PERSONAJE : LA RAPOSA

IT WASN’T until a couple of years later, in early 1993, that a snake came into me, and by that time I had stopped looking for one.

I’d been commissioned to do some medicinal plant collecting by Shaman Pharmaceuticals on the Yavarí and Gálvez rivers. The Gálvez, where Pablo lived, was a second home to me by then;

the Yavarí, the border between Brazil and Peru, was another story. Sparsely populated, there were no riverboats or ferries that ran its length and special military permission was needed by non-locals to enter it—permission that Moises was able to secure in Iquitos. Brazil had two small military outposts on its side of the river; Peru had three. Between those posts it was essentially wild territory. I’d been on the river before, but this trip was going to be different because I would be captaining my own boat—a trip I estimated would take a month, most of that in territory where small villages would be one running boat-day apart from one another.

I’d rented a small Brazilian riverboat, the Rey Davíd, a wooden-hulled 40-foot beauty with a 24 horsepower inboard diesel engine. My crew included the owner’s son, who would act as motorist, taking care of the engine, a timonel—helmsman—who would share the piloting duties with me, and a young woman named Gilma Aguilar Chávez, known as Chepa. She had grown up on the river—her father had owned riverboats—and was recommended to me by her brother-in-law, Joe, a gringo friend of mine. Joe, who owned a large riverboat, urged me to take her, as she was one of the few people in Iquitos who knew the river and the people at the military outposts we’d pass. They were notorious for demanding money and goods in exchange for the right to continue on the river, and Joe thought Chepa could handle them well enough to keep us out of trouble.

But while the scenario was something out of Indiana Jones, the reality was less certain. I’d never had my own boat before, didn’t know if my estimates on time, fuel and food would be accurate, and I’d be carrying a pretty woman to the Yavarí—where pirates and smugglers were part and parcel of daily life. I decided to visit Julio and see if I couldn’t glimpse anything I should avoid while on the river.

While most of the evening’s ayahuasca experience didn’t seem noteworthy— much of the river imagery seemed calm—there was one point in the journey when I felt I was being attacked by dozens of ghoulish faces and didn’t know how to deflect them. Julio had already taught me that the spirits from the other side couldn’t psychically cross the boundary into our world to hurt me, but I was still frightened by them. They were colorful, demonic images that weren’t in my sphere of sight as much as they were physically intimidating me. And then

suddenly, unexpectedly, a large, thick boa appeared and began to consume them with a terrible ferocity, a bellowing, wild, uncontrolled fierceness that surprised me. The ghoulish visions, those the snake didn’t consume, scattered instantly, and in another instant the snake slithered quickly into my mouth, and down into my belly. l didn’t fight it. It was just suddenly there. And I knew, though it seemed strange to me, that I would have an ally for the trip.

The Jacare, one of Gorman’s boats

Once we left Iquitos, perhaps a week after my trip to Julio’s, I didn’t give much

thought—other than occasional amazement—to the idea that a spirit snake was living in my belly. I was more concerned with learning how to pilot the boat and avoiding half-submerged tree trunks that would have sunk us in a flash. Chepa spent hours with me at the wheel, teaching me to go with the river flow, rather than trying to steer through it.

And she proved her worth on our first night out. We’d left Iquitos at about 5 AM and arrived at the little town of Pevas about 12 hours later. Attached to the town was a Peruvian military base and we were required to get papers of passage at each base before continuing on. When we pulled into the tiny port, Chepa was in the pantry. A sergeant on duty saw me and boarded with two soldiers.

“Who are you and where are your papers? Where are you headed?”

I answered his questions and provided the documents he requested, then asked for

permission to pass. Instead of giving permission, he pointed to the two lights we were required to have on the boat.

“If you don’t have running lights, you can’t get permission to continue,” he said nonchalantly, then told his men to break them.

I protested. He suggested that he didn’t need to break them if his men, who were fed so little, could go through our pantry and gasoline stores and help themselves to whatever they wanted.

That would have ended the trip right there as I’d pretty much used up the funds Shaman Pharmaceuticals had given me and wouldn’t be able to replace what they took. Fortunately, while I tried to think of a solution, Chepa came from the stern of the boat. In one hand she carried a quart of rum; in the other a loaf of sweet panettone bread.

“Hello, sergeant!” she smiled. “It must be a while since you’ve had a good bottle of rum, eh?

And sweet panettone?”

He smiled broadly. “Chepita! It’s been too long! Come up to the office. Bring your boyfriend.”

Twenty minutes later, after agreeing to give the sergeant five gallons of kerosene— the post was out and unable to run their lights until fresh supplies came—in addition to the bread and rum, we had our permission papers and were free to leave at dawn.

It was something she did at every post. When she’d bought the rum and bread I’d been upset, thinking that we were squandering money so that she could give friends gifts. After I saw the magic those gifts worked, I was glad she’d insisted on doing it.

The first four days on the river—the time it took to reach Leticia and the mouth of the Yavarí—were so exhilarating that I didn’t give much thought to anything except the sheer excitement of having my own boat and being out on the Amazon. On the fifth day, the day we turned up the Yavarí, I meditated on the idea of what an ally, if I really had such a thing, could do. But it wasn’t until the eighth night that I realized its power.

We were four days from nowhere, and hadn’t even collected our first plant yet, as we still hadn’t reached the first Matses village. It was near midnight and we’d been warned at the last military outpost we’d passed that there was a pirate boat working the river. Because of that potential danger we kept going several hours after we normally would have tied up to a tree at riverside in an effort to reach the Brazilian military post of Peletón. A couple of hours before we estimated arrival, a single spotlight from a boat appeared just after the last bend in the river behind us, maybe a mile back. We didn’t think anything of it until the light began gaining—and didn’t begin to panic until it wouldn’t respond to our signals to it.

The boat, one similar to ours but with a much more powerful engine, took less than an hour to cut the distance between us. And, being weaponless except for machetes and knives, there was little we could do to keep it from approaching. When it reached us, it pulled up directly alongside, tied ropes to our roof posts and cut its engine to idle, forcing us to do the same or burn ours out pulling two boats. There were probably a dozen men on board, all of them drunk.

They had two motors in plain view on their deck. I asked my motorman David what we should do.

“They are probably going to kill us,” he answered calmly, “then steal our motor and sink the boat.”

“So what should we do?” I fairly shouted, absolutely terrified and feeling utterly helpless.

“I am going to go over to their boat and drink with them. I don’t know what you are going to do.”

“And if I go too?”

“They will probably still kill you.”

And with that he and my timonel jumped onto the other boat. The men began to laugh at us, their faces almost cartoonish, ghoulish to me. It occurred to me that those were the faces I’d seen when I’d been at Julio’s, and in that moment I silently called on the snake to help me if it were possible.

There was no real time to think. The men were about to come aboard and I knew I couldn’t let that happen. I told Chepa to get below deck to the crawl space—I didn’t think having a woman in full view would be in our best interests in the face of a dozen drunk pirates without women. Then I grabbed a machete and a knife, and with fear as my guide began to shout to the men in English that the first one to step on my boat would lose his hand. I said it out of

complete terror, but it came out of me with a ferocity that surprised them enough to make them hesitate. So I said it again. I knew they didn’t understand my English but they seemed to be getting the point. Just then Chepa appeared beside me.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I screamed. “I told you to hide.”

“What do you have?” she said, indicating my weaponry.

“A machete and a knife.”

“Well,” she said, brandishing a machete, “now we have two machetes.”

And with that we both began shouting at them, daring them to step across. Thank god they didn’t, but for the next hour it seemed as if they would, until they either grew tired of listening to us or the alcohol exhausted them. In any event none of them boarded us and the scene finally became almost comical, with us—in an effort to get them to leave and knowing that they needed to save face in order to do that—explaining that they were indeed dangerous and could have killed us, but were intelligent enough to know that as a gringo I would have a paper trail and that killing me would certainly lead to their capture and subsequent demise.

When they were finally satisfied that they’d frightened us sufficiently and had regained enough face to leave, they untied from us and put their engine in drive. My two men rejoined us just before they pulled off—I couldn’t run the boat without them—congratulating us on the way Chepa and I had handled things. Their congratulations belonged more with the snake than

me. I do not believe my initial threat would have been powerful enough to make the pirates hesitate if that ally had not given my voice an extra dimension that masked my fear.

Once we were moving again, I turned to Chepa and told her I had just fallen in love with her. I told her I might marry her. She laughed and told me I was full of it.

The remainder of the trip, which lasted 31 days and covered more than 1,500 river miles, produced no similar experiences, and in the end proved very successful. We collected a number of interesting medicinal plants, including a new subspecies, and I ended up marrying Chepa a year later.

Even before my marriage, Iquitos felt like home to me. I’d spent two or three months a year there—or working in the jungle out of Iquitos—for most of the previous ten years. But after my marriage there was no doubt about it. I adopted Chepa’s two young boys from a previous marriage, Italo and Marco, and looked more than ever for work in the Peruvian jungle. I

collected plants, I collected artifacts for the American Museum of Natural History, I wrote about the city of Iquitos and the surrounding jungle and its peoples as often as I could. Although Chepa and our two sons moved into my New York apartment after our marriage, my ties to the jungle remained strong and I was able to increase my time to four or five months a year there.

Chapter Two