Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

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 cliche 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 Vaclav 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.

Under the canopy surrounding his cardboard chaise longue, was Switters’s luggage, consisting of a king-sized garment bag and the croc valise, as well as his electronic equipment and Sailor’s unusual cage. There was also a roll of mosquito netting, in which, to his dismay, he thought he could detect holes broad enough to admit the prima