The Turning of the Worm
(from Brazilian Tequila, Matador 2017)
Porto
Velho, Rondonia. I had hoped to find General Rondon and Theodore Roosevelt’s
River of Doubt, but had to be content with the terminus of the Amazonian
railway line. A dirty border town, the climate is killing. Stagnant heat night
and day. Stale air. The humidity is one hundred percent. No point in wiping off
sweat. Hair a Medusa of prickles. Veins stand out. Washed shirts don’t dry.
The
size and cost of the hotels takes me aback. Hilton-style five- stars. Even
modest two-stars are Rio prices. The shops in the main street – not much better
than a dirt track - are mostly gold exchanges and dental offices. The gold rush
is over. I assume prospectors have their fillings removed, and pop in next door
to sell them.
I
lunch in a curbside café. Flies drop dead from the heat into the rice and
beans, part of the nutrition. The local newspaper reports the rate of homicides
in the town like the Dow Jones index. Last week it averaged 2 a day per 100,000
people. I calculate that’s almost two thousand a year. The population of a
quarter of a million must be falling fast. Maybe it was a bad week. But it’s
ten times the highest rate in the world (other than a war-zone). Three of the
five killings today were with knives. It dawns on me that Porto Velho,
bordering with Bolivia and Columbia, is witnessing the alchemy of gold into
cocaine culture. Guns and gold. Knives and drugs. But, I suppose, once the
cartels get better organised their wars will be more discrete. At present it’s
a free-for-all.
Drunken
migrant workers in soiled white suits smell dollars and eye me furtively. Skin
black from foraging in the opencast mines in the sun. When they begin to pester
me the cafẽ owner drives them off with a baseball bat. He tells me that the
common currency amongst disenchanted gold prospectors is bus tickets to the
South. ‘The smart ones barter wives and children to get out. Unless they start
talking to themselves and get religion, the rump stomp around in high-heeled
boots and flared trousers and become freelance lumberjacks, drug couriers,
pimps, private army fodder, Indian killers. There is no escape except by
shooting your way out, keeping the last bullet for yourself.’ Could he be
exaggerating, I ask? He smiles the smile, ‘If I were you I wouldn’t wait to
find out’. I ask him why he stays on in Porto Velho? ‘The money is good’.
It
occurs to me that my General Rondon-style explorer suit stands out as a target,
and the plane out is not till tomorrow. But I think of Theodore Roosevelt. ‘Show
no fear. Face down the dog’. I swagger down to the Madeira river. Trucks
half-sunk in its grimy waters are being washed down. Turbaned women up to their
waists scrub suds out of clothes. Rats rut in the beach rubbish. A lone food
stall, the vestige of a marina, manned by a large black man sitting on a
rocking chair with his back to the counter. When I ask for cachaca, he does not
move. Merely flicks his fingers. An Indian boy appears. Neatly pours a red
scorpion. Takes the money to his boss who is studying me in a mirror above the
bottles with amused contempt. I toss the drink down in one go and reorder
another. He patronises me with a little backhanded wave.
The
end of the line is commemorated by a junkyard, a rickety shack and a newly
built Evangelical church. In the yard redundant rolling stock, elephantine
rust-green relics of steam locomotion. The shack is the Rondon museum,
dedicated to Indian culture. Honest scholarship gone to rack and ruin. The door
is open. Inside a glass case of snakes. Amongst
them is a Sucuri, a crocodile predator capable of assimilating a
full-grown curator (there isn’t one around). Its gorgeous skin would grace a
modern art gallery. I see a case of shrunken heads. And some artifacts
scattered on a table. I pocket a pipe with a halved nut as the bowl, a
passion-fruit stemmed with a red feather, and enter the church to search out
someone to pay. It is bedecked with Christmas decorations, and a crib hangs
from the corrugated roof. But the faithful are not in evidence, or my
hypothetical curator. I’ll give some dollars to the next Indian I meet.
In
this ex-jungle insect repellent is useless. Fierce flies feast on the neck. I
step in a fetid ochre puddle. There hasn’t been any rain. Could it be blood? I
dismiss the thought. It would have to be fresh, and there are no dead or
wounded bodies lying around. But I don’t want to return to my air-conditioned
hotel with its lounge-lizard ambience, very possibly the most dangerous place
in town for me. If I stay much longer I fear more for my health than my life.
What I imbibed for survival would make me an alcoholic anywhere else. I return
to the café, drink a suco, and check my plane-ticket. Tomorrow and tomorrow.
I
ask the café owner about the River of Doubt, and discovered it is now called
Rio Roosevelt, and very much on the map. This tributary of the Amazon used to
attract rich American tourists on the Rain-forest run, ‘until several died of
some fever, or were eaten by the Indians’. He isn’t quite sure, but wouldn’t be
recommending it on foot. It would take a week. I didn’t feel burdened with his
discouragement. It was a relief.
***********
At
the airport custom guards discovered ‘irregularities’ in my papers (a sweat-smudged
date of birth). I know what to do as Pedrinho’s alter ego. Dollars change hands
and all is well. I’m learning on the hoof the ways of jeito, getting by
with guile.
The
thrill of achieving a bribe has worn off. ‘Pay up and don’t overestimate what’s
needed, like most Europeans’, Pedrinho councils. ‘The art in the transaction is
in the nonchalance. Understanding is swift, acceptance casual. The same
impassive official - standard moustache, potbelly buttoned in - receives his
rightful payoff. Notes disappear up his nose, and he waves you on. Nobody is
made seriously rich. Rather than resenting sliding good money into a greasy
palm, regard it as a tip. The acceptable amount is what’s in the left-hand
pocket, ready to roll.’ Reasonable enough, but funds dwindle, and with it fears
of real corruption.
I’m
a naive European with ethical notions of what should or should not be in South
America. ‘Brazil is a poor country. Rich tourists must pay their way’. I hear
this often enough. But what about the Brazilian rich? The five percent.
Invisible, except for their private jets complicating the airspace. Then
there’s the doing-very-nicely middle-class.
Fifteen percent. They travel lightly like Pedrinho. Laugh at petty
officials, puta, and tourists who fall for their idle threats. ‘Don’t
laugh too loudly’, I want to say to him, ‘or I will challenge you to visit my
homeland. Alien moral stances work two ways. You would struggle’. Of course, I
don’t.
Ps Carlos Ghosn, the billionaire boss of
the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, currently under investigation for
corruption, is a son of Porto Velho.