The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  “What if it rains?”

  D looks at me.

  I shrug. “I mean, it is Ireland.”

  “It’s not going to rain.”

  “Really?”

  “Not if you stay positive.”

  “So it’s up to me?”

  “Kinda, yeah,” she says.

  “And what about the people who come from New York, how are we going to deal with them? It’s a long way to bring a sandwich.”

  “I’ll assign them each an Irish buddy, to look after them.”

  “So your two worlds can finally come together.”

  “Exactly.” She leans over and kisses me. “And what do you think about Shelly marrying us?”

  Shelly is a friend of D’s from Ireland. She’s a very funny woman, with a typically sarcastic Irish wit, but not someone who jumps to mind as the person who should, or even could, marry us.

  “Shelly? Is she a priest or a minister or something?”

  “No.”

  “Then how could she marry us?” I ask.

  “It’ll be a spiritual ceremony.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we have to legally get married in the registrar’s office anyway.”

  “We do?”

  “Since you’re divorced, we can’t get married in a church—not that we’d want to—and in Ireland you can’t get married anywhere but a church or at a civil hall.”

  I sense an opening. Perhaps we can simply get married in the presence of a few witnesses and get away with a small celebratory lunch. “So then why are we talking about getting married in the park with lots of people, if it doesn’t count?”

  “Don’t say that. Of course it counts.”

  “But you just said—”

  D glares at me. “Are you deliberately being like this?”

  “Like what?”

  D begins to speak very slowly. Her diction becomes very clear. “Because, I would like to have a spiritual ceremony, with our family and our friends present, to celebrate our marriage. Is that a problem?”

  This is a battle I won’t win. “Where is everyone going to go to the bathroom in the park, darling?”

  My bag is by the door, D is on the phone, and I’m sitting in the large, overstuffed armchair in the living room. It’s the most comfortable chair in our home, the one every visitor sits in when they come over. My son loves to snuggle up underneath the large cushions in the morning after he stumbles from bed. Our daughter lines up her dolls on it. I bought the chair years ago, long before D and I met. When we got together, she had it reupholstered from the ugly red pattern it had to the soft pastel green it is now. Still, she hates it and has been trying to get rid of it for years. I can’t really understand why, except perhaps because it represents my world before her. Some of our other furnishings predate our seven-year relationship, but fewer and fewer over time.

  When D gets off the phone, she squishes down into the chair beside me, something she does often. The seat is not quite large enough to accommodate both of us comfortably and I’m forced up on one hip, cramped.

  “See, if we got rid of this chair then we couldn’t sit all cozy like this,” I say.

  D groans. She has just heard about a friend of hers who is getting a divorce, and earlier in the day we learned of an acquaintance who is having an affair.

  “Are you sure you want to get married?” I ask.

  “We’re different,” she says.

  “Everyone’s different.”

  D ignores me. “I told my parents this afternoon. They wanted to call tomorrow and congratulate you, but I told them you were leaving tonight.”

  I nod.

  “Mum was like, ‘Didn’t he just get back?’ ” Here it comes, just as I’m about to walk out the door. D goes on. “All I can say is that when I talk to you tomorrow I better hear the sound of mosquitoes buzzing around. And is malaria contagious? If you give me malaria . . .”

  We sit for a while and watch it grow fully dark outside. We haven’t turned on any lights; only the glow from the street fills the room. “When you get back we can tell other people.” D’s voice is quiet, detached.

  I nod again.

  “I told Lou and Karen.” Louise and Karen are D’s oldest friends.

  “Oh, what did they say?”

  D shrugs. “Lou was excited, Karen was good.”

  “Then why do you sound so down?”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I don’t want to go either.”

  “Don’t lie. I can see that smirk on your face. It’ll be amazing.”

  “It should be pretty cool,” I confess.

  “Don’t,” D says. “Don’t talk about it. I’m truly jealous. I’m not usually jealous of your trips, but this one, my stomach is starting to churn.”

  “Mine too,” I say. “But I think it’s the malaria medication.”

  When I land in Lima twelve hours later I have an e-mail from D. She has attached a photo she took of a mosquito lying dead on the sheets of our bed in New York. The insect bit her during the night. It’s early April; there hasn’t been a mosquito in New York in six months. D has taken this mosquito’s mysterious appearance as a sign that she was right in not taking the kids to the Amazon. Where others might see a curious coincidence, D will read deep meaning.

  Often, I struggle to follow the chain of thoughts that leads to her conclusions, yet I try to make an effort to support her reasoning, even when it has only the most tenuous connection to the reality that I live in. But the idea that a mosquito was sent by the Universe to confirm her decision not to come to the Amazon—I get behind this immediately. I call her from the food court in the Lima airport while eating my Papa John’s quatro queso pizza at six thirty in the morning.

  “Thank God you stayed home,” I shout into the phone when she answers, cheese hanging from my mouth.

  “Can you believe it? I heard this buzzing in the middle of the night; I thought it was in my dream.” For D, the interpretation and significance of dreams plays nearly as important a role in understanding life’s directions as does the metaphorical significance of waking events, such as the mosquito’s appearance.

  “Well, if ever there was a sign . . . ,” I say.

  “Oh, shut up.” She’s laughing.

  I can feel myself relax. I’m wired from lack of sleep and with food slowly filling my stomach, my spirits become buoyant. I love D deeply in this moment, and tell her so.

  “You just love me because you’re far away.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “But it’s easier,” she says. I can hear the smile and an acceptance in her voice that isn’t always there.

  Our four-year-old daughter, who has just woken up, squawks for the phone. When I tell her I’m having pizza for breakfast she tells me she wants to move to Peru.

  During a very bumpy one-hour flight to Iquitos, in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, I try to focus on an elegant brochure of the vessel I will travel on. It’s an old riverboat converted for luxury cruising; up to twenty-four passengers are housed in twelve deluxe cabins with king-size beds and large picture windows that look out onto the passing river. Twenty-four attendants pamper the guests. The brochure has photos of an elegant dining area with crisp white linen tablecloths and of a glass-encased lounge with deep couches and a bar. In one photo, a captain in white uniform stands chatting with a guest while a barman mixes what must be a pisco sour—Peru’s contribution to the world’s libations. The boat is all shining metal and rich mahogany.

  My examination of the brochure serves two purposes: first, it helps to distract me from the incessant turbulence, and second, I’m searching for a phone number. The prospect of such luxury has made an idiot of me. Because I knew I was simply getting on a boat and heading upriver, with all the day-to-day decisions taken out of my hands, I have done none of my usual preparations. I can’t even remember what Peruvian money is called. And the thought has occurred to me that if the car arranged by the boat to pick me up at
the airport isn’t there, I have no idea where I need to go or who I could contact for assistance. I will be—quite literally—up the river without a paddle. The only phone number on the brochure is for reservations—it’s a U.S. number. Perhaps I should have headed into the Amazon more prepared.

  “Are you going on that boat?” the man across the aisle asks. He is a lean, well-tanned, and casually elegant man with dark hair and a confident manner.

  “I am,” I answer. As is often the case when I travel, my vulnerability—like not knowing what the hell I’m going to do upon arrival—makes me more open to outside interactions than I might be when I’m at home and think I know best what needs to be done. On the road, serendipity is given space to enter my life.

  “That’s my boat,” he says.

  “This is?” I ask, holding up the brochure.

  He nods.

  “Oh, good, then you can give me a ride.”

  “Pleasure,” he says, extending his hand and smiling. His white teeth are in a perfect line. Crow’s-feet wrinkle beside his green eyes.

  Francesco Galli Zugaro is a citizen of the world. The son of an American mother and an Italian father, he grew up in Switzerland, was educated in the U.S., married a Peruvian woman of Ecuadorian parents, and lives in Lima, after running boats in the Galápagos for six years. He is on his way to Iquitos to check up on his second Amazonian boat—which he has plans to put in the water in a few weeks’ time.

  “Come have a look at it with me,” Francesco says, “then maybe we can eat some lunch, before your boat launches in the evening.”

  Iquitos is, in essence, jungle-locked. There is one road that stretches for sixty miles into the rain forest, only to taper out at a small village. Other than that, you need to travel upriver for three days to get anywhere that has a road leading to anywhere else. Most people arrive, and leave, by plane. Yet when we land, I see an old DC-8 sitting just off the lone runway, rusting badly, a not-so-subtle reminder that so much of what takes the trouble to get into the Amazon doesn’t make it back out.

  Francesco’s driver is waiting for us in the stultifying heat and humidity. On the way into town, I see few other cars on Avenida José Abelardo Quinones. In fact, there are hardly any cars at all in Iquitos. But there is no shortage of motorized transport. A strange hybrid called a motokar—a bastardized motorcycle modified into glorified tricycle, with a bench to seat three in the back and a plastic cover to protect passengers from the afternoon showers—owns the city streets. The motokars produce a loud, high-pitched buzz that keeps Iquitos humming in a constant state of heat-induced laconic frenzy. Along with open-air buses, they are how most of the five hundred thousand locals maneuver around the riverfront city.

  We funnel onto Avenida Grau and are engulfed in a swarming chaos of the weaving and darting motokars. Horns tap-tap out a thin “meee-meee,” much like the sound made by the Road Runner from the Looney Tunes cartoons. Francesco says something to the driver in rapid-fire Spanish—of which I understand nothing—and we turn onto Putumayo Street.

  An abandoned eight-story construction site dominates the sky. “That was supposed to be the tallest building in Iquitos, the Social Security Administration building, but the soil was sandy so it was going to be too unstable,” Francesco explains. There are no plans to take down the aborted project. The rest of Iquitos has a similarly unimpressive appearance; unfinished cinder block and raw cement seem to suffice for most newer structures.

  Then we approach an open green square where the buildings have a sense of permanence and a faded charm. Blue and white Portuguese tiles adorn facades of tired mansions. “This is the Plaza de Armas,” Francesco turns and shouts to me over the incessant din of the motokars. “It’s really the only sight we have in Iquitos.” Then he points to a two-story silver building with a cast-iron balcony dominating the second floor. The building looks strangely familiar.

  “It’s from Paris,” Francesco says. “It was built by Gustave Eiffel.”

  It turns out that during the Universal Exposition of Paris in 1889, rubber baron Anselmo del Aguila saw two structures built by the French architect—a tall tower and a two-story iron building. The tower was too large to move, but he bought the smaller building, had it dismantled piece by piece, and shipped it across the Atlantic, steamed two thousand two hundred miles up the Amazon, carried through the jungle by hundreds of men, and rebuilt beside the Plaza de Armas. It still stands, a testament to the glorious and fleeting moment of global significance Iquitos enjoyed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the nearby rain forest was plundered for its rubber to meet the global demand created after Charles Goodyear’s invention of vulcanization. Iquitos’s brief moment in the sun ended as quickly as it began when rubber seeds were snuck out of the country and orderly plantations were set up in Malaya, plunging the town back into Amazonian oblivion, where it has remained ever since.

  “Our industry now is oil, illegal logging, logging, and tourism, in that order,” Francesco explains as we walk the once-fashionable Malecon Tarapaca promenade, which stretches for just a couple of blocks above the river. A few more vestiges of Iquitos’s glory days line Próspero Street, but there is little else to point toward any immediate appeal. Despite this, the hanging heat and dense folds of humidity, there’s a shaggy-dog charm to Iquitos. There is nothing here that is remotely reminiscent of my life back home—none of the threadbare shops, or primitive advertising, or restaurants have a familiar or even recognizable feeling about them. Such an alien sensation is increasingly rare in a world heading toward homogenization. The only thing familiar in this environment is me; consequently, I am acutely aware of my own thoughts, which in moments like this run toward a feeling of possibility. I wish I were staying in town for longer, possibly much longer.

  “I’m glad you see it,” Francesco says when I express my immediate affection for Iquitos. “It’s not always obvious. I like it, too,” and then we’re back in his jeep and headed out Avenida 28 de Julio to see his boat.

  In short order the road is filled with puddles, and soon it is too flooded to continue. The level of the Amazon fluctuates up to thirty feet per year, depending on the rains, and a tributary of the river has begun to flood the area. We hop out and walk along planks placed just above the rising tide.

  “Last year the river was the highest in recorded history, and this year the water is already higher, and the rains aren’t finished yet,” Francesco tells me. Several vendors have set themselves up beside the water. An old woman is grilling something on sticks over an open fire. Francesco lifts a twig off the grill that’s holding half a dozen large maggots. He offers it to me. “Loaded with protein.”

  We climb into a long and narrow skiff and head out across the water to the boatyard. A hulking shell of steel is swarming with men. The boat is already booked full for its maiden voyage in a month’s time. There is much to do. Francesco walks me through the still-raw vessel. “The toilets are from Kentucky, and I had to DHL the engine from China to get it here in time. It cost more to ship than the engine itself, but I have to be ready.” It will take one hundred men and three tugboats twelve days to set the boat in the water. “If you told me twelve years ago that I’d be running boats in the Amazon, I’d have laughed in your face,” Francesco says, shaking his head.

  His comment makes me consider my own course over the past dozen years. Twelve years ago, I was drifting, still trying intermittently to capture a version of pop stardom I had run from when it was on offer a decade earlier. The accidental second career as a travel writer, which would revitalize my creative trajectory, was nowhere on the horizon. A dozen years ago, I had no children. Nor had I been through a divorce—and while it was one of the more amicable dissolutions of a marriage, I was still deeply grieved.

  The failure of my first marriage nearly eight years ago hovered over and fatigued me for much longer than I admitted, even to myself. That I was still mourning that relationship when I plunged deep into another one was probably ill advi
sed. A feeling of sadness permeated the early period of discovery and excitement with D; it is a regret we share, albeit one she has been gracious enough to move beyond. Why these thoughts come to me now, while I’m walking belowdecks, looking at exposed piping, I have no idea. But travel does this: it creates space that allows thoughts and memories to intrude and assert themselves with impunity. Smells and sights, the quality of light, the honk of a horn—can all act as touchstones when least expected.

  Francesco takes me to lunch on a floating island in the middle of the Amazon that looks back toward the scruffy riverbanks of Iquitos. The river is littered with all sizes and varieties of boat, transporting all shapes and types of cargo. There are long boats and squat ones, open barges and dugout canoes, most jammed full with people. One, with the name Titanic painted in red, sits particularly low as it chugs upriver, the faces of scores of cramped passengers peering out the small glassless portholes. Another battered boat boasts a herd of goats walking around on deck, and dozens of others, loaded with bananas or palm fronds or lumber, float past. “It is very informal on the river, people will transport anything, anywhere,” Francesco tells me.

  Rarely do I take the time to marvel at how fast one can get so far from home, but in this instant it’s not lost on me that just last night I was eating a cheeseburger for dinner in a still-chilly New York City, and I am now sitting in the middle of the steamy Amazon River eating fresh dorado for lunch.

  Francesco has to return to work and suggests I visit the manatee rescue center.

  “I was thinking I’d head over to the market.”

  “Belen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t really recommend it for tourists. It’s not that it’s not safe, but you have to be very careful.”

  I smile at him. I’m always warned against local street markets. That they invariably reveal a town for what it is, with all its unguarded voraciousness, is something locals are often shy to expose about themselves.

  At a cluster of stalls on Calle 9 de Diciembre, small women grind up fresh fruit for juices, chambira and papaya, camu-camu and mango, and others I don’t recognize. The high-pitched hum of the blenders competes with the more insistent buzz of the passing motokars.