by Tahir Shah
“The police have been after César Vargas for a long time,” he said. “He’s at the top of their list, he’s a prime target. We’re going to clean up this town. This place is the best kept secret on Earth, and we ain’t gonna have it tainted with paedophile scum.”
“He’s dealing in insects, too,” I said limply.
The Texan screwed up his face.
“Low life scum!” he barked.
At that moment, the door of the Gringo Bar swung back with such force that it almost broke free from its hinges. Standing in the frame was a ferocious-looking foreigner. A shade over six feet, he was as lean as a race horse, with a back so straight as to be unnatural. He was drenched with rain and dressed from top to toe in camouflage. His boots, his khaki fatigues, and torn ninja singlet were caked in fresh mud. A bandanna had been tied tightly over his head. His unshaven face was daubed red in warpaint, its long chin etched with a diagonal scar. Around his neck were military dog tags.
His searing malachite-green eyes scanned the bar with robotic precision. Then he made for our table.
“Here’s your man,” said Max under his breath, “Richard Fowler: Vietnam vet”, jungle expert, and occasional guide.”
The soldier pressed his callused hand into mine. My first handshake since Huancayo. His palm felt like coarse grade sandpaper.
He sat down and drank a mug of Pilsen in a single draught. I asked him what had brought him to Iquitos.
“Been living in the woods for a long time,” he said, in a voice molded by Marlboros. “Signed up for “Nam back in “68. I was with 101st US Airborne Division Jungle Operations – long range reconnaissance. Tet Offensive, Battle of Hue, Hamburger Hill, all that shit.”
Richard lit a cigarette, sucked hard, and expelled a jet of smoke through his nose.
“The jungle’s my turf,” he said. “I tried livin” back in the US, but it doesn’t love me, and I sure as Hell don’t love it.”
“Do you know anything about ayahuasca?” I asked.
Richard cackled menacingly.
“Ayahuasca, sanango, chacruna, datura, I’ve done “em all.”
“What are sanango and chacruna?”
The Vietnam vet gulped down a second beer in one.
“They’re nerve agents.”
“What about the Shuar, the Jivaro?”
“Jivaro?” he echoed, lighting another Marlboro. “They make the Vietcong look like pussy cats.”
“Would you take me to them... to the Pastaza?”
“Can I bring Francisco?”
“Who’s he?”
“My shaman.”
“You can bring anyone you like, as long as there’s no paedophilia or insect dealing.”
Richard looked deep into my eyes, his pupils dilating in a sea of green. It was not a conventional Iquitos stare.
“I promise you one thing,” he said.
“What?”
“I promise that if you hire me, I will keep you alive.”
The Vietnam vet” loosened his laces and leant back on his chair.
“The Amazon isn’t a kid’s playground, you know,” he said. “If you come with me you live the jungle, you breathe it... you eat it.”
“Eat it?”
He sucked at a dried callus on his hand.
“If you don’t eat it,” he said ominously, “it’ll eat you.”
“But I’ve got lots of canned food.”
“Screw the canned food,” said Fowler, “I’m talking about fresh chow... peccaries, caimans, larvae, anacondas. You can leave your supplies behind. They’re dead weight. In the jungle you only need one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“A sharp knife,” he said, tugging a collapsible Ka-bar blade from its sheath on his belt.
I boasted about the size of my nickel-coated Alaskan moose knife.
The Vietnam vet scoffed.
“Leave that behind, too,” he said.
Fowler needed two days to put the jungle expedition together. He suggested we hire our own boat and take it right up to the Pastaza. That way we wouldn’t have to rely on the river ferries. But before he could do anything, he’d need to catch up with his belle, Señorita Jane. Like the other foreigners in Iquitos, he had succumbed to the unrealistic gender ratio. Jane would be due out of high school in a few minutes.
“How old is she?”
“Sixteen,” he sniffed, “but she looks old for her age.”
“Isn’t that rather young?”
The Vietnam veteran slipped his knife away.
*
At eight the next morning I found myself sitting at my usual table at Ari’s. With my back facing the wall, I had a clear sweep of all the staring faces. The first die-hard patrons were already sipping Nescafé, black as crude oil. Florita’s colleague was mopping the floor. Noticing me, she mopped her way over to my table. She said that Florita was sick. It wasn’t an illness caused by disease, but one derived from true love. Florita was getting weaker all the time. A trip to Gringolandia was the only antidote. When she was strong enough, if she survived, she’d travel with me to Europe.
“Her bag is packed already,” said Florita’s friend. “You must buy her a ticket. Then you can be married.”
“But I’m already married!”
“So?” she said, “you can have two wives.”
The waitress slunk back across the room, probing the mop between the legs of the chrome chairs. A salesman slipped his way over. He was offering a new range of tarantulas in frames. They came in sets of three – small, medium and large, and were designed to be hung together on a wall in order of their size. I asked him about Titanus giganticus. He looked nervous.
“Expensive,” he mouthed.
“How much?”
“Seven hundred dollars each, maybe more.”
“Why so expensive?”
“Hard to get,” he replied. “There’s only one man in Iquitos who can get them.”
“Who’s that?”
“A man called César Vargas,” he said.
The salesman broke off, grabbed his tarantulas, and scurried out of Ari’s. I looked round to see what had scared him away. César was coming towards me.
He sat down and began to berate me.
“Why did you say you were going to have my legs broken?”
“I never said such a thing!”
“Well, everyone in town’s saying it.”
“César, I don’t want to harm you.”
“God will judge you,” he said, “He knows how bad you are and how good I am.”
César had stopped eating. It was his own form of hunger strike. He wouldn’t swallow another mouthful of food until his name had been cleared. Meanwhile, he’d turned to God for guidance. His conversation was heavy with religious remarks. César had been born again.
“Meet me tonight at the bandstand in Belen,” he said, “and I will give you the money I owe you.”
*
Since hiring Richard, my confidence had been bolstered. He looked like the sort of man one could do with having along on a dangerous mission. I admired his devotion to the jungle, and was secretly jealous of him. Even with the most rigorous military training, I would never be as hardy. He was from different stock – tough as nails, with honed muscles, a foul mouth and an iron gut. He was the kind of man who could live on mealworms and termites, with no fear of insects with more than six legs. I was thankful Richard had turned up, and that César had been exposed in the nick of time.
At nine o’clock sharp I felt a muscular hand on the base of my neck. The Vietnam vet” had crept up, and was looming over me. He was chewing on the end of a cigar.
“You love this town, don’t you?” he said.
“It’s all right,” I replied. “It grows on you.”
“All right? It’s more than all right,” said Fowler, slapping his hands together. “It’s the Saigon of South America!”
Three men were standing to attention beside him, waiting to be introduced.
�
�Meet my buddies,” Richard said.
I shook their hands.
“This is Cockroach.”
He motioned to a teenager with an innocent face. “He’ll be the cook. And this here is Walter, he’s your motorista, he owns the boat.”
“Who’s the third man?”
Richard moved the cigar to the left corner of his mouth.
“That’s Guido.”
“And what does Guido do?”
“He’s an odd job man.”
We left Ari’s and went down to the floating market at Belen. A battered speedboat was waiting to take us down river, where the Pradera was waiting to be inspected.
“She’s as sturdy as any craft on the Amazon,” Richard bragged as we bounced our way downstream. “she’s got a big engine and the space we’ll need for a long river trip.”
“She’s very strong,” said Walter, the boat’s owner. “She’s only six months old. You will not regret hiring the Pradera.”
Two hours later, with the afternoon rain lashing down, the speedboat swerved off the Amazon and down a tributary. The current was much slower, the river-banks abundant with wildlife and breadfruit trees. We veered into a backwater off the river. The craft’s aluminium hull sliced through fields of water lilies. Then, taking a right hand bend widely, the pilot brought the speedboat to a sharp halt. Bobbing in the wake was a rotting monstrosity of a riverboat. It reminded me of the African Queen shortly before she was destroyed.
Forty feet long, it was clinker-built, with open sides and a flat roof. The lime green paint was chipped, and the woodwork was in a pitiful state. An unskilled hand had daubed in red paint at the bow the name, Pradera.
I climbed up and had a look at what would be our home for weeks, possibly months. From the moment the soles of my shoes touched the floorboards, I knew this boat was trouble. The beams were covered in cobwebs; like all the other timber, they were rotten to the core. The problems were not only structural – the battery was dead, the steering mechanism was held together with fragments of string, and the engine wouldn’t start up. Rats could be heard dashing about in the cavity between the boards and the hull.
At the stern there was a medicine cabinet. I opened it optimistically. It was filled with giant red beetles, and had no medical supplies. Beside it was a Johnson 6 5-horsepower engine with a damaged propeller and, beyond that, was a makeshift toilet... a hole in the floor.
Richard sucked on the end of a cheap cigar.
“Great, isn’t it?” he said whimsically.
“What do you mean? Could it get us to the Pastaza?”
“Course it could.”
“There’s no way this boat’s six months old,” I said. “It’s falling to bits. The wood’s all rotten, it’s leaking like a sieve, the battery’s flat, its engine doesn’t even work... and it’s infested with rats.”
The Vietnam vet” struck the motorista on the shoulder-blade with his fist.
“It’s a fine boat,” he said. “We’ll take it!”
*
Richard dropped by my room at Hotel Selva later that day. The Pradera’s owner would bring it to Iquitos at night, he said, ready to set off at dawn. The rotting vessel was going to cost $25 a day, plus petrol. I regarded it as highway robbery.
Once he had picked his way through the nineteen sacks of loot, Richard swore violently.
“César said we’d need all that stuff,” I said. “I admit the Fanta bottles were my idea. They’re an invaluable tool.”
Fowler froze me with his green eyes.
“You gotta understand something,” he said, “people in the jungle don’t want pretty little combs and mascara, they don’t care a toss about mirrors, beads or fuckin’ Fanta bottles. They only want one thing...”
“What’s that?”
“Sixteen gauge shotgun shells,” he said, “that’s what they want.”
Lugging some of the gifts and tins away to swap them for ammunition, Richard said that he’d catch us fresh meat during the trip. Canned food, he said, was for wimps.
A little later, when the evening air was ringing with the buzz of miniature wings, I made my way to Eiffel’s bandstand at Belen, to wait for César. Squatting nearby was Rosa, the woman whose face had been dunked in acid. She smiled shyly when she saw me, covering her cheek with her hand. I bought a peeled guaje from her and sunk my teeth into its yellow flesh.
Why wasn’t she at home with her husband?
“Esposo, husband?” she replied, “what man would marry someone as ugly as me?”
“I’m sure many men would,” I said.
Rosa offered me another guaje.
“Tómalo, take it, I have so many and no one wants to buy them.”
I asked about the maestro, the one who’d had the premonition.
“He was not a good man,” she said tenderly. “He seduced young women. He often made them pregnant and said the Devil was the father. He would try to get me to sleep with him. He was disgusting. So I scorned him. But my parents believed in his magic.”
“The maestro’s dream?”
“Si... my mother threw acid on my face when I was sleeping. He told her to do it.”
César arrived at the bandstand an hour after Rosa had gone. He said he couldn’t stay long. The police were after him.
“They’re saying I’m a criminal,” he said weakly. “They want to throw me into jail and beat me up, and rape me. They want to break my legs.”
“Why did you tell me the boys were your brothers?”
“They’re like brothers,” said César. “Our friendship isn’t a crime.”
“Please give me the money back and I’ll leave you alone.”
César sat on the edge of the bandstand. He was very frail, no doubt a result of his hunger strike. He was holding a pair of Tupperware boxes. They were white and familiar.
“Is the money inside them?”
César ducked his head subserviently, and blinked.
“Not money,” he sighed. “I’m still waiting to be paid, and all the money you gave me was spent. Debts, so many debts.”
“So what’s in the boxes?”
César held them out towards me.
“Have a look,” he said.
Somehow, I knew what the Tupperware boxes contained even before I prized off their lids. In each one, paralyzed with fear, was an enormous black beetle. They were over five inches wide.
“Titanus giganticus,” said César proudly. “They’re little more than babies. I’m giving you them in place of the money,” he said. “They’re worth $800 each.”
EIGHTEEN
Green Hell
I do not know why, but the Pradera was supposed to meet us alongside the dance-floor of an Iquitos disco. The nightspot stood precariously at the Amazon’s edge, beside a quay. In the middle of the night Richard, Cockroach, Guido and I ferried our sacks through the disco to the water. A wild Brazilian salsa band was in full swing. We weaved in single file amid the throng of sweaty dancers. Richard had bought 300 gallons of pure drinking water, 100 gallons of petrol, and almost 1,000 shotgun shells. They had to be shuffled through the disco along with the rest of the supplies. The motorista, Walter, had promised to be there dead on 5.30 a.m.
I had tried to find someone to look after the giant beetles in my absence. Max, the CIA snake man, said he didn’t look after anything with legs, Florita said it was against her religion to babysit beetles, and the receptionist at Hotel Selva said her husband would feed them to the chickens. So, with great reluctance, I took the two Tupperware boxes down to the quay, along with all the rest of the goods. The pair of baby Titanus giganticus would just have to come along with us to meet the Birdmen.
By about 9 a.m. the band had packed up their instruments and sauntered off home. A handful of people stayed to dance even though there was no music. They were salsa fanatics.
Quite suddenly Richard picked a fight with Guido, the odd-job man. He accused him of lying, stealing and general dishonesty. Guido ran away with his knapsack. When
I asked Richard why he’d disgraced the man so publicly, he replied: “It’s a warning to the others. If I don’t make my mark right at the start, they’ll take us for all we’ve got.”
Richard treated Cockroach to a few drinks. I was touched by his generosity. He said it was also important to keep the men watered. Well-watered men had high morale. And without it the journey would end in disaster.
At three o’clock that afternoon we were still waiting for the Pradera. I sensed myself losing control of the trip again. I was about to march back to Hotel Selva with the beetles, when I spotted a dark green hulk fifty feet out. It was heading towards the quay, low in the water, moving in slow motion. It could only be the Pradera.
Once she had docked, I moored the guy-line to the disco’s bar, and supervised the loading. We struggled to haul the sacks, the water, and the barrels of petrol on board. Only then did I throw my own bags up, before climbing aboard, with the beetles’ boxes tucked under my arm.
The departure from the disco quay at Iquitos lacked pomp and circumstance. But then, some of the greatest expeditions in human history, I mused, must have had no send-offs at all. As we ventured out, into the beds of water hyacinths, I made a solemn oath. I would not return to Iquitos until I had spent time with the Shuar, with the Birdmen of Peru.
I gave Cockroach the Tupperware boxes and explained what was inside. The valuable jungle commodity was being entrusted to him, and him alone. He would have to establish what Titanus giganticus liked to eat. Under no circumstances was anyone else to be permitted access to the precious insects. Cockroach nodded his head repetitively, indicating that he had understood the instructions. He cleared the common red beetles from the medicine cabinet, and stowed the plastic cartons inside.
The Pradera bobbed along up the right bank of the Amazon, heading upstream towards the great river’s source. The size and current of the river were truly daunting. Even in the Upper Amazon, it’s at least a mile wide. Richard said that, at any one time, a fifth of the Earth’s fresh water is flowing through the waterway.
Gradually the log dugouts, the shanties, and the fishermen’s canoes fell away. The grumble of the outboard motor broke the silence. I sat on the roof, filled with elation. The journey had at last begun.