How it all started…
Anavilhanas Archipelago, Amazonas, June 1990
Hawks hover in the sky above us, looking for prey. Chattering parrots flutter like bright green spots between the trees, sometimes accompanied by the roar of a group of monkeys.
I open my camera to change the film. A sweet smell hits my nostrils. Suddenly I feel a piercing buzzing near my ears and something crawling on my head. A sting and another. I drop the film and the camera into the water. For a moment I think I’m the only one being attacked, but then I hear José screaming behind me: BEES! They are all over us, in our hair and clothes. My shirt feels like it is on fire. I am flailing wildly. I see José in the water. Piranhas, it goes through my head, caimans. Get in! He struggles out of the water. His leg is bleeding. After several futile attempts to start the outboard motor, it finally roars to life. We make our way through the dense vegetation as if the devil himself is after us, in the form of a dark cloud of stinging insects with a single goal.
When the forest spits us out into the open river, the bees leave us alone. The bottom of the boat is littered with small brown bodies, beaten to death, drowned. José looks incredibly depressed. In contrast to the thirty or forty stings each of us received, his back looks like a red, swollen pin cushion.
We take care of each other and remove the stings. My head feels like it’s being clamped in a German steel helmet that’s too tight.
In the meantime, José has become even more quiet than usual. He has some poisonous needles on his foot from the palm tree he landed on when he jumped into the water. When he complains of pain in his ear canal, a pair of tweezers fishes out the remains of a bee. An hour later, the boat boy is hanging over the railing, vomiting. We decide to return to Manaus. As if we hadn’t had enough for one day, the weather suddenly changes and dark clouds appear in the previously clear blue sky. It can get rough on the Rio Negro. The hours-long return trip at full speed has an eerie quality to it, with the crew pale and sprawled out on the deck while heavy rain pounds the boat as it lurches through the high, whipped waves.
C. Cornell Evers
Former music journalist. Swapped the editorship of the Dutch music magazine OOR for a hammock in the Amazon in the 1990s.
