City of the Beasts (6 page)

Time went by slowly, hours dragging into eternity; even so, Alex was never bored. He would sit at the prow of the boat and observe nature, and read, and play his grandfather's flute. The jungle seemed to come alive and respond to the sound of the instrument; even the noisy crew and the passengers on the boat would fall silent and listen. Those were the only times that Kate paid any attention to Alex. The writer was a woman of few words; she spent her day reading or writing in her notebooks, and in general ignored Alex or treated him like any other member of the expedition. It was pointless to go to her and present a problem directly related to survival, such as food, health, or safety. She would look him up and down with obvious scorn, and answer that there are two kinds of problems: those that solve themselves and those that have no solution… so please not to bother her with foolishness. It was good that his hand had healed rapidly, because otherwise she would be capable of solving the matter by suggesting he cut it off. (Kate was a woman of extreme measures.) She had loaned him maps and books about the Amazon so he could look things up for himself. If Alex commented on what he had read about the Indians, or outlined his theories about the Beast, she would reply, without taking her eyes from the page before her, "Never lose an opportunity to keep your mouth shut, Alexander."

Everything about this trip was so different from the world Alex had grown up in that he felt like a visitor from another galaxy. Now he had to do without comforts he had always taken for granted, like a bed, a bathroom, running water, and electricity. He used his grandmother's camera to take snapshots, in order to have proof to show back in California. His friends would never believe that he had held a three-foot-long alligator!

His most serious problem was food. He had always been a picky eater, and now they were serving him things he couldn't even name. All he could identify on the boat were canned beans, dried beef, and coffee, none of which he had a taste for. One day the crew shot a couple of monkeys, and that night when the boat was tied up along the riverbank they were roasted. They looked like a couple of burned infants, and Alex felt queasy just seeing them. The next morning they caught a
pirarucú
, an enormous fish that everyone but Alex, who didn't even taste it, thought was delicious. He had decided when he was three years old that he didn't like fish. His mother, weary of struggling to make him eat it, had given up, and from then on served him only food he liked. Which wasn't much. That short list kept him hungry the whole trip; all he had were bananas, a can of condensed milk, and several packages of crackers. It didn't seem to matter to his grandmother that he was hungry. Or to anyone else. No one paid any attention to him.

Several times a day a brief but torrential rain fell and the humidity was horrendous. Alex had to get used to the fact that his clothing never really got dry and that after the sun went down, they were attacked by clouds of mosquitoes. The foreigners' defense was to douse themselves in insect repellent—especially Ludovic Leblanc, who never lost an opportunity to recite the list of diseases transmitted by insects, from typhus to malaria. He had rigged a heavy veil over the Aussie hat to protect his face, and he spent a large part of the day tucked beneath a mosquito net he had the crew hang at the stern of the boat. The
caboclos
, on the other hand, seemed immune to the bites.

On the third day, a radiant morning, they had to stop because there was a problem with the motor. While the captain tried to repair it, everyone else stretched out in the shade of the roof to rest. It was too hot to move, but Alex decided it was a perfect place to cool off. He jumped into the water, which looked as shallow as a bowl of soup, but he sank like a stone beneath the surface.

"Only an idiot tests the bottom with his feet," Alex's grandmother commented when he came to the surface streaming water from his ears.

Alex swam away from the boat—he had been told that caimans prefer to stay close to the banks—and floated on his back for a long time in the warm water, arms and legs outspread, gazing at the sky and thinking about the astronauts who had experienced that immensity. He felt so comfortable that when something quickly brushed by his hand he took an instant to react. Not having any idea what kind of danger lay in store—maybe caimans didn't hug the riverbanks, after all—he began to swim as fast as he could back toward the boat, but he stopped short when he heard his grandmother yelling not to move. He obeyed out of habit, even though his instinct was advising the opposite. He floated as quietly as possible and then saw a huge fish at his side. He thought it was a shark, and his heart stopped, but the fish made a quick turn and came back, curious, coming so close that Alex could see its smile. This time his heart leaped, and he had to force himself not to shout with joy. He was swimming with a dolphin!

The next twenty minutes, playing with the mammal the way he did with his dog, Poncho, were the happiest of his life. The magnificent creature would circle around him at great speed, leap over him, stop a few inches from his face, and observe him with a friendly expression. Sometimes it swam very close, and Alex could touch its skin, which was rough, not smooth as he had imagined. He wanted that moment to never end; he was ready to stay in the water forever, but suddenly the dolphin gave a flip of its tail and disappeared.

"Did you see, Kate? No one is going to believe this!" Alex yelled when he was back at the boat, so excited he could barely speak.

"Well, here's the proof." She smiled, pointing to her camera. The photographers for the expedition, Bruce and González, had captured the event, too.

As they went farther up the Río Negro, the vegetation became more voluptuous, the air heavier and more perfumed, time slower, and distances beyond measuring. They moved as if in a dream through a landscape of fantasy. From time to time, the boat emptied as passengers got off carrying their bundles and animals, heading for the huts or tiny villages along the riverbank. The radios onboard were no longer receiving personal messages from Manaus, or booming with popular songs; people grew silent as nature vibrated with an orchestra of birds and monkeys. Only the noise of the motor betrayed a human presence in the enormous solitude of the jungle. By the time they reached Santa María de la Lluvia, the only people left onboard were the crew, the group from the
International Geographic
, Dr. Omayra Torres, two soldiers, and the two young Mormons, who were still with them, but had been felled by some intestinal bacterium. Despite the antibiotics the doctor had given them, they were so ill they could scarcely open their eyes, and sometimes they confused the blazing jungle with the snowy mountaintops of Utah.

"Santa María de la Lluvia is the last outpost of civilization," the boat captain told them when they saw the village at a bend in the river.

"From here on, Alexander, it is a magical land," Kate notified her grandson.

"Are there still Indians who have never had contact with civilization?" he asked.

It was Dr. Omayra Torres who answered. "It's believed there may be two or three thousand, but in fact no one knows for sure."

Santa María de la Lluvia rose like a human mistake in the midst of an overwhelming natural world threatening to swallow it up at any moment. The settlement consisted of about twenty houses, a large shed that served as a hotel, a second, smaller shed that housed a hospital and was under the charge of two nuns, a couple of tiny stores, a Catholic church, and an army barracks. The soldiers monitored the border and traffic between Venezuela and Brazil. In accordance with the law, they were also supposed to protect native peoples against the abuses of settlers and adventurers, but in practice, they never did. Foreigners were moving into the region and no one was stopping them as they pushed the Indians farther and farther toward impenetrable jungle, or killed them, with no fear of being punished.

A tall man stood waiting on the docks at Santa María de la Lluvia. He had the sharp profile of a bird, strong features, and an alert expression; his skin was tanned by outdoor life and his dark hair was gathered into a ponytail.

He introduced himself. "Welcome. I am César Santos, and this is my daughter, Nadia."

Alex guessed that the girl was about the age of his sister Andrea, maybe twelve or thirteen. Her curly hair was wild, bleached by the sun, and her eyes and skin were the color of honey. She was dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and plastic sandals. Several colored ribbons were tied around her wrists, a yellow flower was tucked over one ear, and a long green feather pierced the lobe of the other ear. Alex thought that if Andrea could see those adornments, she would immediately copy them, and if Nicole, his younger sister, saw the little black monkey on her shoulder, she would die with envy.

While Dr. Torres, helped by the two nuns who had come to meet them, took the two Mormon missionaries to the tiny hospital, César Santos supervised the unloading of the numerous supplies for the expedition. He apologized for not having been in Manaus, as they had agreed. He explained that he had flown his plane to every corner of the Amazon, but now it was very old and in recent weeks several pieces of the motor had dropped off. In light of the fact that it was in danger of crashing, he had decided to order a new motor, which was supposed to arrive any day; he added with a smile that he did not want to make an orphan of his daughter, Nadia. Then he led them to the hotel, which turned out to be by the river, a wooden construction on stilts similar to the other rickety buildings in the village. Cases of beer were stacked everywhere and liquor bottles were lined up along the counter. Alex had noticed during their trip upriver that, despite the heat, the men drank gallons and gallons of alcohol, at every hour of the night and day. This primitive building would serve the visitors as their base of operations, lodging, restaurant, and bar. Kate and Professor Ludovic Leblanc were assigned cubicles separated from the others by sheets strung on a rope. The rest of the party would sleep in hammocks protected by mosquito netting.

Santa María de la Lluvia was a sleepy little village, so remote that it rarely appeared on maps. A few settlers raised longhorn cattle; the rest dealt in the gold found in the sandy riverbed or wood and rubber from the forests. A few daring souls set out alone into the jungle to look for diamonds, but most just vegetated, waiting for opportunity to fall miraculously from the sky. Those were the visible activities. The secret ones consisted of trafficking in exotic birds, drugs, and weapons. Groups of soldiers, rifles slung over their shoulders and shirts soaked with sweat, lounged in the shade, playing cards or smoking. The little village was in the doldrums, dazed by heat and boredom. Alex saw several bald, toothless men, some half blind, some with open sores, waving their arms and talking to themselves. These were miners crazed by mercury and slowly dying. For too long, they had dived to the bottom of the river, hauling powerful tubes to suck up the sand saturated with gold dust. Some drowned; others died because their competitors cut their oxygen lines, but most died slowly, poisoned by the mercury used to separate gold from sand.

The children of the village, in contrast, played happily in the mud, accompanied by a few tame monkeys and gaunt dogs. There were a few adult Indians, some wearing a T-shirt or shorts, others as naked as the children. At first, Alex was embarrassed, not daring to look at the women's breasts, but he quickly became accustomed to the sight and after five minutes didn't even notice them. These Indians had been in contact with civilization for several years and had lost many of their traditions and customs, as César Santos explained. The guide's daughter, Nadia, spoke to the Indians in their own language, and they treated her as if she were from their tribe.

If these were the ferocious natives Leblanc had described, they were not very impressive. They were small, for one thing; the men were under five feet and the children looked like miniature humans. For the first time in his life, Alex felt tall. This tribe had bronze-colored skin and high cheekbones; the men wore their hair cut as round as bowls, stopping just above the ears, a fashion that accentuated their Asian features. They were descended from inhabitants of the north of China, and had come by way of Alaska some ten to twenty thousand years before. They had escaped being enslaved during the conquest of the sixteenth century because they were so isolated. The Spanish and Portuguese soldiers had been unable to conquer the swamps, mosquitoes, jungle vegetation, enormous rivers, and waterfalls of this Amazon region.

Once the group was settled in the hotel, César Santos began organizing supplies for the expedition, and planning the remainder of the trip with the help of Kate and the photographers. Professor Leblanc had decided to rest until it was a little cooler since he did not do well in the heat. In the meantime, Nadia invited Alex to go for a walk with her.

"Don't go beyond the boundaries of the village after sunset, it's dangerous," César Santos warned them.

Following the advice of Leblanc, who talked as if he were an expert on the dangers of the jungle, Alex stuffed his pants legs inside his socks to guard against the voracious leeches that would suck his blood. Nadia, who was almost barefoot, laughed.

"You'll get used to the bugs and the heat," she told him. She spoke very good English because her mother was Canadian.

"My mother left three years ago," the girl clarified.

"Why did she go?"

"She couldn't get used to it here. Her health was bad, and it got worse when the Beast started roaming around. She could smell it; she wanted to get away, she couldn't stand to be alone, she screamed… Finally Dr. Torres took her away in a helicopter. She's back in Canada now," Nadia said.

"Your dad didn't go with her?"

"What would my dad do in Canada?"

"And why didn't she take you with her?" Alex persisted. He had never heard of a mother who would abandon her child.

"Because she's in a sanatorium. Besides, I want to be where my dad is."