My fascist moment on the ship of failures

There are no roads from the Peruvian river port of Iquitos, but the rich take aeroplanes. Those who cannot pay to fly may pay the premium for the 40ft motorised express canoes that take only a day to roar to and from the upriver port of Yurimaguas with its bus station. But losers in the global race cannot afford speed. For them there are only the big, slow, hot, lumbering cargo boats: nearly four days’ journey from Iquitos to Yurimaguas.

So the moment a passenger walks up the gangplank and strings their hammock between the iron rafters of the open–sided deck, we can guess he or she is not one of life’s winners. Anyone who was wouldn’t travel this way.

No less than among the rich there is social stratification among the poor, and the river fast shakes people down. About 24 hours is enough for the passengers on an Amazon cargo boat to settle into a mutual recognition of their relative levels of failure. So it did not take long for everyone on board — all (apart from us) mixed-race Peruvians — to reach an unspoken understanding about who the outcasts were.

I didn’t immediately recognise they were a family. I had noticed first a very black youth among the brown passengers. Black in the African sense, and with entirely African features, he was a fine-looking boy of about 15 and seemed alone and ignored. In the Spanish Andean countries, black people do meet prejudice.

Next, and soon enough, we noticed the crazy guy. He was infuriating. Of medium build and middle age, he stood out first because of his garish tracksuit, secondly because he carried with him at almost all times a portable personal sound-system with loudspeakers and flashing lights, and thirdly because whenever this was not blaring out awful music, you could hear him coming because he never picked up his feet, but just slid his flip-flops noisily along the iron deck.