The Dream Merchant

by Fred Waitzkin

  The house was situated on twenty acres of property, all of it encircled by a ten-foot concrete wall painted light green to blend into the foliage. On the east side of the estate, just over the wall, Manaus approached with its open sewers and glistening corporate headquarters. The most intriguing facet of the estate was its western vista: behind the house, servants’ quarters, and past the lakes, the wall braced against the dense jungle that played out unabated for nearly four hundred miles. If you walked along the west wall at night you might hear the growl of a jaguar. The estate, presently owned by the wife of a diseased Mafia capo now living in France, was a buffer zone between conflicting realities.

  The property was much more than Jim required but was very special, as Luis had said. Jim found himself lingering. From the front side of the house he looked out across a field of fruit trees, and the same kitchen girl was now taking a walk. She was very young, eighteen or nineteen, with long black curly hair. The girl was laughing and picking fruit. She was wearing red shorts and was moving slowly across the dusty property alongside a boy of about twenty, one of a half-dozen workers who maintained the property; they walked through a stretch of cashew and guariguara trees, close, in rhythm with each other but not touching. The girl looked toward the house and saw that Jim was watching, but this didn’t make her self-conscious. Jim wondered if she and the boy were lovers and decided they must be. The girl’s walk was slow and rhythmic, as though drawing purpose from the earth.

  Jim was about to leave with Luis when the girl came back on the porch holding a knife and a piece of fruit. Jim didn’t know what it was, but she was offering him a cashew. He cut off a slice and ate the tasty fruit from the skin like a mango. Then he looked around for a place to put the rind. The girl smiled at him and offered her hand. She won him on the spot. She was intoxicating but utterly from another world, and much too young.

  At the start of their drive back to town, Luis looked amused, but his mind quickly turned to something else. The following afternoon, Jim bought the property from the owner’s widow for $140,000, nearly one-third of what he’d brought to Brazil for his new business venture. It was much more than he wanted to pay, but he reasoned, impractically, it was only a tiny fraction of what such a place would cost in the States or Canada.

  When Jim returned to the estate two days later as the new owner, the Indian girl didn’t seem surprised.

  * * *

  Jim had never built a business without Marvin Gesler’s vision and prodding. He wasn’t a business genius like his partner, nor was he a detail guy. Marvin’s vulgarity and raunchy deceits had always cast Jim in a favorable light, and Jim had relished being the good guy. Now he wasn’t sure who he was or needed to be. Marvin had always known the rules, or he made the rules while Jim brokered their deals. Jim felt Marvin’s absence, to be sure, but he had found gold near the Rio Novo four hundred kilometers south of Manaus. This simple fact quickened and thrilled him more than any lust he had ever known, more than any previous worldly success, perhaps more even than his desire for Ava, or at least it was enough to make him forget. The grains of gold in the batilla kept Jim on course. If it was the right course was a much larger question than Jim could resolve, not that he ever cared for abstract inquiry. Jim had no Marvin, limited cash, and scant knowledge of finance, but he had gold, or the chance for it, and he had Luis Carlos with his considerable quirkiness and personal magic. Jim had no desire to return to Toronto and the Quonset shed business. He didn’t miss it or even want to know what was going on.

  Luis guided Jim to a street lined with cantinas, maybe fifty cantinas housed in a four-block stretch of Spanish colonial buildings from eighty and ninety years earlier, when rubber barons had imported renowned architects from Europe to design the most daring, opulent residences on the entire continent. By 1980, they were long ruined from neglect and water damage. There were jungle plants sprouting through cracks in the floors as if the rain forest were trying to reclaim the land. The venerable houses smelled from hardworking girls and the sweat of an army of lusty garimpeiros back from the gold mines. Jim needed to learn about such places, counseled Luis while he mopped his brow and took Jim to see the tiny cheerless cubicles where girls worked on soiled mattresses for next to nothing. Most of them were very young; some were attractive, others fat; they did their work with dead eyes. Jim found these places depressing, but Luis urged him to stay awhile and take a look around.

  During the next month, Luis introduced Jim to gold buyers, airplane pilots, gorgeous women. Luis introduced working girls with a touch of nostalgia or regret. Jim, he explained as a longtime connoisseur, many of these girls are sincere people, believe me. But on other occasions, Luis referred to them dismissively as bitches. He introduced the owner of a gun shop who sold Jim an arsenal of weapons, at a fair price, and then, within an hour, the white-haired shop owner had assembled a militia of thirty gunmen, each of them willing to risk his life for ten dollars a day. Luis drove Jim to meet Martha, a plump woman with an endearing smile who was a good cook and didn’t mind working in the deep jungle; Luis brought the pilot Ramon Vega to Jim’s estate.

  Ramon ran his own jungle operation eighty miles east of Jim’s camp. He was a handsome, powerful guy about Jim’s height with a coffee-colored complexion and a contagious smile. Men and women were drawn to Ramon, who was nearly Jim’s equal in terms of charisma and affability. He rented a turbopropped helicopter to Jim for two weeks to fly heavy equipment into the camp; after that, Jim bought two older planes from his new friend. When the two men were in Manaus they went to clubs with Ramon’s knockout girlfriend, Iliana, who had studied geology in college and was presently working in the gift shop of one of the local hotels. Ramon entertained his friends with stories about the jungle life, ambushes, murders, animal attacks. He had a talent for finding the attractive or socially acceptable side of cruelty. Listening to Ramon was like going to the movies. His girl had a pleasant polished manner that you could almost take for softness, but she could turn on a dime. Iliana wanted a lot of money and would do almost anything to get it.

  Jim questioned Iliana about rock formations that might offer clues to concentrations of gold on his property. She was attracted to Jim, even though he was twice her age. They were always fooling around, probing and tempting each other. Ramon didn’t seem to mind. He had this manner: what’s mine is yours. Jim enjoyed Ramon’s largess and extravagant convictions about women and the predatory rules of the jungle, which he enunciated with deeply felt pleasure.

  Whenever Luis saw Ramon and Jim together, he smiled, as if he’d known all along they’d become friends.

  Luis seemed to grow in stature at the prospect of bringing people to meet Jim. These were Luis’s Broadway moments. During the initial starburst of making introductions he was charming and well versed, verbally nimble about subjects one would not expect him to know about. He got people talking. He knew how to break the ice. But then he lost interest. Once he was past the stage of facilitating, Luis’s observations became shallow or seemed ill-informed. The deepening levels of a subject didn’t interest him. After fifteen or twenty minutes, he was looking off to the future, and he would say to Jim, I am like Cinderella. I have to leave now.

  * * *

  Over time Jim grew confident about his assistant’s suggestions, even though it wasn’t always apparent, with the language difficulty, where the quality of Luis’s many acquaintances might diverge from his own considerable enthusiasm and charm. Luis became Jim’s Jim. Of course, in their hardworking thirty-month history Luis would make some terrible choices. He’d wipe the perspiration off his face and make up for disasters with more matchmaking that was nothing less than astonishing.

  He introduced Jim to Ribamar, a short, powerfully built man of about sixty with thirty years in gold mines south of Manaus. He had spent the past eight months living in the city with his young wife, Lu, and their new baby. No one understands the jungle better than Ribamar, said Luis, who became melancholic when he spoke of the older man. You’
ll need Ribamar to survive; you’ll need him like clean water.

  It was a hard moment for Luis and surely a reflection of his affection for Jim that he brought this new man into their world, because including Ribamar meant that Luis had to sacrifice some of himself, maybe the best part; whenever he was around Ribamar, Luis seemed undressed, cheapened, largely irrelevant.

  Ribamar was a calm and serious man who filled a room without speaking. He sensed keenly, like the animals he knew so much about, and he trusted himself beyond all else. In their first meeting, Ribamar admitted to missing the jungle greatly. He had been away too long and was very pleased to hear about this new mining operation. Also, with a young family, he needed money.

  Jim voiced his many concerns about the large task ahead while Ribamar listened patiently but also with a hint of irony or dawning conviction. His judgments were deeply held and he almost never shared them fully. Jim kept returning to the threat of jaguars because he’d heard that the area around his camp was infested with big cats. In the history of the camp, many workers looking for gold had been killed. How could they survive and run a business with jaguars slaughtering the workers? For some reason this grim question tickled both men and they began to laugh.

  Finally, Ribamar answered that jaguars don’t attack unless a man is alone in the jungle or the cat feels threatened. The jungle is safe, Jim, if you know what to do. Garimpeiros are attacked because they are reckless people. They think they can do anything they like. They feel tired and go to sleep under a tree. You must learn where you cannot sleep. The jungle is healthy. It can be your friend as well as your enemy. It will provide for you when you are sick. Men make the forest dangerous by stupidity.

  Jim had many questions for Ribamar about gold mining, jungle animals, malaria, the right and wrong foods to eat, where to get drinking water. Is it true, he asked, there is a tiny fish that swims up a man’s penis? It was an extensive list of concerns that Ribamar found burdensome. He put a strong arm on Jim’s shoulder. Jim, the job for you is to know two things. The first is only to focus on small things, one at a time. The second is that all things are small things. Then he added, enigmatically, Listen to the sounds of the jungle at night, Jim. It’s a great music. You need to pause and listen to the music or you are wasting your time here.

  Jim nodded. He was greatly drawn to Ribamar.

  * * *

  At first, Jim felt uncomfortable being with the girl who was only eighteen and dressed for the heat in shorts and T-shirts or skimpy dresses that showed a lot. When they drove to Manaus in his Jeep or walked on the cobbled streets of the city holding hands, he looked like her grandfather and worried about being taken for a dirty old man. That passed quickly in this city where anything goes. No one cared about Jim and the girl.

  During the first several months, because of the language, Jim never knew what Angela was thinking. He tried to imagine what she said to him or what was in her mind. In his pidgin Portuguese, he tried to convey that she should try to imagine what he was saying, that’s how they would become friends, by guessing and making things up. They would create each other in their imaginations. They tried to do it and laughed. This was an appealing idea, to be utterly new and special and perhaps even invented for one other person in the world. And it was true that they never really learned many basic things about each other. But the girl was better at their game than Jim. She didn’t mind not knowing.

  The guessing sometimes heightened Jim’s pleasure, but it was also frustrating. He wondered what she was making up. He would find himself listening for clues when she spoke Portuguese to one of the other workers on the property. Jim could tell that the girl was self-possessed and had much to say.

  In their imagined language she seemed too good to be true. But he wondered sometimes if she had ever worked in a cantina, because sex was so comfortable for her and she knew a lot for her age; how would he ever know for sure? He decided it didn’t matter. But then he couldn’t leave it alone and he pressed her about the men she had known. He thought that she said he was her third or fourth; it seemed important at the time, which, three or four.

  Oddly enough, the peasant girl did not seem to have large expectations or needs. When he took trips into the jungle, she wouldn’t ask when he was coming back. She worked in the kitchen and in the gardens for the same modest wages Jim paid other workers on the property, and Angela seemed satisfied with her lot. When he was in the mining camp, he didn’t think about her so much, because the jungle was a huge passion. Also, the girl had trained him. When he came back, she would be there, waiting, like the large rooms of the house made of fragrant wood. The girl never once asked Jim for extra money or presents. When he once brought her expensive red sandals from one of the hotel gift shops she accepted them without fanfare and put them away in her little closet, preferring to go in bare feet or in cheap native slippers. She didn’t have aspirations like all the other women Jim had known. At first, he was suspicious about this and wondered if she had secret motivations, some devious plan, but eventually he took for granted her graciousness and lack of guile; it was part of his new life in Brazil.

  Since Ava left him, it was over a year now, Jim had had trouble making love. For a week or so in Canada, before he met Phyllis, he had dated a beauty queen, Miss Alaska, and he couldn’t have sex with her. It wouldn’t work whatever she tried. With Phyllis, there were stretches of time when he was impotent. He never knew when it would happen. With the Indian girl, this problem disappeared.

  He loved the taste of her, which was like sweet mango or cashew. He couldn’t get enough of kissing her. The girl had great patience for this, but eventually she giggled and bit him gently on the lips, urged him with her voluptuous body and sweet manner.

  When he began to have difficulty, she brought him back, patiently; she had a few ways that surprised him and he tried not to think about how she had learned. Finally, they’d fuck, very hard and fast; she had spirit and hunger that came from the jungle, where she had grown up—at least Jim fancied that was the explanation—until finally all of his life flooded out of him; it felt that way. He was empty and almost desperate afterwards, as if he couldn’t reclaim himself. She offered him a piece of melon in the canopied bed, but he couldn’t move. She laughed and fed him.

  Angela didn’t sleep the night in Jim’s bed, although he invited her. When he asked, she smiled, as though she might, but in the morning she’d always gone back to her own little room. It had been her place for nearly a half year, since the day she’d come from the jungle to work in the large house. In her parents’ small thatched hut, on the bank of the Igapo-Acu River, Angela had shared a tiny doorless room with three younger sisters. Having a room of her own was very important.

  She was an unusual girl, Jim decided. She would fall into a trance listening to nonsense on the radio, jingles and such, and when he bought a television, she watched the soap operas. All of this was a revelation to her, a new universe. She didn’t know much and yet she seemed to understand a great deal. Angela was very young, and though Jim lured her with his great salesmanship and a touch of the Manaus high life, she kept a big part for herself.

  The first evening back in the camp, when it was only a small clearing, pitiful really, without so much as a hut or lean-to, Jim swathed himself in netting and climbed into the hammock. The air was warm and sluggish, laborious to breath. Jim hung between two skinny aaí trees, wrapped like a mummy, sweating, and hardly able to turn over. He would remain this way for the next thirteen or fourteen hours.

  The night fell quickly and was darker than anything he had ever imagined. He could not see the hand in front of his face, nothing, and yet the jungle filled Jim’s head with an ocean roar of insects heaped upon the bleating and screaming of parrots and monkeys, birds in crisis, predators and prey, that infernal racket drowning out logic and even conviction. There were menacing crashes beyond the clearing, calls and cries that were inexplicable and savage.

  In time (but how much time? Hammock nights were rest
less and without end) the bedlam blended to a more predictable buzzing and chirping; it took on a rhythm that pulsed in Jim’s head, as if there were a greater sense to it. He even found it appealing and it gave him something to lean against. Jim fell into the sultry mix of jungle sounds, memories, and sweating, gulping water, wondering, vaguely, if he had malaria. He went off into the night with his father, Nathan, searching for the farmer’s cows, or tracked game with Ribamar. Sometime later (but when? Three hours? Was it almost dawn?) Jim dreamed about the girl in Manaus, or he thought of Ava. She wanted him again and Jim’s desire spread into the jungle’s mysterious urging.

  The two camp dogs barked whenever something approached the edge of the clearing. Jim woke with a start. He could see the glow of Ribamar’s cigarette. He was sitting nearby on a log, and he nodded solemnly. Or some nights Jim would hear Ribamar’s soothing voice and he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming or remembering yesterday when they walked together in the forest; many days they went hunting for game. Jim loved to watch Ribamar move quietly through the dense bush, with his elbow pushing aside vines and drooping fronds, letting them flow back in place as though they’d never been touched. He moved without a trace.

  Jim, you mustn’t wear deodorant, Ribamar reminded him gently. But Jim slathered it on every night because he couldn’t stand the smell of himself for thirteen hours in the hammock. Jim, when you are in the jungle you want to smell like an animal, Ribamar cautioned. Deodorant is for the cantina, for the girls. If you wear it in the jungle, you make the jaguar curious. He wants to see who you are. Ribamar knew so much that he could say anything at all and it might be true; he could make it true with his will, his gravity, his amused and lordly conviction. In the hammock, it seemed as though Ribamar created the jungle. Still, Jim tried to guess what was really true and what was part of their gamesmanship. He decided it wasn’t true about the deodorant.