Places: Green Mansions

Ytaioa Green Mansions (ee-TI-oh-ah). Solitary hill situated in the savanna region west of Parahuari, whose lower slopes protect a densely forested oblong basin. In the heart of this forest–the “green mansions” of the novel’s title–the wanderer Abel finds a kind of natural paradise which contrasts as sharply with the Native American village in the neighboring Parahuari hills as with the turbulent civilization he had earlier fled. It is a vivid place, roofed by the crowns of tall trees and lavishly furnished with ferns, mosses, creepers, and shrubs. The shade of the canopy creates a perpetual twilight, full of the music of birdsong.

Rima is the incarnate spirit of this forest, integrated into its lush ecology more fully and more intimately than would ever be possible for the corrupt Native Americans of Parahuari or for refugees from civilization like Abel and the old man who passes himself off as her grandfather. The rain forest is, in this metaphorical reckoning, the edenic garden which humankind’s ancestors deserted when they fell into the bad habits exhibited by savage Native Americans and technologically sophisticated colonists alike. Unfortunately, it remains a wild place, subject to the harsher vagaries of nature, as Abel discovers when he is bitten by one of its serpents. It is, however, the consequences of that bite that allow him to forge a more intimate relationship with Rima.

Abel takes Rima up the slopes of Ytaioa in order to show her more distant peaks. She has her own names for some of them, but has no idea how big the South American continent really is. The geography lesson he gives her changes her notion of the world and of her situation within it; it is this new sense of place that drives her to leave her petty garden in a desperate attempt to find a greater “Eden,” from which even she is an exile. This further Eden is supposed to be situated in the legendary mountains of Riolama for which Rima was named, but it is irredeemably lost–and while she and Abel absent themselves in the search for it, the fragment of Eden that they had is invaded and despoiled by the Native Americans. Rima is destroyed by fire, the first and foremost of all technological devices.

Parahuari (pehr-ah-WAHR-ee). Hilly region to the west of the part of the Orinoco River which flows from north to south between what became the Venezuelan province of Amazonas (known in the novel as “Guayana”) and the Colombian province of Guainia (which was also part of Venezuela when the novel was written). Parahuari is the site of the Native American “village”–a single mud-walled and palm-thatched hut with subsidiary extensions–where Abel’s journey comes to its first terminus, in a haze of drunken idleness.

Manapuri (mah-nah-PEW-ree). Native American settlement on the Orinoco between its confluences with the River Meta and the River Guaviare, consisting of a number of hovels with walls of mud or plastered wattle and roofs of thatched palm leaves. In the story, it represents one of the intermediate stages of civilization through which Abel “descends” as he journeys up the Orinoco into the dark heart of the continent.

*Georgetown. Capital and chief port of British Guiana (now Guyana), to the east of Venezuela. This is where the second phase of Abel’s odyssey comes to an end, when his haunted flight from Rima’s ashes finally brings him “home” to civilization. It is where the narrator listens sympathetically to his tragic story, in a house on Main Street symbolizing all the anaesthetic comforts of modern life.