Iguaçu
In 1759, the last Jesuit missions in the remote regions of the
Parana were razed to the ground, and, with the collusion of the Portuguese and Spanish
crowns, the order expelled from Brazil -- their trespass being in providing desperate
shelter to the Tupi, Guarani and Nambikwara Indians being systematically
exterminated by the 'bandeirantes'. For over a generation, terrified by the bounties being
put on Tupi-Guarani scalps by the gobernadores of Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro and Spiritu
Sanctu, the Jesuits had been driving their Indian flocks deeper and deeper into the
seclusion of the Andean peaks or the rainforests of the Parana, but the end, when it came,
was swift and ruthless. If you go to meet the Black Pope -- the Secretary General of the
Jesuits -- in Rome, he will show you murals of terror and anguish as one hideout after
another was plundered and monks put to the sword.
Some Americans made a movie about some of this. It was called 'The Mission', and began
with a miracle -- a body of a Jesuit monk tied to two lashed poles drifting down Rio
Parana and then plunging straight down hundreds of feet into the foaming waters of a giant
waterfall in the midst of lush forest -- twisted flesh and wood ending, impossibly,
as a grimacing crucifix impaled into the sand at the bottom of the falls. The movie won
some awards in the mid-eighties, and thus duly turned up in my dusty Indian college campus
a year or so later. We watched it, hot and sticky, in half-empty L7, it being the summer
term and most of the other undergraduates at home. The sublime image of a bestial torrent
stayed with me.
Nearly a decade later, I step out of the little Fokker that has flown me from Sao Paolo to
Foz do Iguaçu in the middle of the night, the
curtain of the forest parting at the last moment to reveal a scabbard trail of runway
lights and the dim glow of the town. It is a wet summer,and the purser from the flight
uses his flashlight to stab here and there at the darkness as we splash through the
puddles on the tarmac,for what seems like miles, till a bunker marked 'Arrivals' appears,
steam rising slowly from the concrete in the orange glare of sodium-vapour light.
It is past midnight. Only two battered Peugeot taxis have stuck around, waiting for this
much-delayed flight, and they are quickly snapped up by the doctor from Manaus and the
professorin from Stuttgart. The purser tells the drivers to look out for signs of the crew
minibus on their way to town, and ask it to hurry. I turn up my collar and settle down to
wait.It starts to rain again. The pilot walks toward me, takes off his peaked cap, and
blearily rubs his jowl.
***
In 1541, Alvar Nunez, the illustrated Cabeza de Vaca, chanced upon Iguaçu on his way to
what would become Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. If you look for this in Nicholas
Echevarria's 1992 movie on the man, you will be disappointed -- it deals with other
exploits in the life of this prodigious traveler; read Cabeza de Vaca's diaries instead:
"... the current of the Yguaçu was so strong that the canoes were carried furiously
down the river, for near this spot is a considerable fall, and the noise made by the water
leaping down some high rocks to a chasm may be heard a great distance off, and the spray
rises two spears high and more over the fall. It was necessary, therefore, to take the
canoes out of the water and carry them by hand past the cataract for half a league with
great labour ..."
The 'Foz' lie a few miles upstream from the confluence of Rio Iguaçu and Rio Parana.
Millions of years ago, the lava flow that created the basaltic plateau over which Rio
Iguaçu now flows, stopped abruptly, leading to cliffs plunging down to plains below.
Today, 50,000 cubic feet of foaming water plunges straight down this site every second, to
create a spectacle that is wider than Niagara and higher than Victoria. Before reaching
the precipice, the river divides into many streams and channels which form their own
distinctive spumes, making the larger Iguaçu more than 2 miles wide -- and, downstream,
all of these recombine amongst deafening noise, and mist, and rainbows -- to form the
famous 'cataratas.' In the surrounding 100,000 hectares of rainforest are bright toucan,
and rooting tapir, sleepy iguanas, inquisitive anteaters. Perhaps jaguars.
Before European 'discovery', Iguaçu had been part of Tupi-Guarani legend for millennia --
the name means Great Waters in Tupi. The warrior Caroba incurred the wrath of a forest god
by eloping with the beautiful Naipur, the god's handmaiden. As the lovers sped downriver
on canoe, the god made the riverbed collapse into a chasm, and Naipur, plunging to her
death, turned into rocks at the base of the cliff. Caroba became a tree at the top,
overlooking his fallen love. This was a burial site thereafter: great warriors were given
Viking funerals by casting canoes bearing their bodies down the falls; even today, the
waters will sometimes yield up human bones downriver.
The sight of Iguaçu will silence you for a moment. At the top, the Argentine authorities
tried to build a series of catwalks to provide close-up views after UNESCO declared the
Cataratas a World Heritage Site in the 80s. The next floods swept away human folly. Today,
you can take a boat to the mouth of the falls, and if you slip the boatman some money, he
will cut the engine as long as he dares, so that you are swept to the Garganta del Diablo,
the Devils Throat, where the waters take their plunge. The feeling is one of, as somebody
has said, stepping off the edge of a flat earth -- the noise is like being in a tunnel as
a train thunders by, the spray drenches you through, and 270 degrees around, deluges of
brown water hurl themselves into the impenetrable mists below. You yell in glee or shout
your prayers, and then suddenly the engines roar into life again, the current tugs, and
tugs, but yields, and the boat inches back first up-river, and then starts zig-zagging
across to the trees far away on the banks.
***
A day later, I'm holed up in the outskirts of the town of Foz do Iguaçu, a dozen miles
downriver from the Cataratas, but close to point where Argentina and Brazil and Paraguay
meet. Foz has a reputation for being rough after dark; the Itaipu dam, one of the world's
largest hydro-electric projects, is forever being built close downriver on the Parana --
"enough concrete to pave a 4-lane highway from Lisbon to Moscow", according to a
guidebook -- and streets of this town are yielded up to hundreds of hard-drinking laborers
once the sun sets. I run into the doctor from Manaus. We sit around and chug 'Guarani
champagne', slapping at mosquitoes, desultory, watching a fierce storm brew up over the
jungles east and west. There is a loud thunderclap, and a flash of explosion close by. The
lights go out. As the hours pass and the heat turns stultifying, I begin to suspect that
it is more than a junction-box -- perhaps the lightning hit a transformer or a
sub-station. The doctor begins to hint he likes boys; and after some time suggests we go
out and look for some. He has, improbably, a rented car, and we bump around Foz from dive
to dive, sweating, drinking, picking our way between the cardsharps and punks and
transvestite strippers. It is Ciudad del Este, across the border in Paraguay, which
will turn out, the next day, to be a real hole -- "Muchacha, caballero, doce an~os
..."
It is midnight, and there's still no power. The doctor has found a friend, so I trudge
around awhile on my own till I can find someone to give me directions back to the hotel.
The staff have lit candles, and a card game is in progress in the lobby. I go back to my
room and lie in the dark, listening to ice melting in the fridge.
***