———
I always save the moment I enter the water for them. Dianne and I wait at the edge of the river, and I do not swim until the dolphins come. I spot one fin, close, and give my body to the water.
Dianne stays at the edge of the river, or sometimes on the roof of the Gigante, photographing. She is a strong swimmer, but her father was a sea captain; those who know water most intimately, I have found, tend to more wisely respect its dangers. But I lose myself utterly in the water, like a soul leaving a body.
Now that we have come here daily for a week, we recognize seven individuals: there are two medium-sized grays, the bowler-hatted businessmen. In fact, Dianne knows an Englishman who owns an actual bowler hat, and we named one of the dolphins after him—David. The other we named Gary, whose distinctive rain hat had been the envy of everyone on my second trip to Peru. One very large gray dolphin we name after Vera. A very large pink one we call Valentino. Another is gray with pink lips, and we name him that—Pink Lips. And occasionally we spot a mother and baby. It is nearing Christmastime, so we call them Mary and Jesus.
Pink fins, gray bellies, the bulbous soft heads; I so wish I could touch them. I can feel the currents their bodies make as they slip through the water. One day, I look down into the water beneath me and see a large gray form swim under my feet. All but immersed in these clear blue waters, I feel as if embraced by paradise.
In Curucu, we had found an ideal site. We could imagine no situation better. But we still felt we should visit the dolphins of the Arapiuns.
At the Mercado 2000 in Santarém, we had met a fisherman with thinning hair and strong hands named Valdomiro Ribero who had spent a month on the Arapiuns when he was fifteen. He would never forget it. “There were many, many dolphins there,” he had told us. One night when he had slept on the beach, he had spotted two strange-looking girls, perhaps eleven and thirteen years old. Their skin was very white, he said, but had reddish spots. And they had very little hair. These girls, he had been told, were the boto’s daughters.
Certainly, there had to have been a reason that film crews had bypassed our lovely Alter do Chão and made the day-long journey upriver to the Arapiuns to the west. Perhaps, Dianne and I thought, the waters were even clearer there, the dolphins more easily seen.
We found making arrangements for the journey difficult. Not every boatman will risk it. Braulio told us his Gigante could not negotiate the current. The portion of the Tapajós leading to the Arapiuns is difficult to navigate—there are dry spots and rapids—and besides, he said, the place is full of mosquitoes.
It took us five days to arrange for a boat. Sadly, Isabelle was leaving us, to visit Brazilian friends in Belo Horizonte, but she helped us get the trip organized before she had to depart. Socorro knew a boatman, Gilberto Pimentel, who agreed to consider the trip. Necca’s beautiful daughter, Keila, speaks some English, and she agreed to help translate our negotiations for the boat. Grateful for Keila’s and Socorro’s help, we invited them to accompany us. To our surprise and delight, they accepted.
Through Keila, Gilberto explained that his boat was a strong one. It is named Boanares, after his father, who accompanies him on his trips. “But even with a strong boat, the trip can be dangerous,” he warned. “Many boats break up when the water is angry, and there are many shifting sandbars. The river is so wide that you cannot swim to shore.” We should plan on bringing supplies in case we got stranded, he told us. In any event, we would need to spend one night on the water, where, he confirmed, there would be many mosquitoes.
We left at four in the morning, when the wind was very still. But after an hour of travel the waves grew so rough that the little table in the cabin fell over, and all of us but me were thrown from the hammocks we had strung up in the boat’s central cabin. We sat on the floor. We stopped for an hour at Ponto des Pedres—Place of the Stones—to wait for the water to calm down.
Another hour’s travel upriver, at about fifteen miles per hour, and we reached a spot called Icuxi. Here, Gilberto strung up his seventy-foot-long net, with plastic Coke bottles for floats and a brick of red sandstone for weight. Once the net had caught some fish, he explained through Keila, the dolphins would come. So we waited. We lay in our hammocks. We walked along the beach. We waded in the water. But, although the net caught several fish, no dolphins came.
We continued on. We passed more white sand beaches. We passed innumerable fires. Finally, toward sunset, we reached the Rio Arapiuns. Its blue waters were calm. No fewer than nine fires burned on the western horizon. To our surprise, the Arapiuns looked exactly like the Tapajós.
As night rose, we strung up our hammocks again, and Dianne and I fitted ours with mosquito nets. The mosquitoes were as voracious as predicted. To our dismay, we discovered that Socorro and Keila had not brought netting, but our friends did not complain; clouds of Portuguese were rising from their hammocks in an animated discussion. I imagined their Portuguese somehow repelled the mosquitoes, like a column of smoke from a mosquito coil.
I listened, and to my surprise, even with my rudimentary grasp of the language, I found I could understand their conversation:
“Do you think a boto will come?”
“Will he be enough for four women?”
“And we’ll need one for Gilberto! And for his father!”
“Oh, we will not sleep tonight! We will wait for the boto to come!”
“If only we had festa music to attract him!”
Rocking in my hammock, I could feel the waves rising beneath me like a lover.
We woke at five and headed to a place called Jari. There were many shallow channels there, and good fishing—for both people and botos, Gilberto said. With Keila, Gilberto took a rowboat out to speak with the fishermen, to see if they had seen any dolphins.
Yes, they said—right over here! They pointed to a channel separating two grassy shores where skinny cattle were grazing.
And sure enough, we spotted three botos: a large pink adult, a large gray adult—and a small, grayish pink baby.
Quickly, Gilberto and his father set the net across the channel, confining the botos to the shallow waters where we could best see them. The water is only waist deep and somewhat muddy. Dianne quickly loads her camera. But in the channel, something has gone wrong. Something is caught in the net—the baby boto! The bright pink adult starts to thrash in the water, showing her flippers, obviously distressed. The baby might drown! I jump into the water—without thinking to remove my sneakers—and immediately sink into the mud up to my ankles. Gilberto and his father jump in, too, wisely barefoot, and rush to the net. I stagger to join them.
The baby is squealing in terror, and with every effort to escape, entangles itself further. Gilberto’s father, Boanares, reaches it first. I try to hold the baby still and keep the head above water while Boanares disentangles the flippers and tail. He does not want to tear the net. A seventy-foot net takes more than a week to make by hand, and in a store costs $150. “Cut the net! Cut the net! I’ll pay for a new net!” I bellow, but of course Boanares doesn’t understand me because I have forgotten all my Portuguese.
The baby screams in my arms. Its melon heaves with the force of its terror, its blowhole opening and closing, howling like a tiny mouth. The infant is nearly four feet long, and shockingly strong, one big muscle tensed in panic. The best I can do is hold it still, try to calm it down. I slowly stroke its skin, running one hand under the belly, holding its side against my pounding heart. The skin feels like a boiled egg, and is now flushing pink with exertion. I know now the baby will not drown, but I fear the net will cut the delicate skin. I look into its pearly eye. To the terrified infant, I am a lightning storm, a caiman, a pack of piranhas, an evil spaceship. The baby has no way to understand that we are trying to help.
Finally, Boanares frees it from the net. I hold the baby for a moment longer, at once a heartbeat and forever, my clasp around its body a plea and a prayer. And when I release the boto, I let go my heart from my throat, an
d feel the water surround my empty arms like forgiveness.
But now the mother is caught in the net! Dianne hands her camera to Keila and gets in the water with us to help. The mother is much calmer than her baby. Dianne wants to hold her, and the mother doesn’t struggle in her arms. I almost wonder whether, in the manner of mother birds feigning a broken wing, the mother had embedded herself in the net to distract us.
Now the dolphins swim free. The dark one leaps, as if in triumph. Gilberto and his father remove the net. We all adjourn to the orange and blue Boanares.
Everyone is exhausted. Socorro and Keila had been terrified that the two adult dolphins would attack us while we tried to disentangle the baby. Gilberto and his father were afraid that somehow the Brazilian environmental police, IBAMA, would find us with a dolphin in our net and arrest us all. And Dianne, though seeming cool and poised, was worried, too: she was afraid that she would miss the shot. But she didn’t.
I collapse with emotion—the thrill of holding the baby, the terror that it might be injured, the guilt that had a boto been hurt, it would have been my fault. In the Tapajós, I had so wanted to touch the botos. But here, we had not intended to catch the dolphins, only to briefly confine them; yet this near tragedy, which could have drowned two botos, was, I was sure, a consequence of my own desire, flaming like a fire on the edge of the horizon. Again, I am reminded of the damage an outsider can wreak.
My sneakers are encased in mud. My feet are made of clay.
On the way back, we stopped at Curucu. Even after only one day away, we missed “our” dolphins, and although Keila and Socorro knew we were swimming with them daily, they had never seen such a thing and were eager to watch.
Within three minutes of our arrival, the dolphins appeared. It felt like coming home. I swam out to them, perhaps a quarter mile. All seven botos appeared, blowing, pulling their heads from the water to look. A single tucuxi leapt. Valentino surged out of the water, showing his flippers. One of the medium grays, Gary or David, rolled on his back, waving his flippers, and then turned, flipping his tail.
Meanwhile, Gilberto and Boanares set the net beside the boat. Within an hour, it was heavy with fish. Dianne, Socorro, and Keila stood on the roof of the Boanares, watching—and suddenly, fast as an arrow—“Rápido! Rápido!” shouted Socorro—Valentino shot by the net upside down and plucked a fish from the mesh. Another dolphin—which I couldn’t see—tried to grab it from his lips. Valentino rocketed to the surface, shaking his head with the fish in his jaws, and jetted away.
We waited to see if more dolphins would feed from the net, but none came. When we retrieved the net, we noted with horror that it contained two four-inch, red-bellied piranhas.
Periodically, we would take the bus into Santarém to change money. It was usually an enjoyable ride of an hour and a half or so, depending on the route, and we became such familiar passengers that the robust, mustached bus driver began to greet us (particularly Dianne) with a hug. Brazilians seem to try to fill every silence with music, and like most buses, this one came equipped with a tape deck. Even though we would have preferred Caribe or boi- bumbá, our driver often played American artists in our honor. On this December day, as we return to Alter do Chão from some morning errands, he plays an Elton John Christmas tape. Outside, it is snowing: huge black snowflakes swirl through the windows, the cinders of a fire whose heat we can feel nearby.
We are driving through thick smoke. Our driver is unperturbed. On one side of the bus, the trees are burning. None of the passengers seem concerned. An entire side of the road is flaming like a Yule log, and absolutely no one cares—until we come to a corner where one of the fires chews through the thatched roof of a house. Now they gasp and cry, “A casa! A casa! ” and crane their necks to see.
———
When we return to Alter do Chão, the skies are smoky and brooding. The day before, we had learned, there had been such a dangerous wind on the Tapajós that many fishermen raced home early. But today the wind is even stronger, as if fed by the force of the flames.
We have a larger boat today. Braulio, too, had to go to Santarém on an errand, and arranged for his friend Manuel to take us out on his forty-foot boat, the Sabiá . The craft bucks on the waves. We anchor at Curucu, and immediately Dianne spots a pink fin. I go to him, swimming out a quarter mile before I stop to look, treading water.
The waves slam against my face. They jostle, like tall people who crowd in front of you at a parade. I try to peer around them, only to be slapped again and again. The water goes up my nose and down my throat. I am swallowing the Tapajós, and it is swallowing me.
I hear a blow. I turn to spot two grays. David and Gary have surfaced next to each other, seven yards from me. The sound of their breath comes to me on the wind and seems as if it is in my ear. I feel safe with them.
But meanwhile, Dianne grows nervous. The two-foot whitecaps whack the boat so hard that bottles and fishing knives crash through the cabin, a bar of soap skids across the floor, a stool flips over. From the poop deck of the Sabiá , she can no longer see my head at all, not even with her camera’s 300 mm lens or her binoculars. She calls to me: “ You’re — too— far — out! ” but the wind takes her voice away.
I’m treading water, scanning for dolphins. The waves behave like a schoolroom of naughty boys: they grab my hat, snatch at my glasses, pull at my bathing suit. A forehead surfaces and dives, a dorsal rises and rolls, the waves bob up and down— it’s like a hall of mirrors, the dolphins and the waves, the waves and the dolphins, until I feel as if I am staggering, drunk. And then the dolphins are gone.
My arms and legs are working hard to fight the current. I feel the water trying to sweep me around the point. I look back to see where I am and notice the boat looks small as a toy. And now Dianne’s voice comes to me on the wind. I work my way back to shore—a tiring swim. Dianne jumps out of the boat to meet me in the water. I’ve been inside the waves for thirty-five minutes, and as I emerge, I realize my arms and legs are tired. But just as we sit down on the shore together, we spot another pink fin. I go back out.
A tucuxi leaps in front of me. Dianne tells me later that half a second after that, two other tucuxis ganged me from the back. Most of the time I couldn’t see them, but I was surrounded by dolphins—tucuxis and botos, like guardian angels against the storm. Perhaps that is why I was never for a moment afraid.
I come back to shore and together, Dianne and I watch the smoke-stained sunset. Just as we are about to leave, we spot big, pink Valentino. Amid the waves, his dorsal ridge seems to hang above the water like a sail in the air—weightless, timeless, impossible.
One afternoon, Braulio failed to meet us at the Gigante at the usual time. While Dianne waited with the photo gear, I trekked back over the sand to his house and found a spiffy red car in the courtyard. Braulio was next door at the restaurant, the Lanchonete, with a young, dark-eyed lawyer named Felicio Pontes, Jr. I invited him to join us. He speaks French, Portuguese, and English—the English with a French accent. He lived in Paris for a year. Born in Rio, he worked in Belém for a year before coming here to argue cases to preserve the forest in Pará.
Unlike the local Brazilians, Felicio swims and swims well. But he won’t go out into the waves even a third as far as I do. He and Dianne wait as I swim to the dolphins—five of them today. Valentino surfaces close to me, opening his blowhole not five feet away, intimate as a kiss, and then slowly rolls over. David and Gary surface side by side, then dive. I can see Mary and Jesus in the distance, stealth-floating near the surface. They are eyeing the stranger among us cautiously, I imagine. When Mary dives, she shows the flukes of her tail.
The others stayed near for half an hour and then swam away. I returned to Dianne and Felicio, and as we stood together in the clear water, Felicio told us Indian legends. He told us how the tears of the Moon, weeping for her lover the Sun, had formed the Amazon, the river of impossible love. He told us how the tambatajá tree was born: when a Macuxi warrior’s
wife was killed in war, the grief-stricken husband buried himself alive beside her grave. The beautiful bananalike tree arose from that soil, he said. “It is a plant very melancólica ,” he said, “very huge with branches like arms closing.”
How was it he came to know these stories? I asked. “It’s important, in order to convince the judge of your argument, to know what is important to the people,” he answered. “I prefer always to stay with the people and learn how they understand the world.”
As an environmental lawyer, Felicio represents the people who still swim in the tears of the Moon, who still see their own love and tragedy twined in the arms of the trees. Felicio tells us of one case he recently argued and won: “There are a hundred and ten falls in the beginning of the Tapajós River,” he says, “and they were going to explode them, to make the river more navigable for commerce. But the Indians there told us this was happening—and we stopped it.
Journey of the Pink Dolphins Page 25