Iquitos

The city pulsates to the sound of motocarros, like a motorcycle gang got caught on a cyclical road with no exits and only ever stops for gas and the occasional whistle. There aren´t any roads leading to other places on the continent, just a few that straggle out of town to end abruptly at rivers and jungles that deny any attempt to infiltrate them. The men and women here have brown bodies that they like to show with scanty clothing of bright yellows and greens and reds, and they aren´t afraid to let each other know they like what they see. Anytime a pretty woman walks down the street in impossibly tight pants she is followed by every possible variation of whistle, whistles that seem to echo off of each other from their sheer numbers, repeating whistles like a flock of birds searching for each other in the dark. I suppose that´s kind of what they are. Everyone seems to like it but the gringos, who rush around with harried expressions like they are being singled out particularly, which they certainly are. This attention seems to make some of them lose a considerable amount of weight. Not infrequently did I see a rail of a gringo walking around with a worried look on his face, ravaged by the sun, hair falling out or completely gone, looking, indeed, on their last legs. Some of the gringos here do well in this town though, adopting jungle man personas and careening around with much younger women in jeeps, with sunglasses, hats, vests, and an aura that they would rather be monkeys.
There is a market in this city the likes of which I´ve never seen before. Blocks and blocks and blocks of stalls full of every thing the jungle produces, from illegal skins of endangered animals to fruits and vegetables, lives turtles on their backs in bowls, feebly kicking in slow motion at an apathetic sky. Birds cawing pitifully from their too-small cages, sounding hoarse with cawing, yellow and green in the neon lights of the stalls. There is an alley in the market where indigenous medicines for every conceivable ailment are available, herbs, spices, plants resins and infusions and distillations, raw ayahuasca and san pedro cactus, ungents and salves for the skin and the nails and the hair and the eyes, pieces of animals for various potions some of the locals must know how to make, things to shred and things to powder and things to soak in water and discard, having drawn out the goodness from them. When gringos walk down that alley it seems like all the locals know what we want. Calls of `áyahuasca amigo?´ followed me as I strolled, avoiding the small animals on the ground, looking at the little babies swinging in little hammocks at the tops of the stalls, asleep.
And the meats! A gigantic warehouse full of meats. The smell was overpowering when I entered, that metallic smell of blood mixed with the ripeness of fresh flesh and minerals, leaving a taste in the mouth and along the nasal passages that seems to harden as one breathes. Rows and rows of men and women with cleavers busily chopping off chosen sections of legs and hocks and ribs for excited looking people, who never stop eyeing their meat. Not too much of a stretch to imagine human heads in there, in a secret backroom with red lights and elevator music, for visiting Jivaro executives.
Then the fish, everywhere there is fish in the market, medicinal fish to fish for simple eating, giant fish, tiny fish - it is the ubiquitous product for sale. I´ve never seen so many fish cut in half in my life. That smell, the briny, intestinal stench of it, is unique and unforgettable as well, like the river was emptied and after the water drained away the life of the river sat on tables, suddenly disembowled. Their eyes reflect the churning throng of people in their yellows and greens, their flipflops squelching through what I suppose is called mud but which is really something more intense and primal than the mud we know in America. Somehow richer, with more density and body than the mud I know, mud with soul.
There are stalls full of the exact same shirt, like some rich man accidentally ordered a thousand too many and is paying the shirtless native sitting lackadaisically in the stall to get rid of them. The fact that he isn´t wearing one of them made me wonder what was wrong with them.
Then there are shoe stalls, battery stalls, lines and lines of little restaurants offering set menus for almost no money. People sit on benches in the middle of the wide pedestrian thoroughfare and devour plate after plate of rice with egg, with beef, with fish, with chicken. You can tell the ones who stay longest from their girth. A spicy cheese sauce, that seems more watery than it should be for some reason, sits in little bowls along most of the tables. Flies, as often as not, are allowed to take their repast at their leisure.
The city seems to stretch out farther than it was ever intended to, like once it got started with the first internet stores and restaurants and clothing stores and electronics stores, it just kept replicating. Storefronts display beautiful banners and have a few simple items inside. One storefront had an advertisement declaring it would solve your concrete needs, and inside was a giant pile of concrete, bagless, a dune protected from the wind of the wizzing motocarros. Another had kids clothes: exactly four outfits. The furniture stores here seem to sell the pre-fabricated stuff and nothing else.
The city stretches so far that there is a part of it, Belem, that stretches into the floodplain, and floats during the rainy season. The residents call it little Venice. They definitely got the smell right.
This place is really alive with the energy of the jungle. You can feel it the moment you get off the boat, with the endless port making a noise you can hear a bend of the river away. I walked out of my hotel today and there were four people waiting for me, waiting to ask me for things. One woman wanted to sell me necklaces and bracelets and rattles, another had an incomprehensible note that she assured me explained everything, a third has a miserable looking foot that no amount of money could fix, and when I told them all I didn´t have much money it didn´t slow them at all. The fifth time I said it, nothing happened. I pulled out a cigarette and lit it, and a fifth person asked me for a cigarette. He was a cab driver, and I told him he could buy a pack, which is twenty cigarettes, for the cost of a single ride in his cab, and that I knew he had the money. This seemed to make him really happy, and he high-fived another cab driver, celebrating, I suppose, my aplomb. The rattle seller stayed in front of the hotel for the entire day, waiting for others gringos to exit, but they stayed within for what seemed the entire day, eating at the restaurant there, using the incredibly slow internet there, trying to convince themselves, in ways I cannot imagine, that they were really in Peru.