by Ellen Levy
As she rubbed alcohol on my arm, she said, You’re a very lucky young woman, you know. You could have died out there. An allergy to sulfa can be fatal. Next time, it probably will be.
I nodded and braced myself for necessary pain.
• • •
On the bus I took to town the following day, people stepped away from me, clearing a path as if I were contagious. I could not explain that I was not really ill: that my symptoms were merely a reaction to a drug that had built up in my blood, that my effort to protect myself had become the thing I needed protection from, the thing I needed to fear.
The bus route was familiar now. I had come this way several times since Fearnside first took me into the city more than a week ago; I had come on my usual errand, in search of diuretics and laxative teas. These errands that gave my days a semblance of purpose.
INPA was on the outskirts of town, a twenty-minute bus ride from the city center. On the way to town, the bus crossed a bridge. At the far end of the bridge was the governor’s palace: a baroque confection in yellow with pillars at the entrance, ornamental urns, sculpted shrubs. Below the bridge, on either side of the river, were the makeshift houses of the poor—os favelados—which rose on stilts along the river bank. The houses were small and boxy, built of corrugated tin and weathered planks. One shack had a sign nailed to its side, facing the bridge: No Dumping. It struck me as a surprisingly dignified declaration, though it should not have come as a surprise; it is only natural to protect the place you live. It is unreasonable, unnatural, not to.
Amazon Snapshot #10
Jews, I’ve recently learned, are not supposed to care about nature. In an article published in Tikkun magazine a few years back, Professor Andrew Furman argues that Jews have traditionally been antagonistic toward the natural world. (There are, he notes, few Yiddish terms for specific varieties of birds, flowers, trees.) While American literature as a whole has been marked by a celebration of wilderness, Jewish American writers have largely written “city scriptures,” Furman claims; “Jewish American writers” he says, “. . . have, by and large, created a literature that either ignores, misrepresents, or . . . vilifies the natural world.”
This emphasis on text over terrain—he maintains—reflects the Mitnagged tradition, Jewish rationalism that reached its peak in eighteenth-century Lithuania and Russia and that emphasized a “text-centered mode of Jewish life.” The ethic was pragmatic as much as principled. Jews did not own the land, so they’d better not rely on it. The word—Torah—would always be theirs.
We’re not supposed to be attached to the land, but on my father’s side (the Jews), we’re marked by where we’ve lived. My grandmother’s family name—Bialtzokovsky—was taken from the land they left (or were driven from), a small town outside Chernobyl in the Ukraine known as White Church; a common practice then.
In this way, perhaps, destination and destiny—destino—are linked: the places we live mark us, shape us, whether through the isotopes we ingest that record where we have been or through a name taken on departing a town or through the subtler shaping of sensibility that comes of a life spent in a forest, a city, or on high desert.
“Landscape is culture,” landscape architect Peter Latz told the Times Magazine in May 2004. “Landscape is not the opposite of the town.” Latz designed the Duisburg-Nord, a landscape park in northern Germany, built on a former industrial site; instead of trying to recover the “natural” terrain, he left the industrial structures—slag heaps, blast furnaces, a transformer station. This, our landscape now.
Latz means, I suppose, that humanscapes have become first nature for many of us in the industrialized West, but I think another meaning applies as well, that he is right in an altogether different way—that we are where we live: Landscape shapes us and thus our culture, as much as we shape it. I wonder how what we are doing to the natural world now will shape our future, reshaping perhaps the civilizations we have built.
It became our habit in the West at the close of the twentieth century to imagine that the personal is projected out onto the world, made global by grandiosity. The world is not out there to be encountered but invented, a complex of cultural, historical, semiotic, economic, and personal projections writ large. And yet, what if the world were projecting onto us? Might the grief and fear I felt on behalf of the Amazon at twenty-one be a kind of world-sorrow that I absorbed like sunlight? Is that possible? What if the recent increase in the incidence of so-called panic disorders is not merely the consequence of more stressful lives but a signal from the natural world, a tremor we feel the way horses scare before a storm. Its fear, ours. Its sorrows, our own.
The poet Jane Hirschfield notes that the elegy was more and more the mode of literature at the close of the twentieth century because our age is marked by a pervasive sense of loss, by wars and extinctions of species, a sense of ecological fragility. We like to call ourselves the Information Age. It sounds so optimistic. But I imagine we will be called other names by those who look back and wonder how we let this come to pass.
The Cartographer of Loss
In the wake of my failed outing to the forest, I returned once more to Fearnside’s office and asked if I might assist him in some way. I offered myself up as a flunky, willing to do anything. At first, he could find nothing for me. He was working on an article for publication about his effort to map deforestation rates using LANDSAT images from space. He hadn’t the time to supervise me on a project. Eventually, however, he said he could use my help mapping coordinates—translating the LANDSAT coordinates to localized maps. Cartography, he called it: it was the first time I’d heard the word. Map making.
I thanked Fearnside and left his office to begin the long hot walk back to INPA. As I walked the shoulder of the asphalt road, dodging rocks thrown up by passing truck wheels, squinting at the pale sky hazy with dust, I was grateful for my new job. I was glad to have something to do here, to be—at last—of use.
For the next six weeks I would map absence; I would be a cartographer of loss.
As a child, I could never manage to keep straight north from south, east from west; though we would live for years in the same modest, white-brick ranch house in a suburb on the outskirts of Minneapolis, Minnesota, I never got it down. Even now, returning to my childhood home, I have to remind myself where New York City is (east, beyond Saint Paul) to get and keep my bearings.
In childhood directions seemed reversed, as if glimpsed through a mirror. Perhaps I was distracted, too much immersed in my own thoughts to note the cardinal directions; perhaps I was absorbed elsewhere, observing my beautiful brilliant mother, whose despair held my attention like a work of art. Whatever the source, I was not aware of my body in space: I was aware of my mother’s sorrow.
It is only in the wake of my stint in the Amazon that I will begin slowly to orient myself; and in discovering desire, laying claim to the intimate territory of the body at twenty-five, I will finally get my bearings and begin at last to chart by the truth north of desire.
At INPA, I settled easily into my routine. Rote, comforting. Each morning, after Ayda left for her lab, I would go into the bathroom, lock the door, and run in place, jogging in front of the bathroom mirror, flapping my hands over my head as if jumping jacks, in a parody of activity, going nowhere fast.
Each morning, on my way to Fearnside’s office, I stopped at the canteen for a cup of sweet café com leite and a hot-dog-bun-sized roll that was split down the center and heavily slathered with shiny white salty butter. I sat at a picnic table alone and listened to the leaves rustle, observing the mangoes’ gradual ripening as the weeks passed and the growth of the small red bananas, the palmettos, and the red-orange palm nuts clustered among the fronds of the trees from which dendê comes. I batted away flies. I chewed, almost happy.
Then I walked the gravel path among the buildings to a white office in which I sat at a white drafting table and annotated maps as if the forest were not a place but a set of shifting coordinates, an abstrac
tion, a series of neat transparent squares to be filled in.
On free afternoons, on Saturdays and Sundays, I took the bus into town to buy laxative teas, walking the city streets for hours in the hope of burning off calories. A purposeless exertion. At the time, the irony did not strike me: my public effort to stem loss, my private campaign to lose. My days revolved around these calculations.
Looking at photos of myself from the time, I realize that I was pretty then and slim and might in time be beautiful. Whatever it was that I was trying to lose is not evident in the photos; whatever that was doesn’t register on film.
In truth, I don’t remember much of what I did there those months at INPA.
I had set a course and simply followed it unquestioningly to its illogical conclusion, as the Brazilian government seems intent to do, and ours, even after it has become plain that by destroying the Amazon, we are destroying a global treasure, that greenhouse gases—of which the U.S. produces nearly 25 percent—are warming the world, that we are risking massive extinction on a scale unseen since the last Ice Age, that there are options and better ones. I stayed my faulty, fruitless course because I’d set it, and it seemed more frightening to diverge from the path I’d set—to reconsider—than to continue on.
I never again saw red-haired Ron. When I saw handsome, blue-eyed Bill with his Japanese girlfriend, he was cool, remote. Ayda finished her research and went home to her kids, leaving our room to me. I don’t remember much else. What I have are these few notes, taken shortly after my return.
I remember a study of raindrops. Touching, really. Almost a child’s meditation. The scientists were British, as I recall. The project was no doubt scientifically sound, this hydrological study, given the complexity of water distribution in the rain forest, but it seemed whimsical in the extreme (to study raindrops). I wanted something more heroic. I didn’t realize that heroism is often composed of such small gestures (a woman sitting down on a bus or a man taking a seat at a lunch counter, or a study of rain).
Amazon Snapshot #11
Twenty years after my first visit to the Amazon, I will return to Manaus to see Dr. Fearnside at his office at the National Institute for Amazonian Research. He will be just as I remember him—a tall, gaunt man, with the clichéd physical awkwardness of the scientist; his neatly trimmed hair is going gray, as is his walrus-like mustache; his bright blue eyes visible through gold-rimmed glasses.
In his office on the campus of the National Institute for Amazonian Research, there is no sign of the forest he has dedicated his life to protecting, not even a poster of trees. The only suggestion of the subject of his thirty years of study is a single, desiccated leaf in a small glass jar on one of the high shelves that line his office walls to the ceiling. His office is heaped with papers, gray file cabinets; boxes of manuscripts are stacked on chairs; in the entryway we pass through to enter his office, several sets of hanging folders are filled with copies of his articles.
In a recent editorial, Fearnside had written of the valor de existência—a value that transcends monetary measures. I ask him repeatedly what he means by this. What is the value of its existence? I ask. Why should people care about the rain forest? Why does he?
I suppose I want him to say what I have not yet been able to: to explain why this forest matters so very much to me, even now, even after I’ve turned my back on it.
But he has no answer. Or rather, he refuses to answer. He speaks instead of the environmental services the rain forest provides (hydrological cycles, biodiversity, carbon sink); he talks about how he’d planned to be somewhere else, serendipity of a sort having kept him here in the Amazon for twenty-eight years. I’m annoyed, but I get it. Like Shakespeare’s Cordelia, he won’t heave his heart into his mouth. He says, finally, Once you start talking about the beauty of the forest, they dismiss you as a poet, a romantic. He would calculate an answer, a figure cold as cash, translatable as currency.
Amazon Snapshot #12
On a cool, tiled veranda overlooking a plantation surrounded by rain forest deep in the Brazilian Amazon, Senhor Gabriel—the agricultural engineer who is my host this afternoon on my return trip to Manaus—slams his palm on the table between us and shouts, What use is the rain forest?
He means, of course, what use is it undeveloped?
Our conversation has been drifting all day into the dangerous terrain of religion—my host insists God gave us the earth to use; he quotes Christ as saying, “If the fig tree does not bear fruit, cut it down.” A secular Jew, I’m in no position to argue, especially not in my pidgin Portuguese, having lost the fluency I’d gained twenty years before. But Senhor Gabriel rants eloquently on. He believes that we are on earth to work, to better ourselves and the world; he believes “man can improve on the creation.”
It’s an argument he made repeatedly that morning as he drove me here from Manaus. Careening along Highway 110, through what once was dense jungle but is no more, dodging tire-sized potholes, passing bulldozed patches of red and white earth, land skinned and raw, ribbed with erosion, from which here and there plumes of gray-white smoke rose (from once-forested lands now cleared by fire) but few trees, I had asked Senhor Gabriel what he thought of the sight. He said he thought it beautiful.
Now, after our lunch of chicken, rice and peas, shredded cabbage, he wants to know what value I think the forest has, what use it is. And I feel acutely my lack of language, how inadequate my vocabulary is to say what needs to be said here.
What use is love? I say, finally.
Senhor Gabriel sits back, red faced, and stares at me, whether with admiration or contempt I cannot tell. Beyond the terrace, enormous clouds scud by. Beyond us, the rain forest—what remains—thrums with life.
Amazon Snapshot #13
When I return to the rain forest that second time, I will find it beautiful—heartbreakingly beautiful—as I failed to when I was twenty-one. The variety of trees, the tea and coffee smell of it, the marvelous animals and the birds. On my first day back in Manaus, I go for a walk in INPA’s urban forest preserve, a little island of forest habitat in what has come to be the suburbs of an expanding city; strolling among the trees, I see a toucan with a blue beak, squirrel monkeys, red macaws, peixe boi, marvelous yellow-hooded blackbirds.
Later I will travel up river to a preserve where I will canoe through flooded forest, past trees ringed with three-inch spines long as sewing needles; past the massive trunks of kapok trees like poured concrete curtains; past dolphins pink as bubble gum and rare, red-faced uacarí monkeys in their white fur coats; through the marvelous symphonic night.
Even the city of Manaus will delight me. The strange enjambment of new and old, human and wild, charms me now. The great vital mess of it all—the crowds down by the docks; even the jarringly mechanical jingles blaring from advertising trucks, the trees in front of the police station cacophonous with birds.
I will love all of it; even the weird, surreal, obscenely misplaced Taj Mahal, that five-star hotel in the middle of the city where none was before, where I will lie beside a turquoise pool in the morning and watch the chlorinated water pucker and lap under fierce Amazonian winds as towers of gray-white cumulous clouds scud by close overhead (like having mountains pass you by while you stretch in a chaise lounge), nineteenth-century church bells tolling the hours.
And I will wonder, do I love this place now—this forest, this city—because I love now? In the years since I was last here, I have discovered joy, desire, sex, the nature of my own heart, a deep guiding pleasure that I could not have imagined then, and with it trust in myself, a strength I did not know I had. Was the ugliness I perceived in Manaus years ago my own? Its lack my own? Is the change in the forest or in me? And when we see only lumber when we look at trees, when we see only oil when we stand on a tundra or look out to sea, what poverty of vision is that? What exactly are we looking at?
Landlords
I spoke to Nelci only once by phone when I was in Manaus, just long enough for her to tell me t
hat she was moving out and would be gone by the time I returned to Salvador.
True to her word, the September night I returned to Salvador, Nelci was gone. She left no message, no forwarding address; she did not call. Instead I received phone calls in the middle of the night from strangers asking for Marcy, men with accents I could not place. My doorman gave me long looks.
A week after my return, my landlord called to notify me that he wanted me out.
—You will have to move out by month’s end, he said, a full two-and-a-half months before my lease was up. Nel had been paying the rent, or had paid me to pay it—so I knew that I was not behind on that. When I asked why he wanted to break the lease, my landlord said only that he needed the apartment.
—But I can’t possibly move now, I said. I explained that I was recently back from the Amazon, that my parents were arriving soon to travel with me through Brazil, after which I was scheduled to visit half a dozen Rotary Clubs across the country to give talks and present them with tiny flags of friendship between nations. I have plans, I explained. Moving out is not among them.
—You must be out by month’s end, he said, then he hung up.
Maybe it was because the stakes were small and the territory comprehensible, 400 square feet at most, not millions of hectares; maybe it was because I’d had my fill of loss, of getting along and going along; whatever it was, whyever it was, that time I made another choice. I decided to fight for this little bit of territory.
That afternoon, I went to my landlord’s apartment, not understanding why he wanted to evict me, not understanding what the trouble was. He was not home, but his wife—my landlady—was. She told me at the door that he was out. I said I’d wait. She seemed reticent to let me in, but did.
We sat together in her dim lace-filled dining room, amidst her carefully polished table and sideboard and crystal, and she said again and again that she could not tell me why her husband wanted me out.
—It is for my husband to tell you, she said. It is his business, not mine.
