It’s hot, it’s raining, and my pants are too big.
A construction crane came down in a violent storm here not too long ago, it crashed through the roof of a bank building in the Plaza de Armas, the central square of Iquitos, piercing it through. This historic building was the original home of the famous and notorious rubber baron Fitzcarraldo. Though the damage is being repaired, the storm struck it with dramatic effect. One symbol of progress skewering another, at the hands of a storm disgorged by the Amazon. Fitzcarraldo’s house, it’s fair to say, represents the enormous wealth gained from daring enterprise, along with a great measure of greed and exploitation. It’s an enduring reminder of the man who became an iconic figure of the rubber boom’s gilded age in the upper Amazon. The great mansions you see along the main streets are still dressed for more optimistic times, their faded dinner jackets once glittered with bright, intricate tiles from the finest kilns of Europe. Now a hundred years have passed, and most are chipped and faded and written over. These last reminders of the rubber boom have blended into the busy streets of Iquitos, and time has made rough diamonds of them. You find them scattered here and there along the streets near the water, decaying monuments to wealth, discarded like gilded runes by gods that made and lost fortunes of epic proportion. Yet they remain, hovering with huge shoulders over the motorcar traffic and the rows of ordinary shops and worn-down doorways like ghosts of more glamorous times.
I watch the guy with a hammer slowly knock out a section of wall on the Fitzcarraldo house. Just knocking it out, bit by bit, in the scorching heat. A local points out to me that the building is unusual in that it was made of traditional earthenware, and not of brick like most buildings of the period. Next to it, the crane that fell was being used to renovate another grand old building from that era, which was in such bad shape that they gutted it all the way to the façade. They completely skinned it down to teeth and toes, like a hungry cat that caught a rabbit. Construction could take awhile, I imagine. They simply closed off one side of the square, and the bricks have been lying in the street for weeks. There’s no heavy construction equipment. There’s just guys with hammers and wheelbarrows, carrying material in and out, stacking things here and there like ants. I watch a dozen men struggle to carry an enormous steel I-beam in through the doorway. It takes awhile. During the peak hours of the day, it gets very hot, and they rest. Eventually the yellow tape blocking off the street breaks and even flutters in the wind, but by now everyone knows it is closed. Things do get done, and most things are done by hand. Someone has to rebuild the crane, of course, and in the meantime, the bricks pile up. Eventually a crew with a truck will come and take them away. The heat slows everything down. You have to pace yourself. It’s the whole charapa lifestyle here. Charapa is a turtle. It moves slowly and doesn’t like to work much. It prefers to sit on a log in the shade. It’s a term other Peruvians use to refer to people from Iquitos.
I watch this slow progress from a table at Ari’s Burger across the street. This corner sees just about the biggest circulation of street vendors in the whole city. There are shoeshine boys, young men with big felt-lined boards crowded with legions of earrings, men selling maps, and of course the guy selling sunglasses and watches. When it rains he sells umbrellas. He seems to just go around and around the block all day long. I saw him once at night, drunk and working late, still hawking sunglasses in the rain. Then there are the old men with anaconda skins, they unspool them for you on the sidewalk, and wave palm fans and display jars of Blue Morpho butterflies and rhinosaurus beetles under glass. Jaguar teeth necklaces. Ayahuasca charms. Shipibo women with their array of clothing and fabric embroidered in patterns of psychedelic geometry signifying visions of sacred plants. Pendants in endless parades, seed and stone bracelets, amulets and oils, men wearing boxes stuffed with cigarettes, chiclets and jungle trinkets. They drift by again and again like a circular stream, shaking their wares at you or chanting their virtues, pausing to detect the slenderest sign of interest. And woven in among this constant flow are lots of kids asking for money. Some who ask for change are not really asking for change; their immediate problem is hunger. The employees chase away lots of drifters and beggars, but they also look out for the ones who really need a handout the most. I often see the waitresses at Ari’s get a plastic bag and discretely gift the leftovers to a street kid after Johnny Gringo has had his fill of french fries. Good for the waitresses at Ari’s. It’s just going to get thrown out anyway.
Fresh market fish is cheaper in the dry season. When water levels are low, the fishing is good.
There was a big rain awhile back, and I went out to the compost pile and discovered the biggest toad I’d ever seen in my life. It was the size of both my fists. It wrestled out of my grip and I had to chase it down several times before I got a hold of it. I turned on the light, and there was a tick the size of a grape attached to its back. It had been there for awhile, judging by the state of the wound where it was attached. It was the biggest tick I had ever seen, attached to the biggest toad I had ever seen. I pulled it off, it was the least I could do.
A tick on a toad. I just tell you what. You see something new every day down here.
I got up the other morning and went to get a glass of water. There was a tarantula the size of my hand cruising around in the sink. Big, black, hairy thing. I left it there and went back to bed.
We had some indigenous guys over to make some food and they grilled a mahas. I ate a leg of it–delicious, smoky, oily meat. As I ate it, I noticed that the foot was intact and I saw that it had big, black gnarled claws. It looked like a rat’s foot. Turns out, mahas is in fact a giant rat that lives in the Amazon. And you know what, I’d eat it again. That’s some good bushmeat.
I don’t know why, but I like to watch the vultures descend on Belen market in the afternoon. You can see them in the sky, in lazy winding circles, settling into smaller and smaller gyres before alighting to feed on heaping piles of half-rotten vegetables and the day’s detritus market vendors leave behind. They scoot out of the way of motorcars like little pedestrians, then rush back to the pile, shoving one another and talking all kinds of squawking smack. They even chase away the dogs that sidle in to sniff out the offerings. They’ve got attitude, these vultures.
A family of hawks lives in the trees above my house. Such graceful animals, and the most fearsome predators in their weight class. They pierce the dawn with a single keening scream, announcing the day. It is a sound that seems to come straight from the raw wilderness. It wakes me up every time, gives me the chills. I remind the kittens not to wander too far out in the yard until they’ve put on a little more weight.
Lucuma has a mangy dog named Hitler, which he intends to fatten up and eat.
Jungle Love 