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Photo: Stew (beans and meat) for lunch cooks on the track that leads from the boiler to our house.
Oi amigos e familia!
We sing a lot while we toil at work here on Murutucu, sometimes in Portuguese, sometimes English. Needless to say, when it’s in English old Benjamin Da Nova Zelândia is usually performing gloriously solo, usually at the top of my voice (regular highlights include Beyond The Sea by Bobby Darin and Lady In Red by Chris Deburgh). And when it’s in Portuguese it’s most often the local lads (except for the three songs and one chorus I’ve learnt so far), in particular Edimar, Eder (mistakenly named as “Ed” in a previous photo) and Nelinho.
In frequently comedic turns however, Edimar often gives touchingly enthusiastic backing and/or lead vocals in full impressive voice to my heartfelt renditions of classics such as We Are The World, Unchained Melody and You Are Always On My Mind. He also loves the Radiohead (or as he pronounces their name, “Hadio-hedje”) song Creep as well as Sweet Child O’ Mine and Patience by Guns’N’Roses.
The comedy comes from the fact that he doesn’t know English, so the “words” he sings are really only sonic approximations of the real lyrics, words that exist in a kind of lingual no-man’s-land between our two languages and that often don’t even resemble the real lyrics at all. He doesn’t care in the slightest that he’s getting it wrong though, he just loves to sing and he knows the music just fine so he croons those invented words over the top of the laughter of anyone in earshot with 100% gusto.
The top of the charts hit though is our duet of Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry. The reason for the awesome emotional power us two towering vocal giants elicit from Marley’s classic composition is that a Brazilian artist called Gilberto Gil has recorded many of Bob’s songs in Portuguese. So one day (a good three months ago now) when I sang No Woman, No Cry me old cobber Edimar pipes up with Gilberto’s lyrics and a match made in heaven was forged on the spot.
Like McCartney and Wonder before us, ebony and ivory form a tag-team of unstoppable musical force, this time in the jungle, the mighty jungle, in a kind of trans-Pacific harmony.
One sunny Amazon morning a week or so ago, while Rii was still here, I went into the house looking for her and found no one there, Valentim and Dona Lourdes also being somewhere out and about. I figured Rii must’ve headed out for a walk to visit Soldalici or the school so as usual I followed the orders coming from my stomach and scrounged around in the kitchen for something to eat and grabbed a drink of water.
While I was standing by the sink eating I lifted my gaze up to my right and saw there drooping down the wall a little way a snake. It was hanging in a loopy U between two of the exposed roof battens (we don’t need ceilings because it never gets cold enough) and moving slightly but not going anywhere in a big hurry. Unlike my first snake encounter I knew right away what I was seeing, this one was starkly contrasted against the whitish wall rather than in a dark corner on the dark green floor.
I called out for the closest person around, Manaquim (Mun-a-keem – a nickname meaning mannequin because he has a very correct upright posture) the other carpenter who was working with me on the school that day and also handily the subject of a story I’d been told of anaconda slaying on the island when he used to live there. If anyone could handle this little guy in my roof it was Manequim. (When I say little I mean compared to an anaconda. This one was maybe just under a metre long and potentially plenty venomous)
The story of Manequim The Anaconda Slayer involved Manequim shooting an anaconda with a rifle. The day he helped me out he decided against a ballistic course of action and used a more ancient method of man-versus-beast confrontation, a 2 metre long stick. In one move he slung the snake onto the ground by our gas burner and in an initially surprising further series of moves he beat the snake to death there on the concrete floor of our kitchen.
At first as he was hitting the snake the adrenaline from the threat prevented me from being repulsed by the action. I was still thinking, “Get him Manaquim, get him out of here, who the hell does he think he is coming into our house all dangerous and snakey.” But as he continued to rain blows on the creature I found myself, like a big girl’s blouse, turning sympathetic to it. I left him to it obviously – there’s no way you want to get between a man with a big stick and a reptile with pointy venom dripping fangs – but I found the sight much less appealing and turned my head.
I guess whatever made me turn my head was the same thing that made me not want to watch the video of Saddam Hussein’s hanging. It’s not that I necessarily felt the action was unnecessary, it’s that seeing an increasingly helpless poisonous reptile be put to death holds no thrill for me, and nor did watching the snake die like that. The difference was that afterwards I don’t think I put Saddam’s body in a bucket for a couple of hours to show to interested visitors to our house, nor was Saddam’s last meal likely to have been a lizard (although who really knows for sure).
The school is still well behind where I want it to be and I can’t see any way it’ll be finished when I fly out of here in the first week of July. The slowness is due in part to lack of manpower, in part to lack of powertools. It’s not a surprise that it’s turning out the way it is, or even too much of a disappointment, I only came to offer what help I can give and that’s what I’m doing.
But it will mean the story of my stay here will have an incomplete strand to it, a feeling of unfinished business. They don’t need me here to get the job done per se, Manequim could build it with his eyes closed and one hand tied behind his back and a troup of howler monkeys throwing things at him, it’s just that it would have been cooler if I could have left them with a usable school when I left. Beggars can’t be choosers they say, and neither can the bum foreigner living on Murutucu.
A couple of weeks ago I’m walking on the track from Mad Maria the boiler to our house when a flying tarantula lands a metre away to my left. This 40m track isn’t a timber walkway like the others, it’s a long 3m wide pile of açai seeds built up above the level of the high tide mark, but like all the tracks here it’s overhung by a variety of plant life. One of the things these big spiders have that most other insects barely do is weight; they’re a mass that packs a punch so when this one landed on a strong bit of foliage by me it made a good sized “thwack”.
It sounded at first like a piece of fruit had fallen but when I turned to see what had threatened the unlumpedness of my melon it was no inanimate juicy piece of tropical seed carriage, it was an animate juicy piece of hairy black spider. And sure, you know the literature says they don’t jump and they don’t attack humans (did you know they’re more scared of us than we are of them? Who knew?), but when one lands that close to you it doesn’t take much to kick your imagination into overdrive. Soon you’ll have convinced yourself that this 8-legged senhorita had launched herself at you with the cold calculated intention of a puma stalking a gorilla.
It was only the fact that Lady Luck was holding my hand that day that saved me from certain bitement, webbage and devouration, but the chilling fact remains … that same spider is still out there somewhere, maybe outside this very office as I write, waiting on the roof above the front door. There’s only one way to find out.
Peace, love and açai,
Ben
