Jungle Roses

The jungle has eyes. It watches the intruder; it does not let him out of its sight for one second, follows his every step. It has thousands of eyes, which can see but can't be seen, because they are hidden in the green darkness. The intruder can't see further than a few feet into the jungle, but the jungle sees everything. Its gaze is so intense it makes you feel exposed, it makes you want to hide.

You can't hide from the jungle. It follows you from the second you enter it. Once the intruder enters the jungle, he cannot flee. All the intruder knows, sees, feels, tastes, hears, is green. Green above and underneath, to the front and to the back. Even when you close your eyes, the green is still all you can see.

The intruder is a young woman, she has not yet celebrated her 20th birthday – and someone who is lost in the jungle will not celebrate any more birthdays. Her long dark hair is tangled, leaves cling on to it, as if they tried to form a veil for her, to decorate her like a young bride. Her high, clear forehead glistens with sweat, and mud is smeared over the bronze-colored skin of her face, her beautifully formed shoulders, and her long slender legs. Her fine hands, that do not look like they belong in this harsh green world, are shivering and blood runs down them from the fight with the jungle.

She has a knife, barely big enough to count as a real machete, and she tries to clear a path with it. She cuts off parts of the lower trees, of wild, twisted, green vegetation. She tears small scrapes into the jungle that close again within seconds. The jungle barely feels these wounds, yet it never forgives those who hurt it even the smallest bit.

It whispers with a million voices, a whisper so loud it fills your head and covers up any thought. You are mine. You are mine forever. I am your cradle and your grave. I will never let you go. And it swallows her into its green womb, closes the path behind her, so those who follow her won't find her. Nor will she ever find the way back to those she is now fleeing from, to the fate she fears – a fate that will soon seem so much better than what happens to those, who get lost in the jungle.

***

Everyone agreed that Rosa Luz was surely the most beautiful woman of the small jungle settlement of Iquitos, probably also of the whole region of Lareto, and some even believed she must be the most beautiful one of the whole viceroyalty of Perú. That she had been born in this backwater, a small mission in the middle of the jungle, several weeks of hard journey on mules and boats from the capital, seemed an irony of fate. A woman like her surely was not made for a place like this, which was founded decades earlier by the Jesuits, with only a few hundred inhabitants who kept defending the small town against the surrounding jungle tribes. But Rosa Luz loved the jungle.

She was beautiful indeed. Her soft, brown skin was just fair enough to be acceptable to the upper classes of her times, yet she had inherited her mestizo mother's exotic beauty. Her hair was slightly wavy and not quite black, and between long eyelashes sparkled lights in her dark eyes, like the moon's reflection on a deep mountain lake at night. She was taller than most women in the region, and her father's ancestry had equipped her with long legs, with a slim, yet feminine.

Her mother had died at her birth. Rosa Luz had been raised by her grandmother and had grown up listening to stories of the jungle. The grandmother had lived there as a young girl, before the white people had made their way here from the coast and the mountains. Her tribe had lost a big battle against them. They had taken some children away from the jungle to the coast, to be raised in monasteries and educated in the Spanish language and in Christian faith, which they then should carry back to their families. Thus, the grandmother had returned to the jungle mission several years later, dressed like a white woman and pregnant. She had been glad to be finally at home again, but her people wouldn't accept her. She was not one of them anymore. Thus, she continued to live in the mission, which by now was run by Franciscan monks. And there, Rosa Luz's mother had been born – a girl of mixed race that did not belong in either world.

Rosa Luz's father, on the other hand, had been born at the coast. He was a true Criollo with Spanish parents, raised in the nobler circles of Lima, the viceroyalty's capital. As a young man, he had first moved into the mountains and had become a witness of the uprising of the Indios there under a man called Tupac Amarú II, who claimed to be the Inca and rightful ruler of the country. The uprising had been supressed with a brutality the young man could never forget – and while he was glad that those wild Indios had been put in their place, he now dreamt of a post in Spain where he hoped such cruelties would never happen. However, he was just starting a career in the viceroyalty's administration, and of course, someone born in the colonies could not attain a post out of the colony they had been born into.

So, instead, he was sent into the jungle, into the new settlement there to help the monks establish the little town against the harsh surroundings and the still fighting Indios. He met Rosa Luz's mother on the first day after his arrival, and soon fell in love with her. They married before his faraway parents could interfere in the unsuitable match their son was getting into. She gave him first a son, and two years later a daughter, before she died. After the fevers of the jungle had taken her, her mother – Rosa Luz's grandmother – raised the children.

When the grandmother died just as Rosa Luz entered puberty, her father sent his children to be educated at the coast. He himself, though, did not ever again want to leave the lands which for him forever remained those of the only woman he had loved. His son Sebastián soon enough found his place in the circles of the young criollos in the capital and learnt the trade of a businessman. He became involved in the trade with bird droppings that were called guano and that he claimed to be more important than gold, something his sister never quite understood. He told her all about it whenever she met him on Sundays after church – she could then for a few hours leave the convent in which she learnt all a young woman of her time needed to know.

Finally, Rosa Luz returned to her beloved jungle town – she had finished her education in cooking and sewing, music and art. Now, her father felt, that the atmosphere at the coast was not suitable for a young woman anymore. Something was in the air, and Sebastián, who refused to move back to his father's faraway home spoke ever more that the Spanish had no right to interfere in his business with the precious bird droppings. There were rumours of fights for independence in the faraway viceroyalty of Río de la Plata, and the young criollos listened to them with admiration. Maybe, one day, someone with enough courage would organize them for a similar movement?

It was better for his daughter to be far away from all this. She had learned all a young woman needed to know, and should now marry – preferably an influential official, hopefully Spanish-born, to bring back to the family a status that the father still wished for, even though some relatives and especially his son argued against it.

There were enough men interested in the quiet, dark eyed beauty. Her brother's friends and other men who had seen her in Lima spoke highly of her, and more than one man asked for her hand. Her father finally decided upon an official of the Crown, an elderly man who was in the colonies only for a few months more and who would then take her to Spain – that was more than a young woman of her origins could hope for. And it would take her to the country her father had once longed for, but which he had been denied to enter.

But Rosa Luz was of a different opinion. She did not want to leave her home. The stories her grandmother had told her had created a love for those mysterious jungles in her – for the lush green that Rosa Luz had never entered, but in whose presence she had grown up. The jungles that were always close, and whose air filled her lungs with every breath she took – the green that had painted the world of her childhood.

To the last moment she had hoped that her father might change his mind. She wished that he would listen to her begging and not get her married her to this man – who, besides wanting to take her to Spain, was also twice her age and had a reputation of being violent. But all her hopes had been in vain. Finally, the night before she was to travel to Lima with her future husband, she decided to flee.

Her grandmother's voice still sounded in her ears after so many years "You are a child of the jungle. You are not meant to sleep in beds and eat at tables. The jungle is in your blood."

Rosa Luz believed her. She did not know the jungle except from afar, but she had always felt a call from it. Everyone said how dangerous the jungle was, no one dared to enter it alone – but Rosa Luz was sure this would be different for her.

***

She got up late at night and dressed in what she thought was most suitable to go out into the wilderness. It was a knee-length, wide dress. It had to be a dress; even going into the jungle it would surely not be fit for her to wear men's clothes. If she found her grandmother's people, then, so she hoped, they would teach her what was fit for women to wear in the jungle tribes. She was as quiet as she could be while dressing in the darkness. The house was silent, only a faint snoring could be heard from the room in which her future husband slept. Rosa Luz had hidden a small bag with a bottle of water and some bread in her wardrobe, along with a machete. She got those, and then approached the window to climb out into the garden.

The dogs that guarded the house came towards her as she climbed out. They did not bark, as they knew her since they had been little puppies. Rosa Luz kneeled down to pet their heads. One dog made a little whining sound and pushed forward to be closer to her. Rosa Luz took its head into both her hands and looked into the animal's brown eyes.

"Don't cry. I will be fine. It's just the jungle. I will be closer to you than if I don't flee. No one will find me."

The dog calmed down, but kept looking at her with sad eyes, as if doubting what she was planning to do was a good idea. Rosa Luz knew that when left free, her father's dogs never dared to venture deep into the jungle. They preferred to return to their human masters, who put them behind fences and offered them food and safety.

She stood up and looked around. The house of her childhood was a colonial building made of wood and adobe, surrounded by tall palm trees. A bit further off she saw the huts of the native inhabitants of the village, they were mainly of the Iquitos tribe, after which the settlement had been named. She saw the faraway lights of some fires in front of them, heard the laughter of a few drunk men. Sounds of the evenings of her childhood – her grandmother had not wanted to sleep in the house, it made her feel locked in, and she had taken the girl to her hut, where there was a hammock for each of them. Rosa Luz would sneak away as soon as she heard the even snores of her grandmother and hide in the shadows between the huts, to watch the men sitting around the fire keeping night watch and passing around a dirty metal cup, filled with a liquid that caused them to sing and tell jokes about things Rosa Luz did not understand, but whose crude words made her blush none the less.

The fires were far away, but Rosa Luz could still taste the smoke in the air. The wood was never quite dry, especially in the rainy season. It used to almost cause her to sneeze; even now she felt it tickling her nose, while the coarse laughter filled her ears after so many years.

She was tempted to sneak back there again, to sit on the muddy ground behind a hut and see whether they were still the same men telling the same jokes.

She was already taking a few steps in that direction when the cry of a night bird rose into the air. It came from the jungle that started a few hundred metres to the left of the fence, looking like a dark wall in the night. It called her, warned her not to go to the huts. If the men saw her and took her back to her father, her plan would be spoilt. The morning was close,so she would not be able to escape again, and they would make sure to guard her well on the way to Lima. She would be married before the end of the month.

She stepped towards the small gate that let her out of the garden. She felt the chill of a wind that announced the early hours of the morning. Far towards the horizon, beyond the deep, forested valley, the hills painted black shadows against a slightly red stripe that was appearing in the sky. She had to hurry.

Under her bare feet, Rosa Luz felt wet grass and the soft, muddy ground. Behind her, she could hear again the whining of the dogs, who stayed behind the safety of the fence and did not dare to follow her. Around her, more and more trees appeared as she walked, at first small, solitary, cut down by the people of the village – the human fight against the jungle. Then, in front of her, undergrowth started to fill out the spaces between tall trees, as if trying to keep her out. Her eyes searched along this green wall, and she found a little space, like a door that allowed her to slip inside, into darkness that surrounded her soon after she stepped into it. It was a darkness that made her forget which direction would lead home with every step she took. Darkness, that only became greener as the sun came up, but remained dark, remained shadowed, and did not let through a single ray of the sun or the blue sky. A darkness, that pulled her into itself deeper and deeper, that swallowed her, like a green, dark womb...

***

Rosa Luz walked through the jungle for days. Once the water and bread she had brought along were gone, she drank the water of the afternoon rains that got caught on leafs and ran along the tree trunks, and that of little rivers she crossed at times. She ate the fruits she could recognize, thanks to her grandmother's teachings.

She soon realized that people's fear of the jungle had been right – she was lost and scared. She expected snakes, poisonous insects and worse to attack her at any time. The jungle did not accept her as part of it. It recognized her as a stranger. It ripped the red silk of her dress off her. It revenged the tiny wounds she gave it with her knife by slapping branches into her face, by cutting her legs, by setting hungry leeches onto her ankles when she had to cross swamps. Her grandmother's stories had made her expect that she would instinctively know how to live in the jungle and where to turn to find her grandmother's people. But the forest rejected her. She remained a stranger. She was forced to fight the jungle, and the jungle was fighting her.

Yet, she was alive. The jungle hit her and fought her, but it didn't kill her.

At night, she climbed up the lower branches of a tree, to be safe from what was on the ground while she slept. Once she woke up facing a huge snake, but the snake ignored her. From then on, she had a constant fear of being crushed to death by such an animal in her sleep, but for some strange reason she woke up alive every morning.

A few times she believed she heard human voices mixed with the constant noise of the jungle. She called out words in her grandmother's language. Once she even saw someone – she could not recognize whether it was a man or a woman – but the person fled when she called out. Maybe they were not of her grandmother's people and spoke a different language she thought. She cried at the realization that not even the people of the jungle would accept her.

That day, she resigned herself to death. She walked on, because there was nothing else to do. She ate and drank, because the instincts of hunger and thirst were too strong and she was too tired to resist them. But she stopped fighting.

The jungle, however, still did not kill her. It did not allow her the relief of the death she wishedfor. Instead, it became more gentle, giving her food just when she needed it, and leading her by opening the thickets in one direction or other. The undergrowth and biting insects stopped torturing the girl's soft skin. Instead, huge leafs and ferns seemed to caress her as she walked by. The jungle was like a big cat that now tenderly rubbed its head against her, when just before it had scratched her.

'The jungle is playing with me,' Rosa Luz realized. She didn't trust it; she knew that at any moment it could show her its claws again, for the last and final strike. But she was too tired to feel the terror that had gripped her heart on the first day – the day she had realized why they called it the green hell. All she could do now was to walk on and on. When she stopped and sat down, all the tones of green and brown in front of her eyes became a blurred mess that made her head ache, the sounds of birds and insects echoed throughout her body. Only when walking could she tell them apart. Only when she kept moving could she avoid looking up along the never-ending tree trunks, to see just green and more green, going up forever, proving that there was no sky and surely no heaven up there, that the green was never-ending, that it was all there was in the world.

At some point it occured to Rosa Luz that she must have a fever. The afternoon rain's drops seemed to sizzle when they hit her hot, glowing skin.

She reached a part of the jungle where the trees were thicker and taller than ever. It seemed like no human foot had ever touched the ground, and even the birds and insects were unusually quiet here. It seemed as if the thick vegetation had swallowed all of their sounds.

It was getting dark, so Rosa Luz grabbed a lower branch of a huge and old tree. Its bark was green with moss and it seemed to be the most majestic tree she had seen so far. She pulled herself up and rolled into an embryonic position on some mould that had formed near where the branch met the trunk. The smooth coolness of the tree seemed to calm the heat of fever that raged under her skin, and slowly Rosa Luz drifted off into sleep.

***

Something thick and long slid over the girl's back. It was almost as thick as her waist, and seemed to be crawling over her, starting at her feet, over the legs, the small of her back, her back, approaching one of her shoulders now. It was of a cool and slightly rough, yet somehow smooth surface. With a strong movement it crawled around her shoulder, covering her, almost hugging her.

Rosa Luz awoke slowly at first, feeling a gentle touch, something caressing her all over her body. But then, when consciousness slowly crept into her mind, she was fully awake with a sudden, strong beat of her heart. Her eyes still closed, she could feel that whatever it was that was trapping her was almost as thick as her own waist, and she had no idea how long it was. It started to slip underneath her now, making it absolutely impossible to get away.

'A snake!' she thought, and forced herself to remain silent. Maybe it would go away then. If she moved, its strong muscles would surely crush her. Yet, whatever it was already above and underneath her, had slipped all around her body. And then she felt that she was being lifted up into the air, away from the branch she had been sleeping on. Only now, Rosa Luz opened her eyes.

The jungle was dark in the daytime, and it was darker at night. But this part of the jungle was the darkest – it was difficult to see anything at all. Yet the one thing that Rosa Luz realized was that whatever moved so snake-like around her body, holding to her strongly but with apparent care not to crush her, lifting her far up into the air was not a snake.