A Review of Mario Vargas Llosa's The Green House

I was walking down a street in Barranco with a new friend--an old journalist who’s been writing in Lima his whole life--when another old man pulled up on his bicycle and started talking to us ecstatically: Mario Vargas Llosa had just won the Nobel Prize. We bought a few bottles of Pilsen and made our way to “the oldest house in Barranco” (says Marco), a cozy two-story duplex, full of paintings by the art professor who lived there. Her hair was still flaming red despite her age. She served us a delicious lunch of pasta as we toasted Mario Vargas Llosa over and over again. It was a happy afternoon, one of the best I’ve had on this trip.

When I went to the jungle, I knew I had to find a novel by Vargas Llosa about the region. He’s written several. So I started at the beginning. The Green House was written in 1965. Though he’s written a dozen more, Vargas Llosa’s first three novels (Time of the Hero, The Green House, Conversation in the Cathedral) have always been hailed as a kind of triad of early masterpieces. In respect to form, The Green House resembles nothing like a sophomore effort. The style is never complacent. The book is divided into five parts, which in turn are split between four different storylines which eventually converge. There are extremely creative passages which I’m tempted to call “stream-of-consciousness” but technically cannot, because the voice doesn’t belong to any of the characters. The narrative is challenging. At times the setting will change mid-paragraph, demanding close attention. It is disjointed, spans decades, and crisscrosses Northern Peru back and forth from the Amazon to the Sechura Desert, following the tumbling misadventures of a large cast of characters (some of whom are the same person, though only perceptive readers will pick up on this before late in the story),

Bonafacia is an indigenous Aguaruna girl stolen from her people to be “civilized” by a convent of nuns in the frontier town of Santa Maria de Nieva. The nuns are severe, decrepit, but by contrasting them with the cruel and corrupt civil and military authorities, Vargas Llosa shows us that their motivation truly is holiness and justice, not profit and domination. Despite the nuns’ dedicated efforts to reclaim her from the darkness, Bonafacia, their servant girl, suddenly betrays them by helping children at the convent escape. The act sets off a series of events where Bonafacia is handed off from party to party. Her identity as a civilized person is always at stake. Bonafacia’s very nativeness is an object of fixation for all those want to dominate her. Nuns are repulsed by it; men are drawn to it. Will this be her salvation or her undoing?

The other jungle storyline is presented to us as a dialogue between two mysterious characters floating slowly down a river. Fushía, an invalid, is full of bitterness at his ill fortune; he is cared for by the older Alquilino. With Alquilino as his inexhaustibly patient audience, Fushía bitterly recounts the saga of his doomed exploits as a renegade rubber baron, selling contraband rubber to axis countries during WWII and in general just doing one horrible thing after another.

On the other side of the Andes, in the desert town of Piura, three friends await the return the long-absent fourth member of their quartet. Lituma has been gone for a long time; as the celebration begins, his friends dread telling him that a certain someone is now in a brothel.

So what is the Green House? If you guessed that it’s a brothel, you’re right, but which brothel? Brothels reflect the main qualities of jungle: full of sex and hard luck stories, crude affection and savagery. In this final dimension of the plot, Vargas Llosa takes on an entirely different style: a historical tale in sepia tone, polished, ironic and fabulous, reminiscent more of Melville than Faulkner. You almost feel as if you’re being rewarded for sifting through the choppy stream of images and dialogue that comprise the other parts of the book. We are taken back somewhere earlier in the twentieth century, when an eccentric bohemian arrives unexpectedly in the sand-coated, mass-attending colonial town of Piura. Don Anselmo, as he calls himself, is relentlessly buoyant, mephistophelian, wild, full of joy de viex, and apparently has deep pockets. After a period of aimless carousing, he suddenly begins constructing a building on the edge of town, a big green building, a brothel.

The success of the Green House catches everyone off guard. Suddenly appetite appears where it never showed its face before--and the only man untouched by it is the indignant Father García. Despite the priest’s political crusades against the Green House, it is clear that he is no match for Don Anselmo, whose success is fueled by the boundless lust of the Piurans, whose eros will not be put back in its cage. But Don Alnselmo is not invincible. His downfall comes as a plot twist, followed and explained by one of the most beautiful passages in the book. Don Anselmo’s weakness shows us Vargas Llosa’s appreciation for the contradictory nature of life, and the phenomenon that charismatic people usually have the most bizarre secrets.

Like his other early novels, Vargas Llosa’s tone here is extremely pessimistic. The English translation of the second line of his next novel, Conversation in the Cathedral, is: “At what point exactly had Peru fucked itself?” A young Vargas Llosa is attempting to show, with brutal realism, the backwardness of his country, the culture of machismo, the oafish force of the military, the obnoxious self-righteousness of the church. What this kind of novel inevitably lacks are three-dimensional characters, people complex enough to feel like real human brings. For much of the novel the nuns, soldiers, rubber barons and indians are hideous to the point of being caricatures. Feminist critics will grow tired of the portrayals of women as constantly victimized, whimpering, cloying, jealous. On the other hand, it is an act of assertion (her freeing the children from the mission) for which Bonafacia can never be forgiven, which sets her off down a path of endless subjugation to men.

The fundamental question that The Green House asks is: Can men love women without destroying them? For a young Peruvian writer in the 1960s, the answer is apparently “Not here, at least.”

My Last Week at Reserva Santa Cruz/ A Special Shout-Out

This week I got back from my final stint of volunteering at Project Amazonas. We were out for nine days. I feel very lucky to have had this experience, of which I will only be able to convey a fraction.

I think volunteering with a good NGO can be the perfect way to see the rainforest, especially if you're on a budget. Once you remove the profit motive, you can trust that your guides are not selling a bill of goods. If you walk through the center of Iquitos, you'll be swarmed by locals guides who want to take you to the jungle. Some of these people are legitimate experts of the forest, although if they're worth their cost, you'll probably be able to find them in an office or via recommendation of the expat community here. Talk to Bill Grimes or anyone else at the Amazon Explorers Club, or Mike Hollis, who edits the Iquitos times.

Some guides want to take you out to their "lodge," where you'll find animals in cages. Some will solicit you in the street to do Ayahuasca, a traditional Incan herbal beverage that, based on the testimonials, makes you lose your mind (after you've lost your lunch). You'd think people would be more discerning as to go do a hallucinagenic drug with some stranger out in the woods. It is something that should be taken very seriously. I find that the newfound casual attitude to the once-sacred rite of Ayahuasca (which most people in Iquitos have never tried) simply reflects that of the tourists, some of whom actually told me they pre-game with booze and weed before taking a drug that, traditionally, necessitated a week of bodily cleansing and fasting. Turn some of these guides down, and in the next breath they'll offer you "blow, mary jane, chicas?" They know their clientele all-too-well.

Anyway, I came to the rainforest looking for reality, not trying to escape it. For me, Project Amazonas was ideal, as I knew it would be. They're well-organized, with a long-term, sustainable vision. They're priorities are equally the health of the land (old growth rainforest) which they have purchased, and the wellbeing of the communities who live alongside it. The director Devon Graham is a seasoned biologist with an effortless, encyclopedic knowledge of wildlife. He'd be the first one to hit trails in the morning and the last one to leave the dinner table at night. The Project provides seasonal employment to Peruvians, and Devon and Fernando (the only salaried PA employee) had assembled a team of hard-working, goodnatured people, all from Iquitos or villages on the Mazán.

It's not easy. Anybody can do this. There were 70-something-year-old birdwatchers with us, one who could barely walk without hiking poles. The most challenging aspects are the heat and the bug bites. I had plenty but some of us escaped totally unscathed. For 20-somethings who don't have anything tying them down at home, the only real obstacle is the cost of a plane ticket. I did not even look into the very real possibility of obtaining grant money to do this kind of thing, though I might in the future. My time with the Project, and in Iquitos, for that matter, was very affordable. There were biologists, the aforementioned birdwatchers, and even a retired zoologis with us, who came solely to observe wildlife. Thanks to them and the local people staying with us I saw a dozen species of snakes, lots of frogs and bird species. Their trips were more expensive, since they were not doing work but just using the facilities. But even that contributes to the Project.

The work that we did was simple but I learned a lot. I learned how to identify a dozen common tropical trees, I learned what they’re used for, how to steer a pecky-pecky boat, how to canoe upriver with another person, how to map a trail with GPS, and, most satisfyingly, how to use a chainsaw. I learned as much as I could about the native culture from the shy women and the drowsy men in the Pueblos in the reserve.

I'll probably dedicate a few more posts to the cool stuff I saw and learned in the Santa Cruz. But today, to your possible disappointment, reader, I'd like to take on an aspect of the trip that really irritated me. To ignore it would be to miss something worth writing about. So let me get this out of my system and I'll get to more of the positive stuff later.

We would do our work in the morning. Most days after lunch everyone would just stay at the field station and chill, ostensibly because it was too hot to do anything. The thing about siestas, though, is that you can’t sleep in that kind of heat; you lay there, sweating, in this sedated, heat-stupified state, dozing off until your hammock stops swaying...and a few minutes later you wake up soaked and suffocating.

You know those Vietnam movies where there’s a unit posted out in the bush somewhere and they haven’t seen action in ages, and while they’re waiting to hear from Command, their lives boil down to this monotonous repetition of chores, playing cards, drinking, never wearing a shirt, trying to keep socks clean, trying to read while the tropical afternoon heat lulls you off into a hundred little mini-naps? That's what afternoons in the jungle are like: lazy, austere, lethargic, with no real stimulation or entertainment other than the surrounding forest, which at times appears to you as this really gross and malevolent entity. The conversation is stilted and eventually everyone just starts ignoring each other. Very soon you realize that you're out there with someone whom you would not have picked...

Anyway, at the time I originally wrote this, I let a certain personality conflict that I'd had with one of my fellow volunteers stand in the way of getting toward a more meaningful experience. analysis. Now I look back and I see more my own shortcomings, and I realize I have a lot of work to do on myself, especially if I'm ever lucky enough to get to do this kind of thing again...

Anacaspi

Anacaspi

You came across something once,

By accident, by surprise, by yourself.

A tall dream: a world comprehended.

Eyes (or shadows?) brimming with answers but

Only leaving you with questions which

Were bottlenecked in your throat when

The thing turned away and vanished.

You knew that it knew you.

And you believed

That if you searched long enough,

Worked hard enough,

You’d find it again one day. You’d be it.

Why else?

So you looked and you looked.

Walkabout (First Trip to Santa Cruz - Last Day)

This is one way the rainforest is being destroyed in Loreto, Perú: not with fire, not with bulldozers, not a clear-cut but a crude swath, pushing through the jungle with nothing but chainsaws, gravity and the bone-crunching labor of its campesinos.

***

As my first trip with Project Amazonas drew to a close, I had a free day. The day before I had met Abraham Guevara, the president of the villages we visited. We talked extensively about the various challenges facing the people of the region: the drought, the depredation of resources, and the government’s refusal to help in any meaningful way. We made plans for Friday to go up the Mazán river and see some of the devastation created by the madareros (loggers).

Abraham is a short, silver-haired man who wears a tattered dress shirt and trousers and is always carrying his sandals rather than wearing them. He walks quickly, purposefully, his back erect. From the shade under his hat, you see his eyes squint and peer out, his chiseled features betraying an extra dose of Old World blood. Father Abraham has seven offspring: Isaac, Esau, Jacob, Rachel, Caleb, Moses and Abraham Junior.

After the distribution of mosquito nets, he invited me to come speak with him in the shade of his open-air house, littered about with children’s toys and daily utensils. We made minute-long video recordings of him talking about Project Amazonas, the pains of this extraordinary dry season, waterborne and insectborne illnesses.

“Have you ever had malaria?” I asked him.

“I’ve had it five times,” he said. “But that’s because I take care of myself. Most people here have had it ten, fifteen, maybe twenty times. I take care of myself. For example, I boil my water. Most people just drink it straight from the river.”

Abraham insists that all levels of Peruvian government, from district to region and nation, have no interest in the suffering of his people. Not only that, but local people are not receiving their share of the wealth that Perú and its business partners are harvesting from the jungle's resources: mainly lumber, gold and petroleum.

I started to understand why Abraham’s politics are so sharpened when I learned that he’s from Bagua, a town in western Peru’s higher jungle, a notorious battleground between police and indigenous protestors in the summer of 2009. It fits the man. Ask him a simple question about his area, then try to ingest the impassioned analysis that flows rapidly, confidently and earnestly from his mouth, and you’ll know that he must have grown up in a tradition of radicalism.

We got a late start on Friday. Boats, fuel, trips, miscalculations, overlooked obligations, etc. Finally Abraham, Alex and another man showed up at the field station. I got my things we hiked to the casita by the river where we moor out pecky-pecky boats. I looked down in the water: no boat.

“We’re going to walk,” Abraham said.

“How long will it take?”

“Twenty minutes,” he said.

***

For the next hour we are hiking in single file.Like I care how long it'll take us. I came to Perú, to Iquitos, to Mazán for stuff like this. And there's nothing for me to do at that field station but try to read, try to nap, and, in frustration, try to enjoy a beer, but at every turn be thwarted by the stifling heat.

Abraham and I periodically to pick each other’s brains about life in Loreto, life in America. Like other locals men I've talked to here, Abraham simply cannot or will not slow down his Spanish (which is more elegant than most) to a point where I can more easily understand it. He talks fast or he doesn't talk at all. I have to be in front of him or run up and lean over his shoulder to get the gist of what he’s saying. Eventually this tires both of us and we talk sparingly. Alex and our other companion are silent, occasionally mumbling three or four-word quips to one another that I’m hopeless to comprehend.

We come to another house in the woods, an open-air wooden casita like all the rest. A woman lays in hammock, an infant held up to her disproportionately, massively swollen breast. She squints at me, or grimaces, or stares blankly. Children, playing in the dirt, look at me and freeze. The only one not paying too much attention is the man, a boy really, younger than his wife, in his early twenties, hacking away at something with a machete.

Abraham tells him what we’re doing, asks him to accompany us. Without looking at me the boy literally drops what he’s doing and we follow his bare, dusty feet into the woods. Behind me, Alex coughs and hacks phlegm. Hacking is as acceptable here as whistling outside. I hear that nasty sound everywhere: here, in the street, in every public bathroom, even in the lobby of my building when I'm waking up in the morning. I catch myself holding my breath whenever Alex gets going with his cough. I am going to catch that, I said to myself. And once again, my gringo paranoia proves warranted: immediately after I return from the jungle I’m sick. I cough up tons of phlegm, I jerk awake at night trying to expel butterflies from my throat. For several days my voice is a rasp, absolutely pathetic....

Finally we come to a kind of clearing, a path that at places is 20, at places is 40 feet wide, which winds around corners in both directions. It is not so much an old, beaten trail; here and there is fresh vegetation, chopped or crumpled or knocked over. Paths like these are created by madereros. After felling massive tumalu trees, they size down the trunks to about 15, 20 feet. Using these logs or other means, they push and cut a trail through the surrounding jungle. Two parallel lines of long skinny trunks are laid out like a railway. Then workers roll the logs along the rails until they reach a creek bed, which, this time of year, will be dry. The logs will be stored there until the creek floods and carries them to the river, which in turn carries them to Mazán, where they will be sold.

As we walk up the trail we see a man and some boys resting on a trunk, the width of which is waist-high. They are quiet, enjoying a break, appearing unthreatened by our presence. Abraham asks them to give us a demonstration, if they’re ready. They go to their places behind the log and start pushing. One of the boys climbs over the log to get it unjammed--"Cuidate, hijo!" Abraham shouts--the trunk starts rolling and he jumps back to the other side. It could easy roll over him. Alex and another boy wedge thick sticks under the trunk to ensure it moves along from rail to rail. After a complete roll or two, the trunk starts to gain momentum, and the pack chases it down the rail. No one is wearing shoes.

“Ten Soles a day?” I confirmed with Abraham.

“Yeah."

“And the kids? Do the kids get paid?”

“No. They are usually with their parents. They say, the parents are getting paid, so why do the kids need to?”

Ten Soles comes out roughly to a little less than four US dollars. It’s pretty normal for manual labor in this part of the country. To put it in a daily living perspective, ten Soles is the price of one quarter chicken with a side of french fries in most pollerías in Iquitos.

We walk over a cue of trunks all waiting to be rolled down the trail. At the top of a hill is a gyrating contraption with four pillars sticking outward. Men push these pillars around to drag logs up the hill. I realize it’s the same kind of machine Werner Herzog used to drag the boat up the mountain while making Fitzcarraldo.

Up the next hill we come across some kind of overseer. He amiable, more mestizo, more completely dressed. Abraham asks him a few questions and I record but do not understand his answers. The impression I get is that the abuses that happen are out of his control, that he pays someone who pays these workers. At the very top of the pyramid, far above him, people sell these log for $2,500 a pop.

So is this illegal? Well, it depends on who you ask. The Ecological Police here have a reputation for being very ineffective: some say because of laziness, some say for corruption. I've heard from others that the entire department consists of two people and they never leave Iquitos. Every time someone wants to cut down wood in Loreto, they're required to have a permit. In fact, there's this fabulous law in Perú which states that you're supposed to be able to trace every log with GPS back to the very spot it came from. Take a boat down the Mazán river, see the hundreds of yards of logs floating by the pier, and you'll get a good laugh out that little bit of magical thinking. GPS, that's rich. If you should be able to get a permit for the land you'd like to decimate, it still costs money. So most loggers get one permit and use it over and over again, on whatever land they happen upon, because all they have to do it show to the Ecological Police--if they actually show up--and they'll be sent on their way.

“It’s a Mexican-Peruvian arrangement,” Abraham told me earlier. “They sell this wood to Mexican companies who sell it to the United States, who are forbidden by law from buying it themselves. The companies are owned by narcotraffikers, who use these businesses to launder their money."

***

My guides decide that we’re going to cut a crosscountry trail back home, straight through bush. I wave my hat in front of me to destroy spiderwebs. Three times I almost have an accident. Once, while shuffling down a hill, I grab onto a massive vine for balance. The vine is hanging from a hundred-foot tall tree, with a powerful crack it snaps--bloody dry season!--breaks into four or five large heavy pieces that rain down on us but fortunately no one is hurt. Twice, we are crossing a little gorge, and while I’m walking across the designated log bridge, it cracks and snaps and gives way under my feet and it’s only jumpy adrenaline reflexes that keep me from breaking my leg.

At one point we part ways with our other two guides and Alex, Abraham and I continue on. Soon the woods clear and we have arrived at an isolated piece of property.

“Where are the owners?” I ask Abraham.

“I’m the owner.”

A big chakra, two casitas, one with rounded walls and artwork, a towering guimba tree filled with weaverbirds like the ones at our station. We take a seat in the shade and eat some sweet plantains. At my feet are chickens and a bag of ayahuasca sticks. I’m out of water and glistening with sweat. “You ready to go?” he asks me. “Yes...no, wait just a minute.” And we sit to enjoy another two minutes of shade, breeze, those sweet moments of relief from the heat that remind me of growing up in the South, hiking in the summer, cross-country practice.

On the last stretch of the hike, we come across a massive tree. Its trunk has to be between 20 and 30 feet around. I can’t see it’s crown through the canopy. “This tree is a little older than Project Amazonas,” Abraham says and Alex and I laugh.

“It’s older than Pizarro.”

“It’s older than Christ.”

When we make it back to the field station, I insist that they drink more than one glass of water before heading home. As dismayed as I am by the hardships and the destruction we've witnessed, I’m grateful that there are still grown men in this world who--for whatever reason: politics, love of nature, boredom--will not hesitate to spend several hours hiking through woods with a new friend.

La Minga (First Trip to Santa Cruz - Day 3)

This morning, on the river, we passed a pecky-pecky boat with about ten passengers inside, and I asked Emerson where they were going.

“To la minga. It’s a custom here. If you have a chakra [a small field of crops] and you need to harvest it, you invite all your neighbors and they come spend the day working at your place. Then, when your neighbor needs to harvest his chakra, or catch a bunch of fish, or fix his roof, you go to his place.”

“So it’s a system. Reciprocity.”

“Yes, how do you say, Communal?”

“Communal, yes.”

“Yes, but the thing is, when you have la minga, you are expected to provide food and masato for everyone who is there. And the people drink the masato while they are working.”

Masato is a drink of fermented yucca. It's fermented with saliva. The women in a village stand around a tub, chew yucca, spit it out, leave it overnight. Supposedly the alcohol is strong enough to clean all the germs from the saliva. But it can't cure it of the lumpy texture and the taste, which I've read somewhere is "as awful as it sounds." Later, when we were hiking back to the station, I asked Emerson if he drinks it. "I do," he said, grinning. The other guys in our group, all campesinos, started smiling and laughing at my shock and revulsion. I wouldn't be surprised to hear about this being practiced by uncontacted peoples. But ribereños like these? And Emerson--when he's not working for the Project, he's a waiter in Iquitos. "Devon drinks it too," Emerson told me. Devon, the director of Project Amazonas, a biologist from Canada. "Whenever we go into a village, he's the first one to try their masato," Emerson laughed. I have not tried masato. I might find myself in a situation where I have to so as not to insult the people I am staying with. I am not looking forward to it.

Anyway, I wasn't really surprised to learn about la minga. Indigenous life tends to be full of these cute little forms of communism. And communists especially would love this boozy dialectic: not just bringing people together but also erasing the divide between work and play entirely. But the possible ramifications of la minga didn’t really sink in for me until we took our mosquito nets to the second pueblo for the day, Catorce de Julio. As we walked across the soccer field in the middle of the village, it appeared completely abandoned. There was one old man waiting for us in the local communal, sweeping the dusty cement floors of the classroom/church/meeting hall. Emerson opened the main doors and dragged over one of the wooden desks which were piled in the corner and placed it near the front door like we were a storefront. The first man to show up to get a net was tall, shirtless and swaying like a tree in a gail. He was plastered to the point where everyone avoided eye contact with him in fears of him becoming beligerent. He would shake my hand and mumble something and I would nod and smile and look away. Once he called me “Meester” to try to fuck with me.

“How old are you sir?”

“47.”

“And your spouse?”

“17.”

“How many children are living with you.”

“Well she just had her first, and it’s a couple months old.”

“Ok, sir, one net for you and your family.”

We put the net in his hand. He looked down at it, wobbled around, kept standing there. I knew it would be risky asking him to move along, so I followed everyone else’s lead and just ignored him. Emerson motioned to the old lady behind him, “Pase por favor.” She stood in the narrow space between the old man and Emerson.

“How many of your children are living with you, Señora?”

“Uh, well, there’s Segundo.”

“And how old is he?”

“28.”

“And he is still living with you?”

“Yes.”

“And he is not married?”

“No.”

She named 5 other sons, between the ages of 28 and 16, all of whom, she claimed, were not married and still living with her. So this is the village where everyone tries to bullshit us, I thought.

However, when the drunk guy saw this solitary old lady leaving with six mosquito nets, about 2 or 3 more than the average family received, he spoke up.

“I have other children.”

“Sir...”

“Older ones. From my dead wife.”

“Sir, we asked you how many of your children were living with you and you only said one.”

“No, the rest are still living with me.

Another man, middle-aged, was leaning against the door, looking out, and shaking his head, vigorously, “No.” We just ignored the drunk guy. Soon he quieted down. But he kept standing there, wobbling. By the time he left, he was full of warm feelings for all of us. It was a different vibe than anything we had experienced so far. But after these first two individuals, everyone else was fairly gracious, cooperative, honest. As usual, the confident old people of the community came to shake our hands and tell us thank you. An enchanting little girl with a wide-eyed, tooth-missing smile came up to me to ask me a question. It was something very simple--three, maybe four words--but no matter how many times I asked her to repeat it, I could not understand what she was saying.

As the hour progressed, groups of people would emerge from a bush to the left of the soccer field. Women holding an umbrella in one hand and a baby in the other, with gold on their front teeth, their milk-swollen breasts bulging or their old bags sagging through their threadbare tank tops, which they never thought twice about pulling up to breastfeed in front of me. You could see a lifetime of difference between their sullen, uninterested faces, and the enchanted smiles of the little girls. I asked one of the women where they were all coming from. "Nuestra chakrita," she said.

I asked Emerson, “Is there a lot of alcoholism here?”

“Yes. It’s la minga. After they get done with the masato, they start taking agua diente. Rum.”

First Trip to Santa Cruz - Day 2

The first village we visited was the largest in the Reserve and it was also called Santa Cruz. A few men met us at the water and carried up the large packets of mosquito nets up the steep bank. We set things up in the local communal, a barebones multi-purpose building--usually the only one in the village made of stucco or concrete. Inside it’s cool, dust on the floors, wood benches, maybe a blackboard, junk crammed in the corners.

People trickled in and out. Mostly women, half with babies at their breast. A few men, older, sitting along the back walls. I was introduced. I took some pictures but started to feel uncomfortable. So many stoic, inscrutable faces. Alex, a young man from the community who worked with us for most of the week, started calling names from the list he had of all the residents in the village. Head of a household. Usually it was the wife who would come to the desk and tell us, in a near whisper, the names and ages of everyone in her family. Sad, distrustful, timid? I tried to imagine the boredom of living in this village of less than 120 people. But I couldn’t imagine any of them leaving, wanting to leave. Just about every single adult got married and started having kids around 18-20 years of age. The average amount of kids was about four, less than I expected actually. People would randomly approach the table and say thank you.

The method of distribution. One net for a couple, who are expected to sleep with any baby under six, one per teenager or single person, and one for a “barón” - a kid between the ages of 6 and 12. However, if there are two barónes of the same gender, they probably will be sleeping in the same bed anyway, so one for the two of them.

We came across a surprising amount of people in their 80s. One older lady, white-haired, skinny but walking upright, ambled over to our table. She had been listening closely to the people before her. She got a little ahead of herself. After she gave us her name, Emerson asked her, “Cuántos años tienes?”

“20...” Before she could correct herself, the room burst into laughter. She was referring to her granddaughter.

Later on, a disheveled kid, still wiping the sleep from his eyes, was called to the table. He was 24 years old, his wife 20.

“Cuántos hijos tienes?”

“Uno. El tiene un mes.”

“Y su nombre?”

He looked blankly at the table.

“Joven...el nombre de tu hijo?” Emerson said.

“Dame un minuto...” Emerson and Alex started laughing. In a minute or two he remembered.

All in all the distribution took no more than 2 hours. Afterwards we went to the schoolhouse to talk with 5 schoolteachers. They all are from Iquitos, sent to pueblos like this by the government during the schoolweek. They told me a lot of stuff. For example, the secondario (high school) has about half as many students as primaria (elementary), because it’s not mandatory. So instead of going to school, the kids go, or their parents make them go, upriver to work for lumber companies, who pay them 10 soles ($3.50) a day to chop down the rainforest. Sometimes people get a permit for one area but chop in another. If they are ever stopped by the Ecological Police, they just show their one permit and they’re sent on their way. According to Emerson, the Ecological Police are corrupt and rarely leave Iquitos.

As I'm reflecting on my first visit to a village, I'm reexamining my impressions of the people. It's easy to walk away feeling grim; their lives are so difficult. You can see it on their faces. But I want to look deeper. Stoical cultures are a response to hardship, a necessity for managing pain. It does not mean that people are unhappy. I feel like I still have a ways to go before I understand campesinos, who are more enigmatic than I expected, and even farther away from my understanding than the people in Iquitos.

First Trip to Santa Cruz - Day 1

October 26, 2010 - I’m typing this inside of a cube of mosquito net. I can feel the wooden floor of the field station beneath my sponge mattress. Filling my ears is every frequency of cricket song; clicks and clucks echo in the woods like there’s percussionist out there trying to create mood. The generator is humming too, giving us one more hour of power before the lights shut off. It’s 7:52, but it feels much later. The sun goes down early.

My first day in the field with Project Amazonas. I'm staying at Santa Cruz Reserve, about a two hour trip outside of Iquitos. The reserve is a protected chunk of land on the Mazán river which is home of to collection of villages and some property owned by Project Amazonas. This week we will be visiting these villages to deliver mosquito nets. Mosquito nets are perhaps the most effective preventative measure against the spread of the insect-borne illness malaria; victims usually are infected by "sacaduro" mosquitos which bite them in their sleep. Just this month, three villages of Yanomami indians on the Venezuela-Brazil border were reportedly wiped out by malaria epidemics, according to the Associated Press.

This morning I met up with the two researchers from the University of Chicago, Ben and Steffy, at La Pescana. They are staying at the Santa Cruz field station while collecting ant specimens for their research. Fernando showed up and we took taxis to the port at Rio Nanay, and from there we rode a motor-boat 45 minutes down the Amazon River. It was an overcast day, with the wind blowing, me sitting up front, the other two behind me. For the first half of the ride the water was dirty, with patches of yellow foam.

We arrived at a muddy little beach and several porters began eagerly unloading the boat and carrying our many supplies up a steep hill. We all tried to pitch in but like imost of the time, the idea of gringos doing work was deemed unnecessary. Our backpacks sitting behind us, we rode about 15 minutes down a “highway” through jungle farms. It was a ten foot wide concrete path and the moto-taxi lunged up and down hills without staying in a lane.

We drove into a bustling little port town, weaving through flocks of primary school uniforms, plantain vendors and pigs. The town Mazán is at the confluence of the Napo, which flows South from Ecuador, and the smaller Mazán, which emerges from the West. Soon we reached the boardwalk, a “Boulevard,” like Iquitos has, with banisters made of stone, making them look antique, elegant and ironic in this grimy, ramshackle town. The porters began unloading the taxis and this time we didn’t try to help, we stood above the steep and muddy slope that led down to the Napo and the long, skinny boats. A dark brown, silver-haired, grinning old man was trying to get my attention, motioning toward the bag of knobby sticks that sat at his feet.

“No thank you,” I said. He smiled at nodded like we were old pals and it was no problem. “What type of wood is that?”

“Ayahuasca.”

Ben and Steffy were the first gringos I met here who did not know what Ayahuasca was.

After loading the boat, we set off up the Mazán. Up front, Fernando joked and laughed with the old man, and I couldn’t hear anything over the chugging of the motor. The banks of the river were long muddy slopes, dramatically revealing the low state of the river, at the bottom of which women washed clothes or baled out the pecky-pecky boats that were moored there. Twenty, thirty feet above were large, thatched roof houses. Kids standing outside, stock still, watching us.

The sun was starting to come out. The motor was humming. All there was to do was sit hunched over, the bones in my ass rubbing painfully against that same wooden plank. I put my head in my hands...I asked the cook if it was alright I stood up. I stood up and felt a little better. The truth is I hadn’t slept much the night before.

Finally we arrived at house on the edge of the Santa Cruz, and at about the same time a family in another boat pulled up. We unloaded our supplies and then started deciding who would carry what on the 25 minute hike that lay in front of us. There was a tree next to the house. One of the women propped a ladder against the trunk, climbed up with a large stick in her hand, and started shaking the branches. Clusters of small purple fruit fell to the ground.

“This is like a grape,” our guide said, peeling away the skin to reveal a white glossy globe. It was delicious: juicy, mildly sweet, with an oily core in the middle as big as an olive’s. We each ate a dozen of them. A started talking to the family.

An old man leaned against the railing. “Your first time in the jungle?”

“Yes.”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Muchas hembras.”

“Hembras?”

“Females.” Laughter all around.

The walk to the field station drenched us in sweat but it wasn’t that bad. It reminded me of walking through humid woods in summertime NC.

The field station is two wooden houses, a kitchen and a dormitory, both slightly elevated as is the custom here, but not open-air. The bottom half of the wall is wood, the upper half screen. At night you hear everything that passes outside. There’s a toilet/shower structure as well. All this in middle of clearing with a few mango and papaya trees, another plant that has small orange fruits. The yards are patrolled by chickens and three deer-like little girls. When we look in their direction, they freeze, stare at us, and then, at the prompting of who knows what, they turn and bound away. We try to talk to them they are mostly speechless. They are the daughters of the caretaker, Dennis, and his wife, Elba, who is almost as quiet.

Tonight, while I was taking a shower the dark, I looked up through a gap between the top of the wall and the roof, and I saw the most stars I think I’ve ever seen. When I walked outside I saw a ceiling of black marble speckled with powdered sugar, a dome full of constellations I didn’t recognize. There was no moon. It was so bright. For a second I felt dizzy; I felt like for a second I detected the turning of the earth. I said to myself, “This is the greatest thing I have ever done.”