BELEM

THE ADVENTURES OF DON-EDUARDO
& DONA SHARON, LA ARTISTA

ENTRY ONE BRAZIL JULY 2004

Louis Bougainville, Alexander von Humboldt, even Charles Darwin might have had the knack, but I find it difficult to tap into the mythos and romance of adventure travel at three forty five in the morning. The aforementioned explorers may have been able to function without even a short hit of coffee, but I cannot and for that reason rarely leave Santa Monica without my “two hit” espresso pot.

And so it was in the middle of a torrid night in early July, two inches of the caffeine enriched black liquid, enables me to get on the bus, which transports us to the boat, that carries us to an island in “The River.” The destination where we arrive at dawn to watch parrots as they wake up and fly off in cute pairs to begin their day’s activities. The fact remains it is an ungodly hour, even for parrots, whose first forays into flight don’t look particularly graceful or self-assured.

In that early morning half-light, it is nearly impossible to identify the flying objects as parrots or discern their bright green feathers. The only thing that was undeniable was the beginning of an extraordinary sunrise.

A sun - lighting a wide expanse of “The River” framed by that ever-present perfect look of primary growth jungle. A sun - growing brighter in a surprisingly wide swatch of deep blue sky. A sky - with a thousand clouds, each rippled to the same width and angle – the same size and shape. Clouds changing color from black to gray to pink to purple to white. The density of the colors changing in a thousand clouds all at the same time, as if Nature was being altered in real time with the same perfection, I’ve seen Dona Sharon accomplish with a push of a button in PhotoShop VII.

It was a spectacular sunrise and would have been had it been any river, but it was my first, observed sitting on a boat, floating down The Amazon!

We were downstream of the city of Belém, considered geographically and historically at the mouth of the great River. Belém, is a very old city for one in the Western Hemisphere, having been founded soon after Brazil was discovered, 500 years ago.

At various points during that long history, The Amazon has served to make Belém, the richest city in the world. Pick a century: 17th, 18th, 19th… pick a highly valued commodity: gold, silver, rubber… at some point it was being found up stream, somewhere in the endless riches of The Amazon Basin and had to come through Belém on its way to the rest of the world. As a result, the world’s riches flowed back into Belém.

The German film “Fitzcarraldo,” which brought fame to the Opera House in the upstream city of Manaus, because a boat was carried over the Andes to get to it, never indicated that the Amazon’s first Opera House was built in Belém a hundred years earlier around 1750. At a time when Manaus was little more than an upriver trading post, while Belém was one of the riches cities in the world. We were told that during the 18th century the people in Belém were so rich (and the infrastructure so lacking) that they sent their dirty laundry to be done in Lisbon. It took four months door to door. You have to believe they did a really great job at those Portuguese laundries. We looked and looked, and to this day, early in the 21st C., Belém still lacks a decent dry cleaning establishment or Chinese laundry.

Despite that fact, we enjoyed Belém a great deal. As the city sits within yards of the Equator, the simplest landscaping is lush and tropical. The Jungle seems to come right up to the next corner and must be cut back on an ever-continuing basis. There are no suburbs, you either live in the city or in the middle of the Jungle. Being Brazil, even though remote (it’s 2000 miles south to Rio), Belém has a skyline of hi-rise dwellings, the residence of choice for Brazilians.

Despite being the 5th largest country in the world, and there are millions upon millions upon millions of acres of uninhabited land, Brazilians (who possess anything) value SECURITY more than anything else, and choose to live in vertical dwellings like New Yorkers, because they provide a false sense of security. As a result, even in the wide open spaces at the mouth of the Amazon, they choose to live in high rises buildings.

Now of course, the security provided is ultimately an illusion. Because the security guards are almost universally members of the “have-nots class” of Brazilians. Should resentment get the better of them, as it often happens due to the arrogance and insensitivity Brazilians of the upper classes often manifest, collusion with thieves occurs. Then, even an apartment on the thirty second floor becomes vulnerable.

We came to the conclusion that Brazilians like to live in high-rise buildings because they need a sense of security even if it is a false one. The pattern of high rise construction clearly indicates that it isn’t the unobstructed views they are after. But ten or fifteen miles upriver on the Amazon, the skyline of Belém looks incongruous sticking out of the primary growth jungle.

Belém felt relatively safe to us, although it’s location, history and population give it an, “edge of civilization” feel to it. Even with its cosmopolitan mix of indigenous peoples, mulattos, and European descendents amidst its decaying equatorial 19th C. architecture, you always feel in the middle of the jungle.

But all the various craft floating, sailing or motoring along The River always remind you that heading upstream is the depths of the Amazon which these days, like the preceding 500 years, remains a dangerous place for a wide variety of reasons. One need not be a “pain-in-the-ass environmentalist” to get killed these days up the Amazon, we were told, so we choose instead to visit Belem’s highly-touted zoo.

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One of Belém’s top attractions is a zoo/botanical garden/museum that is second to none. It’s lush vegetation in the middle of the city feels like it has always been there and that the paved streets, street stalls, storefronts and high rises which surround it, supplanted the jungle which once stood around it. That in fact might have been the case, but I doubt the hundreds of animals, birds and fish collected there, (some in cages, some not) were simply around when the fences were put up. Amidst the unimaginable dense flora are immense blue parrots, panthers, dozens of different kinds of turtles and in the aquarium some of the most amazing fish species I’d ever seen. Those kinds of species only found on the Amazon. We visited the gardens on our first Sunday in the country along with all classes of Brazilian families which made the day’s excursion a total delight.

But what made Belém such a special place for us… was meeting and getting to know “RIC”.

Ric Corday. Corday is a French name. Ric’s father was French. His mother from somewhere in the Northwest, Seattle I think. Although raised in Paris in the 50’s, Ric grew feeling and thinking he was a lot more than 50% American.

Technically one might call Ric an ex-pat. Although with his heavily-French accented and rusty English, American would not be the first identity you would pin on him. And as Leon Trotsky probably spent more time in residence in the USA than Ric has, it is only his attitude and outlook that identifies him as an American.

Ric felt so deeply that he was an American that in his innocence, he felt the need in the mid-60’s to join the armed forces. Fortunately, he got over the French guilt of losing Viet Nam before he got sent there and got himself killed. Joining the US forces also radicalized him and he emerged from his time in the service like a real American of the 60’s, angry at authority, long-haired and sympathetic to left-wing politics.

By this time, his father had moved to South America, and Ric gravitated there. His father’s establishment credentials (he had already become the head of the Chamber of Commerce) helped Ric decide to stay outdoors and he became a hunting and fishing guide in Southern Brazil and Argentina.

Eventually he migrated into filmmaking, becoming a DP in commercials, in Sao Paulo. These days he owns a restaurant and bar in the newly gentrified Warehouse and Dock area of Belém.

We found Ric because it was meant to be. We were hungry and it was the wrong time of day to find an open restaurant (as usual). A waiter walked by carrying a plate of steaming rice from Ric’s kitchen when Dona Sharon spotted him, hunched over his Apple I-book at one of his table, a thick DSL cable trailing off toward the wall.

A plate of rice. An intense man hunched over an Apple computer with a fast Internet connection on the banks of the Amazon. Dona Sharon was looking to download her photos onto a disc, having not yet seen an Internet Café anywhere in NE Brazil, I wouldn’t have minded checking my e-mail. Who better to start up a l conversation than Dona Sharon.

A casual conversation begins. Apple this, Mac that. Who knew where it would lead? Four hours later we were still talking. Sharon had forgotten about downloading her pictures, I’d forgotten about e-mail. With a disarming suddenness, a conversation with a stranger felt like one with an old friend. Ric felt the same way and showed it, surprising himself. People who live on the edge of civilization, so close to the forbidding and wild aren’t open, emotionally accessible and generous of themselves. We had lot of questions about Brazil, about Belém, about him. Ric was open, responsive and had a lot to say about – everything!

When four hours of conversation seem like 10 minutes, we knew he was one of those 500 people. Long ago I came up with a theory that postulates, “there are really only 500 connected people in the world, only we have not yet met them all. That day in Belém we finally met Ric.

As it turned out there was nothing casual about meeting Ric. It was simply rediscovering someone we had always been destined to know. Despite the external differences in where life had led us, we shared too many of the same ideas, had too many common experiences, similar perspectives and outlook on the world.

Too quickly an uncommon familiarity, awareness and knowledge of how different things looked, felt, seemed today, 20 years ago, all our lives. It was one of those – connections – only made these days when on the road – an openness to new people – which allows the experience of coming to quickly know you want to have this person in your life because –its so comfortable and familiar – we must know them already or should have met before…

We spent only a few days in Belém, but we spent a part of each day hanging out with Ric. He wanted some of his friends in Belém to meet us. They unsurprisingly turned out to be great people, of course, Brazilians who were smart, progressive and made it plausible to live in a place like Belém.

The lack of a shared language was not a barrier, only a gap and delay in the conversation. One night Ric gave one of the most masterful displays of simultaneous translation, I’d ever seen as he translated both ends of a conversation I had with his friend, a shrink named Jose Paulo. Ric was so good at it, it blew his mind. He claimed he’d never done anything like it before.

Even before we left Belém, I started thinking about how fortunate I’ve been in my traveling life. I’ve met some of my best friends while I’ve been out on the road. People, who despite their far and distant locations, enable me to establish a bond, despite differing perspectives and points of view. Perhaps it is HOW we think about the world, rather than WHAT we think about it. Like me they are people who live their lives, do their things, but spend a part of each day in their heads…thinking… about ideas, history, politics, people, relationships, weapons of mass destruction, small handguns, design elements, sometimes sports, sometimes the Jews, always about how the world could be a different place if only…

While I sit part of most days in my perch in Santa Monica, looking at the Pacific to ponder these questions, I know my friend Guerrando is just outside of Firenze wandering in his backyard, pacing along the banks of the Arno doing the same; and my friend “Hob, ” too, as he saunters down to the Rio Grande where it runs through Albuquerque, and my friend, “Hic” ruminating on why his “neo-con” friends keep making mistakes, while traversing alleys and bad neighborhoods around Denver; and my friend Osvaldo, worrying about the Jews on the banks the Rio Plata, taking a coffee after a bike ride, reading the local Buenos Aires newspapers; and of course, my friend “Dags,” the only professional philosopher in my crew, recently relocated to Brisbane on Oz’s Pacific Coast whose thought and consideration to even my most simple questions are sometimes twenty years journeys into the mind and heart… and now Ric, sitting at one of his tables at the “Docks” in Belém looking up from his computer and staring off across the Amazon, wondering if Kerry and Edwards will find a way to defeat the forces of evil.

I see spectacular things in my travels, but the people I meet is what really makes it for me… makes it worth waking up at ungodly hours of the morning on the chance that the next connection to the 500 people will be out there. Less than a week into this trip, NE Brazil revealed another gem.

Somewhere in Arthur Miller’s “Death of A Salesman”, Willie Loman’s successful brother Ben, has a speech that expresses an idea I particularly like. And I’ll paraphrase it here, “I went into the Jungle, with nothing. Some thought me a pauper, with little of value, barely a penny to my name. But when I came out I had found what I needed to be a rich man. It wasn’t the gold I now carried in my pockets, it was good friends I had made!”

don-eduardo
Sete Cuidades, Piaui, BRASIL 12 July 2004

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Comments

[Aaron Wilde]

Hello-
I enjoyed your stories of Belem, your journey, and Ric... I am interested in travelling to Belem, and perhaps living and working there. I am a grad film student from UCLA (finished with my classes)... Can you let me know Ric's contact information, or some more about Belem? Thank you,
Aaron