Journey of the Pink Dolphins Read online

  One day, he explained, when his grandmother was about fourteen years old, her father went to Iquitos to sell bush meat in the market—a week-and-a-half-long trip by canoe. She and her brother were alone in the house, with a canoe, a shotgun, and two dogs.

  Their fourth night alone was a moonless one. She and her brother sat on the front of the house by the wide, rain-swollen river. The manatee oil burned in the corner. She looked at the river and watched it move. A dolphin gasped.

  And then, perhaps a mile downriver, they saw a great soft light shining from beneath the water—shining like a diamond. They asked each other: what could it be? They had never seen light like that. Watching, transfixed, they saw it was a great boat, bigger than a house, coming toward them slowly, almost magisterially, and incredibly, making no sound.

  The magnificent boat came closer. Finally, it was close enough for her to see inside: It was packed with people, and the sounds of their laughter and music drifted to the children on shore. Men were dressed in wide hats, black shoes, white pants, and there was a beautiful girl dressed like a princess. In the wheelhouse of the boat, she saw a big man reclining like a king. His teeth were pure gold, and the diamond-light, she saw, was coming from his mouth.

  The two dogs began to bark, and the young girl who would become Moises’ grandmother grew scared. “Take the gun!” she shouted to her brother. He fired three shots.

  The boat began to sink slowly back down into the water. But the diamond-light strangely rose. Within ten minutes, the boat had vanished—but in its place, pink dolphins leapt and blew.

  The next night, Moises’ grandmother and her brother went to stay with the other family in the village. But on their way, dolphins surrounded their canoe, as if they were trying to convey some message.

  The message, Moises explained, came to his grandmother in a dream. The Yacuruna said to her, “Why were you scared when you saw my boat? I am a rich man. The beautiful girl you saw is my wife, the princess. I have many employees in the boat. The people in the white clothes you saw, they are dolphins. I have a big city in the water, with towers and a palace. I want to give you diamonds and gold, if you will come to live with me.”

  When her father came home, she told him about the boat, the light, and the dream. But he didn’t believe it—not until later, when he went fishing in a canal near the mouth of the big lake.

  He was looking for tiger catfish, which are best caught at night, and had brought along his cigarettes and his harpoon and long lines with big hooks. In the middle of the night, he felt something big pull on the line, and he pulled hard, but it wouldn’t give. It kept pulling, so hard that his lamp fell into the water. Finally, he felt his canoe might go underwater, too, so he hurriedly tied it to a tree. Later he returned with his son, and the creature on the line again pulled so hard that the canoe seemed to be fighting huge waves. “Something is trying to catch me!” said the father. And the son said, “I know. I saw his boat.”

  After that, the father fell ill. The son had to fetch a shaman from Tabatinga in Brazil—the best shamans used to live there, Moises explained. A learned shaman was found, and he sought the answer in a trance. In his dream, he saw the Yacuruna, and spoke with him, and once the trance was done, the shaman revealed what he had learned. “You are a good man,” the shaman told the father, “and the Yacuruna wants your daughter to live with him.” The shaman blew tobacco smoke on him and sucked on his stomach, and the illness was gone. But the Yacuruna was still there, and he is there still. There was nothing the family could do but move to another town. They moved to a village called Malupa.

  “But what if your grandmother had gone to live with the Yacuruna and the dolphins underwater?” I wanted to know. “What is it like there?”

  “The shamans say life in the water is the same as here, but better,” Moises said. A shaman in Iquitos had told him, for instance, that underwater there are more hospitals. There are epidemics here—malaria, cholera—but not in the Encante. People live longer there; one month underwater is the same as a year here. But even in the Encante, there are dangers. The shaman told Moises the story of a young man who went to live beneath the water.

  One time, at the mouth of the Napo River, a young man’s boat disappeared, and his family was devastated. But just a little while later, the young man appeared to his mother in a dream. “All is well,” he told his mother. “I am married to a beautiful girl who is a princess. I live underwater, in a beautiful city. It is good here,” he said, “but tell my sister not to wash her clothes in the river, or the dolphins may come to steal her away to the Encante.”

  For twenty years, he lived happily beneath the water. But one day, he told his wife, the princess, that he would like to visit his mother and sister on the land. His wife told him, “Until you return to me, I will give you a little rock, and it is your life. Please don’t lose it.” So the young man came to visit his mother and sister. As the mother was taking water from the river, she saw her son coming toward her in his canoe. They hugged and cried.

  He kept the stone in his pocket, and when he swam in the river he could touch his wife. But one night the village held a celebration, with masato and liquor, and he lost the stone. The following morning, his mother found him dead in his hammock. His hair had turned white, like an old man’s.

  The story ended, and we sat together in the lamplight, think ing of death. Then suddenly, a terrified scream erupted from the direction of the cold-water showers—a woman’s voice, Graciella or Gladys. Without thinking to grab my flashlight, I ran toward the voice. About halfway there, I realized I was running in the dark toward something that made a person who lives here scream. Gladys had collapsed near the sink and was crying hysterically. “Onde fica perigo?” (“Where is the danger?”) I asked, forgetting that Gladys speaks Spanish, not Portuguese. “Serpiente,” she said between sobs, and then for some reason I demanded in Bengali, “Shap kothai? ” (“Where is the snake?”) and in English, “Did it bite you?”

  A contingent of other staff as well as Dianne and Steve appeared in the dark, and in a second, with his lightning hand, Steve had caught the snake, pinning its head gently but firmly between his right thumb and forefinger. It was a three-foot yellow tree boa, whose triangular head gave it the look of a viper, but it was harmless. Steve handed it to me and let it wrap its lovely length around my arm, like a caress. I felt immense gratitude toward this snake: I was grateful that it had not bitten Gladys, that it was not poisonous, that I could touch it without fear. At that moment, I fervently loved that snake, for I could admire its beauty without fearing its cruelty. Unlike the Amazon that had swallowed Mario’s son, I could adore it wholly, and feel no guilt for loving it.

  We released the snake by the front steps leading to the dock, where we expected it would reappear on a fishing pole or in our boat the next morning.

  After dinner, Moises had an announcement: the little boy’s body had been found, and there would be a gathering at the house that night. We were all invited.

  Dianne felt we shouldn’t go. She and her husband, Pepper, knew what it was like to lose a son. At the time, she hadn’t wanted to see anybody. She had hated having to smile at the well-wishers, who would say things like “I know how you feel,” when they actually had no idea, and counsel, “Time heals all wounds,” when nothing ever heals such heartbreak, not really. What would Mario’s family want with a bunch of rich tourists gawking at their dead son? She felt we should butt out.

  But perhaps, I worried, Mario’s family would be offended if we didn’t go. I asked Moises what he thought we should do. The family, he said in his soft voice, would consider it an honor if we attended.

  The front of the house was jammed with canoes when we arrived that night. Ours was the only boat with a motor. Five men were sitting outside, smoking, atop an overturned canoe. The grandfather, Juan, whom we had met here just three days ago, greeted us with a smile and a handshake and “Buenas noches .” We stood silently outside for a few minutes, then mounted the ste
ps to the stilt house and joined the crowd inside.

  About fifty people were there. In the flickering lamplight, we could see men playing casino, gambling for cigarettes, in a corner behind the mosquito net. Women lined one wall, sitting on wooden benches and rocking children in two hammocks while piles of other children slept like puppies at their feet. It seemed like a party, except the peccary-hide drum was still in the rafters, stilled, and no one was dancing. But no one was crying, either. In fact, people were laughing and telling stories. Everyone, including the few children who were still awake, was drinking masato, the beer made from manioc root, which the women chew and spit out to ferment in a jar, or, for a really big party, in a dugout canoe. The grandfather, Juan, offered cigarettes to everybody with a kind smile, exactly like a hostess passing canapes at a party.

  In the midst of it all, Mario’s son lay dead on a table, his little body wrapped in white cloth decorated with red plastic flowers, a crucifix at his head and two candles burning at his feet. Mucus bubbled from his nose periodically, and his older sister, perhaps five, unceremoniously wiped it with a handkerchief, a motion she had completed hundreds of times before. She had done this for him while he was alive; why should she not do so now that he was dead?

  Soon Mario appeared, wearing a towel around his neck, joined by a friend wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed DO THE WILD THING. “We’re so sorry, Mario,” we said in English, reaching for his hand. Mario smiled at all of us, his great, gold-glinting smile. He was glad we had come.

  Then Mario turned to his son on the table. Together with his friend, Mario slid out a tape measure along side the little boy’s body, running from head to foot. Minutes later, we heard a handsaw at work. They were making the coffin.

  We sat down on benches and looked around the room. Almost every woman of fertile age was visibly pregnant, including one gray-haired, stooped grandmother who wore her pregnancy like a basket too heavy to carry. Imagine having to bear a child at her age, I said. “I would shoot myself,” said Dianne. Yet the abortion vine is growing everywhere, I observed. The crucifix at the head of the child’s bier, though, probably put an end to much of that.

  I wondered how these pregnant women felt, here at the wake of their friends’ child? My friends at home would have felt guilty, I knew, thinking the great ripe fruits of their bellies an affront to the bereaved parents. I remembered how one friend of mine, who had just given birth to a healthy son, had grown shy around a woman friend whose baby girl had been born with a slight deformity; another friend, newly pregnant, would not discuss her pregnancy with a girlfriend who was barren. Both felt guilty for their own fortune. But this is not the way of the people here. Death is no freak in the Amazon, but a companion with whom one walks daily—not without fear, not without mourning, but with composure and grace.

  Most of the people in this house would stay the night with the family. Some would sleep, and some would play cards and smoke and drink masato and tell stories. They offered their presence like a gift, to stay beside the family to prove they aren’t alone. They don’t defy death, but they defy loneliness.

  Like people confronting death everywhere, everyone brought food: Food equals life. One person brought a rooster. And just before we left, we saw Mario carrying it by the feet, a tin pot in his other hand, in the direction of the kitchen. Then we heard it scream.

  PART THREE

  BREATH

  On the glass-smooth waters of Charro Lake, we wait for the moon.

  A bat shoots by, a flying shadow. In the dark, frogs call in the clicking voices of bamboo chimes; others twang like rubber bands. Lightning pulses silently in the southern sky. But the moon hides behind dark billowing rain clouds, so we wait.

  Patron and seducer of women, the moon opens women to nighttime lovemaking, Amazon myths tell us; it controls the cycles of plants and menstruation. The Shipibo say that by moonlight, women are especially susceptible to spells cast by dolphins. The moon, it is said, is the sun of the underworld. It traverses the world of darkness, illuminating the Encante. That is why Dianne and I have come here now: with Moises and Graciella, with Jerry and Steve, we wait in our canoe for the moon to reveal the dolphins.

  At 6:40, a glow pierces the clouds. By 6:45, it shines bright enough to write these words by. And still we wait.

  Around us, bells, creaks, whistles, honks; the forest heaving and sighing, like a dream set to music. And then, at 7:04, we hear their breath: “Chaaahhhh!” A minute later, another gasp.

  Another minute passes. And now, all around us, tiny bubbles begin to rise—behind us, in front of us, to starboard, then port. It is the expelled breath of dolphins—breath so close we can touch it.

  I stop taking data. “This can’t be happening,” I say to Dianne. “Believe it— it’s happening,” she answers. I dip my hand in the water and feel the bubbles sizzle on my skin, intimate as a caress. It seems as unreal as a kiss from a ghost, and yet it continues: for four minutes, we touch the intangible and see the invisible, as the dolphins bless our canoe with their breath.

  This communion is a magic that we, in the modern West, have long forgotten, but one humankind once knew well. The ancient Greek word psyche, which signified “soul” or “mind,” also meant “breath” or “gust of wind,” and was derived from the verb psychein, which meant “to blow.” Another Greek word for “air, wind, and breath”— pneuma —also signified what we call, in English, “spirit,” as in the Latin word spiritus, which gives us dual-meaning words like “inspiration.” The ancient Sanskrit word atman, which means “soul,” also means “air,” as well as “breath.” But as David Abram points out in The Spell of the Sensuous, breath, air, and soul are the most primal and meaningful of connections: we are all, he writes, animated (from the Latin anima, also meaning “breath, air, and soul”) by the same currents, by the “living, sensuous, holy air.” This can’t be happening! I am thinking as the bubbles sizzle around us—for breath is air and air is absence, invisible; “The most outrageous absence known to this body,” writes Abram, “. . . the air can never be opened for our eyes, never made manifest.” But the Navajo, he notes, can see it: They say the whorls at the tips of our fingers are where the animating winds of life leave their trace. The wind-whorls on our toes hold us to Earth, and those on our fingertips hold us to Sky; this is why, they, say, we do not fall when we move about. It is breath that anchors us to life, and soul that anchors us to body.

  The bubbles disappear. In the seventeen minutes that follow, we can see, by moonlight, the glistening pink heads bobbing in the water. But still, more real than the visible are these breaths: a loud blow, a tail slap, a sigh; a gasp, a blow, a ballet of breath. And now the breaths grow fainter, more distant, as the dolphins move away.

  As we are leaving, Graciella, who grew up in a village, says she sometimes sees little stars slowly moving when the moon is out. There—can we see it? Dianne and I tell her it’s a satellite, but our answer makes no sense.

  Vine of the Soul

  “No rain last night.”

  My first words to Dianne each morning were usually about the rain: what time it had begun, how long it had lasted, how it might affect our dolphin observations that day. The rain had become like a companion to us, whose daily activities were as important as our own. Many days had passed since we had attended the wake at San Pedro, and almost all of them had brought rain. But today we were thirsty for it. There had been no rain the day before, nor that night. I had missed its presence even in my sleep; my dreams had been dry and strange, like an orchestra with no strings.

  “The water is going down,” Moises told us at breakfast that morning. Already, the water level at camp had dropped two inches. The fish, he said, would go to the Amazon, and the dolphins would follow.

  So, crying “Spines! Branch! Ants!” we threaded our way north through the flooded forest to one of the channels leading to the Amazon—thick, brown, and wide as a sea. We waited, but saw no dolphins there—not even Moises, with his Amazon eyes. So Moises
directed our canoe through a young, mostly submerged forest of cecropia (as our cries of “Ants!” increased) to a little thatched stilt house by a flooded breadfruit tree laden with green globes the size of grapefruit. A beautiful young woman in a blue dress was swinging her baby on the porch.

  “Where have all the dolphins gone?” Moises asked her in Quechua.

  A long conversation ensued, with much waving of arms. Later he told us they had all gone to a lake with no name, an hour from here. We did not have enough fuel to get there today. But that night, we would meet the dolphins another way.

  We had arranged for Ricardo Pipa, the local shaman, to come to camp. Ricardo, sixty-two, was a thin man with a wide, humble smile, a close-cropped mustache, and a deep cough. Quite soon after we had arrived in Peru, Dianne and I had met him at a logging camp named Ramirez near the lodge. While Dianne played with a captive squirrel monkey, I had talked with him about the dolphin spirits, as Moises translated.

  Although Ricardo was gracious and Moises worked hard, it was one of the most difficult interviews I had ever conducted. My hearing is bad to start with, the victim of too many old boat motors on Third World rivers, and Moises’ voice is so soft I often couldn’t tell when his Spanish had ended and his English translation had begun. And on this day, his English was flagging: he mixed up “man” and “woman,” “he” and “she,” “week” and “month,” and he dropped words as casually as one peels a fruit. To clarify, I sometimes asked him to spell a word, making things worse: in Moises’ alphabet (which I was only able to decode much later), what is pronounced as A means E and E means I. In addition, while we were talking, we were under attack from a plague of biting triangular horse flies swarming up from the water beneath the slatted floor on which we sat. As they bit our thighs and buttocks we slapped at them violently, derailing Ricardo’s narrative. Also, both Ricardo and I were afflicted with coughing fits (“Jungle cough. Gone in a month,” Moises had assured me). Later, when I played back the tape of our interview, Dianne and I howled with laughter: each of my questions in English elicited a series of mumbles in Spanish and Quechua, violent slapping noises followed by curses in three languages, and periodic coughing duets.