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.
