Trail of Feathers (17 page)

In the market, all kinds of products were for sale. We pushed through the crowds, peering at the merchandise, which was offered on makeshift stalls. Meat was being sold at the first area. Fresh caiman legs and jungle pig hooves, chunks of water eel, giant snails, and turtles hacked from their shells, sold along with their eggs. There were other creatures from the river, too, including a piraiuca, a giant, prehistoric, freshwater fish.

We pushed forwards through the crowds and came to a line of stalls selling live jungle animals. There were three black spider monkeys tied to a pole, $3 each; a young ocelot pacing in a cage ($35); three toucans with yellow bills ($15); a baby anteater ($20), and a curious species of primitive turtle, called a matamata ($4).

Gonzalo led me to an area roofed in blue polythene, where chonta, the heart of palm, was being shredded into what looked like tagliatelle. No meal in Iquitos is complete without a great pile of it. Beside the chonta was a line of tables selling mapacho, black tobacco, used in every shamanic ceremony. The leaves are brought from the deepest regions of the jungle, rolled tight into cylindrical batons, like candlesticks at church. The stall keepers, all women, sat on high stools clipping the tobacco and rolling it into oversized cigarettes.

A little further on a teenage girl with red hair and freckles was selling guajes. These fruit are best described as looking like rust-coloured hand-grenades. The flesh beneath the carapace, a popular snack, is light orange in colour. It’s said to have thirty times more vitamin C than citrus fruit.

Beyond the blue polythene roofs was another market, where medicaments were sold. We always hear in the West how the Amazon is an untapped storehouse of remedies. It’s undoubtedly true. But not until you walk through an emporium of raw jungle medicines, can you comprehend the range of plants involved.

Piled high on the tables there were roots, barks, oils and tinctures, each with a specific use. Gonzalo held up a section of ũna de gato, a vine celebrated for its ability to stop cancerous tumours. Beside it was a heap of coja bark, used for arthritis; and beside that siete raíces (seven roots) a bronchial dilator and aphrodisiac in one. At one stall the owner held up a jar. In it was a boa constrictor’s head pickled in brine - a remedy against rheumatism. Another table was arranged with dozens of miniature bottles filled with beads - amulets as powerful to the believing as any drug.

Before we left Belen, Gonzalo took me to meet a friend who sold guajes at the water’s edge. His table was in the shadow of an impressive bandstand, designed and built by Gustave Eiffel, in the good old days. Gonzalo’s friend employed a woman whose face was hideously disfigured. She was shy, reluctant to give the usual sales banter. As we looked for a motocarro to take us back to Plaza de Armas, I asked Gonzalo if he knew what had happened to her.

‘Everyone at Belen knows the story of Rosa,’ he said.

‘What story?’

Gonzalo wiped his mouth with his hand.

‘She used to be the most beautiful girl in Iquitos,’ he said. ‘Every schoolboy dreamed of having her. Then, when she was about fifteen, a maestro said he had seen a vision, in which Rosa was raped by five men. The dream was a premonition.’

‘But what happened to her face?’

‘Rosa’s mother didn’t want the dream to come true’ continued Gonzalo. ‘The maestro said there was only one thing to do - to turn her beauty into ugliness. So one night Rosa’s parents dipped her face in acid.’

                                                                  *

At noon the next day César sent word for me to come to his friend’s house in Punchana. As before, I found him crouching behind the door. This time he said he was looking for beetles on the floor. The sitting-room was now filled with equipment and goods. There was enough stuff to kit out an entire shop.

Rocking back and forth on the chair, César publicised what he had bought for the trip: ‘Fifty kilos of sugar and two hundred bars of soap’ he said, ‘eighty cans of tuna fish, sixty of sardines, thirty tins of butter, three hundred rolls of toilet paper, one hundred kilos of cooking salt, and forty of salt for preserving fish; a sack of rice and another of flour, a box of detergent for washing clothes, two boxes of bleach sachets, twelve dozen eggs, twenty litres of cooking oil, a box of cocoa, coffee and tea, forty fishing hooks, three propeller blades and three sacks of used clothing.’

‘Why do we need so much stuff?’

César smiled wide and blinked twice.

‘Gifts’ he said. ‘Without gifts the Shuar will butcher us.’

When he had finished with the manifest, César asked me for an extra $600. He had overspent on the food and was running short. Cash was still needed to hire a 15-horsepower outboard and to buy fuel. I went into the corner and unzipped my money-belt. Only the emergency money was left.

‘Sorry, but I don’t have any more dollars’ I said.

César rocked up and down a couple of times.

‘Then we won’t be going anywhere.’

I handed him the emergency money, and again asked for a receipt. Another excuse was knocked back at me.

In addition to taking clothes, fishing hooks and food, César said the Shuar would expect other things. He hadn’t budgeted for these, but advised me to go to the market and get what I could. Gonzalo would accompany me and, afterwards, we could pick up an antidote for snakebites.

‘What gifts shall I get?’

The Shuar like shiny things’ said César. ‘Combs, mirrors, beads, that sort of thing’

Back at Belen, Gonzalo and I trawled through the hardware shops. Like the ones at Nazca, they were piled floor to ceiling with Chinese-made merchandise. I bought a box of plastic combs and another of hand held mirrors, with coloured backs. After hearing Cesar’s story of the empty-handed missionaries, one couldn’t be too careful.

When the adventurer Lewis Cotlow went into the jungle in the early 1950s, he took lipsticks, mascara, and elaborate cosmetics. Warriors, he said, always needed warpaint for their faces. After Cotlow came a New York socialite, Nicole Maxwell, who spent years in the Peruvian Amazon. She hit upon a novel gift item. Before leaving the United States, she bought dozens of glass eyes in her own eye colour. Indian chiefs were amazed when she brought them out. I thought hard to come up with something as original as glass eyes.

It was then that I remembered the film The Gods Must be Crazy, in which a Coca-Cola bottle finds its way into a remote Botswanan village. For the Khoikhoin people the bottle was an invaluable tool. They used it as a rolling-pin, a musical instrument, for pounding grain and even as a weapon. Eventually, fights broke out because everyone wanted to use the bottle. The only way to ensure peace was to take not one Coke bottle, but two dozen.

Gonzalo thought it was a ridiculous idea. He said the Shuar would hit us over the heads with the bottles and then slit our throats. It worried me that any story told by Iquitenos, involving the Shuar, ended with everyone getting their heads hacked off. I had a gut feeling that the Coke bottles would go down well. After hunting for more than an hour, we ended up with twenty Fanta bottles. They would have to do.

Gonzalo said it was time to get the antidote for snake bites. But it wasn’t sold in the market, he said.

‘Where do we get it, then?’

‘From Anaconda Man.’

We climbed aboard a dugout canoe near Eiffel’s bandstand and headed out through the floating village. Anaconda Man lived a short distance from Belen. Gonzalo said that no one would dream of going deep into the jungle without a remedy for snake bites. A boy of about seven sat at the bows, stabbing his oval-ended paddle into the water. The canoe was precariously low in the water. Gonzalo said this was normal, a result of advanced wood-rot. We ducked every few seconds, to avoid the walkways that bridged the channel. Soon we were out past the maze of houses. With a constant rhythm we jerked forwards through beds of water hyacinth.

A few miles out of Iquitos, the young boatman punted the craft skilfully towards the river-bank. Gonzalo helped me out onto the mud. As I slid up to the grass-roofed shack, its occupant came out to greet us. He was average in height, but had extremely muscular shoulders, stocky thighs, and a maniacal laugh. When he walked, the mud shook. This, Gonzalo whispered ominously, was the Anaconda Man.

We sat on a log and watched as Anaconda Man wrestled a fifteen-foot anaconda. His bravery was fortified by a swig of chuchuhuasi, a strange jungle liqueur made from aguardiente and the bark of the colossal chuchuhuasi tree. It was impressive to see the snake coil around his back and arms, constricting.

When it came to reptiles, Anaconda Man was a show-off. First he posed with his collection of giant snakes. Then he stuffed a baby black caiman in his mouth, and sucked a lizard’s head like a lollipop. I told him to stop, but ignoring me, he rammed a larger caiman down his trousers.

Keen to get down to business, I asked him what snakes we might expect on our journey to the Pastaza. Anaconda Man broke into hysterical laughter. There were too many to name, he said, yanking the caiman’s tail from under his belt. My tropical medical kit included a list of dangerous Amazonian snakes. It was a long list. The main ones to avoid, it advised, were pit vipers, bushmasters, lanceheads, coppermouths, parrot snakes, as well as boa constrictors and anacondas. The leaflet went on to say that, without the correct anti-venom, you hadn’t got a chance of surviving a snake bite.

Gonzalo slapped his hand on Anaconda Man’s back.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘this man has one anti-venom for all snakes.’

It sounded like powerful stuff.

Anaconda Man went into his shack and returned a minute later with a wide-mouthed jar. It contained dull green oil and what looked like anatomical specimens.

‘How many do you want?’ he asked.

‘All of them,’ said Gonzalo.

‘Cuarenta soles, 40 soles,’ replied the snake expert.

I dug the money from my pocket. Gonzalo put the jar under his arm and led the way back to the boat. I asked Anaconda Man how to use the remedy.

‘When you get a snake bite, rub one of the pieces onto the fang marks. Then swallow it.’

‘What are they?’ I asked. ‘What is the medicine?’

Anaconda Man helped me into the boat.

‘Los corazones de serpiente, they’re snake hearts,’ he said.

Breakfast at Ari’s Burger was always a sombre affair. Each face was drawn, reflecting the previous night’s debauchery. The scent of Nescafé and cigarettes lingered in the air. Every so often a stray curio-seller would bluster in and tout tarantulas in frames. No one ever bought them. The giant spider market never heated up until at least noon.

One old American was downing his third cup of black coffee. There were four unopened packs of Marlboros stacked up on his table. He had a long day at Ari’s ahead of him. Nearby, at the front of the café, a pair of immaculately dressed women were nibbling toast. They were coutured in identical grey and white uniforms, the livery of the Peruvian airline, Tans. They were fresh and alert. And, unlike the rest of the Iquiteños, they were too sophisticated to stare. In Iquitos everyone stares as much as they possibly can. Lecherous old men stare at teenage waitresses with curls, waitresses stare at foreigners, and foreigners stare at busty local women, who stare at the lecherous old men.

Florita served me a cup of Nescafé. She’d been fighting off the advances of an Australian man, she confided. He was very handsome, she said, with a broad chest and dimples in his cheeks. He had asked her to Gringolandia, and he had bought her a bouquet of flowers. Pausing to apply a coat of pink gloss to her lips, Florita pouted harder than I had seen her pout before. All the weary hungover heads turned in slow motion to watch. Even the air hostesses looked over.

‘I have two left feet when it comes to dancing,’ I said.

‘I’ll teach you to dance, me amor.’

‘I go to bed by ten.’

‘Then, we’ll set off for Gringolandia extra early,’ she said.

‘But I’m married’

‘So?’

When Xavier turned up I asked him to take Florita aside and set things straight. While I was flattered, there was no way I could go disco dancing with her. I don’t know what he said, but later in the day Florita came over to my table. With tears welling in her eyes, she handed me another note.

It read: ‘Lo lamenartás. You will regret your decision.’

Xavier had come to take me to meet César. As we drove towards Punchana, he started bragging again about his tattoo. He went on and on about the pain, and about the size of the dragon. If I were to see the beauty of the mermaid and the angels, he said, I would go mad. I asked if I could see it. As before, he refused. So, without warning, I pulled up his tee-shirt. He thrust his arms across his bare chest.

‘I can’t see the tattoo,’ I said. ‘Where is it?’

Xavier pointed to a pair of parallel lines, about a centimetre long. 

‘There!’ he said. 

‘That’s not a monster.’

‘I haven’t got the dragon yet,’ he said, squirming, ‘but I’ve got the dragon’s fangs.’

Nineteen nylon sacks of loot were blocking the entrance of the Punchana house. They were tied up with yellow string. César was sitting on the concrete floor making calculations. All the food was ready, he said, and an outboard engine had been hired and tested.

César climbed onto the rocking-chair and smiled apprehensively.

‘I have to go into the jungle on a quick trip,’ he said.

‘Can’t it wait?’

He shook his head.

‘Got an urgent order.’

‘An order for what?’

‘Insects.’

As well as being a celebrated linguist, healer and navigator, César had a profitable sideline, in the giant insect business.

‘I have customers all over the world,’ he said, ‘they pay hundreds of dollars for the big ones.’

‘How big?’

César motioned something the size of a small cat with his hands.

‘Titanus giganticus, the biggest beetle in the world. They grow up to twenty centimeters.’ 

‘What are they worth?’

‘Collectors in the USA or Japan pay $800 for them, dead or alive,’ he said. ‘I have a friend in Canada who’s a very serious collector. His largest specimen is worth $500,000.’