Not with a Bang, but a Whimper (2)

This story recounts the final days of the Amazon through the eyes of the region's most enduring legendary being, the river dolphin, who changes into human form for seductive purposes.

The taxi jolted as it hit a rickety bridge, and Beto sat up from his daydream beside Vanessa. The cabby slowed to navigate the one-lane structure, the vehicle making a racket as it crossed the wooden planks. To either side, bushy mangroves rose up on stilted roots, lining the muddy waters of a tidal creek. Yes, all was set. They’d picked up a bottle of aguardiente on their way out of Soure, and a couple of limes to make it go down easy. Beach and alcohol spelled easy drowning. But would he be able to go through with it when the time came? Would he be able to watch the shock on Vanessa’s face as he pulled her under, and hating him for it?

On the other side of the bridge, the palm tree savanna gave way to sun-baked pastures, where water buffalo lounged in ponds, their horns curling over their heads like giant sickles. Yes, the plan was moving along without a hitch. It had to, given Beto’s reputation was at stake. Given the very survival of the old ways of the Amazon might crash and burn if he failed.

When Beto had first suggested going to Pesqueiro beach the night before, Vanessa was nervous about it and non-committal. Evidently, there were rumors about a very bad dolphin on the loose, a fanatic, and she wasn’t so sure about going to a beach, which was the classic ambush site. But Beto had been able to soothe her nerves with a meandering barrage of sweet-talk, spiced with heart-felt admissions about dreams he’d never realized, and deep-felt emotions about a relative who’d died of cancer before Beto’d had a chance to say good-bye, which brought a teary moment at Vanessa’s side, and the subdued confessions that he was a romantic and that his favorite movie was Titanic. Vanessa had climbed into the cab at the appointed hour, not a care in the world, as anxious as he was to see this beautiful place, Pesqueiro.

After the fiasco three weeks before, Beto had taken a few days to lick his wounds, then started collecting intelligence. It didn’t take him long to figure out who Vanessa was, that she lived in Soure but travelled to Belém often to visit relatives and to shop. When all was set, Beto followed her discretely to the boat for Marajó Island and boarded with her, knowing there was a big fiesta that night in Soure, and that Vanessa would be going, alone. After conniving to meet her early in the evening, the seduction had proceeded. In fact, it had moved along wonderfully, the poetry of the music, the weightlessness of the dancing, shapely Vanessa so responsive in his arms, the sheen of her black hair in the lights of the town square, the wanton sense of humor that sparkled in her eyes.

They’d laughed their way to the early morning hours, until members of the band began to nod-off and the roosters crowed. As the eastern horizon showed smudges of orange, they walked off arm in arm to the open-air guest-house where Beto was staying, hanging hammocks side by side to coconut palm trees. Beto slipped into a hazy state of mind, a half-human slumber beside Vanessa, and was only roused by Vanessa rocking his hammock, complaining it would be too late to go to the beach if he slept all day.

“We’re getting close,” the cabbie said, looking back at them through the rear view mirror. Sure enough, off to the right, sand dunes rose perhaps a hundred yards away, crested by green toupees of vegetation. Coconut palm trees struggled up through the sand, trying to avoid being swallowed. Although people had told him that Marajó Island was beautiful, Beto wasn’t prepared for it, and what he was now seeing came like a slap to the face, with its brilliant contrast to the City of the Deep, their ultimate destination.

Yes, the City of the Deep had once been spectacular. Beto remembered how their eyes would open wide, once the women he’d pulled under realized they were able to breathe the water. He could see their amazement in looking about, at the gilded dome formed by the swirls of golden phosphorescence, at the hobgoblin shapes as big as whales, irradiated in the darkness by strobes of penetrating sunlight, at the fish-beings who were partly human, with gills on their cheeks and their faces puffing out like Louis Armstrong on trumpet, at the orderly lay-out of the sea-weed cabanas. Even though they were mad at what he’d just done to them, Beto could tell that the woman took comfort in the massaging of the warm waters, that the sandy bottom tickled their feet, and that they found the majesty of Cobra Grande reassuring, as he cradled the river-bottom habitation with his gigantic coils.

But now the place reminded Beto of a two-bit county fair. The City of the Deep was no longer the center of spirituality it had once been, but an underwater ghetto barely visible beneath the garbage of Belém, polluted by its sewage, and torn apart on a daily basis by the pressure waves of the deep-drafted container ships.

Beto understood that change was inevitable, but things had gotten out of hand, at least as far as the Amazon was concerned. He knew this from firsthand experience, having scraped his head against soybean barges near Porto Velho and Santarém, and having shot past droves of gringo tourists wanting to swim with him at the eco-lodges just outside of Manaus. His most recent incident had been with jet-skiis right in front of Belém. He’d nearly been decapitated on coming up for air!

Beto’s last conversation with Cobra Grande, just before heading for Marajó Island for the second time, hadn’t helped much. After he’d confessed his failure with Vanessa, Beto’d expected a dressing down, but instead the great snake had changed the subject and given a frank appraisal of the situation confronting the City of the Deep. For one thing, his dry-land agents had up and quit, the Curupiras, the Mapinguaris. With them gone, there wasn’t much hope for the forest, which once-upon-a-time they defended. The water creatures were also in a state of disaffection. Although the great mermaid, Uirara, continued true to the mission of the City of the Deep, the dolphins were going outlaw by the dozens, staying human past the time limit and suffering grim consequences as a result, usually in the form of a crippling debility. They preferred to be beggars in the streets of Belém than knights of the round table in the City of the Deep.

Beto had been tempted to become an outlaw himself, figuring he’d broken enough rules already he might as well. On more than one occasion, he’d played chicken with the time limit, pushing the pain away as it crept through his bones, compartmentalizing it until there were no more compartments, until he couldn’t stand it anymore. On more than one occasion, people had watched him running through the streets, twitching with the onset of a disability, tearing his clothes off as he reached the river, shouting the incantation in mid-air as he plunged to the water and disappeared beneath.

But even though he had his doubts, Beto wasn’t defeated yet. There was one more woman he needed to drown, and she was sitting beside him in the rusty cab. Beto had the distinct impression that this drowning would be different. That this drowning was going to make everything right again.

* * *

“We’re here,” The cabbie said, pulling off to the shoulder, which was just a wide band of sand. He pointed to a trail through the scrubby pasture, leading to the dunes in the distance. After negotiating a pick-up later that afternoon, Beto and Vanessa got out and starting walking. Hardly a minute had passed when they spooked hundreds of scarlet ibises from behind a trail-side berm.

Beto watched as they blazed through the sky like swirls of orange wind, sweeping this way and that as if by the snap of a magician’s fingers. This wasn’t the dolphin world of the murky river, or even the grandeur of what the City of the Deep had once been. Vanessa appeared to be sharing his same amazement, and Beto wondered if this was what it was like to be human, to be happier knowing that someone else was happy, than having experienced what had made them happy, alone.

“They’re beautiful,” Vanessa said, taking his hand.

“Yes, the scarlet ibis is quite spectacular,” Beto said, as if he’d seen thousands of them.

Coming out from the dunes, they walked by a couple of huge mangrove trees to a view of the beach, which spread in a sweep of brilliantly white send for a couple of hundred yards, out to breaking waves and jade-colored water. The exact location of where the mouth of the Amazon River met the Atlantic Ocean.

“This is simply out of this world,” Vanessa said.

“I thought you’d like it,” Beto said, nonchalantly.

“That’s the Atlantic? It’s calm.”

“Yes, the river sediments keep it shallow for a hundred miles off-shore.”

“Africa’s out there?” Vanessa pointed into the vastness of the ocean.

Beto scanned the horizon. “Yes, and over there, you head up the Amazon River, to Belém.”

Although Beto’s instinct was to get going, he also knew that the best seductions unfolded in slow motion, with an immobility that allowed one to sample each delectable nuance. At his suggestion, they sat down in the patchy shade of the tall mangrove trees to open the aguardiente and cut the limes. After several passes of the bottle, they got up to start their trek across the sand to the water’s edge.

It took fifteen minutes, with stops along the way for aguardiente, but at last Beto and Vanessa stood with their feet in the water, the wind blowing cool and warm at the same time, patches of ocean moisture then the dryness of the savannas, the blue sky saturated with light, billowy clouds low in the sky looking ready to catch fire. Vanessa sloshed in, turned, and shouted above the sound of the wind, “Coming?”

Beto put the bottle down and waded in, the jade water crumbling into froth about his ankles. Vanessa skipped out even further, the water at her waist. She turned to him, teasing, “Come on!”

Before he could take another step, loud squawks sounded, and both of them looked up to see two macaws shooting out from the mangroves, their huge wings rotating like pinwheels. Beto’d never seen macaws in the wild before, only at the Goeldi Museum. He reached up as if to touch, amazed they could ride the wind like that, and wondering if this was what it was truly like to be human, to feel beauty like a pang, so sharply it made you want to cry.

“They’re coming back.” Vanessa pointed at the birds on the return of a boomerang flight to the ocean’s edge. This time, they flew close enough to see their bright red chest feathers.

“Vanessa....” Beto said, trying to get her attention so he could ask her directly. But she’d waded out even further, so he had to follow, and as he did so it gave him pause to wonder if he should even be posing the question, the one that had been on his mind for some time now, the one that Cobra Grande had no expertise in, which was what it was like to be truly human.

Beto had a pretty good idea, as he’d been walking the streets in human form since 1616. He’d watched the evolution of human society and its technology to the point that the City of the Deep seemed decidedly primitive, even embarrassing.

Beto had grown to love the human toys and implements, the IPads, the GPSs, the cinemas with digital sound and 3D projectors. He’d grown to love the continuous advance of knowledge, the blasting off of space missions, the Hubbard telescopes, the genetic revolutions, the cable channels with 24/7 commentary on human societies and their crises, including how humans were destroying the natural world in places like the Amazon. To enjoy what humans made wasn’t necessarily to be human, though.

There were those who knew what it was like, of course, namely the outlaw dolphins who’d chosen the mendicant life of being a cripple in Belém. Beto would see them in the streets, off President Vargas Avenue near the Plaza of the Republic, the beggars with their withered legs, their hunchbacks, their bent bodies, their giant goiters. They’d be dressed in rages and seated on pieces of cardboard, their hands extended in supplication to the pedestrians that rushed around them like water around boulders in a stream. Beto would walk by and toss coins their way, for which they were grateful.

One of them in particular had been famous as a dolphin, the one they called The Hulk for the form he assumed on becoming human. He hadn’t had much luck with seductions, and was known to be sullen and uncommunicative. But once he’d gone outlaw, that had changed. True, his disability was appalling. He’d become human, only to lose both arms and legs. But on the sidewalk along President Vargas Avenue, The Hulk was a maestro of the beggar’s cup, and also a great singer of bawdy songs, which he belted out with all the strength of his powerful upper torso.

Perhaps ironically but perhaps not, he was a great lover, too. A couple of times, Beto had watched as The Hulk’s crew of teenage bad-boys put him in a wheel-barrow at the end of the day, and pushed him to one of the many “houses of encounters” just off the Avenue, behind the Hilton Hotel. Once, he’d waited in stealth, then walked past the place to where they’d dropped him off. It shocked Beto to hear the obscene shouts of The Hulk, almost as shocking as the delighted shrieks of the women who were in there with him.

Beto’d had sex with female dolphins before, but it never did much for him and was more a “one-two, then you’re through” encounter, which had all the romance of a bodily function. Maybe he’d watched too much human cinema through the years, but the thought started gnawing at him about what would happen if you crossed the poetry of the seduction with the undeniable compulsion of a sex act? Would this be it, the essential human experience?

The fact of the matter was, Beto didn’t know. After 20,644 seductions, many of them brilliant and all of them heartfelt, Beto remained a virgin, at least in human terms. What was worse, he’d never even kissed a woman’s lips. Pathetic. Maybe Vanessa would make a man of him today, he could only hope.