Manaus, Brazil: Moving Limbs
By John C. Ford

In a tiny retail space at the foot of an office building, fifteen young men sat elbow-to-elbow, playing military-themed video games at computer terminals cramped along the walls.  They appeared to be regulars, with the laconic body language of weekend gamblers pulling dollar slot machines, hour after hour.  Their headphones cocooned the sounds of gunplay exploding across their monitors, so that we could only hear the reggae on the speakers, and below that an orchestra of dull keypad clicks. 

We had happened upon this space on our way to dinner.  The darkened, black-walled room had no windows.  Looking through the frenzied magenta glow from the screens, we made eye contact with the twenty-something guy on duty and I prepared for the challenge of expressing, with my limited Portuguese: “we thought this was an internet café; do you know of one nearby?”

This was our first night in the Amazon.

The city of Manaus, population over 2 million, sits in the metaphoric heart of the Amazon rain forest, just 10 kilometers from the point at which the Negro River joins the Solimoes River to form the Amazon, which runs 1700 kilometers east to the smaller city of Belem and, eventually, the Atlantic. 

In preparing for our trip, I had to adjust to the idea that a large metropolis exists in the middle of the Amazon.  The notion was incompatible with my uninformed mental image of the forest, which featured, among other things, Toucan Sam from the Froot Loops box.  But we had flown in just that morning to Manaus’s international airport, and by evening, standing amidst the video‑gamers, the reality of Manaus had descended on me, perhaps a little heavily.

Manaus, as it turns out, has a more than full complement of urban discomforts: drivers that seem to aim for pedestrians rather than avoid them; air-conditioners that polka dot the city buildings and drizzle onto the sidewalk; a sharp, burnt odor—coming from, I believe, the ovens of street vendors selling “pizzas” and salgados—that permeates the air. 

It soon became more difficult to conceive of a rain forest surrounding Manaus than the other way around.

Manaus bills itself as the “Paris of the Jungle,” which is true in the same sense that Newark is the Paris of New Jersey.  And yet, walking past the dirt-streaked apartment buildings, past the sad sight of chincy clothing stores with girls posted at the entrances like so many doormen at Fort Lauderdale bars, you see signposts of the city’s faded glory. 

Earlier in the day, I had toured the Teatro Amazonas, an elegant rose‑colored opera house built with profits from the rubber boom of the late 1800s.  Inside, white marble columns shipped from Portugal glisten against the scarlet curtains behind each of the three boxed seating areas, ringing the theater. 

The effect is one of intimate grandeur.  One of the more spectacular drawing rooms in the wings has flooring of such rare wood that visitors are required to wear slippers before entering.  I did, and then looked to the muraled ceiling.  It was a fine example of perspective painting, I had been told—and indeed, as I crossed to a balcony on the far side of the room, the eyes of a crowned angel followed me and the limbs of a nude cherub, reclining on a cloud at her feet, shifted dramatically.

The opera house, the city’s architectural centerpiece, continues to host performances.  Despite this, and despite its well-maintained condition, it is tempting to think of the construction of the Teatro Amazonas as a kind of grandiose folly.  To commission the structure of an opera house that took 15 years to build, made of materials imported from Europe and transported by the modes available in 1896 to Brazil’s dense interior, suggests an audaciousness of vision for the city’s future that well outstrips its present circumstance. 

But whatever shortcomings Manaus may have, its people are Brazilian.  Which, we have learned from our time in the country, meant that we could expect them to receive visitors with an astounding—almost embarrassing—kindness.  I was not surprised, then, that the clerk listened patiently to my broken Portuguese, showed us to the lone open terminal, and insisted that we use it to access the Internet.

And when we were done, he refused to be paid.

I had come to the Amazon with a certain ambivalence.  Though eager to experience it, I struggled with questions needling at my mind—of whether our trip would contribute to the degradation of the forest, no matter how careful we were, and of whether there is something boorish in vacationing amongst an impoverished people. 

A bar near my home in Washington, D.C., displays pictures of third-world peoples wearing beads and standing against stark landscapes.  The pictures are beautiful, as are the people in them, but they are also malnourished and wan.  I think the pictures are meant to represent some kind of exotic authenticity, which you might find refreshing if you are busy and rich in America, and if you feel trapped in the confines of your own privilege.  Drinking your mojito, you can gaze at the pictures and be reminded that there is something more elemental to all of us than our email traffic.  But the pictures feel to me like exploitation, like poverty porn.

Landing in Manaus, I focused on our selection of a responsible tour operator, one that didn’t feel Disney-fied.  The tour outfits had small offices at the airport, one of them occupied by a young Israeli couple with an absurd amount of baggage, grilling a friendly-faced woman behind a Playskool-sized desk.  Katayoon and I grabbed some pao de quiejo, the cheese‑filled pastries that had become our new favorite Brazilian food, and waited.  After the couple left, the woman at the desk, Lucia, greeted us like friends and described a lodge that floated on the Negro River where we could stay for the next three days.  Her manner put us at ease.  We signed up, and Lucia gave us a ride into town, entertaining us with asides about her layabout boyfriend and complaints about rain, which she somehow made fresh even though she had been living in the Amazon for years.

At eight thirty the next morning, we arrived at the harbor, where a joyless energy came from the men unloading crates from the vessels clogging the docks.  A collection of eight or ten others, including the Israeli couple from the airport, joined us on our pastel-green-trimmed boat. 

It felt good to be on board, heading to an excursion.  We cut loose from Manaus and headed to the “meeting of the waters,” the point where the dark Negro River and the pale waters of the Solimoes funnel into each other and create the Amazon.  But instead of mixing together, as you would expect, the two strands of water resist each other.  And so as far as you can see, the Amazon river has a light side and a dark side, as distinct as the vanilla and chocolate stripes in a carton of Neapolitan ice-cream.     

After we lingered at the sight, a heavy rain started and we huddled on the bottom deck.  We had all gotten to know each other a little by then, helped along further when the Israeli man shared a bottle of wine all around.  He had a loud, entitled way about him, but he was also jolly, and I found myself thankful for his presence.  The rain slapped at blue tarps the captain had pulled down to curtain us against the weather.  I felt an electric‑charged comfort, like I had as a kid when retreating into the basement of our Midwestern home during a tornado warning. 

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