Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (9 page)

“The key word here is
roots
,”
Maestra had countered. “The
roots
of depression. For most people,
self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It’s
about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a
whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it
can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first
time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news
that the world, by and large, doesn’t give a rat’s ass. Even an old tomato like
me can recall how painful, scary, and disillusioning that realization was. So,
there’s a tendency, then, to slip into rage and self-pity, which, if indulged,
can fester into bouts of depression.”

“Yeah, but, Maestra—”

“Don’t interrupt. Now, unless someone
stronger and wiser—a friend, a parent, a novelist, filmmaker, teacher, or
musician—can josh us out of it, can elevate us and show us how petty and
pompous and monumentally
useless
it is to take ourselves so seriously,
then depression can become a habit, which, in turn, can produce a neurological
imprint. Are you with me? Gradually, our brain chemistry becomes conditioned to
react to negative stimuli in a particular, predictable way. One thing’ll go
wrong and it’ll automatically switch on its blender and mix us that black
cocktail, the ol’ doomsday daiquiri, and before we know it, we’re soused to the
gills from the inside out. Once depression has become electrochemically
integrated, it can be extremely difficult to philosophically or psychologically
override it; by then it’s playing by physical rules, a whole different ball game.
That’s why, Switters my dearest, every time you’ve shown signs of feeling sorry
for yourself, I’ve played my blues records really loud or read to you from
The
Horse’s Mouth
. And that’s why when you’ve exhibited the slightest tendency
toward self-importance, I’ve reminded you that you and me—you and
I
:
excuse me—may be every bit as important as the President or the pope or the
biggest prime-time icon in Hollywood, but that none of us is much more than a
pimple on the ass-end of creation, so let’s not get carried away with
ourselves. Preventive medicine, boy. It’s preventive medicine.”

“But what about self-esteem?”

“Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies.
Accept that you’re a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it.
That way lies grace—and maybe even glory.”

All the while that his grandmother
was assuring him that he was merely a cosmic zit, she was also exhorting him
never to accept the limitations that society would try to place on him.
Contradictory? Not necessarily. It seemed to be her belief that one
individual’s spirit could supersede, eclipse, and outsparkle the entire disco
ball of history, but that if you magnified the pure spark of spirit through the
puffy lens of ego, you risked burning a hole in your soul. Or something roughly
similar.

In any case, Sailor Boy’s squawky
refrain reminded Switters of Maestra’s counsel. He felt better at once, but to
insure that he’d keep things in perspective, that he wouldn’t again tighten up
or inflate his minor misfortunes, he opened a hidden waterproof, airtight
pocket in his money belt and withdrew a marijuana cigarette. Then, with a tiny
special key that was disguised as the stem in his wristwatch, he unlocked the
lead-lined false bottom that
Langley
had had built into his reptilian valise and unwrapped
an even more secret piece of contraband: a compilation of Broadway show tunes.

After inserting the clandestine disk
into his all-purpose laptop and cranking up the volume, he lay back on the bed,
lit the reefer, and sang along zestfully with each and every chorus of “Send in
the Clowns.”

He found Inti down at the lagoon—the
Laguna Pacacocha—where many Pucallpans moored their boats. Suppertime, Inti was
aboard his vessel boiling a stew of fish and plantains on a brazier fashioned
from palm oil tins. The boat was what was known on the Rio Ucayali as a
“Johnson,” meaning that it was a flat-bottomed dory, about forty feet long with
a five-foot beam and low gunnels, driven by a seven-horsepower Johnson outboard
motor. A quarter of it, amidships, was shaded by a canopy supported on bamboo
poles. The canopy had once been all thatch but was now augmented by a sheet of
blue plastic.

Switters was seriously questioning
Juan Carlos’s description of it as a “good boat” until he looked around at the
other Johnsons in the lagoon and saw that most of them were even more dirty and
battered than Inti’s. What sold him on it, however, was its name:
Little
Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters
. Henceforth, we shall refer to
it
as
she
.

As for her captain, Inti was stocky, gap-toothed,
bowl-cut, calmly pleasant if somewhat melancholy, and probably in his late
twenties, though with Indians age can be difficult to judge. If Juan Carlos had
slightly overstated the worthiness of the boat, he had wildly exaggerated the
competence of Inti’s English. Nevertheless, with a verbal and gesticular
amalgam of Spanish, English, facial expression, and hand signal, the two men
agreed on a voyage to Boquichicos, embarking early the following morning.

So,
thought Switters, as he
strolled back to the city center in the cherry-cola monkey-buttocks tropical
watch-dial dusk,
I’ve got a date with a virgin, even if she does look like
an old whore.

In the hotel bar, the talk was
almost exclusively about the raid on the airfield. The men who drank there were
capitalists, connected to oil or timber interests (gold prospectors, would-be
cattle ranchers, and dealers in exotic birds drank in the less expensive bars,
workers in cheaper bars yet, while drug merchants drank in private villas,
soldiers and policemen in brothels, and Indians in the street), and corporate
sentiments ran hotly against the Marxist raiders. Because he was privy to
classified CIA files, Switters knew that any number of the atrocities
attributed to the Sendero Luminoso actually had been committed by government
forces. In no way did this exonerate the guerrillas, for plenty of innocent
blood mittened their hands as well.

Power struggles disgusted Switters,
and usually his contempt for the combatants was distributed equally on either
side. At the onset it was easy to favor rebellion because the rebels usually
were struggling legitimately against tyranny and oppression. It had become a
grotesque cliché of modern history, however, that every rebel success embodied
a duplication of establishment tactics, which meant that every rebellion, no
matter how successful, was ultimately a failure in that it perpetuated rather
than transcended the meanness of man, and in that those innocents who managed
to survive its bombardments would later be strangled by its red tape. (
Czechoslovakia
’s “velvet” revolution, nonviolent and generous of
spirit, was so far proving to be a notable exception.)

Where is
Peru
’s Václav Havel?
Switters wondered, although he
supposed he might as well have asked,
Where is
Peru
’s Frank Zappa, where is its
Finnegans Wake? He
squashed any impulse to pose those questions to his fellows in the bar. He, in
fact, refrained from making eye contact with others in the bar. It was part of
his training, and though it was a part he regularly ignored, on that occasion
he intuited it to be prudent. Quietly, he ordered another beer. As if unwilling
to allow his mental focus to shift to fantasies of Suzy, however, he began to
silently lecture an invisible audience on the sorrow and betrayal inherent in
any insurrection led by the ambitious, the bloodthirsty, or the dull; but since
none of the points he made were new to him, he soon grew bored and went up to
bed.

In the hallway, around the corner
from his room, he spotted a pair of calf-high rubber boots sitting outside a
door as if waiting for a valet to give them a polish. They looked to be nearly
new, and they looked to be his size.
I could sure use those babies where I’m
headed,
he thought, but because he liked to fancy himself morally superior
to both the appropriators in government and the appropriators seeking to
overthrow government—he had, after all, just attended his own lecture—Switters
left the equivalent of thirty dollars rolled up in a condom and knotted around
the doorknob. He even uttered a polite
“muchas gracias”
under his
breath.

Cigar soup. That’s how Switters
would have described the river.
Campbell
’s broth of stogie. It was the color of cigar tobacco,
it smelled like the butt of a cheap cheroot, and every now and then an actual
cigarlike entity would break the oily sheen of its surface to glide among the
citrus rinds, plastic cartons, and Inca Cola cans that dotted the waters. These
small torpedoes were, of course, neither waterlogged double coronas jettisoned
by a listing Cuban freighter nor a species of blind Amazon trout but, rather, a
sampling of the ocherous projectiles fired into the river night and day from
the fundaments of
Pucallpa
. “A regular
turd de force,”
muttered Switters,
who was, characteristically, repulsed.

No sooner were they upward of
Pucallpa
than the pollution cleared, as if the city’s garbage
and sewage were thronging to a hu-man filth festival somewhere downstream: Dead
Dogs Welcome. Like all jungle rivers, the
Ucayali
was perpetually silty, though less so in the so-called “dry” season (as
Switters was soon to learn, it still rained once or twice a day), and two hours
out, he could see fish and turtles and, occasionally, the bottom, for the Rio
Ucayali was not especially deep. It was wide, however; more than a mile wide in
places. A flat, broad, meandering stream, it bent, coiled, and doubled back on
itself again and again, causing its length to exceed, many times over, a
straight line drawn from its source in the southern
Andes
to the place where it jumped in bed with River Amazon way up north at
Iquitos
. All in all, the
Ucayali
was as great or greater than the
Mississippi
. The fact that few North Americans had ever heard of
it should not be shocking, since a survey conducted in 1991 revealed that 60
percent of
U.S.
citizens could not find
New York City
on a map.

The knowledge that he could have
flown to Boquichicos and back in an active afternoon instead of chasing his
tail in slow motion around the loops of a giant liquid pretzel might have
fattened his resentment toward the insurgents, with their special talent
(typical of such groups) for lowering their boom-boom upon inappropriate
targets, but by then Switters was resigned to a magical mystery tour, going so
far as to consider (influenced, perhaps, by his halfhearted flirtation with
Catholicism) that it could be deserved punishment for a particular sin that
he’d rather not ponder.

Undoubtedly the heat was a salient
feature of that hypothetical retribution, offering as it did a foretaste of the
afterlife steam-cleaning promised in certain quarters to the morally gritty.
(Surely there would be humidity and plenty of it in Hell. Hard to imagine a
condemned sinner saying cheerfully, “Well, yes, it’s two hundred and sixty degrees
down here, but it’s a
dry
heat.”) Switters lounged upon a cardboard
couch fashioned for him beneath the canopy, but though he was kept shaded, he
was not kept cool. Off the gleaming surface of the river, heat bounced like
vectors from a microwave oven, bounced right into the boat, shady spot and all.
As the day progressed it grew hotter yet, and Switters could feel if not
actually hear streams of sweat gushing down his legs and into his rubber boots.
The following day he would travel as nearly naked as Inti and the crew. Or, he
would until the black flies struck.

The gap-toothed skipper of the
Little
Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters
sat in the stern, his hand on the
tiller/throttle arm of the outboard motor, his eyes rolled so far back in his
head he might have been inspecting his own brain.
Spot anything interesting
or unusual, Inti? Frontal lobe seems a tad distended from here.

In the bow were two other Indians,
boys of about fourteen. Or twenty-four. During rainy season, when the
Ucayali
was more often than not at flood stage, there were limbs, stumps, logs,
entire trees (branches, bird nests and all) in the water, not to mention sudden
rapids, and whirlpools mammoth enough to swallow a Johnson and not spit it out
until closing time. Now, however, with the river as sleepy and sullen as pupils
in ninth-grade algebra, there wasn’t a whole lot to look out for—only rarely
did the
Virgin
meet another boat—but the crew stood its watch anyway,
practicing, maybe, for more lively excursions.

Lashed in the stern with Inti were
several cans of gasoline, the proximity of which seemed to have no bearing on
the captain’s practice of chain-smoking misshapen hand-rolled cigarettes. Up
front with the crew were such items as fishing gear, machetes, a tin of palm oil,
a brazier made from empty tins, a couple of pots (heavily blackened, as if for
a culinary minstrel show), and woven food baskets containing corn, beans, and
plantains. There also were three bottles of pisco, and as Switters looked from
the booze to Inti and back again, a dark puff of worry scudded his inner sky.
Likewise mildly troublesome was the manner in which one of the food baskets
rocked and jiggled. Switters hoped that it contained nothing more vivid than a
chicken or two.