The Brazilian air force had banished me from the rainforest, but not from nature, which tends to leak into the city from the wilderness outside. Ornithology is rewarding in Manaus. The black vulture, the urubú, tends to gather in big, social gyres over the church steeples and other salient points of the city, sometimes a hundred birds or more. Flocks of parrots pass overhead and herons work the riverfront. My binoculars were more in play in these streets than they had been in the trees.

Belle Epoque: Teatro Amazonas, the Manuas opera house, was prominently featured in Werner Herzog's 1982 film Fitzcarraldo. Araquem Alcantara

Ichthyology, too, is easy. There are more species of fish in these waters than in all the rivers of North America combined, and a good portion find their way to the riverfront Municipal Market. The tables of the fish market are piled with the big species, pirarucú, tucunaré, tambaqui, and jaraquí, along with dozens of smaller species whose names I never sorted out.

In the banana market the same dizzying profusion prevails: great drifts of eating bananas of many varieties, assorted cooking bananas, and big plantains stacked like artillery shells. The market is so ripe with good tropical smells that the olfactory sense overwhelms the aesthetic. It was not until an off-day visit, with the market closed and its tables hosed off, that I was able to notice the architecture: black wrought-iron latticework in the signature style of Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, architect of the Eiffel Tower. Commissioned by Brazilian rubber barons to design the market, Eiffel laid it out on the plan of Les Halles in Paris. The market is Manaus in microcosm: Old Euro-Brazilian elegance meets tropical funk.

I pursued my investigation of Rio Negro fish in restaurants, where I ate all the large species mentioned above, and anaconda and caiman besides. Now and again, to clean my palate for renewed appreciation of fish and reptiles, I visited one of the city’s fine churrascarias, or meat grills. Brazilian beef is as good as Argentinian; even better, many think. The waiter keeps coming with spears of beef and lamb and sausage until you must wave him off.

My favorite fish was tambaqui. This species grows to 70 pounds and has the horselike molars unique to a few groups of South American seed-eating fish. Its staple food is the exploding fruit of the various rubber tree species. The fibrous capsules of the fruit constrict in the midday heat and detonate, throwing the seeds as far as a hundred feet across the flooded forest, and the tambaqui swims toward the plop. It is a fish built, like Manaus itself, on rubber. It tastes of Rio Negritude.

Cal Discoveries south of the border:

Aug 10 – 19, 2008:
Machu Picchu Explorer

Nov 5 – 18, 2008:
Patagonia Spectacular

Dec 6 – 13, 2008:
The Panama Canal and the Wonders of Costa Rica

My exile to the city, I came to understand, was lucky. Most tropical scientists and eco-tourists, passing through on their way to the rainforest, fail to see Manaus as destination. I, however, had seen the light. Obrigado Brazilian Air Force and thank you Mrs. Thatcher.

If any one structure summarizes the city that I came to love, it is Teatro Amazonas, the Theater of the Amazon, Manaus’s Belle Époque opera house, the most celebrated of the 19th-century palaces that rubber built. A portico of arches and slender columns fronts a grand, pale-pink building topped by a vaguely Moresque dome covered in blue-green and gold tiles imported from Alsace-Lorraine. Inside the foyer are golden drapes, vases of Sèvres porcelain, pillars of cream- and coral-tinted marble, and seats carved of jacaranda.

Teatro Amazonas blooms and fades with the fortunes of the city. Today it is in blossom, after its fourth restoration, and it draws an improbable migration of fine musicians from Eastern Europe. The theater, as an artifact of the rubber boom, was built on greed, treachery, and the enslavement of Indians. “To visit the famous opera house in Manaus,” wrote one visitor, “is to be reminded of the bizarre and grandiose opulence which, like some Amazonian orchid, grew out of rottenness.”

This is not a motto the town fathers are likely to adopt, but it captures Manaus, this huge, improbable saprophyte of a city flowering on the banks of the Black River at the center of the biggest rainforest on earth.

Kenneth Brower ‘67 is a Berkeley writer specializing in nature and the environment. He is the author of many books and writes for The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and other magazines. His most recent piece for California, “When ants can fly,” appeared in the September/October 2007 issue.

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