Free Fordlandia by Greg Grandin Page B

and Tolksdorf, just below where the Tapajós breaks off into a number of lesser tributaries. The trip had been tedious, often taking hours to go just a quarter mile, with Rogge’s crew straining muscles to pole the thatch-roofed boat through currents, navigating around rocks, trees, and shallows. At a number of places, small cataracts forced the party to disembark and walk, and bearers hoisted the vessel above the cascade with a makeshift pulley. The more the boat slowed and the narrower the river became, the thicker the swarms of bugs. “From the rising to the setting of the sun,” another voyager along these waters had written, “clouds of stinging insects blind the traveler, and render him frantic by the torments they cause.” Rogge, too, began to complain of what seemed like an inexhaustible variety of mosquitoes, flies, gnats, and midges, most so small that netting provided little protection. Exhausted and sick from two weeks of quinine and his skin inflamed by bug bites, the lumberjack welcomed the hospitality of Barra’s principal citizen, José Sotero Barreto, a well-off rubber trader whom Theodore Roosevelt met on his journey over a decade earlier and described as a “gentleman of high standing.” Barreto gave Rogge room and board and did everything he could to make the Ford agent comfortable. 9

    As he recuperated, Rogge enjoyed the pleasures of the manor, built high off the ground, with a broad veranda and glass windows. It was, he thought, the “best looking place” he had seen since leaving Fordlandia. Revived by a steady flow of tea, milk, and “plenty of chicken soup,” he attended the nightly dances Barreto held in his parlor. During its golden years, the regional rubber aristocracy had been famous for its love of all things European, particularly Italian marble and Italian opera. But the bust dulled the old continent’s appeal, and as the rubber lords looked north to America’s booming car industry for salvation they also began to appreciate America’s equally booming popular culture. The British explorer Charles Luxmoore, traveling up the Tapajós in early 1928 in search of the lost Colonel Percy Fawcett, reported arriving at the small village of Villa Nova to find people doing the Charleston. * And on offer every night on Barreto’s Victrola were, among other American standards, “My Ohio Home” and “Ramona,” both recorded just the year before. To the recovering Rogge, the 78s “sounded rather good hundreds of miles from home.” 10
    At the end of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo —that other tale of upriver obsession—the title character, played by Klaus Kinski, stands on the deck of his decrepit riverboat as the turntable plays tenor Enrico Caruso singing “O Paradiso.” The scene is meant to invoke civilization’s fragile beauty in the face of what the Brazilian writer José Maria Ferreira de Castro described as the Amazon’s “overpowering sensation of the absolute.” But it’s also meant to convey a deep resonance, a harmony, between that enormity and the opera’s emotional baroque. Despite the foreign provenance of the aria, the image is inescapably embedded in the Amazon.

    Here, though, the music that Rogge listened to was purely nostalgic, not so much grounding him in the jungle as transporting him back home, or more precisely back to an America that was fast disappearing. In contrast to the sexualized, insinuating wooing of Rudy Vallee that reached Mulrooney and his wife in Fordlandia, the lyrics that helped restore Rogge’s spirits conveyed a restless discomfort with the artificiality of modern times. “I want to wake up in the mornin’ and hear the birdies say good morning, the way they always say good mornin’ in my Ohio home. . . . I want to wander in the moonlight and meet my sweetie in the moonlight.” Such wanderlust waltzes or ballads, often set in the American West (and just as often penned by European immigrants, as was the case of Gus Kahn’s “My