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by Jennifer Barclay


  Tired, and the city isn’t made for sitting but moving. Everything is fast food: the cafés, the bars, the restaurants. Where is everyone going? Why do they need to get there so quickly? I’m just shy. I’d like to be flowing along with the others to fixed destinations—offices, meetings, lovers’ apartments—if I knew them, or could see this city as home, as they do.

  What was I expecting of this place? Not quite as exhausted-looking, perhaps. More direct North American rip-offs (the sports bar with Bud signs in the window, the sit-down greasy spoon). A more “tropical” look (neon, indoor palms, references to “beach”). But there is the private helicopter taking off from the roof of the Bank of Boston building, and the odd Mercedes limo to show that there’s money here looking to “develop” more money. And look: a too-loud American bore at the bar of the Hilton.

  Note: Brazilians don’t provide change. The onus lies with the customer to pay the exact amount. A curious and irritating way of doing business. If you have even close to the right bill in your wallet, the waiter will shrug and look at you as if to say, “Well, what are you gonna do?” As a consequence, I end up involuntarily leaving large tips.

  However, the manioc with eggs (crunchy farina dust studded with scrambled yellow chunks) is better than you’d guess.

  February 9

  São Paulo

  A.M. Off and on rain, the morning spent looking for stamps—and then a mailbox—to send letters home. Have idea for a short story, “Postcards,” as a result of thinking of ridiculous time lag (“I’ll be home by the time you get this …”). A guy in Canada keeps receiving these postcards from his girlfriend whom he already knows has died down here. It’s like he’s hearing her voice from “beyond,” these dispatches hanging in the purgatory of snail mail, captured in canvas sacks sitting in the airport warehouses of Manaus, São Paulo, Atlanta, Mississauga, etc.

  P.M. Really raining now. If it keeps up, I’ll be forced to eat in the discouraging hotel restaurant (although I like the bar, in a 1975-golf-club-lounge sort of way). Must mention the hot-dog smell of the streets here. Partly because there are hot dogs for sale on every street, but the meat-composite theme seems to have been taken up in a more general way. Not unpleasant. Unlike, say, the gusts of concrete moistened by last night’s piss. But it sounds like I’m complaining.

  It can rain suddenly here! Heading to dinner around the corner from the hotel, then WHAM!, the heaviest rainfall I’ve ever been caught in. Waiting under eaves with people smiling sympathetically and saying things I can’t understand. And what can I say? So far, nothing but “yes,” “beer,” “thank you”—and “Antarctica” (a type of beer), which doesn’t count.

  February 11

  Manaus

  The craziness begins here. The jungle (the jungle!) is visible on the airplane’s approach, which from ten thousand feet up appears as a field of broccoli that spreads out farther and farther until the earth gets tired of it and drops away.

  And heat. Like I’ve never fucking been slapped with before. One step out of the lobby of the Ana Cassia and I thought I was a goner. Improvements after a cold Coke bought on the street and a new ball cap (the Toronto one with the nylon flap in back from Urban Outfitters is too, too ridiculous).

  Much stimulus on walk through the market: slabs of meat and fish offering unusual perfumes, the clustered riverboats, the Rio Negro itself, broad as a lake. Reminds me of a documentary of the kind shown in Social Studies classrooms when I was a kid. Something lens-distanced, containable, tidily anthropological about it all. Yet I know that this impression is only a mental defence mechanism, a way of seeing that calms the anxiety of being so far away from home.

  No shit: black vultures fly over town. They eat fish guts and human filth, I’m told, and likely not humans themselves. Two just landed outside my window and are looking in at me hungrily nevertheless …

  P.M. At night, a haunting image. Down a street away from the centre, one of the old French-style townhouses stands empty and cracked, full of bats, wrapped in vines. I stop and look at it, transfixed. A woman (a girl?) standing there assumes I want her attention and starts calling to me from across the street: something in Portuguese, then in English, “My friend! My friend! Come here, my friend!” I take off at a trot.

  I love the weirdness of this town: a stucco pimple growing out of the middle of the jungle, a rubber fortune built on the backs of slaves, a sudden economic crash, empty shells. Yes, it’s sad. And spooky. But mostly, I find it thrilling.

  A drinking friend after dinner, an American who’s just spent six weeks with a National Geographic photographer in the jungle. Forty-five, a teacher in Maine. Fat (from a parasite, he says). Good stories. One involves Tetunka, the German-Indian son of a rape victim who acts as a guide and kills a good number of his guests for revenge, for the hell of it. Another is about the Brazilian government encouraging Indians into towns on the river to be “slaves” in lumber, but they end up sitting around watching TV most of the time. (Which is worse?)

  Behind us, two barely teenaged prostitutes throw bits of napkin at my back to get our attention. My friend looks like a walrus. We exchange e-mail addresses that both of us know we will never use, lumber back to our hotels past the haunted house.

  February 14

  Valentine’s Day in the Amazon: Will you be mine?

  A.M. Trip to Indian village, which involved a long, Marlow-esque trip in a motorized canoe, which scratches some cinematic itch of the imagination. The forest slouching past, the water holding the boat to an even world. A fresh, moist breeze, the clouds a textbook selection of the flat, the explosive, the braided and the wispy. The planet, despite our very best efforts, continues to be beautiful.

  In the village, a marriage of old and new (the handmade canoes, the one-shack school, the Tweety and Britney Spears T-shirts). We are watched from hut windows like uninvited soldiers.

  Being far away and alone produces in me the side effect of having random snapshots of home come to mind with extraordinary vividness: the backyard of 571 Dovercourt, the view from my father’s old office in Stratford. This is the strange way memory sharpens the world, so that the recollection becomes more tangible than the thing itself.

  I felt, for an absurd moment, that I could live here.

  Now a giant, translucent, grasshopper-like thing on my shoulder.

  And now, a tall, stork-like bird—a juburu—lifts into the air, its legs dangling like cut ropes behind it. The few clouds pull back to throw laser beams down upon the canopy on either side of us. Only a moment ago the air was a mustard haze. Now it’s instantly burned away. And we can see how close we are to the jungle, crowding in on us, standing atop fifty-foot stilts. So high and uninterrupted, our voices bounce back and forth in millisecond delay within the rib-cage of trees.

  February 15

  The Rio Negro is not black. It’s a shadow. Deep and untouched by the sun except for a skin of purple scales on the surface. Look down from straight above, and there is nothing but oily shade, licking and curling upon itself. The narrow line of our wake bubbles up like agitated Pepsi.

  People wonder about a man travelling alone: “What’s wrong with him?” Yet this wondering lends him greater mystery than he likely deserves. Most of the people on these tours and in town are South American—exceptions are three or four German backpackers and a Japanese couple on the boat. The fixed tours booked in North America must protect the Midwestern hobblers from general public view.

  Just had first mosquito bite.

  Asked the guide about the dangers of travel in Colombia (abductions, tortures, ransoms), and he denied them. “The media,” the guide said. I don’t believe him.

  February 18

  A walk in the jungle this morning, learning all about how gum, Pepto-Bismol and tonic water come from trees.

  In Huck Finn, the river was life, an almost innocent discovery, flowing outward through to the “discovery” of America. In Heart of Darkness, it’s the inward path to the soul. What does it feel li
ke to me? I’d say it’s the path to the real, that which lies beyond the virtual, the programmable. The river has a way of peeling away our trained affectations and responses, the layers of protective irony. It takes manners out of us and replaces them with what, in time, might turn into simple madness.

  Missed the afternoon’s excursion as I fell asleep in a hammock by the river. Don’t regret this. The American guy with the equestrian wife got on my nerves a little, though his condom in a cashew trick was very impressive.

  February 25

  Manaus

  Bugs falling on the page.

  Back in Manaus temporarily, waiting for the next boat to take me upriver. Walked by the harbour bars tonight: two fluorescent rooms side by side opening onto the street. Across from them, a bingo hall and a narrow entrance with a turnstile and, upstairs, a grim strip club. From an abandoned building with walls blasted out, the powerful stench of shit and garbage and piss all wound up by humidity and months of equatorial heat. I find all the decay and depravity kind of exciting. That is, it frightens me.

  March 1

  Aboard the Clipper, chugging north toward São Gabriel. Saw a beautiful green comet from the upper deck and made a wish. The stars are different here. The Southern Cross (a perfect, absurdly geometrical square) above instead of the Big Dipper.

  Out of the bush comes a bug sound like some electronica backbeat: echoing, multi-layered, symphonic.

  March 3

  Jungle walk at dawn. Rougher. Had to machete through. Got bite on my face from something and now one side of my mouth has swollen up like a baseball. Realized how easy it is to get lost in forest this thick: the American couple took a wrong turn and for a minute, there was only their voices calling out, “Marcos! Marcos!” (the guide).

  Ants literally in my pants. And my pack. Long lines of them hiking from one sock to their anthill. Their organization calms me.

  A beautiful name for a butterfly I saw: Blue Morpho.

  Note to self: Change your socks. These ones feel bad.

  March 4

  Up at 6:20 A.M. for breakfast. Inflamed throat and sinuses from now obviously ill-advised swim in the Negro yesterday. I gave the cook my Urban Outfitters cap in trade for her fried banana recipe (fry sliced banana in vegetable oil, sprinkle with cinnamon). People here smile a lot.

  Saw meeting of the waters, where the tea-coloured Negro meets the caffe latte-coloured Amazon and then forms two ribbons that run side by side for several miles before mixing together and heading out to the Atlantic. After this, we made our way past Manaus to the Tropical Hotel. There’s a mini-zoo, where there’s monkeys in the cages, who, when you unzip your bag or put your hands in your pocket, stop everything and gather against the fence, hoping for food—as they do in every zoo, everywhere.

  March 12

  São Paulo

  Hanging out at São Paulo airport, waiting for transfer flight to Toronto. Outside, the beautiful planes landing in impossible suspension in the Brazilian night. No, not “Brazilian.” Any night, in any airport lounge, raising my head from the page and being happy to be here, nowhere in particular, carrying a head cold and my knapsack, going home.

  Andrew Pyper is the author of Kiss Me, a collection of stories, and Lost Girls, a novel selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail and the New York Times. His second novel, The Trade Mission (researched in part by the journey described in “A Brazilian Notebook”), was published in the fall of 2002. Mostly he lives in Toronto.

  015Destination: China

  UP THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (AND DOWN BY CABLE CAR)

  David Manicom

  This is a Canadian brain—one of the youngest brains on the planet—looking at a Chinese thing. It is also the away-from-work brain, trying during a long-weekend outing to tear out some of the corporate synapses that train and constrain it, find some Web-free space and maybe a little startling beauty. It is a modern brain. While respectful of humanism’s traditional urge to link up all with all, its first-things-first, survive-the-stress motto is “only disconnect.” And now it is looking.

  One of the particular beauties of Tai Shan, most holy and rootedly Chinese of China’s sanctified peaks, is cypress. Living antiques, wind-grey, age-sprained like free-range bonsai, yet green still, supporting verdure after so many centuries of blood and thunder and ceremonial tea. The textured foliage is cut-papercraft complicated. Look at them all, says the Canadian brain, lining the unscrolling ceremonial path up the mountain, filtering the sunlight into lace handkerchiefs, each with a goddamned tin strip nailed into its venerable flesh. Number tags, naturally. Inventoried cypress. A calculated forest. You could doubtlessly load the thing into a database and run some stats.

  Probably planted in the Ming dynasty, pruned in the Qing, and not quite chopped down during the Cultural Revolution.

  A sound idea, presumably, counting your trees, logging them in a ledger for the annual tree report and maybe a five-year tree plan with the word “conservation” in the title. We’ve flown down from Beijing where we live, where there are ten thousand red taxis with “Green Beijing” bumper stickers, and decals in their windows chanting “Build New Beijing Hold Great Olympics.” Amid an ideology of demolition, the rhetoric of conservation thrives.

  But the gleaming backdrop for cypress grey and green, that sky, new every day, beyond the tenacious counted trees, lifts my spirit toward beauty. I have the kind of Canadian brain now, at forty-one and in its eighth year abroad in societies old as coal, that says things like that to itself. And then notices it said it. It’s a gorgeous autumn day, and I’m on a holy Chinese mountain, moving steadily along its elegant narrative spine up a set of 6,600 broad stone steps (laid by the Ming, spruced up by the Qing, and too sturdy for the Red Guards to scar). I’m walking it with my wife and children and thousands of holidaying Han Chinese. We’re a ten-thousand-segment snake with its head on the bald crown of heaven and its tail down at the Red Gate with the taxis and souvenir stands. The gate is the official launching point of the climb, and pretty new by local standards. It was built around Shakespeare’s day by the Ming, refurbished by the Qing a few centuries later, and is flanked by one Taoist and one Buddhist temple in honour, respectively, of the Princess of the Rosy Clouds and the Amitabha Buddha. Hedging your bets is, in general, the Chinese approach to stairways to heaven.

  The Chinese are chatting, grinning, plodding, eating as regularly as Hobbits and having a whale of a time. I figure they’d be having an even better time if their numbers were doubled. I’ve been in Beijing supermarkets where the fruit and vegetable section felt like a mosh pit—just as crushing and just as buzzing with good vibes. It’s not badly crowded here. There’s a lot of mountain to spread out on, six hours foot-to-peak at our pace. Just a steady flow, half ascending, half (having overnighted on the peak to watch the sunrise) marching down.

  Except I’m not marching anywhere at the moment. I’ve sat down in the diffuse autumn sunlight to take notes about one of the lovelier temples and to breathe a little air.

  Tai Shan has been sacred through Communist, Qing, Ming, Song, Tang, Han, Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist dynasties, ideologies and faiths, back to the earliest cults. This, combined with the emperors’ habit of climbing the “Honourable Mountain,” has led to a Central Way littered with temples, stelae and relics galore amid the enumerated groves. The Five Taoist and imperial holy mountains (there is also an agreed-upon set of nine Buddhist holy peaks) have held their special status since before the Han dynasty; they were already ancient in renown to the great Han historian Sima Qian in the second century BC. In the Tang, a mere 1,300 years ago, this mountain was given the title Tian Qi Wang, “King Equal to the Sky.” We’re a quarter of the way to the sky.

  Across from me is a gracious small Taoist temple with red-brown walls. It has a modest paved plaza with a view over the gardened rooftops of a small village and on into cypress and pine. The Goddess Doumei temple has sat here since ancient times. An inscription suggests a Ming bureaucrat-abbot guar
ded it just the day before yesterday, in the 1500s, when the Spaniards were bumping into America. A cool courtyard within is of swept earth, centred by a small pond for luck, getting the wind and water on your side. The grey-tile Ming eaves fold down like half-enclosing wings. It is dim in the inner sanctum, incense and candlelight and gold. A vendor’s shrill speaker back down the path scrapes my eardrum like a fork on a plate, but for a moment here and there, you can screen it out and catch a bit of birdsong.

  The breeze is cool, but each sunlit stone is warm as fresh bread. The others have gone on ahead. I’m trying to focus on the geometry of sensation in this courtyard, soil and grey eaves, and coins in the pool under dusty cypress beneath high-voltage sky. But my multi-tasking modern mind is remembering a note in my Blue Guide that says the actual tip of the mountain is now enclosed within a building. This seems like moving Mount Kilimanjaro to Vegas or wrapping a pool with a swim-up bar around the source of the Nile; but a colleague will later remind me that the hushed titanic cathedrals of Europe were, in their heyday, hubbubs of market and pilgrim trinkets and sweat.

  So I try to stop thinking, and I look up from my nib’s inky trail. A ring of Chinese tourists has formed three feet away. They smile pleasantly, eyes open and direct. If there is any social taboo against staring in China, it doesn’t apply to laowai. They are murmuring and pointing, gaga at my spectacular gymnastic feat of carving out English letters with my left hand. I lift my pen and shrug, to their enjoyment. Behind me, a sign hammered onto an outcropping reads, “The Vocks Are Dangerous, No Staying Place.”

  There are no staying places. Time looks after that. We’ve come down from Beijing two weeks after the World Trade Centre massacre. The nearest airport to Tai Shan is at Jinan, where it was unseasonably cold, damp with drizzle. At the door of the plane, coal smoke stung our eyes; a damp mist that was part nature, part burnt sulphur followed us through a barren terminal to an under-lit exit and a disinterested club of taxi drivers hawking phlegm and slapping cards. All the way into town, factories and brick kilns funnelled burnt earth into the air. Jinan, like all Chinese cities worthy of a dot on the map, has millions of people, but few were out. The noxious cloud was suffocating the street lights. At ten on a Saturday night, Jinan had the feel of a town that turns in early.

 

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