The Dream Merchant (25 page)

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
a
aí
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 restless 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.

*   *   *

When Jim sat up to ask Ribamar, the older man was lying on the dirt a few feet away, dozing. And yet when Ribamar had set up Jim's hammock he'd been careful not to allow it to even touch the ground lest ants and other bugs crawl into it and torture Jim through the night. Jungle insects didn't bother Ribamar.

In an hour, or three hours, when Jim looked up again, Ribamar was sitting on the log, smoking a cigarette. What about the snakes, Ribamar? Can you hear the cobra in your sleep? Ribamar nodded yes. Once or twice a week, a cobra, coral snake, or pit viper would crawl into the clearing. Ribamar, or one of the other men, would kill the snake with a machete or smack it with a log, and kick it back into the trees. With his ear on the ground, Ribamar could hear a snake coming out of the bush. He could hear a man approaching. Even without dogs, he could sometimes hear the jaguar.

What does it sound like, Ribamar?

Your body starts to tell you when a jaguar is near, the older man said. Sometimes you hear it moving through the vegetation, but usually it's nothing specific. You feel your death arriving.

Ribamar was smiling a little, but Jim decided he was telling the truth.

Go to sleep, Jim.

*   *   *

In the early light, Jim awoke with the conviction that he was saving his family. It was the remnant of a dream and he didn't stay with it for long. Jim rarely thought about the past, and when he did he felt impatient. Every morning he was newly born in hot rancid water. It still wasn't time to leave the hammock, another couple of hours before the mosquitoes mostly disappeared around mid-morning and Ribamar released Jim from this hanging hell where he ached and scratched his legs and belly drenched from sweat or from pissing on himself when he couldn't find the bottle in the dark.

Jim listened to the squeal of parrots and thought about his plans for the day. He had flown in a dozen laborers from Manaus. There were four gunmen hanging around the clearing and more were coming. There were about a dozen
garimpeiros
living near the camp, beginning to dig for gold. Jim's tiny community was growing. There were no barracks yet and all of the laborers slept in hammocks slung between trees. In another hour they'd be working on the runway, hacking through the trees south of the clearing. It was so exciting. Big things were happening and mistakes were often not tolerated. Two days earlier a worker bathing in the river had been eaten by piranhas. There were many deadly creatures, and yet, besides the insects that teemed everywhere, you didn't see them. They were hiding in the trees or inside your hammock or boot, biding their time, protecting themselves, or waiting to pounce.

Jim didn't worry about animals or sickness. Ribamar watched over him, made Jim feel untouchable. More, the violence of this habitat excited him. He knew that he could win here. He saw it clearly while lying in the hammock. He could stay in the fire longer than the next guy. He loved constructing an empire from a puny clearing in the forest. He wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty. Many afternoons he dug in the mud with
garimpeiros
or swung a machete, clearing trees and vines. Jim knew a few words of Portuguese and gestured expressively, what he wanted and where. He urged his gunmen to lend a hand, though they were lazy men who resented labor, but eventually they also grabbed machetes and cut back the bush. Jim's enthusiasm was infectious and his men loved him. He gave them a hug. He knew just the right words to keep them going. He told them a little about the future. They were like his children. He knew the men would follow him and do whatever was necessary.