The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
INTO THE UNKNOWN
Amid all the bad news coming out of the Amazon, the tale of Lucy and the Matses is a heartening one. And to think I might have married her
Enough, I hear you say. Enough of your wise cracks and silly tales. Benedict, aren’t you meant to have spent more time wandering the Amazon than just about anyone? Well, the place is presently burning, so for Pete’s sake, this month pull yourself together and write something to reassure us.
To which I respond: oh, all right. As you asked so politely. That the “lungs of the world” are being destroyed is, of course, no laughing matter. I, too, might have been in despair, hearing recent reports of yet more destruction – but for one thing. Or, perhaps, one person.
Last summer, after an absence of 32 years, I returned to the Amazon to check on the Matses, a remote people on the Peru-Brazil border who’d once been kind to me. Even back then, loggers were extracting what they could. So how had the Matses fared, and what of their long-suffering trees?
I took a small military plane into the interior and all the way my heart was in my hands – and not just because the teenagelooking pilot was having to be reassured by the unshaven old duffer beside him. I was thinking back to a cheery character called Pablito, a Matses leader who’d befriended me on a canoe’s ride upriver from my first destination, the unlovely settlement of
Angamos – and also his three wives and 30 children (always something of an estimate) to be found in huts scattered through the undergrowth en route.
Pablito, it was, who’d taught me how I might fend for myself in the Amazon – or he would have but, while hunting, I scared away the wildlife, so he handed me to his range of older children. Soon they, too, felt I wasn’t up to much and gave me to Noe, a boy aged five. Unfortunately, Noe decided that far more interesting than hunting with me was simply hunting me. I had to be rescued by his eight-year-old sister.
In time, Lucy showed me how to track rodents and gather herbs, and later, when I proceeded with my journey and was duly robbed by two Brazilian loggers, these lessons would save my life. But more relevant here – and this says something about the desperate situation the Matses were in – Pablito asked me if I might marry Lucy, for she was his cleverest child (she was certainly the bossiest) and this alliance with an outsider might somehow safeguard his family.
Well, marrying an eight-yearold was never going to happen, but I was deeply moved by the Matses’s plight and now, a generation on, I wondered how life had panned out for Lucy and her innumerable siblings.
First indications were not encouraging. Pablito had died. As for Lucy, she was no longer to be found upriver swinging on vines, covered in red paint. I discovered her in Angamos hanging around a third-rate goods store and the only red to be seen was her nail varnish.
Standing there in front of a range of cheap plastic buckets, Lucy barely acknowledged me. And fair enough, I suppose. She was only a little girl last time. But next thing I bumped into Noe playing football and he remembered me, all right. Off we went in his canoe: he wanted to show me the forest, which, to my astonishment, was doing just fine. The loggers had been chased away, a gang of drug smugglers, too.
There’s something else. Out among the trees one day, Lucy appeared, having engineered with Noe to meet me alone. “I remember everything,” she said. “Benedicto, you lived in Retam.” “Streatham. In London.”
“Yes, Retam. And I did not want to go to Retam.”
People seldom do, I was tempted to say. But in all seriousness, there, on the path, Lucy opened her heart. She explained how, over the years, the forest had faced this and that threat. In short, rather than fight the cause of her people from a semi-detached in
They may play football but still they have their forest and their pride in it
Streatham, Lucy had deftly managed to marry Wilner, supreme chief of the Matses; together, they’d pulled the situation around.
Pablito, then, had been right thinking he should trust to his clever little Lucy. When I get despondent about the continuing assault on the Amazon, I remind myself that somewhere out there is a little community deciding their future for themselves. They may play football, sometimes hang around stores, but still they have their forest and still they have their pride in it.
To read more articles by Benedict Allen, see telegraph. co.uk/tt-benedict