We returned to Santarém to stay one more night, for the next morning, a Friday, was the day of the regional market at the Mercado 2000. Vendors of fish and produce come to the shopping center from all over the region, and I was eager to talk with the fishermen, to hear if they had stories about botos. Isabelle was particularly interested in learning which medicinal plants were for sale.
We spoke with a well-muscled, gray-haired vendor standing by a tiny stall whose wooden shelves were crammed with bark, leaves, birds’ nests, seeds, and bottles. In Portuguese, he introduced us to some of his inventory. These sesame seeds yield a fluid to prevent stroke, he explained. This bark, invirataya, can be burned to evict evil spirits. This pod, jucá, would cure intestinal ills. The grassy bird’s nest, which he called eva de chombo, would yield an infusion to strengthen the liver.
On and on he explained his elixirs: a tea for gastritis, a poultice for warts, syrups for coughs, baths for infertility and infidelity. All of them Isabelle recorded with great care. Finally, I asked if he had anything that would help attract botos. He looked confused. He reached into a paper sack behind the counter and handed me the dried head of a viper. “This attracts botos?” I asked through Isabelle. No, he had misunderstood; the snake head, he explained, attracts money.
Isabelle and I tried to clarify, but my request was so odd that he had trouble believing that attracting a boto was really what I sought. Next he brought out a shriveled brown object, which looked like a six-inch piece of chewed rawhide. “What is it?” I asked. “It is twenty-five dollars,” he answered. It was the dried vagina of a boto, he explained, and from this, a curandeiro could make a perfume that would help me attract a boyfriend. Horrors! “Tell him I have a man, I have a man!” I implored Isabella earnestly. If I had a man, and didn’t want money, what could be my problem? He considered for a moment. “Ah,” he said. A light came into his eyes that showed that help was at hand: He brought out a four-inch piece of what looked like ligament. It was a boto’s penis. “Infuse it into wine or liquor. The one who is weak must drink it,” he said. “You will have great sex!”
I thought it was time we adjourn to the fish market.
We spoke with a handsome young fisherman of African ancestry as he sponged off the white tile counter, preparing to close shop for the day. We spoke of the fish at first, and the dry season, and finally I asked about botos.
“When the boto comes out of the water, he dresses in white and wears a hat,” he told Isabelle in Portuguese. “When he takes off his hat, he becomes a dolphin again.” He said he knew this was true because he knows someone who had a baby by a boto: the child is so white he cannot go out in the sun.
His companion, the owner of the stall, chimed in. In addition to the white clothes, he told us, the boto also wears shoes of kari—armored catfish. And the female boto calls people into the water, especially men who flirt with them. This doesn’t happen here in Santarém—only in the country, he said. But his own father saw: as he was coming back from fishing, when they lived at a place called Lago Grande, he saw a man dressed completely in white, who jumped into the water and turned into a boto before his eyes. And yes, he assured us, women become pregnant by botos, but their babies have holes in the head and die very quickly.
It happened to one of his cousins: a boto had come to her one night, disguised as her husband. But her husband was away fishing. They made love as if in a dream. Nine months later, she gave birth to the baby. It was born in a gush of water. “It was as if,” he said, “the baby was made of water. The baby just melted away.”
As he told us this, his eyes flitted nervously, as if the very mention of the incident frightened him. “When you are alone in the water and the boto comes, you are afraid,” he said quietly. “They make a hole under the water—the Encante. And they really attract you. They seduce you. You must be careful—cuidado com o boto .”
We next approached an old man with clouded eyes, working behind a towering pile of foot-long, shovel-headed catfish called surubim. I asked him if he ever encountered botos. Yes, he said. “When the boto comes, he takes away the fish from the net. Once I was so angry, I shot at one. When a man is very angry, he does a stupid thing.” Fortunately, his shot missed. The boto has powers, he said, and then told us again how the dolphin comes to parties and seduces pretty women. A woman must be careful, he warned, especially if she has her period. The boto will enchant and seduce her, and she will remember it only as a dream.
Isabelle then told him that we had swum with botos, and that we planned to do so every day. “ Cuidado! ” he warned us, shaking a finger. “Why? Are we in danger of being enchanted?” I asked. Isabelle translated. “No, that’s not what he’s saying,” she told me. “He says they are very big animals, and they bite people.”
———
Of course, we knew the botos were capable of hurting us. Vera had warned us about their strength, and we remembered the boto who had rammed Roxanne, hitting her at the heart. Also, Steve Nordlinger had sent me a small news clipping earlier about Chuckles, the pink dolphin at the Pittsburgh Zoo. A zoo volunteer had forced her hand beneath the screening of his exhibit, and the dolphin, annoyed by this intrusion, had leapt up and bitten her finger. (She sued, but the court ruled the zoo was not liable.) When we later visited Chuckles, we learned he had also bitten several keepers, some of them rather seriously, in what the staff later considered may have been a territorial display during his rut.
We thought none of this surprising. But most people forget that dolphins, like all animals, have agendas we do not understand and under some circumstances can be dangerous. At the marine mammals conference in Orlando where we had met Vera, Scottish researchers had reported on shocking attacks of bottlenose dolphins on harbor porpoises. Unusual numbers of harbor porpoises began washing up on the beaches, especially off the Moray Firth, between 1991 and 1993. Postmortems revealed forty-two of them had been bludgeoned to death. The researchers discovered to their horror that, essentially, small gangs of thug dolphins were beating them up. Ben Wilson of the University of Aberdeen even had two videos of the attacks: Two or three adult dolphins would chase a single porpoise, who was clearly trying to escape; the dolphins relentlessly butted their victim, sometimes sending the poor porpoise flying clear out of the water. Wilson called the gruesome movie Jack the Flipper and questioned whether “Swim with Dolphins” programs were such a good idea.
None of this information, however, was going to keep me out of the water. Simply being with the botos was worth a great price. If anything, we were more eager than ever to see them that afternoon, because both Isabelle and I were getting our periods. I wanted to test if the stories that menstrual blood attracts the dolphins were true. We might also, I realized, discover whether there actually were any piranhas in the water.
On the boat ride to Ponto de Curucu, as Dianne applied lip gloss and jaborandi hair conditioner she had bought in Santarém, I swallowed six aspirin to increase my blood flow.
But on that day, the dolphins did not approach us. We saw them in the distance—perhaps five in all, fifteen yards or so away—but they did not come near. I wondered if our previous luck was merely a fluke.
The following morning, when we went out to the point, Isabelle stayed in town. She is fairer than I, and our previous outing had given her a searing sunburn, which she was treating with one of her many herbal salves. My skin stung, too: little blisters were forming on my arms and chest, and my face was red as a uakari’s. One night, I slept all night on top of a big wooden clothespin and never realized it, because my senses were flooded with pain from my sunburn. The itching that followed was even more annoying, especially once I located its source: hundreds of tiny brown ants discovered the bounty of my shedding skin and weeping blisters, and would flood into my bed each night to drink the fluid and collect the skin to carry it away. (“I hate it when insects eat my flesh,” I had commented to Dianne. “Yeah,” she agreed, “especially when you’re still alive. It’s OK when you’re dead, tho
ugh.”) We decided that we should limit our visits to the dolphins to times when the sun was less strong, in the early morning and in the late afternoon.
On this morning, Dianne and I sat together on the beach, waiting for the dolphins to appear. I grew impatient and paced along the sand, scanning, expectant. No waves transformed themselves into faces and foreheads and fins. I walked farther, and finally walked right into the water, making myself an offering. There I waited, my mind drifting on the waves, willing a boto to appear. Then, suddenly, a shadow on the water—the play of clouds on the waves?—rose to the surface directly in front of me, and resolved into the dorsal of a boto. And then it disappeared.
Did I imagine it? At first I was dumbstruck, then desperate. It must be there, I thought. And then, again— close—there were two! Two dark fins rose at once, just ten feet away.
I remembered Dianne. We had promised to call out to the other if either saw botos. She was at the other side of the point, a thousand yards off, and my voice wouldn’t carry. I started to run toward her, and as I rounded the point, I saw her waving her arms.
“Holy God, Sy!” She was breathless. “One came within five feet of me! And he blew!” It was so unexpected and so close, she said, that she was frightened. “I just stood there,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do.”
We stood together waist-deep in the water. “We are in their element,” I said. We sang for them, and splashed. Two again! One large, the other small—a baby born, perhaps, in June. They were ten feet away, then twenty, then thirty. Both leapt! The baby popped almost entirely out of the water. The face was so tiny, so perfect! Dianne’s skin, I noticed, was covered with goose bumps.
A third dolphin appeared. All three leapt from a common center, exploding in different directions—a starburst of flesh. One lay on its back, waving a flipper. Another, a gray one, rose, not ten feet away, and raised his head out of the water and looked at me. I could see his eyes focus on mine. And immediately another rose beside him and, turning his flexible neck, stared into my face.
The dolphins seemed to be getting closer. But now I realized I was swimming, and the water was over my head. Dianne, still waist-deep in the water, called to me: “You’re too far out!” I turned to see her, and she was only an inch tall, much farther away than I’d thought. I saw that the current had also carried me sideways and was about to sweep me around the point, where the current was much stronger. Reluctantly, I swam to shore.
“Jesus, I thought they were taking you away,” Dianne said.
How willingly I would have gone with them. I had surrendered to their Encante. In the water, I was a creature transformed: no longer terrestrial, no longer bipedal, I shed the world of earth and air: I left behind the way I breathe, the way I move, the very weight of my body. Each immersion offered a baptism, a new birth. Inside the water, I swam in the womb of Mystery, where pink dolphins looked into my face, where every element, including my own future, was utterly out of my control, and where the most impossible of possibilities come true.
As I emerged from the water, my body suddenly felt leaden, spent.
Dance of the Dolphin
"Our legend is that there was a very pretty girl in one family. Here, you see, we used to hold a ball—the Rose Ball—and before the dance, the girl came to bathe in the river. She didn’t notice she was being watched by a boto. But from that time on, the boto wanted her.”
Through Isabelle, Necca is telling us the story she learned from her grandparents. Necca’s full name is Ludinelda Marino Gonçalvez, and she is forty and wiry, with the high cheekbones of a Bourari Indian, a heritage of which she is proud.
Even though we hear her words in translation, as we sit beneath the thatched roof of the cabana where she sells fried fish and soft drinks at the edge of Lago Verde, we can see Necca is a master storyteller. She reveals her story slowly, slyly. As she speaks, her eyes slide from corner to corner, as if spotting some detail there to remind her of the next turn of events.
“The night of the ball,” Necca says, “the beautiful girl arrived with her boyfriend. But the boto was the handsomest man there. She looked at him and fell in love—and he with her. They were blind for one another.”
Oh yes, Dianne and I agreed with a glance. We knew that feeling: when love floods the senses, jams your sonar, blinds you to all else. Lightning might crash around you, eels and piranhas nibble at your toes, and you don’t care, because only One Thing matters—that longing which has overtaken your soul. We humans were made for that sweet, sweeping sickness. But what if you have fallen blindly, impossibly in love with a dolphin?
Necca continued: “One man realized that this was a boto. He chased him away. But the girl loved him. She loved him madly. At the next ball, she came and looked for him. There he was, and they danced all night in each other’s arms, and then they walked on the beach.
“They lay down in the sand, and there they made love. They did everything with each other,” Necca said, inviting us with her eyebrows to imagine the details. But after the lovers fell back into the sand exhausted, he suddenly leapt up and disappeared into the water.
“She was heartsick. She went to the village curandeiro, hoping he could help her find her lover. The curandeiro asked help from the Mother of the Lake. The Mother agreed to ask the Moon to call him back. For the girl was now pregnant. And the curandeiro saw that the father of the child was a boto.
“At the next full Moon was the next ball. The Moon called to the boto, and he came to the ball to meet his love. And then the girl told him she was carrying his child. Now he was forced to explain: though he loved her and longed to be with her, he could see her only at the balls, for he could change into a man only on those nights.
“It was months before the next ball. When they met again, she brought him his son. Every ball thereafter he came to see her, to dance with her and see their son.”
Necca choreographed a dance to tell the story. Braulio had told us this earlier: the dance is performed each year, the last week in July, at a festival at the water’s edge in Alter do Chão. Necca has danced in it, and now her beautiful twenty-four-year-old daughter, Keila, performs; when Keila’s young daughter is old enough, she will dance, too.
“Many people, old people, believe this story,” Necca told us. “Many girls today come to the balls hoping to meet a boto! For they are the handsomest men there. And when people come to see the dance, dolphins often come near the beach, as if they knew the dance was about them.”
As rain was our companion on earlier journeys, now our companion is fire. We had welcomed the rain, flooding the world with its brimming abundance; but though we dread the fires, we cannot escape them. Some days, on the horizon at Curucu, there are four or five columns of smoke; some days the air is leaden with it, pressing the river flat as quicksilver. One night, fire had nearly come into Alter do Chão itself, so close we could feel its gnawing heat. Always, somewhere, there is fire or smoke, insistent reminders of the greed consuming the world.
As we head to Curucu this morning, we see three big fires to the west, and the air is hazy. Only in the river can I find respite from the burning. As Dianne unpacks her photo gear, I swim out to meet the first fins. I breaststroke slowly and they come to me: first, the mother and baby; one very large pink adult; two big grays.
I am surrounded, but I do not know this; Dianne, taking photos from the top of the Gigante, later tells me there were dolphins all around me. Two pinkish tucuxis joined the group, one with a slash across the dorsal. For three-quarters of an hour, there was not one minute that I could not see a dolphin at eye level. As they surfaced, it seemed I could feel their glance. Or perhaps it was their sonar. Later, I would learn that people who work with marine dolphins say they feel the animals “sounding” them, throwing out trains of ultrasonic clicks created by moving muscles in the melon, and waiting for their echo to return. Their sonar retrieves a three-dimensional soundscape, a sonogram, of what lies ahead of them; the boto, with its flexible neck, can tur
n the head in a wide arc and obtain an exceptionally broad sounding. One researcher, Bill Langbauer at the Pittsburgh Zoo, told me when the sound waves hit him, it feels like humming with your teeth clenched.
But that was inside an aquarium tank. I swim inside of living water, and always I feel the water humming, charged with life like the blood in my veins. I cannot feel the botos sound me, but surely they are doing so. They can see through me, as God does. They do not touch me, but their soundings penetrate my flesh. They know my stomach is full and my womb is empty; they can see the faulty mitral valve in my heart. And yet, even possessed of this astonishing sonar, they still pull their sleek faces out of the water to look at my face. Why would my face be important to them? They can recognize me by the other nine-tenths of my body beneath the water. Yet they look into my face again and again. They must know we humans wear our souls on our faces. Perhaps, to them, too, a meeting is more profound when it is face-to-face.
And what do I know of them? I only know the sex of one—the mother with her baby. I do not know how long they have lived. I do not know how far they travel. I do not know if this group always stays together, or only comes together here to investigate the pale, terrestrial stranger who hangs in the column of water before them.
But somehow I am not frustrated that I will never learn the answers; this is not, I now know, what they have to teach me. Already, their kind had shown me so much: the botos brought me to Manaus, the impossible Paris in the Amazon; the botos drew me to the Meeting of the Waters. The botos drew me to Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo, and to Mamirauá, and now, to the clear waters here. Throughout these four journeys in the Amazon, I had followed them, though not in the way I had originally planned. For the verb “to follow” carries many meanings, most of which I hadn’t been aware of when I had decided to follow them. To proceed behind them, to go after them in pursuit, as I had envisioned when I’d hoped to trace their migration, was merely one way of following. Other meanings are more subtle and profound: to be guided by; to comply with; to watch or observe closely; to accept the guidance, command, or leadership of; to come after in time; to grasp the meaning or logic of. And so, without chasing them along a migration, without a single hit on Vera’s telemetry, I had followed them nonetheless. In Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo, I had followed them to the spirit realm, where shamans commune with the powers of the plants and visit the Encante; with Gary, I had followed them back through time. At Mamirauá, they had taken me to the heart of the Amazon’s modern conservation dilemma. And now, I followed them still, hanging in the water before them, ready to receive their gifts and their guidance.
Journey of the Pink Dolphins Page 24