About Schmidt - Louis Begley [61]
You are really disgusting. I know what Schmidtie should do. Let’s send him to our Amazon island.
What’s that?
Gil, you tell him about it.
That’s exactly the place for you, and I think it can be done. We went there in the summer, which is not the right season, three or four years ago, after my film opened in Rio. You remember Marisa, the Brazilian who played the mute whom Jackson finally marries?
Certainly.
Her family arranged it, when we told them we were exhausted and needed a place to be alone and rest. It was the best thing we have ever done. We flew to Manaus from Rio, and there we chartered a tiny plane that could land on a tiny clearing in the jungle on an island in the middle of the Amazon, about an hour west of Manaus. The island itself is the size of your hand and the river is very wide; I think the shore was almost two miles away, on either side. At one end of the island, near the landing strip, there is a village of caboclos—that’s the word for Indians of mixed blood who have more or less joined the twentieth century. They live by fishing and are obviously very poor, but there are a couple of television sets in the village and so forth. Toward the other end of the island, completely surrounded by jungle vegetation, is the guest house. It’s owned by some Brazilian company that runs it like a club for invited guests—usually not more than two couples. But I think you could have it all for yourself, as we did, if it hasn’t been booked. An amazing structure: imagine an octagonal house, made entirely of native Amazon woods and very airy. The walls don’t quite reach either the roof or the ground—no nails, indeed no metal components in the construction, except in the bathrooms and in the kitchen. Caboclo servants, very silent, moving like polite shadows. You only see them when you want something, and they seem to know it without being called. And rather wonderful food. Strange fruit juices and jellies that are supposed to prolong your life and do other things for you that are even better, flat bread, and river fish. For a couple of days, we had chops, that’s really what they were, carved from a fish like a huge river monster. An absolute delicacy! To drink, there is beer and pinga—a Brazilian rum with the kick of a buffalo. If you want anything else, you will have to bring it.
Did they speak English? Or is speaking Portuguese another one of your attainments?
You don’t need to speak. The other thing is that you won’t have to stay in the house all day and all evening reading and listening to the parrots and the monkeys. We had a guide who met us on the island and acted as the majordomo as well as guide. He told the caboclos what to do. He is German—in fact I wonder if his name wasn’t Herr Schmidt!
My Doppelgänger.
Gil, his name was Lang, and you never called him Herr.
That was just a nice idea. The man’s name is something else; more like Oskar Lang. He is a biology student from Hamburg, who came to Manaus right after the war. He intended to study Amazon fish—actually, he says Studien instead of study—but in the midst of Studien he got hooked up with an Indian woman and never left, except for funerals, when his mother and then his father died. He married his Indian. She became a nurse in Manaus and he became a river guide, working for people doing documentary films and scientific expeditions. He is quite an expert on fish.
And breasts! He kept on pointing out to Gil that white women’s breasts fall as they get older—here he would look at me—while his Indian woman has boobs that stayed small and hard. Like mein fist only nice, so nice and small, was how he put it!
That’s true. He showed us a photo with boobs he had taken of her in one of those round backyard pools made of blue plastic, right behind his house in Manaus. Anyway, Schmidt—I mean Lang—had a comfortable long rowboat with an outboard motor. He also had an assistant, the most beautiful young Indian boy you can imagine, who paddled when we went out in the canoe instead. And what eyesight that boy had! He would