The Riverboat Ledger

The telegram came to the boarding house in Rio de Janeiro on a wet Tuesday in March, while Mara was at the long table in the front room with a law book open and a cup of coffee going cold, and the landlady brought it in on a tray as if it might explode.

It had come a very long way. From Manaus, two thousand miles up the Amazon, by the cable that ran down the river to Belém and along the coast, and it had cost somebody a great deal of money per word, so there were not many words.

JOAQUIM DIED SUNDAY STOP RIVER STOP FUNERAL HELD STOP WILL NAMES YOU STOP COME AT ONCE STOP PASSAGE PAID LLOYD BRASILEIRO STOP AMELIA ARRUDA

Mara read it three times, standing up, with the rain coming down the window behind.

Joaquim Arruda. Grandfather. A name on letters that came twice a year with money in them, and a photograph on the wall of a man with a white beard and a white suit standing in front of a river steamer, squinting into a sun Mara had never seen. Mara had met him exactly once, at the age of eleven, in this same city, the year after Mara's father died: a big, quiet, frightening man who had bought her an ice cream on the Rua do Ouvidor, looked at her for a long time while Mara ate it, and said, You have his eyes. Good. Use them. And then had gone back up the river, and never come again.

And now he was dead, in the river, and his will named Mara.

Mara went first to the old cathedral on the Rua Primeiro de Março, in the rain, and lit a candle for him, though Mara was not sure what to pray, or whether he would have wanted it.

The church was dark and smelled of wax and wet wool. An old woman in black was saying her rosary in the front pew. Mara knelt at the side altar with the little flame, and tried to remember his face, and found that what came instead was his hand: big, brown, spotted, resting on the marble table of the ice-cream shop, with a heavy gold ring on it and a long white scar across the back, and the way it had stayed perfectly still the whole time he looked at Mara, as if he were a man who had learned long ago to keep his hands still while he thought.

Use them, he had said. Use your eyes.

Mara blew out a breath, and the candle flame bent and stood up again. Then Mara went back through the rain to pack, and at dawn the Lloyd Brasileiro office opened, and the ticket was waiting, already paid.

The voyage took nearly three weeks.

Down the coast first, past Bahia and Recife and the long white beaches of the northeast, where the dry country came down to the sea and the passengers in third class were families from Ceará, whole villages of them, with bundles and hammocks and children, going north and west to the rubber country because the rains had failed again at home and somebody had told them there was money in the forest. Mara watched them from the rail of the first-class deck and thought about the twice-yearly letters with money in them, and where the money came from, and found that Mara had never once asked.

Then Belém, steaming and green at the mouth of the river, with its iron market and its mango trees; and then the great river itself.

Nobody had told Mara how big it would be. For days at a time you could not see the far bank. The water was the color of milky coffee, and moving, always, a whole continent's rain going past the hull at walking pace, carrying whole trees, islands of floating grass, now and then a dead cow, a canoe, a hat. The forest stood on either side, when you could see it, like a green wall a hundred feet high, perfectly silent from the deck, and at night it was not silent at all. The steamer stopped at towns with wooden quays and tin roofs and a church, and took on firewood, and put people off, and took people on. It got hotter every day. Mara learned to sleep in a hammock and to drink coffee so strong it made the heart race, and to watch the river.

And on the last morning, very early, the color of the water changed.

Mara was at the rail when it happened. One moment the river was coffee-and-milk, as it had been for two thousand miles; and then, ahead, there was a line across it, sharp as a ruler, and beyond the line the water was black. Not dark: black, like strong tea, glassy and shining, and the two waters ran side by side, the pale and the black, without mixing, for mile after mile, as if there were a wall under the surface between them.

"The Meeting of the Waters," said a man beside Mara at the rail, a Portuguese merchant in a straw hat who had been up and down the river thirty times. "The Solimões and the Rio Negro. They run together like that for six leagues and never mix. Like two families at a wedding." He laughed. "You are going to Manaus? To the rubber?"

"To my grandfather's funeral," said Mara. "I've missed it."

The merchant looked at Mara, and then took his hat off. "Arruda," he said. "You are Joaquim Arruda's grandchild. I heard." He turned the hat in his hands. "I am sorry. He was a hard man and an honest one, which on this river is a rare thing." He hesitated, and lowered his voice. "Be careful in that house. There is a great deal of money in Manaus. And where there is money on this river, people fall into the water."

Before Mara could ask him what he meant, the steamer came around the last bend of the black river, and there it was.

Manaus.

A city of white and pink and yellow stone on a low hill above the black water, with the forest all around it like a sea. Church towers. Iron roofs glittering. Tall palms along wide straight streets. Electric wires strung on poles. And rising above everything, on the top of the hill, a great dome of green and gold and blue tiles, shining in the morning sun like something out of a dream, as if somebody had picked up an opera house from Paris and set it down in the middle of the jungle.

Below it all, along the waterfront, the strangest thing Mara had ever seen: a harbor that floated. Long iron pontoons the size of streets, moored out on the black river, rising and falling with it, linked to the shore by great hinged bridges, with steamers tied up three deep alongside, and cranes, and warehouses, and men and carts and rubber, mountains of black rubber balls, everywhere.

Somewhere on that floating harbor, a month ago, Joaquim Arruda had gone into the river.

And somewhere on it now, waiting at the quay in their mourning black, was the family Mara had never really known.