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Manaus, capital of the short-lived rubber<br />
boom that ended one hundred<br />
years ago, lies 1000 miles up the<br />
Amazon, but is actually on the banks of<br />
the <strong>Rio</strong> Negro just above its confluence<br />
with the brown waters of the <strong>Rio</strong><br />
Solimões to form the Amazon River<br />
proper. The meeting of the waters is<br />
not a straight line, but a swirl of the two<br />
colors, black and milk coffee brown,<br />
where the pink dolphins like to play.<br />
I first went there 40 years ago, hoping<br />
to tour the Teatro Amazonas, its magnificent<br />
opera house with gilded dome<br />
ringed by a multi-coloured band, built<br />
to classic French and Italian design<br />
from imported materials by imported<br />
craftsmen, sparing no expense. It is<br />
set in a black-and-white rolling motion<br />
square reminiscent of <strong>Rio</strong>. I was sorely<br />
disappointed to see that it had been<br />
allowed to fall into bat-infested decay.<br />
But when we visited last month we<br />
confirmed that, as we had been told, it<br />
From the Editor...<br />
CHANGE COMES TO MANAUS<br />
JACK WOODALL<br />
has been completely restored, with red<br />
velvet seats on the individual chairs<br />
instead of well-ventilated wicker ones<br />
and air conditioning in place of ice<br />
blocks beneath them. In a side gallery,<br />
a glass case holds the pair of delicate<br />
pink satin ballet slippers worn by<br />
British prima ballerina assoluta Margot<br />
Fonteyn for her performance there on<br />
her last Brazilian tour in 1975 -- she<br />
also danced in <strong>Rio</strong> and Curitiba at that<br />
time. A curious detail; Margot's maternal<br />
grandfather was Brazilian, and she<br />
first took his name, Fontes, as her<br />
stage name, but when the family<br />
objected, changed it to Fonteyn.<br />
Opera festivals are held every year.<br />
Even today, local law prohibits any<br />
building in the city centre rising above<br />
the gilded dome of the Teatro; the<br />
modern skyscraper hotels are way out<br />
of town.<br />
In recent decades Manaus has been<br />
resuscitated as a tourist and sport fish-<br />
ing center, with an international airport<br />
and a duty-free industrial zone where<br />
imported electronic parts are assembled<br />
into TVs, computers, cell phones<br />
and other consumer goods. The population<br />
has grown to over two million, if<br />
you include the suburbs, and the glow<br />
of the city’s lights at night can be seen<br />
for miles upriver.<br />
The British brought many benefits to<br />
Manaus during the years of the rubber<br />
boom and after. Among them were<br />
the wrought iron balustrades of the<br />
Teatro Amazonas, made in England to<br />
French design. There is a decorative<br />
steel suspension bridge made in<br />
England, in the style of the Albert<br />
Bridge in London but much smaller,<br />
now called the Ponte Benjamin<br />
Constant, and the first trams in the<br />
city, steam-operated, were British<br />
built. But all these were rather offset,<br />
from the Brazilian point of view, by<br />
the British explorer who allegedly<br />
smuggled rubber tree seeds out of<br />
Brazil to start plantations in Ceylon<br />
(now Sri Lanka -- imperial Brits could<br />
never get local names right!) and<br />
Malaya, ending the rubber boom and<br />
the unique glory of turn-of-the-century<br />
Manaus.<br />
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