THE AMAZON
quinta-feira, 1 de abril de 2021
quarta-feira, 31 de março de 2021
TRADUÇÃO COMPLETA
TRADUÇÃO COMPLETA THE AMAZON
Translation by Christopher Schindler
One: The Journey
It was at the crack of dawn on Christmas day 1897 that we said our good-byes by
the Gate of Patos in Pernambuco - my mother and I. I never saw her
again. The whole town turned out – people I don't want to
remember. I left with two changes of clothing in a suitcase tied up
and sewn together and a stereoscope to look at views of Manaus, Belém, Paris,
London, Vienna and St. Petersburg.
I rode along on a mule in a wool convoy through the Borborema and three
days later I was in Timbauba de Mocós, head of the rail line, gathering place
for cowboys from Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte. There I boarded a train to
Recife where I found lodgings in the Brum near the Lingueta wharf and stayed
for five days before boarding the Alfredo bound for the Amazon. I was still in
my teens.
We traveled that day and awoke the following morning at Cabedelo. The
dock was filled with anxious people out to meet fighting men from Canudos,
Monte Santo e Favela, Travessia and Uauá. Spirits were high but there was also
a lot of weeping and wailing. We did not linger there but went on to Natal
where migrants fleeing from the Northeast were waiting for a boat to the Amazon
country. Besides 500 soldiers of the Pará state police, the entire 4th
battalion of infantry returning from the War, without casualties, was already
settled in the hold of the ship; so, in Fortaleza, Commandant Bezerra had to
have a list read aloud of more than 600 souls done in by the dry spells of the
Northeast, part of a steady migration since '79 to the Amazon because it had
stopped raining. The ship which not even a single crate of pigs would fit into,
accommodated that horde stinking of dust, sweat, manure and urine - hammocks
crisscrossing - there was stealing, drinking, rapes, fighting, knifings and
death. A father caught a guy by surprise with his daughter in a livestock stall
and skinned him; another, drunk, pissed right on the floor where it trickled
towards a crowd of people sleeping on the floor; on top of a wicker chicken
cage a man defecated, relieving himself under the light of a yellow oil-lamp
full of flies. He was a soldier.
I was still in the hold when we passed the lighthouse at Acaraú and
stopped in Amarração to get rid of a corpse, a prisoner and two passengers
covered with smallpox. But we sailed right past Tutóia and arrived at the port
of São Luís where the Alfredo was surrounded by small boats and dinghies
transforming the water into a gigantic, floating market. They all climbed
aboard: sellers of fried shrimp, sweets and fruit. What a wonderful journey it
was! Then untied and sent off, the heavily laden Alfredo continued her run
along the coast towards Belém and, as it was growing dark, we slowed down to
let on the Lighthouse Bar pilot. When the Alfredo crossed the estuary of the
Amazon, it penetrated the great river, pilot at the helm, with binnacles lit,
as it was night and covered with stars despite everything.
In Belém I stayed at a hotel called “Two Nations” (one of its owners was
from Portugal, the other from Spain). As I had to wait a month for the Barão de
Juruá to go up the Amazon, my money started to run out. I slept outdoors to
save money for meals and I already owed the skipper for advancing me
passage-fare.
Once embarked I would arrive in Manaus without hindrance after six days at eight
miles an hour. Two days later we passed Boca do Purus and 5 days later the
mouth of the Juruá. We traveled all day and all night. At the mouth of the
Juruá the Solimões River is 12 km wide and birds unable to fly far (the
trumpeter, curassow, cujubim) could not manage to cross it but died, tired and
drowning, at the bottom of waves brushed with yellow from the headwind. In
eight days’ travel on the Juruá we arrived at the Tarauacá River and docked at
São Felipe, a nice, clean town of forty-five houses. Nine days later we entered
the Jordão River from which point the Barão, because of its deep draft, could
not continue. So we went on by canoe on the Bom Jardim Bayou. We paddled
upriver and came to our final destination, our node point, the terminus, the
final boundary, the farthest and innermost place on this terrestrial orb – we
finally got to Hell’s Bayou, the limit of the ends of the earth where we
encountered the legendary, mythical and vast Manixi rubber plantation wrapped
in the weight of its fame and unexpectedness – forty days after leaving Belém,
three months and five days since leaving Patos.
Now I didn’t mention that I came to look for my brother Antonio and
uncle Genaro who had been sent off to Manixi. No. They had been rubber tappers
on the Jantiatuba for the Pixuna rubber plantation, 1,270 miles from the city
of Manaus (where years later the Alfredo would shipwreck). They were staying
along the Eiru river on a bend, almost a lake, really. From there they left on
a barge, boat and canoe to the Gregorio river where they worked for Frenchmen.
From there to the Mu, on to Paraná da Arrependida - free tappers that they were
- they went up to where they say the son of Euclides da Cunha, who was a
deputy, died in a tappers uprising. They traveled on to the Riozinho do Leonel,
along the Tejo, Breu, the beautiful Corumbam Bayou – magnificent! – the Hudson,
Paraná Pixuna, Moa, Juruá-mirim, up to the Paraná do Ouro Preto, entered the
Amônea via the Paraná dos Numas, near the Paraná São João, then along a natural
canal without name leading to an unknown place and there they met the boat that
went to Hell’s Bayou. It left them in Manixi, in Acre, where they settled down,
free tappers of the rubber plantation owner.
I confess (this whole book is a confession of my life) that I felt at
that moment that Genaro and Antonio were longing to return to the brush
country. The Amazon crisis was getting worse and conditions already were
getting bad for tappers – so my brother and uncle fretting and wasting away in
order to draw milk from the jungle without profit.
When they saw me they couldn’t grasp what I was doing there. I emerged
thin, overwhelmed under my curls of brown hair, forlorn, like an apparition,
from a bench under the canopy of a shed (I remember a dark, stormy downpour,
night lightning and the whistling of the wind). No, they wouldn't recognize me
(since I was a witness to their wretched fate); they were not overjoyed to see
me, rather, they resented me. Hadn’t they left, quite young, more than ten years
ago with the memory of a kid in bleach-worn diapers? Didn’t they see me as the
incarnate killer of their hopes, the bold headline of one more crisis coming to
this part of the country upon more bad news, renewing a complaint which already
had gone on so many years, scattering the family in all directions (people that
I neither knew nor knew if they were still alive) – one went to São Paulo and
became a soldier, another with muscular legs left suddenly for Belém returning
later via Piauí passing through Serra Grande to Teresina, then via Maranhão to
Goiás, a footloose ruffian he was, then climbing the Tocantins to Bahía where
he finally disappeared and there was no news of him except that he ended up in
the leprosary of Paricatuba (“I have faith in a man who eats and walks armed,”
he told us the day he left. “It gives you muscle and guts. With a full stomach,
a gun and knife at my side I can take on any kind of wild animal!”). The other,
the oldest – ah! – was dying of hunger, exhausted, worn out, because he
wouldn’t leave his old mother (she loved him most of all. She died two years
after I left. She despised me; I know she hated me, cursed me on her deathbed).
And our sister, pretty, captivating, the youngest - her husband left to work as
a drover in Vila de Santa Rita to earn something to escape the hunger of the
world while the brush country was peeling with drought; yes, our whole family,
screwed over and broken, as I later saw, left me all by myself in
the fear of God.
They didn't say a word. They were withdrawn and I just sat there in the
dark for a long while brushing off the rain from my tied-up suitcase, crying in
desertion and solitude. I wanted to leave and not be there. I wished I hadn’t
come. But I had no way back. And I never returned.
Slowly from the next day on, I began to do the necessities: cooking,
cleaning the hut, fishing, gathering fruit so I wouldn’t go hungry. And since I
now owed the boss (whom I didn’t know), I had to start running, a prisoner of
odd jobs, going along the trappers’ path with a small tin cup, doing the
smoke-curing with aricury, chips of cow tree and acabu, making my own rubber
balls. The milk turned black at my touch. Farming and rubber tapping don’t mix?
Produce what you eat? They told me nothing, taught me nothing, like they didn’t
know I was there. And they didn’t talk to each other. They had become dumb
animals – I don’t think they knew how to talk. They returned at dark, like
worn-out monkeys, mute and dirty, they ate and they slept, stinking. At dawn,
they were back on the trail; they moved mechanically as if by some internal
wire contraption. I don’t know where or for what.
But I learned to cut the trees, cure the latex, pile up rubber balls
with the pervasive sound of oily bubbling from the nudging dark waters of
Hell’s Bayou (which I can still hear to this day and will keep hearing until
the hour of my death in this middle of nowhere).
Two: The Palácio
This narrative - a parody of an historical novel which defines my long
overdue confession with sufficient accuracy - will reveal to you the quite
surprising life of Ribamar de Sousa, the adolescent that I was, emerging on an
unexpected day of the Amazon winter, to an extremely percussive ostinato of
dense rain under the improvisatory direction of an imaginary score, in tune
with the surroundings, composed of polytonal chords, as I was sitting on a
wooden bench in a thatched lean-to, to the accompaniment in 5/4 time of Hell's
Bayou, which flows into the Bom Jardim Bayou, which flows into the Rio Jordão,
which flows into the Rio Tarauacá, which flows into the Rio Juruá, a tributary
of the upper Amazon River (the
so-called Solimões), to which we were returning.
I remember how, on Hell's Bayou, yet lower on the farthest line that
marked the horizon on that late afternoon – there was a golden diagonal and a
storm approaching on the other side of the horizon – the handsome art nouveau
form of the Palácio Maxini (the mansion's name), seat of the rubber
plantation and residence of Pierre Bataillon, appeared magnificently before my
eyes like an outline of a scene from a detailed historical dream; we were
returning then in search of that forbidden past, since we arrived at the end of
the era when that mansion appeared dazzling in its multiple reflections of
crystal baubles, window and door transoms transformed into bright plates of
shining, vivid and delirious gold, a wild and vibrant gold, of striking
brilliance, golden and frenzied, illusory and delirious, out of this world and
unimaginable, brought into being by the early accumulation of nearly a century
of exploration, investment and endeavor of layer upon layer of heterogeneous
levels of history, in a creation of the entire sweep of the modern world,
confined here, circumscribed here, centered here in permanent dependence on
itself and of its lingering isolation and anachronistic testimony.
We were returning to the elaboration of our luxurious past; we arrived
unconscious and fatigued in that golden, dark late afternoon,, in which the
mansion in its singularity possessed all the details of an appearance of
dazzling light. The Palácio (as this structure was known, later
went into decline after the rubber bust, a ruin and dead), a transparent and
unexpected mansion awaited us in the tranquility of its points and angles, with
which it beckoned and came to meet us, with its immortal exaltation, above
sheets of dark and primitive waters originating from the life of the world: on
the surfaces of Hell's Bayou glided the riches of the world's high altars, from
the frontier, inevitable, indeterminate, virgin trees. Lost, vacant,
undemarcated... So, because all its strongest codification of a
building, a two-story mansion with a cellar (since abandoned), of art nouveau
style, looking towards a return to civilization, surrounded by exquisite
fencing of gracefully shaped iron, convulsive and violent scrolls of tendrils
of elegant and effeminate contours, disguised, unseemly, decorating the
twisting and bombastic marble staircase, dark and in full fruition of reproduction
European villas. Its majesty was something felt even at a distance,
as from afar it made its grandeur and distinction known; a concern for taking
for itself terraces and balconies that project into the air...- but all that is
in discontinuous ruins, all that is no longer here today, and this description
corresponds to what the mansion was many years ago in my youth and the
proliferation of lost memory, ah, yes, because I am old but not senile, and the
sources of wealth are still there in the middle of the forest: cultivation and
substance to confirm their existence and development. I see clearly
the twisted body of that escapist nineteenth century (since pillaged) edifice
on its height of terra firma, planted in relation to a truth of this end of the
earth, to the account of rivers of blood and scandal of tons of pounds sterling
of glittering rubber gold – oh, gods!, that luxury existed, unacknowledged or
supposed, misfortune and extortion, waste of the pleasures of wealth at the
seat of the Manixi plantation, far away, at the farthest reach, remote from
everything, remote from itself, a distance of almost 2,000 miles from Manaus …
I do not exist in the present,
but in another epoch. I am from the time of a primitive,
archaic, sumptuous capitalism, interlaced with gold and precious stones, a time
out of fashion now when the Palácio was an image in search of its deeper
nature. There, a music room was arranged mainly for
listening to Beethoven, with a Pleyel grand piano, the showcase where
Pierre Bataillon exhibited his collection of violins (the Guarnerius, the
Bergonzi, the Klotz, the Vuillaume), prints of Viotti, Baillot,
David, Kreutzer, Vieuxtemps, Joachim and the death mask of
Beethoven with a bronze laurel wreath by Stiasny. The library where someone
read aloud verses of Lamartine. Rooms and rooms asking “why?”,
salons, galleries and apartments interconnected by doors which opened into
private halls and passageways and which closed in on themselves to the sound of
Pierre Bataillon at the piano in dialogue with Frei Lothar's violin in a Mozart
sonata, like someone fixing one's attention within, with a mortal, agile and
terrible energy which was expressed in the painted stucco walls, by an
iridescence of greenish and dark gold, in the interlaced rhythms of branches
and foliage, of a hallucinated and Japanese vegetation which rose in these
shapes toward the ceiling reflected many times over in
beveled mirrors and in the crystal prisms of chandeliers to evoke
the remembrance of exotic pleasures. Yes, I am an old man of another
century and there I lived all those years, observing, learning and absorbing,
within the magic circle and around that population of antique objects and
furniture that portrayed devouring monsters: like the vision of sexual fantasies
in the decoration of the Venetian commode; the Boulle armoire and its hunting
scenes with defeated wild boars and dogs chewing on bloodied birds shot down by
the Duc de Chartres and other aristocrats on horseback dressed in the idiocy of
red trousers and black boots; in the strict silence of the English study, in
the dynamics and prostituted morphology of the Delanois divan; in the unity and
elliptical variations of the settee - and in the vines, irises,
thistles, diverse stylized insects, incorporating themselves in the furniture
and the lines of the French panels in a neo-rococo delirium such as nature
never intended: statues on lambrequins, eclectic beads and rosettes, urns on
the cymas of the balconies symbolizing energy, the ontology and desire of
capitalism devouring everything, spending everything, producing everything,
preserving everything, needing and appropriating everything, spilling over and
miscarrying into madness, misery and death – caryatids, capitals, forest
foliage – a seemingly small Pierre Bataillon ate and consumed and threw away
his entire immense fortune in the taste of his furnishings, sumptuous, amassed
and useless, in a process of cupidinous and grasping schizophrenia, by the
suction of his refined, dehumanized mouth, to put an end to the surplus of his
surprising profits, in autophagic pleasure of the minimum daily expenditure of
his miraculous capital, bloody and luxuriant, by transplanting to that place,
at whatever cost, the whole spirit of European humanism that was transported in
chartered and laded ships, to the confusion of his beautiful, exquisitely
crafted but useless objects, of a vain, futile art, suicidal because
unproductive, insatiable and banal. Such is the irony of these
efforts for putting gold filaments on the horizon and making the impression of
distance more distinct, to defile the pestiferous history with gold – in
illness, madness, deaths, impuned and imperial crimes (various native peoples
disappeared), in obedience to criteria of an odd capitalistic aesthetic, in the
emptiness and inocuousness of a coquettish, amoral and modern paganism.
Three: The Numa
I saw them on the other side of the river,
two little girls, Indians, naked, among the trees. They
were on the other shore of Hell's Bayou between the columns of trees; they came
from the bend upstream where it flows from dark green to chalky
green up to the steel skirt hem of the river's cold sheet. When it
comes to beauty nothing is absolute. What makes something beautiful
is the beauty of the moment it appears unexpected and
surprising. As they began to come into focus their lips were
none other than lovely. Wow! They had come out of
nowhere. They were in plain sight. Two girls, two Numa,
unmistakably Numa. A challenge, inducement, suffering. An ancient
bathing ritual. They moved slowly in total silence. One
was a child, the other an adolescent. They perfumed the air in which
they moved, long legs swaying, virgins, tall and thin, descending upon the
archaeology of the shore in delicate and cautious delight. Yes, it
was all right. Now - and what smile appeared in their eyes... -
delicately pointing her foot, the older one put her toe in the water. She
tested the water and was filled with
pleasure. Thrilled. She drew from her body its essence
and transmitted it to the life of the surface. The river whimpered
like a plucked, taut string. The water was dense like black
oil. Melpomene on a columnar plinth on a terrace. In her
minimally hastening movements, any false step would be terrible, a terminal
act. Warmth, pleasure. The dull river came to life like
latex the consistency of warm blood. Bending in graceful curves -
stucco detail on ballroom cornices. A sudden, violent excretion of
temper that dissipated. Foam of blood. My view being
blocked, I could not see them. A white cloud right in front of my
whole body, in solid thin pieces. They did not see
me. They did not know I was there. They just
disappeared. One after the other. They caressed, held
hands, slipped into the air. The wind concealed me; they were not on
the lookout for me.
They did not pick up my scent. But
I saw them. I was the first person to see a female of the Numa
people.
The waters flow from the beginning-less,
secret places of their brutal narrative under two hundred foot high trees; the
waters flow from the unknown places of origin of the Numa
people. Waters of survival, cold, they are forgotten and left
behind. The people got lost, and became dangerous,
terrifying. At first where the Numa territory lay could not be
precisely determined in relation to the Manixi rubber
plantation. Then it became obvious. By
feel. Rare, smooth markings. An arrow propped up on a
tree trunk, lying across the red trail. A broken branch saying: “Go
no farther”. Beyond the Tucumã Bend the crossing of the axis of the
river separates. You can swim and fish this one
side. Little by little the Numa infiltrated, advanced, crossed
over. They went beyond themselves, not respecting their own
boundaries. Crossing the river and the order imposed on the forest
by it. Led on, entranced, they reached up river from where I
lived. This happened through the perfect dominion that the Numa
exercised over the many sides of the “S”-shaped river, an invisible
(you could not see them) and secret dominion, around which the rubber tappers
fanned out, the high ground, terra firma, under careful almost cordial
control. Phantoms invaded the plantation every night. Everyone
retrenched. Harmony above all. Restraint. At
no time involuntary or violent gestures that could break the tenuous, working
pact of the spirit of ready silence. Knowledge was
insufficient. Be mindful of your actions, do not speak loud, ensure
the peace, stealthily, as if peace depended expressly on
silence. Vigilance. Do not frighten them, do not provoke
them. Do not menace them with any behavior that could break the
fateful, established hierarchy, because they were ghostly and mythical, at the
liberty of the wind. They were like wisps. Void.
When Pierre Bataillon first arrived in these
parts in 1876, he came across a little village of the Caxinauá people in fear of the
Numa as if subject to their forwardness and changeability. For the
time being, it was fair to that the Numa tolerated the Caxinauá, but at any
moment they may decide to come to torture and exterminate them. The
village of the Caxinauá was squeezed between the unforeseeable Numa and the civilized and known
part of the Rio Juruá, where it was possible to meet only lost tappers, people left behind
from the 1852 expedition. The Caxinauá had contact with Romão de
Oliveira. But not the Numa. Since 1847 they reacted
violently, when the scholar Francisco de Castenau passed through there and
described them in Expedition dans les parties centrales de l'Amerique du
Sud, a rare copy of which was in the library of Pierre
Bataillon. Travestin, also, in Le fleuve Juruá, refers to
fighting with the Numa. In 1854, João da Cunha Correa, Director
of Indian Affairs, went up
the Tauacá, discovering the Gregório and the Mu,
without any contact. Pierre Bataillon arrived in 1876. It
was as I said. In those years there were no Numa. Several
years went by without them. Pierre established his dominion with
ease on the territory of the peaceful Caxinauá. This was one of numerous Caxinauá villages
in the State of Amazonia. Pierre imposed peace and
order. He destroyed the Caxinauá culture through progress, the new god
of the age, and to whom they submitted without complaint, almost
happily. From then on the women and children of the Caxinauá became
subjects of the plantation by the force of the Colonel's troops. And
the little village, infected with typhus, malaria, measles
and syphilis almost disappeared, in '91, a third of the population
was decimated. The Caxinauás were reduced to a population of 84 farmers,
serfs on the Colonel's fields.
Ten years later, with the return of the Numa
from the mountains of Peru, the picture changed profoundly.
But not for the Numa.
Straying, on the move, on the alert,
wandering from the Andes, pressed on by a perilous winter, they continued lost
and free, persistent creatures, prevailing in their endurance. No
and no. They reacted to agreement, to touch, to
contact. Is there power where there is stamina? The Numa
submitted to and took refuge in themselves. In the multiplicity of
their limits of strength, insisting on existing in the unforeseeable
space. They were, in the beginning, everywhere outside of the power
of the plantation, in the forest network outside of domination. The
Numa surrounded the plantation, restricting it to its own limits, hindering its
inordinate expansion. The immense plantation (you could travel for days
within it), had to halt, restrain itself, retreat, bound by invisibility, of
knowing, of encountering, as if they did not exist except in the void of their
numberless absence, recovered, nowhere, in the non-delineated. Often
they resembled trees and birds of the air. They were not appearance
but immanence, and whoever has traveled the Amazon knows what I am talking
about, in the ambiguity where everything is uncertainty and unknowable,
hermetic, heightened and magnified. The Numa, without revolt,
rebellion, raiding, up the river, potential and improbable, mythified,
solitary, violent, irreconcilable. Always ready for the attack that
did not happen. Destined to kill. The Numa terrified
us. They were unknown strategic points in the correlation of the
power of nature of which the Numas were the guardians. They were
dispersed in an incomprehensible and irregular manner in focal points of
strength (it was said that they could survive under water in certain air
pockets). They spread out with more density in the space of night,
prepared traps with small poisonous snakes on the paths. Oh, the
disruptions! Cold beings, clouded by legends from the mountains,
gods that would come down to punish us for nocturnal offenses. It
was if their eyes were fixed everywhere so that people felt they were being
watched by those strange creatures. At times, they let themselves be
seen. Many trappers tried to hunt them down and shoot them (and they
were dead days or months later in cold and precise revenge). They
moved about rapidly, like a puff of air, transitory; they're not there and then
break out in front of us. Naked, groaning like a wounded beast, a
bird. Just sound. To regroup on paths already covered,
leaving deliberate footprints. They cut through the air with
whistling arrows, marking their tracks everywhere, in the tenacious houses of
our fear. They crossed interconnected networks within the
plantation, infiltrating, traversing, arriving in defiance at the garden of the
Palácio. They
were there without being there. Agile, dangerous
nomads. Naked men with enormous, dark phalli. Some months
they disappeared, vanished, atomized, disunited, quiescent, gone away
forever. Or just wind integrated with the leaves of the
trees. But then, a fleeting arrow mixed its trajectory with the air
to say that they never went away, they were always there, beautiful, their
almond and dark eyes, large exposed sexes, in bodies of grown-up
children. In a certain way delicate. But mere phantoms,
they were enchanted; the prehistoric forest neutralized them, the forest of
gold and milk. Bataillon had advanced into the most secret part of
the forest, up the bayou. Now he skirted the imprecise boundaries of
death. Between the soldiers and the forest of the Numa a tactical
reciprocity of respect and fury was established. Pierre left
presents for them, glass beads, knives and fruit on wooden
trays. The Numa never touched them. There was no channel
between the plantations and the Numas. The plantation, waiting. Observant,
the Numa proscribed boundaries which they broke. Pierre avoided war,
sought a political solution, held back, acted according to the nature of his
single-minded principle without the risk of paying the high price of death.
That thin, short (five foot two in height)
man, always elegant, stiff, erect, his head held high disguised his small
stature, tiny mustache à la Carlitos, by which he appeared arrogant but without ridicule,
haughty, noble, grandson of the Duke de Cellis, one of the most aristocratic
families of Spain, which came from ancient Rome, intelligent, cultured,
speaking several languages fluently, always with his wife, Dona Iphigenia
Vellarde, catholic, illegitimate daughter of the grandee, Don Angel Vellarde, a
woman who loved the Amazon and its wild extravagance, a candy maker,
embroideress, in her simple and elegant clothes of warm, pink silk, with two
big diamonds falling like tears from her earlobes, two frightful suns – her
ancestry was used by her husband in the alliances and treaties of the Acre War,
when Pierre made a clever game of duplicity with Brazilians and Bolivians,
remaining in peace with the two and drawing equal advantage from both, mainly
availing himself of the fact of being protected from the war by an uncrossable
mass of 400 square kilometers of forest, marshes and flowers – yes, it was
impossible to conceive, I tried, how this nobleman set in the forest,
surrounded by all that Parisian luxury and his many books – the classics,
Schopenhauer, Rousseau – like a conquistador of the Amazon, of the vast empire
of latex ( - “Such is latex”, he used to say, “elastic like
character. And because of that it comes out of those trees like a
sticky prima materia, like viscous fluids under the body's skin, pus,
white, watery plasma, gum, wild sap of mucus which makes the forest bleed
clammily – such is the rubber latex: the blood of the Amazon that we collect
like a strange evil and for which some day we will have to pay a very big
price”) - yes, this man was not morally disturbed in his abysses and the extremes
he went to to transform and fortify the plantation into a concentration camp
during the Numa dominance.
No, most acutely obsessed, Pierre Bataillon
had inherited the spiritual remains of the monarchy of great kings, admired by
nations, or raw material of literature – as if he were anticipating as obvious
that the Numa would come to prostrate themselves and pay homage to his supreme
character and style – the uncommon reactions of the man, to be determining,
outside the indistinct mass of humanity, belonging to the number of those who
represent something exceptional, who distinguish their name with an internal
image for their own use, associating themselves with the metaphysics of the
creation of a peculiar superman and inscribed in the atmosphere of everyday
fantasy.
About 500 yards upstream from the thatched
shed there was a stretch of the river where Hell's Bayou closed in - still
flowing, deep, dark and cold - the Tucumã Bend, beyond which no one ever
ventured, a universe ruled by the Numa - “Don't go beyond there”, uncle Genaro
said that evening. “You should never cross the
river”. The boundaries projected out on the river bank overlaying
marks significant to life, watchfulness and warning of danger in unfathomable
and lines (“Do not cross!”). Because of this, that place,
forbidden, different, attracted you all the more onto the steel blade of the
repeated and interior mirage, which liberated the sharp tendency toward a leap
into unforeseen trouble. So, those two men stayed like frogs in
their pond on this side. I was condemned to what was some kine of
family with those protagonists of the enigma of my silence and anxious gestural
communication, relatives like mute animals, who justified their forsaken lives
with monosyllabic grumbling, living without women or friendships, existing in a
geographical prison where recall was only possible under the pressure of a
savage materialism and militaristic solidarity: at dawn they left for the road
as for death, impelled by a biological order, always leaving me with the daily
chores: fumigate the rubber balls in the ever the same awareness that I had
lost my way to paradise - yes, I cast my fishing pole which filled
the idle hours, idle days, idle time, I thought without thinking - weeks,
months, it would be so year after year until I died, life just this, the world
merely expectation - until everything came to stagnate in the mute and null
anonymity of a circular and sterile monotony, of a mechanistic life masked by
impersonal catastrophe - because I knew that I would get sick - and ailing here
would die without absolution. I divined my insignificant
individuality in the class condemned to die of malaria in the abyss of the
forest, eaten by wild beasts.
But life is a road that can suddenly branch
off. And it happened one day, that day - and it was exactly 3
o'clock in the afternoon, a calm afternoon, hot and, above all, among the
trees, green - at the Tucumã Bend there was a trunk I sat on,
waiting - it was well before the full bend of the river: the place was
good for fishing because the bayou, at this height, jutted into a rapid and
free turnaround, nearly overflowing, a pool-like inlet, half-closed off and
dark (a tall man could hide above the shore) below the general singing of birds
with long beaks and colorful feathers - when, on purpose, surprising, in an
indecorous and comical manner, there appeared those little naked Indian
girls.
It was true after all, the Numa were
returning from their legendary and unknown mountains in
Peru. Gigantic and ferocious they were indeed returning, moving into
the equally imaginary regions of the Pique Yaco River, the Rio Toro and even
farther beyond. Still they never appeared, wherever they were: they
were not visible, out in the open, in the forefront, distinct, unless on the
bias, diffusely met with, merely suspected in the obliquity of
sight. But those girls there - poetry fabricates one world, prose
another - were very real, more real and human than their brothers, rebellious
males. Neither was it a retaliation for all the exaction endured by
the forest during the rubber tappers' occupation. Where there is
power, is it exercised? For me, they were one in the other,
embracing each other under the water which was so natural for their little hands
that I caught sight of from my perspective of fantasy. Real, humanly
real, there on the other side – the first Numa females that appeared in all the
world, beautiful as the sun on the furrow of the Earth.
I choked from emotion. I
cast my fishhook. I was cramped, stooped low to the ground,
protected by a clump of brush. I knew the Numa were near, on the low
water mark. I had never really seen any, but we knew they
were around because game had disappeared! - where the Indians are there is no
game, because they eat it all – pig, curassow, tapir – they killed them with
arrows of strong sugarcane plume grass and bows from palm trees, the spiny
peachpalm, bacaba palm, pataua, paracouba, itauba. All trumpet
bush? And tapir, mostly tapir which they especially liked – tasty,
always crossing their paths. No kidding. I stayed there
until they left. It was enchantment! I didn't tell my
uncle and brother who would have seen I was done in, if they had ever looked at
me. And, in the middle of the night I dreamed intensely. I
was ill and bruised. I dreamed about the older girl – her whole body
in union with mine, in the middle of the night my uncle awoke to my sighs and
came in, I don't know why, with firearm in hand, he shook me but went away,
calmed down into sleep, snoring lightly – my uncle, a light sleeper, always
with a firearm beside him.
On the following day, at about the same time,
the girls reappeared and I was the navigator of my obsession and looked for the
lost intimacy in the substantial benefit of that reappearance, sliding on that
humid earth of the Amazon of my former days.
This, however, happened on the third day:
They were there almost at the same time, bathing, and I – to see them better,
closer – set myself in the foliage of a fallen trumpet tree from where I had to
get out, headlong - nearly howling – helter-skelter, totally covered with a
coat of carnivorous sauba ants. I jumped into the
water. The Indian girls looked at me. They were not
frightened. They did not budge. It was if they already were
aware of me. They had already seen me, those other times
before. They stayed where they were. Without
fear. Not surprised. Impersonal. Covered with
blood, I washed away the ants clinging to me with their barbs. I,
noisy and making a scene, leg bleeding. Then laughing at my being in
the water and putting my head out, I yelled to them:
“Speak!” Serious, they did not
reply. Statues. The unexpected dunk revived
me. The two girls were there almost within reach of my
hand. Tranquil. Joyous is what they were on the line of
the dry talweg. I played in the water. - “Say something!”
I yelled to them. The rapid and cold current of the river and my
amazement carried me. To get closer, I got out of the confines of
the pool and entered vigorously into the current. I swam
blind. I got out farther, downstream, pulled by the
current. - “May I come closer?” - I hollered, certain that they
understood me. In a few strokes I would reach them. In
agony, I dove down into the water and crossed. Sometimes we do what
the impulse of our heart bids even if it's the last thing in our
life. I emerged in front, yards beyond. I came through
the reeds on the shore, naked without care, getting closer. They
were not such children when I saw then. They looked at me without
fear. Their bodies radiated a strong light. I, more
blinded, came closer. I had never seen them like
that. And I tried to see them through the light.
It was then the smaller one came up to me and
touched my stomach with her tiny hand as if attracted and surprised by my white
skin. It was a cute thing to see. Suddenly I reached out
my hand to touch her also, on the head - and then, she bit me. A
quick bite. I felt it and shouted. With pain, with
surprise. Blood shot out on my hand, the swift and ferocious little
creature. That was it. Thus, the impersonal attitude,
then rapidly dissolved. Did they become disenchanted? I
was now in front of them. The two started to laugh, and they came
assure me, together, and laughed a lot. Hi hi hi they
laughed. And I also laughed. They laughed and supported
me laughing. It was just as I the Narrator say.
They did not appear on the fourth day.
The river was a wilderness. I had
not succeeded, in the madness of the previous day, the fullness of which, that
a while ago, in me, was only an obscure and nameless impulse of
desire. I had risked my life. I had been capable of
actually changing my life, which was worth it, which was worth life, in a
surprisingly twisted equivalence – the course of life is not a straight road -,
but in the initiation to the Parcae, I trace the name of “daemon” with
serpents . My truth. Tamped by time. An
ultimate truth to be implanted inside the head in the catalogue of the best and
most ancient profundities, in the subversive imagination of terror and violence
– to love them for me would be to demystify: the fugitive girls, in the
quickest of action, in an instant they could not be caught, in the desirability
of the gesture, in the discernment of accounts.
I awoke suddenly in the middle of the night:
the whole forest was in flames! It wasn't a dream, oh no, I saw it
wasn't right away and heard the shots from my uncle's
firearm. Shouting and shouting. In the exposed, red
clarity, among black clouds of smoke, my brother contorted in great pain,
riddled with arrows of pig bristles - a pin cushion of pain! And my
uncle, behind the balls of rubber, in a bad way, dying. The Numa
attacked us in the middle of the night, but... I was still alive and unhurt.
Then I knew nothing more of what
happened. I didn't know how I escaped and dove into the invisible
water of the bayou of cold and swift darkness, and I was carried along and
taken away. From afar the shots became silent at once, I no longer
saw fire with its serpent flames and a dark current embraced me, enveloped me
and carried me on. I hit into sticks and rocks but I kept on and on
in the pitch black night, weightless, rapt and unthinking, with the stars, as
if all this was the continuation of my dream in the hidden and very dull, blind
night, hypnotic, horrifying, continuing thus for many hours among shadows,
secrets and tears of everything in dissolution … So it was.
Four: Paxiúba
Someone said,”Hey!”. (The voice,
like what?)
It was that
big strapling caboclo Paxiúba who
is entering this story and talking - at this time about
nineteen years old, but already endowed with size, reputation, status, at a
height of six foot three. (Ah yes, I remember him all too
well. We get old but before dying, memory revives us and we live in
it until the tamp of time snuffs us out; a glossy, big tomcat swipes his
tongue in the forgotten stillness, nothingness, so that we disappear; it will
be as if we never existed, not even as a fictional character which is what we
are.) But his bestial eye sees everything, and registers it – his
voice like a fly on the blood rose and void of conversation. It was
said Paxiúba was the son of a black man from Madeira-Mamoré, Barbados, and a Caxinauá
Indian woman, whom I did not know, and became legendary and eternal - it was he
himself approaching, rowing, silent and menacing in the height of the morning
towards the lush growth in front of Laurie Costas's door, located on the left
bank of Hell's Bayou which was subsumed and meandered through the renowned
plain.
So he came saying only: “Hey!” addressing
himself to a certain Zilda, the wife of Laurie Costa, a washerwoman, squatting,
crouching over a smooth, leached itaúba board, a soapy scrubbing board, - she
had not even seen him nor could she foresee him covering her entirely like an
gigantic caiman - Paxiúba in his dugout, a handsome spectacle to see
(in a literary sense), an enormous tetrapod, as I thus later came to know, a
dark caboclo and tiger, huge, wanton, with snake eyes, bold,
intensely savage, fierce, shining in the yellow eye of the sun, ferocious, his
noble musculature would make the statues in the Louvre envious, head raised on
a thick neck, solid, alert, belligerent, murderous, frightening subjectivity -
it was thus he was coming, cynical, predatory, sparing or tolerating no one,
not even a judge, as if he were saying to himself: “I know you: I know who you
are” - the certainty of guilt, the indecent and menacing look enough to
frighten a policeman – his power came from the the smell of the tonka bean tree
that extracted from his easy victim the expected confession, indeed, he
weakened and anesthetized people, putting them to sleep under his power (it was
known he was never to be trusted) - imposing his bulk which backed up his
bloody designs and commands, acquisitions and pleasures, which he found in the
depths of ourselves, wrenched out and submitted to his access, ah, the brute,
but primordial: from the fleeting impression to the exact and guilty certainty
that, in the logic of our dark innocent region, coerces and presses to reveal
itself, impelled outward by a hypnotic force toward new submissions, smiles
infiltrating into the cracks of power from which he rules, cunning and
intimate, in the empty intersection and prohibition of response, in the
inversion of retrograde forces, unmasked roguery, his sole nobility, any
left-over dignity: “Speak his truth” was the language of an order from his eyes
in the perfidy of his sensual and perverse smile, underscored by an outline of
sin that photographed us, that spoke to us, in the considered mirror of
indignities. It would not be good to meet Paxiúba suddenly on a
deserted road. He demanded caution; fear and mute experience of
a dim familiarity with sensitivity was seen in the transmission of his
secret. In one word: obvious. When he left, people
crossed themselves. Because he came off as a warrior of irregular
seasons, of inverse time, of the most remote, crafty mechanisms, of corporeal
possibilities that were his prerogative, out of the ordinary and capable of
much accomplshiment, forming an alert and ready
muscle. Paxiúba, emblem of overgrown and brutal Amazonia,
shadowy, unknown, pernicious. And the dugout, having traversed areas
requiring caution, gently collided into the plank of the dock where Zilda was
washing clothes, white and clean, shining, suds rising and going forth in soapy
and glassy bubbles scattering on the white edge of the river's surface
reflected by the sun and in religious purification of the water.
With her back to him, (she didn't know that
would be the day) Zilda attentive to her work, concentrated, absorbed - and
plop - she beat the wash against the heavy soap board to scatter the
accumulated heaps of flying and colored bubbles into the air, vaporized,
elevated, exploding into little panics. And the fixed urgency of his
look frightened her and made her feel ill, like the coming of a sickness, of
death, in a quickly developing turnabout into hatred, nausea, loathing and congested
phlegm. The voice she heard in its flight of sounds, native
sounding, diction of a conniving phenomenon, curiously sharp, metallic, like a
needle in its vibratory height, plucking and peeling of arpeggios and
aggressive trumpets, and undertones of violin and harpsichord, a continuous
ensemble behind the domination of the whinny of an excited horse with a black
and shiny mane, a voice that she didn't know where it came from, as from all
sides but not from his mouth, and yet it reverberated in the opposite
direction, outside of the surrounding space, like it immediately came out
strong from his abdomen, and generating, to the extent that it existed in lax
and heavy modulations, an entreating and irresistable appeal, a low and earthy
blow, but attentive, like a snake that makes itself known as a queen,
propagating, gradual, delayed, primal, intrinsic, in the glands of an
established and fecund operation, the nervous schemes of his body's musculature
and primary clinical urges and needs, awakened and abounding, hard, such “ssss”
vibrations inclined to weaken a woman's supports and defenses.
Zilda was stirred inwardly under that
pressure, troubled, and in a panic, with loathing and odious horror, feeling
herself affected by the hospitable penetration of the killing and bestial head
of that voice, native of the tonka bean tree, fructifying earth – autonomous
and sibilant timbre of a serpent, not aggressive but insistent, of a demonic
audacity that said: “I know you”. And which was saying: “You can't
hide from me”.
Now she knew. She knew in her
whole being the outcome of that voracity, what his body wanted. She
knew what he expected of her. Sickness: her guard dropped,
apprehensive, hidden, cowering, squatting, exposed to the intimacies of that
sound. What happened then? She could have secured the gun
that was always kept behind the shrine of Saint Rita. But she was
afraid of the paralysis of her will. Her husband far
away. The nascent aggressive
figure. Confrontation. Her wet clothing leaving bare the
solid, concrete, white corpulence of her large breasts and her mature woman's
body, ripe for fecundation, skirt between plump legs attainable in the
amplitude of morality.
Due to the Morgados, her husband was the only
rubber tapper on the Manixi plantation who was able to bring along a
wife. Laurie Costa was a favorite; Bataillon liked him and approved,
though provisionally. Zilda became the personal laundress of the
Palácio's linens, except those laundered in Lisbon, as the dross of the river
water, beggars' water as it was called, soiled some of the
laundry. The Morgados, having sold the plantation of the Riachuelo
Bayou upon the direct order of Dona Isabel Morgado who was afraid of the
fevers, had become rich enough to move to Lisbon, where they settled in the
Amoreiras district. Laurie and Zilda said good-bye to their friends,
the Indian Iurimão and his young Indian wife Ianu, who went to Rio Ji-paraná,
where they were never heard from again.
Now then, Paxiúba was
walking dangerously near on the dock, his glance fixed on his prey and near the
lurking malice of an odious and arrogant false friend; alert, she drew back
instantly, polarized, armed in the preservation of the defense of her integrity
against the straight aim of that corruptor's look. She hoped that
Paxiúba would not come nearer, that he would exclude her from any harm ever
since the time he was a person of the Palácio, head of the police apparatus of
the plantation, body guard of Zequinha Bataillon (they said a friend who slept
with the boy), a man of primary importance. Paxiúba, armed assassin,
eagle and snake, eliminated whoever needed to be in his function of coercing
and killing. Thus, the cynical face, perverse and damp, glued on
her, possessing something that pulsated in him, in delight. Oh, this
was happening when she was alone in the hours of her solitary
drudgery. The king's gunman, Paxiúba, police soldier. A look
was enough to know he would exact something, examine, humiliate her, corner
her, surreptitious, excessive, cynical, obsessive, dominating, provocative,
pornographic, hypnotic. Greater danger: he was looking at
her! It meant that he saw her, was aware of her, powerless against
that devastating, forced, psychologically invasive and debauched
knowledge. Would she tell her husband? No, she would say
nothing to prevent the death of Laurie Costa, her only darling. She
loved him, the most kind of men. But she didn't have children, she couldn't. And
what's more: she never felt anything with him. She served her
husband. Only a loose woman should have an orgasm. Laurie
would kill her if she moaned, experience pleasure. Trying to impregnate
her Laurie regularly got on top of her with his clothes on and not touching
her. A child would be the cement for a happy family. She
married quite young, guided by her godmother Rita, from one of the best
families of Vila da Serra da Mernoca, in Ceará; then had come a prolonged,
approved courtship. They went to Roçado de Dentro, but godmother
Rita died, the crisis came and, banished, they had to come to the
Amazon. Laurie always reliable, proper. Now peace
infiltrated by the tonka bean tree. In the last few days she was
troubled, becoming sick just being seen by that brute. The situation
got worse with the weekly solicitations. Paxiúba showed a certain
affection, courtesies, in a choking voice that indicated that he was still a
child after all. And Zilda, disliking it because he was a bully, read
in those eyes what he wanted, expected, begged for and which said: “I will wait
for you. You will be with me one of these
days”.
Zilda's house was a one-room thatched hut
with a floor of beaten clay, walls and doors of rasp palm, with two doors: one
opened over the bayou passing below; the other opened onto the forest ahead
where there was a garden box on four poles. Their dog had died,
bitten by a snake, leaving her even more alone. The smell of beans
cooking on the fire came from the kitchen located by the door into the
bush. But, Paxiúba was coming towards her, the smell of
tonka bean tree upon her. He had a present, a big cichlid spread out
on a plam leaf, barely alive. Paxiúba was the best fisherman
of the Amazon, as if by magic, with his eye of a snake of the hypnotic and
horrifying type. Almost happy with the fish, Zilda felt her hatred
increase in a brutal rush. It was the first time she hated somone;
remoseful, she crossed herself. She felt nauseated near the fellow,
her mouth contracted from disgust, from repugnance of something repulsive,
phlgem, thick gum like latex, her mouth filled with saliva that she spit out
when he came to her, which seemed strangely satisfying for the brute, as if she
were spitting out of love. She never looked at him directly,
however; gathered into his desire by her timid look, she was afraid to glance
at him, so as not to take in directly and see something
menacing. But there came to her in the last few days such a
foolish, silly idiocy, a dizziness of enchantment, a jinx in the smile from the
lips of the fellow; she became paralysed without strength, anesthetized without
power, useless in spite of his ugly face and a smirk that came to have an
energy, an excitement (as it was insane) that crazed, she plunged against
herself in a vain reflex awakening a certain irresponsibility and attraction in
the weight of an unknown madness and the strange fragrance that emanated from
her body such that everything that boy represented to her, might contaminate her;
it was the force of the Manixi Palace's power, the splendor of the rubber
plantation, in its orgy of charismatic luxury - Paxiúba, the brother
of Zequinha (son of Dona Iphigenia, her mistress) - all that resounded in her
contradictory dreams, in everything wrong and other in her life, ingrate and
destroyed, without discretion and now without a future, here, unlucky, lost,
idle in the Amazon, the most far away of worlds, and she knew well that the
body of that brute, mainly the broad chest and handsome shoulders, exuded the
heat of power of the Bataillons as if he were the firm and strong iron of the
authority and glory of the estate, imbued with that fragrance of tonka bean,
oily, contaminated; she also felt it within her as the odor of love, honey from
the body of unknown love in the midst of soapy sweat on the skin.
Then what happened was the following: Zilda
unable to refuse him, she picked up the fish from the palm of that hand,
without touching it and no thank you's, rose decisivley from her work leaving
the laundry there in its soap suds and went stright and quickly; in the house
she took the lid off of the jug and drank a mug of well water that made her
choke – but it was when she saw in a panic that man displaying himself there in
her house, without being able to react that she became ill, twisted inside,
struck dumb; he seized her firmly by the wrists with those enormous hot hands
and she yielded completely, so that when she decided to scream the scream did
not come; she collapsed at the moment of being bound with him, defenceless,
drunk, silly, washed out and nauseated, suffocating... Oh! grief of
griefs! Oh! defeat of defeats! Oh, woe, the weakness of
the human condition. “Quiet, little one!” he was saying in a gentle
voice... “Be a good little girl”, he begged, whispering very softly in her ear,
adding: “Keep still, my love”. Demons!, how soothing was that soft
and docile voice, for the victim horrifyingly docile!, she bleeding inside,
irregular, against a monster of so many initiatives and resources that she
encountered within her a treacherous demon, allied with an enemy, hidden in
darkness, seeing how helpless it was to react, to struggle, disengaged, the
impregnating enemy in the contraction of disconnected forces. The
cry was fast and terrifying. It could have been heard at the Manixi
Palace if it had been heard there. It was as if she was being
swallowed alive. It was the cry of the oppressed, of despair, of
horror in the encounter with inimical forces...
On the next day Zilda's husband was dead, his
liver pierced by an arrow.
But the day before, after Paxiúba left saying
to her “thank you, my love”, she remained stretched out on the floor and
realized she was not going to die while her husband was on his way bringing her
a stalk of bananas gathered from the road beyond the risky limits of the Numa
and their signs marked in the shadows of the edges of Hell's Bayou; at home he
found the cichlid cooked and fragrant, prepared in sauces with fine herbs, a
beautiful fish, king of Amazonia.
What more? How? Unexpectedly the day after, as he had not seen where he
was tearing the veil, he had departed from the boundary and broke the law; he
was suddenly killed at the limit where Amazonia determined the directions to
the right and to the left, boundaries of the Numa which were there and were
advancing, finding their origin in everything and everywhere realizing the
course of their weave of nodes that reveal nothing of themselves and upholding
themselves, in blood veins that cover it in Amazonia, in its permutation, in
its alteration, in all its unknown grandeur. The corpse was thrown in front of
the Palácio as a warning. And in those same days there occurred important
events in other places and times, historical and decisive for this fiction and
which I will relate at the opportune moment, but for now, I have some surprises
of many other occurrences.
Five: Ferreira
First thing, I caught sight of the Palácio.
Day was just dawning. The veranda was like a
stage set where a breakfast scene was playing with Pierre Bataillon and
Iphigenia Vallarde. Young Ivete was serving. I was at the dock,
carried there by the current. Benumbed, my body almost dead, I touched
the steps of the stairs, but did not feel them. They did not see me, but
I saw them. There was the king, the builder of the Amazon empire of
rubber, of land and latex, who built everything with hundreds of men, workers
and tappers. I was brought forth upon the waters like Moses in
Egypt. Faint flashbacks appeared and disappeared. The image of my
dead brother came in and out of my mind. But it did not pain me. It
was a vague, fuzzy picture.
Bataillon was a shorter and thinner man than I had
imagined. Well dressed, erect, broad gestures, haughty and nervous
behavior, dignity, old-fashioned manners. Aquiline nose. Fine
hair. Little black mustache. His head raised, noble, he had
an aura. Bow tie, jacket of white linen, wide coattails and trousers,
patent leather shoes. His air, the gaze with which he looked upon
the outside world, was arrogant, superior, proud, like a sovereign by royal
concession. He put you on edge. He made a display of his
importance. In spite of his small stature, it was as if he were looking
down from on high, from an upper platform. Yes, there was elegance and
dignity. I heard him speaking erudite Portuguese, artificial, bookish,
classical and correctly pronounced, but fluent. I got bits of his speech
… “she gave birth to a son named” … “it was agreed upon that” … The white
three-piece suit shone. Well tailored. Silk shirt, suspenders,
collar, a solid gold John Bull watch attached by a metal chain of double rings,
heavy, platinum and gold. He was a man in a showcase, in a museum, on
exhibit. In his belt there was a Smith & Wesson of nickel and silver
with an ivory handle. It was said that he was a good shot, like a
military man, that he collected firearms, revolvers, rifles, antique muskets
that filled the Hall of Weaponry of his shock troops.
I don't know why Pierre Bataillon wanted me to stay,
to work with him. He liked me.
But now, a visitor is coming down the gangplank of
the Comendador, a young attorney whose professional credentials were recently
publicized in the city of Manaus. The Comendador is a fine ship, a long
white boat. It belongs to the rich Commander Gabriel Gonçalves da Cunha,
father of Glorinha, or Maria de Gloria, “the Dullard”, wife of the young lawyer
who is arriving. The Comendador, shining white, contrasts with the
various shades of the surrounding green and blue, crackle moss green, snake
vines, emerald, cobalt of the water, the blue sky vault. The lawyer
leaves the gangplank laughing. His name is Antonio Ferreira. He is
the agent and business successor of the extremely rich Commander. He has
the appearance of a child. A big white child, elegantly manicured hands,
curly black hair, falling in ringlets over the gold frames of his
glasses. Cambric three-piece suit, Panama hat, black, narrow pointed
shoes. The sun beats down and the contour under the fine fabric of his
clothes is that of a strong body, stocky legs, full buttocks. His eyes
sparkle and flash joviality; they explode
with lightheartedness and active fantasy underlined by a permanent
adolescent smile, candor and slyness inscribed on sensual lips. A needy
child. Boyish face, outlaw, killer. Friendly, educated, sociable,
exhibitionist. Ferreira was the greatest propagandist for himself.
It was not other women that he really loved, but Glorinha; and he was at her
service in various ways. His ambitions were concentrated upon her.
In spite of being the son of a humble, middle-class family, he was elevated to
the podium: he had married “the Dullard”, or better yet the most solid fortune
in the land; how the young man knew like no one else to make himself liked by
his father-in-law, who saw in him the personification of intelligence, loyalty,
merit, equal understanding equal, and the more corrupt the more loyal to the
type of capitalism in practice there at the time; the old man loved him his
whole life like a son, even after he separated from the daughter, as we shall
see. Glorinha was tall, thin, pale, skeletal, wan, buck-toothed,
big-nosed, the image of a fairy-tale witch, bony, an illustration from a
children's book. Practically an imbecile. She fled from her groom
on the wedding night with ostentation and scandal - which betrayed her later
madness – crying, to her father's house, racked with fear, in a panic, a fit of
nerves.
Even speech was controlled in that house in which
storks with enchanted babies were seen in the dream fantasies of a shut-in
little girl, benumbed, warped by a strict father, about whom the neighbors on
the same street knew nothing; any trivial event, which was everything, had to
be hidden from Glorinha, brought up as a freak, going out in company only
inside a closed carriage, puffed up in pillows and amid the ruffles of the
clean, indigo-dyed and aseptic white skirts of a legion of old maid aunts and
her proper, severe, vigilant mother Dona Martha, who saw everything, knew
everything, even what the girl was looking at. Hidden in the corners and
back rooms of the house, nervous and insecure, depressed, pallid, she never appeared,
fearful of everything, never visited anyone regularly, embedded in her fears
until her sad end. Alas! When anyone arrived, she retired saying
she had a headache. On the rare occasions she remained in the room, she
stayed seated, quiet, hunched over, saying nothing, looking idiotically at
everyone, agreeing with everything that was said, she smiled vaguely, as is
from afar. Glorinha did not speak, did not play, did not hate. All
was a passive introversion of fear, terror, obedience, silence. An
example of a Manauara education, it was said she remained a virgin her whole
life and that Ferreira did not violate her. Perhaps he loved her.
She was the living inheritance of the immense fortune, influence, political
power of her father: a rising force, head of a political class, leader, boss,
cruel murderer, corrupt, corrupter of that age of splendor and glory of Amazon
rubber gold.
This is the young man whom we see coming off the
gangplank of the Comendador onto the dock on this Sunday morning, and Sunday
mornings are different on the plantation: the rubber collectors come on
principle, of necessity, for no reason, by a string mechanism pulling them to
the headquarters, which was a large open shed, to be sure not the Palácio, the
separate residence of the Bataillon family which no one approached; they come
to deliver the balls of rubber, exchange products for provisions (as few see
actual cash), seek out a pint of cachaça on credit to go off and drink
alone. Sinister, heavily armed, the Colonel's men go by. The air is
full of the smell of caxiri beer. The open inlet of Hell's Bayou, an
intersection of two plains, is smooth as a mirror; there are cries from the
tree tops. Two Peruvian prostitutes arrive in a canoe. The movement
of men, boats and machines give life to the place that overflows with the
agitation of the day; it is Sunday morning after all.
In the shade of the door I see a human figure.
It is Colonel Bataillon with a stiff collar, daring red tie, Havana suit, hands
in his pockets, appearing happy on the ridge of the marble staircase, eyes on
the fixed horizon like the king of a green sea without limits. Now he
gestures with his index finger in the air, an inaudible order given to the
urchin servant Mundico, frolicking near him, and who then disappears toward the
back of the house. Ferreira, on his way up the steps, continues to smile
towards his host who awaits him.
“What brings you here, then?” Pierre says extending
his hand, slanting his head to the left, ear towards his shoulder. “You
must have had an excellent trip in this weather...”
“How are you?” Ferreira asks, one step lower, his hand
going forward to take hold of the older man.
“Well, I tell you,” Pierre continues. “These last
days have been the best for travel to these parts. I understand the
courage of travelers who arrive here. Fifteen days ago we had a superb
rain. A day of deluge. If you had seen …...” (his accent sounded
Frenchified). Pierre led the young man by the arm. They walk toward
the house slowly. Halfway there, however, Pierre stops, motionless.
Then he raises his arms, dramatically and turns around. He points to the
sky with the tip of his finger, “See those clouds. The weather is
changing. Cumulus clouds are forming. Tonight the forest will exhale its
sylvan soap bar perfume. Tomorrow the waters will be fresh and clear...
we have rains par-dessus les autres. Water washes water, not the muddy
turbidity of the Upper Amazon. Heavenly weather with the
blessing...” I do not hear any more; the two enter and disappear beyond
the portal. A scarlet macaw, red and yellow, makes its fabulous brush
stroke on the sky.
When the two reappear on the terrace in the evening,
near the upper gallery, the rain had already passed and, in front, two
children are bathing in Hell's Bayou in the line of vision of the statue
erected on the patio, “Splendor of Amazonia”, an allegory on latex extraction,
commissioned by Dona Iphigenia Vellarde in Paris in 1894.
“You have the good fortune to live among works of
art,” Ferreira says.
“Works? These?” Pierre stops short with beady
snake eyes. “The arts, my good man, corrupt the spirit and morals.
They are a heap of impurities. Only contact, direct relation with the
natural world, the forest …”
“You don't prefer the civilized world?”, Ferreira
interrupts.
“To the uncivilized world?”, (Pierre exults:) “The
expression of wickedness accumulated by culture, all this, isn't that entire
thing uncivilized? Look: I am transplanted here, at Manixi, Social
Democracy. See my dog Rousseau. I love him and for that he is
faithful. He protects me and for that I love him and feel protected and
loved. What does that mean? What is this dog?. What separates
the two worlds meets in him, the pure sentiments of the corrupted. You
believe in the purity of the heart, don't you?”
Ferreira looks at him as if he were looking at a
crazy person. I can see from where I am that he is dismayed. So to
calm him, he asks, “When is your son returning from Europe?”
As if he had heard nothing, Pierre continues
speaking, “Have you seen the ... bordered in pure gold ... Cattleya edorado in
the deepest recess of the forest? Do you know the famous, rare and
unmatched Cattleya superba?”
The two urchins are visible and audible, crying like
birds. They are in the line of sight of the statue on the terrace.
“Splendor of the Amazon” is an art-nouveau lady of white marble and she is
dancing with a basket over her shoulder; she represents fertility, wealth and
the abundance of latex. She is covered with earth and sprinkles of
latex. In her basket a live seedling of a rubber tree is planted; it is
already the length of a palm of the hand. Ferreira notices it. The
two are on the terrace. Pierre grasps the outer edge of the parapet; I
see the glint of his signet ring. The terrace is an old part of the construction.
Four caryatids stare at the Amazonian shades of green-yellow. The Amazona
festiva parrot squawks on its perch.
Abruptly, incomprehensibly, interrupting with
impetuosity and effulgence like Phoebus on the horizon – a tall, hardy, intense,
vigorous, marvelous Maacu Indian woman, like a goddess, emerges, appears,
explodes through the door with arm tattoos of red and blue; she is almost
naked, wrapped in a coat of silvery silk and in a brilliant blaze like the
sky. Spread out in her arms, she is carrying a round tray of gilded
silver, as if it were the sun itself, incandescent, impossible to look at,
thousands of megatons above what would be bearable, the coffee and liqueur
service of rose-colored Baccarat - a shock, Ferreira closes his eyes blinded by
the diamond brightness and she places the tray in front of him, almost in his
lap, on a table top of red-streaked marble placed there on a tripod of
embellished iron, feminine, in an offering gesture of French symbolism, a
banana tree branch, exotic bird of paradise plants, of straight petals in the
form of long birds with orange crests inspired by art nouveau, vivid and above
the balanced paradise between elegant impulses, between subtle meditations of
the node, of acrobatic sarugaku, air-borne – Ferreira is dizzy and fails to
understand the most beautiful of women, Maacu Amazons, pure bronze, Diana
leaving the Teatro Amazonas, a slightly sweet vision of the delights in the
sumptuousness of the panorama and in its contagion, in the intoxicant that
smells of pomegranate, inhamuí, panquilé, which might have come out of a bath
of roses, hair the fragrance of wind, strength, passion, clean and pure love of
a young being, twenty years old, irradiating freshness, luster, energy;
Ferreira sees her from his low cane chair, the strength, the savage color of
those long legs.
Maria Caxinauá, an Indian woman who seems as old as
the forest serves lunch. Still there, the lively Maacu woman exposes her arms
to the imagination of a glance. The silk accentuates and glides like
runny paste. Everything drips at this time of day. Listless, lazy,
sensual. The bayou brightens in invisible speed, in its oily flow.
Silence. Unctuous river. It is called “bayou” by geographical economy,
for its narrows, its hidden pass between two large silk cotton trees.
“Hell's” means “of the Numa”, from which it comes, of latex milk and
Indians. Concentrated wealth. Pierre Bataillon discovered that
bayou in 1876. Extraction in the Amazon was doubling every decade.
From 1821 to 1830 it was 320 tons. In the following decade it expanded to
2,314 tons. From '41 to '50, 4,693 tons. A big development came
from '51 to '60: 19,383 tons. From '71 to '80, 60,225 tons. After his
arrival: 110,048 tons! Up to that year Pierre managed to extract 20
thousand tons, saving up a fortune in pounds sterling, employing almost 500 men
who were spread out into an area into which several European countries would
fit. The Maacu looks. Ferreira feels a mortal shiver pass through him.
He feels cold at the hottest time of the day. Large mosquitos and
blood-sucking flies buzz in his ears. The buffalo gnats are
annoying. The heat is heavy, humid, sweet with genipap and honey.
He melts. Fantasies, day dreams, deliriums, reveries. This is Ferreira's
first trip into the interior. His father-in-law and he want the
plantation; they are preparing for the complicated bidding of a commercial
chess game. Ferreira looks tired from the voyage. Pierre puffs
smoke into the air. He is all caution and anticipation. A surprise
at any moment. Now, Pierre starts to talk about the Numa. Ferreira
goes from desire to apprehension. He looks with fright at the trees, as
if afraid a monster will appear. Pierre appears calm. He suppresses his
phantoms, legs crossed as in a Parisian cafe. Why doesn't that man
liquidate his fortune and return to Paris? Pierre, the unexpected.
His ambition is his antidote to the tedium of the Amazon. Provoking,
Ivete (as the Maacu woman was called, Ivete Romana) observes the young man from
afar. She, defiance and incitement. Ferreira coughs and arranges
himself in the chair. Ivete's eyes move with serpentine elasticity,
devastating and tactile. Ferreira recedes into his chair feeling
tipsy. Beyond the stone columns of the parapet the excessive panorama of
the stylized neo-rococo Amazon panel is unveiled, interlaced with tendrils and
offshoots. The forest tightens its embrace. But the young man
attempts to survive in the fullness of the amphitheater of the crowns of the
pre-columbian silk cotton trees. At Juriti Velho there is a tree 200 feet
high. The whole building is like a fortified castle, a capsule of the
civilization of European humanity. It is a place where juridical
erudition does not reach. As if betrayed, Pierre sees the possibility of
neutralizing the visitor. He wants to draw out the secret motive that
brought him here. He intuits menacing cordiality. He is wary in his
deliberations, conversation, narration. The urchins play on the moored
dugout. They hold their noses with two fingers and jump in
standing. Then they run along the shore. Shrill, incessant, like a
band of parakeets. Mundico, the oldest, is the son of Isaura, the cook at
the Palácio. She has two sons from different fathers. The second
son is not there. His name is Benito Botelho and he is in Manaus.
Benito was the greatest intellectual in the Amazons. As a boy, he was
stricken with smallpox; Benito was taken away by Frei Lothar who was fond of
him. He ended being brought up at the Vassourinha, the orphanage of Padre
Pereira, as Frei Lothar never remained long in Manaus. Flies buzz about
malignantly in the silence of the afternoon. The bayou weaves dizzily
between the trees. There is no one about. The trees at a
standstill. Profound. Immersed in green ecstasy, in the heat, in
eternity, in the fecundation of the late afternoon. The young jurist's
spirit is with the Indian woman. A macaw, the national bird, breaks the
silence of space and flits toward the other shore. It repeats its
screeching, proud of itself, its clamor and ostentation. A silent rower
appears at the bend of the river, salutes the Palácio and touches the liquid
lamina of the water's surface lightly with his oar. In the progression of
new incidents, a very handsome lion monkey appears. A very small
one. In the papaya tree, near the terrace. It begins to come
down. It jumps on the parapet. Looks at the motionless men
seated. Turns toward the trunk. Stops. Looks up, fearful of
the sky. Looks down, fearful of the ducks. Looks at me. The
monkey looks with its entire head, not only with the eyes. Then he
descends, very quickly hazarding the air, disappearing in the duck yard.
Now there is the odor of a matrinchão fish, smell of pepper and tucupi seasoning.
The air is so oxygenated that I become dizzy. Calmness falls. It
penetrates the pores. Vaporous, tranquilizing flavor. Stasis,
impassibility. A dark god is sleeping, in the unnamed, in the universal,
immersed, incomplete, prehistoric of a million years ago, when this was a
sea. We are almost 2,000 miles from Manaus. Gabriel Gonçalves da
Cunha had bought the Rio Jordão and the whole left bank of the Bom Jardim bayou
up to the São João bayou and an inlet of the Cruzeiro do Sul bayou. He
has isolated the Manixi Plantation. The price of Amazon rubber is rising
on the London stock exchange. Production of tires is increasing.
The Amazon, only producer of latex in the world. Rich Manaus copies
Paris. Businessmen get rich. The Teatro Amazonas show off its
crystal mirrors. Millionaires play cards with fingers weighed down in
diamonds, risking fortunes at the Hotel Cassina, at the Alcazar, the Eden, the
Casino Julieta. Tiles from Marseilles in the moonlight on the Rua dos
Remédios, on the Rua da Glória. Art nouveau architecture of the Ernest
Scholtz palace – then the Palácio Rio Negro, seat of the government. Wall
brackets, transoms, rain spouts. Intercolumniation. Corner,
lambrequim, scroll, capital, cornice. Architrave. Cleric's cap,
lattice, balcony, loft, jade, ringbase, wing, stipe. Enxalso, cinammon
pediment. Galilé. Little Manaus, big Paris! Shops, stores,
tobacconists, book stores, tailors, jewelers. Bissoc. Pastry.
Sugar, fruit, cream.
A la Ville de Paris, Au bon marché, Quartier du
temple, Villeroy's Closet for Women, Casa Louvre, Palais Royal Bookstore (in
the Rua Municipal, No. 85, the newest books), Universal Bookstore, Freitas
Agency, Casa Sorbonne (inside the Grand Hotel), the Bijou Confectioners,
the Progresso Bakery. Lanterns of morona stone and puraquequara. The
beautiful Villa Fany, total luxury. The Barés Wharf, the Provincial
Library (that was set on fire fraudulently to destroy Public Files in the back
rooms). The Student Craftsmen's building that gave its name to the
neighborhood. Amazon Steamship Navigation Co. A building imported
piece by piece from England: the Customs House set up there. Another, a
project of Gustavo Eiffel, of iron: the Municipal Market. Serviço
Telefônico serves the city. Electricity illuminates the streets of Manaus
at the beginning of the century, perhaps the first Brazilian city to have this
service. Sidewalks of the Praça São Sebastião of black and white
Portuguese stones in a wave design that allegorizes the “meeting of the waters”
of the Rio Negro and Upper Amazon (later imitated on the beach of
Copacabana). Electric Trolleys of the Manaus Tramways. People
consume Veuve Clicquot, truffles, champagne. Huntley & Palmers, Cross
& Blackwell. Cork, Pilsen, Bordeaux, cold cuts, Estrella Sierra
Cheese. Lobsters, Crystalized Guava Jam. Charteuse, Anisette.
Champagne Duc of Reims. Vermouth. Vichy Water. Milk from the Swiss
Alps. English coats and tails, H. J., pongee, tulle. Canes with gold
knobs. Top-hats, gloves, French perfumes, silk handkerchiefs.
Silver pistols and ivory handles. Victor Gramophones. Double-sided phonograph
records of Caruso. Wholesalers. The State of Amazonas participates
in the St. Louis Commercial Exhibition, in Missouri, and later in the Universal
Exhibition of Brussels, where it wins 32 gold medals, 39 silver, 70 bronze, 6
Diplomas of Honor and the 13 Grand Prizes. Manaus-Harbour.
Chessboard. Operas, operas, operas. Daily. Imported
prostitutes. The Miranda Correia Brewery.
Praça da Saudade. The Roadway, the Quay.
Syphilis. Malaria. Glasses of Labarraque quinine.
Cod-liver oil. Silva Araújo wine. Fermentation regulator.
Rose-colored pills. Coffee Beirão. Winchesters with butt of waxed
mahogany. Beggar's Asylum (built by the Commander). The Empress
Bridge, Big Waterfall Bayou. The Sawmill on Holy Spirit Bayou. Baths of
the Seven Pools. Buritizal. Games in the Parque Amazonense.
Departure at Barcelos. Night in Jirau. Wall of the Aleixo Leprosary.
In the recess - the Chalet. View of the Bomba d'Água. Travel. Steam Lines. Manaus-Belém, Manaus-Santa Isabel,
Manaus-Iquitos, Manaus-Marari, Manaus-Santo Antônio do Madeira,
Manaus-Belém-Baião. Gonçalves Dias in the Hotel Cassina. Coelho Neto in the small
palace of Epaminondas Street. Euclides of Cunha in the chalet of the
Villa Municipal. Amazonas
Comercial, O Impartial, Rio Negro, Jornal do Comércio. 126 ships operate
within Amazonia. Two-stack steamboats, small river steamers and barges. In 1896 the
Teatro Amazonas was inaugurated at a cost of 3.3 million dollars, the most
expensive and useless Pharaonic public work in the History of Brazil, no
expense spared and everything imported, with paneling, hundreds of Venetian
crystal chandeliers, columns of variegated marble, bronze statues signed by
great masters, beveled crystal mirrors, porcelain vases the height of a man,
Persian rugs – all of which disappeared in 1912 when the theater was emptied in
order to turn it into a rubber storage depot for an American company. At that
point, the treasury was buried in a debt of 10 million milréis: the Teatro
Amazonas cost the price of 5 thousand luxury homes. The dollar to three
milréis. For 300 thousand dollars the courthouse was built. And for 525
thousand dollars the Government's Palace was built, never finished. The
Theater cost 10 thousand lives. Yes: In 1919, 150 thousand immigrants had
already arrived in the Amazon. Rubber in those years was as important as
coffee. Amazonia exported 66 million dollars in rubber against 100
million dollars coffee from São Paulo state in the same period. In 1908
the oldest university of Brazil was founded in Manaus, with courses in Law (the
only to survive), Engineering, Obstetrics, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Agronomy,
Sciences and Letters. At that time 12 million French francs disappeared,
robbed during Constantino Nery's government. Manaos Improvements was
fraudulently and unnecessarily expropiated for 3.3 million dollars – the
price of the Teatro Amazons. Accumulation of corrupt extravagance is the
history of the Amazon.
That evening Antonio Ferreira was snoring in the
hammock and dreaming of large expanses of empty land, forests, secret places
where no civilized man had been – rivers, waterfalls, rocks, mountains, beyond,
beyond the horizon, undefinable, out there, beyond the emerald curtain and the
shade of the left bank of Hell's Bayou – Aurora, Itamaracá, bends of the Rio
Jordão, to the southeast, even to borderlands of Peru towards the Rio Pique
Yaco and fantastic, dazzling El Dorados...
He awoke. A light pressure on his left leg,
something alighted there like a feather in the middle of the splendor of his
sleep; it brushed his body with velvet. He saw the spider, furry and red,
about 6 inches in diameter, lethal, coming up his thigh, but then the Maacu
woman removed it with a piece of cloth, venomous – rare and menacing – a
type of tarantula, the acanthoscurria atrox! - it jumped onto the parapet,
turned on itself raised its front legs in an aggressive, protective attitude,
bristled and disappeared. To comfort him, the Maacu woman sat on the edge
of the hammock. She looked at him and laughed, stooping over his
chest. Ferreira took a hold of her head firmly and drew it towards
him. She neared with a muffled, wild moan. From the edge of the
roof an eagle took flight reaching the blue spaces. It was an uiraçu, a
harpy eagle.
“In '94 my son acquired the nanny Maria Caxinauá, an
Indian girl a little older than he, who was four years old at the time.
They grew up together. When the boy did anything naughty the girl was
punished for it instead.
Iphigenia hit hard but the Indian girl didn't whine; she didn't
cry. She didn't seem to feel pain. I don't trust Indians.
They are treacherous, cruel, vindictive, capable of revenge, even after
years. But Iphigenia would not listen to me, would not believe me.”
Pierre puffed out smoke before continuing, “Every
three years her parents came to get her on the pretext that she not forget her
tribe. She remained a month at their encampment and returned, skinny and
sick – her parents said she did not like being away from Zequinha...”
They were silent for a long while during which the
four chords of a night hawk were heard, coming out the darkness and silence of
the night. Antonio Ferreira inhaled some snuff. He had smooth,
combed hair parted in the middle connecting with long side whiskers which he
was caressing.
The music room was empty. There was little
furniture there, the baby grand Pleyel, a table, four chairs and the armoire
for the violins, closed. Pierre offered a cigar and said: “Until the year
the Numa showed up...”. That room was situated apart from the
Palácio. No one could enter, especially when Pierre was playing.
The two men stared at the table separating them. There was a carafe on
the table and two goblets. Pierre sighed. His aged eyes looked
troubled by his reflection on the remote past. His face was
elongated. He lifted his arms on high, remained silent and looked at the
other man in a vacant manner:
“The stories I am going to tell you are absurd; they don't deal with
human problems but with a different realm than ours.”
Ferreira made an effort to get a hold of the goblet
and drink. He was appreciating the luxury of the Baccarat when he heard
the following:
“In November of 1905, the Numa appeared and started
to hunt down the Caxinauá. They came every day. That had never
happened before, not the Numa, so close and aggressive. There was a
drought, low water. I had to take forceful measures. I gathered the
Caxinauá together at Quati and brought in armed men. Since becoming
docile, the Caxinauá were defenseless. They came and hid their
belongings. They are masters of this, in the art of safekeeping, of
hiding, of camouflage. They can make entire canoes disappear, burying
them under water that they disinter years later, even. Each Caxinauá
always has a hidden treasure.
Pierre nipped the end of his cigar. He propped
himself on the cushions of the Voltaire chair. Two candlesticks of five
movable bobeches each illuminated the paneling of the walls and softened the
glare of ivory silk in which the panels were painted. In a scene from the
18th century, a mythological figure was preparing to shoot an arrow.
Pierre sank into reflection.
“Do you know what happened then?” - the older man
asked.
He remained silent.
“A robbery,” he replied. “A small box was
stolen”.
He got up, stood up, got on his feet and walked,
solemnly to a chiffonier placed against the curtains. From there he
showed him a metal strongbox. “Like this one.” It was a medium size
travel chest. About 30 cubic centimeters and made with iron coating
separated by non-combustible substances. It was opened by an artistically
realized, filigree key.
“Were there jewels?”
“No,” the older man intercepted. “Iphigenia
kept money in there - pounds sterling and coins of 0.900 fine gold. It
was the only thing robbed that I was unable to find. After this I keep
all valuables in the big safe. I never got to the bottom of it; Iphigenia
always said Maria Caxinauá was at fault. They tied her to an anthill and
she almost died. But she confessed nothing. When my son found out,
he came to her defense. Even if I had continued the investigations and
ordered her to be tortured to death, she would have died without confessing
anything. Frightening!”
He coughed. He took the cup, leaned back
straight against the chair and straightened his neck with a jerk.
Ferreira, troubled, stirred and asked:
“Some servant? Someone could have become rich,
a spendthrift, showed signs of good fortune...”
It was as if the old man was at a megaparsec:
“No one. I couldn't have been any servant … it
was hardly a Caxinauá … the chest is here, it's been here all along, I'm
certain.”
“How do you know?” Ferreira asked, clutching the
string of his tie.
“Simply because of that. No one seemed to be
rich and the Caxinauá do not know the value of money. Besides, it is
impossible for a Caxinauá to live outside the tribe. They make up a
simbiotic people, a single organism, living, unique. They are not individual
beings. The individual is the people, the race. Because of that it
was só easy to pacify them. One Indian alone could not have stolen the
chest and fled to Manaus or Belem. Not a Caxinauá.”
Slowly the big door opened and the Caxinauá
appeared.
“Come here, my girl,” Pierre said to her. And
as the Indian girl come near, the old man frowned, looked straight into the
face of the girl and asked: “Do you know Maria Caxinauá? Did you see her
before?”
Her coarse long hair darkened her face like a mask
of death. Her pupils were bestowed with an incomprehensible white aura, a
frightful horror. Aquline nose, cunning. Dark, burnt and tarnished,
bronze skin crushed like paper. Dirty, long blue garment, torn on one
side, without a belt, creeping along the ground like a madwoman in an
asylum. Observed at a distance, she was the concentration of
hatred. Close up, she was fear, uncontrollable dread, eyes wide
open. Her wizened face indicated that she had lost all her teeth; her
eyebrows were thin. But that woman was not old! Suddenly she
revealed herself! “There is arrogance, contempt, defiance, a dangerous
look, venom in her face,” Ferreira thought, gripping the string of his
tie. Hostile, that silent and animal existence was concentrated in her,
reflected in her, like a snake. From that night on Ferreira feared
her. He saw an enemy, Because the Caxinauá was accumulated,
petrified revenge. All the innumerable multitude of Indians massacred
found their territory in her body. All those tortured, expelled,
exterminated by European humanity, plundered, deprived of their culture were
mapped there, in the physical and individual person of Maria Caxinauá.
Entire races were deprived, traumatized, dispossessed of their gods and their
wealth built up over centuries, consumed in hecatombs, liquidated
forever. Comtaminated with diseases, enslaved and corrupted, submitted to
slave labor that consumed millions of persons deprived of their subsistence
economy, tragically tranformed into proletarian masses – twenty million
indigenous people massacred in Brazil embodied there in the blind gesture of
Maria Caxinauá.
With tense hands, the Numa warrior turned around
abruptly and yelled a feline-like cry; the loud call was heard throughout the
forest on the arid ground; there was commotion of his blood-red eyes under
locks of hair and warlike shiver of his skin. His entire strength
increased and seemed to hurl itself with the fire he threw out and strewed into
the palm hut. His weapon of long shadow extended into the air and opened
the skull of a young Caxinauá who appeared on the side, hurling him to the
ground – his eyeball left the socket spit out on the ground like a rolling
boiled egg, a ball in the dust of the earth. He hurled a heavy rock on
the enemy who jumped up like a wounded and hunted tiger and he howled with torn
flesh, the voice of a thundering wretch. His face distorted with
hatred, his shoulders apart, he raised his arm with the heavy weapon and
advanced to kill like a winch raised aloft, the hull of an enormous ship pulled
from the bottom of the water, water dripping like the dribble of dark and
rotten mucus. Others screamed and ran. The fire spread wide, high,
tears and overcame the night air with its wings of fire like the opening of
butterflies. Great and inexplicable fear took possession of the Caxinauá
frightened by some God and death descended on every one and scattered them
into the fatal night of paralyzing ire, all strength and courage absent,
neutralized. Oh! She was completely burned, enveloped in flames, naked,
but she did not feel pain or fear. She disappeared toward the shade
expecting with empty hands the adversary pursuing her. Yes, he was
coming. And coming with the intent to kill in the darkness. In the
ominous bed of Hell's Bayou she searched for a stone, but she only bumped into
rotten cadavers of her Caxinauá brothers that the quantity of dark blood
buried. The Numa was coming to look for and seek her out in the
water. She had difficulty cleaning the caked blood in her eyes, which
made her vulnerable to the near and audible enemy searching for her weapon in
hand. For the enemy, his was the hour. Blood burnt her eyes and she
was unarmed. Silence. The enemy listened and waited for an
effective reaction, but did not know where she was, did not sense her and
proceeded in the dark. Then there was an interception by a Caxinauá
warrior who rushed in, cowardly fleeing, and was attacked. It was time to
get out of there as the two were arm and arm in combat to be killed and be
carried away by Hell's Bayou. Was she farther away than she
thought? Three hundred of her tribe's people exterminated. The fire
illuminated the forest and was seen from the Palácio. Wasn't she fit for
the sacrifice? Frei Lothar, who appeared suddenly, took her in. She
no longer looked at her face in a mirror. No one wanted her anymore, as a
woman
Pierre looked at the young man and coughed.
Sleep still permeated the thoughts of Antonio Ferreira.
“Do you know
Padre Pereira?”
“Yes,” he said.
Pierre Bataillon had the Amazonas Commercial in his
hands, the newspaper of Abraham Gadelha, the political adversay of Ferreira's
father-in-law. The young man, adjusting his tie, felt this as an
agression.
The older man, calmly, cordially, as if he did not
know that on the previous page the Commander was toasted with adjectives such
as “low life” and “thief”, said: “Fund-raising banquet of Padre Pereira for the
Vassourinha Orphanage and birthday party of my friend Juca de Neves. I'll
ask you for two favors: represent me at these symposia … the Events column says
of Ricardo Soares, Jr. ...”
“But look!”, Pierre interrupted himself, changing
his dry, dull tone, as if he were submerged, stuffed, cadaverized. The
young man looked at him – he looked pale, suddenly aged and seemed even
smaller.
“The wreck of the Bitar! I didn't know.
I hadn't read about it. Oh, mon Dieu!”
Since the disaster of the steamboat Izidoro Antunes,
he was preocupied with the frequent shipwrecks on the Amazon. He knew
them by heart: the Izidoro Antunes had made only a single voyage, it had just
come from England. Modern, comfortable, equipped with electric
lighting, it was full of merchandise when it sank. After this the Otero,
the Perseverance, the Prompto, the Macau, the Etna, the Colomy, the Julio de
Roque, the Waltin, the Mazaltob, the Ajudante (collided), the Manauense (rolled
over), the … - all under water, dragging with them people who disappeared into
those muddy and dark waters, ripe and with funereal murmurs, vague and
indifferent, covered with a veil of mud, dense and compact in the dissolution
of life's liquids, in the horizontality of those endless rivers stretched out
in the slow movement of time – elemental cadavers decomposed in the marshes of
water lilies, eaten by fish, listless, sunken in the dissolved material of the
briny surface.
Pierre was frightened to travel in those waters full
of sticks, logs, sandbanks, hardened clay blocks, rocks, hidden riverbank
ledges and whirlpools, eddies, beaches, overflow lakes, turbulence, ponds,
shoals, dead heads, depressions, ship skeletons, two-headed beaches, bends –
all obstacles and dangers of ordinary navigation, for ships of large and small
draft, motor boats, canoes, dugouts and wide sailing canoes, everything, the
whole mass of an infernal theory of dangers to avoid, bypass, be on the alert
for, defy, fear.
Suddenly the silence of death fell upon the whole
space of the Palácio, static as if the entire Amazon was immobilized over the
Marseilles tiles. The night hawk emitted its four octaves. In the
distance a fisherman shook his fishing rod in the water.
“One day,” Pierre said, “an official from Santarem
asked Bates on which side of the Amazon River the city of Paris was
located. He imagined that the entire universe was intersected by that
great river and all the cities had arisen on one bank or the other.”
“Are you expecting to return?” Ferreira asked.
“I don't know,” the older man replied. “I think
that I should some day.” And turning toward the young man with his
shoulders: “Do you know why I came here?”
“No,” Ferreira replied.
“For my health. I have to live in a warm
climate.”
The cry of the screech owl tore through the night;
it heralded death. Ferreira looked at the little man sitting there, while
rubber latex was at 308 pounds per ton. The year before it was at 374
pounds per ton. Modification of the price, however, would give it a jump
to 655 pounds per ton! But the fall would be abrupt; in 1921 it fell to
72 pounds per ton. Ten years later, in 1931, it would fall even more, it
went to 32 pounds per ton, less than half the price 109 years earlier, even
discounting the evolvement of prices and slight inflation. It was Death.
The decadence and death of the Amazon empire. From sole producer, Brazil
came to produce only one percent of world consumption. A figure
disappeared out the door vanishing in the arcade of the corridors. High
stucco walls, heavy decoration, baroque, fantastic, surreal luxury. A
trumpeter cried out in the duck garden. Those rooms interconnected in an
area of fifty-four hundred square feet. There were fifteen apartments
with painted baseboards, column balustrades and ceiling of gilded friezes, floors
of Brazilian teak and boxwood. The building's entrance opened into
a spacious hall at the end of which was the office of the colonel. At the
left, the door to the isolated music room. At the right was the alcove
and the circular gallery which wound around the back of the building and toward
the back of the music room, as well as the terrace which opened up from there
at a right angle. An iron grating closed off the duck garden.
Pierre invited me for coffee in an adjacent room served by a Caxinauá
boy. We sat on a pair of Voltaire chairs. A lost false viper shook
the leaves of roots where it curled up like a toad. It was the strong
coffee with which Pierre would stay awake all night, wandering like a ghost
through those large rooms semi-lit by candles and firefly lamps. Pierre
would play the piano in the middle of the night, read, walk around inside the
house at the end of the world. Nights were gloomy, lugubrious; they
enveloped the Palácio in demons that came out of the darkness. Pierre, indifferent,
walked and his steps were heard along the arcade of doors and windows. He
would look at paintings, follow the row of windows with double shutters down to
the ground, heavy, padded, transoms furnished with tulle pleated drapery.
In the shed was a pen for ducks who protected the Palácio from snakes, spiders
and scorpions. The steely surface of the water attempted to hinder an
invasion of ants. But still you could encounter a furry spider on top of
a bed, be surprised by a scorpion crossing below the dining table or come upon
a snake slithering along the empty space of a hallway. The doors and
windows were closed as night fell. They would start burning a mixture of
cow dung and tapir oil in censers scattered throughout the house to repel
insects; the odor permeated and marked the palace. Even so the building
was besieged at night by clouds of flying insects that wanted to enter
attracted by the lights. Ferreira felt dread. All the people,
servants, balata gum gatherers, wild rubber collectors, fishermen, drovers,
hunters and Indians seemed like demons. The house was frightful,
supernatural. The eyes of Paxiúba and Maria Caxinauá. The curtained
off halls, like in a theater, the sculptured furniture – demons and lions –
gloomy luxury. Pierre opened the doors of the armoire and took out a
carafe of Black Velvet. Ferreira drank keeping in view the Caxinauá
urchin standing up right in front of him. Pierre's fortune had its source
in the slave labor of the entire Caxinauá nation that produced the food
which Pierre exchanged for the harvest of the rubber tappers who seldom
received any money. The small figure of the man seemed painted at last on
its true facade.
* * *
Worn thin on the carpet, the embroidery plays with
the shadow and light coming from the door. Lights reverberate on the
surface of the mirror, fire from tapers in the iron candlesticks and large
candles that sing a lyrical moment. When the colonel plays they seem to
dance. Family remembrances bring me to a shore of the imagination.
My mother liked to go barefoot. Since leaving Patos on Christmas of 1897,
I had not thought of her with such tenderness. I've been here a long
time. My brother and uncle, dead, intrude along with disturbing stains on
the ground, with the death of everyone, everyone from Laurie Costa to Maria
burnt in the attack of the Numa, to the Caxinauá encampment. The solitude
of the empty room was veiled. An enigmatic sensation that the doors
were not closed tightly, that the horn-shaped hinges were open – the incised
parts of the stop in the door jamb on the double rabbet rubbing out the oblong
of the rims. I entered very cautiously. I crossed the empty space
on tiptoes. On the facing wall I discovered a door unknown to me, somehow
concealed in the decoration. I touched it with my finger, probing
it. I tried the hidden doorknob, the edge gave way and sounded like an
squeaky wheel. Chairs of dark wicker were scattered here and there; bats
sounded like wind, nervous, their strident squeaks shattered the night air,
tiny ones. I was on the threshold of the room. Someone was sleeping
in the torpor of the penumbra, half-illuminated by a lamp that was going
out. Startled, I saw there the figure of fallen twisted metal, the variegated,
disperse figure of a man sleeping, powerful, submerged, big, legs extended and
open on the easy chair. It was Paxiúba, frightening body, his large,
bronze, strange, curved member visible. Yes, he was sleeping the bloody
sleep of his dead victims.
“And where is Ribamar?” - I heard the voice of Dona
Iphigenia looking for me. I closed the door and followed to attend to
her. I was on call during the night.
“I am very lonely,” Pierre said taking leave of his
guest, “but my son will be returning. He is lonesome for Caxinauá and
Paxiúba,” he added with some irony. “They're friends, Paxiúba is his
bodyguard. Maria a second mother and lover. José wanted to take
them to Paris, but I managed to dissuade him from it. Good night, my friend.
Sleep well. Ivete should arrange a good bed for you,” he concluded,
serious, dignified, natural, extending a sincere hand to him.
The Juruá is a river of deceptive waters, yellow,
muddy; when leached they deposit three inches of thick sediment in the bottom
of a drinking glass. In these waters Pierre Bataillon and Iphigenia
Vellarde disappeared in 1910 when the launch Angelina wrecked.
Six: Julia
At the apogee of the price of rubber, it was quoted
on the London Stock Exchange at 655 pounds per ton, a speculative quote which
benefited the interests of British companies in the Orient. It was the
last year of the Amazon Empire. Subsequently, the Teatro Amazonas closed
its doors opening only once two years later for Villa-Lobos to give a cello
concert on June 12, 1912. Immediately after the tragedy, the junior
Bataillon arrived from Paris and received Antonio Ferreira on board: there he
sold the Manixi plantation, except for the Palácio, in a transaction that was
never made clear. As he always did, José left for Hell's Bayou without
setting foot in Manaus.
Pierre's son Zequinha was a handsome young man,
wild, educated, delicate, strong, Apollonian body with soft, golden tan skin,
mysterious, very dark almond-shaped eyes. His fine hair fluttered in the
air. To some, a half-Indian, to others a Parisian snob who used to go
deep into the forest with Paxiúba and his men in search of adventures, like the
time he forayed into the mountains of the Pique Yaco River in search of Numa,
without coming across any. He was not married and did not have a
girlfriend other than Maria Caxinauá. Paxiúba slept at his feet like a
dog. Maria bathed him. He was born in the middle of the river in
1890, on board the Adamastor, a birth foretold by shamans as that of a god
coming from a distant star named Thor. In 1854, Visconde de Mauá barred
foreign nations from sailing the Amazon and held out until his fall. The
Santa Maria de la Mar Dulce met up with the Adamastor a few months after José
was born and, to save him from malaria, which was decimating the children of
the area, he was taken and shipped with his mother via England to Strasbourg
where he was left with his uncle Levy, with whom he lived his infant years,
first on the Place Kleber No. 9, then above the Pharmacie du Dome until 1894
when he returned to Manixi. He stayed another three years before leaving
for Paris in '97 where he lived on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. He did
not return until he was 15 years of age, in 1905, shortly before the attack of
the Numa, which was in the middle of November. In 1906 he was back in
Paris for his studies.
After the massacre, Maria Caxinauá hid and stayed
for some time in a thicket of brush near the Palácio, totally alone. She
thought of dying and did not want to be seen anymore. Pierre had about
five hundred men in the vicinity, hunters, foresters, rubber tappers, balata
gatherers, freelance tappers, escorts, field workers, fishermen, laborers,
servants, housemaids. No one. No one saw her. To be invisible
when one wants to be is the same as being invisible. How we were easy
targets of hurled snakes, arrows, darts and blowguns. The blowgun
discharges a very small and fast dart into the air and is very precise and
lethal; it is poisoned with a type of curare made with uirari vine and venom
from snakes, flies, spiders and scorpions mixed together in a kind of
ritual. It paralyzes the nervous system and kills by asphyxiation.
Some Indians use snakes as weapons. A certain Othoniel das Neves, from
Juruá, famous for his cruelty and murders, died bitten by a rattlesnake found
under his pillow. Painted with special herbs, the Indians elude the best
hunting dogs. In the Numa massacre only charred bodies were found.
Almost dead, Maria had to be taken quickly to Manaus by Frei Lothar and
Zequinha. It was the worst war in the region up to then. After
that, Pierre Bataillon, who liked witty expressions, and to lift the morale of
his troops who were beginning to respect and fear the strength of the Numa
warriors' resistance, in spite of the difference in weapons they were using,
came to call the Indians “ new Ajuricabas”, a reference to the hero of the
Manau who in 1723 confronted and defeated the soldiers of the Portuguese crown
under the command of Manuel Braga.
“Now we're declaring war on the “Ajuricabas”, he
said to João Beleza, a hired assassin and perverse and cruel bandit who was his
war commander.
Ajuricaba lived on the Hiiaá river, at the left bank
of the Rio Negro between the Padauari and the Aujurá in the district of
Lamalonga. When he went to rescue his son, he fell into an ambush and was
taken prisoner by the Crown in 1729, which wanted him taken alive to torture
him with punishment and death. On the way Ajuricaba got loose from the
clasp which was fastening him and with manacled hands and feet started killing
Portuguese soldiers before suddenly hurling himself into the dark waters of the
Rio Negro which condemned him. Because of that the waters of this river
are sterile, there are hardly any fish in them. But soon after, Belchior
Mendes de Moraes went on a shooting rampage of 300 Indian villages, in a
sacrificial killing of twenty-eight thousand Indians on the shores of a river
which came to be known as the Rio Urubu. Artillerymen under the command of
a priest with a pious name – Father José dos Inocentes, later the name of a
street in the red-light district of Manaus – dispersed contaminated clothing
that disseminated an epidemic that devastated forty thousand Indians with
smallpox, an infectious, contagious disease whose virulence rots the body still
alive with eruptions of pus and rachialgia, papules, pustules, blindness and
the agony of a slow bacteriological death; the corpses are devoured by flies,
gnats, giant mosquitos, matuca flies, beetles, rove beetles, horseflies,
catuqui gnats, wasps, suvelas, venomous beetles and mainly ants.
Man-eating umbrella ants can devour a cadaver in twenty minutes. On the
construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad in 1908, corpses were spread out on
the road to be buried (30,430 workmen interned in the Candelaria Hospital) and
when the locomotive returned there were only dry bones, cleaned and eaten by
umbrella ants. Also, fire ants, swarm ants, stinging ants, manhura ants,
sauba ants, red-brown ants, worker ants, tree ants, tracuá ants and the worst,
the tucandera ant, furry, enormous, poisonous, a single bite is all it takes to
kill a man, with acute pain and fever – and it was used by the Indians in the
male initiations of boys, who had to stick their arm in a gourd full of
tucanderas and endure to prove they were men. And the leaf cutting ant,
the sauba, the warrior ant and the army ant. Von Martius describes whole
populations fleeing from ants. Sugar ants could make an army retreat!
A week after the death of the wife of the rubber
tapper Laurie Costa and immediately right after the massacre of the Caxinauá
village by Numa warriors, Pierre Bataillon formed a military unit under the
command of João Beleza to confront the invasion. Then regulars began to
march in pursuit of the enemy. The possibility of a frontal attack by the
Numa was not dismissed and an emergency drill was carried out since the
majority of the men had never been under fire; they were north-easterners who
swore by the success of their knives. The Manixi garrison had about 150
men armed with 45-caliber English Webley II revolvers and Winchester 94
American repeating rifles of eight 44-caliber cartridges. They were
dressed in boots, bandoliers, rawhide breeches and vests to withstand thorns
and snakes. Equipment followed on mules and canoes. Recruits, armed
men, swift Caingangue bushmen determined the location of the Numa camp and
active troops advanced quickly in barges attacking repeatedly in rapid
incursions and achieved significant victories, killing some Indians and keeping
the Numa under fire inside the forest. But the Numa fled and disappeared.
João Beleza, who was lame, still pursued and sought
them out for a week, but only caught up with old people and women carrying children
who could not run and were immediately executed. Lock, stock and barrell,
they were all killed thus in cold blood crushing the heads of the children who
were running from the discharge of bullets.
One day João Beleza, who was camped in the evening
on the shores of the Pique Yaco river to wait the Acre with new provisions and
as the day began to dawn, ordered commandos to proceed forward along the river
advancing slowly with mules and canoes that were carrying heavy combat
equipment, when a white-skinned man named Julio, who was walking ahead, stopped
and, cocking his rifle, lifted to take aim, fired a shot that echoed in the
vast Amazon atmosphere. Then, a scream of a woman in agony emanated from
a thicket of brush; she went running toward the forest; she was carrying
something, a kind of ball that she was holding with both arms to her breast,
hiding it from the pointed rifles of pursuers ready to shoot. She ran
quickly until up ahead she fell stretched out on the ground, dead by the barrel
of João Beleza himself. João Beleza cut her down in the space between her
hiding place on the water's edge and the border of the forest. But the
Indian woman, upon the impact of the 44-caliber bullet that crushed her ribs
and shoulder, let go of that ball wrapped in straw from her arms onto the
ground from where it went rolling down toward the river.
It was a baby girl. A new born that the Indian
had just delivered. João Beleza took it and held in the air, saw that it
was a girl and lifting her up said, “You will be called Julia!” - and she was
placed in a fiber hunting bag between the bullet cartridges on a
raincoat. When the commando returned to Manixi, they carried her to the
shack of João Beleza, who wanted her to bring up.
Oh, I remember that little girl, how I remember
her! From when she was a tiny infant, a child barely two feet in height
and different in everything – she never cried or whimpered, she did not talk or
make any noise whatsoever. No. She was not happy or sad, just a
being, a being who observed, a mysterious being who looked without fear or
terror, as if she saw nothing with her dark enigmatic eyes. Yes, that was
Julia, I neither invent nor lie – she did not get sick, beg for food, and
stayed motionless in a corner, without moving, not requiring care, growing up,
growing up strange and mute as if she knew what would happen. When she
was still a little girl, a piranha from Lake Quati hollowed out a spherical
piece of her thigh, tearing away a chunk of soft flesh. Julia just
laughed and laughed, “hee, hee,” she kept laughing under her breath, as if the
wound gave her pleasure.
João Beleza treated her like a daughter. Years
later, Julia prepared meals for him, cleaned the shack, took care of the
animals and tamed them. And she must have been an extraordinary lover as
João Beleza always slept with her.
Seven: Disappearance
The reader is not going to believe what I am going to relate, as I have
seen wonders that even now surprise me. How, not returning to Paris to
finish his studies, José Bataillon (he would be twenty-eight years old in 1918)
remained on Hell's Bayou and led a strange life, by whimsy, removed from normal
customs and expectations; the tappers withdrew several leagues from the
Palácio, next to the Caxinauá and what remained of them within the boundaries
of Amazonia. Let us now descend into this unknown world.
Apart from Maria Caxinauá, at Manixi there now lived
the strapling caboclo Paxiúba, the boy Mundico and his mother, the cook at the
Palácio, Isaura Botelho (the mother of Benito Botelho who was living in Manaus,
taken, as I said, by Frei Lothar and then left in the care of Padre Pereira at
the Vassourinha orphanage). I, Ribamar de Souza, also stayed on at the
Palácio, still a young man, having come from Patos in search of my brother
Antonio and our uncle Genaro – now both dead. There was as well the
Indian Arimoque, whose fantastic stories still spread throughout the region
even today. The lame João Beleza and some men of the guard stayed at the
big shed at a certain distance. The Maacu Ivete was married to Antonio
Ferreira and lived in Manaus, - Ferreira separated from Glorinha “the Dullard”,
daughter of Commander Gabriel Gonçalves da Cunha, and was frequently mentioned
in the social chronicle of the Amazonas Comercial with a certain irony.
The proprietor of the newspaper, Abraão Gadelha, a political enemy of the
Commander, had been on the brink of ruin but was saved by the intervention of
Dona Constança das Neves, wife of Juca das Neves who disbursed a fortune in
social works.
But let's not waste time.
When the urutu viper bites, it causes severe pain
and the flesh swells up; it becomes a dark purple until appearance of
hemorrhaging and death. Now the rattlesnake bite attacks the central
nervous system, the pain goes away, vision becomes blurry, the victim slowly
becomes blind and starts to lose movement in the body, at first the fingers and
toes. Then come pains in the neck, ever stronger, paralysis will ensue,
the death process will be seen to progress from the extremities to the center,
the body becoming rigid, hard, death comes with clammy rigidity, by
asphyxiation when the diaphragm hardens. Death conquers the body.
The coral snake, like a jeweler's creation, is beautiful, red-yellow, brilliant
colors and short fangs but rarely bites. This beauty should not delude
since biting, it kills. But the worst of all is the bushmaster, large,
aggressive, strong and, unlike the others, it comes on the attack. It
contains a good quantity of venom and remains in ambush on the dark edges of
rivers and lakes.
But, reader, we continue silent, alone.
So from what I could gather from newspapers of the
time and letters of those close to him, the disappearance of Zequinha Bataillon
on the shores of Hell's Bayou occurred in January of 1912. If this was
not a work of fiction I could cite in footnotes at the bottom of the page the
sources from where I obtained such information. But the disappearance of
the son of Pierre Bataillon, a man who lived from the riches in the Alto Juruá,
remains shrouded in such mystery, an event forever mythologized in the popular
imagination of Amazonia and Acre, and all the hypotheses raised then could not
justify, nor explain, at least for me, the reason why I later had recourse to
those alternative sources that I had the good fortune to come across, sources
still alive, testimony of the main persons involved that I must omit,
unfortunately, but which ingenious readers may soon discover if they know my
family. In the meantime I know and I said it before that this is merely a
work of fiction and as such mendacious, among the several which exist in the
literature of the Amazon, but a surprise awaits the reader, in spite of this,
by what the thread of destiny will reveal. All the facts disclosed here
were significant realities and actually happened for my imagination and, if not
exactly as I describe them, perhaps they would be even more extraordinary if it
was not I who were writing them in the passages of the sections of the
composition of this complex narrative.
Seven: Disappearance
The reader is not going to believe what I am going to relate, as I have
seen wonders that even now surprise me. How, not returning to Paris to
finish his studies, José Bataillon (he would be twenty-eight years old in 1918)
remained on Hell's Bayou and led a strange life, by whimsy, removed from normal
customs and expectations; the tappers withdrew several leagues from the
Palácio, next to the Caxinauá and what remained of them within the boundaries
of Amazonia. Let us now descend into this unknown world.
Apart from Maria Caxinauá, at Manixi there now lived
the strapling caboclo Paxiúba, the boy Mundico and his mother, the cook at the
Palácio, Isaura Botelho (the mother of Benito Botelho who was living in Manaus,
taken, as I said, by Frei Lothar and then left in the care of Padre Pereira at
the Vassourinha orphanage). I, Ribamar de Souza, also stayed on at the
Palácio, still a young man, having come from Patos in search of my brother
Antonio and our uncle Genaro – now both dead. There was as well the Indian
Arimoque, whose fantastic stories still spread throughout the region even
today. The lame João Beleza and some men of the guard stayed at the big
shed at a certain distance. The Maacu Ivete was married to Antonio
Ferreira and lived in Manaus, - Ferreira separated from Glorinha “the Dullard”,
daughter of Commander Gabriel Gonçalves da Cunha, and was frequently mentioned
in the social chronicle of the Amazonas Comercial with a certain irony.
The proprietor of the newspaper, Abraão Gadelha, a political enemy of the
Commander, had been on the brink of ruin but was saved by the intervention of
Dona Constança das Neves, wife of Juca das Neves who disbursed a fortune in
social works.
But let's not waste time.
When the urutu viper bites, it causes severe pain
and the flesh swells up; it becomes a dark purple until appearance of
hemorrhaging and death. Now the rattlesnake bite attacks the central
nervous system, the pain goes away, vision becomes blurry, the victim slowly
becomes blind and starts to lose movement in the body, at first the fingers and
toes. Then come pains in the neck, ever stronger, paralysis will ensue,
the death process will be seen to progress from the extremities to the center,
the body becoming rigid, hard, death comes with clammy rigidity, by
asphyxiation when the diaphragm hardens. Death conquers the body.
The coral snake, like a jeweler's creation, is beautiful, red-yellow, brilliant
colors and short fangs but rarely bites. This beauty should not delude
since biting, it kills. But the worst of all is the bushmaster, large,
aggressive, strong and, unlike the others, it comes on the attack. It
contains a good quantity of venom and remains in ambush on the dark edges of
rivers and lakes.
But, reader, we continue silent, alone.
So from what I could gather from newspapers of the
time and letters of those close to him, the disappearance of Zequinha Bataillon
on the shores of Hell's Bayou occurred in January of 1912. If this was
not a work of fiction I could cite in footnotes at the bottom of the page the
sources from where I obtained such information. But the disappearance of
the son of Pierre Bataillon, a man who lived from the riches in the Alto Juruá,
remains shrouded in such mystery, an event forever mythologized in the popular
imagination of Amazonia and Acre, and all the hypotheses raised then could not
justify, nor explain, at least for me, the reason why I later had recourse to
those alternative sources that I had the good fortune to come across, sources
still alive, testimony of the main persons involved that I must omit,
unfortunately, but which ingenious readers may soon discover if they know my
family. In the meantime I know and I said it before that this is merely a
work of fiction and as such mendacious, among the several which exist in the
literature of the Amazon, but a surprise awaits the reader, in spite of this,
by what the thread of destiny will reveal. All the facts disclosed here
were significant realities and actually happened for my imagination and, if not
exactly as I describe them, perhaps they would be even more extraordinary if it
was not I who were writing them in the passages of the sections of the
composition of this complex narrative.
Eight: Rats
We come to the point in this road where I should
state that, at a certain time, I remember well seeing a dark streak between the
floorboards. It was something that went by like a moving, dark straight
line. A cinematographic dash, continuous. Then it looked like a
straight, tiny snake infiltrating itself between the cracks of the worn-out
structure, something passed through time, traveled across the world, flowing as
if it were gliding to bore and hollow out the earth. Then it appeared as
a larger body, a solid body – an end, a tail. Indeed, it was the tail of
a rat.
Perhaps a big rat came out of there ahead of me from
its rats nest. Maybe. Ratania of Pará. Maybe a large rat, an
enormous rat, like a water rat, a swamp rat, gnawing, chewing under ground,
eating away husks, nibbling and gnawing on crusts, consuming, devouring, in
constant mastication. Or more. Or the black back, or dark gray,
with a tail nearly six inches long, leather, tail of leather and a field mouse,
murids – and behind, others are coming, house mice, small rats, and another
black rat with a bristly coat, a rather fat mouse, maggot mouse, spiny mouse,
palm mouse, spring mouse and more. More. And there were many more
rats entering the big shed, vermin, varmints, tens, hundreds, thousands –
Manixi was being consumed by rats and not only at night but even at any time of
the day.
I am telling that this happened in those years,
later, as I witnessed the process of decline and death of Manixi.
To describe what I saw then, I will say that rats, daring, voracious, famished,
were multiplying, aggressively. All the earnest efforts of João Beleza,
who was managing the property, all his struggle against the rats furthered
nothing, the rats did not disappear and they increased day by day; it was like
there was nothing that would rid us of them, as even cats were unsuccessful;
the cats could do nothing, they ended up dead, corpses of cats pillaged and
eaten by hungry rats, avid, manifold, as if it were the last judgment.
Taken over by his fury, João Beleza got a boa
constrictor to frighten them, the rats, and rid the big shed of them, but the
snake disappeared and then the trader Saraiva Marques, a man the worth of many
men, showed up; he recommended and sold João Beleza a rat poison having a base
of Prussian green arsenic. João Beleza proceeded thus to feed the rats
every night serving them food in a large pan. The rats were eating a
puree of manioc for days, each time more and more until they were sated and on
the last day they ate the poisoned puree.
Julia was laughing. She was the first to make
known their demise. She smiled then, and guffawed, high pitched,
nervously, “hee, hee, hee”, deliriously; the rats were dying in front of
her. She watched them die with an amiable interest, one by one, and
looked upon them with affection; Julia dealt with them, crazed and enraptured,
saw them die in the light of day, touched them, nestfuls here and there, on the
bank of Hell's Bayou she started to laugh outright – the rats seeming to
decorate everything, a collar of dead rats lining the water's edge, and there
were tens and hundreds and thousands of dead rats; Julia laughing at those
moribund beings, she took hold of them by the tail, speaking tenderly; she
showed them off and bundling them together, laughing, she threw them into the
condemned waters of Hell's Bayou.
Afterwards there was a strange peace at the Manixi
plantation.
It came about that João Beleza woke up sick.
He had colic; he went to the latrine but could not
defecate, his bowels were burning inside him.
He spent the day like that and ate the soup that
Julia gave him. When night fell he was worse, his stomach swelled even
more and his arms and legs were falling asleep; they became cold. His
vision started to become blurry and darkening; he was dying slowly with pain
and putrefaction, since Julia had poisoned him with the rat bait arsenic and on
the following day he was completely dead, indeed.
For the first time ever, Julia started to cry.
Julia started to cry, and she cried clasping her hands; she cried to the sky
and she poured out tears made tender by her immense misfortune.
So it was that she left, without anyone seeing her, and disappeared into
the forest without allowing anyone to come near her, like an enchanted being.
No one heard anything of her again. No one. She was a young woman
when this happened some years later. I don't know exactly when, I just
don't know, no, don't know...
Nine: Frei Lothar
The seated
figure, waiting for a tambaqui fish to be baked and served on a banana leaf,
which would be reinforcement to his heart and stomach, was rendered sadder by
the shade of the kapok tree. It was the first substantial meal he
would be eating for the two days in which he had been traveling. Frei
Lothar felt tired and reflected on his life and misfortunes like the one he had
just endured. He was still gasping, upset by the
calamity. He felt a certain obscure fragility, old age at the least,
and so he knew that the appointment of his days in Amazonia was coming to the
end and that now he would have to abandon everything, retire and
die. Coming by canoe through a channel of the Numa Slough, he was
passing over a floating island of tea wort when the canoe tore into a kind of
moving fabric, a horrible carpet in the shape of a map of Brazil formed by
crackling and armed yellow scorpions, in an area of several square yards; they
were advancing, one on top of the other, crossing the river in
migration. A caboclo started to shout and the canoe almost overturned.
“Quick!”, the
padre commanded.
But already the
scorpions threatened to climb on board and Frei Lothar, lighting a fire with
the newspapers he was bringing to the judge in Calama, filling the barque with
flames and getting burnt all over, exclaimed, “Oh, my Amazon!, God is great but
the forest is greater and I am not the same.”
Beginning to
recover strength, he was waiting to depart after lunch on the Barão do Juruá,
now owned by Antonio Ferreira, as was everything else there. But
Ferreira had gotten a bad deal; the price of rubber was declining more and more
from what it had been a hundred years before, as the Brother had seen on the
trip he made this month to the Rio Machado – rubber tappers decimated by fever,
ruined by the crash, unemployed since rubber from Ceylon, without microcyclus,
supplanted production in the Amazon; thousands of tappers witnessed the
permanent end of the gigantic empire, in which vast fortunes made overnight
disappeared and the Amazon returned to what it had been before 1850: hell
entrenched in an economic crisis that lasted a half century and killed
thousands.
There were
still a few places where Frei Lothar could stand to go and Manixi was one of
these. The brother had lost his faith, spoke coarsely, spit on the ground,
went around armed, was cross and smelled bad. The Rio Machado
dazzled him, seduced him, its green water running over emeralds, strange
country of a strange world where one only met with adventurers and Indians: the
sparrow-hawks, the macaws, the bobtails, the shelf fungi, wild, savage,
indomitable, hidden in the high and shady forest. It was paradise,
it was hell, and Frei Lothar loved it; he could not live without those trips,
adventures in search of the unknown. But the worst trip he made was
in 1908, when Frei Lothar, in a caravan carrying rubber latex from Cruzeiro do
Sul to the Cocame plantation, from the Rio Juruá to the Rio Tarauacá, crossed
the Manixi plantation, crossing the Rio Gregório, the Acurauá, proceeding on a
rough trail over a distance of two hundred miles. At that time,
however, Frei Lothar was young and at his hardiest.
Not much time
had passed when, with sandals sinking in the muddy clay, he was watching the
loading of the barge that the Barão do Juruá would be pulling to Manaus from
the Rio Jordão. His old cassock stank, as it was soaked with
sweat. Sweat dripped upon much older sweat drenching the
patches. Under a big, old and ill-fated black umbrella, the friar
looked ridiculous on the steep river bank, a strange type, exotic, on the edge,
in the greatest difficulty. The Barão do Juruá was being loaded and
the friar debarked for lunch, unsteady, in need of terra firma and an escape
from the heat, his feet sank in the soft mud. He was clambering up
the slippery ladder of the bank with difficulty when the first dogs
appeared. At first, there were two that came down the ladder in a
fury. Then others came and Frei Lothar eventually found himself
surrounded by dogs and was using the cross of his rosary to defend himself. The
children and men were laughing – the old good-for-nothing. Some of
them owed their life to him. But Fernando Fialho, the harbormaster,
showed up suddenly and rescued him. Fialho was busy loading jute,
the new commodity of the region, on its way to Manaus. It seemed
that Frei Lothar could not board because the stevedores had taken the gangplank
away and, strong and squat, they were going back and forth on it weighed down
by their loads so that they were sinking into the bank. Frei Lothar
looked at the muddy water that dirtied his sandals. Boys had gone
down the ladder. They had not even asked for his
benediction. It was said that he liked little boys, which was a
lie. The boys jumped into the turbid water near
him. Water sprayed, sparkling. They were near to giving
the missionary a bath. Frei Lothar did not protest because he was
ill, with the illness of old age, without strength, without courage, without
nerves, without vitality, without spirit, without faith. He looked
upon all this with compassion, sweat and impatience. It was truly
satisfying – that splashing which refreshed him. If he could he
would have taken off his smelly cassock and happily submerge himself in the
water. All these events blended together for Frei Lothar: the scorpions,
the dogs, the dousing, illness, old age, calumny. The
end. Annihilation. Death. His legs trembling,
Frei Lothar was on the point of fainting in the heat. Miserable
dogs! Miserable urchins! Miserable
life! Evening began to fall and night was approaching. The Barão
do Juruá was going to sail, finally, empty – a blessing that Antonio Ferreira
forbade it to carry passengers. No, it was not true that the
world was against him. Just the day before he had been treated
well. Ferriera tolerated the old padre who administered medicine to
people on the plantations. The Barão do
Juruá and everything that belonged to the Bataillon empire was the
property of Antonio Ferriera. The Barão was going empty,
the friar would travel in peace, in comfort. He had known trips in
vessels full of pigs and hammocks, stinking of excrement and putrid
fish. The padre's neck was burning with the heat, sweat was pouring
and was rushing into his chest. How easily those men lifted and loaded
the heavy bales! Oh, youth, youth! Ah, the strength of
their arms! Frei Lothar had come from Tarauacá, which he still
called Villa Seabra, had crossed on foot the arduous São Luis slough and the
São Joaquim, by way of Universo, Santa Luzia, Pacujá, he came by canoe by that
hidden channel. Now, no... He was no longer up to
it. Let him prepare to die. But Frei Lothar did not want
to die, he had spent his life fighting death. He would end up sunk
in a hammock in Manaus in the parish of Aparecida in the midst of wretched
charity. Well no, that was not certain. He would like to
die in peace or return to Europe, a dream that dissipated, as he was
poor. Forty years in the depths of this hell, forgotten, diminished,
lost in the jungle. Would he know how to live far away from this
savage world? How would he be able to get to Europe, to Strasbourg,
his native city? He had done everything that had to be done, fought
off wild animals and fevers, said masses among the Indians, baptized
illegitimate urchins on river banks. What more? Would
they still want him? As he could no longer ride horseback due to
sciatica, he had to live on foot, bent over by the weight of years and
arthritis – my God! - his entire life most sad, wasted, among serpents,
vilified, chased by dogs … a difficult world! And within the Church,
Frei Lothar only saw the struggle for power! He had saved the lives
of thousands of men and was accused of illegitimately practicing
medicine! The families of Manaus had nothing to do with him as he
had a bad reputation and bad character. He spit on the ground and
used vulgar language. No, he received nothing in exchange, he never
had money, never had a place to live, never flattered the powerful, never
tolerated them, always irritated them. After working forty years he
only reaped enemies. And the heat and mosquitos, the suffocating
nights. He had forged his way into impenetrable forests full of
snakes, spiders and scorpions. And how did they acknowledge
him? With malicious gossip, with dragging his name through the
mud. Those scoundrels could not understand his life among the
Indians as other than for some sordid motive born from their sick
imaginations. No one believed that he had labored in that hell for
forty years in exchange for nothing. This ate at his soul. There
were letters from superiors with accusations, the Provincial came with rumors …
Ah, let them take him from there so he would be gone forever – if they killed
him they would be doing him a big favor! … He was superfluous in that world; he
would certainly like to die to oblige the parish priest who detested
him. No one liked that ugly man who only wore the habit of a
padre. His rough and weary voice, his crude and strong hands, his
fierce expression. Frei Lothar hated the ruling class, hated religion
and the faith; rather for him it was medicine and practice. He did
not talk of pious matters, scratched his balls, prayed unwillingly, was
irreverent, laconic, frank, aggressive, gruff with the authorities, primitive
and rude. Frei Lothar was an irritated soldier in Amazonia, God's
officer, armed.
The night was
quite dark when the barge was fully loaded.
The plank was
transferred to the Barão which was already stirring and near
departure. Frei Lothar carefully climbed on board and went to his
cabin where he took a bath before dinner.
Then, clean and
sated after his dinner, he was in a better
mood. The Barão continued its journey in the middle of
the night – risky, but as could be expected Ferreira wanted the boat in Manaus
right away. The sound of the engines did not bother him, he was
resigned to it. Frei Lothar went up towards the stern in the dark to
a sort of terrace. He was alone. The wind began to feel
good to him, that wind had a delicate scent, an atmosphere; he remained looking
out at the dark night while sailing downstream between the forms of
shadows. It was as he always felt – a passenger in the
world. He never stopped, here today, gone tomorrow... He thought of
the man he had been tending in Villa Seabra. That man was about to
die … What is death? What is faith? Many men had died in
his arms and he could do nothing. What was death? His
faith lost long ago. Let the Provincial get angry! What
Frei Lothar saw and observed his whole life – it was not God: it was suffering,
pain and death, misery and desolation. Frei Lothar got up with
effort and left to go to his cabin from which he emerged with his
violin. He sat down. He would practice until sleep
came. It was Bach's Second Partita that he knew by heart but he
never succeeded in overcoming certain difficulties. He played
without the score. He practiced without a score, in the dark, in the
fleeting wind. Alone. Without a score and without light,
without anyone. Oh! It was thus in the
Amazon. The Amazon did not have a score, light or
anyone. The Amazon was an immense plain of misery. The
economic depression hovered in its monstrous silence. The Partita
came out rather well from his old, arthritic fingers. He never had
time to practice, never had the conditions, the leisure. He traveled
with his violin in ships and canoes, in channels and pools, and almost lost the
violin with the scorpions: it was a valuable violin and symbolized what he had
never been. A bad padre, a bad doctor, a bad
violinist. He had never done anything well. Nothing
complete. Now he was old, weak, having little faith, little
knowledge, little technique. “Oh, worse than death is
mediocrity!”, thought Frei Lothar; the violin moaned, litanies,
recitations, reflections. He attended the sick without resources;
said masses without passion; and now played the Partitia
badly. Without remedies, without scores, without
know-how. Frei Lothar played with imagination. The violin
was a Guarnerius. It was a present from Juca de Neves, one of the
few men with whom Frei Lothar was on terms of friendship. Actually,
a Guarnerius is not an imitation. It is a refinement of a
Stradavarius and much more resonant, appropriate for concert halls and with
large orchestras, whereas Strads were for suited for chamber
music. Aided by inspiration the Partita came out quite
well. The Barão continued on in the middle of the
night. Suddenly, the friar recalled the Brahms Double Concerto –
what beauty! - and he modified one of the sections of the Partita with the
violin part from that other work. All was unease and sublimity in
the Double Concerto. He imagined himself surrounded by the
orchestra, remembered his dreams of becoming a musician, and not a priest; he
immersed himself in the concerto, hearing the cello and the entire big
orchestra. He saw full galleries from which triumph burst forth, the
applause, all that far away from the Amazon, far away from death. He
was elevated by his daydream. Why? Nothing was left of
the old mysticism. Why? He played Brahms plying his way
through the Amazon forest. Night was at its height and the Amazon
sky suddenly became transparent and clear, covered with stars that sparkled,
and everything appeared to him as of one nature, in a whole in which he did not
exist but was integrated in a totality – and Frei Lothar stopped playing, ran
to the ship's rail with tears in his eyes and suddenly saw, ecstatic, immensity
and eternity appearing suddenly there before him, approaching and arriving to
him, wide, entering through his eyes, his ears, and everything was one
Immeasurable... - and he, one with it, eternal, gave a shout and felt
incomprehensibly happy.
Ten: Lost
Day was
breaking when the Caxinauá woman arrived there. Large shoals of
sardines were passing under the liquid surface of the river. She got
to the lake across a splendid labyrinth of channels and bayous. Stagnant
waters, gloomy, lost crossing of sealed byways, the Quati lake in the middle of
marshes on the penumbra of the low water line, channels going through branches,
hidden. Beyond, the horrible Mucura slough.
Maria
Caxinauá lived right on Fedegoso Point on Cuco Beach where they said Zequinha
Bataillon had disappeared. She would not leave that place since the
disappearance of the boss's son. They said she was expecting him to
return.
At that time
Manixi plantation was in distress, unproductive. Ferreira himself
had not appeared there for two years and the headquarters, since the death of
Captain João Beleza, was under the command of a certain Ribamar
(d'Aguirre) de Souza, a native of Patos, Pernambuco, as related in the first
chapter of this narrative.
The
Caxinauá woman advanced alone among the gigantic roots. One
could say lost, quiet among the large prehistoric trees, in the marsh, among
water hyacinths, caimans, clumps of tonka bean trees, under murity palms,
licania trees. Her oar cut the water without a sound; the canoe glided
along in the dead side of the world.
She arrived at
a clump of arum. She caught sight of black vultures on
high. Under the fabric of the water fish could be seen, indolent,
immersed in a dreamy sleep in the spillway of the lake.
She was in no
hurry. She took off her clothes and entered into the water, in the
heavy humidity, stepping on the smooth-stoned bottom, which she recognized by
the end of the submerged white stone.
Anyone who saw
her would have seen a beautiful woman. Her face, neck and shoulders
blighted, burnt – the tortured skin, burnt in the Numa's attack. But
from her breast on down she was beautiful and unharmed.
She glanced at
the shores. Her ancestors had lived there. She was among
her own there. The Caxinauá loved to visit that historic
site. There was no trace of the past; the forest had triumphed.
Suddenly she
sensed danger.
She felt at
once that, from inside, deep in the brush, something menacing was
approaching. She knew it was coming very quickly – there had not
been any indication of anything and she got out of the water in a flash.
But it was too
late: she was seized by enormous hands, enormous arms of a monstrous being,
from behind, and she could smell the aroma of tonka bean and the strong warmth
of that body; she knew immediately who it was, that she would be another one of
the Paxiuba the Mules' victims. She summed up the situation: one of
the Mule's arms could break her neck, she was starting to suffocate, she understood
his insurmountable, savage animal strength. She remained
motionless. She let herself be lifted. She knew what he
wanted. The monster's body trembled with pleasure, it was hot,
desire grazed along the back side of the Indian woman, heaving like a dog.
She saw that he
would not leave her alive. She knew she would get her revenge if she
escaped alive. But Paxiuba now tried other means, he tumbled over
with her on the grass and, strangely, he took his pleasure, right there,
howling while finishing himself off like a furious bull, sparing her.
After he
disappeared, as mysteriously as he had appeared, she fell into the water to
wash off that venomous sticky fluid.
Eleven: Ribamar
She – and I remember
as if it were yesterday – did not like to have her nails done in the
morning. She preferred to have them painted in the afternoon, because in
the morning, besides the flock of children, there was always a lot to do in
that house.
The manicurist,
however, came early as she was all booked up in the afternoon (after all, it
was not her day). Sebastiana – Sabá Vintém, the manicurist was a
black woman from Barbados, rather well-known in Manaus; she served all the
society ladies with her impeccable work – she painted little flowers on the
nails of the ladies and little hearts for the girls. Thanks to her
contacts, Sabá herself was a force to be reckoned with. She knew all
the scandals of the city, the intimate lives of all the families and because of
this Sabá Vintém was the municipal megaphone: lovers, abortions, hidden
pregnancies - she had a special knack for finding out everything, then
discretely she added up fragments of overheard conversations in various houses,
sewed and fit them together, like an attentive police detective. She became
valuable to the ladies of the house who let her talk at the price of a good
tip; passing herself off as a silly woman, she made herself a confidante of all
of them without irritating anyone. She made whomever her present client
was think that she was preferred and it was just to her that she confided what
she knew.
“For the love of
God, Dona Diana, I'm only talking because it's to you ...”
So,
Sabá had no free time during the week. She became prosperous with
age. She had lunch and dinner in the houses of ladies while amassing
money for decades.
Yes - she did not
like to have her nails done in the morning. Dona Maria de Abreu e Souza,
young and pretty still, as I knew her, beautiful, elegant, lived on the Rua
Barroso in a house whose backyard looked out on the Aterro Bayou. That
evening, Dona Maria was going to a birthday party and sent a black boy to
summon Sabá to repair her nail polish and had already made an appointment
at Mezzodi, the fashionable hair salon at the time.
That was when there
was a knock at the door.
In those days the
Amazon had changed. The recession was great, but in Rio Branco there were
250,000 head of cattle, between thickets of fanwort, waterlilies and grasses -
wealth luxuriating among marshes and swamps.
No servant was
near. It was Dona Mariazinha herself who, solemnly rising from her chair,
went to see who was at the door.
“Good day, madame,”
said a badly dressed caboclo, linen trousers, stiffly starched rough cotton
shirt, straw hat on his head with his hand wrapped around a wooden travel
bag. The man took off his hat to speak to her.
“Do you know where
Seu Juca das Neves lives?”
When Dona Maria saw
him she stiffened but became courteous in her reply as that was how she treated
those who were beneath her station.
“Next door,” she
said and returned sitting in front of the black woman, Sebastiana Vintém.
She was the
most refined, elegant and beautiful lady of the day, yes, it is as I, the
narrator, am telling you.
And that man was
Ribamar (d'Aguirre) de Souza.
Twelve: Manaus
Juca das Neves
was not in. An old caboclo woman said to him:
“He's at
the Mercantile.”
“Where's that?”
Ribamar asked.
The woman was
startled. How could there be anyone who didn't know where
the Novelty Mercantile was, the famous store of
Manaus? But she replied:
“There on the
corner, on the Eduardo Ribeiro.”
Ribamar descended the Rua Barroso. He took the
24 de Maio through the shade of the mango trees that had been there for many
years. They were huge mango trees that provided a broad shade of
clear green and which would be cut down fifty years later.
Without father
or mother, no relatives that he knew of - not even any friend nor anyone in
this world - Ribamar went down the Rua 24 de Maio. But instead of
feeling alone, he felt light and open to the many possibilities of the
city. Everything inside of him said that he had set foot on that
ground to emerge winner.
One day, Maria
Caxinauá said to him:
“You should go
to Manaus now ...”
He did not say
anything, but he knew she was right. There was nothing more at
Manixi and the Palácio where he was living was in ruins. Maria Caxinauá recommended
that he look up Ivete and Juca das Neves. Within a week Ribamar
left.
But he was
surprised by the nice street, as Manaus was lovely. Quiet, deep in
the stagnation of the economic crisis, forgotten, abandoned, but
solemn. The big and beautiful mansions, the air of art nouveau
supremacy - Manaus was a kind of ghost town, a neglected mini-metropolis,
beaten by the clarity of a splendidly brilliant sun Its shine
trickled along the calcite pebbles of the sidewalks.
Ribamar
proceeded slowly, he passed by the chapel of Saint Rita - a place so very
sacred, which no longer exists. The street was
deserted. All the houses had the windows and door
shut. But it was a lovely place, clean. It recalled
Paris.
He felt happy
as is it was the beginning of his conquest. Manaus in decay seemed
to him something he could reanimate and that he would love.
The last of the
employees of the Novelty Mercantile left the city to try his luck in
São Paulo, so the job was his. The Mercantile, however,
was nearly going out of business. Ribamar would receive little,
would work as a porter, sales clerk, secretary in exchange for room and board.
That same night
after dinner, the boss chatted with him. Ribamar told him his life's
story, how he did not know his father, how his brother and uncle Genaro has
died in the attack of the Numa. And told him more. Talked
about Rio Jantiatuba, the Pixuna plantation, the Alfredo. Of
the Rio Eriu, the Rio Gregorio, of Mu, of the Arrependida Slough, the Leonel
Rivulet, the Tejo, the Breu, the Corumbam Bayou, the magnificent, the Hudson,
the Pixuna Slough, the Moa, the Numa Slough, the little Juruá, the Ouro
Preto Slough, the Paraná das Minas, the Amônea. He lingered over talking about the
Numa Slough, Hell's Bayou, the Pixuna and the tapper agents of the Ramos.
Juca das Neves
rambled on about his illnesses and his misfortune.
Thirteen: Conversations
“Good Evening,” is
what Father Pereira said upon stepping into the room where Commander Gabriel
Gonçalves da Cunha, who was playing chess, awaited him.
The Commander lifted
his eyes from the chess board and stared at him.
Gabriel was still a
strong, thin and elegant man. He always wore white linen suits that
matched his silver-colored hair. He pointed out a chair, facing him,
where the Padre sat down.
Gabriel had been
playing chess alone. The two remained in silence for a while as if they
were thinking what they would say. They could hear sounds from the
kitchen, the steps of someone in the next room, street noises.
A maid entered and
the Commander handed her the chess board which she took carefully so the game
was not disturbed.
The heat in the room
was mild, large mosquitoes buzzed around. Modest furniture.
Exquisite. Modern.
“And our man?” the
Commander asked. That was the topic of the visit, then. Father
Pereira, very reluctantly, had asked to meet with the Commander on a delicate
matter. Gabriel accepted, inviting him to dinner. They would have
an opportunity to chat.
“A little better,”
the Padre answered. “It seems some orders came in from the interior and
he managed to sell something.”
“Wrong!” the
Commander yelled at him gruffly. “You know nothing!”
The Commander never
lost his Portuguese accent despite having been in the Amazon for decades.
“Juca das Neves'
debts amount to more than his inheritance!”
A few days ago Padre
Pereira had heard this sentence from Juca das Neves: “ Only you can save me”.
“How?” the priest
asked.
“Speak to the
Commander.”
Juca das Neves had
been a great friend of Pierre Bataillon.
When Zequinha
disappeared, Juca das Neves ordered them to look for him out in the
jungle. His envoy, Raimundo Bezerra, organized an expedition. They
left from Praia do Cuco with two guides, looking for the place to which the
Numa had carried off the rich and powerful youth.
The rumor was that
Zequinha had arrived at the Praia do Cuco in a canoe to meet a Numa girl who
was his sweetheart and that in company of the entire Numa nation left from
there with her in an undetermined direction, vanishing into the jungle with the
whole retinue to get married in the village. Everyone said that he went
of his own will and, because of that, it would be totally impossible to look
for him as they were doing.
In spite of that,
however, they searched for nearly ten years in vain – later, to give him up for
dead. His case was listed among other disappearances of persons and even
whole ships, like the Presidente do Pará, in 1896, the Jonas, on the Uerê Lake,
the Japurá 517 miles from Juruá, the Tocatins at the mouth of the Cobio Bayou
in 1900, or the Ituxi in the Mixirire overflow in 1897, or the Douro in
some place in 1900, the Leopoldo de Bulhões returning from the Encarnado in
1897, or even the Herman, the São Martinho, the Alagoas – and many other ships
that disappeared in the Amazon, as if they had not shipwrecked but simply
vanished, bewitched, no one having any news of them again or of any of their
crews.
Smoke from lamps, which cast a yellowish
light, impregnated the room. The exotic atmosphere combined two cultural
phases, art nouveau with the up-to-date style which was starting to emerge from
modernity in the industrial production of North America. It was a room
with very high walls, it had a set of striped armchairs, an antique chest of
drawers. And an R.C.A. Victrola.
“Juca das Neves will
not get out of this,” the Commander said cruelly to the priest seated opposite
him. “He will fail. He is broke … finished!”
“It so happens that
he is ill...” Padre Pereira started to say.
Padre Pereira was
there on a mission to appeal to the Commander. He knew his mission was
impossible; the Commander was cold, logical. During all these years the
Padre had received much money from Juca das Neves for the orphanage. Now
it was incumbent upon him, at the very least, to do something in his favor.
“Ill, you say?”
asked the Commander who was the biggest creditor of Juca das Neves. In
spite of considering that money lost, it was always unpleasant to know that
someone was going to die without repaying, a surprise, a discourtesy. The
Commander became even more irritated. “What does he have?” he asked.
“I don't know
exactly,” the Padre said evasively. “It seems that the situation of the
company is ending with him ...”
“And his daughter?”
the Commander rebutted.
This was the reply
Padre Pereira did not expect to hear. The priest's look became severe;
the old man looked like
he was reprimanding him to have asked such a
question, and it was with the most melancholy air that he answered:
“As always!
Juca ...” the priest started, trying to change the subject. Gabriel
cut him off:
“A bitch in
heat.” The eyes of the Commander glowed in the darkness.
“Yes,” the padre
responded with a restrained voice. Losing control of himself, he added,
as if he were recriminating on high, imploring the heavens:
“ The worst is that
her father has no authority over her; he is dominated by her!”
At that exact moment
Juca das Neves' case was irremediably lost.
“And her mother, as
you know, is a neurotic, she does nothing, knows nothing.”
Dona Constança was
the mother.
“The child has gone
astray ...” the Padre said lamenting.
“And the father is
broke!” old Gabriel added, victoriously. “Fiery whore! But she's a
pretty one, yes indeed.”
The priest turned
away as if to parry the insult.
“To complicate
things,” Padre Pereira added, “Juca das Neves has taken a man into his
house...”
“A man?”
“Yes. A young
man from the interior. Shrewd and well-mannered. He is living there
and works now at the Mercantile. His name is Ribamar.”
Fourteen: The Fan
That same night
Ribamar moved into the basement. He found the Mercantile abandoned
and during the entire day he was there, no business was transacted. It
was as if a plague had descended upon Manaus. The crisis was evident in
that hot silence, the moribund lights at sunset, the extinction of the
capitalist heyday. The Amazon was left without 80% of its economy, a
lifeless, sterile desert on a flood plain in a crisis that would last a half
century. Rich families left for Paris and Lisbon. Those who
remained were nearly dead. Colossal fortunes were reduced to dust.
Maurice Samuel, one of the rich men, even lost the furniture in his house,
pawned, and moved to a small rental house in the Silva Ramos. Jewelry was
sold at any price. Women became widows and turned to sewing to
survive. Capital vanished. Everything solid dissolved into thin air
and toppled like a house of cards. The Teatro Amazonas was abandoned,
becoming a depot for old rubber. What was left was very little, but it
was what I loved the most.
Dona Constança
had been brought up as an air-head baby doll. She overdid it and became
mad. Very thin, petite, nervous, after her beauty was gone, she seemed
like a witch, an ogress; she had a pale face right in the center of which was a
curved nose and the straight knife line of a mouth, when open a fine gash
without lips. Her big eyes blinked constantly, without pause. Dona
Constança shook her fan as if burning with an internal fire. She had
a very bad temperament. A person only needed to turn their back on her
and she started her retaliation. A thin voice, a viper's tongue. A
look flashing hate. People of the lower classes were “riffraff”; they did
not exist. Pedro Alonso, on the day he was ousted as Inspector of the
Treasury, was cut from her dinner list when he had already left his house (he
found out on his way there). She was the arbiter of society: one
day Aristides Lourenço, a person she never greeted, found in his hands an
unexpected invitation after he was elected to the City Council. Dona
Constança, full of friendliness during his entire term, turned her back on
him when he was not reelected and returned to the humble position of editor of
the Official Press, Dona Constança discriminated openly, without
pretense.
She never had a
woman friend. She started talking about all of them as
soon as she shut the door to the street. She talked to Juca das Neves;
she spoke very rapidly, her voice nervous, thin, anxious. She spent hour
upon hour gossiping, slandering, hiding behind doors to listen, peeking through
windows to spy. She embellished her stories about people from her
imagination, nurturing a hate for everyone that infected her entire
being. She was even capable of going out of her way for the pleasure of
“being in the know”. Her face then lit up, her eyes sparkled, she was overjoyed.
“Doooon't tell me, dear...”. News kept her alive. It
tortured her if she did not have the latest gossip, she hired people to find
out for her - “I must know, I swear I'll find out” - her life depended on information,
such that they said Juca das Neves was half deaf because of her thin and
incessant voice, which injured his eardrums with its cruel timbre concealed in
the little voice of a defenseless child. And during lunch Dona
Constança talked without interruption, not pausing for breath as if words
were burning her mouth, a metallic ratatatat, talking about other people's
lives, fanning herself frenetically, talking and fanning herself, talking next
to her husband, whispering in his ear, nudging him below the table if someone
was coming and fanning herself; she was gracious and well-mannered. Fan
and gossipy babble reached their greatest splendor in the petite
and delicate Dona Constança!
She became
worse as she got older. She started talking and fanning herself alone
seated in her rocking chair where she talked and fanned herself late into
the night. And talking alone, talking, fanning herself,
fanning, her eyes staring, a characteristic of hers, at the “tail of the eye”,
she called it, not looking at anything straight on, not looking anyone in the
eye, but with her glance fixed to the side and the edges of the eyeballs as if
she was constantly looking to see or hear something happening on the side and
beyond, a glance frozen in hate, and I remember her to this day seated thus,
looking off to the side and beyond as if she were surrounded by enemies,
fanning herself frenetically and talking anxiously, speaking ill of imaginary
people, of people who had been dead for a long time; lonely, forgotten...
Fifteen: The
Bookstore
It was a
windowless room under the staircase and inside it felt very hot, humid and
moldy.
A luxury for
Ribamar. For a decade, the very tidy Benedita, an old employee, now deceased,
of Juca das Neves had lived in that room. But on the moldy wall the humidity
has enlarged two brown spots. Ribamar set up his hammock and lay down. He could
exit without being seen by others in the house through a side hallway. On the
second floor, to which he would move later, the Melina's piano was heard. Juca
das Neves had already retired. That day Ribamar became acquainted with the
Hotel Cassina, in decline, later transformed into the Cabaré Chinelo. He
found the Alcazar and the Royal Bookstore at Rua Municipal 85, where works of
popular authors - Garcia Redondo, João Grave, Júlio Brandão and Bento Carqueja
- were on display. A book by Carmen Dolores was there and another by Haeckel.
There were panegyrics and light reading. The “People's Library”, the
“Rationalist's Library”. Village Night Work by João de
Lemos. One book was called Happy Look by Alfredo de Mesquita
and had been a bestseller. It cost 50 reis. Juca das Neves had a part of Pierre
Bataillon's library at home. Melina did not play badly. Ribamar remembered
Pierre Bataillon playing Schubert. Ribamar passed by the door of the London
Bank. Smooth launches could have entered the door of the bank building. When
she was a servant, Ivete went around half naked. Ribamar was astonished to meet
her now, a great lady married to Antonio Ferreira.
Sixteen: Benito
Conspicuous, drunk,
leaning on the counter of the Bacurau Bar at the beginning of
João Coelho Street, master Benito Botelho, discoursing, supercilious,
resembling most that representative of Brazilian modernism Mario de Andrade,
was at the head of an animated conversation about one of the subjects of his
main preoccupation: the disappearance of the son of Pierre Bataillon in the
depths of the Amazon forest. Benito had speculated and investigated and
on that very day published an article concerning it. He was 37 years old
at the time. Thin, pale, poorly dressed, drinking and
smoking to excess, he had rotten teeth, a large and yellow head, mostly
bald with already graying, curly hair. Big, lively, shining, mordant eyes
were the only trace of his once handsomeness. Being a man of irony,
bringing venomous insinuation and certainty against the powers that be and the
mean, conservative milieu in which he lived, had made him no more than the
lowliest proofreader of the Amazonas Comercial. But poet and
polyglot, he read and spoke French, English, German and Italian, besides having
a solid knowledge of Greek and Latin. Self-taught. Library employee
Dona Estella Souza said that he had now read everything in the Amazon State
Public Library. Conversant with the two worlds, his mastery went from
philosophy to literature, from history to philology. He could recite
almost the whole of the Divine Comedy and the ocean of his
photographic memory enabled him to cite, in various languages, his favorite
authors, some with full references – page, publisher, city and date. That
had never been seen before.
The scum of Manaus
society came together at the Bacurau. There were fishermen, police,
queers, poets, prostitutes, communists, fishmongers, musicians and the group from
the Gregório de Matos Satire Club who made life hell for the Madrugada
Club. Mirandinha always appeared at dawn to conduct Leonildo Calaça, a
big, mature caboclo with a voice of renown. Calixto Dinis, an uncouth and
introverted little poet appeared. Old women came by looking for
companionship, food and cachaça. The great poet Lopes left early.
But the whole ambience smelled of fish, obscenity and murupi pepper.
Benito questioned,
argued and described the whereabouts of Zequinha Bataillon. The boy had
been his childhood companion; Benito grew up at Manixi, he had seen the
Caxinauá, Maria, the Mule, the Myth. Oh, Benito! A sage and
scholar! Unfortunately he scorned and was scorned by all. He was
despised! Irreverent, loose tongued, ironic, savage, irritating. A
perpetual drunk, every night, as always. Expelled from the State
College. He was unrecognized. In the city the belletrists, the
Academy barons, men of letters, jurists with glasses on their noses and
impeccable overcoats, doctors, counsellors, magistrates and judges
pontificated. Benito was not taken seriously with his penchant for
vulgarity. But he was talked about in academic circles.
Retalitorily.
At first Benito
lived with Frei Lothar who taught him German. Then, at the orphanage
of Padre Pereira who wanted him to become a priest. He was expelled
from there at age 17. Then, he lived with aunt Eudócia who sold flowers
and coconut candy on the Remédios Beach, artificial flowers which she learned
to make as a girl in the house of her ex-mistress. Benito joined the
Communist Party. He did everything at Amazonas Comercial: he
was typographer, proofreader and reporter. He wrote articles that were
very advanced for his time; they came out when the newspaper did not have any
material to fill in empty spaces. Benito wrote them very quickly,
sometimes even at the linotype machine from which the text emerged almost
without errors. He had the article in his head and knew his references by
heart.
Eudócia's
house was a straw shack on the edge of the Sete Cacimbas Bayou. When the
river rose, water splashed on the door sill. Two rooms without lighting,
no running water, the bathroom a ditch. The main room - as it was called
- was office, library, alcove and kitchen all in one. Aunt
Eudócia slept in the bedroom. Dirt floor, hardened clay. A
type of general use table where they ate between piles of books. An
enormous armoire without doors transformed into a bookshelf, books heaped up
and lying on their sides. This piece of furniture, a legacy of Eudócia's
ex-mistress, was about 2 meters square and contained about two thousand books
in several languages. His whole life, miserably there. At five in
the morning Eudócia left in the direction of the Stairway Market
of Remédios Beach. Benito spent his mornings in bed, afternoons
at the Municipal Library, where he was often the only patron. In the
evening he worked at the newspaper, the brothels and sordid bars. The
Municipal Library had a valuable collection. The two thousand books in
Benito's wardrobe were considered by his students (as I was one) to be the most
important in the history of human culture: from Homer to Machado, from
Parmenides to Marx. Benito only read serious literature, ancient and
modern. People could not understand how he remained lucid, drunk that he
was. A photographic memory and instantaneous intelligence.
In the Typographical,
Historical, Descriptive Dictionary of the District of the Upper Amazon,
authored by Navy Lieutenant Lourenço Amazonas, published in Recife in 1852,
Manaus was a city “on a gentle and pleasant hill” that consisted of a public
square and 16 streets “yet to be paved and illuminated”, houses covered in
tiles with “900 whites, 2,500 half-breed Indians, 4,070 natives, 640 mestizos
and 380 slaves”, a population “which spends part of the day in baths provided
by the lakes and beaches”. When the rubber merchant Manuel dos Santos
Braga arrived from Portugal in 1877, however, Manaus was already modern, just
20 years later.
Dona Maria José was
already up in years when she hired Eudócia to help in the kitchen.
Aunt Eudócia did not like Benito, who was a moral obligation for her, a
duty at the end of her life. Eudócia was unmarried as were all
servants at that time, and very tiny, visibly thin, cheery. She smiled
with an expression of thousands of wrinkles of her face - her big eyes, a
suffering, wide forehead. She worked until quite late. Dona
Maria José liked her service, her cleanliness, honesty, silence, respect; she
worked as if it were a religious rite, perfect and anonymous. The
mistress wanted to take her to Portugal when she left, but Eudócia did not
want to go and she went on to live off of coconut candy and paper flowers that
she sold at the edge of the tapioca porridge table of Godmother Lula.
No. Eudócia really did not hate Benito, but could not love him nor
be happy to see him; but tired and old as she was, she had to support him from
then on - the boy never earned any money to help the household, though she felt
pride having him and knew that he loved her in his own way.
Benito used up the
little money he earned at the Amazonas Comercial buying books
and booze. He even had to ask Eudócia to lend him money for
the “Flores” streetcar. Long spells unemployed, reading and writing
without leaving the house. Would she be better without him? Before
him, she had managed to save some money that he gradually spent by simply existing.
She increased her workload. Benito was a researcher, a thinker and knew
nothing more. Submerged in his internal world from which he only emerged
drunk (and he had to drink to endure Manaus and other people) he would not have
survived without her. A born contrarian, hated by the powers that be,
Benito, personally unbearable, did not forgive anyone's mediocrity; he had not
managed to get the job at the Municipal Library that he set his heart on.
His was the only voice of opposition in that flattering, self-congratulatory,
servile, laughable and patriarchal society. And he never loved anyone,
nor knew any woman other than the prostitutes of Frei José dos Inocentes
Street to whom he went when he was already quite drunk. Benito was the
enemy of the elite to whom Eudócia was ally and slave – because of that,
however, and being grateful toward her patroness whom she considered a saint,
she did not understand her nephew's hatred, a hatred of which she was a victim.
Seventeen: The Street of Flowers
Conchita del Carmen
presumed the man would turn back.
There was no one in
the street. A narrow street, in the Vila de Transvaal,
sloping. Plants and flowers in exuberance. The Rio Jordão, which
ran through the town at the end of the descent. On the sidewalk two cats
were licking themselves. Conchita, sitting in a rocking chair, was
watching the man and filing her nails. Fernandinho de Bará smiled
nervously at her when the man turned around. Fernandinho was standing
beside her under some begonias. Before the man turned around, distracted,
examining her nails, a French magazine fallen on her lap, Conchita del Carmen
had not observed him closely. She was a fat woman, very fat and very
sexy.
Fernandinho de Bará
was a middle-aged transvestite. She began her life there as a
housekeeper, hired by the owner, Pedrosa the Turk, whose lover she was in the
early days. De Bará was then a young and pretty girl, solid legs and easy
smile, a light-colored Indian. Discreet. Timid. Gentle.
Pedrosa, an associate of the mayor, a thin man, bald with a bushy mustache, was
with her ever since she arrived from Celismar on the Embira River, expressly to
this place famous in the whole Amazon - she had run away from her father who
wanted to kill her when he found her out. The scandal in the Vila de
Celismar made her famous.
When she arrived,
young, De Bará personified cheerfulness. Very strong, a dancer, electric,
splendid feminine body, helpful and loyal, amiable and neat. She cleaned
up the Street of Flowers with the energy of ten men. Madam's house was
the envy of the street. In a few hours De Bará, alone, could clean all
the rooms like a whirlwind. She never tired, she worked the whole day
from early morning and spent the evening frolicking in her feminine luster.
Streets ornamented with flowers that she cultivated in made-over houses.
The former Street of Old Women became the Street of Flowers under her
reign. With the wisdom gained only from his experience, the river peddler
Saraiva had advised the young woman to seek out a living in Transvaal.
Fernandinho proved
to be worth an entire city hall. She transformed Transvaal into a tourist
destination, vernal and poetic, a model, the most beautiful in the region in my
(the Narrator's) mind - vases and beds of flowers on the sidewalk, along the
curbs, in window sills, at the entrances of houses. She was the unmatched
landscape architect of the Amazon, the first to use tropical foliage as an
element of urban decoration. It was a monument to green! The Street
of Flowers was really the most beautiful city garden that I had ever seen in
the whole history of the Amazon with colored flowers and plants of the region -
caladiums, tropical vines, arums, leguminous plants, heisterias, peperomias,
passion flowers and belladonna, crinums, palm plants and even ornamental banana
plants – a natural talent for gardening.
De Bará alone
reigned over her decorative work for decades. If she had been born in a
great cultural center, De Bará would certainly have been a plastic
artist, a couturier, a set designer, an interior decorator. As she had
had no model or school, everything came out of her futurist imagination.
Fernandinho de Bará painted the doors and windows of the Street of Flowers
golden yellow, cobalt blue, dark violet blue, antique red, emerald jewel green
- according to the mixture and combination of colors that the inhabitants
inspired in her, like mandarins, or maybe birds, country women in a strange
family of green or pink. Over transoms she painted flowers or motifs,
long-life mushrooms, ducks in a landscape, mythical knights - rough to be sure,
but which became transformed into aphrodisiac stained glass on the walls of
slate houses covered with an always recent layer of whitewash with robust gesso
in a thick paste, a virgin layer garnished with silver. An unimaginable
luxury. Whoever went to the Street of Flowers never forgot it: palatial,
polished wooden floors, with throw rugs of colored patchwork - oh, that place:
purity of caboclo perfection and art, magical, with saints in niches, framed
figures of Our Lady of Grace. The place was domestic - a holy fairy she
was! - and frequented by gentlemen above suspicion, respectable men from the
town and its surroundings, travelers - all got together at night for profitable
conversation with the women, general and instructive chats, drinking a bottle
of XPTO and confiding in their favorites. A place of rest and relaxation,
safe and quiet. Domestic. And also towards morning the beardless
students from the public school appeared, playing truant to get exercise in
practiced brawls.
Conchita del Carmen
was ever the madam of the Street of Flowers. Perhaps you are wondering
what the Street of Flowers has to do with this story. You will see.
But Conchita did not
believe what she was seeing almost in front of her. Fernandinho, always
attentive to that kind of observation, called her attention to the one whom she
had never been seen before as. In spite of her years, De Bará had never
lost her sense of curiosity from the explosive and glorious early times.
That was true, indeed.
He was a tall and
dark fellow, a monstrously enormous a fortress of muscles and limbs, half
Indian, half Negro, badly dressed and barefoot. He was, however, in a
certain sense, appealing.
Conchita del Carmen
was still living in her dream of the son of the legendary Colonel Pierre
Bataillon, who had been the opposite of the one now standing before her.
Zequinha had been gentle, courteous, childlike and sensual. The fame by
which he was glorified as the greatest fortune that was ever seen in the whole
history of the Amazon transformed him into a mythical being – so, Zequinha was
the most handsome young man that Conchita del Carmen had ever known. One
day he just appeared: elegant manners, a young gallant, he did not wake in her
love at first sight, no. When she saw him for the first time she was
frightened - the fear that powerful men awoke in her. After that she was
astounded. Only on the next day she was in love. But it was
late. She would have given her life for him, be his slave in return for
nothing, she would have followed him beyond the ends of the forest in which he
had hid away and was lost forever.
She had already
attempted to follow him, with all her weight and broadside in
a caravan of women, in canoes, into the mists of Hell's Bayou, in search of the
younger Bataillon Colonel.
Zequinha was her
Prince Charming. He treated her like a court lady. Oh, she would
have been capable of anything! Zequinha appeared only once and stayed
with her whom he had chosen above all others. He behaved as if she were a
queen, attentively and gently. He cuddled at her breast, a
defenseless child, with delicate love during the night that passed with sweet
nothings and tenderness in his Frenchified Portuguese. Seated on her lap,
naked, he reached his arms to her neck and spoke very close to her, in her ear
- feeling his breath on her, she grasped his tanned body, caressing his dark
and smooth hair, gazing at his eyes that shone with a kind, intelligent and sad
expression.
No - she was
not going to pride herself, through vanity, to have been held in the arms of
the Prince of the Amazon, master of the world, accustomed to life in a European
capital, living in the palace of a king, in gold and luxury.
And that was not
all.
After having spent
the night with her in amorous conviviality, at dawn the prince gave her a present. A
curious thing and worthy of telling. Zequinha sent to wake up the man -
whose name I do not wish to recall - who was the District Judge, Mayor, Chief of Police and
owner of the only store in Transvaal and, not even discussing the price, right then and there
bought for Conchita del Carmen the famous Street of Flowers, which had had Pedrosa as a partner. The
transaction done, so say the gossips, Zequinha in his shorts ordered the Judge
to draw up the papers in that very room and go receive payment in cash at Manixi.
The following year
Conchita del Carmen got bigger - as she was pregnant. So, the
following year she had a son - Maneco Bastos, a genuine Bataillon.
That monster of
a man was the
opposite of him who was her lost
prince. Rich, powerful, Conchita did not need to work. She was disgusted at the sight of him. The monster
was moving away towards the end
of the slope of the Street of Flowers, his hat that he tipped to them in his
hand. He had come from
the Rio Jordão.
But he turned
around.
He was
returning! He passed in review the doors of the houses. As it was
morning, they were sleeping. Every bit the Mule. Then … he decided
on her.
Women at that
time had dignity. They enticed before giving in, which increased their
value. Not so gallant, accustomed to ravishment, the men saw themselves
worthy by desiring something more difficult, as what was offered easily did not
merit consideration. The women, as ladies to be respected, affected a
sultry look, pouting lips and a certain offended air of timorous, fleeing
gazelles. That was part of the game of love, the etiquette.
Ladies were requested first, gentlemen were rejected
later. The men regained a conquering role, an easy woman was an offense;
the woman was the desired one which granted her favors as a concession.
The man had to conquer, show himself capable.
And so it was.
But Conchita did not
feel herself flattered by that courtesy, it was something other than
that. Obese, Conchita was still magnetic, she made her entire body
desirable. She lived in delight. Especially now, in voluntary
abstinence. She would not lack customers if she had wanted them.
But she had retired. It was impossible to say how old she was. Made
up, hair tied in a knot on the nape of her neck, a red flower on her
bosom, crimson lips, her fat visible through her pink dress as
well as her girdle, enormous legs, very plump, feet thrust into
slippers with red fur pompoms – no, she was not ugly.
But men did not want
her. Just an Indian among them – he looked like an assassin, a
bad lot, with whom it would do to deploy an amiable, but firm, evasive
discourse. She knew well he was an outlaw.
The man was coming
closer.
Half-blushing, as it
befitted treating a lady, he came saying his hellos.
Seeing the man up
close was when De Bará cried out,
“Dona Conchita, it's Paxiúba from Manixi.”
Magic words.
Suddenly before her
appeared the companion of her lost prince.
Paxiúba was the confidant of Zequinha, slept in his bed, brought
up with him from infancy, adored him, like a dog. He, the
protector, would kill for his master - the guardian angel
of her great love. Paxiúba here, at her arm's reach. She had
never seen him before but always knew of him. Paxiúba did not
frequent brothels. He was aged but still a wild bull – and by a swift,
immediate process, as a contagion, a lightning flash, she was smitten.
That body had rubbed against the body of her Lover. For years on end, the
two had had an Indian friendship, a type of quasi homosexual liaison, Paxiúba combing
the boy, picking lice from his hair, sleeping in contact with
him, each pressed together into the body of the other as if they were
lovers. Paxiúba bathed him in the bayous. At once that
enormous and imposing body came to be for her a negative enlargement of the
other one, a monument of the one who had disappeared and she was infatuated at
that instant and remained so.
The Street of
Flowers perhaps had been one of the most safe places in the
Amazon. No one was talked about there, an implicit law dictated that what
another person did was not seen. The fact of being there was considered a
natural thing. Because of this everyone felt at ease as if they were in
their own homes, free from blame, without consideration of the value
of their actions - I would remind, within the norms of respectful and
harmonious familiarity. For example, one did not speak loudly. And
getting drunk was not permitted. The Street of Flowers, so antiquated -
it would function for decades – succeeded in imposing proper conduct
on its visitors. It was the custom not to greet anyone, to betray
acquaintance. A relief for the burghers who frequented it. Like no
one would be capable of asking: “Going already?” when it was time to
leave. No one expected to meet a relative or acquaintance there.
Mainly because few - only travelers - circulated freely through the entire
street.
Clearly there were
always those who arrived there in triumph as if saying to themselves: “I'm
here, girls!”, flaunting their being there as major and public proof of their
existence and masculinity. The majority, however, assiduous clients,
appeared discretely, on the sly, in escapades of everyday informality – some
with aversion stamped on their face, fear of being recognized coming with
heads lowered, hats down, rapid footsteps, hiding while penetrating
those familiar doors that were quickly closed. So the Judge,
the sons of Dona Consuelo, the seminarians from the Ponte or the vicar
himself, who appeared at dawn, before mass, when the streets were still deserted.
At closing time, the
distress of some gentlemen increased. Then, relieved by the competent
professionalism at work, they were not so boisterous as they
returned to the contrition and guilt of fathers and grandfathers of families,
venerable persons that the city knew how to respect. Because of this,
when those customers ended exercising their functions, Fernandinho de Bará went
to see if the street was clear and cast a glance around the corner. And
those gentlemen dispersed, nervous as if they had carried out some horrendous
crime or were fleeing from the flames of hell.
Eighteen: Encounter
It was a dark
and rainy night cut through by flashes of lightning. The street was unlit
and there was only wind on wet roofs. The eyes of the man would have
difficulty finding his way. He was crossing the Educandos Bridge stepping
in puddles of water.
He entered the
Chalet in the middle of the Heliodor Balbi Square, ordered a cognac, drank it
and disappeared under his umbrella toward the Bridge. In his head only
thoughts of doubt and apprehension.
Crossing the Bridge
he went down a narrow road to another wooden bridge in the middle of which he
was expecting to meet someone and lit a cigarette. The little flame cast
a yellow light into the air, as a signal, a distant beacon. From there he
saw the outline of the city from afar, empty, dead, aged. The rain became
less intense. Benito Botelho waited for some time, then moved
forward. The minuscule ember of the cigarette below the umbrella was
certainly visible to the one he was waiting to meet.
Earlier he had been
correcting proofs when someone tapped on the window pane at the side outside
the back windows of the office of the Amazonas Comercial. Just
he and Margarido the linotypist were there. Benito interrupted his work
and went to look, but when he got to the window he could barely make out the
fleeing shape of an old Indian woman in the dark; she spoke to him
quickly. She said something to him and disappeared.
When Benito could no
longer see her, he returned to his desk and, apprehensive, he put out his
cigarette, opened the drawer from which he took out a revolver, which he put
into the pocket of his coat, and left in the pouring rain towards the Bayou of
Apprentice Craftsmen.
He came to the plank
bridge that the woman had indicated, the passageway over the bayou connecting
an island to the mainland where there was the Gloria Bridge that crossed the
Remedios Bayou. The rain was dying down but the plank bridge that Benito
used to cross over was still wet.
Then, growing larger
as it approached, the figure of an old, black caboclo, sinister, tall, smelling
of tonka bean and urine, bent and monstrous, emerged like an armed demon,
bellowing like a wild beast.
Benito shot him in
the middle of the chest, killing him. Yes, Benito killed him. The
dead man was Paxiúba, the Mule.
A week later Benito
went up the River Jordão
and entered Hell's Bayou. For hours the motor boat
navigated the bayou, cruising along the shores where at another time the wealth
of rubber was to be found. This region had been depopulated for
decades. Intersecting with vines, thorns and marshes, it was as if the
boat was asking permission to penetrate the forest full of the cries of unknown
birds. An unusual silence awaited them – Benito and the men of the first
expedition in search of Colonel Zequinha Bataillon that the newspaper Amazonas
Comercial organized. Abraham Gadelha was convinced that a
successful result would give him political advantages.
Suddenly, the
silence was broken by a scream: the caboclo Jutai had his mouth open as if he
would vomit. He fell into the water and everyone started firing in all
directions without knowing where the arrow had come from.
Thus ended Benito
Botelho's first expedition. They returned from there firing at random
without seeing anything in the bush. Their descent was swift due to the
current.
“We could not have
gone on,” Benito said in an aside to Gadelha, “we would have needed a regular
army ...”.
But Benito kept
working in other ways to discover what had happened with Zequinha. In the
series of articles he wrote (all made use of here), he reconstructed the apogee
of the Manixi rubber plantation. Listened to testimonials, consulted
newspapers.
Nineteen: Mystery
It was impossible to
save the Novelty Mercantile of which only old furniture
remained, out-of-style luxury. In spite of everything, Ribamar opened the
store every day. The owner did not show up so as not to be humiliated by
his creditors. Weakened, prostrate, almost always drunk, he hid at home
as if imprisoned by illness. By and by Juca das Neves grew old. Was
he a ruined man? Money for food began to become scarce. He sold
objects and jewelry so he could go to the market. On the day that one of
the bills which he could not settle became due, he sank into bed in
anticipation of death.
But Ribamar appeared
at the threshold of his door.
Ribamar had not
opened the Novelty Mercantile that day. He was already
living with someone whom you will finally see entering this work of mine -
Diana Dartigues. But for the time being I will leave her in peace.
Diana was quite a bit younger than he was.
He worked there for
years hardly receiving any remuneration. Ribamar, however, was a
frightfully quick learner and quickly understood the company's situation.
Juca das Neves could confide in him - in part because he was the only
one. As a sign of friendship he gave him a room in the upper part of the
house, a comfortable apartment with two windows opening on the garden.
But Ribamar almost never slept there since he was already acquainted with the
mysterious Diana Dartigues, about whom no one knew who she was or where she
came from. She rented a small house in the Vila Municipal, a house that
had belonged to the director of the Manaus Harbour, Baron Rymkiewicz, when he
arrived there in 1900. Certainly Diana was paying the rent. Ribamar
was no longer the same. Elegant, natty and well-groomed, he was changing
into the man that people would come to know as an older man. He wore the
best clothes and inherited suits from Juca das Neves, who was the same size as
the young man. Ribamar was seen in a collection of expensive coats,
English H.J., silk shirts with stiff collars. Juca das Neves had been
very rich; he ordered his clothing from the best European couturiers.
When Juca das Neves returned from Paris he brought an entire Parisian
collection with him. He was more vain than his wife and daughter.
He had a wardrobe that would dress ten men. But he became fat, didn't
work and lived on booze. Juca das Neves saw misery as a concrete
reality. He only opened up with Ribamar - Dona Constança, already
completely mad, could not comfort him.
“Tell me, my
good Juca. How
much are your houses on Rua Frei Jose dos Inocentes worth?”
“Nothing, my son,”
replied the old man, tiredly. They're old houses, mortgaged ...”
Ribamar went toward
the bed and sat down in a chair nearby. He lit a cigarette. He was
strangely calm. He was strangely confident. He started to speak.
Their conversation was
leisurely. At first Juca das Neves listened lying down, like a dead
man. Then, he was sitting up. He put his foot out of the bed.
Then he was sitting on the edge of the bed, he stood up and walked around the
room from one side to the other. Following that, he started getting
dressed - and lastly he left with the young man, he was someone else! He
was a changed man! Another man entirely.
What was deduced
from that conversation and became known was that Ribamar managed to have the
debts put off and the next day he, Ribamar, traveled to Transvaal to the Street
of Flowers, which was for sale, and he went to make a proposition in person to
Dona Conchita del Carmen to bring the women from there to the city of Manaus,
to the houses on Rua Frei José dos Inocentes,
where they would be lodged. In short, Ribamar was about to enter upon the
biggest enterprise in the history of the Amazon crisis and the only profitable
one, which would prosper from then on, mainly because it had the support of the
Gonçalves da Cunha
family, Commander Gabriel, then governor who would give police
protection. Juca das Neves committed to settle his debts when the
establishment was up and running.
Antonio Ferreira,
the ally of old Gabriel, sealed the contract himself. For Ferreira it was
better to wait and see, rather than lose everything, since nothing Juca das
Neves owned could be sold and everything was pledged to the London Bank.
The bills were substitued with other bills payable in five years. The
mystery was finding out how Ribamar arranged so much money. Clearly it
came from Diana Dartigues.
After a few years
Ribamar de Souza would not only pay off the debts of the business but start to
get the houses from hock, not only those on Rua Frei José dos Inocentes, but also the one on Rua Barroso and even the
building of the Warehouse, which had remained closed all this
time. Ribamar, with the help of Juca das Neves, modernized the Novelty
Warehouse and began carrying various North American products,
like Singer sewing machines - enormously popular. Ribamar expanded his
operations and started to threaten the commercial empire of the
powerful Gonçalves da Cunha
family and his ex-son-in-law Antonio Ferreira. It was then that Ribamar
finally got married - in a discrete, but elegant ceremony - to Diana Dartigues.
Years later Ribamar
de Souza was mentioned in connection with one of the most solid fortunes of
Manaus and a political enemy of Commander Gabriel and his ex-son-in-law.
The elder Gabriel lost his prestige in the Federal Capital. There was a
mystery involving the origin of Ribamar's power that no one could quite figure
out. I don't know if you remember the figure of Diana Dartigues.
Tall, thin, elegant, Diana had a small oval head on which her long, sleek,
black and shiny hair fell. She had a dark complexion, almond-shaped eyes,
a long and straight neck, fine, long hands. You couldn't say pretty, but
she was an exotic woman. The last time one must have seen her was in the
cemetery at Juca das Neves' burial.
Twenty: Night
It was seven o'clock
in the evening. Benito had to wait for the aged Frei Lothar to finish his
soup before he could speak. The friar, weak, with an embittered
expression, had to be lifted so he could then fall, prostrate, onto a nearby
sofa. Benito lit a cigarette and listened:
“The Caxinauá.
You have to find Maria Caxinauá. Only she knows,” he said, passing his
arthritic fingers over the cheek of the young man.
An Indian woman
brought him coffee - he drank coffee day and night. Benito accepted a
cup. The cup shook in the friar's hand with its long, thin fingers, like
twigs.
“She must have returned to
Hell's Bayou. What...Paxiúba tried to kill you?”, asked the friar.
Benito responded:
“Yes.”
“But, Paxiúba,
why?” Frei Lothar was still shaking his head.
“Well, he was coming
at me. I fired a shot, but I don't think I killed him.”
“Thank God...thank
God. Wasn't he with Conchita del Carmen?”
“No,” replied Benito,
“he killed her.”
There was a
pause. Silence, the friar sighed, his eyes tearful.
“Maria should be on
the Praia do Cuco, if I know her. That's where Zequinha Bataillon
disappeared. You must reach her. You won't know anything without her.
Listen, my son. Before Pierre came to Brazil he lived in Paris. He
must have relatives there. The last time I saw him was at Manixi.
He must have brought that pistol from Paris,” he was silent for quite some
time.
“She is the proof of
the crime,” he added, finally.
It was a Belgian
pistol from the end of the century, silver. Very popular at the
time. A relic. I saw it several times on Bataillon's belt.
“I saw it at Rio
Ji-Paraná,” Benito said. “Personalized. It had the initials “PB” in
gold...”
“I saw it near the
Richuelo Bayou,” continued the friar, “in the hands of the Indian Iurimã, who
was married to Caciava, an Indian woman, who told me that he got it from the
dying Zequinha Bataillon. But I know they were lying. Iurimã was a
warrior.”
He went on:
“Zequinha's fortune
today would be worth 20 million dollars.”
And after a silence:
“Pierre was a good
musician. I played the Kreutzer Sonata with him, failing to keep up with
his tempo. Those were unforgettable nights in the middle of the densest
forest, in that well-lit music room full of curtains and carpets, playing
Beethoven's Kreutzer. He at the piano, an authentic Pleyel, a baby grand,
though. That sonata has a motif that repeats and on this pair of notes
Beethoven constructs his plot, a warp and weft of questions and answers,
examinations, a series of loving queries, passionately transcendent, that the
violin takes up and prolongs, developing into quick and loud phrases in dialog
with the piano... the second movement tells a short and simple story, a
consequence of what came before, that the violin repeats, retells, reinforces,
harmonizes, supports and resumes. The violin enters with soul...”
Frei Lothar was
hearing the music in his imagination, his eyes tearing up. He was more of
a musician than a mystic. As a mystic, he was a physician.
“That palace,” he
said, “was a museum of paintings and crystal, silver, Limoges china. What
happened to Dona Ifigenia's jewels? Her jewels, big ones, were the
showpiece of the house. One day Ifigenia went to Belém to see
Pavlova with whom she dined at her hotel. She was a friend of
intellectuals. She came to Manaus to see that author of best-sellers at
that time...what was his name?”
“Coelho Neto...”
“Yes. Ifigenia
corresponded with him; he had wonderful handwriting. She often visited at
the house of Thaumaturgo Vaz. In 1889 she gave a reception for the the
Count d'Eu at the Municipal Villa. But she liked to stay at the Hotel Cassina.
I remember her in 1883 accompanying Paes Sramento à Conceição to the ceremony conferring the
distinction for which he was honored by the Emperor - Induction as an Officer
into the Imperial Order of the Rose. Another coffee?”
Frei Lothar was lost
in reminiscences.
“But who ended up
with the pounds of gold?”, Benito asked returning to the main topic of his
visit.
“I don't know.
Nor the paintings.”
“The paintings are
at Ferreira's house,” said Benito.
“Really? There
was a Fromentin in the music room. They took over the Bataillons'
assets...but how are you going to prove that?”
There was a long,
deadly silence in the room.
“How are you going
to prove that they killed Zequinha Bataillon?”
No one said anything
more. Until the friar sighed:
“Oh, much has
happened! Near the Crystal Waterfall, Pierre constructed a Japanese
chalet. Everything has disappeared. The same also with the
Marinchões' rubber plantation, at Calama. At Ayucá the owner, I don't
remember his name, personally set fire to everything he couldn't take, before
leaving. Ah, terrible! Ah, yes, it was Rigoberto. He lived in
a struggle against gnats, strong men, the country, snakes. At Ponta do
Poedeira, I had to attend a childbirth, near Ayucá. The mother died in my
arms, but I was able to save the child. On the Rio Jantiatuba, which runs
very swiftly...”
And there followed a
prolonged silence.
“And the gold,
Father, the pounds of gold?” Benito asked. “Who ended up with the pounds
of gold?”
But the friar was
sleeping.
Twenty-one: The Portico
A monotonous, watery
course through the green meanderings of the submerged forest - and they chugged
on.
It was Benito
Botelho's second expedition in search of information concerning the young
Bataillon's disappearance. For several days the landscape was
unvaried. Smoke from the funnel puffed in rhythm with the sound of the
motor over the pure air, the dripping heat and the crowns of trees bent down by
the strong and heavy sun; rays of light filtered through dark green onto the
liquid ground, bright specks on networks of a fluffy, haphazard covering
arranged in layers of dead leaves like a sylvan pâté, a wet, veneered, creamy, brown pavement where
wild flowers lay – yes, this was Hell's Bayou revisited, invaded after so much
time, much further along than where the previous expedition had reached.
Hell's Bayou, though deep – a vessel with good drift could navigate it – was a
narrow and camouflaged trap, which they entered from the Bom Jardim
Bayou. An island set in its mouth closed it off from inside. The
damp bush concealed it, as in a description. An observer with a
good eye would not see it behind the glorification of that vegetal
splendor. Syncopated and intrusive, the launch, named Solar,
penetrated it like the blade of a knife, long in that aquatic park of ancient
giants, dignified, haughty, discontented from being inconvenienced. It
was the unknown, unnamed, distant route to the sopping place of magical beings,
the Numa. It could be said that the archaic structures of the world were
hidden there, that the world ended there in its unknown motives.
No one had navigated
those waters in thirty years. Benito and his men had to pass through the
Embira channel from Tarauacá. Traveling that way, however, through the
Rio Jordão, their journey might run into the hidden fur of some wild animal
which they could encounter and surprise at any moment after rounding some bend,
as if it was a prehistoric monster. The Solar was a
typical Amazon river vessel, eight meters longs, the housed mid-section,
pilot's seat under the bow cover, windows, bunks, engine in the center, cans of
fuel under greasy, dirty benches. The turns were interminable.
Benito did not remember the place where he spent his childhood. The area
was abandoned and given over to the Numa who had come down from the mountains
of Peru. Hundreds of people had perished in those forests full of rubber
trees. Hundreds of people shot with poison darts fashioned from quills of
the scarlet ibis. This was the final hidden place on the earth yet to be
civilized.
Seated on the
hatchway, armed with a rifle on his knees, a heavy 44-caliber Winchester 92,
Benito appeared to be a happy man. Raised in a library, of delicate
complexion, this trip revived him, excited him.
The political career
of Abraham Gadelha had increased in the New State. He had the support of
Vargas and in order to dampen his adversary's strength, he tried to discover
the alleged crime committed against Zequinha Bataillon in the past, which had
been carried out on the orders of Gabriel Gonçalves da Cunha and Antonio
Ferreira. Investigations had yielded nothing, but the former journalist
did not give up. The death of Zequinha had an influence on a series of
facts of vital consequence for Amazonian politics. Gadelha had been the
federally appointed temporary governor and now a candidate for State Governor
by direct vote on the slate of candidates which concurrently had Ribamar de
Souza for Senator. As you remember, Ribamar's proxy would have been his
own wife – Diana Dartigues.
Ribamar was a
powerful ally of Abraham Gadelha and the two, as complementary forces, had
tried to destroy the resurgence of the policies of Gabriel Gonçalves da
Cunha and his ex-son-in-law.
A crime of that
period could involve their names in a dark, bloody and unknown episode – so
thought Ribamar de Souza, a successful entrepreneur who represented modernity,
industrialization and the entry of the State of Amazonas into a new type of
non-extractive capitalism.
He had a chain of
department stores that branched out to Belém and São Luiz, he owned a hotel in
Rio and still had the women's houses in the Rua Frei José dos Inocentes.
The investigation continued, a secret project of Abraham Gadleha. Ribamar
was against the idea – the tables could be turned on them: he, Ribamar,
had been a childhood friend of José Bataillon (and always mentioned the obscure
origin of his own immense fortune). But Gadelha wanted to cast
suspicions: a crime would offset the unstable balance of public opinion.
It had not been easy
to organize that expedition. Benito Botelho wasn't telling the
truth. For one thing, he was working for a São Paulo entrepreneur who was
looking to buy land. At Porto-das-Duas -Canoas he had to dodge mentioning
the topic to the ship's crew, caboclos who were not keen on
traveling Hell's Bayou and its Indian country, abandoned for years...
Suddenly, there
appeared on the bank of the river a woman bedecked in green as if dancing on an
elevated part of the ground: with her arm raised she held up a vase from which
a full-grown rubber tree emerged. The trunk of the tree went behind the
marble statue, now green, which Dona Ifigenia Vellarde had brought back from
Europe at the end of the last century.
Behind this frozen
woman there it was – magnificent, dominant, unutterable, majestic – the Manixi
Palacio!
They had arrived at
Manixi.
The shock was
hallucinating and beautiful.
Long and thick
branches of leafy trees that had sprouted inside were coming out of the open
windows and it appeared as though the Palacio had grown wings and was beginning
to take flight.
The Palacio was
blaneted by a patina of extraordinary beauty, a monumental presence – right
there, alive, washed out: a crazed landmark of its time.
It was a sanctuary,
it dominated its surroundings, an ancient temple lost in the middle of the
forest from another era. It radiated a light all around itself, of another
civilization, of another century, of another unknown world, a living boundary
of the luxury and splendor of the rubber boom at the end of the Empire.
The forest was
closing in on it forming a strange enclosure over the moldings and iridescent
coloration of its ancient architecture, covered with vines and branches of
abundant foliage which emerged from inside the exquisite rooms and created the
aura of an ecstatic spectacle.
They moored the
launch and Benito got out and walked toward the marble stairway. A
rattlesnake slithered away to safety underneath rocks coming loose from the
foundation.
The entire past of
the Amazon was there on those steps covered with dry leaves, on the fine and
flowery railing of corroded and rusted iron.
The door was
open. From the portico Benito peered into the middle of the spacious
hall, on its floor of worn planks covered with plants and, about to topple
over, the intact, noble, Faustian, small Pleyel grand piano of Pierre
Bataillon. It was the only thing in the room, the single piece of
furniture that remained and there it was, abandoned, closed, stifled, in
silence, just like after a concert when they turn off the lights and the
theater becomes empty and depopulated.
But all the
sumptuous phantoms arose there. The course of the whole history
unraveled. Time was frozen, defenseless, in the middle of the spacious
rooms, disappearing along the same corridors, dripping along the lugubrious
walls heavy with stucco and baroque decoration. Invisible beings appeared
once again dragging long and heavy, squalid garments of green velvet, putting
on glittering full dress, emerging from the luxurious sepulcher of that time,
through those open spaces populated with symbols inside that enormous
construction of another world, of the end of the world from which everyone had
fled, now peopled with demons, guilty, expiating their dead faults.
And at night they
paraded by along those corridors, through a series of windows and doors,
reflecting their successive silhouettes in the dim mirrors mixing with the
figures painted on the walls, famished, icy, not daring to go out into the
abandoned garden, this side of the door ornate figures of fine and fierce
glance who would not allow anyone to penetrate that sanctuary of refuse of old
and condemned wealth, let no one go up that staircase and go through the rooms
beyond which were marble figures brought countless years ago to accompany the
ashes and waste. It was if they were saying: “Disappear!”. Or
threatening: “Get out!”.
The hulk of the
former, disenfranchised owner of the house could be seen at night through the
windows, as if a cathedral were illuminating him, showing his terrifying and
desperate face, his eyes sunken in darkness, searching for something, searching
for time, searching for himself – and passing into his infinite misery without
anyone seeing him. All the splendor of that former luxury was a torment
sinisterly plunged into the destruction of an empire silenced there at last.
Twenty-two: The Daily News
Benito Botelho stood
in front of the house of Abraham Gadelha for some time without making a move to
enter. At 52 Joaquim Nabuco Street. Two stories, Moorish style.
He had a feeling
that he would be fired. A few years ago he would not have worried, but
the situation was different now. Aunt Eudocia was old, sick and did not
get out of her hammock. He had to provide some money to take care of her,
pay for a cabocla maid to come in, and opportunities in Manaus
were rare now.
Surprisingly,
Gadelha received him amiably and invited him for dinner.
Gadelha foresaw his
defeat at the polls. It was just a month until the elections and Antonio
Ferreira had an advantage over him. Ferreira was livelier and physically
stronger, more likeable and was solely occupied with politics, working at
nothing else. On the contrary, Gadelha was seldom in Manaus, was employed
in Rio de Janeiro where he resided; Antonio Ferriera was a professional
politician, Abraham Gadelha a journalist and entrepreneur and the influence of
his sponsor, Getulio Vargas, was beginning to decline.
But Gadelha would
form an alliance with Antonio Ferriera in those first years. As the State
of Amazonas had not come out of the pre-failure situation in which it remained
since the end of the rubber boom, it would be impossible for Ferreira to
institute good governance and so Gadelha finally broke with him, accusing him
of corruption and being irresponsible; he would assume power again and choose
Ribamar de Souza as his candidate.
Ribamar de Souza,
however, was elected to the Senate.
Abraham Gadelha
counted on Benito Botelho to write a serious article against the coming
government. Benito would write signed articles, polemics, putting a lot
of wood on the fire as only he knew how. Meanwhile, Gadelha would go to
Rio. When things cooled down, he would return to Manaus, dismiss Bentio
Botelho and make an alliance with the new Governor. He knew that only
Benito had the courage for a direct attack. Benito figured in his
plans. Benito had nothing to lose. There had been a bounty on his
head for a long time now.
The meal was
simple. They ate at a roomy table covered in the middle with a folded
tablecloth. Gadelha lived alone, far from his family. Black beans
and rice, fried and cooked fish, banana farofa.
“So?”,
asked his host, suddenly, fork in hand. “You found out nothing?”.
Bentio Botelho took
a swig of beer before replying. He felt guilty about the decline of the
party.
“Nothing,” he
said. “But I ran across something I wasn't looking for.”
“Really? At
least it would give up some good material and compensate for the money
lost. Tell me.”
“Unfortunately, it's
something not for publication,” said Benito.
“All the better,
then.”
“Listen, Gadelha,
one step at a time … do you know the story of the Caxinauá Indian woman?”
“Who?”
“I told you about
her, Gadelha. She was brought up at Manixi with Zequinha Bataillon.
She was his nursemaid.”
“Yes, I remember.”
said Gadelha.
“It happens,
Gadelha, that Maria Caxinauá is living and is the grandmother of Diana
Dartigues.”
Gadelha choked.
Gadhelha was
coughing; he became very red. He took a swig of beer.
Gadelha did not
easily recover. Now the powerful Ribamar de Souza, his ally, who had come
from nothing, from the village of Patos in Pernambuco from which he left with
two changes of clothing in a tied-up and sewn together suitcase, was revealing
his secret? Gadelha's head was spinning at a frightful speed.
Because Diana Dartigues was a mystery to everyone. No one knew the origin
of the couple's wealth. Money appeared as by magic.
The social columns
fed the Diana Dartigues myth. Ricardinho Soares said: “Diana is
divine.” She was mentioned as one of the most elegant women of Brazil in
the column of Ibrahim Sued of Rio de Janeiro. Thin, tall, elegant and
sensual, no one denied the position she always occupied among the most
progressively fashionable of her time. Her walk, her way of flinging her
arms forward, her adroitness in twisting her long neck, a long-legged crane,
studied movements, French model. Diana did not walk – she sashayed
past. Always with bright clothes making her brown complexion stand out,
always with high heels. She wore almost no jewelry, always in a certain
moderation – a small brooch, or a single finger ring, a string of pearls.
That was it. Sometimes a ribbon around her neck with a ruby.
It was a fine sight
to be there when the couple of Ribamar and Diana got out of the white Buick
with their chauffeur. Ribamar, very much older, an entrepreneurial type,
smiling at everyone. And Diana with her hat, a hint of a smile,
dignified, tall, thin, aristocratic, one foot, then the other, young, arms
raised or flung forward with indifference, hips a little askew, but not
exaggerated.
A handsome
couple. Even their adversaries respected and feared them.
“But that is not
all,” continued Benito.
“How did you find
out these things?”, Gadelha asked.
“An Indian woman
named Irini told me. She brought up the child. It was she who
brought her to Manaus...I was with her.”
“You were going to
say...”
“Yes, look,
Gadelha. Juca das Neves was bankrupt. Who paid his debts?”
“No one ever knew,”
said Gadelha.
“She did.
Diana Dartigues!”
Abraham Gadelha
looked at his interlocutor with disbelief, but Benito continued:
“Years ago, Maria
Caxinauá stole an iron chest full of Pierre Bataillon's pounds of gold.
She hid it the whole time and then gave it to her granddaughter to start out on
life...”
“Don't you think
this story quite extraordinary?”
“I do and it is,”
said Benito. “But it's the truth.”
Getting up, as the
dinner was over, they went out to the indoor garden. Portuguese mosaics,
glazed walls, cane chairs. The garden was a circular orchidarium with a
pool in the middle, Cattleya superba, Cattleya eldorado,
fairy-like, hallucinatingly beautiful. They sat surrounded by orchids,
the host's favorite spot where Gadelha received politicians. Warm air
wafted down through the skylights. Humid hothouse atmosphere, botanical
garden.
“And Diana's
mother?” Gadelha asked.
“She died a long
time ago.”
They remained
silent. Then Benito spoke:
“Do you know who
Diana's grandfather is?
“Who?”
“Zequinha
Bataillon... Diana is the granddaughter of Zequinha and Maria
Caxinauá.”
Twenty-three: The End
Years later, when
Antonio Ferreira was elected Governor and an alliance had been made with
Abraham Gadelha, Benito Botelho was then indeed unemployed.
I see him in the
Bacarau drinking away the last of the money earned from writing a speech for
Deputy Fonseca Varella. Benito was drinking it away while listening to
the river peddler Saraiva Marques who was there in the company of a short,
nasty, thin little mustached man, Maneco Rastos, son of Conchita del Carmen.
Maneco, meanwhile,
was saying that his father was the famous son of Pierre Bataillon. Maneco
drank a lot, he had a tab at the Bacarau and was losing credit. This was
his favorite place because he could avail himself of master Benito's erudition.
But Benito was in
decline and Maneco could not help him. Benito Botelho was drinking more
and more; without his aunt, he was more thin, pale and shaky. He fell
down in the street and had lost his former luster. Drunk, he said nothing
coherent anymore, dulled, inert.
Then the river
peddler Saraiva Marques said:
“Do you know what
happened to Zequinha Bataillon?”
Benito Botelho in
his cups raised his head, looked at the old man but did not see him.
“After he had
disappeared for ten years, he showed up on the Praia do Cuco from where he
left: he was crazy. Maria Caxinauá found him and hid him for
years. One day he got worse and she had to tie him up. He still
survived tied up like that for several years. When he died, she buried
him on the banks of Hell's Bayou...”
But what seemed like
a tall tale was the truth. Saraiva kept quiet. There was
silence. It was death.
Then Benito got up
with difficulty and started to recite a poem of Álvaro Maia, called Night.
The
night is hunger-giving. Black chasms are rising...
Benito recited
from memory. The sonority of the phrases echoed in the
surroundings. A sensitive man, Maneco was deeply affected by these verses
which he knew well. The words came out of his alcoholic mouth booming
like thunder.
A young prostitute
entered the Bacarau and sat down at a table where there were leftovers from a
meal. A cat was licking itself on the counter and cigarette smoke
enveloped it. The pitched voice of a drunk Benito continued:
In
the lugubrious unfolding of eternal tragedies …
That morning Abraham
Gadelha was wounded by a bullet fired by an unknown person assumed to be on the
order from his ex-fellow party member Ribamar de Souza. The whole city
had talked about this, but the shot was forgotten at the Bacarau. Gadelha
survived.
In
the solemn silence there are magic and rituals...
In the
confusion of lives and debris are seen
Consolations from God, hatreds from Satan.
Benito was down-and-out.
He had had pancreatitis and could not continue drinking.
His fingers shook in
the air and already he saw nothing.
Something was dying.
That was when the
poet Lopes, who signed himself Aflopes, entered, towering, athletic. He was
a strong young man, friendly and talented.
“Hey, Lopes!”,
Maneco shouted seeing him. He approached the assembly.
How
the moonlight terrifies! how it shines is so sadly!
Lopes waited
for the poem to end. Benito was forgetting verses, confusing stanzas.
When the Master was
finished, the poet Lopes spoke:
“I am the bearer of
sad news.”
Silence.
“Do you know who has
just died?”
The cat jumped off
the counter.
“Frei Lothar.”
Blinking, proud,
heavy with alcohol, eyes closed, Benito rose from his chair that very instant,
on foot, not looking at anyone, motionless.
Then he opened his
dull eyes and said, leaning on the table:
“Gentlemen...dear
Gentlemen...One of the greatest men this earth has known has just died...Frei
Lothar spent his whole long life in the arduous task of fighting against
misery, against diseases, against Amazonian ignorance...”
He did not continue,
but fell onto the table breaking a glass of cachaça into pieces on the
floor. He died five days later and was buried under an unmarked cement
stone in the Major Gabriel cemetery. A few years after that, Ribamar de
Souza and Diana Dartigues were separated. But at this point I am running
out of breath as I come to the end of this my story; day is dawning and coming
upon us and it is time for me to leave you, my friend, I am still here who have
seen everything that was to been seen and, in spite of this, your make-believe
Narrator who is at his end is still alive until now to bring the matter to a
close. There is no more, it was just as I told it - this story
fashioned and spoken by me; those things took place according to what I, the
Narrator, have said. Good-bye, my son: remember me your Narrator who will
be alive no longer and do not forget this very fine story of the lover of the
Amazon. The Amazon is a particularly fantastic place which is also at its
end, and when you dream, dream of Hell's Bayou going inside that marsh, passing
by the Manixi Palace of long memory, of the young Zequinha Bataillon.
Remember Maria Caxinauá, the big fellow Paxiúba, Benito
Botelho, Pierre Bataillon at the piano and Ifigênia Vellarde. Do not
forget Antonio Ferreira, Ivete the Maacu, Conchita del Carmen, Juca da Neves
and his wife Dona Constança and the Commander Gabriel Gonçalves da Cunha.
But also, Frei Lothar and Ribamar de Souza who is leaving now as
this your Narrator and disappearing at this point.
-
TRADUÇÃO COMPLETA THE AMAZON Translation by Christopher Schindler One: The Journey It was at the crack of dawn on Christmas day 189...