Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [9]
“I understand,” Jean said. “It was like that in the circus.” Seer-coos, he said.
“Party all night, sleep during the day. For a long time, that was my life. Like so many people in Rio. I met this Italian guy a few weeks ago, who had been coming here every year for the last twenty years. He had married a girl here. And he had never heard of the Tijuca Forest. He just comes here every year to go to the beach. He told me, ‘I don’t like it here in the forest. It’s too green. I feel suffocated here.’”
We both looked up at the light filtering through the canopy, hundreds of feet above our heads, and then back at the little fresh-air lichens. “It is funny,” Jean said, “how people do not perceive what is right near them.” He looked up again. “I like it here. Now, I work when everyone else rests, but is OK. I could not work in some room with four walls.”
We started hiking again and moved upward through the wearisome raptures of the forest for another hour or so. (With all respect to Darwin, plodding up switchbacks in 85-degree, 85-percent humidity is far more wearisome than endless greenery.) As we neared the peak, the trail leveled out into an overlook of white rooftops and the d i stant Pão de Açúcar. The Pão is one of Rio’s most identifiable landmarks—the jungle-covered rock that rises from the water in postcards—and a distinctive reminder that, even if the interior jungle looks like tropical jungle elsewhere, from this overlook you are now incontrovertibly looking at Rio de Janeiro.
Of course, there are other things that can do this. “There’s the Maracanã,” Jean said, pointing at the world’s largest soccer stadium. He was, unsurprisingly, a soccer fan. (“I taught Ronaldhino how to play,” he insisted, smiling. “Everyone says he’s the best player in the world. He’s just the best player playing professionally.”) Other than the Maracanã, he pointed out no other buildings in the city. I think he felt unsettled by the city intruding so aggressively on his forest—his home. For the last few hours he had named every plant and bird and identified every rustle in the bushes, but faced with the sprawling, honking complexity below, he went silent.
Instead, he pointed out a vulture with white wingtips, circling high over the city. “People don’t like them,” he said, “but they are very beautiful at flying. Scientists say that vultures fly only to find food, but I’m not sure. I believe they are flying for fun.”
We pushed through a few small clumps of grass and trees and emerged atop the second-highest peak in the park, the ground falling away below us into a breathtaking 300-degree view of Rio, splayed out on the coastal plain around the glittery silver Guanabara Bay. “I could sleep up here,” Jean said. “This is my favorite view in the whole park.”
“The cidade maravilhosa,” I said. Rio de Janeiro’s nickname: the Marvelous City.
“Yes,” Jean said. He repeated, sadly, “Cidade maravilhosa.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “I’m not so sure. I like to come up here and think what it would be like if the Portuguese had never come.” He looked away from the city, over the jungle stretching out toward the ocean to the south. He shrugged and wandered off for a minute.
“Just like everywhere,” I said when he returned. “Brazil and California are similar. Many of the Indians are basically gone.”
“And with them, all the knowledge,” Jean added. The topic seemed to depress him. “They knew about ecology. How to organize their home.”
He asked whether I wanted to climb the rest of the way to Tijuca Peak. I said yes, of course—Darwin wouldn’t have settled for the second-highest peak with the highest peak in such plain sight. Its bald dome rose from a densely forested ridge connected to where we were standing. The trail wound through the jungle to the base of the summit, then turned to climb 1,020 stairs that had been cut into the rock specifically for the King of Belgium in 1921. The president of Brazil