After we returned the equipment, we continued to watch the dolphins every day. Our backs and legs ached from the boat’s hard, backless benches; our skin blistered; we stank with sweat—and all of this vanished with the sight of a fin, a face. Every day they came, surrounding us, six, eight, ten or more at a time. They seemed to recognize us, though we didn’t recognize them; if Ruffles or Shika or Scar ever reappeared, the water and glare kept their identities secret.
Each day brought some fresh wonder. One morning, tucuxis joined the botos, and one of the small gray dolphins rolled and rolled at the surface, over and over like a child twirling herself dizzy. Another morning, the whole river seemed to be gathering its breath for song: the tucuxis splashed, the dolphins blew, and then from the forest, the howler monkeys began to chorus, their voices growing in intensity like a gathering wind. Their song rose and sank and pounded, its melody curved like the botos’ smooth bodies. Then their song died, and almost instantly, the dolphins vanished, taking even the waves on the water with them.
Each surfacing brought a physical thrill, like the sudden drawing in of breath, or the rush of a shudder. With each sighting, the waters opened with new promise. Yet at the end of each day our longing was undiminished. And when we left Mamirauá, we knew our journey was not over.
What did I want from them? No longer did I hunger to map their travels, Point A to Point B. No longer did I need to count them, to time their surfacings, to measure their breaths. I no longer wanted to pursue them; now I wanted to join them. I longed to swim, like them, with my nostrils above water and my lips below. I longed to look into a face, and know that face. I wanted, in short, to partake of their grace—not simply the grace of their effortless beauty, but the grace of a benediction. But what form this might take, how or where I might seek it, I had no idea—only that this still awaited me, an unspoken promise.
Later, back in New Hampshire, I remembered Dianne’s dream of lovers and diamonds after Ricardo first consulted the dolphin spirits, back in Peru. “Glass is good luck for you,” he had told her. “So is clear water.”
Perhaps the dream had offered that promise.
PART FIVE
THE MOON'S TEARS
“The Sun and the Moon were once lovers,” the young man tells me, “but they were separated by the god Tupa.” We are standing waist-deep in the clear blue waters of the Tapajoós, watching for dolphins. “They were impossible lovers,” he says. His dark eyes dart into mine to make sure I understand what he means.
“But sometimes they meet. Not often. It is called. . . .” He is looking for the word in English.
“The eclipse,” says Dianne.
“Yes. Eclipse,” he says. “But it is rare that they meet, very rare.”
Exiled to a realm separate from her beloved, the moon wept. And according to the creation myth of the Mawé Indians of Amazônia, that is how their world was formed: “They say it is the moon’s tears that formed the Amazon,” Felicio says. “It is the river of impossible love.”
Tapajoós and Arapiuns Rivers
Burning
The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians about longing for the Lord: “For now we see in a mirror darkly. . . .” He might as well have been writing of the dark mirror of the Amazon, concealing all but fleeting glimpses of the dolphins. Its mirroring qualities are both the danger and the revelation of the water-world: we are blinded to its depths by the image of our own reflection. No wonder the authors of the Bible painted God’s appearance as a man, only omnipotent. No wonder river people believe the Encante is a world like this one, only brighter. We see our own desires reflected and magnified in the river’s polished surface—but then we miss the truth of its depths.
To penetrate the surface, to pass through that dark mirror, requires a soul’s rebirth. Paul hints at this promise as he writes of the future: “. . . but then, face-to- face.” By what baptism could I come face-to-face with the botos? The answer was shockingly simple: by meeting them in clear water. Clear water: that was the message in Dianne’s dream.
I had found no published studies of dolphins in the Amazon’s clear-water tributaries. But we had seen film clips of botos in clear water, and discovered they had all been filmed in one location: beside a stretch of white sand beach along the Rio Arapiuns, in the Brazilian state of Para. Crews had always filmed in the dry season, since the water was shallowest then. Now, in November, the water was nearing its lowest point.
In our e-mail correspondence, Vera provided us a contact: in the little resort village of Alter do Chão, an American expat, David Richardson, knew where to find the dolphins, and was said to have sometimes swum with them in the clear waters of the Rio Tapajós. Both Alter do Chão and the site on the Arapiuns were within a day’s travel from Santarém, the third-largest city in the Amazon, two degrees south of the equator.
But to get there, we would have to fly through skies full of fire.
With the hot, dry weather brought on by El Niño, the fires set each dry season by loggers and ranchers throughout Amazonia were burning out of control. The New York Times reported that at least 10 percent of the 2 million square miles of Amazon forest had been destroyed by fire. “Raging fires in Brazil dwarf the ones in Indonesia and Malaysia and could ultimately pose a larger threat to the rain forest’s rare and uncharted animal species, the supply of breathable air, and even the world’s climate,” we read in an ABC News story on the Internet.
Forest fires in Indonesia and Malaysia had been burning since mid-July, to international dismay. Smoke from a 4.2-million-acre blaze completely obscured the island of Java from satellite photos; in September, the smoke had been so thick that an airplane crashed and a supertanker collided with a cargo ship on the same day. Those incidents made the Asian fires headline news for weeks. But the Amazon fires got comparatively little press.
What we had heard, though, was disturbing. Vera e-mailed us that the low water again meant hydropower was rationed. Phone service was spotty; we never could reach David Richardson. Manaus, we had heard, was engulfed in smoke. Another friend forwarded correspondence from a colleague in Brasilia, who said some days the smoke was so bad that planes couldn’t land; many people were hospitalized with breathing problems. I bought an inhaler for the trip.
But most Brazilians didn’t seem to think the fires were unusual. At the Miami airport, I asked the Brazilian ticket agent at the Varig counter for news of the Amazon fires; surely the airlines would know the state of the skies. “Oh, the fires burn, the rain puts them out,” she said cheerfully. “You come back and show your tan!” At the airport at Manaus, we met a German, the president of a timber firm, who was flying to Belém; he said he had heard nothing out of the ordinary. At the Hotel Monaco, no one could furnish us any information; we began to wonder if the few news reports had been exaggerated.
But when we arrived in Santarém, we could see the land was parched. Charred trees and singed fence posts lined many of the roads; in some places, even the red soil was blackened by fire. “It’s what they do this period of the year,” said the cabdriver who took us to our hotel. “Just the fields are supposed to be burnt, but the fire always escapes. It’s normal. Only this year, it’s too dry.”
Because the river was so low, electricity was rationed to twelve hours a day—which twelve hours varied daily. Because our room at the Hotel Tropical was aircondicionado, it had no screens; when we opened the windows at night, mosquitoes and moths flooded inside, and I wondered whether bats might soon follow to hunt them. But our winged roommates were the least of our problems. We still couldn’t reach David Richardson. When we dialed his number, we kept getting a recording we couldn’t understand. Overhearing our distress, a guest at the hotel, a wholesome Belgian woman with short blond hair, decoded the message: his was a cell phone, and it was now out of range.
Isabelle Druant, we learned, was a forty-year-old agronomy student who had spent a year teaching English in Brazil at Belo Horizonte. She had come here on vacation. So far, it wasn’t very
relaxing. She had made arrangements to travel on a boat named the Sim Blanco, but then discovered that it had sunk ten years ago. When it had entered the harbor at Manaus, all the passengers had rushed to one side to see the beautiful city, and the boat flipped over and sank. Isabelle then booked herself on the João Pessoa, a sturdy-sounding, 345-ton, three-tier passenger and cargo vessel. Normally, it could accommodate 425 passengers, but now it carried only 150 because the entire bottom tier was jammed with cargo: coffee, wheat, farina. The boat was so overloaded, she said, that when she first boarded, she had climbed up a plank, and once everything was aboard, the angle of the plank had reversed.
When they reached Santarém, she and the other passengers had planned on spending their first night on the boat, which was included in the fare. But that afternoon, they were advised to leave the vessel, although they were assured they could leave their luggage aboard. Isabelle thought the boat was listing strangely, so she removed her luggage from the cabin.
When she came back, she found the boat had sunk—along with three cars, two motorcycles, two horses (who swam ashore), the coffee, wheat, farina, and all the passengers’ luggage—including all the worldly possessions of at least one family who was moving to Santarém. We later encountered the captain at a restaurant, who told us the river was so low the boat had hit a dock piling, breaking the bilge pump. There was no insurance.
Isabelle relayed this story while Dianne and I wolfed down sandwiches on the Hotel Tropical’s poolside patio—I had ordered vegetariano and had been issued a ham-and-cheese. We told her about our project. We needed a translator. Would she like to join us? Isabelle said she’d be delighted.
I asked her for news about the Amazon fires. “Fires? I haven’t heard anything about fires,” she said.
The next day, the three of us took the bus to Alter do Chão, thirty-one miles away, to look for David Richardson. A taxi driver had told us we could find him at the Indian museum there, the village’s sole cultural attraction.
The museum is a big yellow cement structure with a red tile roof, a block from the bus stop along the red dirt road. We were met on the steps by the cleaning staff. David wasn’t there, they told us, but his wife, Maria Antonia, was. A fine-boned woman with horn-rimmed gold glasses and shoulder-length black hair, she told us David was in Manaus till the end of December. She knew nothing about the botos. Pressed, she finally gave us a cell-phone number for Manaus. She didn’t offer us use of the museum phone.
We found a telephone outpost behind a pile of rubble next to the police station. David’s cell phone was turned off. But thanks to Isabelle, we discovered that the pretty telefonista knew David’s two boatmen: one was named Braulio and the other Simão. They live in town, she said. Everyone knows them.
We walked downhill along the dirt road to a little open-air restaurant near the big cement church that presides over the village square. Dianne was hungry. While we shared fried fish, isca de pirarucú , we looked out over striped beach umbrellas and thatched cabanas gathered around the turquoise Lago Verde, feeding into the blue Tapajós. Great gnarled mango and cashew trees, laden with fruit, grew parklike in the white and lavender sand.
The proprietor of the restaurant directed us to Braulio’s house. He lived two doors away. Isabelle stood in the courtyard and clapped her hands: “Oi da casa! ” she shouted, the local equivalent of ringing a doorbell that isn’t there. A broad-faced man with gold teeth, thick glasses, and cropped gray hair leapt out of a hammock and limped to greet us. I asked Isabelle to explain our project, and handed Braulio my card. He stared at it intently. It was upside down.
Could he help us find the botos? You can sometimes see them right here, he answered, but they show themselves briefly and then hide. The best place to see them, he said, was a place called Ponto de Curucu, a spit of white sand named after one of the frogs you can hear calling at night. Did Braulio think the dolphins would let us swim with them? Nobody ever tried except for David, he replied.
So together we walked across the sandy bottom of the shallow lagoon to his fifty-eight-foot-long wooden boat, ambitiously named Gigante do Tapajós, and sailed away.
After we left Alter do Chão, the sandy banks of the Tapajós were deserted. We saw no cement houses, no stilt houses, no floating houses, no other boats—just blue water, white sand, and then forest. Within an hour, we were there. Braulio carried the anchor to the white sand beach and we sat beside it in a row, like spectators at a sporting event, waiting for the botos to appear to us on cue.
This is impossible, I thought.
And then they came.
There were two of them. Both were charcoal gray. We had read that botos tend to be darker in clear water, the pigment perhaps protecting the skin from the sun—and with their bulging melons, they looked like dapper English businessmen dressed in gray flannel and bowler hats. One began to spin in the water, perhaps thirty yards away. His flippers, surprisingly, were pink. As he twirled on his back, he opened them, as if inviting us to join him.
Dianne and I stripped off our shirts and slacks to join the dolphins in the water. “Are you sure there are no piranha?” asked Isabelle. Of course, I had no idea; but David Richardson had swum here safely. “No piranha!” I announced confidently—and, reckless, rushed into the clear blue water.
Dianne and Isabelle joined me. Isabelle hoped Braulio wouldn’t look. “Just three white chicks standing in the Amazon in our underwear,” I said. “What is so unusual about that?”
The botos came within ten meters of us, clearly curious, but always keeping to the deeper waters beyond. Never had we seen a clearer view: for the first time, we could see the botos’ flippers beneath the water, beating like wings.
For an hour, they swam back and forth in front of us. We saw no unusual behaviors, nothing we hadn’t previously recorded, but now we could see them—the flippers, the head and the back and the tail—all at once. Their bodies were perfect. For the first time, they were not fragments, but whole. We stood in the water, transfixed.
After they left, we sat on the beach, limp from excitement. Only then did we notice the fire. A change in the wind brought its big cinders floating toward us like a flock of burnt butterflies. On the southeast horizon, we could see a column of smoke rising, fat and malevolent as a tornado, bruising the afternoon sky purple. The ashes grew larger and took on more shapes, like ghosts of the creatures the fires had displaced: sparrows, caterpillars, spiders, leaves, frogs. We asked Braulio about the fire. “It starts for farms, then burns out of control,” he told us matter-of-factly, through Isabelle. Then he announced that night was coming, and we should head back. We left the smell of smoke behind.
It was dusk by the time we returned. The power was out and everything was dark, quiet, and warm. As we walked back over the beach, the little frogs in the green lagoon were singing. “Curucu! Curucu!” they cried, as if affirming this was the place to which we had been called.
———
We made arrangements to move our base from Santarém. Isabelle picked our new hotel: Pousada Alter do Chão. It faces Lago Verde and the naked red mountain that gives this town its name. “Alter do Chão” means “above the floor” in ancient Portuguese, we were told. The hotel has a wonderful restaurant on its porch. Roses bloom in the doorway and bougainvillea drapes from the roof. A Telepará pay phone, which we never were able to work, yawns its yellow mouth at the lake. Realizing the fan would be of little use, for now electricity was rationed to only eight hours a day (which turned out to be merely a theoretical maximum), we chose what we hoped would be the coolest room, fronting on the porch. We imagined that if we took cold showers and then lay naked and motionless on our beds, we might not swelter. In this we were wrong. But our choice was a good one. Our pousada was lovely and tranquil. The town hosts only about six hundred full-time residents, we were told, and in the mornings we woke to the sounds of whisking brooms and crowing roosters. In the evenings, we listened to the night songs of the frogs: some clatter like glass beads in
a jar, others thrum like a drum skin rubbed with a wet finger, and still others, our favorite, repeat in winking peeps the name of the place we meet the dolphins: “Curucu, curucu.”
Our motherly, dark-haired hostess, Socorro, which means “help,” was aptly named. In back of her open-air kitchen, where she prepared meals on two large gas stoves beneath a tin roof, she had filled a small courtyard with orchids. There were more than two hundred of them, and she knew every individual intimately. Sometimes we would accompany her on her rounds as she watered them, and she would point out to us the unique graces of each: “Como bailarina,” she would say, showing us leaves that cascaded like a lacy waterfall; “Pecino ,” she would note, pointing out blooms as tiny as the head on a dressmaker’s pin.
Each of them, she had rescued from the fires. “One day, three years ago, I was out walking in the jungle near the hotel,” she explained to us through Isabelle, “and I saw all these beautiful orchids in the trees. But the next time I went to see them, they were gone. The dry-season burns had killed them all. I wanted to cry.” So the next year, and each year thereafter, she has made the same pilgrimage into the forest, to rescue the orchids before the fires start. She removes them from their perches—they are epiphytes, perching harmlessly on boughs—and notes carefully where she found each one. She takes them home and transfers them to the hollowed-out halves of coconut shells. She feeds them with the burnt seeds of the açaí palms that grow in the front yard. And there they stay, until the jungle grows green again. Then she takes them back to where she found them. “Three years ago, there were far fewer fires,” she said. And now the river was the lowest she could remember: “This year is the worst dry period. I’ve seen pictures. There has not been so much beach since 1953.”
She worried about us the way she worried about her orchids. She was excited to learn about our project—she had often seen the botos in Lago Verde, and thought them very beautiful. But she was a bit concerned as well. She teased us—the botos, she said, might want to take us away—especially Dianne, who, despite the heat, always appeared at breakfast as coiffed and fresh and beautiful as her neatly folded clothes. “Careful of those dolphins,” Socorro said to Dianne with a wink. “Cuidado com o boto.”
Journey of the Pink Dolphins Page 23