Trail of Feathers (27 page)

The oil plant was bordered on three sides by the jungle, and on the fourth by the Rio Corrientes. Three giant satellite dishes were clustered at one end of the area, beside the low tin-roofed residential quarters. Opposite stood offices, and beyond them an industrial complex. The man with a yellow helmet and rubber boots wrote our names on a clipboard. When he saw Juan’s tumour, he called his superior.

Two minutes later we were sitting in the reception area. A single door divided the two worlds. Outside lay the jungle: suffocating, damp, seething with life. Inside there was central air-conditioning, thick pile carpets and neon lighting. An American water cooler stood in one corner of the room, beside a potted jungle plant. On the coffee table were crisp copies of the
New York Times
, and
Newsweek
. In the background I recognised the hum of a photocopier.

Juan and his father were as threatened as I was comforted by the surroundings. They stood to attention when the bearded plant manager greeted us. He said that their doctor would take a look at the boy. A biopsy of the tumour would be rushed to Lima. When I thanked him, he pressed his hand into mine.

‘Thank God you didn’t go to a doctor in Trompeteros,’ he said.

‘I didn’t expect there to be one.’

‘Everyone in town is suffering from the same thing,’ he said, ‘the quack rubs toothpaste on the infected parts.’

He roved a hand through his beard, muttering: ‘I doubt he’s ever treated a patient’s head.’

*

A concrete path formed the main street of Trompeteros. It being in the middle of the jungle, there were no cars. The path ran the length of the town, a total of about four hundred feet. Either extremity ended in foliage. At the path’s westernmost edge stood
Hostal de Milagros
, Hotel of Miracles. A man with leathery cheeks and swollen eyes stumbled from the entrance and down the steps. He was doing up his flies. On his face was a broad grin and, on his arm, a young woman. Her hair was pushed up in a bouffant style, her heels were high. All her front teeth were gold.

The hotel’s reception was decorated with a number of moth-ravaged leopard, panther and snake skins. A display cabinet above the counter was stocked with dark bottles of beer. I told the man in charge that I needed the best room in the house.

‘
¿
Dónde esta su mujer? 
Where’s your woman?’ he snarled suspiciously. ‘Do you need one?’

He clicked his fingers and, before I could blink, three scantily-clad girls with gold teeth were standing in the doorway.

‘You don’t understand,’ I said, ‘I just want to sleep.’

The local beauties protested for a moment or two, before slinking away.

Room number three was basic, but a welcome change from a hammock infested with wolf spiders. The stench from the blocked lavatory, the lack of sheets, and the pool of dried blood in the far corner, were hardly worthy of mention. I sat on the bed, flicking the light switch on and off. Electricity was a great novelty.

In the stifling heat of the early afternoon, I found Walter and Francisco spending their savings at Trompeteros’s small emporium. It was packed from floor to ceiling with shiny merchandise. Everything was wrapped in crumpled cellophane. The usual supplies of Nivea cream and oxblood-coloured boot polish were complemented by an array of more enticing products - imitation Barbie dolls, pink plastic hair clips, ping-pong balls and tubes of superglue. But the boat’s crew weren’t interested in cheap trinkets. They’d come for ingredients.

When I asked them what they were making, they looked at each other and cackled subversively. Walter said a man was mending the boat’s leak, but the work would take three days. This gave them some time. He turned to the shaman. They pooled their money to buy half a dozen bottles of Chinese ‘Shanghai brand’ body lotion, and a tin of Colman’s English mustard powder. Then they hurried away into the shadows behind the shop.

At the centre of the concrete path, past the boss-eyed barber’s stall and a makeshift bar, lay Trompeteros’s most celebrated feature - the disco. Widely acclaimed as the sleaziest establishment in the Upper Amazon, its bamboo swing doors were never closed to business. The single ultraviolet light never wavered, and the distorted music never waned. In the moist atmosphere a horde of lascivious gold-toothed women hunted for custom.

Outside the nightspot a boy of about five was sucking on a syringe. He said the doctor had given it to him. When his mother exited the surgery, opposite the disco, she cursed the physician. She said the medicated white cream he prescribed to all his patients didn’t do any good at all.

Further down the concrete path I came across a man touting giant Amazonian snails. He was cutting them up live to make
ceviche
. Beside him, another man was trying to sell some daffodil-yellow lingerie. He said it was imported specially from Paraguay.

I was admiring the size of the snails when a well-dressed man strode up to the salesmen, and handed them each a dozen red sachets. All over town the tomato-coloured packets were being passed around. You could have as many as you wanted for free. Indeed, the more you were seen to take, the more praise you attracted. The sachets contained condoms.

The people of Trompeteros were a wily lot. Privately they frowned on using the prophylactics, but this didn’t stop them grabbing as many of them as they could. Men, women and children alike had found that a condom had a thousand uses. Food could be stored in them, and liquids carried; they made fine markers for fishing nets when filled with air, and they could be burned to keep insects away, or roped together to form a lightweight clothes-line. Some women used them to tie back their hair. And no child was without a homemade condom whistle.

The electricity, the running water, the condoms and the disco of Trompeteros were all made possible by the oil company. Without the multinational, the town would have shrunk back to being another insignificant village on the Rio Corrientes. And yet, everyone in Trompeteros despised the oil workers and their production plant. One man told me that they were low life workers from Argentina; another that they were polluting the river and killing the fish. A third, a haggard man resting on the steps of my hotel, revealed another reason to hate the oilmen. They were so snobbish, he said, that they wouldn’t sleep with the local women.

Back at the Hotel of Miracles, a line of beauties were waiting in the corridor outside my room. There must have been about thirty of them. All had mouths chequered by gold teeth. I feared that news of a foreigner had tempted the most infected of Trompeteros’s femmes fatales from the humid confines of the disco. But, as I edged down the hallway, none of them even looked at me.

They had been lured by room number four. Thinking no more of it I went into my room, flicked on the light, and got ready to go to bed. I tried to hang my shirt on a hook mounted high on the wall. But, to my surprise, the hook snapped off and fell onto the cement floor. It was then I realised that it wasn’t a hook at all, but the chrysalis of a giant moth.

I lay on the mattress coaxing my back to embrace the flat surface. Occasional sounds disturbed me from next door. I could have sworn I heard Francisco’s raspy voice through the wall. The thought of the chrysalis twitching with larvae disturbed me, too. But before I knew it, I was asleep.

By the time the sun had risen above Trompeteros’s pair of street lamps, a stage had been constructed at the centre of town. The boards of the podium were made from yellow mahogany, its backdrop was a screen of woven banana leaves. Once the stage was prepared, it was decorated with inflated condoms. Nearby, another team were rigging up speakers, and scrappy red bunting, strung together with yet more prophylactics.

I asked the barber what was going on. He looked at his watch.

'It must be carnival,’ he replied, vaguely. In Trompeteros it’s always carnival. Prepare yourself … the
fiesta
is very wild.’

An hour later, a horde of people was massing at the far end of Trompeteros, dressed in a multiplicity of costumes. Mothers and wives were prodding the menfolk into line, as the last stragglers arrived. Peruvians like nothing more than to put on a fabulous parade, which they can do at the drop of a hat. It’s a way of showing off their finest clothes, and is a great booster of morale.

A band shuffled forward, their home-made uniforms tattered by years of wear, the dents in their instruments reflecting the light. As they assembled, silence prevailed.

Then, with the clash of cymbals, the jamboree began.

The theme was the jungle. Many had dressed as tribal warriors. The painted faces, feather crowns and blowpipes suggested that it wasn’t fancy dress at all. There were animals, too. One man had dressed as a toucan, another was wearing a panther skin, and a skinny woman was wrapped in a cape made from sloth skins. Behind her was a sinister young man. He was dressed as a giant rodent.

After the rodent came a clutch of gold-toothed girls in seductive clothes. They had come as themselves, day and night dancers from the disco. And, after them, followed a wave of men and young boys dressed like Rambo. They wore the ripped black clothing of guerrilla fighters, and carried home-made guns. Their faces were blacked with charcoal, and they had bandannas tied around their heads. They had come as members of the
Sendero Luminoso
.

At the front of the crude parade, was a little girl of about nine. She was set apart from all the others, for she’d spurned the pageant’s theme. I recognised her as the type of little girl that every normal child loathes. Her hair, adorned with pearls, was neatly tucked behind a silver comb, and her prim little ballet shoes were free from dirt. She wore a velvety alabaster tutu, lace gloves, spotless white stockings and bright red lipstick. As she marched, her miniature hands juggled a silver baton faultlessly. I prayed that the giant rodent would nudge her into the mud.

When the parade ended, the tribal men paced off into the jungle to go hunting; the loose women slunk back into the disco; and the giant rodent meandered away home. The little prima donna pulled the lace gloves tighter up her wrists. Then she barked a string of orders to her brow-beaten father. I wondered what her future might be in Trompeteros.

I took a stroll down to the
Pradera
, where a robust carpenter was at work fixing a brace into position over the crack. Cockroach still hadn’t been relieved by Walter or Francisco. He said they were up to no good. Even before stepping off the boat, they had been hatching a plan to woo the sleaziest women in town.

‘No sensible girl would be interested in them,’ I said, ‘They’re both uglier than Quasimodo.’

‘This isn’t like other countries,’ said Cockroach, apologetically. ‘Here in Peru, the ugliest men get all the most beautiful women. It’s a fact.’

This may have explained why I had attracted advances from so many Peruvian women. As I pondered the thought, Cockroach suggested we let the beetles out of their boxes for a few minutes, to stretch their legs. I commended him on the idea, after all they had been locked away inside the medicine cabinet for days. I stood well back as he tapped out the huge specimens into a shallow cardboard box. Although still juveniles, their size was truly astonishing.

When I got back to the hotel, the queue of women waiting outside room four had grown. It now snaked round the corner, up the stairs and through the reception. I asked the manager what was going on. He put a hand on his groin and murmured
‘
¡
Milagros!
Miracles!’

Having been unable to find Walter or Francisco, I slumped on my bed. That night a jungle beauty pageant was going to be held, I’d been told, in the centre of Trompeteros. I knew that the event would be sapping to the senses.

As my cheek pressed deep into the stocking-stuffed pillow, I heard noises radiating from room four. Sounds of arousal were mixed with instructions from a rasping, familiar voice. It sounded like Walter. But, as I reasoned it, no self-respecting woman would have given him the time of day. Then Cockroach’s words came to mind. I stepped out into the corridor and called Walter’s name. The sea of gold-toothed girls parted as the room’s door opened no more than a crack. A frenzied eye jerked about, straining to focus. It was Walter’s eye. Before I could ask how he was attracting such large numbers of local women, he volunteered his ruse.

‘Una cura
, a cure …’ he whimpered, ‘we are curing the women.’

‘We?'

‘Francisco and me.’

‘He made a medicine, a cream … and I’m giving it to the women.’

I asked if, by any chance, it contained ‘Shanghai-brand’ body lotion, and Colman’s English mustard.

Consulting with his accomplice, Walter said that those were just two of the many ingredients. Francisco’s head poked up.

‘We’re curing the disease,’ he said, proudly. ‘These women all have a disease.’

‘And what good is Chinese body lotion and mustard powder at curing their afflictions?’

The shaman slapped his hands together and spat.

‘Una cura milagrosa y gratis
, it’s a free miracle cure,’ he said, beaming, ‘after all, this is the Hotel of Miracles.’

I might have dismissed Francisco’s potion as a sham, but the last free miracle medicine I had come across had miraculously cured me of asthma. It was being dispensed in the old city of Hyderabad, India. On the first day of the Monsoon each year, the Gowd family, who live there, hand out a remedy to anyone suffering from chest infections. Having developed asthma myself, I took advantage of the physic, along with more than half a million others, from all over India.

Everyone who turns up for the miracle cure makes their way to the Gowds’ two-storey whitewashed house. They each bring with them a live
murrel
fish. After days of queuing, they hand the fish to one of the Gowd brothers, who fills the creature’s mouth with a glob of foul-smelling yellow paste. The afflicted person opens their own mouth very wide and, before he knows it, the amateur physician has stuffed the live fish down his throat. Words cannot adequately describe the hateful nature of the experience.