Amazons

by Ellen Levy

  The restaurant where we met the others was on the edge of town, a simple tent roadside that served beer and fish fresh from the river and farofa—manioc meal salted and dried. The air smelled of roasting meat, a salty charcoal smell, oily and rich.

  I hadn’t brought much money, so when the waitress came by, I ordered only a beer and settled back to listen to the others talk.

  —What? A guy seated next to me asked. You’re not eating?

  —I’m not hungry.

  —Don’t tell me you’re on a diet, he said.

  —No, I said. I’m just not hungry.

  —You have to eat. This place has the best pirarucú anywhere. She’ll have pirarucú, he yelled to the waitress.

  —Um outro? the waitress asked, looking at me. One more?

  —Não, obrigada, I said. No, thanks. I’m really not hungry, I told the guy, embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t afford it.

  —Um outro, he said to the waitress. He said to me, We’ll split it, okay? Then he laughed a good-natured laugh.

  The waitress looked to me.

  I shrugged and hoped they’d take a check.

  At dinner, I was audience to the conversations of men. Ron, the red-haired zoologist, led off with an informal lecture on the mating habits of possum—perverse polymorphs of the animal kingdom. He informed us that there were over seventy-five species of possum in the Americas. Some fluoresced if you stuck them under ultraviolet light, glowing all the colors of a rainbow: purple, green, orange.

  After a couple of beers, Ron got around to describing his favorite, a Venezuelan breed, which he called a sexual kamikaze. (I don’t remember if he told us, or if it was later that I learned, that some possum have forked penises, that others are born without an assigned sex, becoming whatever sex the group needs them to be—male, female, a matter of social necessity.) The Venezuelan possum that Ron described has protruding tusks and grows to be twice the size of the tusk-less female. When it’s time to mate, the male’s genitalia swell to the point of dragging and change color. After mating, the male dies. The female lives long enough to suckle her litter; when they’re weaned, she too dies.

  The specifics of Ron’s research escape me now, but the moral of his story that night was clear: reproduction is the possum’s raison d’être. They have their mating rituals; this, alas, was one of ours.

  When the check came after dinner, I pulled out my checkbook but the waitress said they only took cash. I hadn’t enough money for my share, so I asked if someone could lend me 10,000 cruzeiros—about $5 bucks—till we got back to INPA.

  —I left my cash at home, I said.

  —Ahhh, said the guy who insisted I eat. She expected us to buy her dinner. She’s one of those.

  —I didn’t expect to eat, I said.

  Mine was assumed to be a coquettish gesture. But they missed the point entirely. I didn’t want their help; I simply wanted to control my losses.

  Back at INPA, as we walked from the bus stop to the alojamentos, along the neat mosaic-tiled paths of INPA, the conversation shifted from possums to my preference for working with handsome Bill or red-haired Ron. I knew the subject had never really changed. Sex had been our subject all along. I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to be of use here. I wanted a way into the forest, to be part of a team, not a couple or ménage, but I’d take what I could get.

  Probably I would have joined Ron’s team to trap bats had I not feared for my diet. That calculation was my priority, at the expense of everything else. I was like the researchers in this way, though the absurdity of my regimen was more obvious, if perhaps not wholly more absurd. We were all absorbed in calculating loss, in hopes of controlling it, mistaking control for security, its ironic opposite.

  —I’d rather have a project of my own, I said. At Duque Reserve.

  Handsome Bill nodded, as if indifferent to this outcome.

  Ron, miffed, stalked off into the darkness alone.

  Bill walked me back to my apartment. He offered to take me on a motorcycle tour of INPA’s grounds the following afternoon; he said we’d go to Duque Reserve over the weekend, go in on Friday, come out Sunday night. He’d make all the necessary arrangements.

  I knew what he was saying. I understood that we would spend the night together, the weekend. This was the price I’d pay for his help. But I didn’t really mind; he was handsome and I couldn’t afford to mind. I needed his help, or thought I did.

  I didn’t realize then that there was another option, that there had been all along, there beside me—like the shimmering island of Itaparica in the Bay of all Saints—another possibility: I didn’t realize that I didn’t need someone else to make a place for me, I didn’t need permission. I didn’t realize that the choices were mine to make, simply waiting for me to make them.

  The following Friday, Bill and I took a jeep into Duque Reserve in the early afternoon. We were to camp on a sandy bank of a tributary at a site deep within the 10,000 hectare reserve, which meant a long drive to the ranger’s station and then, from there, an hour’s hike in.

  The road we took was slick with mud and deeply rutted from jeeps that had passed over it. Rainwater from an earlier storm had run off and pooled in milky patches that teemed with larvae and water skimmers. When we reached the ranger’s station, Bill went inside to speak to the ranger and I sat under a metal awning that covered several picnic tables, like a camping site in a public park. When Bill returned, he tried to get me to take off my tennis shoes and leave them at the station.

  —You won’t be needing protection against the world in there, he said. There are no big animals left this close to Manaus. There aren’t even mosquitoes to bother you. He explained that without human settlements to attract them, significant pest populations didn’t exist in the Amazon. People, in his view, were the problem, the pest.

  —What about leishmaniasis? I asked, eying a milky pool outside the ranger’s house. I knew from my reading that pools like this, left by human activity, were breeding grounds for mosquitoes, which carried the disease, which produced chronic subcutaneous ulcers and disintegrated—in advanced stages —the nose and palate.

  Bill shook his head and started down the path without me.

  As we walked in along the wide, muddy road, Bill proposed projects I might pursue, a study of frogs I might undertake. He posed this as a series of questions, reeling off facts about the frog and inviting me to answer, a sphinx offering me a chance to enter the city for the price of a clever answer. But these days I couldn’t make things fit together, add up.

  I grabbed fistfuls of branches, trying to steady myself as I made my way along the thin ridge of solid ground that separated the soft trail from the tangle of forest. Bill walked ahead of me, splashing through puddles, his bare feet sinking into the soft earth.

  I tripped over roots as I struggled to keep up with him.

  He turned to look at me.

  —It would be a lot easier, Ellen, if you’d just take off those shoes.

  Leaning against the damp bark of a tree, I slipped off my shoes. There was a hum of what sounded like crickets in the trees and the whir of a bird behind me, chirps and rattlings. The sun was a white blur, flaring through the canopy. The leaves, silver and green, seemed less like something organic than like green vinyl cut to form. Tall, thin skeletal trees, their elongated, white bodies reminiscent of ganglia, branched into twigs and leaves. Gigantic and still.

  It was growing dark by the time we rounded a bend and caught sight of our camp, where a lean-to of untrimmed logs, with a khaki tarpaulin stretched over it, stood in the center of a clearing. Enormous Morpho butterflies, iridescent blue, flitted around the clearing’s edge.

  Beyond this, the forest pressed on all sides.

  We slipped down the embankment to the clearing and began readying ourselves for night. Bill unpacked our gear: beakers, lanterns, plastic bags, tackle boxes full of measuring tapes and balances. I strung up our hammocks under the tarpaulin and walked into the forest to gather wood fo
r a fire.

  The afternoon shadows swelled and deepened, leaving the trees gray. I was down at the water’s edge, gathering kindling from the underbrush when the light dimmed. Sunset comes suddenly in the forest, the dense canopy blocking out the light long before the sun reaches the horizon. I made my way back to our camp, squinting at every tree root that rose above the soil, fearing snakes.

  Bill had already started a fire and skewered a slab of beef and begun roasting it; the meat dripped into the flames as it cooked, sending up sparks and making the flames hiss. I piled the wood I’d gathered next to the cooking pots and sat down on the ground in front of the fire. I tore open a pack of saltines at my side. Around us the forest was dark, an indistinguishable darkness. (I’m certain there must have been sounds—the forest at night is full of racket—birds, frogs, bugs, cries and chirs and barks, but I don’t remember these.)

  It’s when I stopped moving that I first noticed that I was feeling bad, weary and feverish and a little disoriented. Uncoordinated, edgy, and tired. I chalked it up to stress. I wanted nothing more than to stay there in camp and rest.

  —We can’t waste the whole night here, Bill said.

  I could not understand why not. Wasting an evening by a fire would have suited me just fine. I was feeling ill and needed rest.

  —We’ll lose our chance, he said. If we don’t go soon.

  It occurred to me to argue with him, to ask if we couldn’t gather specimens in the morning. It didn’t occur to me that this might be a test. An impractical joke. In any case, I did not want to appear weak, a sissy, a girl, so I crumpled the cracker package closed and stood up, wiping the dirt from my palms on my pants.

  Bill riffled through the supply pack and pulled out two miner’s lamps, plastic belts with a lamp midway round. He handed one to me.

  —You put it on like this, he said, taking my head in his hands to show me how to fit the band around my brow so that the lamp sat securely on my forehead.

  Then we stepped out into the forest.

  Bill led the way down the sandy path that ran from our camp to the river. The beam from his lamp illuminated a small circle of light ahead of him, mine lit one behind his feet. When we reached the river’s edge, he walked in and sank up to his chest in black water. I stood on the sand above.

  —Well, c’mon, he shouted, his lamp bobbing midstream. Don’t tell me you’re afraid of getting your feet wet.

  I placed a foot at the edge of the river, holding onto a branch to steady myself. When at last I stepped off, the river rose to my armpits. The riverbed was slick under the soles of my feet. Plants and mud oozed up between my toes as I waded to the other side, holding my arms above my head, trying to keep my head above water. I tried not to think about electric eels, piranha, crocodiles. Reaching the other bank, I grabbed at roots and vines and hauled myself up onto the fragrant peaty earth.

  Bill was waiting for me on the path and waved for me to join him, scooping his hand in the air. As I approached, he raised a finger to his lips. He pointed at the ground at our feet. In the beam of light from his lantern there was an enormous megalomorph spider, big as my fist. Two inches tall, five inches wide, it crouched beside a broad tree trunk. Bill pointed out its burrow among the tree roots. He pointed out the downy black fur across its back, which he claimed was a set of poison quills that could be fired at will (a claim I doubted, even as I feared it might be true).

  We walked on. Barefoot along the path. Bill had insisted that it was safer to go barefoot out here. If you stepped on a snake, he had told me earlier, you’d feel it—maybe before it bit. It didn’t occur to me that he might be joking. He went barefoot; so did I. Soon my head ached from squinting into the shadows of roots, trying to avoid stepping on spiders or snakes; we crossed roots, waded through streams. My mouth tasted sour and dry.

  I was relieved when, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes later, we reached the pools we had come for: broad shallow stretches of water where the tributary’s current had slowed. Bill walked downstream while I walked up among the fallen trees and mats of leaves that decomposed in the still, shallow pools. These were the best places, Bill had said, to catch the little fish and tadpoles that he suggested I study.

  I approached the inlets stealthily, my net extended in front of me, poised to catch the small fish, the soft gelatinous eggs, the sperm-like tadpoles. Two snakes coursed by, skimming past in search of bigger fish. I pointed them out to Bill, finding them beautiful. Bill said they were poisonous and to avoid them. We gathered fish and roe from the water’s edge, glistening and globate; they darted and quivered in the baggies we would carry back to camp.

  On the way back to camp, Bill insisted that I take the lead. I tried to show no fear, but I was relieved when we reached the river bank across from our camp. I stepped into the water, sinking straight away up to my armpits. I was halfway across, too far to turn back, when Bill shouted that there were crocodiles. Turning was slow and difficult in the current, but I managed to twist my head in time to see the red retinas of a freshwater crocodile, some three yards downstream from where I was, illuminated by Bill’s lamp.

  The battery for my lamp had been growing weak as we’d walked, thinning out, and the beam was now too faint to see me across to the other side.

  —My light is going, I shouted. Can you shine a path over here?

  Bill did not respond; possibly he did not hear me. There was a splash of water downstream, and I watched as Bill’s lamp illuminated the current beyond me in a weird orange glow.

  My lamp went out. Around me the water was dark as oil. The pressure of the current seemed increased by this absence of light. I had to fight to stand upright. My feet sank into mud; I worried with every brush of a pebble or weed against my feet about piranhas.

  —Bill, I shouted.

  He did not answer. Then I saw him downstream, in the center of a tannic glow—a strange illuminated underwater scene—embracing the crocodile. It occurred to me dimly that this might all be for show, a calculated adventure, his idea of an aphrodisiac, but there was nothing I could do about it. Right or wrong. There was nothing to do but go on alone. I put my hands out in front of me, as in a game of blind man’s bluff, and began to feel my way toward the other shore.

  After changing into dry clothes, I went to bed while Bill stayed up by the fire to eat and make notes, whether on the croc, the tadpoles, or me, I was not sure. When he entered the lean-to for bed, I pretended to be asleep, wrapped in an alpaca blanket in my hammock. But I did not sleep. I felt terribly chilled and nervous, my skin itched as if I had been bitten by ants.

  Bill seemed to fall into sleep quickly, his breath slowing and deepening. I lay awake, listening to the constant patter of rain on the canvas overhead. I found the deep silence beneath the sound of rain disquieting. I felt strange and disconnected from the world, unreal to myself. I felt like maybe I was going crazy. I had the panicked sense of unreality that sometimes overtook me as a child, as if the world were a scrim I might force my hand through. I looked over at Bill who lay in his hammock on the other side of the lean-to. Real or unreal, he was snoring softly.

  Danger Signs

  The next morning when I woke, the world appeared weird and glassy, and despite the heat, I was shivering. Bill asked if I’d ever had the measles, because—he said—it looked like I had them now. I was covered in red spots. I couldn’t recall if I had or hadn’t. I thought I’d had those shots, those illnesses, hadn’t everyone?

  Back at INPA, he dropped me off at the medical center, a modest, one-story, wooden building, reminiscent of counselors’ quarters at summer camp. There, a kindly lady doctor examined me—she looked in my eyes, down my throat, took my temperature—and announced that I was having an allergic reaction. A severe one. My throat and tongue were beginning to swell. I had a very high fever. My body, I could see for myself, was covered in red bumps: hives.

  She asked what I had eaten, had to drink lately, where I had been, whether I was on any medication. I told her I was only t
aking Fanzidar, an antimalarial medication I’d been given in the States. I did not mention the herbal laxative teas I drank by the quart.

  She said, We have to stop the swelling immediately. I’m going to give you a shot of cortisone, okay? To reduce the inflammation. And you are to stop taking Fanzidar.

  —Is that necessary? I asked. The cortisone? (I hated shots and didn’t want to take it.)

  —You are in grave danger, she said.

  —What about side effects? I asked, stalling. Cortisone damages the kidneys or liver, doesn’t it?

  —If we don’t reduce the swelling, your throat could close, she said. You could die. It is already swelling.

  It was true that I was having trouble swallowing, that my tongue was thick. But I was afraid of shots, afraid of this doctor whom I did not know. What if she was wrong? What if the shot didn’t help? What if the drug exacerbated the problem? (The mind fastens on minor threats in the face of serious danger.)

  —You are having an allergic reaction to Fanzidar, she explained, which she believed had built up in my blood, triggering the allergy. If we don’t treat this immediately, you could go into anaphylactic shock. Do you understand? You probably have an allergy to sulfa drugs; many people do. Understand?

  I nodded. I sat on the examining table, looking out through a small rectangular window above my head, at the pattern of leaves, the green and gray shadows, flickering against the screen.

  —Okay, I said.

  As she prepared the syringe, she told me about a researcher who had recently died while researching malaria at INPA. The drugs he was taking, perhaps Fanzidar itself, had only masked the malarial symptoms. By the time he realized he was sick, it was too late.

  —The cure, she said, is sometimes worse than the illness. Illness at least you can cure.