by Ellen Levy
Past the guardhouse, the road meandered back through the INPA campus. Here shade replaced glare: the sunlight was filtered by a canopy of trees, the road kaleidoscopic with shadows. Instead of sidewalks, wide paths of hexagonal tiles wound through the manicured, well-maintained grounds. Trees on either side of the walkway were identified by green nameplates that jutted up from the soil on steel spikes: Paullinia cupana (guarana); Hevea brasiliensis (rubber); Theobroma cacao (cacao). Every detail conspired to give an impression of order and control, of a forest on good terms with the people who moved through it.
Set back from the road, veiled by leaves, were clusters of single-story buildings. Oblong structures of red brick with large picture windows indistinguishable from one another save for the wooden sign nailed over each door, which identified some as classrooms, others as laboratories. Ichthyology. Ornithology. Morphology. One was a medical facility. Others were classrooms.
At the far end of the loop formed by the road, grouped in a semicircle like a wagon train, were the alojamentos where visiting researchers were housed. There were two wooden lodges, each comprising six apartments, each of these with its own patio deck and sunken living room.
I was assigned to an apartment with a Brazilian ichthyologist named Ayda. In her early forties, Ayda wore the uniform of a grad student: jeans, tennis shoes, a baggy sweatshirt. Her jowls sagged a bit and lines scored her pale face. Her silver hair was shorn in an androgynous cut. She offered me prune juice when I arrived, then sat on my bed to tell me about herself.
Ayda had come to INPA at the urging of a professor of hers, having begun her doctoral thesis on the suggestion of a friend who felt, after Ayda’s divorce, that she needed a project. Her two children had been living with her sister in another state for over a year. Her bookshelves in our shared apartment were stocked with pills and self-help books: The Power of the Subconscious, Psychosomatic Illness, a Brazilian version of Cosmo with articles on improving your sex life and weight-loss tips. She confided that she’d had the cellulite surgically removed from her thighs. At the time Ayda seemed to me a slightly ridiculous figure, but now I am amazed by the courage it must have taken for a middle-aged mother to leave her children to come save some part of a forest.
That afternoon, after Ayda left for the lab, I phoned Fearnside’s office to arrange a time to meet and discuss what I might do here. I expected to reach a secretary, but I got Fearnside himself. He suggested that I stop by that afternoon. He asked that I bring a copy of the research paper whose bibliography I had sent with my letter of inquiry, a bibliography that had evidently helped secure me a place here. I told him I’d be happy to.
Fearnside’s office was about a half mile’s walk from the main campus and my apartment, in a collection of brick buildings at the end of a dirt drive that branched off from the highway. I found him in an office on the second floor of a brick building of white offices and labs. He looked like Ichabod Crane, tall and gaunt and ghostly pale, his pallor enhanced by his dark hair and walrus-like mustache. He was stiff and formal, but not unfriendly.
He greeted me with a handshake, offered to have someone show me the labs after our talk. He said the labs were at my disposal, then asked what it was I planned to do here, what precisely my project would be.
It was a perfectly reasonable question, but it was a question for which I was perfectly unprepared: I had no answer.
When I’d determined to get myself to INPA, I hadn’t thought about what I’d do once there. I had imagined that I’d tag along on someone else’s project, that I’d fit in to someone else’s plans. I knew the outline of my desires—that I wanted to help save this forest through sound development—but, as in love, the specifics confounded me.
I told Fearnside I wasn’t sure yet.
After showing me around his office, Fearnside turned me over to an assistant who would show me the facilities. We shook hands and I gave Fearnside my paper. We agreed to meet the next day for lunch to discuss my work and what I might do there. As I left, I felt buoyant. The paper I had given him was one that I’d presented in a graduate-level seminar at Yale; the seminar professor—an exigent visiting prof from Columbia—had praised my work and kept a copy for his reference, proof (I thought) that I was well versed in the subject, one of them.
Amazon Snapshot #9
Graham Greene famously said that it’s hard to write happiness; joy lacks the compelling texture of sorrow, the distinction that Tolstoy rightly noted every unhappy family has. The same can be said, I suppose, of writing about a rain forest and nature, the world’s magnificent wild places—how is one to make its value visible to those who do not see it? Like Cordelia, it seems unwise to heave one’s heart into one’s mouth—to try to name or (worse yet) enumerate the things I love. To argue for nature’s value is to allow for argument against it. I want to say now of the rain forest, as I did of that sunset glimpsed in childhood, Beautiful, beautiful, but I fear the reader, like my childhood friend, may scoff, think, Jeez. It’s just trees.
When writers write of the Amazon, they often speak grandiloquently of its beauty, its marvelous diversity (the poet Pablo Neruda spoke of it as “the endless secret of fertility”), as if it were an Eden, reclaimed.
In truth, the forest smells like a bog, of moist decay, leaves, black tea, and dirt.
There are said to be 200 kinds of mosquitoes there.
There is a fish (the candirú) that swims up the human urethra, where it grows large, and lodges until its host dies of renal failure or hemorrhage.
There are, famously, piranha and poison dart frogs.
In truth, the rain forest is a tedious green.
The novelist Andrew Holleran, after a recent trip to the Amazon, said he found it uniform; I believe he said he found it dull. Green and dull.
The Amazon has been a story as much a place. Accounts of its exploration often conform to certain forms and tones: part documentary, part breathless adventure story, the stories emphasize physical hardship, natural wonders, the ruthless (or magnificent) “primitive” juxtaposed with the supposedly “civilized” writer. (Titles like Sebastian Snow’s My Amazon Adventure (1951) are unfortunately typical.) In his book The Rivers Amazon (1978), Alex Shoumatoff of the New York Times self-consciously harkens “back to the great nineteenth-century naturalist explorers of the Amazon, Spruce, Wallace, and Bates . . . Forging into unknown territory, these men were intrigued by everything.” Like many others, Shoumatoff compares the forest to a woman: “I reached down and ran my fingers along the midribs of a little plant called Mimosa pudica. The leaves folded up like a woman shrinking from someone’s advances” (italics mine).
What Africa was to a nineteenth-century imperial European imagination, the Amazon arguably has been to the United States’ and Brazil’s. We have seen in it what we’ve longed for and feared: a verdant frontier, an answer to overpopulation, the ultimate wilderness against which to test our civilized selves, a gold mine, a spiritual restorative, a pharmaceutical cornucopia, a threat to national sovereignty, a base for popular guerrilla insurgency, the promise of paradise, a paradise in the process of being lost.
By and large, the Amazon’s explorers have been men; travel narratives by men of many nations abound. If women have gone there, they’ve generally not gone on about it. (The once-famous Isabela Godin des Odonais—toast of French society in the 1770s for having been the first woman to descend the Amazon—did not record her story; her husband did.)
Accounts of Amazonian adventures inspired generations of would-be explorers. Mark Twain was “fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon” after reading Lieutenant William Hernadon’s Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon (1851–1852). When he found $50 in the streets of Cincinnati, he set off for New Orleans to find a boat to Pará (now the city of Belem) at the mouth of the Amazon; unable to find passage, his money running out, Twain met a river pilot whom he begged to teach him the Mississippi. John Muir, the American naturalist whose efforts would lead to the creation of the national park
system and conservation movement, was ambitious of going to the Amazon when a lung condition prevented him, so he went to Yosemite Valley instead.
It can be hard to see the forest for all the words.
Fast
When Fearnside and I met the next day for lunch I could tell that something was wrong. He seemed cooler toward me than he had the day before, and when he proposed that we drive into town for lunch, I had the feeling he’d rather not go at all.
I wondered, briefly, if it was my outift: I had dressed like a Bahiana, in a thin, sleeveless indigo blue shirt with a plunging neckline and jeans that hugged my hips, realizing only now—as I waited for Fearnside—that none of the few women at INPA dressed like this. (They wore T-shirts, sweatshirts, oversized khakis and jeans, practical clothes, the sort I’d worn at college.) I was aiming to look pretty by Bahian standards but those standards didn’t apply here.
Despite my nervousness, I was eager to lunch with Fearnside. Even meeting him was a thrill, this man whose articles I had read for years, who was fighting to save this forest, charting its loss so that its absence became a presence. He asked if I’d been in town yet, and when I said I hadn’t, he suggested that we go to a Chinese restaurant in the heart of Manaus, so we got in his car and drove there.
Fearnside was in his late thirties then, perhaps fifteen years older than I, but he seemed to me infinitely old; he was an ecologist whose work addressed, as one biographer put it, some of the most controversial issues in the Amazon region, from challenging official Brazilian government estimates of the greenhouse emissions from deforested tracts to revealing the true sources of deforestation.
The restaurant, as I recall, was on stilts, off a dry dusty street, a huge, square, two-story bamboo structure. The main dining room of the restaurant seemed dim after the brightness of the street, and empty of customers save for us. I felt the pleasant thrill of anticipation, both eager and afraid to hear Fearnside’s opinion of my paper.
We sat down at a table in the large, bamboo dining room where fans turned slowly overhead, and Fearnside ordered tea for two. Then he told me that he’d read my paper and that I had it wrong.
I don’t remember precisely what his criticisms were, but the gist of it was this: my paper was marred by errors, principal among which was a confusion of silviculture with cattle ranching. Silviculture, of course, is tree farming; cattle ranching involves cows. I knew the difference; I had written research papers on both, but in this—my longest and most comprehensive—I’d evidently conflated the stats somehow, writing as if they were the same thing. I didn’t know how it happened, but I could guess: I must have transposed the terms at some point during some late-night all-night revision and once confused kept going, misapplying statistics on the damage done by one to refer to damage done by the other.
I had come thousands of miles to learn that I had not been paying attention.
My face was hot and blushing. I wanted to explain that I knew the difference, that these errors were not errors of understanding but more like typos. But instead I nodded, mute, afraid that if I opened my mouth I might cry, as he cataloged in a tired and disappointed tone my mistakes and offered simplistic advice on each point as if I required such simplicity.
Perhaps memory makes matters worse: perhaps my humiliation magnifies the moment. Looking at the paper now, I see that the errors are actually few and minor, but I didn’t know that then. I scanned the menu with a lump in my throat.
When the waitress returned, I said, I’ll just have tea.
—You’re not going to eat? Fearnside asked.
—I’m not very hungry, I said.
—Eat something, he said. I don’t want to eat alone.
—Tea, I said, I’ll have green tea. That’s all I want, I lied.
In truth I wanted so much more. But if I could not have what I wanted—which was to be one of them, one of those who could make a difference here, to be like Barbara, who knew how to dress, how to speak, what to say, what she wanted and how to get it, who seemed unafraid to take her place, to take action and the consequences—then I would practice not wanting. My fast, my penance, at least, was mine.
Moths
That night, while Ayda was out working in the ichthyology lab, I stood in the doorway of our apartment. I leaned on the doorframe and watched the lights click on in the other apartments. I was lonely and discouraged after my meeting with Fearnside; I felt nervous, self-conscious as I often did then, as if straining to hear some call or tone just beyond my perception.
Moths drew near the light that emptied from our doorway onto the cement porch. They fluttered around my face, then battered past me into the apartment where they’d likely die, disoriented by the artificial light. Researchers came too. An affable and inebriated Nicaraguan was the first to arrive, coming over from a neighboring apartment to offer me a drink from his private stash of rum (a powerful brew he claimed to have smuggled past Customs). Another Nicaraguan showed up. Then a tall American, who gave his name as Ron and who had thin nervous lips under a rust-colored beard. Ron said he was a professor of zoology. He named the small private college where he taught. I nodded, smiled, sipped my rum. I’d never heard of it.
When Ayda returned with a friend from her lab, she served coffee. We stood around on the narrow strip of cement that served as a porch, talking and drinking, until a dark-haired Australian showed up. He had a black beard and moustache, aquamarine eyes; he entered our circle with the complacent self-regard of the handsome, the showy laconic indifference of the alpha male. He introduced himself to me as William Magnusson and said to call him Bill. I didn’t know if it was a general dislike for Bill or the lateness of the hour that ended our party, but soon after he arrived, the others left and so did he and we each of us went to our beds alone. I fell asleep listening to the papery sound of moths battering the windowpanes.
Mating Rituals
The following night Bill and Ron knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to join some of the other researchers for dinner in town. There was a fish restaurant they said was great, and some of the guys were going, did I want to come along?
I pocketed a few thousand cruzeiros—enough for bus fare and a drink, not enough for a meal so I wouldn’t blow my diet—and stepped out onto the sidewalk between the two men. They were old enough to be my professors, those guys, and that comforted me. I felt protected by their presence, grateful they had thought to invite me along.
As we walked through the campus toward the bus stop, I listened to them talk, keeping my mouth shut, hoping to appear intelligent, as if silence were somehow smart.
When blue-eyed Bill asked what my project would be here, I admitted that I didn’t have one.
—You could assist me at Tucuruí, red-haired Ron said.
Tucurui was a valley northwest of Manaus, where a hydroelectric plant was being constructed and a river dammed. Ron was heading up a team to rescue—for taxonomic purposes—fauna in the area to be flooded.
—It will mostly be catching bats, he said. He described the massive nets used, the painstaking process of extraction.
—I’d love to, I said. And I meant it.
I turned to red-haired Ron, grateful for the offer to assist him and amazed at my good luck. But he was not looking at me. He was looking at his feet. In the light of the street lamp we passed under, I could see that he was smiling a compressed, timid smile.
—Of course, he said, you realize that in order to get clearance to enter the site—as, uh, Bill here has pointed out to me—you’ll have to go as my wife. He looked at me for the first time. Or mistress, he added. He had a high laugh.
I might have suggested that I go as his daughter instead (I was young enough), had I had my wits about me. But at the time I didn’t have much wit. I was witless, straight man to every joke. I looked at handsome Bill, who stared blankly back at us, his face unreadable as a Rorschach.
—I’ll think about it, I said. Thanks.
I had known from our first evening on the p
orch that there was a bidding war of sorts going on over me among the researchers, most of whom were male. And I knew that Ron was a part of this, but I recall the sense too that he was trying to protect me, trying to offer an honorable escape. A way out of here, a way into the forest, a chance to be part of a team, not a pair or a ménage.
Even at the time, it was obvious to me that I was not the object of their attentions so much as another opportunity for the cheerful exercise of masculine rivalry, the territory they fought and bonded over. Theirs was a sporting noncommittal game to see who could bed me. The fight was the thing they cared for, not me.
On the bus into town, I sat across the aisle from Ron. Handsome Bill sat behind me. As we rode, Bill leaned forward across the back of my seat and proposed that I work with him on a project at INPA’s Reserve Duque, a 10,000 hectare ecological preserve about 35 kilometers from Manaus. I would collect tadpoles and fish to study which of the former were palatable to the latter and which were not, then speculate about why. It wasn’t nearly as exciting a prospect as gathering monkeys, bats, and parrots at Tucuruí, but I thanked him for the offer.
—You wouldn’t be a technician at Duque, Bill said. You’d be a researcher.
—Of course, I said, as if the distinction were clear to me. Beyond my window, the outskirts of Manaus ran like a watercolor.
—The difference between a technician and researcher, Bill continued, is courage. The courage to continue your work with uncertainty of success and the courage to succeed.
I’d read a little Ayn Rand by then and should have recognized in Bill’s rhetoric something of her fervor—a weird eco-survivalist hybrid that flourished at outposts like this, where geeky researchers could fancy themselves Crusoes, scientific cowboys, John-fucking-Wayne. But I didn’t realize that he was right: that what we need is courage.
