City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende Read Free Book Online Page A

foreigners who though only a few yards from the river had died without ever finding it. At dawn, they would see rosy dolphins leaping through the water and hundreds of birds flocking. They also saw the large aquatic mammals called manatees; the females of that species gave rise to the legend of the sirens. At night, they would see red dots in the dense growth along the banks, the eyes of caimans peering through the dark. One
caboclo
taught Alex to calculate the size of the reptile by how far apart its eyes were. When it was just a small one, the
caboclo
would dazzle it with a strong light, then jump in the water and trap it, holding the tail in one hand and clamping its jaws shut with the other. If the eyes were wide set, he would avoid it like the plague.
    Time went by slowly, hours dragging into eternity; even so, Alex was never bored. He would sit at the prow of the boat and observe nature, and read, and play his grandfather's flute. The jungle seemed to come alive and respond to the sound of the instrument; even the noisy crew and the passengers on the boat would fall silent and listen. Those were the only times that Kate paid any attention to Alex. The writer was a woman of few words; she spent her day reading or writing in her notebooks, and in general ignored Alex or treated him like any other member of the expedition. It was pointless to go to her and present a problem directly related to survival, such as food, health, or safety. She would look him up and down with obvious scorn, and answer that there are two kinds of problems: those that solve themselves and those that have no solution… so please not to bother her with foolishness. It was good that his hand had healed rapidly, because otherwise she would be capable of solving the matter by suggesting he cut it off. (Kate was a woman of extreme measures.) She had loaned him maps and books about the Amazon so he could look things up for himself. If Alex commented on what he had read about the Indians, or outlined his theories about the Beast, she would reply, without taking her eyes from the page before her, "Never lose an opportunity to keep your mouth shut, Alexander."
    Everything about this trip was so different from the world Alex had grown up in that he felt like a visitor from another galaxy. Now he had to do without comforts he had always taken for granted, like a bed, a bathroom, running water, and electricity. He used his grandmother's camera to take snapshots, in order to have proof to show back in California. His friends would never believe that he had held a three-foot-long alligator!
    His most serious problem was food. He had always been a picky eater, and now they were serving him things he couldn't even name. All he could identify on the boat were canned beans, dried beef, and coffee, none of which he had a taste for. One day the crew shot a couple of monkeys, and that night when the boat was tied up along the riverbank they were roasted. They looked like a couple of burned infants, and Alex felt queasy just seeing them. The next morning they caught a
pirarucú
, an enormous fish that everyone but Alex, who didn't even taste it, thought was delicious. He had decided when he was three years old that he didn't like fish. His mother, weary of struggling to make him eat it, had given up, and from then on served him only food he liked. Which wasn't much. That short list kept him hungry the whole trip; all he had were bananas, a can of condensed milk, and several packages of crackers. It didn't seem to matter to his grandmother that he was hungry. Or to anyone else. No one paid any attention to him.
    Several times a day a brief but torrential rain fell and the humidity was horrendous. Alex had to get used to the fact that his clothing never really got dry and that after the sun went down, they were attacked by clouds of mosquitoes. The foreigners' defense was to douse themselves in insect repellent—especially Ludovic Leblanc, who never lost an opportunity