Journey of the Pink Dolphins

by Sy Montgomery

  But since Peru was removed from the travelers’ advisory list in 1993, tourism has rebounded. Today some 30,000 foreign tourists and 73,000 Peruvians visit the region each year, for it is the gateway to Peru’s Amazonian jungle. Its enchantment beckons adventurers of all sorts. Some come to kayak, some come to count birds; some come to meet Indians, some come to watch monkeys; some come to take home blowguns and monkey-teeth necklaces. Some come to immerse themselves in the keening calls of the jungle night. They come in search of forest primeval; they come in search of their souls.

  Tour guides still tell of some of these seekers. There was the man from Wisconsin who insisted on wandering barefoot through the jungle, drinking river water, and sleeping without a mosquito net. (He emerged from his adventure with punctured feet, cramping diarrhea, and bug bites gone septic.) There was the self-styled “shaman” from California who came to sample the sacred drugs of the local Ayahuasqueras. (He spent most of his time throwing up, Iquitos and in the end, begged to go home.) Some tourists keep coming back year after year. But Iquitos feels like a city where no one lives; and in fact a sizable portion of the population stays only a short time. Teachers, evangelists, aid workers, soldiers, and sailors do their tour of duty and move on; traffickers in illegal drugs and contraband animals take what they can, get out, come back. “No one asks questions,” Jamie says. “You can get anything you want here; you can be anything you want here.”

  Though it was founded as a Jesuit mission in the 1750s, since the rubber boom Iquitos has been the nefarious trade capital of the Peruvian jungle. The rubber barons who built their headquarters here were responsible for some of the worst atrocities committed against the rubber tappers: 30,000 Indians were murdered on the Putumayo River, just to the north, sacrificed to the rubber empire of the infamous Júlio César Arana. One of his overseers had as his motto, “Kill the fathers first, enjoy the virgins afterwards.” Despite its mansions and tiled walls and riverside promenade, even at the height of its wealth, Iquitos harbored few pretensions to grace. Prostitutes filed their teeth razor-sharp like piranhas. On carnival days, section chiefs would toast with champagne the man who boasted of murdering the most Indians that year.

  Exposing the cruelties of Arana in a series of newspaper articles for a London-based weekly, Walt Hardenburg, a twenty-seven-year-old railroad engineer from New York, hastened the end of the Amazon’s rubber boom in 1913, inciting worldwide outrage at the atrocities. But today, from this bend in the river 2,300 miles due west of the Atlantic, Iquitos continues to bleed forth the stolen lifeblood of the jungle and its people: oil, timber, cocaine, animals.

  Iquitos is still an isolated frontier town. Though it now has radio and telephones, there are still no road links with the world outside; you get here by air or by boat. We had flown from Manaus to the little border town of Tabatinga, where Brazil meets Colombia and Peru, and where we’d stayed in the tiny Hotel Christiana in a room swarming with mosquitoes. There were no hooks for mosquito nets, and its blue-painted cement walls were impenetrable to the thumb tacks Dianne had brought for such an emergency. We determined the mosquitoes were attracted to the lidless, seatless toilet in a doorless, low-lying corner of the room, which was surrounded by a small pond of leaking water. “You would insist that we come during the wet season,” Dianne said. “It’s high water even in our room!”

  We’d set out at four-thirty that morning on the twenty-seat boat, the Loreto Rápido —so named because the boat’s 230-horsepower diesel engine permits travel at the impressive pace of forty miles per hour, arriving in Iquitos ten hours later. We had come here to meet Moises Chavez, who works for a friend of mine, Paul Beaver. With business partner Suzy Faggard, Paul ran the only lodge in the area, on the edge of the 800,000-acre Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo Community Reserve on the Tahuayo River, a day’s travel from Iquitos. The reserve and its surrounding area were astonishingly rich in wildlife, with more species of primates (14) and rodents (26) than any other area of South America—and there were plenty of dolphins, Paul had promised. He generously offered his lodge as our base, and arranged for Moises to act as our guide.

  Moises met us at the garden of our cozy hotel, La Pascana, in Iquitos. A small, strong man of thirty-eight, with wide, high cheekbones and a voice soft as wet leaf litter, Moises’ dark, dreamy eyes always seem to be looking past you, as if scanning the forest for a particular tree in fruit or a troop of monkeys or the cryptic form of a sleeping sloth. His father had been a teacher, whom the government sent to isolated tribes. With his seven brothers and four sisters, Moises grew up learning about the jungle from the Indians on the Napo River: the Yaguas, who decorate their faces daily with elaborate red designs and dress in grass skirts, and the Secoyas, who pierce their bodies and hang their fishhooks conveniently from holes in the nose.

  “In Iquitos, many years ago, before the Belen market was built, Indians lived there, on the bank of the river,” Moises told us. “What happened was, many young girls and young mens celebrated on Saturdays. But it got out of control. Everyone’s gonna drink beer. The dolphin watched this for one year. And when this one girl comes to the river, that dolphin, he’s gonna watch her. But she doesn’t know. Some people say the dolphin’s just a dolphin, but the Indian people, they know a different story.”

  Moises knows the stories well. He has heard dozens of them, over and over—from his father, from his grandmother, from his Yagua and Secoya friends. The beginnings of the stories are always long and convoluted, like the meandering canals of the Amazon, and his sentences, like the waterways, crisscross one another, weaving past and future, germane and incidental. He recites with almost poetic cadence. He recites them trancelike, with a faraway look in his dark eyes, as if seeing his way back in time.

  “One day—a day like today—they gonna celebrate a really big party,” Moises told us. “One day, an orchestra from Iquitos was going to play. . . .”

  That night, when everyone was drinking and dancing, a handsome man with white skin and blue eyes showed up. The beautiful girl asked the young man to dance. “I’ve never seen you before,” she said. “Where is your home?” He said, “I live here—I saw you one time when you swam by the beach near Iquitos.” But the girl, said Moises, had never seen him.

  She quickly fell in love with the stranger. And that very night, he asked her to marry him. “I will give you a present,” he said, “a gold watch. My father is a rich man, and I have many gold items at home. I will invite you to my house someday.” And that night, along with the gold watch, he gave her a fine diamond and a gold ring. She was very happy. But the young man warned her not to show her new gifts to her mother or brothers or father. “Hide them,” he said. “They will be good luck for you.”

  “Till two-thirty in the morning they danced,” Moises told us. “They planned to meet the next week, at the next dance. They said good-bye and he disappeared.”

  But the greedy girl couldn’t resist boasting to her parents, her brothers, and all her friends about her rich new boyfriend, and all of them showed up at the dance looking to meet him. “Then,” said Moises, “about three o’clock in the morning, they tried to restrain him. But he disappeared. One of the men heard a big splash in the water; but no one thought anything of it.”

  The next week, the stranger returned to the party, seeking the girl. This time, he brought her beautiful clothes with gold buttons, beautiful shoes, a golden necklace. They would be married soon, he said. Again, he begged her, “Please don’t tell your family or girlfriends.” But she told everyone in Iquitos she would soon be married to a rich man.

  “And the dolphin knew,” said Moises. “Because the spirit of the dolphin was always watching her.”

  The next week the stranger returned sad and angry. He told her, “I am very sad. This is the last day I will ever see you.” And with that he jumped into the water and disappeared. At that instant, her beautiful shoes turned into big armored catfish. Her ring turned into a leech. Her watch turned into a crab and crawled away. Her neckl
ace became an anaconda.

  “She screamed and cried, but didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened,” Moises said softly. “Three months later, she’s in the hospital. She’s gone crazy. And the people saw there were hundreds of dolphins in the water by the river.

  “My grandmother told me this when we lived in the Napo River with the Yagua Indians,” said Moises. ” So I know this is true.”

  Carefully, Moises reviewed our gear for the trip upriver. He found one item conspicuously missing. Even though we both had headlamps and strong little flashlights, he insisted we would need a set of giant flashlights, in case we became lost in the jungle at night. In pursuit of these, we set off together for the market at Belen.

  Its stalls are arrayed along the sloping street that spills down to the river and its drowning shantytown. Little booths no wider than a card table offer cigarettes and cassette tapes, socks and hammocks, lace and fishhooks. On the outskirts of Belen, where the average family includes nine children, a month’s supply of Lo-Femenal birth control pills goes for the equivalent of 50 cents—the cost of three packs of giant bobby pins from China at an adjoining stall. Mingled with American drug store fare was the produce of the jungle: piles of dried frogs and fish, the bleached white shells of giant armadillos, the teeth of piranhas, strange fruits with luscious names and sensuous shapes. This large, leguminous inga tastes like a guava, Moises explained; this sapote like an orange. The strawberry-shaped pijayo is the fruit of a palm, whose peach-pit-sized seeds can be roasted like cashews.

  The air was thick with the smell of roasting flesh. On charcoal grills, the scaly heads and feet of the river crocodiles called caimans were cooking, and the hocks of peccaries, and shish-kabobs of tiny Andean swifts, their little bills and feet burning black on wooden skewers. One stall sold giant Amazonian snails with shells bigger than a man’s fist. A soup made from them, Moises told us, would cure tuberculosis. An old man in the neighboring stall was selling bottles of fermented honey. Moises explained there are ten different kinds of bees in the jungle, but only one produces the honey from which this elixir is made. A shaman must bury the honey in the ground for several weeks, then mix it with various barks and saps; this produces a medicine good for arthritis, and for young women whose wombs are cold. Even in the city, even the most westernized shop owners and hoteliers and restaurateurs still look to the jungle for its magic. There is hardly a businessman in Iquitos who doesn’t keep a boa constrictor’s head somewhere on the premises, or a jar of dolphin grease, he told us, for it’s believed that these items will attract money and women.

  In fact, sometimes the charms work too well. Moises told us of a man he knew, named Antonio, who learned from a type of shaman called a banco how to make potions and enchant charms. Antonio had collected half a bottle of dolphin fat, and smeared it on his hands; it is said that any girl you touch will then find you irresistible. “I saw this work great,” Moises said. Women swirled around Antonio, and finally, the dolphin grease enchanted the most beautiful one of all. Within three months, Antonio made her his wife.

  But one day, Antonio went away on business. He returned to find his wife had left him. Moises remembers his friend’s anguish: he talked in his sleep, calling for his lost love. Eventually, Antonio sought another shaman’s help, and he found out why his wife had left. She had come across the dolphin potion, not knowing what it was. Picking up the greasy jar, she had unwittingly smeared some on her hand. She had been unable to resist the very next man she saw. “You see,” Moises said, “the dolphin’s power is not always under your control.”

  Then I felt Dianne’s hand on my arm. “Oh—my—God—Sy.” She was staring at a short, dark woman in a pink dress. Clinging to her shoulder was a baby pygmy marmoset, the world’s tiniest New World primate, a minute, wide-eyed sprite. Its body, not including the ringed black and tawny tail, stretched less than four inches long. It is an infinitesimal, monkey version of a Pekinese: with its large round head, pug nose, and big eyes, a pygmy marmoset is the incarnation of adorable. We had hoped to see one in the wild. They live in groups of seven to nine individuals, communicating with one another in high-pitched trills, warning whistles, and clicking threats. They sleep in tree holes at night. By day, they drink tree sap and with tiny, dexterous, orange hands, capture insects and spiders and pluck fruits and buds. Male and female mate for life and are devoted parents. The father actually assists the mother when she gives birth. He receives and cleans the babies, usually twins, who, like us, are born hairless and helpless. Babies first cling to a parent’s belly, and later ride like jockeys on the back. To procure the infant on this woman’s shoulder, someone had shot both of its parents. Its sibling had probably also died.

  Next to the woman, a black-faced young woolly monkey clutched a man’s hair. A titi monkey, head swiveling in alarm, clung to another vendor’s arm. I had seen titis at zoos; they sit with their flexible tails intertwined with a mate’s or a friend’s. At a stall where twenty men were playing cards, one wore a baby white-fronted capuchin monkey like a bracelet. The terrified infant gripped him tight with all the force of its humanlike hands, feet, and prehensile tail, but still screamed with every motion of his captor’s wrist. These monkeys had almost certainly been obtained in the same way as the marmoset: the parents had been shot so the babies could be sold here today.

  In cages, we found yellow-cheeked parrots, canary-winged parakeets, and more tiny primates, saddleback and black-mantled tama-rins—all endangered species. Two baby caimans, two hard-shelled water tortoises, and two more tamarins were packed into a one-by-one-and-a-half-foot-square cage with a baby agouti, an aquatic rodent with a piglike body and a rabbitlike head. The tiny tamarins clutched each other like frightened children. They tore at Dianne’s heart. Once, when she had worked as a keeper at the Fresno Zoo, she and her husband, Pepper, had raised two infant tamarins, whose mother for some reason could not nurse them. Both had been charmed by the creatures’ agility, their inquisitiveness, and their constant chatter to one another as they raced around the couple’s house, climbing the curtains, leaping from lampshades with what surely looked like exuberant joy. Do tamarins feel joy? “I’m sure of it,” said Dianne. “Being a tamarin must be a rush.”

  Atop the cage, another tamarin and a squirrel monkey were tethered by their waists with dirty string. “CITES, Appendix One,” Dianne said with gritted teeth. She was speaking of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which she has repeatedly attended. Yearly, this convention—of which Peru is a signatory—convenes its delegates to decide upon the species of animals that need protection from commercial exploitation. Except for the agouti, the sale of every species we had seen was strictly prohibited by international law. A white POLICIA truck was parked not twenty yards away, but no one seemed concerned; the police do not interfere in such matters. In Iquitos, the officers tend to reserve their attentions for endeavors more lucrative. The desperately rare tamarins were priced at 15 soles each, less than $5; the pygmy marmoset for 20, about $6. I mourned the slain father marmoset who had meticulously cleaned his now-stolen infant, the titi monkey who should be twining his tail around a mate’s, the tortoises who might otherwise live for thirty or forty or perhaps even eighty years. But to the people selling these animals, their lives mattered not at all. What mattered to them was the handful of soles.

  Feeling sick, we headed back to our hotel. As we left, we passed a woman who was lying on her back on the table of her little stall, her face aglow with rapture. Her hands were occupied and her eyes focused upon something that we couldn’t see, because a curtain of leather belts was in the way; we assumed she was playing with a baby. We rounded a bend to see the object of her delight: she was counting coins, dropping one after another upon her belly, savoring each metallic clink. I remembered Moises’ story of the boastful girl whose gold watch became a crab. I wished the coins could transform themselves back into animals, and like the crab, crawl away.

  Though there are no dolphins in Iqui
tos’s underwater city, we found one in the center of the municipal square.

  On the Plaza de Armas, a bright pink, eight-foot fiberglass sculpture sprang from the center of a round reflecting pool, perched atop a three-tiered fountain spewing water onto the litter below. The dolphin statue points its snout at a thirty-degree angle toward the sky, its big flippers spread like wings. Dianne observed it looked like an aquatic Peter Pan about to take flight.

  The dolphin statue materialized from a dream. Roxanne Kremer, a former mineral trader from California in her late forties, says a vision of a pink dolphin atop the fountain came to her in her sleep one night in 1987. She believes dreams are important: “I set about transforming this dream into reality,” she told us. Friends made a mold of the dolphin in her Rosemead backyard, and she had it shipped air-freight to Iquitos in 1988.

  The statue was as much a monument to her crusade as to the species. She told us her story when we met her in Miami the year before. Roxanne first encountered pink dolphins on a mineral- and crystal-collecting trip along the Yarapa River, the first tributary of the Maranon. As the dolphins approached her canoe, she said, she began to hyperventilate with excitement. “I saw this pink cloud under the blackish water. There were four or five dolphins around my boat. They looked like a huge, nude human . . . like a mermaid! And they started to communicate with me.” She’d been warned not to put her hands in the water, but she couldn’t resist: she beat her hands on the side of her canoe, and was rewarded by the dolphins’ hissing spouts.

  She didn’t want to leave them that afternoon, but her guide insisted, warning that the dolphins could come and take her away to their enchanted city if she stayed the night on the river. As she left, she said, a huge rainbow spread itself across the sky; and that night, from her lodge, she heard the coughlike spouting of their breath, as if calling her back. “The dolphins struck a deep chord in me that transcends kinship,” she had told us. “They say the dolphins steal you away—and they did. They didn’t take me physically, but they did transform the course of my life.”