The Mapmaker's Wife (38 page)

This was the landscape in which Isabel, her two brothers, and her nephew were now stranded. During the daylight hours, they tried to keep moving, usually in single file, with either Juan or Antonio in the lead, the other at the rear, and Isabel and Martín in the middle. They would walk and walk, and then they would have to stop to rest, drained by the heat and humidity. They would drink their fill of water at a stream, and at last they would pull themselves to their feet and wander some more, until their throats thickened again with thirst. They were not trying to go in any particular direction, they were just trying to keep moving, hoping that they would stumble back upon the Bobonaza. Then, as dusk fell, the insects would come out, and there was absolutely nothing they could do to protect themselves from this onslaught. They had no ointments, no mosquito nets, no tents—only the clothes they were wearing and several shawls, which they would desperately wrap around their faces and hands. But it was futile. The insects feasted on them, and even the full darkness of the night did not bring them relief. They would huddle together in the blackness, perhaps leaning
against a fallen branch or against a large tree trunk, and hordes of ants would begin their onslaught, crawling over them, under their pants and over every inch of exposed skin. This would be their lot for twelve nightmarish hours, and then the pitiless cycle would begin all over again.

During these awful days, they were plagued in particular by mosquitoes laden with botfly eggs. A botfly will stick its eggs to a passing mosquito, and when the mosquito feeds on an animal, the animal’s body heat causes the eggs to hatch. The larvae then burrow beneath the skin. A botfly maggot has two anal hooks that anchor it firmly in its new nest, and there it grows for more than a month, causing discomfort in its host every time it turns because its body is covered with sharp spines. At last, it emerges as an inch-long worm, ready to pupate and begin its life as a botfly. Monkeys in the lowland rain forests of the Amazon can be so parasitized by botflies that they die from them. And that was now happening to Isabel, her two brothers, and young Martín. They were taking their turn as food for the botflies of the Bobonaza forest, even as they were slowly starving to death.

T
HE FERTILITY OF THE RAIN FOREST
, with its profusion of plants and wildlife, suggests that it should be an easy place to forage for food. Orellana and Acuña, after their voyages down the Amazon, reported that Indians living along the banks had bountiful supplies of food, raising turtles in pens, growing manioc, fishing, and hunting the abundant game. But their mastery over the environment had been achieved over the course of 10,000 years, and in a part of the Amazon basin that was much more habitable than the swampy lowlands near the Bobonaza. Wild Jibaros of the eighteenth century may have hunted in these lowlands, but they built their villages on drier ground, further upriver. Even in that more hospitable environment, nearly all of the available food—other than game—is out of reach, in the top part of the canopy. At ground level, there is little to harvest. Trees and plants are in such
fierce competition for light and space that they are armed with a panoply of defenses to prevent their leaves and bark from being consumed.

The foremost of these are chemical toxins, mainly phenolics, tannins, and alkaloids; this last group is experienced by humans as analgesics, stimulants, and hallucinogens. In the wild, they serve to discourage insects from feeding on a plant’s leaves. As one naturalist has written, the caffeine that we find stimulating and enjoyable
“is in reality a form of insecticide.” Indigenous tribes in the Amazon use these compounds in their shaman medicine and also, as La Condamine discovered, as poisons with which they hunt and fish. In addition to an array of chemical defenses, tropical plants may have spiny leaves and jagged stilettos on their trunks to ward off insects. These daggers are in turn covered by lichens and microbes that can easily cause an infection.

As a result of this plant warfare, the food cycle in the rain forest is an unusual one. High up in the canopy, there may be an abundance of fruit and nuts that can be consumed, since plants may depend on animals to spread their seeds. The fruits and nuts are feasted on by monkeys, sloths, bats, birds, insects, and other denizens of the treetops. But lower down in the rain forest, there is little food available for ground-dwelling herbivores. Most of the ground animals either consume dead vegetable matter, as ants and termites do, or feed on fish, birds, monkeys, and other meat-eaters, with the jaguar at the top of this particular food chain. The American biologist Victor von Hagen, who lived among the Jibaros in the upper Amazon during the 1930s, described how impossible it is to forage for food in this environment:

All that the primitive has, he has cultivated from indigenous plants in the forest. These he has grown since time immemorial. The jungle yields, in its wild state, practically nothing. To be explicit, there are only four or five foods that may be obtained, irregularly from bountiful nature, and none of these can sustain man, brown or white, over an extended period of time.

One of the few edibles that can be found in the Bobonaza watershed is the palm cabbage, and that is what Isabel, her two brothers, and Martín were
“fain to subsist on,” along with “a few seeds and wild fruit.” After their food ran out, they spent all their daylight hours in search of something to eat. They would fall upon a palm cabbage as though it were a feast, and then they would resume their hunt. Yet they were growing ever more gaunt, and each succeeding day their
“fatigue” and their “wounds” increased. “Thorns and brambles” tore at their flesh and clothing, and the insects never let up; every inch of their bodies was covered with bites, which were horribly infected. The jungle was killing them in a thousand small ways.

They struggled in this way for three weeks, and then a fourth. They were still on their feet in late December. They kept on finding just enough food to keep going a little longer, wandering for a few hours each day to hunt for palm cabbage and then moving on to a new spot, until at last,
“oppressed with hunger and thirst, with lassitude and loss of strength, they seated themselves on the ground without the power of rising, and waited thus the approach of death.”

T
HE PROCESS OF DYING
from starvation is fairly well understood. At first, the body is able to draw on stored carbohydrates and fats as a source of energy. Liver glycogen, which is how the body packs away carbohydrates for emergency use, is broken down to maintain blood glucose levels. Once the glycogen stores are depleted, the body begins to break down muscle tissue to extract amino acids that can be used to make glucose. At the same time, with glucose in such short supply, the body begins to utilize an emergency energy source, ketones synthesized by the liver from fatty acids. The body’s metabolism slows down as well, and the starving person becomes ever more lethargic. Toward the end, speech becomes slurred, and all of the senses start to fail: Hearing dims, eyesight fades, and smell disappears, the body progressively consuming itself until death arrives.

This was the point of near-death that the Gramesóns had reached. As they lay on the forest floor, too weak to move, all except Isabel, who retained a certain strength, slipped in and out of consciousness. Isabel did what she could to care for her brothers and her nephew, whose pain during these final hours came not from their hunger but from their thirst. The humidity of the jungle drew water from their parched bodies just as it drew moisture from plants, and there, in a rain forest of all places, their agonies were increased by the torments of dehydration. As their saliva dried up, horrible lumps formed in their throats, which they were unable to dislodge no matter how many times they swallowed. Their tongues thickened so much that they gasped for breath. It was as though they were dying not from hunger or even, in the very end, from thirst but from suffocation.

Martín was
“the first to succumb.” Isabel cradled him in her arms, for she still had the energy to sit, with her back against a tree. Their unlucky fate was such that hardly any rain came in those last days, but when it did, Isabel soaked up the water with her shawl and used it to moisten Martín’s forehead and his lips. Her nephew looked so
old
. His skin had turned purplish, and his eyes had sunk ever deeper into his skull. He seemed to be pleading with her, but he was too weak to speak, the only sound escaping from his lips a low moan. At last his eyes closed, he groaned slightly as his lungs fought for one more breath, and he was gone. His father Antonio and his uncle Juan expired in similar pain over the course of the next couple of days, and then Isabel, having
“watched as they all died,” awaited “her own last moments.”

Because women have a higher percentage of body fat, they tend to outlast men in starvation situations.
^*
Isabel was also short and middle-aged, both factors that affect metabolism in ways that allow a
starving person to live a little while longer. And for two days more, Isabel lay
“stretched on the ground by the side of the corpses of her brothers [and her nephew], stupefied, delirious, and tormented with choking thirst.” All of the flies and insects of the forest had descended on the three rotting bodies, and they swarmed over her too. She was little more than a living corpse, and she desperately wanted to die. Yet even as she prayed to God for relief, for an end to her suffering, images of Jean began to flit in and out of her mind. At one point, she thought she could hear him calling to her. She was hallucinating, of course, yet it seemed so vivid, and in those moments she felt a surge of willpower, a desire to live. God was sparing her, it seemed, and a boat was waiting to take her to her husband. She was thirsty, she needed to
“look for water,” and suddenly a single thought was pushing loudly to the front of her mind:
Get up
.

At last, as Jean would later write, Isabel gathered the
“resolution and strength” to stand. Her
“clothing was in tatters” from the many weeks in the jungle, her blouse so torn to shreds that she was nearly naked from the waist up. Her shoes too were gone. After steadying herself, she saw clearly what she had to do. Taking the machete in hand, she knelt next to the decaying corpses. Antonio’s shoes would now be hers. She
“cut the shoes off her brother’s feet,” and hacked away until she had converted them into sandals. Seeing that her clothing was “all torn to rags,” she
“took her scarf and wrapped it around herself.” And then Isabel Godin, who only three months earlier had departed from Riobamba dressed in silk, disappeared into the forest.

B
Y THIS TIME
, a rescue canoe had long since come and gone from the sandbar where Isabel and the others had been stranded. The scene that Joaquín had found there was as gruesome as the one in the forest. He, Rocha, and Bogé had successfully reached the mission station in Andoas on November 8, “at four in the afternoon.” The resident priest, Juan Suasti, was not there when they arrived, as he was off visiting a village further downriver called
Pinchis, and it took Joaquín at least two days, and possibly three, to pull together a crew of Indians willing to go upriver to rescue those left behind. Rocha and Bogé declined to go back, seemingly indifferent to the fate of Isabel and the others, which caused Jean to later write bitterly that Rocha thought
“more of his own affairs than forwarding the boat which should recall his benefactors to life.”

Because they had to row against the current, it took Joaquín and the Andoas Indians fourteen days to reach the sandbar, more than twice as long as it had taken Joaquín, Rocha, and Bogé to come downriver. Suasti described what happened next:

Filled with hope, they jumped onto the land, the slave [Joaquín] with greater energy than the Indians. But they found no one living. The slave entered the rancho where they had left everyone, and found there the beds of straw strewn about, the clothes scattered about the beach, some human bones without meat on them in the forest, and a cadaver in a dip in the river, without much vestige of a person. There was a balsa raft leaning on the side of the river, and on the bank they could find perhaps the footsteps of three persons.

Joaquín and the Indians arrived at the sandbar on November 25, and thus the tragic timeline: Isabel and her family must have departed just a few days earlier, and then those staying behind—Juanita, Tomasa, and Antonio—were killed by marauders of some kind from the jungle. Although the cadaver in the river was badly decomposed, Joaquín thought that perhaps it was Antonio, Rocha’s slave. But he also found reason to hope that not all had died. The pile of human bones in the forest was not very big, and there were footprints in the riverbank by the raft, suggesting that several in the group had tried to go on. He ordered the Indians to scour the woods
“on both sides of the river to see if they could find some trail,” and he too went in search of his beloved mistress. He was a slave but also a Gramesón—in the culture of eighteenth-century Peru this was his
family
—and he walked through the wilderness
for four days, calling out Isabel’s name every few seconds. He and the Indians searched five or six miles inland, on both sides of the river, but, as Suasti wrote, “all these efforts were in vain.”

Before departing from the sandbar, Joaquín took an inventory of the items strewn about the beach. Everything that had been there when he had left on November 3 was still to be found, except for the
“ax and machete” and a pair of
“old trousers.” But Isabel’s jewelry and silverware were still there, as were her fancier clothes, such as a “velvet petticoat,” and these items he gathered up, intending to bring them to her father, who was waiting in Loreto. On the way back to Andoas, they traveled slowly, regularly stopping so that the Indians could hunt for footsteps or any sort of trail in the woods. They spent two weeks making their way downriver in this halting manner, arriving back in Andoas shortly before December 15. Joaquín and the Indians told Suasti what they had found, and he, in turn, summed up the “sad” news for authorities in Quito: