Trail of Feathers (16 page)

In Iquitos, casual compliments are taken very seriously. The girl, who said her name was Florita, lamented that she hadn’t a date for Gringolandia, the disco. She would wait for me at ten. I choked out a list of excuses, and got back to my plans.

There was still much to do before my search for the Shuar could start. No time for disco dancing. On a paper napkin I made a list: (1) Guide. (2) Supplies. (3) Boat.

Florita swanned over with a huge banana split. Its bowl was as big as a geranium’s pot. I rooted around with the long spoon, hunting for bananas. There were none. I asked what was going on. Florita said the bananas had been blended up.

Back to the list. Getting a guide was the main worry. I needed a man who knew the Pastaza region, where the Shuar lived. He would have to be adept at diplomacy as well as jungle survival; a knowledge of ayahuasca would be useful as well.

Florita told me that I shouldn’t look for a guide. If you want something in Iquitos, she said, you wait for it to come to you. Hang around, she pouted, and a guide would turn up.

Exactly thirty seconds later a sleek young man slipped easily onto the chair beside mine. He pulled a Marlboro from a soft pack, slid his tongue down the edge, and lit the end.

‘I heard you were looking for a guide,’ he said.

‘Yes, I am, but how did you know? I haven’t told anyone but Florita.’

The man, Xavier, squinted as the smoke furled up into his eyes.

‘It’s my job to know what’s going on,’ he said.

If Ari’s Burger was Arnold’s Diner, then Xavier was its Fonz. His hair was a number one on the sides, sheered with electric clippers, an oily quiff crowned the top. He wore his own self-styled uniform -ripped jeans and a white tee-shirt with the arms torn off. As far as Xavier was concerned, arms were for wimps. Under the shirt, he confided, lay a tattoo of staggering size and imagination: a dragon savaging a mermaid, surrounded by angels. The sting of the needle, he said, had been excruciating.

‘Can I see it?’

Xavier swept back his quiff.

‘Are you kidding? The girls would go wild.’

Florita tiptoed over and nuzzled a note under my glass. It declared her undying love for me.

‘Let’s get down to business,’ I said. ‘Do you know the Pastaza region?’

‘No man’ said Xavier, ‘I’m not a guide … I’m a fixer.’ 

‘Well can you fix me up with a guide? I need someone who knows the Shuar tribe.’ 

Xavier’s ice-cool expression cracked.

‘Shuar?’ he murmured, miming a round object with his hands. 

‘Shrunken heads’ I said. ‘But they don’t do that any more.’ 

‘It’s not going to be easy. No one goes up there.’

‘Well, I’ll have to get another fixer who can find a man brave enough for the job’ 

Xavier thumped his breast.

‘Give me until this time tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll find you a guide so brave that he could walk through fire.’

*

In the late afternoon I explored the streets leading onto Malecon Tarapaca, the road which runs along the waterfront. Tourism didn’t seem to have taken off in Iquitos. Despite this, the backstreets were littered with tourist kiosks. Each one sold the same range of curiosities. There were blowpipes seven feet long, spears and snuff-pipes, feather head-dresses and stuffed piranhas, jaguar teeth necklaces and masks made from caiman skin. Frames panelled the walls of every kiosk. In them giant insects were pinned out.

I sipped a tall blended drink on the porch of a restaurant called Fitzcarraldo. It had once been home to the legendary rubber-tapper and explorer of the same name. Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo had made a great impression on me years before. I never thought that one day I might be sitting in the rubber-tapper’s headquarters, looking out over the swollen waters of the Amazon.

Fitzcarraldo’s story echoes the trailblazer spirit and the wild excesses of the rubber boom years. Born Brian Sweeny Fitzgerald, the eldest son of an immigrant Irishman, he was known in the jungle as Fitzcarraldo. He fled into the Amazon in his early twenties, after being accused of spying during the war between Peru and Chile. Two years later, in about 1877, he had made a fortune as a rubber-tapper, and was one of the richest men in Peru. The money was soon spent.

After watching Enrico Caruso perform at Manaus’ £400,000 opera house, Fitzcarraldo swore he’d lure the great tenor to the Peruvian jungle. His dream was to bring opera to the natives. What better way to entice Caruso, he thought, than to build an opera house to match the one in Manaus?

To raise funds, Fitzcarraldo came up with a plan. He would make use of the vast rubber-tree forest on the Ucayali River, where 14 million trees lay untapped. To succeed, he first had to get a boat beyond Pongo das Mortes, the Rapids of Death. Everyone said he was mad, which he probably was. He sailed his steamship up a parallel river and forced his labourers - all of them Shuar - to haul it over a hill and down to the Ucayali.

Once the steamer was on the Ucayali, Fitzcarraldo and his companions celebrated with drink. As they did so, Shuar labourers cut the mooring ropes, sending the boat charging towards the rapids. From the start they had planned secretly to sacrifice the vessel, to appease the spirit of the waterfall. The boat plunged over the rapids. Somehow, Fitzcarraldo survived but never lived to build his opera house. He died soon after, in 1889, drowned in the Urubamba River. He was just thirty-five.

Night falls quickly over the jungle. The patina of dusk diffuses into darkness, a signal for the nocturnal world to wake. In Plaza de Armas the street-lights seethed with insect life,- mosquitoes, moths and hornets among them, hurling themselves at the orbs of brilliant white glass. The restaurants and bars, bright with neon lighting, were haunted by them. No one but me was in the least bothered.

The only place in Iquitos free from insects was Ari’s Burger. Every few minutes one of the bubbly waitresses would float through, spraying poison gas from an aerosol. I sought refuge there, preferring the gas to the bugs outside.

Even before my backside had met the chrome chair, Florita was standing over me. She had missed me during the afternoon, she said, but would miss me even more later in the night. Three other guys had already asked her to the disco, but she’d rejected them in favour of me. She exclaimed that she would never look at another man. Murmuring more excuses, I ordered another banana split.

I closed my eyes as the poison gas rained down. When I opened them, a robust-looking man was sitting across the table. His skin was tanned, his hair expertly cropped and parted at the side. He had an honest face that seemed out of place in Ari’s Burger.

‘Iquitos is the best kept secret in the world,’ he said in a west-Texan drawl, ‘but there’s a lot of bad people down here. But we’re cleaning it up.’

I was on the lookout for conmen, I said. 

The Texan tapped his index finger on the raspberry vinyl. 

‘Don’t let down your guard,’ he replied. ‘The bandits see tourists like you as game… game to be hunted.’

An Englishman buttonholed me in the corridor of Hotel Selva. Dark circles lined his eyes; his face was as white as Dover chalk. In a Liverpudlian accent he asked me what I thought of the hotel.

There’s no electricity, running water or glass in the windows,’ I said, ‘the mattress is rotting, and the bathroom’s full of chickens. And there are a pair of nymphomaniacs in the next room.’

‘Why don’t you find somewhere else?’

Making a fist, I rammed it into my palm.

‘I’m going into the jungle,’ I said. ‘Going to need a lot of toughening up. Even the jungle couldn’t be as rough as room 102.’

The Liverpudlian walked down to the reception and asked for a room just like mine, leaving me to wonder what kind of lunatic he was.

Later that day, Xavier strolled into Ari’s Burger and winked.

‘Got you a guide,’ he said.

‘Is he brave?’

‘Like a kamikaze pilot.’

‘Bring him over, and we’ll have a chat.’

‘He won’t come to Ari’s’ said Xavier, winking again.

César was squatting behind the door of his friend’s house, in a shanty town called Punchana. As a successful jungle guide he was, he said, hiding from bad, jealous men - the very same kind of people he’d protect me from were I to hire him.

‘If you’re going to protect me, you’re not going to be able to hide behind doors,’ I said.

César paced over to a rocking-chair, made from steel construction poles. He was about thirty, chubby with a big head and a nervous twitch. From time to time his face would erupt in a broad, anxious smile. The more he smiled, the more he twitched. Rocking back and forth nervously on the chair, he told me of his life.

‘My brother was killed by Sendero Luminoso,’ he began in a voice inspired by gloom. ‘His body was dumped in the river near Pucallpa, and was eaten by piranhas. Then three months ago my sister died of cancer. My three brothers and I carry on the family name, living however we can.’

‘What experience have you as a guide?’

César revived from his fit of melancholy.

‘I’ve been taking tourists into the jungle for twenty years,’ he said, ‘since I was a child. I speak eighteen languages - German, French, Arabic, Japanese … and I can navigate by the stars.’

‘What about ayahuasca?’

He smiled, then blinked as if a bright light were shining in his eyes.

‘Taken it hundreds of times,’ he said. ‘I’m a shaman. I was taught by a maestro on the Napo River.’

‘When were you last up in the Pastaza region, with the Shuar?’

‘Shuar?’ he mouthed. ‘Yes, I know the Shuar. If you look them in the eye they’ll slit your throat. If you see their women they’ll hack off your head with a machete. And if you show any signs of illness, they’ll drown you.’

‘Dangerous people, the Shuar,’ said Xavier, wincing.

‘Only last month a group of missionaries flew up to the Pastaza in a seaplane,’ said César. ‘They landed on the river. When the Shuar elders came out, the missionaries greeted them. The tribe seemed friendly, so the Christians camped on the river-bank. But in the night the Shuar warriors attacked and killed them all. They chopped off their heads for trophies, and cut up the bodies.’

‘Why did they murder them?’

César rocked back and forth tensely.

‘No gifts,’ he said. ‘They came with empty hands.’

Although his nervous disposition worried me, I hired César as a guide. His good English, claimed knowledge of Pastaza, ayahuasca and jungle medicine were the credentials I was after. We negotiated a fee and a budget for equipment and gifts. It was a lot of money. Xavier said I could rest assured, for I was hiring the best in the Upper Amazon. César suggested I employ his three younger brothers as porters, for an additional $600. All the money, a total of $3,100, would have to be paid in advance, he said. I handed over a wad of used banknotes.

To save time and fuel, César proposed that we take a river ferry up from Iquitos to San Ramon, at the base of the Pastaza. The journey up the Amazon and its headwater, the Mar anon, would take about ten days. We would take food and supplies with us, as well as a small outboard motor and fuel. Upriver we would hire a dugout and fix the engine to it.

César was just about to write me a receipt when there were shouts from the street. Without flinching, he ran out the back door and over a neighbour’s fence, taking my money with him.

‘What’s the problem? That man was shouting ¡Los Policías!’

Xavier lit a cigarette and inhaled.

‘Someone must have got robbed,’ he said. ‘The crime’s terrible in Iquitos.’

                                                                  *

My head was heavy on the fetid pillow that night, under which was the magic cob of maize. I had a dream in which César was laughing demonically. He was about to say something when I woke up, startled by the sound of the bedhead banging on the other side of the wall. I stumbled into the bathroom where the chickens were roosting, and tried to coax a single drop of water from the tap. As usual, it was bone dry.

The cook started slaughtering chickens early the next morning. Over the racket, I heard the manager’s wife screaming for me down the corridor. César had sent his brother, Gonzalo, to meet me. I noticed at once the familiar trait of delivering a blink with a smile. He had instructions, he said, to take me to the floating market at Belen.

As we walked the mile or so down Calle Putumayo, Gonzalo told me tales of evil, depraved men, who were hell-bent on destroying his family.

‘Iquitos is a dangerous place,’ he said. ‘People will rest only when you are dead. They use black magic to make you ill, so you die slowly, and with pain.’

‘Who are these people?’

Gonzalo blinked, but he was not smiling.

‘They are the Mahicaris, the Devil Worshippers,’ he said.

Beneath the tranquil veneer of daily life, there lurks an underworld of sorcery and superstition. The entire Latin continent is founded on a bedrock of magical belief. But nowhere else, except perhaps for Manaus, had I come across such a fear of the occult. The Brazilian Amazon has a history of Macumba, a religious system blended from West African belief and Catholic iconography. African slaves were never brought to the Upper Amazon, and so Macumba, and its sister faith Santeria, are unknown in Peru.

Instead, a shamanic tradition has grown up, which touches every member of society. It heals illness when people are sick, and solves problems; for, as I was constantly reminded, everyone in Iquitos had problems.

I asked Gonzalo about the Devil Worshippers. I wanted to meet them.

He bit the corner of his lip and blinked.

‘You can’t go to the Mahicaris’ he said. ‘You have to wait for them to find you.’

                                                                *

Belen was buoyant with activity, even though the shops on Calle Putumayo still had their shutters closed. The market area extended down to the sludge-brown water and the floating village. Thousands upon thousands of balsa wood shacks were slotted together. When the water was high, as it was then, the houses simply rose on the tide. Children were splashing, avoiding lumps of raw sewage,- their mothers busy washing clothes, and everyone else was doing their ablutions.