for mooning over him. She reminded me that he was married. She said that he was just a pretty face. But I wanted that beauty he had, as if his calm radiance might be transferred to me by touch.

  When, eventually, we went to bed together, I did not think about his wife. As we made love, I thought only of his face, beautiful as a madonna’s, over mine. The color of cacao. At his cheekbones, the skin was brighter, almost gold. He had a face you wanted to touch, a smooth carved head. Seemingly permanent by virtue of its beauty. I did not take pleasure in this. I did not think about his wife. I failed to make the connection between us.

  Help

  Nel was getting up later and later. She packed and unpacked her plastic bag. Napped in the afternoon on the mattress. Read Manchete or Veja if she could borrow them from Zé. She left the apartment only rarely. When I come home from shopping, she woke.

  —I’m sorry to be sleeping on your bed, Elena, she said, as if apology were necessary. She drew herself up to rest an elbow on the giant yellow pillow I’d sewn. I don’t sleep too well on the floor, she said. It’s so hard. And you weren’t here . . .

  —Don’t worry about it, I said, but I knew my voice sounded annoyed. Lately, we had had this conversation too often. At other times I had said, You’re welcome to sleep there, Nel. I have the hammock, but I was tired of repeating myself.

  Her apology, I suspected, was an accusation. Her apology let me know that I had offered help but hadn’t helped her. Perhaps it was because I knew this was true that I was angry.

  I brushed through the room to the kitchen. I set the bag on the stove top, next to a pot of something thickened and unidentifiable.

  I glanced into the pot.

  —You can try it, Nel said, stroking her stomach as she stood.

  —What is it? I asked, suspicious.

  —It’s farofa with salt and a little oil. It doesn’t have much flavor, but it’s filling and it’s cheap. I bought two pounds of farofa today for mil cruzeiros (50 cents). Not bad, eh? She dabbed a finger in the congealed paste and popped it in her mouth.

  —Nel, I said, we have food. I opened the fridge. Look.

  She leaned a hand on the red stove corner but looked at the floor, not to the fridge. She raised one shoulder in a tense shrug.

  —I know, Elena, but I don’t like to eat that. That’s your food. I need to have food of my own. I don’t like always taking from you.

  She shook her head, slowly, from side to side.

  —Besides, she said, looking up at me, I need my own money. I went out with Isa on Saturday to the port and I couldn’t even afford a suco.

  Nel’s face was taut, and I thought she might cry, but her voice was strong as ever.

  She walked into the living room, leaving me to unload my sack of groceries.

  —It’s horrible, she said. She spread her arms out like braces against the windowsill and leaned out over the withered flower box. The sound of a Rede Globo announcer came from the neighboring apartment, and from the street came the screams of monkeys in the trees.

  I set a bunch of bananas on top of the fridge and took a couple of water crackers from the box I’d just bought. I went into the living room and sat on the edge of the mattress to eat my cracker.

  —Have some, I said, holding out a cracker to her. I got the kind you like. Nel glanced at me, but shook her head before turning away. She rested her forearms on the windowsill, leaning farther out.

  —Maybe we could work something out, I said.

  —Like what, she said, turning to face me.

  —I don’t know. I mean, I could pay you to clean up the apartment. I don’t know how much, but it’d be something.

  I could see her jaw working, as if she were chewing on the thought, her chin jutting out as it did when she was thinking hard. I watched Nel for a moment then I read the name printed on the pale toasted cracker. I liked its neat holes, its toasted blisters.

  After a while, Nel began to nod, slowly.

  —What would you want done, Elena? she asked, almost whispering.

  —I don’t know, I shrugged. It’s just an idea.

  Something had gone wrong, I knew, but I didn’t know what.

  —I could scrub the bathroom, Nel said. It’s disgusting. And polish the stove and fridge. Sweep the kitchen.

  I found it hard to swallow the wad of cracker in my mouth. I got up to get some water to wash it down. I had a sudden fear of choking.

  —I’ll do it, Nel said.

  When I turned to face her, her eyes were dark, hard with something I did not want to name.

  As the date of my departure approached, we could hardly stand to be in the apartment together. Its single room shrank precipitously with our mutual disenchantment. We passed through it with elaborate unspoken choreography. Each morning Nel emerged from the bathroom at a later hour—her toilette taking longer each day, prompting me to speculate that she lingered there expressly to annoy me, waiting for me to ask her to come out so that she could once more, patiently submit to my outrages, my selfishness.

  I refused to knock. Instead, I lay each morning in the hammo
ck tightening my buttocks to stay the urging of my bladder until after 40 minutes or so she appeared and—without glancing at me (for my part, I posed as if absorbed in a magazine)—padded to the kitchen to prepare her coffee. Filaments of tension wrapped us round so that each turn of a page, each cough registered like the pressure of a fly on a web.

  • • •

  By the time I left for the Amazon, Nel and I were weary of sharing quarters. Nel rarely left the apartment and we hardly spoke except to exchange criticisms. She complained that I was spendthrift and that I left my underwear on the bathroom floor after I showered. She criticized my familiarity with our laundress, whom Nelci said should not be encouraged. I complained of Nelci’s constant presence, of her lethargy and dependence. She gossiped to our neighbors, and began to treat me with the disdain the needy lavish on those they need.

  I was glad to leave the apartment when I left, but I wanted Nel to pay the rent if she wanted to remain there. I told myself that I could not afford to pay for my housing in Manaus and maintain the apartment for Nelci in Salvador. My fellowship was ample, but it would not easily cover two residences. I decided I had to give up the apartment we shared. Nelci would have to fend for herself, return to the boarding house, get a job. Had I economized, I could have kept the two apartments, supported Nelci, but I was not feeling generous by then. But to my surprise, Nelci said she would stay on and pay the rent on the apartment. So I left it to her, in her care.

  A few days before I departed for Manaus, I brought the monkey to the house of the man beautiful as a madonna. It occurred to me to be embarrassed meeting his wife, but this was fleeting. Mostly I was grateful, deeply grateful that he would take this creature I could not care for and nurse it back to health. The monkey crawled onto his shoulder and perched there, as if it has found its place.

  —Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of him.

  —He likes yogurt, I said.

  —Yogurt? He laughed.

  —Yeah, and he’s not big on fruit.

  —Okay, he said. Yogurt it is.

  We shook hands and then kissed each other on the cheek, three times, and I left, not wanting anyone to see—as if caring were a kind of weakness—that I was crying.

  * * *

  2. In 2007, the Brazilian government freed more than 1,000 workers from enslavement on a sugar-cane plantation, the largest anti-slavery raid in Brazil’s modern history.

  PART III

  AMAZONS

  The Amazon

  Some halfway up the Amazon River in the tropical moist forests of the Brazilian Amazon is the capitol city of Manaus. It has been more than twenty years since I lived there, and a great deal has changed, but then as now Manaus was a kind of urban mirage. A construct of myth as much as of stone, a fantasy of a city. An imperial dream. Manaus was as close to a mirage as a city could be, because it was a projection of urbanity as much as an embodiment of it. Many of its most prominent buildings had been built in the cities of Europe and then dismantled, brick by brick, to be brought whole from England or France. The fish market beside the river was designed by Eiffel; the customs house was English, each yellow sandstone block numbered so it might be disassembled to be reassembled here.

  When I think of the Amazon now, what I recall is not the forest or the cry of howler monkeys, not the figures I once knew by heart nor the hours spent mapping loss at a small desk in the corner of an office on the grounds of the National Institute of Amazonian Research; I recall strange disconnected images. A bus ride through back streets of the city, and how—stopped for a moment in traffic—I glanced up and met the eyes of a man whose face had been ravaged by leprosy or leishmaniasis, a gape where his nose should have been. How I watched a mob of workers on the grounds of the National Institute of Amazonian Research slowly beat to death with sticks the dazzled figure of a three-toed sloth because its slow and unhurried movements had amused or annoyed them. I recall conversations with scientists from Australia, England, the U.S., who spoke over beers and plates of fish about the discoveries they had made of species, few of which were expected to last the decade, exciting nevertheless in a technical and professional way. An American man who invited me to join his team in catching bats in a valley that was to be flooded by a new dam, the construction of which had been funded by banks from our country. A drawer full of taxidermied birds.

  I recall how little it seemed any of us could do to prevent this loss.

  I arrived in Belem at the mouth of the Amazon River at dawn on Friday the thirteenth of July, having traveled thirty-six hours by bus from Salvador. There were only two viable ways to get to Manaus in those days: boat or plane. I had originally planned to go by boat, considering it a romantic mode of travel. I’d read in Fodor’s that one might catch a ride on a supply steamer in the waterfront at Belem and travel cheaply the 930 miles upriver to Manaus that way. Many of the local peasants—caboclos—traveled like this. So, for that matter, did all the livestock and much of the dry goods destined for Manaus.

  In Salvador, where I’d lived for the last six months, I’d met a couple from Indiana who’d made the trip by boat. During the day, they’d told me, you squeezed on deck and squinted at the green thread of shoreline in the distance and prayed for a breeze. At night, you went below with the cargo and strung your hammock between beams. With hardly any space between the hammocks, you slept with your arms tight to your sides, swaying into your neighbor with each rock of the boat, the smell of chickens and pigs and humans constant through the long night. I found the prospect of the five-day trip romantic; it sounded wonderful.

  But in July, as I prepared to leave Salvador for the Amazon, several supply steamers sank on their way from Belem to Manaus, overloaded with cargo and passengers, and I bought a plane ticket.

  What I remember of Belem is the airport: a cement, two-story terminal with a runway edged by billows of forest, dense as cumulus clouds, a seemingly impenetrable green. On the airport’s upper terrace, I stood leaning on a railing, staring out across the runway where a few small planes were parked. American pop music from the 1970s came over a loudspeaker in another part of the building.

  After all I had imagined, the Amazon was disappointing. Smaller. Shorter. Just a forest, after all, at the edge of a runway.

  I had not had breakfast. I had not slept. I had approximately ten hours before my flight. So I went downstairs to the snack bar and bought a sweet roll, doughy and sticky (literally a sweetened roll), and came back upstairs to wait. I returned to the railing that overlooked the runway and chewed. To my left and right were row on row of plastic chairs. In the distance, the Bee Gees sang. Tired of chewing, I dropped my roll onto the runway. A young boy, maybe five or six, in a tattered shirt and shorts ran out and grabbed it and stuffed it inside his shirt. He looked up at me and I looked down at him and then he casually walked away.

  By evening, the terminal that had been empty hours before was filled with the unsteady glow of fluorescent lights and reverberant with voices. I went to the café where I’d spent a solitary hour that morning and found the place mobbed with travelers.

  I bought a bottle of water at the concession, made my way to an empty table in the back, and sat down to wait for my flight. I pulled out my book, a novel by Doris Lessing as I recall (which, as I recall, I never finished), but I couldn’t get my eyes to focus; I sat staring at the black lines trying to look absorbed.

  When a hand came to rest on the chair next to me, I looked up.

  —May we join you?

  The man who asked was handsome, well-dressed, middle-aged. He had a carefully trimmed moustache and dark hair flecked with silver; his face was deeply tanned. Beside him stood a square-jawed, Teutonic guy of perhaps thirty; blond and blocky, he held a shopping bag and a small wicker case. I closed my book.

  The men were part of a veterinary congress from Curitiba, São Paulo, which had been touring the Amazon to get a feel for the region’s fauna. The older man told me about what he called the civilized south and urged me to visit
him there. He pressed a business card into my hand. I could stay at his ranch, he said, where he raised thoroughbred horses and cows.

  —Have you ever tasted fresh milk, still warm from the udder? he asked.

  The younger man sat back in his chair and watched me over the rim of his drink. I was leaning forward onto the table, my arms folded before me. I could feel his eyes move over my neck, my shoulders, my brown arms. He clicked his tongue, and I looked up. He smiled.

  —Come here, the blond said. He reached out and took my hand. I want to show you something.

  There was an excitement in his eyes that made me hesitate, but the older man nodded at me and frowned. I got up and went to stand by the blond.

  —Look in the bag, he said. I leaned over the bag and looked in.

  —Oh, it’s great, I said.

  —Shhh. He held a finger to his lips. It’s our secret.

  —May I touch it? I asked.

  He winked and nodded.

  The contraband three-toed sloth lay on its back in the shopping bag, grinning—so it seemed—oblivious of any malice in the world. I knelt down and stroked its belly.

  —What’s in that one? I asked, glancing at the wicker case.

  —Parrot, he winked.

  Now, of course, I wonder why I didn’t do something. Why I played along. I might have alerted someone; I might have had the contraband creatures confiscated and freed. I might have saved their lives. No doubt they didn’t last long in São Paulo, on the pampas, 3,000 miles from their forest home. But I didn’t. I was in on it, after all. I was more afraid of the poor opinion of strangers than of what might be lost. I played along, still believing then that if I went along with the plans of men like these—knowledgeable, reasonable, professional men—that I would be, we would all of us be, all right.

  INPA

  Two guards were posted at the entrance to the National Institute of Amazonian Research when my cab pulled up the next morning. The guards leaned against the guardhouse, trying—it appeared—to stay out of the dusty morning glare. They wore khaki uniforms; pistols hung in holsters at their hips. They watched a truck thunder past. Even this early in the day, curtains of heat rose from the asphalt. On the other side of the two-lane highway, a trampled patch of brown grass served as a bus stop. The guards called out flirtatiously to two young women who waited there. The girls ignored them. The guards laughed, waved us through.