No one could trace the secret roots of Skinny Pedro’s devotion to the world of machines. Yet nobody doubted the young man’s earnestness as he read and reread old instruction manuals that kept arriving in the camp on a fairly steady basis, despite the exasperating sluggishness of the banana boats, which wound their way upriver to connect that forgotten part of the jungle to the rest of the world.
Some thought the mystery bore a direct relation to the green tangle that tightly encircled the two dozen shacks balanced precariously between the rain forest and the yellowish waters. Indeed, the diverse lush tones joined forces with the suffocating heat of the jungle to disguise an essential monotony, the primary function of which was to drive crazy anyone who might be inclined to formulate an original thought. Skinny Pedro’s obsession might therefore derive from some sort of insanity.
Others were convinced the enigma could be explained in a much simpler, more prosaic way: It had its roots in the river silt, from which no one had extracted gold or any kind of precious stones for months, but the sticky texture of which bespoke a desire to reclaim the immense resources stolen from nature. Skinny Pedro must certainly have fallen victim to some kind of sorcery.
Whatever the reason, the fact was the young man felt called to a purpose, which he repeated aloud to whoever would listen: The day would come when he would build and fly his own airplane.
An outrageous ambition, given that he was stuck in an outpost whose end had been decreed a few months earlier by the very men who had created and funded it. The act of extinction, formalized thousands of miles away during the course of a tense meeting, had involved opposing factions in the company responsible for the destiny of Skinny Pedro and his companions.
“We can’t just leave those people out there, can we?” pondered the employee on whom the future of that handful of men depended.
“For the last six months they’ve been a dead loss to us. Let them come back on their own if they can!” retorted the manager, brandishing his report, as if the river’s refusal to produce any more gold was due to the prospectors’ incompetence.
When, many years later, Skinny Pedro had learned the details of this particular meeting, he wasn’t surprised. The forest had taught him that city dwellers could often be regulated by cruel and rather unpredictable codes.
Not to mention unfair. God knew how hard they had all worked to fill the quotas fixed by the company, churning through mud that had become the source of a collective hysteria. The prospectors liked to compare the warm, unctuous caress of the silt on their legs and thighs to the kisses of ten thousand lips, rather than imagine that the river had nothing to offer them—except mud.
It had all been in vain. The gold, modest in quantity even in the early days, had simply disappeared. The geological maps had proved useless. Either that or the wrong people had been bribed. The camp was simply crossed off the map. The breeze would spread the sweetish odor of death through the forest and the animals would take care of the rest.
Except for Skinny Pedro, none of the men doubted the company’s good intentions. Not even those who, inspired by occasional bouts of yellow fever, had sure access to fleeting moments of lucidity. They all believed that in some large city (the exact location of which remained unknown to them), company managers were actually dedicating their best energies to relocating a labor force that, besides being cheap, had never given them the slightest cause for complaint. Throughout the history of gold panning, workers had never been abandoned in remote or forgotten areas of the jungle. It didn’t occur to anyone that it might be expensive to bring back what had cost so little in the first place.
In the beginning, everything went on almost as usual. The jungle quickly swallowed the little landing strip used by the small planes on their weekly visits, but the banana boats continued to resupply the almost sixty men for some time. And even if it had been two months since the last boat had disappeared downriver, with much waving on both sides, there was no reason to worry: Thanks to Skinny Pedro, they wouldn’t starve.
For he had been given the task of coordinating the fishermen in charge of feeding the prospectors. A job he had accepted happily, as from his boyhood he had loved to fish—and furthermore, it was no good questioning the foreman’s commands. A violent type who never separated himself from the camp’s only available gun, the foreman was feared by everyone because of his strength and the nonchalance with which he seemed ready to dispose of other men’s lives.
But Skinny Pedro had accepted the task for another, more important reason. The long hours spent fishing were also good for meditating and reinforced his belief in the destiny marked out for him. He was convinced that the sum of knowledge he had acquired in his boyhood, simple but rich in wisdom, made him a chosen man. A man, above all, in tune with the drama unfolding around him. From long analysis of the intricate diagrams in his manuals—a solitary exercise that provided his reasoning process with an almost alarming clarity—he came to realize that the camp had been abandoned to survive on its own. And since it was unlikely that other banana boats would visit that particular section of the river, which had never been part of their usual routes, he further reasoned that it wouldn’t take long for collective despair and violence to fall on the outpost.
Being entrusted with such secret knowledge conferred a special power on Skinny Pedro.
He felt protected by the same serenity that from time immemorial has illuminated the souls of warriors and martyrs. Thus, instead of injecting doubts in his companions’ certainties, he read and reread his manuals. Under the noonday sun while fishing, or stealing light from the full moon, the point of his pencil traced the imaginary movements of the washers, threads, coil springs, cylinders, bolts, and screws that had long enriched the workings of his mind. Enthusiastically, he took apart and reassembled the only generator that could still be made to work in the camp—in the unlikely event that a special ball bearing, ordered six months back, materialized among the bananas.
Poking and puttering in this oily domain helped keep his fingers in shape. He had no reason to doubt the invisible links uniting machines of all kinds in a brotherhood accessible to men of his caliber. The lesson learned in his childhood concerning the fluid relationship among fish, plants, birds, and animals must certainly have its equivalent in the no less animated world of engines and machines.
Pedro had no surname; his nickname came from his days at the orphanage. Short in stature, he had long frizzy hair, bright eyes, and hard muscles. Part Indigenous, part Black, he had dark skin that defied the sun; when night came, it let him melt discreetly into the shadows. Then his eyes shone like lamps among the trees. Where he came from, he didn’t know; he had simply arrived in a boat, as a very small child, like so many others before him. But he had been raised in Acajatuba, a small village on the banks of the Rio Negro.
Adopted son of the forest, he had grown up playing soccer with the natives and the missionaries of a sect for which he still felt deep affection, thanks to the prevailing tolerance of its members. He had learned to read and write from these men in their white robes, who spent most of their time cataloging leaves, roots, and seeds, the latter planted lovingly in little labeled pots that, twice a month, were placed in the backseat of a pickup truck and destined to fly away, by courtesy of two small planes, and disappear mysteriously into the skies over the Amazon.
They didn’t do a lot of praying, those monks; and for that reason they were esteemed by the locals. They seemed to be particularly interested in the health of the Indigenous people and recorded in great detail the answers that, between chuckles and puffs on their pipes, the less bashful members of the surrounding tribes gave to their patiently formulated questions. Zealously, they transcribed their own observations on the relationship between certain plants and diseases into notebooks, which they then locked up in a small cupboard.
These missionaries revealed another world to Skinny Pedro on the day they allowed him to watch a strange surgery being performed on the mission’s pickup truck. Perhaps this episode was most ostensibly responsible for the obsession that, from that time on, he had harbored for machines. Ostensibly, because from his Indigenous brothers, he had also learned another invaluable lesson as a child: that one’s eyes truly registered the details of a scene only when that image blended with its twin, submerged deep down in the viewer’s memory.
Thus he believed that in some moment of unfathomable origin, an equivalent scene, involving machines and parts of engines, must have happened in his past. And these mirror images, uniting perceptions barely conscious, were to constitute the basis from which his pilot’s dreams would someday take flight.
The young man was barely out of adolescence when he found himself abandoned in the middle of the jungle by the men from the city. It would take him another twenty years to build and pilot his own airplane. Twenty years of hard work and persistence, blessed by occasional moments when chance had generously smiled on him.
I had the honor of being his first passenger—news that froze me in my seat as we flew over jungle as thick and remote as that which he had managed to conquer in his younger years.
“Today I’m flying officially for the first time,” he shouted with pride from his seat, tipping the wings of the tiny plane over the green immensity. “Prior to that, a flight instructor kept me from harm. … But don’t worry, I have since had plenty of practice flying solo.”
I couldn’t find the strength to offer him my congratulations. We flew on in silence for another half hour, until a fork of lightning flashed close by, followed suddenly by a thunderclap exploding almost on top of us. In a few minutes, visibility went quickly down to zero.
“That’s flying in the Amazon for you,” he commented. We were barely two yards apart, separated by a torn curtain, he in the tiny cockpit, I in the only available passenger seat, the others having been removed to make room for the cargo.
At one point, the fear that squeezed my stomach tighter and tighter gave way to stupefaction. A hard jerk of the plane had loosened from a hook in the fuselage what seemed to be a bundle of cotton. At my feet, the pale folds of cloth gradually came apart, revealing two half-open eyes, surrounded by curly hair, which, tossed by the turbulence, looked strangely alive. I was looking at the small cadaver of a little girl, which rolled from one side to the other at the mercy of the storm jostling the aircraft.
That small body swathed like a mummy, our blind flight over the treetops, the prospect of disappearing in the middle of the jungle without a trace—all this converged to focus a singular intensity on the moment. “Who is it?” I managed to yell, not recognizing the hoarse voice coming from my own throat.
“The girl?” he screamed back, after a quick glance behind him, as if the rest of the cargo might hide other surprises. He was scared, too, I realized from the tone of his voice. The clouds around us grew denser.
Still, he started talking about the girl almost compulsively. He told me her left leg had been chewed off below the knee by an alligator, and it had been impossible to staunch the bleeding. He also said that, delirious, the little girl continued to see the alligator working its way up her thigh, its cold eyes fixed on hers. Her last wish was to be buried on solid ground. A luxury for someone who lived on the river, he added by way of explanation. As he was a friend of her parents, he was doing them this favor, making sure the child was buried in a Christian cemetery.
Without transition, he spoke to me of his boyhood spent fishing on the Amazonian mud banks, and how this experience had served him well when he started working for the tourists, from whom be received five dollars per alligator captured alive, diving at night under reflector lights in the dark waters of the Rio Negro. Thus, as the plane bumped and tossed its way through the tempest, he told me of his life, jumping from one tributary of the river, one forest, clearing, or swamp to another, traveling along the meandering course of his past with the same velocity as our little plane hurtling through the clouds.
Listening to his stories actually saved our lives, so intently did I concentrate on his words. That we didn’t crash into the jungle that afternoon must have been due to my sheer faith in his narrative talent. At one point, taking advantage of a brief moment of calm, he threw me a plastic folder with half a dozen faded photos in which he appeared, fifteen years old, true to his nickname, among fat tourists from whose hands dangled small alligators and piranhas. He had worked together with a Paraguayan guide who claimed to have left his country and made his way up the continent jumping from river to river until reaching the biggest of them all.
Then he told me of Jeff, an American from Florida who had taken a month’s vacation in the Amazon. If it hadn’t been for Jeff, he never would have found the determination to carry out his dream—of building and flying his own airplane. The very flying machine that now seemed destined to disintegrate in midair with us and the little girl.
Fishing had brought them together, as both were expert anglers. In his small canoe, Skinny Pedro had taught Jeff to use a net and taken him far beyond Lake Ubim, where no tourist had ever been. They spent entire afternoons fishing. The American, who in the photos looked like an English explorer of the nineteenth century on a visit to Africa, was a man of few words. But exactly three months after he left, the promise he’d made to the young guide had been honored: Through a fellow tourist, to whom he had recommended the hotel built on top of a bunch of trees, he had sent Pedro a model airplane kit.
The arrival of the small glider had probably represented the most important single event in Skinny Pedro’s youth, since it gave a concrete form to his passion. For the first time, he looked at the sky with a feeling akin to possession and intimacy.
Pedro had assembled his little model plane, made entirely of pieces of fine, smooth wood—the lightest and most delicate wood he had ever seen—with the tenderness of a newlywed who, in the silence of the dawn, leans over his sleeping spouse to hear her breathe. He used the glue sparingly, for he knew it would be difficult to obtain more. Assisted by his Paraguayan friend, who also spoke a little English, he read and reread each paragraph of the instructions before carrying out their commands with a religious fervor.
But he had forgotten the monkeys. And when, at daybreak on January 15, 1972 (a date forever engraved in his memory), he had climbed the highest of the three towers built by the hotel, he failed (unlikely as it may seem) to recall the warning every guide repeated to the tourists: An inspired monkey was capable of causing as much havoc as a small elephant. And five monkeys had been present at the silent launching of the fragile glider, which should have stayed in the air for some minutes, borne on the bosom of the wind, before landing sweetly on a treetop, from which it would then be retrieved by Pedro for another flight. Two of the monkeys had applauded the event with hopping and grunts, but the other three had shot like arrows into the trees, chasing after the peculiar bird that had remained indifferent to their antics.
So Skinny Pedro had experienced the pain of seeing his dream simultaneously realized and shattered. Each monkey had kept a piece of the little glider. And no one at the hotel had ever mentioned the incident again, out of respect for the alligator hunter’s feelings.
But Pedro didn’t give up. Quite the opposite. He dived into the black waters with redoubled energy, accumulating ever more generous tips—for he was the tourists’ favorite—and didn’t rest until he obtained from the hotel management the promise that their agent in Florida would send along another model plane with the first willing tourist—equipped this time with a cable and a small engine.
“The problem then was the macaws.” Not really a problem, more of a false alarm. The macaws only wanted to inspect the intruder, as they didn’t seem to feel that their territory was actually threatened. Two of them flew slightly above the small plane and its cable. Pedro had painted the model in bright colors—red, blue, and yellow—and the circular ballet of the trio against the green jungle didn’t feel out of place; rather, the birds seemed to enjoy the homage being paid to them.
After some time (a time suddenly detached from our flight’s duration, encapsulated as we both were in Pedro’s innumerable tales), the clouds around our tiny plane began to dissolve, and the rain stopped beating forcefully on the windshield. In a corner of the cabin, the dead girl finally rested under her curls. Then a clearing and a small landing strip became visible in front of us. A few more minutes and we landed.
When the little plane stopped moving, we remained silent and motionless in our seats, exhausted but full of a precious energy bursting with relief. There was nobody to meet us; the jeep that had been scheduled to pick us up had gotten stuck about ten miles away and would take another two or three hours to arrive. Outside, fine rain continued to fall. Skinny Pedro unfastened his seat belt and turned his seat around to face me.
“Things got ugly when the men found out the flour had spoiled,” he then said. And added, as if it were necessary, “In the camp I was telling you about.” The story that had been circling in his memory for years now seemed ready to alight.
The rain, or the rats, had made holes in all the flour sacks. With the high humidity, most of the stock had rotted in a few days. The foreman dragged the fellow responsible for this disaster by the hair to a corner of the encampment and, deaf to his pleas, put two bullets in his head. The prospectors, grouped on a little promontory, shuddered as they heard the shots. For the first time, they looked at the turn in the river with fear.
Pedro sensed the collective dread. His aloofness came from the certainty that he would escape, and from a feeling akin to hope that he could save his companions. Or some of them at least. But the void between certainty and hope, where the foreman ruled, troubled him. To protect them all from the violence he knew was coming, Pedro had to change things around somehow—or all would be lost.
There were other people and other camps maybe fifty miles away. But where? The skipper of one of the boats had told them something they hadn’t realized, having traveled at night when they first arrived. The skipper said that just around the familiar turn, the river divided into dozens of branches, which forked and joined again and again, forming a maze so complicated that even he, with more than forty years’ experience in the region, had gotten lost more than once, despite his compass and radio.
Truth? Lies? Two prospectors who had once flown over the area confirmed that, seen from above, the rivers looked like a handful of golden worms twisting through the green.
Based on these statements, the men had concluded it was better to obey the foreman’s orders and wait for the next boat. On it, representatives could be sent to the big city to negotiate the group’s destiny. Leaving the camp at that point would only mean endangering everyone’s fate.
Pedro scratched his chin, with his eyes on the other turn of the river, the one a mile and a half upstream, to the right of the camp. They said that if you went that way, you could end up in Peru. Or Ecuador. But how to navigate against the current? And for how many days? He looked at that other turn of the river, then at the generator. And he then looked at the foreman.
Two weeks went by in this fashion, the prospectors locked into a routine that became a sort of umbilical cord linking them to their past. Although they were convinced there was nothing to be found in those waters, they continued panning. They didn’t even bother to spread within the area marked out by the company. Keeping together in groups, they mulled their doubts over in the ooze, their silence pierced only by the screams of birds.
Meanwhile, Pedro fished. He would take the canoe to the middle of the river and throw his net in, pulling it out almost at once with a strong jerk. When he wasn’t fishing, he read.
Until, one afternoon, he stopped in front of the generator and examined it at length. Then, one last time, he began to dismantle it. But this time, his movements were slow and measured, as if he were rediscovering the weight and structure of each of its parts and seeing them from a new and secret angle.
When the men came back at nightfall, they found the components of the generator spread out on a canvas by order of size, gleaming as if they were on exhibit or possibly for sale. The men stared in silence. Fatigue, hunger, and heat kept them from articulating any thoughts.
The foreman came over to the group and asked rudely what was going on. Pedro explained his ideas. He began by pointing to the stars. Ever since he was small, he said, he had known how to find directions by looking at the night sky. For the other prospectors, who came mostly from the northeast, the stars were a mystery, but for him they held no secrets. And since going downstream didn’t seem feasible, the best thing was to go upstream. They would stop during the day, or whenever the waters forked, and proceed at night, with the help of the stars. Who knew what they might find a few miles away.
“Go upstream? Against the current?” exclaimed the foreman while sixty pair of eyes glittered around the two of them like fireflies. “How?”
Pedro pointed to the parts spread out on the canvas. “By making an engine. For the canoe.” In a lower voice, he added, “You can come with me, if you trust me.”
The foreman laughed. He put both hands on his hips and laughed long and loud at the full moon, his head thrown back. His whole body shook, intimidating everyone. It had been months since anyone had laughed in the camp. Suddenly, with the agility of a wild animal, he grabbed Skinny Pedro by the collar of his dirty shirt and whispered in his ear, “If the son of a bitch works, I’ll go with you. If it doesn’t, I’ll kill you.”
It would work, Pedro assured him, and got busy on it that very night.
For over two weeks he struggled, without neglecting his fishing. On the contrary, he spent long hours throwing his nets into the river and pulling them back with hard, quick tugs. Watching him, the men had the impression that he was pulling inspiration for his masterpiece directly out of the water. Every night, they all squatted around the contraption, which, to everyone’s surprise, snorted and purred, sending out puffs of smoke with all the earnestness of an engine.
The fateful day arrived. They all stopped working to watch the little canoe rocking under the foreman’s weight. Skinny Pedro instructed him to sit on the middle bench, facing the turn in the river, with his back to him, but steadying between his legs the gallon cans of gasoline with which they would refuel the tank. Four men, wading up to their waists in the river, held the prow fast while another four helped Skinny Pedro fasten the engine to the stern with a single solid hook. It was heavy, that machine of his! At a command from Pedro, the canoe was launched with a slow push toward the middle of the stream.
Standing, his hand resting on the silent engine, the first machine for which he felt truly responsible, Skinny Pedro wore a fishnet over one shoulder. It fanned outward over the bottom of the canoe, giving him the singular appearance of a gladiator. The foreman sat in the middle of the canoe, both hands on the bench. He studied the muddy waters in front of them as he waited for the morning silence to be filled by the roar of the engine.
Quickly, the miracle occurred—and the engine amply fulfilled the collective dream of the men gathered on the bank. With a lightning-speed motion, Pedro tossed a cord around the foreman’s neck. With another, he threw the fishnet over him. The engine, freed from its hook by a sudden hard, precise kick, quickly sank into the river, pulling the cord tight and dragging the foreman underwater. The canoe turned over; Pedro disappeared. For a few seconds the foreman struggled, strangled under the fishnet, making a few hoarse, stilled gurgling noises from below the surface, but soon he disappeared, too. And Skinny Pedro resurfaced from under the upside-down canoe.
Absolute silence descended on the scene. Men and birds watched Skinny Pedro swimming after the oars, as if his slow arm strokes could help them decipher the mystery they had all just witnessed. His movements through the mild current were tranquil, as if he were the author and master, not only of the sequence of events but of the very landscape around them.
Once he recovered both oars, he righted the canoe and climbed into it again. Standing up, he shook his frizzy hair back into the wind and turned to look at the prospectors. One of them, fist raised to the sky, let out a long yell, the hoarse shout of a gold panner. Then they all shouted, jumping up and down in the mud, throwing their shovels into the river. Many hugged and kissed one another.
Skinny Pedro had conquered for each man in the camp the sacred right to choose how to confront his own death. Staying or leaving. Struggling through the jungle on foot or building rafts. And since he had been unable to share the secret with any of them before, he now savored these screams with the joy of one who bends fate to his own will.
When the rain stopped, I felt the need to take a few steps on solid ground. The same solid ground Pedro had mentioned when talking of the dead little girl. To celebrate this luxury of sorts, I accepted the straw cigarette he offered me. Smoking in the dripping jungle, I learned, by way of an epilogue, how half the prospectors had followed him down the river in rafts tied by ropes—and how they had been saved, after wandering through the green labyrinth for weeks on end. As for the other half, nobody ever knew what became of them.
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Excerpt from As If by Magic by Edgard Telles Ribeiro. “Turn of the River,” translated from the Portuguese by Margaret A. Neves. Translation copyright © 2026 by Margaret A. Neves. Published by Bellevue Literary Press: www.blpress.org. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
