Goldsmiths - University of London

At least, that was what the Pantanal had been when I arrived. It was September, the end of the dry season and the marshes and rivers were only a few inches deep, it had not rained for two months. Black caiman and capybara sat placidly side-by-side on the banks, panting in the heat. With the water that low it had been easy to catch piranha the first time I came to the bridge. The yellow-faced fish had bunched together about the bait and jumped greedily onto the hook. The rest of the tourists were out horseback riding. I told them I had an injury that meant I couldn't go and Luz had offered to take me fishing instead. For some reason I think she took a liking to me. I worried that I looked comical to her, with my pale skin and damp blue eyes, nearly always watering from squinting at the sun or a stuck piece of dust or dirt. I should probably wear sunglasses, but I don't want people to think I'm trying to look flash.

I had not known what to do as my first caught fish bounced about on the wooden planks and tried to flap its way to the edge. Luz grabbed the piranha with one hand and crunched the blade of a short knife into the top of its skull with the other. She laughed at my squeamishness and explained by gesture and a few words of English that this was the only way to open its jaws. With her help I learned how to deal with the fish. I came often to the bridge with her. We would sit with our backs to each other for hours in near silence, occasionally asking to be passed the bait or showing off the size of a catch. She told me the names of the different fish we caught, which to keep and which to throw back. At the end of the day we would walk back to camp together, with our day's work in a sack ready for the barbecue.

As September progressed, and the rains set in, the tourists stopped coming. I had money to pay my way and the guides didn't seem to mind that I stayed on. Luz would take me on long walks and point out the land's hidden things. She would stop at a tree and tell me there were four iguanas in its branches. I could only ever spot one or two. Luz would give me little facts about the animals. She found me a pair of brilliant blue, screaming Macaws and told me they would mate for life and could live up to fifty years. She could see I was hopelessly under-informed. After a few weeks the rains had established themselves fully, and by December the whole place was bright and living green and I could understand why the roads were built on raised banks.

But Luz was not there with me as I sat on the bridge without a catch. With the day's first drops of rain the flies around the paper bag disappeared. The sky had been darkening for a while and I should have left sooner to avoid getting soaked. I threw the meat in the water and started back to the camp. Perhaps the piranhas understood me too well by now, knew that if they waited for the rain there was a free meal for all of them. I headed off down the dirt road. Drops landed thick on my head and shoulders and the track turned to paste. There was no point in running, it was twenty minutes back to the camp and it's impossible to move quickly in wet flip-flops. With every step I flicked gritty, damp sand up the backs of my legs, and my feet slipped towards the front, rubbing the strap between my toes.

Waxy-leaved trees crowded over the road as I walked, and the fertile sounds of animal life surrounded me. The creatures were less visible now, but their various calls rebounded and vibrated about the air. I trudged into camp and saw the guides sitting on the wooden benches in the open-sided hut where we had our meals, smoking acrid-smelling cigarettes. They laughed when the saw how wet I was and called me over. Leandro told me that they would have to abandon the camp soon, it would be under water in a few days. They were returning to their families in the Campo Grande, the nearest town.

I had come to Brazil to disappear. For some reason there had been a map of the world on the wall of my room in the private hospital. I think they were trying to choose neutral images, but it seemed cruel to me. I stared at the vastness of the country and became convinced that no one would ever find me there. Brazil was pink on my map. I had wanted it to be deep, dark green like air trapped in the jungle undergrowth, hemmed in by fallen trunks and humidity-slick palm fronds. Unfortunately that colour had already been taken by neighbouring Paraguay and Guyana. I tried out a pink Amazon in my head, pink river, pink rainforest, pink jaguars ... boredom, fear and daydreaming. I will be as abrupt as I like, they had taken something from me. With anaesthesia, and the best intentions, they had taken it.

When I landed in Rio de Janerio I thought I had made a mistake. Ostentatiously beautiful people slunk up and down the beaches and pavements revealing everything of their hard, tanned, erotically-charged bodies. I fled west and ended up, not in the Amazon as I had imagined, but in the Pantanal, an area of wetland so vast that when I reached it, it seemed small. It took two hours of bumping along in the back of a pick-up to the camp after the metalled roads ended. The guides didn't care if I didn't talk much and the tourists were easily put off. It was almost the hiding place I had wanted.

But I was not as good at disappearing as I thought. I went back to town with Leandro once, and stopped at the internet cafe. I skimmed their emails, and replied with a few lines to let them know I was alright. I felt slightly silly even sitting there among the backpackers with their dirty tans and easy good-looks. They all seemed so attractive, so at ease, just like the animals of the Pantanal. In England young Stallions are gelded to calm them down, bulls are castrated and dogs neutered. They recover quickly and their temperaments and behaviour are much improved. But nature is not domesticated in the Pantanal, parrots shriek and storks swagger, otters bare their teeth and caiman lie still, daring you to come close. But which type of animal was I?

Luz took me out in the boat the day after Leandro told me about leaving. It looked like it was going to be one of our last days together. She said she was bored of walking and I would never go riding. She powered the thing down the river for a while and then cut the outboard engine when we came up to some giant otters on the bank. They were posturing and growling at us for the invasion of their territory. They looked ungainly out of water with their humped backs and odd way of moving their hind legs together in a half-hop. I did a little impression for Luz, but as I tried to copy their movements the boat rocked and I fell back into my seat. She laughed and I felt something I had forgotten. Her teeth were startling white against the pinkish inside of her lips and her skin the colour of coconut husk. Her hair was as dark and sleek as velvety otter fur. She started the engine and we continued down the river, her smooth, young, unmanicured hand gently controlling the tiller.

She was quiet later as we sat on logs around the large fire they made every night after dinner. The men passed around the cachaca, local sugar-cane rum. Normally I would not have joined them, I don't really like drinking and hate being drunk, but that night I took my turn from the bottle as it went around the circle. I stared at Luz occasionally over the fire, her eyes tilted down to the embers, showing equine lashes. Once she looked up at me and I flushed even through the layers of redness caused by the fire on my face, and the firewater in my belly. I took a few more swigs from the bottle, drawing friendly laughs from the other men. Glancing over I noticed Luz had slipped away. Feeling a rush of heat I stood and followed her out into the darkness beyond the fire. I could hear her footsteps on the damp earth only a few metres in front of me. I called out her name and the footsteps stopped.

I had nothing else to say. I heard her move towards me, and when she was no more than a foot away I saw her form draw itself together out of the air. Eyes do shine at night. We were probably only fifteen metres from the camp fire, although the darkness was so thick that it seemed much more, and I could see the orange glow reflected in her eyes. Standing face to face she was half a head shorter than me and I could make out that her face was tilted up to mine. She moved a little closer and I felt her small hand on my cheek.

'Luz,' I said her name again, she said nothing. Her finger tips slid down my face and ruffled along the stubble of my jaw until there was only one left just under my chin, the faintest contact. I felt her body shift upwards, and imagined her calves taught and strong as she brought herself up on tiptoe.

'Luz,' I said, but my voice was missed as she touched her lips to mine and held the kiss for a moment before slowly pulling away. Her hand dropped back. She turned and walked off. After a few paces I could neither see nor hear her. I went back to the fire, and this time, when the cachaca was offered round, I didn't take my turn. The men were beginning to quieten, taking slower swigs from the bottle and no longer laughing and joking. I leant back on my log trying to catch sight of the shapes that flitted in front of the stars above the Pantanal. Bats, Leandro waved a hand at me dismissively, and in lowered tones they began to tell stories about near-death spider bites and the piercing shock of sting-ray barbs.

Tourist season was done, and they were ready to go back to their families, to their wives or mothers, but where would I go? When I woke the next morning Leandro told me it had rained more overnight and the river had risen, they were packing up the camp. He told me Luz had left early that morning. I felt ... I felt as if a loss had been doubled, but then I felt ridiculous. I did not have much to pack, I tried to help them where I could, but they didn't need me. The place was cleared and they were ready to leave within an hour. It was a different journey coming back out. The pick-up slid its way along transformed tracks, spraying us with clinging, moist sand. The roads were not raised banks but causeways and the bridges barely carried us over the newly flooded marshes. There were birds everywhere, flying in all directions, skimming across sun-reflecting lakes where only pools had been before. A large, male Jabiru Stork was standing on one of the little bridges, five foot high with a white body, pink neck and black head. We had to wait while it sloped off lazily. The cows had nearly all disappeared, the few I did see were fat and mooing.

Leandro dropped me in Campo Grande. I went to the bus station to look at the destinations printed above the booths for the various companies, Goiania, Curitiba, Araraquara, Colatina. I stood there for a while, pronouncing them under my breath, trying to wriggle my tongue between the letters. When I turned round there was a small crowd watching. I was daydreaming again.

I found a map of the country, luckily this one wasn't pink. I didn't want to stay in that town, but there was nowhere I wanted to go. The longest journey I could find was twenty-five hours to Vitoria. I bought a ticket and got on the bus, hoping maybe to sleep. The bus was full of dark-skinned, relaxed Brazilians, chatting, eating cashew nuts. The seats were cramped and I could feel the rough bristles of the upholstery sticking through my t-shirt where the sweat was already beginning to prickle down my spine. No matter how I moved my hips I could not find a comfortable position. I have never been a good traveller. We drove for hours through blank land cleared for cattle farming. I recognised the colour of the earth. I cannot remember a single thought as we passed through mile after empty mile, there was a slight feeling of bereavement. The landscape remained unchanged but eventually the evening came and altered my view.

I had not wanted so much to make a woman smile for a long time. When I had first arrived at the camp I had thought Luz was years younger than me, but it was probably just her rude health. I have felt old for a long time now. Embarrassed and spent like a veteran who every year is wheeled out to some memorial to be reminded that his friends died while their muscles still twitched with passion in movement. Only really half a man. I have always liked to exaggerate. How exaggerated all this was, to run away to South America and sit day after day, legs dangling over some picture-idyllic, rough wooden bridge, fishing for piranha which were ugly but had no malice.

I smelt burning and was ripped out of thought. We had been driving for hours and it was dark. I thought the bus was on fire, clouds of smoke surrounded us on all sides. I looked around at my companions, but even those who were awake seemed untroubled, hadn't they noticed? We drove on and I saw the source of the smoke. They were burning the fields, two perfect rows of flame rose up on either side, the road parting it like hellish waves. I had no choice, no one else seemed worried, I sat back in my seat and tried to relax. The bus kept a straight course through the fire. I could feel the heat on either side but was no longer scared. The lights inside the bus were off and everyone was quiet. I couldn't even hear the noise of the road or engine, just the gentle crackle of the flames as they danced outside my window.

She had laughed when I pretended to be an otter. I am no good at disappearing, and no good at being a cynic. I laughed with her and imagined stretching out a hand and touching that face the colour of coconut husk, and smooth as coconut oil. This too was exaggeration, we were hundreds of miles from a coast where the palms grew. I should have said she was the colour of the slow moving waters of the Pantanal in June, or of the Pantanal soil when the first fresh drops of rain returned to the dry land. But still this would be too much, some fantasy about her innocence and her landscape. She was nothing else, she was Luz.

I had pain in my lower back and my buttocks were numb, but somehow I slept. I must be a better traveller than I thought, I woke as we crossed the bridge over the bay into Rio, the burning fields far behind. The city splashed itself across the hills in front of me, seeming ready to slip down the rocks into the shining water. It was clear daylight now and the memory of last night's orange shimmering flames was beginning to fade, an insubstantial thing seen at night in a foreign country. I had not known when I bought the ticket that the bus stopped off in Rio. I had planned to go further down the coast and find a quiet town where I could stare wistfully out at the ocean, sighing occasionally.

I got off the bus when it pulled into Rio's central station. I saw a plane take off somewhere nearby, the landing gear closing as it gained height. It banked, a spark of sunlight dashed along the fuselage and flicked off a wing-tip into my eyes. For a moment I was blinded. I saw her eyes again, glowing with reflected fire. On the boat I had imagined it, but in the end it had been her hand to stretch out and touch my face. In the darkness I could not tell what tint her skin was, could not embellish or falsify her. She gave me her kiss and then left. I felt like a wildfire had burned through me, the heat clearing and purifying as it went. An open land was left, below a rejuvenating and unrepentant sun. The scorched circles of my retinas dimmed and my sight came back, and with it a decision. I looked up to the sky. The plane I had been watching blurred itself into vapour trail and dispersed among the clouds.