Amazons

by Ellen Levy

  I chewed slowly, conscious of each clench of my jaw, each swallow, each tumbling crumb. I ate, conscious of the waiter in the corner loitering by the coffeepot. I ate, self-conscious to the point of anguish. Each bite, a drag. I cut a tiny square of fruit with the side of my fork, fearful of cutting inexpertly and sending a slice of mango or melon onto the floor. I cut and chewed, cut and chewed, cut and chewed, cut and chewed.

  After two rolls and a glass of juice, a cup of coffee and maybe a dozen bites of fruit, I was exhausted. I was relieved to push back my chair and leave. I considered pocketing a few rolls to eat in private, but I was afraid that the waiter, who had temporarily abandoned his post by the coffee pot, would catch me. I comforted myself that at this rate I was sure to lose weight. As I took the stairs back to my room, I calculated calories burned.

  Amazon Snapshot #2

  In 1984—the year I flew down to Brazil to study in the Amazon—scientists at the National Institute for Amazonian Research calculated that the rain forest had half a century to live, roughly what actuarial tables at the time gave as my remaining life span.

  Precise figures on the rate of rain forest destruction were difficult to come by, but predictions about the future of the world’s tropical moist forests were uniformly grim. A 1980 report for the Committee on Research Priorities in Tropical Biology of the National Research Council stated that “all tropical moist forests could be destroyed within less than 40 years,” given the loss of almost 50 hectares per minute. Dr. Peter Raven, chairman of the committee was “convinced that 95% of the forests will be converted within 25 to 30 years,” expecting the remainder to persist only for a few more decades.

  The Amazon was especially at risk: Science magazine reported at the time that “an area the size of Massachusetts was being permanently converted every month.” And National Geographic claimed that “if deforestation continues at its present rate, the equatorial rain forest ecosystem of the Amazon Basin might disappear almost entirely by the year 2000.” (A fate temporarily avoided in part by rain forest activism, which temporarily slowed deforestation in the 1980s and early 1990s. Some 83 percent remains as of this writing, though recent leaps in deforestation rates suggest that the Amazon is in grave danger—again.)

  Sixty-five million years of evolution might be destroyed in the course of fifty.

  The greenhouse effect was not part of popular parlance in the early 1980s, nor was global warming. (The National Academy of Sciences undertook its first major study of global warming in 1979, at the request of President Carter.) Global climate change—that misleadingly quaint phrase, which suggests we’re in for nothing more than a change of weather (and who, in America, doesn’t like a change?)—hadn’t come into usage. (In the margins of my college research paper, my professor asked, “Will [a two-degree rise in average global temperature] be enough of a change to melt polar ice?”)

  But those of us who’d heard of global warming knew it meant this: increased fossil-fuel burning, coupled with massive deforestation, could result in a shift in the balance of the world’s stock of oxygen and carbon dioxide, raising the level of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, which in turn could trigger a disastrous warming of the world.

  Before the turn of the century, the argument went, 40 percent of the land surface along the equator had been forested: tropical rain forests served as both a sink for carbon dioxide and a source of oxygen. Increased burning of hydrocarbon fuels and wood, coupled with rapid deforestation, had resulted in a rise in CO2 over the last century from 290 to 330 parts per million, with more than a fifth of the rise occurring in the previous decade (the 1970s) alone. By the turn of the next century—that is, by 2001—CO2 concentration was expected to rise 30 percent higher than its 1960 level.

  “For many,” I wrote in a term paper in 1981, “these figures are alarming . . . A major rise in CO2 level of the atmosphere conceivably will raise the average global temperature by a degree in two decades, and by two degrees within 70 years. . . . Polar ice masses might partially melt, raising sea levels by five to eight meters, inundating coastal areas currently inhabited by a large portion of the world’s population. Such a rise in temperature could lead to expansion of the world’s deserts pole-ward . . . Changes in global patterns of . . . precipitation could trigger an irreversible process of desertification, affecting even the grain belt of the American Midwest.”

  There was debate about the role of tropical moist forests in the equation. But few scientists debated global warming’s potentially disastrous consequences.

  The Beach

  When I got back to my hotel room, I put on my bathing suit, over which I pulled a T-shirt and khaki shorts. My skin prickled with the unfamiliar feel of air against it. At the time I was tall and relatively slender, coltish at five feet nine, 135 pounds, but I felt ungainly—fleshy and pale; I dreaded bathing suits almost as much as I dreaded nakedness.

  But today, I thought, I will be brave; today, I will go to the beach.

  As a rule, at twenty-one, I did not like beaches. Or rather, I liked to walk along them but I had never gotten the hang of sunbathing, which seemed to me at twenty-one an inordinately dull form of recreation (recreation itself being a category I found inordinately dull). Sunbathing—like sex (it seemed to me then)—was hot, sweaty, and boring, an uncomfortable stint on one’s back, a waste of precious minutes that might better be spent in more fruitful pursuits, but I reasoned that in no time at all I would be in the Amazon, where there would be no coastal beaches, some 1,000 miles inland from the Atlantic coast; I should take advantage of this opportunity.

  Taking advantage of one’s opportunities was a watchword of my clan and the American middle class from which I’d come. It was among the principal tenets of our secular faith, along with the edifying aspects of painful experience. We believed in making the most of what we were given; we believed in learning from our mistakes (this last at odds with the tenet that said we shouldn’t make any: education, solid reading, and forethought should obviate these).

  I laced my feet into tennis shoes and cinched my money belt once more onto my waist. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I shouldn’t take all my money with me. For a moment I debated the options: if I hid my money in my suitcase, it could be stolen while I was out. If I carried it with me, I could be held up and lose it all.

  I decided to outwit my prospective assailants by settling on a compromise. I would carry a beach bag (stuffed with a towel and suntan oil) and a plastic bag (containing my room key, passport, and student ID)—nothing of interest to thieves. In my money belt, I placed only enough cruzeiros to pay bus fare and pay off any muggers. The rest of my cash and traveler’s cheques I hid in the sole of my tennis shoe. Should I be mugged, I could hand over my cruzeiros without anyone ever suspecting that I was carrying $400 dollars in my shoe!

  And I was ready for my day at the beach.

  At the hotel front desk, I leaned my elbows on the black marble counter and asked where the nearest beach was. The clerk—another tiny man—told me that Barra had a nice beach and was nearby, just a few kilometers from here, down Avenida Sete de Setembro. I remembered the name as one Pinheiro had mentioned as he drove me here.

  I asked if I could catch a bus to Barra, though I said this wrong—using the verb tomar instead of pegar—and it came out sounding as if I was asking if I can drink or seize the bus. I tried again, more simply.

  —The bus goes there? I asked.

  He nodded. Vai, he said, his voice gaining volume, like the waiter’s. Mas tem pegar no outro lado; he pointed across the street where a small crowd is gathered.

  —Lá, he said, there.

  I thanked him and pushed out through the doors and crossed the street to where the crowd awaited the bus. At the stop, I asked a woman next to me whether I could catch the bus to Barra here, just to make sure I was in the right place and because I knew now how to ask: Posso pegar o ônibus pra Barra aqui?

  The woman was short, the crown of her head on level with my sm
all breasts. When she looked up at me, I saw she had tiny eyes.

  —Pôde, she said. The word, in her mouth, sounded jointed, two-syllabled: it sounded like paw-gee, drawn out, like a hen squawking. I wondered if she was from the interior, one of the numerous poor who came from the countryside—the vast sertão—to the coastal cities to find work but often didn’t. She had the slightly vacant expression of people who have spent a long time looking out across empty spaces, as if it were hard to focus the eyes on nearby things.

  The skin of her face was lined and tanned. Her dark hair was pulled back in a loose bun, threaded with gray. Perhaps thirty-five, she looked already old. Her face had the softness of age, like apple flesh. A basket hung from her arm, and she wore a thin cotton dress printed with blue flowers, gray from wear. The shelf of her bosom sagged over her sash to meet the soft shelf of her belly. It’s odd how vividly she lingers in my memory, the sort of figure—as James Baldwin once said—that the mind fastens on when more crucial matters are at stake.

  —Obrigada, I said.

  —Nada, she returned, and squinted once more into the street.

  As the bus pulled up, streaming a plume of black diesel smoke, the matron set her palm on my forearm.

  —Este, she said, looking up into my face. Este vai pra Barra, entendeu? Understand? she asked, and I did: This bus goes to Barra.

  The others at the stop formed a neat orderly line when the bus pulled up, and unhurriedly we boarded at the back. At the turnstile, the cashier asked me for my fare, but I didn’t know how much it was, unaccustomed as yet to the unfamiliar currency.

  —Posso? the matron asked, May I? She opened my palm and picked among the change and then we pushed into the crush of bodies already crowding the seats and aisle. I clasped the metal handrail overhead and hung on. A man stood to offer the woman his seat.

  I felt almost heroic as we rode along the wide avenue. Each small exchange, a victory: discovering which bus runs to Barra (only later would I learn that all buses bound west from here go through Barra), getting on, fishing out coins for fare, riding.

  Over the heads of the other passengers, I could see out the windows. I watched the buildings go past, the low stucco structures and the unpromising cement; grim girls—age ten or twelve—in uniforms filed out to play ball or study behind the bars that enclosed the cobblestone courtyard of an ornate white stucco building that bore the words escola and convento; palm trees, the flat blue sky.

  And then we dropped down a hill, winding through a narrowed street. An elegant new high-rise apartment building filled the view on the left; an old three-story cement building, worn out and lined with cracks, was visible on the right. The driver had to honk, taking each turn, to clear the road in case someone should happen to be coming from the other direction, and I held on, trying to keep my balance, swinging lightly into the passengers beside me, falling against them with a dull doughy weight.

  And then the view broke to the right and there was open water, the whole lovely lapis lazuli of the Atlantic—

  And I thought, it will all work out all right: I will get to the Amazon, I will do something that counts here, help save that fragile irreplaceable forest. There is this, after all, this ocean and beauty, and call it what you will, it is the same thing I love at home—the blue magnificent Atlantic. Glistening with sunlight. And out there an island. Ilha, I said the word in my head. Ilha de Itaparica.

  The bus shuddered and smoked down the curving avenue past a long white cement balustrade with vase-shaped posts. To the left, the land rose steeply into hilly neighborhoods; to the right, it fell away sharply to the sea. I could see waves breaking on black rocks. Below was a club, boats moored at a dock and a glistening aqua pool. There was a smell of salt and the sea and diesel.

  Abruptly, the bus swung toward the curb, then stopped to let people off across from what I could see—by the street sign posted on the other side of the avenue—was Avenida Kennedy.

  The matron tapped me on the arm, urgently. É próximo, she said. Barra é o próximo.

  —Aqui? I said. There was no beach in sight, but I grabbed my bag, ready to get off.

  —Aqui não, the matron grabbed my wrist and shook her head vigorously. O próximo.

  I stayed on the bus, uncertain and afraid of missing my stop.

  The bus rumbled on down the hill, swaying around each turn, until we took the last S-curve—past a farmácia on the right, a few shops on the left—and made a final sharp turn to the right around a small mosaiced praça of black and white marble, a near 180-turn that sent those of us in the aisle gently arcing.

  The matron seated in front of me placed her hand on my forearm and said, loudly, “Aqui oh. Barra é aqui.”

  I nodded and thanked her and then pushed anxiously to the front of the bus, trying not to get trapped inside with the others.

  When I stepped down into the street, the smells changed. To the scent of diesel was added coconut suntan oil, fish, salt, shit, and the seductive scent of boiling palm oil—a smell of ground nuts and smoke, and of the onions left to boil in the clear flame-orange dendê, a staple of Bahian cuisine.

  As the bus pulled away, I stood on the sidewalk facing the street, the beach at my back, surveying for a moment this place. Directly across the street was a laundry, with a window at which one could deliver clothing to have it washed; there was a farmácia and a juice and snack bar, with small round metal tables and chairs overlooking the street and ocean.

  In front of the lavanderia, a large corrugated refrigerator box lay flattened on its side, a pair of bare human feet sticking out. Directly across from me, an old woman sat beside a boiling pot of oil in which little pale fleshy balls, like matzoh balls, floated and hissed. Her face was the color of bittersweet chocolate, gaunt and shiny with sweat, her body hidden under layers of white lace, her head wrapped in a white turban. She called out in a nasal singsong, acarajé, vatapá , hawking her wares.

  To my left was a praça of marble cobblestones. There, young kids with rasta hair sat on blankets on which they’d spread jewelry made of bent wire, beads, and shells. A small wooden hut housed a magazine vendor, his offerings clipped by clothespins to a strand of wire alongside bunches of red bananas. A clothesline strung with tie-dyed shirts and cotton dresses swayed in the breeze.

  Behind the vendors was a building more beautiful than any I had seen here—two stories tall, built of glass and white marble. For a moment I wondered what it was: then I saw the sign, Banco do Brasil. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese crown lavished colonial wealth on God, and churches were Brazil’s architectural gems; in the late nineteenth century, the newly independent nation built fabulous opera houses and theaters, laying claim to Old World culture by building palaces to house it in the New. At the end of the twentieth century, Brazilians built beautiful banks. Beyond the praça, bright white apartment buildings lined the broad avenues that led up into the hills.

  On either side of me, people loitered, watching the street, watching the waves, leaning on the balustrade above the beach that ran the length of the promenade for miles. I leaned my elbows on the railing, and for a moment I was happy here.

  But the beach was a disappointment: small and semicircular and smelly, redolent of shit and fish, enclosed on the right by rocks, on the left by a fort, bodies were strewn everywhere. You had to step carefully to pick your way around arms and legs and backs. There were skiffs beached at one end; sunbathers were everywhere else. The waves slopped in, like bath water. There were no palm trees. It was less a beach than an enormous ashtray.

  Nevertheless, when I saw stairs leading down to the sand to my right, I took them. Bottle tops and cigarette butts littered the beach, but these grew fewer as I walked closer to the water. I chose a place halfway down the beach, modestly distant from others. I flapped my towel out and took a seat, slid off my shoes and shorts and shirt, then folded my clothes and placed them on top of my shoes to form a pillow. I pulled out my suntan oil from my bag and rub it on m
y arms and where I could reach on my back. I brushed my hair, then stuffed the brush and oil back in the beach bag.

  Vendors of fruit and sucos, no more than kids, scuffed through the sand carrying Styrofoam coolers of sodas on ice, the coolers larger than the children and borne on straps around their slender necks. I lay back and close my eyes.

  When I felt someone near me, I looked up and found two women laying out towels a few feet away. A few minutes later, I opened my eyes and saw a man—in shorts, sandals, a three-day stubble, and ratty shirt—seated on his heels a few feet from my head. I worried that he was some sort of creep, but others ignored him and he ignored me so I ignored him too.

  When I felt sand flicked at me a few moments later, I turned and saw the man digging what seemed to be a reverse sand castle—a sand pit. He looked uninterested in me though, so—after a moment—I closed my eyes, and when I again felt flecks of sand on my face, I brushed them away. Either because he stopped digging or because I was inured, I stopped noticing the flecks of sand and dozed.

  After maybe an hour, I woke with the tender raw puffiness that signals a burn. I sat up and pressed a thumb into the flesh of my thigh and watched the skin go white. A bad sign. When I reached for my bag, I found it was gone. I patted the sand; I stood and looked around.

  —Falta alguma coisa? One of the women seated behind me asked if I’d lost something.

  —Minha bolsa, I said. My purse.

  The woman stood up to help me look, but the woman next to her said, Já foi embora. It’s already gone. She had large Jackie O sunglasses and thick curling chestnut hair. She told us that she had seen the whole thing. She had seen the man with the three-day stubble slowly bury my beach bag under sand until he could slip his hand inside and remove the contents without notice.

  I wanted to ask the woman in the sunglasses why the hell she didn’t wake me, but her friend beat me to it.