Eroica / Amazon 2 / Summary

Amazon 2 takes place just south of the city of Manaus in Brazil where the River Negro enters the Amazon. The water of the Negro is very dark, as the name would suggest, but basically clear. The water of the Amazon is muddy. For several miles downstream of the confluence of the two rivers they flow side by side as it were, and then they mingle, the Negro swallowed up by the brown Amazon. The two characters here are the composer Essella, Aaron's inamorata, and her friend Nusala (this name a little different from my earliest references). Nusala is a woman from Essella's tribe, which lives north of Manaus on the Negro. Unlike Essella, she has not been educated by the nuns, but neither is she purely tribal, having visited Essella often in the city and learned much of the ways of western civilization. Nusala is acutely aware of the perilous position of their tribe as the white culture expands ever outward in its search for land and gold. (Gold is extracted in the upper Negro by some sort of horrible water pump system using mercury, which poisons the river.) Nusala is the master of body painting of their tribe. She does gorgeous faces and breasts and limbs as well. So far as I know ethnographers, from Levi-Strauss on, have puzzled over the symbolism of body painting among the tribes of the Amazon. Is it purely decorative? Does it embody an old iconography the meaning of which is no longer recoverable by native reporters? My feeling is that Nusala intuits a tribal ontology-a people born up out of the river and so her painting is never linear but always encompasses the curves and tangle and wildness of the river country without losing a sense of order and beauty.