Insects: A Novel (17 page)

60

Dan Rocha worked
part-time for Professor Azevedo. He spent most of his time drinking coffee and working on class assignments when he was in the professor’s tiny office. As an underfunded biology undergraduate, he was happy to be paid to help the professor but felt occasional pangs of guilt when he thought he was being paid to do essentially nothing. He had instructions to take messages and review the professor’s voicemail. Of which there were few. Most of the time, the tiny LED on the professor’s phone was off. This time it blinked.

At first, he didn’t realize the voicemail was from Professor Azevedo. The voice was stressed, frantic, and the professor was always soft-spoken and deliberate. It didn’t help that the connection was filled with static. Listening to it several times, he transcribed the message into his laptop. All that he had known about Azevedo’s trip was that he was going into the forest with a group of American scientists and that he’d be back in several days.

He studied what he’d typed into his computer, and it was clear that Azevedo was in some kind of difficulty. He didn’t understand the reference to the cabin, but he opened Google Earth and entered the coordinates and saw that they were in the middle of nowhere. There were no nearby roads, no villages or towns, nothing within twenty kilometers or more. He did notice what looked like a small building in a clearing near the coordinates. The satellite image was more than a year old.

Rocha wondered when the call was made and replayed the voicemail. According to the time stamp, the call was made yesterday. This heightened his anxiety as he was supposed to check the phone every day but didn’t come into the office yesterday. He’d taken the day off. It was common among undergraduate assistants when the boss was away. Nothing ever happened anyway, or so he’d thought.

Now, he was confronted by the result of his own laziness, and he immediately began imagining that the professor somehow knew what he’d done, and when he returned he’d dismiss him. But the message sounded urgent. Rocha heard the stress in Azevedo’s voice, and it made an impression because he’d never known the old man to get stressed about anything. Even as Rocha was constantly agonizing about his grades and assistant professors whom he didn’t get along with, the grandfatherly professor always counseled him to maintain calm.

“Stress releases hormones that cause inflammation, which can lead to all manner of physical and psychological problems. Learn to relax, my boy. Learn this while you’re young, and it will help you more than any class you ever take,” Azevedo had counseled the young student.

Rocha had heard this before. By nature, he was a bit on the anxious side, fearful of failure but intelligent and quick on the uptake. His parents constantly told him not to take things so seriously, but it was his nature and might well be responsible for the few scholarships he’d earned and the likelihood that he’d be accepted into graduate school next year, though he knew he would remain anxious until he’d actually received the acceptance letter.

He searched the web for Gonzalo Juarez and decided after fifteen minutes that the man did not exist, at least not in cyberspace. He’d grown up in the computer age, and as a consequence had little experience using telephone directories, catalogs or virtually any paper reference other than books, many of which he could access online. His parents had a landline when he was growing up, but his first phone was cellular, and today he carried an iPhone wherever he went. Fortunately, Azevedo had several phone directories, which Rocha began to use when he finally gave up on finding the captain online.

He first looked through the listings and found several persons named Gonzalo Juarez. He called them all, getting through to only one, who told him he worked in an office. He left a voicemail on two of the calls, and the remainder did not take messages. Then he turned to the commercial pages and started going down the listings for guides. Most of the ads named companies, not individuals. No Gonzalo Juarez.

Rocha was not by nature very organized, relying on his phone to keep schedules and notes. He didn’t like to waste time and kept notes in a personal shorthand on his phone that even he sometimes struggled to decipher and had virtually no experience in locating businesses or individuals who had no web identity.

He then started shuffling through the piles of papers on the professor’s desk. Azevedo’s handwriting was almost indecipherable. The old man scribbled like a child learning cursive, which made his writing difficult to read. Rather than trying to read every paper, Rocha scanned for phone numbers, but those that he found were mostly all campus numbers.

Exasperated, he returned to the digital answering machine and wrote down the phone number that Azevedo had called from. He punched the number into his iPhone and waited. The phone’s speaker erupted in various tones, which were unfamiliar to him, but which he concluded were either busy signals or indicating that the call did not go through. He redialed twice with the same result.

Frustrated, sitting in Azevedo’s ancient wood chair, he scanned the walls. There were a chalkboard and several cork boards, photographs of the professor with colleagues and dignitaries and several prints of landscapes. There were no phone numbers or names on the chalkboard. The cork boards were filled with notes held by pins, some of which looked as if they’d been there for decades. Some of the notes contained phone numbers, including several with names. Most of the names were of academics at the university, which he recognized. Retreating to the desk, he slumped into the chair. He tried calling Azevedo again, and again he couldn’t connect. He listened to the recording several more times as if somehow he’d missed something important.

Leaning back in the chair, an old swivel type on wheels with a padded seat once popular in government offices, he folded his hands behind his head and stared at the slowly turning ceiling fan. After a moment, he leaned forward and started rifling through the desk drawers. Each side consisted of a large file drawer on the bottom and two smaller drawers above it. The file drawers were filled with hanging folders. He didn’t bother with them. The other drawers were filled with accessories such as staplers, tape dispenser, rulers and an assortment of items that the professor had accumulated over the years, apparently with no purpose in mind. Finally, he opened the center drawer. In it were a pile of receipts held together by a large paperclip. He cleared a space on the desk, pulled the clip off and spread the receipts in front of him, shuffling them, spreading them across the desk. Examining each one and creating a pile with the discards, he found a note with the hastily scribbled initials G.J. and a phone number. It was not among the numbers he’d already called.

G.J. did not pick up, so Rocha left a message to return the call to his cell phone.

“If I don’t hear from you, I’ll call back,” he said. “It’s very important.”

Before leaving the office, he tried to call Azevedo, but the call didn’t go through. He assumed the professor had used a satellite phone, being in the forest, but he knew nothing about how they worked and assumed the lack of a signal was not uncommon. Meanwhile, he had a class to attend.

61

Gonzalo Juarez was
taking stock of his fleet, the small, battered aluminum V-hull boats and the ancient thirty-footer he used to tow them. He was already a day late to pick up the old professor and his American friends. The Rio Negro was well above flood stage, and all low-lying areas were underwater. Most of the land within twenty kilometers of the river would be flooded. He’d been caught in the forest during floods and knew there was little to be done except find high ground or climb a tree unless you had a boat.

Trouble was, no one in his right mind would take a boat on a hike in the forest. It was always something one wanted after the fact—after the floodwaters had inundated the forest. It was one of the reasons he refrained from guiding sportsmen during the rainy season, except by boat. The minute they wanted to hike overland was where his work as a guide ended. Flooding during the rainy season was a given, and he understood why other guides would lead their customers through the forest no matter how risky it was if that’s what they paid for. It was all about the
dinheiro
and, to some extent, pride. The younger guides were always trying to prove themselves, and as a person in his early fifties who thought of himself as a businessman more than as a guide, Juarez had adopted a more discreet style. Young guides had little to lose while he had a business with two employees to think about, including himself.

After Azevedo contacted him about ferrying the Americans to a cabin in the forest, he reminded him that there were heavy rains in the east that were headed their way, but it did not sway the professor. In fact, he took a taxi to Juarez’s dock to check out the boat to make sure it would handle eleven people and their equipment. Upon first seeing the boat, he shook his head and chided Juarez for wasting his time.

“Where are the people going to sit?”

“When I carry a lot of people, they sometimes sit on the deck,” Juarez said.

“These aren’t workmen. They’re American scientists. And is there enough room for equipment?”

Juarez felt Azevedo was disparaging his boat and by extension himself, but instead of responding angrily, he decided that it didn’t matter to him whether Azevedo hired him. So he quickly brought up the topic of cost and high-balled the estimate to give the professor a reason to go elsewhere, but Azevedo agreed to it without haggling. Juarez thought, I should have known. Americans have money. He should have asked for more. Still, he was pleased that he would be paid more than if he were transporting a work crew.

The first thing he heard when he answered his cell phone was a loud “
olá
,” which caused him to hold the phone away from his ear. Even so, he could hear but not understand everything that was said by the excited voice.

“Slow down, slow down,” Juarez finally said in Portuguese into the phone, “and don’t talk so loud. You don’t have to shout.”

Rocha apologized profusely, and after introducing himself and confirming that Juarez was the captain the professor hired, he relaxed and spoke normally.

Juarez asked if the young man spoke Spanish.

“What? No. I’m learning English …”

“Then slow down,” Juarez said. “I don’t speak Portuguese good.”

“You want to speak English?”

“No, no, I know only a few words.”

Rocha was surprised that someone living in Manaus wouldn’t be fluent in Portuguese, but he chose his words carefully as he explained that he’d received a call from Azevedo, who was in trouble in the forest, and asked whether Juarez had received a call from the professor. Juarez suspected that the young man was going to criticize him for not returning to the cabin yesterday though, in fact, Rocha knew nothing of the agreement between Juarez and Azevedo.

“They need help,” Rocha said insistently. “Can you help?”

Juarez was hesitant in his response. The river was filled with debris, and he was worried about damaging his boats.

“The river is still rising,” he said, looking out from his dock. “I see all kinds of things floating in the water. It would be dangerous to go now.”

“But they need help. They’re stuck in the forest and, as you say, the water is rising. The whole place is flooding, and Professor Azevedo is an old man. I’m worried about him.”

“Maybe tomorrow will be better,” Juarez said, as he tried to end the conversation.

Becoming frustrated, Rocha’s voice grew louder, insistent.

“Mr. Juarez, you’re a guide, you know the forest, you have a boat. I have nothing, but I’ll go with you. I have coordinates.”

“I’ll tell you what, give me the coordinates, and I’ll call you back. I have to go home to use my computer.”

Rocha was optimistic again, and Juarez was happy to end the conversation. He promised to be quick about it and hung up. As a businessman, he knew how to put people off and felt that he’d handled the call well. He liked things to be on his terms.

62

Rocha felt relieved.
Reaching the boat captain satisfied Azevedo’s expectations and gave him a feeling of achievement. He’d connected the dots, turned a name into a phone number, and into what he thought was a promise to get back to him. At nearly twenty-two, he was on the verge of graduating, and for the first time, he felt he’d done something important, something that could affect people’s lives. He left Azevedo’s office with a spring in his step and a reason to hunt down some friends for drinks. Even though he was poor, he felt so good that he told one of them that the first round would be on him.

Juarez did not
immediately go home. Instead, he walked to a dock nearer the river and watched the muddy, fast-moving water as it boiled past Manaus on its journey south to form the Amazon river. The Rio Negro, almost nine miles wide near its mouth at Manaus, is the world’s second largest in terms of water flow. Captain Juarez would have needed binoculars to see the opposite bank, but he was more interested in whether it would be safe to take his boat out. The call from the professor’s assistant made him feel uncomfortable. He fully intended to return to the cabin, but the floodwaters had risen so quickly that they took him by surprise. He had no backup plan but learning now that the Americans were in some kind of trouble only made him anxious. It was as if Rocha, by making a simple phone call, had transferred his anxiety to someone else.

When Juarez returned home, he went straight to his old desktop computer and pulled up several local weather reports. He could see for himself that the rain had let up in Manaus, but weather maps showed rain throughout the surrounding forest. Using Google Earth, he input the coordinates that Rocha had given him and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

When he returned, cup in hand, he pinned the coordinates and then moved the map around to the area where the cabin stood and pinned that. Then he attached the two points. They were about ten kilometers apart. As he zoomed in, he saw a few clouds, huge swaths of dense forest with clearings and occasionally a building, and several streams, one in particular that headed northeast and appeared to get within several kilometers of the coordinates. He’d guided fishermen in the general vicinity but had never traveled the length of the stream. He called a friend in the guide business who was familiar with the area, who said that during the dry season the streams weren’t navigable and were dotted with stumps that were underwater in the rainy season and could tear the bottom out of a boat.

“If you’re gonna take someone fishing there, it’s best to go at the beginning or the end of the rainy season but not right now with all this rain and floods.”

Juarez thanked him and looked at a calendar that he hung on a wall next to his desk. He’d circled the date when he was supposed to pick up the Americans. That was yesterday. It was too late to leave today, so he was already two days behind schedule. But he wasn’t worried because it seemed the Americans would be late returning to the cabin, too. He looked at the weather report for tomorrow and saw that there was little chance of heavy rain though floodwaters would remain elevated for weeks after the storms had passed.