by Tahir Shah
Again, I tried to reassure him that the oil company would take care of little Juan. They would have a doctor who could treat his tumour.
Richard jumped down from the roof. He cast a disapproving eye over Cockroach and Francisco who had deserted their bailing stations and were playing cards. The shaman was taking alternate drags from a pipe and a mapacho cigarette. He cheated mercilessly and everyone knew it. But fear of his magical powers kept the cook from protesting.
While Juan and his father enjoyed a bowl of stew, made from the rank-smelling legs of a jungle pig, I sat on the roof with Richard. We watched the sun set. And, as we did so, Walter guided the Pradera west from the Tigre, down a narrower waterway, the Rio Corrientes. Its name meant “current”, although the river’s surface was as smooth as glass. Twisting and turning like a snake on its back, its banks were veiled in the thickest jungle we had yet seen.
“It’ll be a miracle if this is the right fuckin’ river,” said Richard. “Walter’s never been this far away from Iquitos before.”
“The boat’s leak has got worse,” I said. “If we don’t get to Trompeteros soon we’ll be in trouble.”
The Vietnam vet” put his hands to his mouth and made the solemn call of the squirrel cuckoo.
“Aukcoo! Aukcoo!”
As he rocked back and forth, the faint sound of a female echoed through the twilight.
“She’s in love,” said Richard. “You can always tell when a female’s in love. But they’re foxy little suckers – they like to keep you guessing. Just like women. You think you understand them and they go and do something stupid.”
Long before meeting Señorita Jane in Iquitos, Richard had been married. In the short time he’d lived in the United States since Vietnam, he had been married twice. His second wife, twenty years younger than he, was a former stage magician’s assistant.
“She did all that stupid shit with the doves and the juggling balls,” he said. “She had the tight skirts and the blinding smile. We’ve got the cutest little girl. We named her Harmony. That’s what our marriage was, Harmony. I delivered her. She popped out like a little paratrooper.”
Richard called out to the squirrel cuckoo again.
“Harmony’s all that matters,” he said under his breath.
Juan’s father asked which engine was powering the boat.
“It’s a Johnson 65.”
“A Johnson,” he said quietly, “a Johnson could get you to the end of the world.”
“We’re going to the Pastaza, to meet the Shuar,” I said.
The man replied without turning his head: “They’re dangerous people.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
“They’re the Antichrist,” he said curtly. “When they kill a man they drink his blood, and eat his kidneys. It’s human kidneys they like most. If the kidneys taste bad, they carve out the eyes and eat them.”
“Have you met any Shuar?” I asked.
The man didn’t reply. He hadn’t finished his rundown of Shuar cuisine.
“They like to eat caimans’ gall bladders, and dogs’ tongues boiled in urine,” he said with revulsion. “If you don’t eat the food they give you, they’ll poison you with ampihuasca.”
He asked why I was so interested in the Shuar.
“They fly,” I said. “They are Birdmen.”
Juan’s father swatted a baby wolf spider on his cheek.
“Ayahuasca... you are speaking of ayahuasca?”
I nodded.
“Es una medicina muy potente, it’s very powerful medicine,” he said. “Take it and fly like a great white jabiru stork. Your wings will take you to the other world. see wonderful visions. But ayahuasca can be dangerous,” he mused, “be careful, you must be careful!”
“Of what?”
“Cuidado con el aterrizaje, be careful how you land,” he said.
TWENTY-ONE
Gold Teeth
Trompeteros is a small town in the Upper Amazon whose reputation beats all the rest. Nestled on the north bank of the Corrientes River, the community surpasses even Iquitos when it comes to vice and depravity. Ask at the remotest jungle village and they’re sure to have heard the legends. They will tell you of the underdressed women, the chuchuhuasi liquor, and the discotheque.
For three days Walter, Francisco and Cockroach spoke of nothing but Trompeteros. They harped on and on about the taste of its gut-rot brews, the mapacho, and the supply of seductive under-age women. There was no question that their speculation couldn’t answer. Remarkable, I thought, considering none of them had ever been near Trompeteros before. I wasn’t interested in the vices available, but I’d heard that the town had one of the finest hotels in the Amazon.
As the Pradera navigated the remaining few miles up river, Francisco imparted a last piece of valuable lore. Go for the girls with gold teeth, he said. The more gold they have in their smile, the better they can satisfy a man in certain carnal ways. White teeth were a sign of frigidity. Walter agreed – sexual acumen and teeth went hand in hand. His wife, he boasted, had no white teeth at all.
We had been on Pradera for too long; shore leave was well-deserved. With the crew running wild after the gold-toothed women, I was uneasy that the boat might be robbed. Although much of the food had been ruined or already consumed, there was still valuable fuel and equipment, not to mention the Johnson 65. As well as guarding the Pradera, someone would have to look after the Titanus giganticus beetles, and Rosario, who needed regular feeding. Until the repairs were done, bailing also had to be done constantly.
The crew would take it in turns to stay on the boat. I drew up a roster and pinned it to the medicine cabinet. Anyone found abandoning bailing duty would go without food for two days. Richard and I were exempted. He wanted to go walkabout in the jungle, and I planned to spend my time ashore, ordering room service and taking hot baths. But before getting too comfortable at the hotel, I promised to take Juan to the oil company for treatment. I gave him a cherry-flavored lollipop with bubble gum inside.
Cockroach took the first shift to bail and keep watch. I’d cautioned him to protect the giant beetles beyond all else. Nothing was so important as their survival. If there were any problems, he was to defend himself with my moose knife. Walter went to look for a man to repair the hole in the boat’s side. He was desperate to get the repairs done quickly, so that he could hunt for gold-toothed women. Tying a bandanna over his head, Richard set off into the undergrowth. I asked when he would be back.
“When I’m ready,” he replied.
After making inquiries, I learned that Plus Petrol, the oil company, had its offices on the southern bank of the river. I took Juan and his father across in a dugout. We were received at a steel-framed jetty, and escorted into the plant. All Plus Petrol employees had identical yellow construction helmets and American-made Wellington boots. Everything they wore, or held, carried the gleaming Plus Petrol logo. They looked as if they’d stepped out of a TV commercial for their firm.
The oil plant was bordered on three sides by the jungle, and on the fourth by the Rio Corrientes. Three giant satellite dishes were clustered at one end of the area, beside the low tin-roofed residential quarters. Opposite stood offices, and beyond them an industrial complex. The man with a yellow helmet and rubber boots wrote our names on a clipboard. When he saw Juan’s tumour, he called his superior.
Two minutes later we were sitting in the reception area. A single door divided the two worlds. Outside lay the jungle: suffocating, damp, seething with life. Inside there was central air-conditioning, thick pile carpets and neon lighting. An American water cooler stood in one corner of the room, beside a potted jungle plant. On the coffee table were crisp copies of the New York Times, and Newsweek. In the background I recognized the hum of a photocopier.
Juan and his father were as threatened as I was comforted by the surroundings. They stood to attention when the bearded plant manager greeted us. He said that their doctor would take a look at the boy. A biopsy of the tu
mour would be rushed to Lima. When I thanked him, he pressed his hand into mine.
“Thank God you didn’t go to a doctor in Trompeteros,” he said.
“I didn’t expect there to be one.”
“Everyone in town is suffering from the same thing,” he said, “the quack rubs toothpaste on the infected parts.”
He roved a hand through his beard, muttering: “I doubt he’s ever treated a patient’s head.”
A concrete path formed the main street of Trompeteros. It being in the middle of the jungle, there were no cars. The path ran the length of the town, a total of about four hundred feet. Either extremity ended in foliage. At the path’s westernmost edge stood Hostal de Milagros, Hotel of Miracles. A man with leathery cheeks and swollen eyes stumbled from the entrance and down the steps. He was doing up his flies. On his face was a broad grin and, on his arm, a young woman. Her hair was pushed up in a bouffant style, her heels were high. All her front teeth were gold.
The hotel’s reception was decorated with a number of moth-ravaged leopard, panther and snake skins. A display cabinet above the counter was stocked with dark bottles of beer. I told the man in charge that I needed the best room in the house.
“¿Dónde está su mujer? Where’s your woman?” he snarled suspiciously. “Do you need one?”
He clicked his fingers and, before I could blink, three scantily-clad girls with gold teeth were standing in the doorway.
“You don’t understand,” I said, “I just want to sleep.”
The local beauties protested for a moment or two, before slinking away.
Room number three was basic, but a welcome change from a hammock infested with wolf spiders. The stench from the blocked lavatory, the lack of sheets, and the pool of dried blood in the far corner, were hardly worthy of mention. I sat on the bed, flicking the light switch on and off. Electricity was a great novelty.
In the stifling heat of the early afternoon, I found Walter and Francisco spending their savings at Trompeteros’s small emporium. It was packed from floor to ceiling with shiny merchandize. Everything was wrapped in crumpled cellophane. The usual supplies of Nivea cream and oxblood-colored boot polish were complemented by an array of more enticing products – imitation Barbie dolls, pink plastic hair clips, ping-pong balls and tubes of superglue. But the boat’s crew weren’t interested in cheap trinkets. They’d come for ingredients.
When I asked them what they were making, they looked at each other and cackled subversively. Walter said a man was mending the boat’s leak, but the work would take three days. This gave them some time. He turned to the shaman. They pooled their money to buy half a dozen bottles of Chinese ‘shanghai brand” body lotion, and a tin of Colman’s English mustard powder. Then they hurried away into the shadows behind the shop.
At the centre of the concrete path, past the boss-eyed barber’s stall and a makeshift bar, lay Trompeteros’s most celebrated feature – the disco. Widely acclaimed as the sleaziest establishment in the Upper Amazon, its bamboo swing doors were never closed to business. The single ultraviolet light never wavered, and the distorted music never waned. In the moist atmosphere a horde of lascivious gold-toothed women hunted for custom.
Outside the nightspot a boy of about five was sucking on a syringe. He said the doctor had given it to him. When his mother exited the surgery, opposite the disco, she cursed the physician. She said the medicated white cream he prescribed to all his patients didn’t do any good at all.
Further down the concrete path I came across a man touting giant Amazonian snails. He was cutting them up live to make ceviche. Beside him, another man was trying to sell some daffodil-yellow lingerie. He said it was imported specially from Paraguay.
I was admiring the size of the snails when a well-dressed man strode up to the salesmen, and handed them each a dozen red sachets. All over town the tomato-colored packets were being passed around. You could have as many as you wanted for free. Indeed, the more you were seen to take, the more praise you attracted. The sachets contained condoms.
The people of Trompeteros were a wily lot. Privately they frowned on using the prophylactics, but this didn’t stop them grabbing as many of them as they could. Men, women and children alike had found that a condom had a thousand uses. Food could be stored in them, and liquids carried; they made fine markers for fishing nets when filled with air, and they could be burned to keep insects away, or roped together to form a lightweight clothes-line. Some women used them to tie back their hair. And no child was without a home-made condom whistle.
The electricity, the running water, the condoms and the disco of Trompeteros were all made possible by the oil company. Without the multinational, the town would have shrunk back to being another insignificant village on the Rio Corrientes. And yet, everyone in Trompeteros despised the oil workers and their production plant. One man told me that they were low life workers from Argentina; another that they were polluting the river and killing the fish. A third, a haggard man resting on the steps of my hotel, revealed another reason to hate the oilmen. They were so snobbish, he said, that they wouldn’t sleep with the local women.
Back at the Hotel of Miracles, a line of beauties were waiting in the corridor outside my room. There must have been about thirty of them. All had mouths checkered by gold teeth. I feared that news of a foreigner had tempted the most infected of Trompeteros’s femmes fatales from the humid confines of the disco. But, as I edged down the hallway, none of them even looked at me.
They had been lured by room number four. Thinking no more of it I went into my room, flicked on the light, and got ready to go to bed. I tried to hang my shirt on a hook mounted high on the wall. But, to my surprise, the hook snapped off and fell onto the cement floor. It was then I realized that it wasn’t a hook at all, but the chrysalis of a giant moth.
I lay on the mattress coaxing my back to embrace the flat surface. Occasional sounds disturbed me from next door. I could have sworn I heard Francisco’s raspy voice through the wall. The thought of the chrysalis twitching with larvae disturbed me, too. But before I knew it, I was asleep.
By the time the sun had risen above Trompeteros’s pair of street lamps, a stage had been constructed at the centre of town. The boards of the podium were made from yellow mahogany, its backdrop was a screen of woven banana leaves. Once the stage was prepared, it was decorated with inflated condoms. Nearby, another team were rigging up speakers, and scrappy red bunting, strung together with yet more prophylactics.
I asked the barber what was going on. He looked at his watch.
“It must be carnival,” he replied, vaguely. “In Trompeteros it’s always carnival. Prepare yourself... the fiesta is very wild.”
An hour later, a horde of people was massing at the far end of Trompeteros, dressed in a multiplicity of costumes. Mothers and wives were prodding the menfolk into line, as the last stragglers arrived. Peruvians like nothing more than to put on a fabulous parade, which they can do at the drop of a hat. It’s a way of showing off their finest clothes, and is a great booster of morale.
A band shuffled forward, their home-made uniforms tattered by years of wear, the dents in their instruments reflecting the light. As they assembled, silence prevailed.
Then, with the clash of cymbals, the jamboree began.
The theme was the jungle. Many had dressed as tribal warriors. The painted faces, feather crowns and blowpipes suggested that it wasn’t fancy dress at all. There were animals, too. One man had dressed as a toucan, another was wearing a panther skin, and a skinny woman was wrapped in a cape made from sloth skins. Behind her was a sinister young man. He was dressed as a giant rodent.
After the rodent came a clutch of gold-toothed girls in seductive clothes. They had come as themselves, day and night dancers from the disco. And, after them, followed a wave of men and young boys dressed like Rambo. They wore the ripped black clothing of guerrilla fighters, and carried home-made guns. Their faces were blacked with charcoal, and they had bandannas tied around thei
r heads. They had come as members of the Sendero Luminoso.
At the front of the crude parade, was a little girl of about nine. She was set apart from all the others, for she’d spurned the pageant’s theme. I recognized her as the type of little girl that every normal child loathes. Her hair, adorned with pearls, was neatly tucked behind a silver comb, and her prim little ballet shoes were free from dirt. She wore a velvety alabaster tutu, lace gloves, spotless white stockings and bright red lipstick. As she marched, her miniature hands juggled a silver baton faultlessly. I prayed that the giant rodent would nudge her into the mud.
When the parade ended, the tribal men paced off into the jungle to go hunting; the loose women slunk back into the disco,-and the giant rodent meandered away home. The little prima donna pulled the lace gloves tighter up her wrists. Then she barked a string of orders to her brow-beaten father. I wondered what her future might be in Trompeteros.
I took a stroll down to the Pradera, where a robust carpenter was at work fixing a brace into position over the crack. Cockroach still hadn’t been relieved by Walter or Francisco. He said they were up to no good. Even before stepping off the boat, they had been hatching a plan to woo the sleaziest women in town.
“No sensible girl would be interested in them,” I said, “They’re both uglier than Quasimodo.”
“This isn’t like other countries,” said Cockroach, apologetically. “Here in Peru, the ugliest men get all the most beautiful women. It’s a fact.”
This may have explained why I had attracted advances from so many Peruvian women. As I pondered the thought, Cockroach suggested we let the beetles out of their boxes for a few minutes, to stretch their legs. I commended him on the idea, after all they had been locked away inside the medicine cabinet for days. I stood well back as he tapped out the huge specimens into a shallow cardboard box. Although still juveniles, their size was truly astonishing.
When I got back to the hotel, the queue of women waiting outside room four had grown. It now snaked round the corner, up the stairs and through the reception. I asked the manager what was going on. He put a hand on his groin and murmured “¡Milagros! Miracles!”