“As I descended into impassible rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen…” — Arthur Rimbaud
“A few days later,” Cigano reads, “I sold off the swag I’d taken from the Gringos. Impulsively, I walked down to the port and bought a ticket on one of the dirty-white riverboats. Before I knew it, I was traveling deep into the heart of the Amazon. The drab embarkation moved forever down-river in a journey of indeterminate length, lulling me deeper and deeper into a state of flat line stupor. The big engine chug-chug-chugged monotonously along the endless expanse of still brown water, as if sluggishly plying my dreams. Days turned to weeks out on the river, melting together like the burning rubber from the ever-present jungle fires dotting the distant land. The brain-melting boredom of that damp timeless voyage through limbo was broken only by infrequent and uneventful stops at the muddy little port towns along the watery road to nowhere…”
The passenger sits in a hammock on the deck, staring absently into space. He opens his journal to write something, but ends up staring at it blankly. Looking at the empty page, he feels as if he is still seeing the endless expanse of brown waters and distant green rain-forests engraved on his vision. The thoughts and words don’t come. They seem to be arguing silently in some blank waterlogged nether-zone, eluding him like tiny transparent fish beyond the chipped white wooden railing of the boat. The boat; his only anchor to reality now as days and nights blend in the interminable trudge through endless waters. The river seems to swallow up the sun in a murky mosquito-humming mist. Dark flashes of lightning and thunder and driving rain define his existence now. It seems as if all the clammy spirits of mankind, past and present and future, living, dead and unborn, are shouting in a mad voiceless din of violent anguish when the storms come marching across the distant expanse of jungle, like angry giants prowling the battered horizon. As soon as the tempests are gone, a weary steam lingers in every aching cell and molecule of his being to form the next round of empty-minded tedium…
“… mostly I just sat in my hammock like a slack-jawed prisoner whose cell becomes his whole universe. The smell of wet earth filled my head like a dose of laughing-gas. I would find myself giggling all alone at times. I was going slowly mad, I knew, in that lingering humid stew without a name, without time or space or definition; swallowed up like a heat-crazed ghost lost in a tangled labyrinth of hammocks crowding the riverboat’s slippery deck. The journey’s plodding progress was defined for me only by the spectacular sunsets and sunrises over the jungle. Time was measured by sporadic afternoon storms and the constant comings and goings of a surreal cast of characters occupying the hammocks around me. Daily life was like a series of watery snapshots… a group of Argentine boys chattering in my ear like drunken parakeets, then suddenly gone again, replaced by whole families of locals bundled together in their hammocks on deck, cowering under clammy grey blankets before the elements. We were like rows of alien pods growing on a sleeping monster’s back in a long restless fever-dream…”
A brown skinned boy with a sunken tubercular chest and eyes black as the night stands beside the rail. A small monkey with a long tiger-striped tail is sitting on the boy’s shoulder, picking lice from his hair, eyeing the curious traveler defensively. The boy turns to look across the water and the monkey pivots like a camera to continue its staring match with the strange traveler under a fantastic orange rising moon. Nearby, a bare chested thirteen year old Indian girl breast-feeds a baby no larger than the monkey. What do these people think about? the traveler wonders. What is this place, this life? Who are these strange vagabond souls with faces like monkeys and minds I can never know?
The traveler is lost in a tedious replay world of memory and contemplation, drained of all energy as he lays in his hammock dreaming an invalid’s dreams of past lives in other places as he drinks from an endless succession of bottles of cheap sick-bed rum, sweet as a useless medicine for this malady without name or cure. He remembers spending his twentieth birthday alone in a fifty cent hotel room on the mosquito coast of Honduras. He recalls the nights spent under the stars there, smoking stupefying marijuana cigars on the rickety wooden dock with a group of pigeon-english-speaking Negro boys about his own age; boys who had never seen the world beyond their tiny palm-hut village, and probably never would. Jonathan lays in his hammock at day’s end, absently rubbing at his unshaved chin. He studies a gaunt toothless white man standing on the deck with a large cross crudely tattooed down the side of his ageless granite face. The strange figure boarded at the last muddy hole, he remembers. Demented looking, the stranger paces back and forth restlessly now, his shirtless bony sun-ravaged torso marked with a long vicious Frankenstein scar. Is that me in 20 years? the traveler wonders. Of course not. I will never live that long. His sweaty shirt is wrapped around his head now like a dirty turban. It is dusk again, he realizes, as the mosquitos hum around his ears. And so he dreams again, his unhappy somnambulant eyes open to the drab mysteries of another alien dusk or dawn or whatever, staring out over the endless murky waters covering the earth’s afflicted surface like a shawl of drunken sickness and despair.
“The riverboat trudged on and on forever under an oppressive low cloud cover that blocked out the sky in an awful milky stew. From time to time I stood up from my hammock and walked over to the rail to stare out at nothing. Small details seemed to take on massive proportions, carving themselves like graffiti onto the walls of my mind, my memory, my dreams. One day a dead cow floated by slowly. It looked like a bloated grimacing leather balloon, its lifeless brown legs sticking straight up, pointing obscenely towards the impotent grey heavens descending forever in that godless mist of eternal nothing.”
Copyright Jonathan D Shaw 2010
I don’t mean to play favorites with your work (cause all of it kicks ass), But this is my favorite part… The Heart of the journey–This part rivals the climax in Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness!”
thank you