¿Te acuerdas cómo quemamos tus mapas?- dijo Aquilino. -Pura basura. Los que hacen mapas no saben que la Amazonía es como mujer caliente, no se está quieta. Aquí todo se mueve, los ríos, los animales, los árboles. Vaya tierra loca la que nos ha tocado.
-La Casa Verde, Mario Vargas Llosa
I was waiting for a boat in Porto Velho that would take me to Manaus. They said it may be a week or more. The hotel man told me the next day to go to the wharf, cargo- hundreds of crates of empty Coca-Cola bottles- was being loaded and the boat may be able to take me. The captain said yes, if I didn’t mind sleeping on deck. And take food for 4 days, he said.
There were 3 crewmen onboard and we got along well. They invited me to their table for meals and we ate fish stews and feijoadas with farofa. Once or twice we ran aground on mid-channel sand bars and the bottles tinkled like wind chimes, it was low water and the unbroken green wall was built upon high mud banks. Only when the channel twisted could I see left or right past the trees.
I spread my books out before me on deck. Vargas Llosa, a Spanish dictionary, and Cowan’s Arabic grammar in paperback, which I still have, although its front cover has been ripped off, I don’t remember but it may have happened somewhere mid-stream on the Madeira. But that quote about maps I copied from The Green House onto the inside cover of the dictionary I still see whenever I look up the difference between scatology and escatology in their Spanish spellings. News Flash- There is no difference.
I also had a National Geographic map of the Amazon basin. Not all of the rivers were named, many were not even marked, but it was in small scale so there wasn’t room to write every igapo and restinga, varzea and campinarana. So I was not expecting to see Humaita- now a town of 50,000, then a flyspeck- when it appeared around the bend.
I had a bad cold and was very congested. Cachaça, the crew laughed. Cachaça is what you need. So we tied up there for the night and went out drinking. I blacked out somewhere and woke up back on board. I never found out how. But no more chest cold, no hangover. And no map needed. It was all downstream from there. It was a crazy country, a tierra loca, Brazil in the year 1976.