View from the Fazenda : A Tale of the Brazilian Heartlands [1 ed.] 9780821440971, 9780821414743

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view from the fazenda

view from the fazenda A T ale

of the

B razilian H ear tlands

ellen bromfield geld

Ohio University Press • Athens

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio  ©  by Ellen Bromfield Geld Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ™              I would like very much to thank my editor, Gillian Berchowitz, for the constant encouragement and excellent suggestions that contributed so much to the writing of this book.—Ellen Bromfield Geld Maps were prepared by Renato Silveira Moraes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Geld, Ellen Bromfield, – View from the Fazenda : A tale of the Brazilian Heartlands / by Ellen Bromfield Geld. p. cm. ISBN --- (alk. paper) .Säo Paulo (Brazil : State)—Social life and customs. . Plantation life—Brazil—Säo Paulo (State) . Säo Paulo (Brazil : State)— History—th century. .Geld, Ellen Bromfield, –. I. Title. F .G  '.—dc 

To my father, Louis Bromfield, and our mentor, Carlito Aranha, without whose romantic instigation we would not be where we are . . .

Contents 1 Of Gravity and Distance  2 A Place of Learning  3 The Frontier’s Edge  4 A Frontier Town  5 A Quest for Land  6 The Incorrigible Pioneers  7 Of Chance and Circumstance

and Juca de Botucatu  8 Fazenda Pau D’Alho  9 The Casa da Fazenda  10 A Step into the Past  11 Of the Passage of Days and the

Meaning of Trees  12 While Politicians Sleep, Brazil Grows  13 John the Bull and His Harem  14 Of Cattle and Men  15 “Resting Our Idea” 

16 Of Cattle Shows, Writers, and Sculptors  17 Of Italian Immigrants and “Clubes -S”  18 Coming of Age in the Valley of the Tietê  19 Of Frost and Exodus to the Amazon  20 The Worlds of Aparecido and José  21 Gold in the Rivers  22 The Trees of the Future  23 A Wedding of Two Worlds  24 A Handful of Grass  25 The Man in the Bell Jar  26 A Timeless Place  27 The Meaning of a Way of Life  28 The One Who Knows . . .  29 The Ohioans and Paraná  30 The Heifer of the Future  31 Dona Zezé and the Schoolhouse

by the Road  32 The Heart of Brazil  33 Of Roots and Ideas 

Glossary of Portuguese and Indian Terms 

view from the fazenda

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1 Of

Gravity and Distance

I imagine everyone has a center of gravity. Something which binds one to earth and gives sense and direction to the things one does. Mine has to do with writing and so depends on where I spread my papers and pencils. Sometimes it is in a corner of the veranda around which I have allowed the garden to grow wild so that I may gaze upon the flowering vines, ferns, and giant leaves of a junglous mosaic while I gather my thoughts. Other times it is a picnic table beneath the eliotis pines from which I can look out over the pasture, where in midafternoon a babá cow keeps vigil over a cluster of sleeping calves while the other cows fan out to graze. But the spot that suits me best is where I am sitting now, at a plain wooden desk before a window beyond which to look through the trees on the lawn and down the slope to the croplands is to relive the changing scenes in a place that has become a way of life. We didn’t come here right away. According to an inscription on the water tank by the vegetable garden, we settled on Fazenda Pau D’Alho in , but it took us eight years to get here. Our odyssey, 1

once we reached Brazil, is rather well illustrated by a photo on the wall in our bedroom. It is of myself and our eldest son, Stephen, then aged one and a half, sitting under an umbrella in a boat on the Ribeira River. We were there because a pair whose names, perhaps out of selective amnesia, I have forgotten thought we were rich Americans who might be persuaded to invest in a piece of land. If only they could have known that the exact opposite was the case—that we were dead broke. But curious about every part of Brazil, we had gladly allowed our hosts to think what they liked. As it was, no place could have been more unlikely a prospect than the Ribeira Valley at that time, and the trip was a disaster from beginning to end. On dirt roads, what now takes an hour took us a day, descending the Serra do Mar in a rattling jeep through jungled mountains that at any time would have been better left alone. Reaching Registro at the bottom after dark, we spent the night in a house next to a guava paste factory that so filled our nostrils and lungs with the stink of rotten fruit that we swore we’d never eat guava paste as long as we lived. Once in the valley our only means of transport was by boat on the Ribeira River itself. It rained constantly, and at the time the photo in question was taken, unable to see a bend in the river through the sheeting downpour, our boatman had managed to shoot the boat onto the embankment, where we sat stranded amid the trees until another vessel happened by to rescue us. I’ve laughed often since but never more than on that trip, which was only one of many excursions we would take over the next few years to many a place which could have been, as my father often used to say, “better imagined than seen.” About one thing that pair of speculators was right, however. We did want to invest in land of our own to do with as 2

View from the Fazenda

we saw fit. It was the whole reason for our coming to Brazil. And for us such excursions were one way to look around while Carson worked as a farm manager, trying to earn the money we needed. The person who persuaded us to come here was of a very different stripe from the two mentioned above. Sometimes still I think he must have cast a spell over us to get us to put all our savings into one-way passages for two adults, a child, and a dog on an ocean liner to a country we knew nothing about. Other times, looking at it logically, it seems to me that, in this world of chance and circumstance, he was simply the right man at the right moment. Carson was fresh out of the army at the time, and while we perched like birds ready for flight at my father’s Malabar Farm in Ohio, with his agronomy degree in hand like a pass to the future he was looking for a job. In the midst of all this, on a fine summer’s day, an amazing gentleman appeared. He introduced himself as Manoel Carlos Aranha from Brazil and explained that he had come to Ohio to talk of the things he had read in my father’s books. Immediately the two set off together to walk over the land and, as often happened with Louis Bromfield, they became so immersed in the complex subject of farming that the Brazilian missed his plane. And so it was that on an August evening in , after a large country dinner, we found ourselves sitting on lawn chairs, talking with this man far into the night. Carlito, as we would come to call him, was tall, erect, and sturdy with traces of Indian and Portuguese nobility in a large, aquiline nose and dark eyes set deep beneath a jutting brow that made his appearance both imposing and alluring. His voice was extraordinarily soft, so that I remember its almost being drowned by the squawkings of the guinea fowl perched in the catalpa tree Of Gravity and Distance

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above us. But then he began to speak of his country, and the description became so eloquent that tropical rain forests, wild savannas, and sweeping, grassy plains edged by ancient aruacarias became clearer in our vision than the starlit night around us. Speaking of his own land in the high Piratininga plains, he said that, as the inheritor of a ruined fazenda, he had worked for years using many of the ideas expressed in my father’s books until he had restored the land to a rich and diverse productivity that provided a good living for what then seemed to us an amazing number of people. “For that, I can speak from experience,” he said. And yet—one moment ecstatic, the next exasperated—he declared that his country had taken its agriculture so much for granted that now, in the throes of industrialization, it was in danger of being unable to provide food for the vast numbers who were flooding to the cities from the land. Haunted by most people’s utter indifference to this fact, his dream was to create a model fazenda which could prove to his fellow Brazilians that they need be dependent on no other country for their food, that anything could be grown in Brazil that was produced anywhere else in the world. At some point during our conversation, Carson and I must have expressed our own longing—natural in anyone who wants to farm—to possess land of our own. For suddenly at the end of his grand description, this imposing stranger turned to Carson alone. “There’s land enough in Brazil for everyone,” he said. “What makes things difficult is that there are so few who really know how to tend it well. For anyone who has knowledge and experience, there are great opportunities—provided of course they have the staying power.” He paused to give Carson what we, talking later 4

View from the Fazenda

alone, would define as a challenging look. “If you really think you have it, the best time for the test would be now, wouldn’t it? Before you gain too many ties?” Somehow, though Brazil hadn’t even been a vague notion until that night, Carlito’s suddenly seemed to be the advice we were looking for. Often since, I’ve reflected on the shock Carlito must have felt when he received a letter saying we were on our way. I’ve smiled too at the ease with which we picked up and went, apparently so convinced that it would work out that we were undisturbed by the thought that we hadn’t the money for a return trip if it didn’t. Fortunately, we had not been long in Brazil before Carlito offered Carson his first job. Who knows if a certain sense of responsible guilt was not involved, but I like to think we must have measured up in some way for Carlito to have made such a move. Whatever the case, with a potential manager at hand, he persuaded a group of friends who were of the same troubled mind about Brazil’s future as he to invest in seven hundred hectares—about seventeen hundred acres—of land. They would call it, in honor of my father’s farm in Ohio, Fazenda Malabar do Brasil. And it would be there that, as Carson’s boss and mentor, Carlito would help us to learn a great many things that can only be learned by their living.

Of Gravity and Distance

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Place of Learning

Our first home in Brazil lay in the valley of the Atibaia River, which flowed into the vast interior of Brazil from the Serra do Mar. Steep and laden with enormous boulders of granite, in the time of slavery its deep red soils had provided fortunes in coffee. Since then some cattle had grazed on hillsides of purple-flowering caatingueiro grass, whose seed, it was said, had come from Africa in the hair of the slaves. But otherwise nothing much had happened in that valley until suddenly we came there to farm. The house we moved into was large and rambling, damp and musty with that memorable smell of old structures built of earth that I shall always remember, just as I will the scent and the mingling of seasonings and wood smoke that came from the great wood-burning stove in the kitchen. The stove was built of brick and clay with a huge oven in which legs of pork, bread, and pies could be baked all at the same time; while on its heavy iron surface, rice in iron kettles could be kept fluffy and light, with beans and sausage simmering over a fire that burned all day and 6

smoldered all night. It was a stove of great character, which in those early days in Brazil was like an anchor that held me in place. For the bread that came from its oven and the gardengrown vegetables, pickles, jams, and chutneys cooked on its surface were a comforting reminder that I had come from one to farm to another—even if it was in a country of whose language and ways I knew nothing. For Carson, who had to give the orders of the day, it meant going out and trying to make himself heeded, if not understood, by people who had lived on the fazenda for generations. To whom, until his appearance, everything had been predictable except the weather; people who looked upon everything from crop failure to a crippling illness as the result of God’s will. And yet who, perhaps out of necessity in such a limited world, were, along with their fatalism, amazingly ingenious. It was incredible to see the things an agile mind could conceive of making from bamboo, such as watering troughs for chickens, cages, and flutes and whistles which could imitate a whole variety of birds. At Fazenda Malabar an elaborate system of bamboo troughs descended kilometers to provide our house with cool, clear water from a spring high in the hills. How all the angles were calculated without even a level to work with seemed beyond us. And so in many ways it was Carson who learned from these people of the valley of the Atibaia rather than the other way around. The kind of people with whom we would live and work in one way or another all our lives, who along with their strange combination of passivity and ingenuity also possessed an endurance that made it possible for them to work all day with a hoe or a machete in the blazing sun. If they taught us much about their ways, it was Carlito the A Place of Learning

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dreamer and stern taskmaster who taught us how to farm in subtropical São Paulo, where truly just about anything could be planted. Rice in the lowlands that bordered the river; strawberries, watermelons, asparagus, string beans, and artichokes along the irrigation canals that carried water from the hills. On the hills themselves, contoured to secure the deep red earth, we planted grapes, tomatoes, okra, corn, and even cultivated tung trees for oil. Since all the machinery in those days was imported, nothing was discarded until it collapsed. As well as a new John Deere tractor and plow, we had a vintage  German tractor called a Lanz Bulldog, which had to be set in motion by building a fire under its hood. Rice was sown by machine but cut by hand and gathered into sheaves which were beaten over wooden benches to separate the grain from the straw. Beans were planted with a hand instrument resembling a bellows called a matraca in furrows made with hand plows drawn by single-minded mules. In the midst of this amazing diversity we would learn as well that, although almost anything can be grown here that is grown anywhere in the world, a winterless climate has its compensating ills. Plant disease was our constant adversary. Weather kept our days enlivened with a perpetual sense of anticipation. One year we harvested more fish and frogs than rice from thirty hectares of lowland along the river. Another, frost destroyed one hundred thousand tomato vines that were just on the verge of production. It was about then that Carlito’s city partners showed signs of being ready to throw in the towel. Though they had invested in a good cause, as industrialists and bankers they were used to making cashflow charts and profit predictions with a great degree of confidence in their calculations. And though they’d been warned, only experience could give them the feel of what it could be like 8

View from the Fazenda

to be thrown back to square one by a single night’s drop in temperature. When they came to inspect the damage, we heard one of them laugh bravely and, patting his friend Carlito kindly, if a bit patronizingly, on the back, say, “You have to be a poet for this.” By that time we had learned that to Brazilians “poets” were people who have more of a romantic than pragmatic approach to what they do. Certainly, after years of practicing the profession, it seems to me that being a bit of a poet is perhaps the only way one can survive as a farmer. For in the end, more than anything, farming is a way of life you either love or become bitter enduring. Poet or not, Carlito Aranha farmed all his life and made a good job of everything he did. None had a better talent for taking the materials at hand—the mule and his stoic driver, the immigrants and their ambition—and adapting them to modern ideas, improving the lives of all concerned. As for ourselves, no need to say how fortunate we were to have had such a man as our mentor. Like all farm managers in Brazil in that day, Carson earned next to nothing, but the experience he gained made it possible for him to bargain just at the moment when it looked as though we were on the verge of having to look for a new job. Indeed, no one understood this better than Carlito. “Of course,” he’d say, spreading his big hands expansively as though it had been part of his scheme all along, “these chances don’t come every day. It’s time to go where the money is.”

] I have seen people frown dubiously when I’ve said it was harder to leave the old house at Malabar do Brasil than it was our families and homes in the United States. But it is true. For from that house each morning Carson had gone out to set his world in A Place of Learning

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motion. Beneath the faded tiles of its roof, I had written my first book and begun to write chronicles for O Estado de São Paulo. Our son Steve learned to read and write in Portuguese in the fazenda’s one-room school. Two more of our children, Robin and Michael, were born while we lived there. And not the least, both Carson’s mother, Jenny, and my father came to visit us at last. They came to know their grandchildren, made chutney on the woodstove, played cards together in the evening, and had a wonderful time. Walking with us over the land, my father was at last grudgingly convinced that we were not young, irresponsible fools, gone on an adventure that would end in disaster and embarrassment. It was, then, the place where our life together really began, and no doubt that is why here at Pau D’Alho I often return to it in dreams. Yet when I awaken in the big corner room that looks down over the pecan grove, I never fail to feel relieved and glad. For those are our trees and this is our land, and now more than ever, I know what a difference that makes.

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View from the Fazenda

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3 The

Front ie r’s Edge

Where the money lay for us in  was Presidente Prudente, some seven hundred kilometers westward from the inordinately fast-growing city of São Paulo along a road that was a river of mud in the rainy season, a tunnel of dust in the dry. In those days, Prudente stood at the edge of a frontier. It was a big, busy town whose periphery of clapboard houses along dirt roads faded into forests of burned tree trunks amid which cotton and peanuts thrived and half-wild Indian zebus grazed up to their humps in deep colonião grass. In the midst of this scene stood the great gins and warehouses of Anderson Clayton, the Texas commodity traders who had been ginning cotton in Brazil wherever it was planted, from northeastern Piaui to Paraná in the south, ever since the early twenties. Along one of the roads which lead out of town was Clayton’s new Fazenda Pagador, named for the company’s Paymaster Farms in Texas. The fazenda was to conduct research on and produce seed of cotton, peanuts, castor beans, and any other oilproducing crop that struck the company as promising. In a 11

country where there was virtually no research on any of these things, it was a very useful idea. Unfortunately, like many such efforts, it would eventually be defeated by unstable politics and narrow-minded bureaucracy. But while it lasted, the research was to be done by three American scientists, one with a doctorate and two with masters degrees, and the farm was to be run by a bachelor of science, Carson, for a reasonable salary that was to us, after our previous experience, astronomical. If anything, Fazenda Pagador itself was a marvelous example of what money and power could do if properly used. For the money made it possible to perform in a few months so many things it would have taken years to do elsewhere. When we arrived to unload our truck and wash off the dust of the road, we did so in a modest little house set in a grove of mango trees in the midst of brush and weeds. Within three months, one hardly would have recognized the place. Like mushrooms after a cold rain, up went laboratories, offices, a guest house for visiting dignitaries, and dwellings for the director, the scientists, the farm manager, the laborers. Along came the equipment, brand new, to do everything but pick cotton by machine. In no time the scientists were bent on learning things about the crops that Carson and his men were cultivating in the region’s subtropical climate. Incredibly, as if to emphasize Brazil’s potential diversity, Carson had yet to work with any of the crops planted at Pagador, and so it was a whole new experience, which he found exciting and stimulating. With all the technology and funds at hand, one could have called it an ideal situation to work in. Yet when you work on a company farm there is always that feeling that, though you are standing on earth you’ve just plowed, the plans in your head can be dismantled tomorrow by the stroke of a pen in some remote 12

View from the Fazenda

air-conditioned office. And for that, even as Carson planned the work and renewed the fields, even as we planted trees and flowers around the house we occupied, it never seemed like home to us. Only a place to sojourn while we sought the land where we hoped to settle for life.

] Presidente Prudente, though, was another story of which we as cattle breeders would one day feel ourselves a part in a sequence that is as endless as the possibilities of land’s change and renewal. Standing at the edge of a frontier that was gradually spreading west and north into unoccupied and seemingly infinite spaces, the town had been through several phases by the time we came to live there in . In the s the region had been claimed by herders whose greatest achievement was simple survival in its sparse campo lands that surrounded them. Their stories, told to us a hundred years later in long evenings of sitting on verandas and talking, were amazingly remindful of Conrad Richter’s unforgettable descriptions of the settling of Ohio during those very same years. One such tale was of the family of Domingos Medeiros, who came, as did many others, to hide himself in the wilderness to avoid being drafted and forgotten in a hideous war with Paraguay which had seemed likely to never end. The splendid forests still being the territory of fierce Caingangues Indians, the settlers occupied the sparse campo lands, where they planted their subsistence crops and turned the cattle loose to forage on the native grasses that grew beneath the twisted campo trees. There these people built houses of taipa—clay meshed with twigs and branches and pounded into sturdy palmetto frames. Within, the T h e Fro n t i e r ’s E d g e

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women wove flax for the spreads to cover their corn husk and kapok cotton mattresses and burned castor oil and tallow in their lamps. Pressing their own sugarcane, they made coarse brown sugar and fiery cachaça, which the men consumed to warm their spirits on their return from herding cattle, hunting, and fighting Indians. Whatever was left over from their labors was traded for lengths of cloth, wheat flour, and salt bought on the yearly expedition to Pôrto Ferrão on the Tietê River, some three hundred kilometers distant. Whatever else was needed, from sun-dried beef and pork sausage to rice, corn, manioc meal, and beans, came from the fazenda. All this domestic labor was done under the direction of the legendary matriarch Dona Maria Maquelina, upon whom everyone ultimately depended. Illness, from the common cold to something sinisterly known as Bauru ulcers, was treated by the matriarch with the guidance of what was known as the Chernoviz, a dictionary of popular medicine apparently written by a French homeopath who, for use in his cures, had included a fine inventory of Brazilian medicinal herbs and waters. During those years, war with the Indians was chronic. And with no mediation of any kind on the part of the government, the battle went on until all the Caingangues who were still alive fled to the even greater expanses of Mato Grosso. It was with the coming of the Sorocabana Railway, which opened the way for the king of crops, coffee, that those great territories so thinly occupied by a few cattle herders would become highly valuable. The land would be divided and sold at great profit; the forests, now emptied of Indians, cleared of trees for the planting of crops. And naturally with all that virgin soil to be used, when the old land was worn out, new land was cleared. The richer forest, as desig14

View from the Fazenda

nated by great hardwood trees, for crops; the lesser forest, for pasture. It was Domingos Medeiros’s grandson Geronimo who performed this job of forest clearance with such zeal that he came to be known as O Desbravador, “The Tamer” of forests, who as well would fill many an evening for us with legendary tales. One of these told that he had lived so long by the rules of frontier barter that money made no sense to him. So it was that on a trip to Rio de Janeiro he was persuaded to purchase a counterfeit machine which, he trusted, would forevermore relieve him of the onus of dealing with banks. But if he could be fooled temporarily by bits of paper, he couldn’t be about land. Wise in the signs of the forest, he went his way trading poor land for rich—taming it, leaving it in the hands of his descendants, and moving on. To do so he always kept close to the men who did the work, living in rude camps, sleeping in hammocks slung between trees. Transient, rough individuals used to a life that was raw and savage but free of burdens—many of these mateiros preferred to forget their names and the ties that went with them and to assume names suggested by their life, such as Cobra or Jaguar or Machadão, “Big Axe.” As independent as they were rough, if the pay or the food wasn’t up to the mark agreed upon, they could easily vanish, leaving their employer with an empty camp and a forest to clear on his own. But cognizant of these codes, O Desbravador was good as his word, and therefore—except to malaria, snake bites, knife fights, and the like—he seldom lost a man. In exchange, those men did a brutal job that went on for years. Where possible the lesser trees were chopped and burned in crude kilns of clay for charcoal. The greater trees that could be removed T h e Fro n t i e r ’s E d g e

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were felled and the logs attached one by one to a crossbar between two immense wheels, the whole of which was drawn out of the forest by teams of oxen. What could not be removed was left standing while everything beneath was set afire. Then with the first rains in September, the seed of a prolific grass called colonião, which grew half again as tall as a man, was scattered over the ground amid the inferno of ash, stumps, and fallen logs, and cattle were turned loose to forage on the weeds and trample the grass seed into the ground. In such a way, the process was repeated until gradually the colonião grass closed in. Back then, in the twenties and thirties, more cattle were fattened on that grass than anyone might have dreamed possible in the rough, inhospitable country where the first settlers set stake. But of course the story didn’t end there. For cattle can wear land out in the same way that crops do, fattening and calving and raising their calves on the richness in the soil that comes to them through grass. And what with overgrazing and burning each year to bring on the new growth, the soil became so acidic and poor and overgrown with ferns and brush it could scarcely support one animal on ten hectares of land where before it had supported one to every hectare.

] By the time we arrived there in the late fifties, with cat’s claw and brush forming an ugly new forest, the job of clearing and renewal was almost as monumental as had been the original. But this time rather than the camps of woodsmen, the dwellings of sharecroppers appeared amid the brush and still-standing dead trees. Those croppers would plow with mules, fertilize, and plant cotton and peanuts for several years on the agreement that grass 16

View from the Fazenda

would be planted between the rows of the final crop. And then they would move on. Their huts of palm and thatch provided as much shelter as a bird cage in a windstorm, but that was all they could afford to build. Known as os flagelados, the persecuted, they had come from Brazil’s northeast, a maddening and bewitching region often afflicted by drought and flood. The world they had come from having been scarcely penetrated by foreigners since the days of the Empire, almost equal measures of white, Indian, and Negro blood flowed in their veins, creating the flatheaded, jugeared, earth-colored man the historian Euclides da Cunha called “the bedrock,” the immutable man of the Brazilian interior. But in the forties and fifties, with the new surge toward western frontiers, even the bedrock had begun to flow. Until we came to know their story better, we thought it was sheer stubbornness that had kept the flagelados so long where they’d been. But later we would discover that what had made them endure the temper of that northeastern climate was that they had had to leave farms which, small and vulnerable as they were, belonged to them. The decision to give up those farms must have been agonizing, but like the Italian immigrants who had come to Brazil in the early s, they hoped that a few years’ harvests in a world where it rained every year would buy more and better land. Arriving as they did with little more than the clothes on their backs and living on vouchers against their coming crops, one crop failure could wipe them out financially. Then too, the curse of ignorance made it much more difficult for them to take advantage of what modern agriculture could offer. A few would win the gamble of sharecropping to settle on land of their own. The rest T h e Fro n t i e r ’s E d g e

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would become part of the great, unruly flood of migrants who would flow north and westward again with the opening of the Trans-Amazon Highway. But that would be a generation away. In the meantime, by the hard work of cropping, they made a lot of land productive again for the families whose fortunes had begun when they had penetrated the wilderness seventy years earlier. The descendants of those first settlers would make secure investments in city lots and travel around the world, but the best thing their riches bought was an education. With it they would come to look upon their pastures as though they were crops. In so doing, they would breed better cattle to make use of land which, with the penetration of roads, was too valuable not to be better used. And the croplands that had been eroded and destroyed by the ignorance and greed for three-quarters of a century would in the s be renewed.

] Before we came to Prudente, we had lived in a land long settled, where the scars of clearing the forest had also long been healed. But here were the skeletons of noble trees that, having grown to towering heights above the rest of the forest, had not been consumed at once by burning but had slowly succumbed all the same. Great perobas, cabreuvas, cedros, and pau ferro, they rose out of the pastures and fields as lifeless monuments to indiscriminate destruction. Knowing that only a forest could replant such trees, the sight never failed to touch me with grief. How much duller our children’s lives would be, I’d find myself thinking, for not knowing them. “Once great perobas grew here,” I could imagine myself saying. But what would it mean to those who had never seen them? 18

View from the Fazenda

That was the landscape around Presidente Prudente in the fifties—one of crop and pasturelands closing in on the stillstanding dead and dying trees. Driving through that same countryside today, it would be hard to believe that such a landscape had ever existed. But I have only to turn my vision inward for a mo-ment to see again those great trees, realize they are now missing, and wonder where it will all end. And even so I can’t help remembering that, despite the primitive approach to nature, there was about the whole of Presidente Prudente a youthfulness and vigor that was irresistible. It was in the tall cotton, its seed surrounded by thick white clouds that burst from straining pods. In the movement of the pickers—women with hands eager for the harvest who plucked the cotton into sacks tied round their waists while children slept and played in the shade of a lean-to or a miraculously surviving tree under a hot blue sky. In those days too, often along the roads that led through the fazendas, you could hear the thunder of hooves and see the dust long before the coming of a boiada, a cattle drive. Then the boiadeiro on the lead mule would appear, his berrante slung over his shoulder. I had seen berrantes hung on walls before, but not until then had I heard the zebu’s fierce, wild lowing as it issued from the curved cow’s horn pressed to the boiadeiro’s lips. A lowing that could only be achieved by someone who understood the sound, tormenting and hypnotic, that drew the herd onward through the day. Sometimes there were as many as a thousand head, come from the campos of Mato Grosso to be fattened on the lush grasses near the railheads. They’d be driven by small, barrel-chested men with Indian features who wore sweat-stained straw hats, carried woolen ponchos against the rain and the cold of the night, and T h e Fro n t i e r ’s E d g e

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rode mules whose bridles were buckled with silver. At dusk they would halt to water, rest, and graze; and the boiadeiros would light fires to cook their rice and jerked beef. Afterward the men would take turns all night, sleeping and moving amid the herd to prevent one spooked animal from starting a stampede that might well end only at the river’s edge. If you were lucky enough to be in a lonely house on a hill, you could fall asleep to the sounds of their moving, the hollow tinkling of the lead mule’s bell, the lowing of the berrante—soft now and soothing. Then when the sun was still a cold red ball on the horizon and everything was cloaked in mist, whips would crack and the mule troop would line up against the fence for the men, holding silver-buckled bridles, to choose their mounts. And before the mist had settled and the earth was warm, they would be gone. Zebu was the collective name given to those descendants of Bos indicus brought from the dusty plains of India to forage in the campo lands of Brazil. Among their varied and colorful breeds were the long-eared, bulging-browed, mottled Brown Gir; the great-horned Guzera, gray Hindu Brasil, Red Sindi, and White Nelore. Standing in the tall colonião grass with only their heads and humps visible, they resembled the noble animals in ancient Indian and Egyptian friezes. That is how I best remember them, at dusk when the black anu birds who had followed them all day to feast on insects stirred up by their grazing flew off to roost in the brush. It is also how I best remember that wide-open country into which those cattle and birds fitted so well: A land in which, at day’s end, the evening clouds reflected the sunset in a sky of endless horizons. And where, when darkness fell, it was unbroken by lights that were as yet far away, beyond the next hill and the next . . . 20

View from the Fazenda

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In that time and place there were few, however, who shared my liking for such open space and silence. Who can say? Perhaps it was the memory, as yet not remote, of solitude and danger in a roadless world that made most find the great stillness of the night in open spaces threatening and sad. A sense of security and cheer, it seemed, could only be found in Presidente Prudente, a hub whose spokes reached beyond the cotton and peanut fields thousands of kilometers into the roadless regions of Mato Grosso. Prudente was a big, ugly town which, in its scramble for growth, had little time for order or design. In the jumble of its mills, armazéns, clapboard shacks, and nondescript brick and plaster houses surrounding a pseudo-Gothic church with louvered factory windows there was nowhere to rest one’s eyes. Yet all that was made up for by the vitality and diversity of the people who had come there to create something of their own, get rich, and make their own modern world. In those days, before television came to dull the mind with 21

badly reported news and the eight o’clock novela, people spent a lot more time exercising their minds with talk—in the corner bars, over windowsills, and on verandas in the long, hot summer evenings. Sometimes the talk would end in the appearance of guitars and a desafio, or challenge. Then a discussion would become a duel of words and music in which the mind became sharper as the selection of words demanded as well a sequence, rhythm, poetry. And because the desafio found its origins in the northeast, the challenge occurred most often on a veranda belonging to Dr. Abel Freitas and his wife, Zelinha. The house to which the veranda was attached was a dark, labyrinthine, two-story structure built in  by Zelinha’s father, Senhor Aurelio Tavarez, who had fled the northeastern state of Pernambuco as the result of one of those family feuds involving land and politics. Marked on the opposing family’s list as the next to be liquidated, Senhor Aurelio had hastily loaded three generations onto two railway carriages and come to Presidente Prudente. Of the first generation, three remained vigorously alive: Zelinha’s mother, Dona Marietta; her aunt Tia Noca; and Lê, an ageless retainer and descendant of slaves, who had lived with the family since her birth. Grown old in the Freitases’ household, Lê had by now narrowed her functions to a single one that consisted of standing at the center of all comings and goings to fix each new arrival with a baleful stare and recount the tale of the first and second toes of her left foot, which, as the result of an evil spell, had long been irremediably crossed. As the comings and goings were incessant, this kept her busy till bedtime, while others tended to the meals which issued steadily from the Freitases’ kitchen stove. The intensity of traffic in the house was in part due to the talk 22

View from the Fazenda

on the veranda and in part to the table, which was no sooner cleared after one meal than it was set again for the next. Over all Dona Marietta, tall and stately and in perpetual mourning, from her raven wig to her highly polished black shoes, presided with matriarchal gentility.

] The table, which ran the length of the sala in which it stood, was always full. For few were those who could resist an invitation to sit down to the exotic concoctions carried years ago to the northeast in the heads of slaves and transferred again through the memories of such as Dona Marietta, Tia Noca, and Lê to the constantly simmering pots on their stove for the homesick of the clapboard town to savor. Just the names were enough to set one’s mouth to watering: xim xim de galinha, vatapá, moqueca de peixe cooked with the milk of coconuts and spiced with hot pepper and oil of dende palm. Like a file of umbrella ants, people streamed in to stop at the table, always “just for a bite, thank you, we’ve already eaten.” Many were relatives who, once Senhor Aurelio had arrived and found Prudente promising, had flocked to take advantage of the beachhead. Others, like ourselves, were simply friends attracted by the atmosphere of good food. And good company. The Freitases’ veranda was long and narrow and furnished with a remarkable collection of old chairs which, for want of space, overflowed into a backyard shaded by a wide-spreading sapoti tree hung with musky brown fruit whose seedling Dr. Abel had presented to his bride when he’d come from Pernambuco in . And it was there, beneath the tile roof and the stars as seen through the branches of Abel’s sapoti, that we heard the stories of the first settlers and gained our first real notion of Brazilian A F r o n t i e r To w n

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politics—something which, like futebol and Carnaval, has to be felt to be understood. Before that we had gotten most of our politics as, laboriously, we learned to read the newspaper. In that way we knew that Getulio Vargas had ruled Brazil—as a dictator and elected president— on and off for twenty years until, painting himself into a corner with his own intrigue, he had ended his life with a bullet. That had all been very dramatic, but it had affected us directly as little as it had the rest of the people in the insular world of Fazenda Malabar. Not until we began to listen to the talk and poetry of city folk would we become fascinated by the power and mysticism of that amiable and ruthless caudilho, who, influenced by the Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish corporate states of the thirties, had certainly changed Brazil. Nor, although we’d been to the world’s most modern city, Brasília, in a retired American troop plane rigged to take tourists to the inauguration, had we yet the feeling for the vision and dynamism of its conceiver, President Juscelino Kubischek. After flying for hours over empty savannas where cattle paths leading to an occasional hut and a corral were the only signs of animate existence, it had been an awesome sensation to suddenly see a shining, concrete city rising out of the Goianian Plateau. Yet we could only begin to grasp how much more there was to Brasília and the man who created this monument to himself when the ecstasy and outrage of Pernambucanos on Abel’s veranda gave them a liveliness that neither newspapers nor that trip could achieve. As is always the case with political discussions, emotion might have reached intolerable levels had it not been for the well-timed interjections of two strategically placed elders. One of these was a bald, heavy-lidded octogenarian named José Leão, who, although 24

View from the Fazenda

he seldom left his position on the veranda, seemed to make a very good living from extensive lands in Mato Grosso, where, in his words, “All one has to do to raise cattle is lie in a hammock and toss a lighted match once a year.” His comments, cynical and guileful, were finely balanced by those of Tia Noca, whose skepticism of a more earthy and honest nature had long ago conferred upon her the honorable title of Mistress of the Last Word. These two never began the discussion but simply sat biding their time as the ecstasy rose over the feat of building Brasília, the scope and grandeur of the idea of placing a capital at the exact geographic heart of Brazil and from it building roads that would at last bind a huge and disparate nation together. “Have you ever thought? All that glass and steel flown in . . . flown! And then, meu amigo, put together by a tribe of illiterate Baianos!” “Let’s be truthful, to bring that off, someone has to be a genius!” As the enthusiasts talked on, one could visualize hundreds of unlettered lilliputians from Bahia scrambling up spindly bamboo scaffolding and over soaring steel girders, swinging from floor to floor on frayed ropes, their tools in old oil cans dangling from a free hand. Or one could imagine roads stretching toward this geographic heart, binding it to the world by pulsating streams of traffic. “Only in Brasil, rapaz, only in Brasil!” someone was bound to exclaim. Until from the depths of a sagging wicker chair would arise José Leão’s derisive, leonine rumble, “Well spoken! Only in Brasil would anyone spend a fortune building roads across an unproductive wasteland to nowhere while people like me have to A F r o n t i e r To w n

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walk our cattle a thousand kilometers to a railhead, starving every step of the way.” The fact that José Leão had never personally walked a single steer anywhere detracted little from the sobering effect of his words. “You’re right, Seu José. And where does the money come from? Borrowed from foreign banks.” “Taxes! A man can’t make a living!” another victim would moan as though mortally bled. Still another, “Most of it’s just printed up at whim, and not by the fellow who sold Seu Geronimo that machine, either . . .” As this voice trailed off in thinly veiled admiration, another would start up on the multinationals who, by producing cars, trucks, tractors, refrigerators, tampons, and toothpaste, were draining the blood of the country, taking advantage of the poor by hiring them for fractions of American and German wages. Until again at some point Tia Noca, whose perpetual mourning and sparse, dyed black hair gave her chalky features the air of a spinsterly vulture, would raise a questioning eyebrow. “But wait a minute, Zeca. If these companies paid American wages here, who would work for you?” Up to then anyone who didn’t know her might have thought Tia Noca, seated in her high-backed Austrian rocker, sewing nightgowns for orphans, was disinterestedly tending her business as maiden aunts ought to. Yet somehow her words always succeeded in causing at least a momentary perplexed and embarrassed hush. Whether the embarrassment was for Tia Noca and her simplicity or a sudden inability to find complicated answers to her refreshingly plain words, one could never be sure. But I shall always suspect it was the latter. While all this went on, Abel, agile and restless, made his way 26

View from the Fazenda

among the people who sat knee to knee on that narrow porch, refilling the men’s glasses with Pernambucano cachaça. He didn’t like to get into political arguments, and when he did it was generally to comment on how far politics and politicians were from the realities that, as a doctor, he saw on his rounds every day. Then he would talk of people who were slowly dying of schistosomiasis and chagas disease because they had no clean water to drink and slept in huts that harbored the chagas’ host, a beetle called the barbeiro, in the cracks in their walls. “The same people,” he’d say, “who reinforce themselves with a shot of cachaça to go out and do a hard day’s work without ever knowing what it is like to feel well.” Or to prove the same point, he’d tell of the woman who had to travel by bus for two days with a dead baby in her arms to get a paper authorizing its burial. And he’d end the tale with an incensed “Show me a politician who thinks of anything but to create more jobs for more bureaucrats to keep him in office. Or a bureaucrat who knows how to do anything but obstruct, even the process of death!” To avoid such grim summations, he preferred to talk about such things as how the best cachaça was aged in oaken casks in Januária on the São Francisco River. How you could tell its worth by the way it bore a golden crown when you turned the bottle in the sunlight, and how it went down with a benevolence worthy of its appearance. Abel was tall, lean, and earth colored. In an angular face the features were jagged and deeply lined, and the eyes bore that feverish look of someone who smoked too much, drank too much, and worked to the limit of his endurance. Yet his laughter was that of one who, though often outraged at life, still enjoyed it immensely. A F r o n t i e r To w n

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] In exchange for the sacrifice of living in the remote interior, many a doctor had gained a fortune in land and become powerful in politics. But Abel never owned anything but that big, labyrinthine house, and he seldom had time to be anything but a doctor, except on one occasion each year. That was during the relentless days of Carnaval, when the entire family composed a bloco dressed in costumes of satin and sparkling tulle over which the local seamstresses had bent at their machines for weeks. The bloco included all but Dona Marietta and Tia Noca, who, in their perpetual mourning, presided over a large table of sandwiches and sweets from which everyone replenished their energies for dancing from midnight to five in the morning for four nights in a row. It was Abel with his long, spindly legs who taught us the Pernambucan frevo as it should be danced, with spectacular knee bends while waving a parasol and balancing as if one were at dead center of a tightrope stretched from nowhere to nowhere in the street or in a ballroom, wherever one might be. As it is meant to do for everyone, Carnaval, joyous and full of play, purged Abel’s soul of its sadness. Later on, he would disappear amid the rivers and streams of Mato Grosso’s Pantanal, where fish abounded and in springtime all the birds of the earth seemed to gather. From there he would return, his soul renewed.

] But for Zelinha, who seldom set foot beyond her gate, where did the solace and renewal come from? I can only conclude that it came from some inexhaustible reservoir of goodness that lay 28

View from the Fazenda

within. And in the end, even more than the food and talk, I think what kept people returning to the labyrinthine house was the sense of feeling at home. There was no gamut of ceremony, characteristic of so many houses, that leaves you spent and speechless by the time you’ve gotten through the door. At Zelinha’s you felt welcome the moment you set foot on the veranda. And perhaps that was why as well, though she had so much to do, we still seemed to find time to talk of many things. Of a reflective nature, she was one of those who frequented the União Cultural Brasil–Estados Unidos for the wonderful books she could find there. Both of us struggling to read in the other’s languages, we talked about what we read and, with our different backgrounds, often amused ourselves making comparisons which wound us up where we’d begun. Such was the time when, reading about the Ku Klux Klan, Zelinha decided that the major difference between Americans and Brazilians was that the former were far more fanatic, the latter more flexible. “It’s not that prejudice doesn’t exist here,” she said, “but we wouldn’t draw such rigid lines. ‘Life is hard enough as it is,’ we’d say.” But just then I was reading Os Sertões, in which backland religious fanaticism on one side and politics on the other had ended in a war of extermination. Mentioning that portion of Brazilian history, I added triumphantly, “So what did you say about flexibility?” We both had to laugh then and agree as to how, underneath it all, we human beings were pretty much alike, and the less power we possessed, the better we could be trusted. And yet, even as we came to this conclusion, I saw in it the usual contradiction. For I knew that my trust of Zelinha was so A F r o n t i e r To w n

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great that I would easily give her full power over that which was most precious to me: my children. In this she was accompanied by another splendid woman who will always be alive in my memories of Presidente Prudente. The wife of Altair Senna, manager of Clayton’s mills, Herminia was as lively and full of intrigue as her husband was constant and dull. Her tiny house with its tiny rooms was as immaculate as she was in person. When Herminia greeted you she seemed always to have come straight from the hairdresser’s—her hands beautifully manicured, her hair in perfect order, her small pursed mouth painted just so. Yet actually she had been working for hours in her miniscule kitchen, kneading incomparable pizza doughs, rolling out homemade macaroni, simmering tomatoes and garlic, rosemary and oregano, or cooking chicken in blood sauce to produce Italian dishes that would beat anything produced by São Paulo’s most famous restaurants. But as much fun as the food was the gossip which she managed to extract from one member of Prudente’s alta sociedade about another—her elaborations upon which, no matter how her husband frowned disapprovingly, could keep us laughing shamelessly an entire evening. Their daughter Angela, the unholy terror of the nuns’ school, was a perfect match for our single-minded daughter Robin, with whom a great friendship was kept alive by the solid cement of contention. No encounter between them came to completion without a battle, the most memorable of which was a tug of war over a mouse they’d saved from a cat in the corncrib. Perhaps seasoned by such strife, Angela’s loyalty to Robin was capable of withstanding many a test, including the prejudices of nuns as depicted by a required weekly list of sins at the top of which 30

View from the Fazenda

Angela wrote in her bold, unrepentant hand, “Once again, conversed with a pagan.” Although it was she who sent her daughters to the nuns’ school to get a better education, certainly, no matter what sins Angela committed, Herminia was not going to let them get in the way of her mingling with these pagans, who in her ever-intriguing mind played a part in her plans. For like many a frontier woman, she was always scheming to help her daughters get away from this dreadful dead end to live somewhere in the great world. Perhaps—who knew?—by meeting foreigners who worked for Anderson Clayton, Swift and Company, the King Ranch, who all had footholds out there at the time. Surely that was behind her first inviting us into her home to listen to her lovely elder daughter Maria Gracia play a neat guitar and sing in a soft lilting voice. After all, where would a wife and mother be if she didn’t scheme? And therefore I realize now that, when the opportune moment arose for me, my own behavior was no surprise to her. It was on one those evenings while we dined on a superb crusty pizza made by her hands that, not without a certain intuitive sense, I let it be known that soon Carson would be using his holidays to travel in search of land, though I, of course, would not be going. “Why not?” Herminia seemed to fall easily into her part. “Ah, Herminia,” I laughed, the obvious reasons tearing around the table on every side, crawling over our laps as they went. Just then, disappointingly, my words seemed to dissolve in the gossipladen air, leaving me to think somewhat ashamedly that my intuition had decidedly gone beyond the mark. But as it turned out, I should have had more imagination than that. For a few days later at Fazenda Pagador, as Herminia and I sat with our feet in the water while the children played at building dams in a little stream A F r o n t i e r To w n

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that wound behind the house, she suddenly said, “I’ve been talking with Zelinha and you’re going on that trip. It’s all decided. The girls will stay with us and the boys with the Freitases.” Then, already joggling Christina on her knee, she went on, “Believe me. They won’t even miss you.” As she spoke, quite suddenly I knew what had inspired me in the first place. And just as quickly, I accepted her offer. While we were away, Robin had an allergy crisis and Stevie managed to break his arm in a bicycle race with Zelinha’s son, Marcelo. No matter. For as well, forever afterward, Kenny would carry with him the dreamlike memory of a lovely, soft-voiced lady who every afternoon walked with him to the church on Prudente’s square to see the nativity in which alligators and jaguars joined with sheep and cattle to adore the Christ child in a plaster Maria’s arms. And though Christina, then a babe of three months, would not remember, I knew that with a baby’s instinct she felt safe and secure in the arms of a loving Herminia. In this there was no martyrdom, no design on her part. If she hadn’t wanted to take care of the girls, she would not have offered. Nor shall I ever forget the ease with which those two ladies took on such a huge and often tedious responsibility, absorbing those children into their busy, lively households. There was something in it that over the years we have encountered again and again, and which I find to be profoundly Brazilian. What should one call it? An innate understanding of what really matters in life? Whatever it is, I know it is real, always there at the right moment. And because of this, my best memory of Presidente Prudente must always be of Zelinha and Herminia, who, never leaving them to cry, took care of the children while I traveled with Carson in search of land. 32

View from the Fazenda

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Quest for Land

While we sojourned at Fazenda Pagador, the intention to buy a fazenda was a covenant securely fixed in our minds that gave direction to everything we did. But where? Living close to the edge of Brazil’s immense frontiers, sometimes by jeep, sometimes flying, we put all our free time into the search. In that way we saw for the first time the open savannas and rich grasslands of Goiás and the forest lands of Paraná that were all too rapidly disappearing before another great coffee boom. But what attracted us most, as if some premonition drew us there, was the wild immensity with which our lives would become deeply linked in so many ways in the future: Mato Grosso. The principal protagonist on our excursions by air was a seasoned bush pilot named Edimor de Oliveira, whose pleasure it was to recount hair-raising experiences just as we found ourselves above some dense tangle that stretched endlessly on the way to somewhere registered only in the minds of those who knew the flight by heart. My favorite tale was of a forced landing in a pasture newly cleared from the jungle. Edimor had made it down all 33

right, but in the process, a wing had struck a stump, causing the fuselage to split into semidetachment, catching a cow in its embrace. A woodsman appeared from the edge of the clearing and, having assisted Edimor in setting the poor beast free, stood, arms folded, shaking his head. “What can you expect!” he said unsympathetically. “It’s what people get for carrying cows in planes.” Though the tales were told with a certain sadistic humor, the experiences seemed to have made Edimor a man of caution whose sobriety concerning flight best expressed itself when it came to the hour of departure. The president of the republic could have been making a speech just to the three of us; it made no difference once Edimor, glancing at the sky, decided it was time to go. And to this precaution I attribute his and his passengers’ survival in a world where nightfall causes everything but rivers in the moonlight to fade from view. During the months of the bruma seca, “dry fog,” when fires were set to hasten the sprouting of the new grass with the first rains, once a plane climbed to a certain height, even the rivers were lost from view below the dense cloud of dust and smoke. Claustrophobia in a tunnel could be no worse than that of flying in the bruma seca in a single-engine plane. On clear days, though, there were certain moments that made the hours sealed in that rattling sardine can with wings truly worthwhile. Moments such as when out of the open sweep of Mato Grosso’s campo there rose the majestic escarpments of the Chapada dos Guimarães, whose broad, level plateaus seemed separate worlds unto themselves. Or when there spread beneath us the Pantanal in its endless yet never monotonous repetition of mirrorlike lakes, grassy plains, and hillocks brilliant with the yellow and purple flames of piuva trees in flower. On the Pantanal’s southern edge, the Serra da Bodoquena rises 34

View from the Fazenda

tall and forested before sloping toward rolling country that is layered in limestone and cut by cold, clear streams that disappear underground here and emerge again there to flow out of caverns beneath the roots of old trees. The possibilities of this fertile, green country seemed infinite, and once we had seen it from a plane, spellbound, we decided to return by jeep.

] In that part of the world at that time, once you crossed the Paraná River into Mato Grosso the supposed all-weather dirt roads became simple trails that determined jeepsters and truckers followed more by instinct than anything else. How many times on that trip would we come to a fork, look down, and decide by the depth of the tracks which was the road and which wasn’t? Rivers were forded or crossed on barges which were attached to creaking cables and eased across by the current. On the first leg of our journey, an entire morning was spent awaiting our turn on the only balsa that carried all the cattle, people, and vehicles across the Paraná. A week earlier, overloading had caused a cable to snap, and as a result, the other balsa was still being put back together where it had run aground somewhere down the river. To be sure, the knowledge caused a good deal of discussion among assorted passengers on the way across as to whether it would “give” to get to the other side. Once we did, a trucker’s cheerful affirmation, “It gave!” was responded to with a universal sigh of relief as we struggled up the bank to solid ground. Once on firm ground again, the other half of that day was spent grinding our way over the next  kilometers to the only truck stop between the river and Mato Grosso’s capital, Campo A Quest for Land

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Grande. The experience was a challenge to one’s sense of balance and capacity to keep one’s bones intact. Yet, as I look back, I see that the struggle was more than compensated for by the tremendous reward of seeing that country as one never can when speeding along an asphalt highway in a cushioned car. From such a highway thirty years later, the cerrado would be a monotony best slept through. But in , entering the region of twisted, windand fire-tortured trees was like departing from all that was known. It hadn’t yet rained and the brush, close on every side, filled our nostrils with the pungent scent of a potpourri of dried herbs. By some great luck as well, the fires that swept across the cerrado at this time of year had not touched this portion. But because these fires were inevitable, in their own defense the trees were covered with a bark that was thick and deeply ridged; and from the scars of each year’s fires, the trees’ branches reached toward the sky in strange, suffering convolutions. Draped across these branches, vines threaded back and forth to form a canopy of flowering pendants. Traveling laboriously within this silent world, I remember witnessing the kind of beauty I had heretofore imagined existed only in tales of enchantment. Above the twisted trees a feverish wind of the kind that arises every afternoon at that time of year slowed to an ominous stillness, and then it began to rain. In no time, choking dust turned to mud soup. We put up the canvas top and set out at a slide. Inevitably the hoe, shovel, jack, and chains that had danced behind us in the jeep before joined us now beneath it as we dug, jacked, lifted, and lurched toward our destination. After dark in a closed jeep on a mud road in the driving rain, you lose track of time, of everything but looming pitfalls in your headlight beams. The exhaust pipe and doors fell off; one by one we tossed them 36

View from the Fazenda

into the back and went on until, to the rat-tat-tat of a diesel generator, a flickering light, suggested heaven. We’d begun to think the truck stop no longer existed and we would be doomed to the proverbial night of stale chocolate and water and the sound, imagined or not, of jaguars breathing in the trees. Instead there was a rambling structure of clapboard with a roof of straw. At certain hours of the night under certain circumstances, gratitude transforms all. A shower bristling with electric wires, which you approach with rubber sandals and a prayer, meat as tough as shoe leather, cachaça that tastes and goes down like kerosene yet warms the sodden soul, a creaking narrow bed with your feet hanging over the end become as good as an evening in the imperial suite at the George V in Paris. One sinks into oblivion to the strains of a pimp’s refrain in the corridor . . . “Sueli, room two,” it goes. “Esmeralda, room five. Maria and Zenaide, room six . . . Yes, the two of you, subito!” At dawn you emerge simultaneously with the occupant of room six, a mountain of flesh with disturbingly innocent eyes in a child’s face, who restores his spent energies by devouring a loaf of bread with his coffee before facing the trail. Is it my imagination again, or is the coffee and milk in these places always steaming hot, the bread produced in an outdoor oven that resembles a termite hill on stilts always as fresh as the morning? Bent over their coffee, slowly coming awake, the truckers talk in low murmurs that rise now and then to bawdy howls—the camaraderie of long, lonesome trails in the newness of morning before the sun turns mud to dust, or rain does the opposite.

] A Quest for Land

37

Campo Grande, which is now the capital of a bustling and prosperous Mato Grosso do Sul—a fine city with broad, treelined avenues—was then far more of a clapboard town than Presidente Prudente. In its midst our haven was the Hotel Semiramis, its lobby ambitiously decorated with a frieze, done in pastel tiles, of Assurbanipal gazing across the plains of Nineveh. If the truck stop had been as good as the George V the night before, the Semiramis, with a shower for one room instead of eighteen, was as good as Claridges in London. And it was possibly even better than Claridges when it came to food, for, as proclaimed by the elaborate frieze, the hotel belonged to Syrians. Ahhh, the esfirras, so light and fresh they dissolved in our mouths. Tabbouleh with homemade pita bread; stuffed grape leaves delicately seasoned with mint and sesame oil and served with thickened milk curd. All made by the wife of the owner, Dona Serafina, and her comely dark-eyed daughters, who turned the frieze into the background of a living pageant as they sat before it in the lobby, hollowing out zucchini for stuffing while they kept their eyes on the door, greeting and gossiping with everyone who entered. Because repairing road-crippled vehicles was possibly Campo Grande’s greatest specialty, by nine the next morning, doors and exhaust pipe back where they belonged, our jeep was ready to go. And we, well fed and rested, set out toward where the dense cerrado gives way to open campo. There the sky opens too and becomes so spacious that if you sit in one place at dusk, you can watch several storms going on at once, as if you were watching a panorama from the top of the world. Our way was again a couple of tracks that meandered instinctively across the shallows of crystalline streams, around swamps, and over hills where tall jatobá trees rose out of the new spring grass and the fronds of canindé 38

View from the Fazenda

palms turned and glittered in the morning wind and sun. Flocks of green parrots and royal blue arrarras nested in the crests of those palms and followed us, screeching shrewishly at our disturbance of their peace. Once we startled a herd of miniature deer, so light they seemed to float in the air as they leaped away to disappear among the tall thin trees of a capoeira on the edge of a draw. A flock of ostriches raced us, running with long, loping strides until they vanished into seemingly endless distances.

A Quest for Land

39

x

6 The

Incorrigible Pioneers

The place we had seen from Edimor’s plane was Fazenda Cerradinha in the foothills of the Serra da Bodoquena. It was managed by Claude and Pepe Zayas, who were of the kind one often ran into in those days. People like ourselves who wanted to create a world of their own. Each of course with an individual background which had lent itself to the initial idea. Claude was the daughter of the French philosopher and novelist Georges Bernanos, who, during the war years, had lived and made an attempt at farming in the valley of the São Francisco River, in north-central Brazil. Apparently the attempt hadn’t been too successful, for eventually they returned to France. But as often happens to foreigners who come to Brazil, Claude could not again get used to a life in France that seemed suffocating and without challenge. Fortunately for her she met Pepe, a Basque marquis who, second in line, had lost the vineyards and olive groves of an ancient family inheritance to his older brother. So, like many other Europeans who have ended up in Africa, Australia, and 40

South America, he had left the inheritance to big brother and set out to found a new fortune in the New World. It was this place we had flown over earlier with Edimor, the bush pilot. Only this time, rattling over the campo, we came upon the Serra da Bodoquena from below, to see their cliffs rising out of a dense forest which clambered up their slopes and crowned their summits with sombre green. From a great height a waterfall gushed out of the rock and flowed like a shining stream of mercury to disappear into an underground river. Using the falls as a guide we climbed the serra, the jeep laboring along the track that led through a forest already grown cold and menacing with the coming of sundown, until we came to a summit above the wide, spreading crowns of even the tallest peroba trees. Below, the Bonito River flowed toward the Pantanal, meandering across its broad valley like a flame-colored snake uncoiling lazily in the sunset. Beyond the river, amid brave new fields, stood the main house of Fazenda Cerradinha. It was built of clapboard, weathered gray and so covered with vines of jasmine, bougainvillea, and honeysuckle that it was difficult to tell which gave greater support to the roof—the vines or the walls. In the kitchen was the traditional brick and clay woodstove built into the wall. But instead of the usual sink with its leaky faucets, there was a system that can exist only in places where water springs mysteriously out of the earth in one spot and disappears just as mysteriously somewhere else. In this case the spring water flowed from a rocky hillock behind the house into a trough that conducted it through the kitchen and into a limestone cavern in the field beyond. On the way, drinking water was siphoned with a bamboo spigot at the entrance to the trough, and dishes were washed further on in the constant flow. A wonderfully practical and at the same time The Incorrigible Pioneers

41

idyllic arrangement that provided the sound of a meadow brook flowing through the house day and night. Within the house a finely wrought French oak bureau and a cherry desk with a Basque coat of arms engraved on its cover stood amid chairs and tables knocked together at the fazenda’s sawmill and benches carved in the Indian way out of single logs of noble wood. The aged French and Spanish furniture, hauled such distances over so much time, seemed almost as alive and communicative as old friends. One could imagine those ancient pieces swathed in old blankets under a tarp, their solid wood creaking but resisting proudly as they traveled the thousands of miles from their historic habitat. And there in the stillness of night broken only by the sound of the kitchen stream, one could imagine their murmuring,“Can this be the end? Can this be the end?” Just as one almost felt tempted to respond, “That’s a good question.” For although Pepe and Claude’s quest was for land of their own, as was ours, I sometimes sensed there was another force behind their searching that would make their quest never ending. Else why would they have chosen to come all the way to the Serra da Bodoquena to plant geraniums and patchouli and other such herbs as were used in essential oils for perfume? Pepe was doing this for a French company named Cherrise, which he had convinced that the mountain climate and lime-rich soil were perfect for such crops, and that the end result—dehydrated to next to nothing—was well worth flying two thousand kilometers to São Paulo, considering the cheapness of the land . . . yet Carson and I would agree that the real reason behind all that logic was an all-consuming love for the challenge of the wilderness. And oh yes, Claude complained about it. “Merde alors!” she’d cry as, gaunt and full of nervous energy, she stalked from one impossible task to another. “Do you see this 42

View from the Fazenda

fin du monde that Pepe has brought me to now? Me with my poor liver? Look at those bugres,” she would toss her head in the direction of some squat, plodding Indians, sorting the beans for supper, “three walls is all they’ve ever known. N’est pas possible!” Yet after a time one detected in Claude’s diatribes a note of triumph at having taught some of those bugres—no longer really Indians but lost souls in a forest that was also no longer theirs— to once again wash and comb and plait their hair. Even as from the vine-covered house, she tended to their illnesses, made them take their worm medicine, and vaccinated their babies against white men’s diseases which for them were as deadly as the plague. Or took some of their children into the house to help with the chores and do their lessons along with her own little girls, who— despite the free, roaming life they led—knew their French and Portuguese very well. One sensed the same passion for challenge in Pepe’s exultant laughter as he told of how, after he had taken a year to clear and plant ten hectares of corn, the crop was devoured within days by a flock of parrots. Over the windows were screens of double-thick chicken wire to keep out the larger creatures—monkeys and jaguars and the like. “We don’t bother about the small ones,” said Pepe, his dark eyes in a handsome, boyish face lighting with pleasure. “Come see the boa constrictor we have in the corn crib to frighten the rats.” Living with them was Pepe’s younger brother Luiz, as insular and sombre as Pepe was outgoing and optimistic. His wife, Djanira, a heavy-featured Indian girl with a passive Indian nature, had recently given birth to her first little marquis. It had happened in a truck on a shopping trip to Aquidauana, seventy kilometers distant. Fortunately, Claude, who had accompanied The Incorrigible Pioneers

43

her, had taken the precaution to travel armed with alcohol and scissors. “Merde alors!” Luiz’s role was difficult to determine. But certainly Claude and Pepe’s greatest helpmate and friend in all things was a young French farmer named Leon Lambert. Sensitive and curious as he was strong, he loved the wild country as few I have known and found companionship and satisfaction in the company of the woodsmen and peons with whom he worked, hunted, and rode. He always claimed that if one listened to their stories and beliefs, one could find the keys to the secrets of the wilderness. And that it was by not listening that the “conquerors” of the wilderness, again and again, destroyed unknown sources of survival. It was Leon’s dream as well to create his own world in Mato Grosso, but he would never succeed in doing so. I think the difficulty lay in his always expecting the exact right moment to come, the right people to back him. So much so that when we settled on land of our own, our image of Leon became that of a pilgrim passing through, always on his way to Mato Grosso with a new scheme to be backed by capitalists in the city. But somehow the schemes never crystallized, no doubt because—as we learned early, working for others—the investors’ dream is never quite like yours. So in the end he returned to France, from where he still makes yearly pilgrimages to that still half-wild country that, I am sure, suited him best. Fazenda Cerradinha was one of those all-too-rare examples of man’s improvement upon nature. Only the tillable lands were cleared; the steep hills with their underground streams and waterfalls were left shrouded in protective forest. Nor, as was the custom in the opening of new lands, were the virgin lands drained of their fertility, to be abandoned when they could no longer pro44

View from the Fazenda

duce. From the first crop, the earth with its wonderful resource of lime was fertilized according to its needs and treated as it should be so that, cultivated, it would become more friable and fertile with every year. There was an orchard in which the tropical jabuticaba, carambola, pitanga, and genipapo bore their exotic fruits mingled with apples, pears, oranges, and limes. In the vegetable garden, asparagus and endives thrived alongside mandioca, cassava, and xuxú. If the house was supported by vines on the outside, on the inside it was braced with shelf upon shelf of books. Botany, agronomy, biology, and plant pathology were all hopelessly mixed with Montaigne, Voltaire, Bernanos, and Sartre. In the evenings when the Indians had gone to sit on their own doorsteps, whittle, and tell stories, the brook that flowed through the house served as a background for discussions that went on farther into the night the more heated they became. Between tempestuous people of French and American backgrounds, the heat could become quite high. I’m sure the Indians’ stories made far more sense than ours as we railed away, backed by our preconceived notions. “America is smothering the world with mass production,” Claude would assure me in her deep, tragic voice, “Even your education is mass-produced. It’s not possible that everyone should go to university. How can there be so many schools? So many courses? How can one become fully educated in anything?” “Isn’t it better to have choices than have to decide your fate before you even have a real beard? How can you be sure you want to be a dentist at the age of seventeen?” I wanted to know, “and what could be worse than a subject without a context to surround it?” And we were off, the wine in our glasses forgotten, our voices drowning out the sound of the stream; Pepe, Carson, and Leon The Incorrigible Pioneers

45

artfully weighing in on the side of the underdog of the moment as we batted back and forth the merits of our respective civilizations. At length I think we reached the conclusion that, the way things accelerated in this modern world, the civilizations we were talking about might already be part of the past. And if that were the case, all we had known would no doubt be unrecognizable to us should we ever return whence we’d come. Whether this would turn out to be true or not, while we were there, Claude lent me a copy of her father’s Dialogue of the Carmelites to read. I looked at it in wonder, noticing that most of the pages had been split apart with a knife. “Of course,” said Claude. “All French editions were once so. It’s only since the Americans came along with their obsession with efficiency that people devour books without thought. In the old days while you slit the page, you could pause to reflect before going on to the next.” So saying she provided me an image to match hers of students emerging from an American university bottled and ready to be labeled, “Like Coca-Cola, n’est-ce pas?” Perhaps so, but as well ever since I have had only to see an old book to envision Claude with a French volume in one hand and a knife in the other, pausing to reflect. She also gave me a honeysuckle vine to plant wherever we should finally take root. In the end Carson and I would not settle in Mato Grosso. But while we would plant our honeysuckle just  kilometers from where we’d started out, the Zayas would follow the frontier to its farthest limits. In Arequemes, Rondônia, close to the Bolivian border, they would begin all over again in  to clear land for planting coffee. Much more than Bonito in the sixties, Arequemes is even today a rough and wild place where gold prospectors, squatters, and Indians have yet to sort out what belongs to whom. Disputes over land are often settled by hired gunmen, and 46

View from the Fazenda

the town is currently known as the malaria capital of the world. How many years would it take them, clearing and planting amid the stumps on the edge of the jungle, to achieve that fortune Pepe had been seeking ever since we met them? One can hear the old furniture creaking and sighing in the darkness, saying, “Surely this is the end, surely . . .” Yet I would be the last to say their life was not a good one. Who knows whether, because of something in their natures, the challenge of the wilderness is to them almost an end in itself. And maybe this has always been the necessary trait for a true pioneer, for whom life without immeasurable obstacles, hardship, and solitude seems to be barely worth living. For ourselves I know it was on that trip that we definitely decided we did not want to be frontiersmen. Future events would cause us to return there again and again; and, while in Prudente, I would begin a novel called The Garlic Tree, its setting inspired by the beauty and spaciousness of the Serra da Bodoquena. Yet talking in the small hours with people like the Zayases made one point clear to us. With the money we had saved, we could have bought ten times more land in the wilderness than we would eventually purchase close to “civilization.” But to turn it into a working fazenda would cost a fortune or a life of sacrifice for the future. One in which our children would eventually have to go to boarding schools, as would Chantal and Pilar, in order to gain an education. We didn’t have a fortune; and to sacrifice for a future which our offspring might not even care about didn’t appeal to us. What we wanted from our land was a life we could enjoy. One we could share with our children before they went off to choose their own lives. So when the opportunity came, we chose a small farm in the Tietê Valley, an hour and a half ’s drive from the thirdlargest city in the world. The Incorrigible Pioneers

47

x

7 Of

Chance and Circumstance

and Juca de Botucatu

People guide their own lives, I prefer to think, rather than obeying fate. In an atmosphere full of chance and circumstance, if we know what we want, we seize chances when they appear which lead us to circumstances which again provide chances. At least that is how things have been in my life with Carson. A good example was a moment in about  when, mostly thanks to politics, Anderson Clayton and Company decided, with that ever-impending stroke of a pen, to dissolve Fazenda Pagador. Severance pay and savings left us with some time to look for a new job or seize the moment to put a down payment on a piece of land. But while we decided what to do, we thought it might be good to clear our heads by enjoying springtime in the United States. That being the case, having met quite a few people through my columns in the agricultural supplement of O Estado de São Paulo, Carson invented an agricultural tour and soon had enough candidates to pay our way from Washington to New Orleans via Illinois, Ohio, and the South. 48

During our trip, there were the usual nightmares of having to translate menus for twenty individualists at every meal and using every trick in the book to keep instinctively recalcitrant Brazilians on schedule. But generally all went well until, upon reaching Chicago, Carson announced that the following evening in out-of-theway Peru, Illinois, he had booked us into a motel. A distinct silence followed, after which Carson and I found ourselves ominously alone. While we pondered our fate, it seems a tribal council was held among our traveling companions from which Senhor José Homem de Mello, a paulista fazendeiro, was sent as an emissary to our hotel room in the Chicago Hilton. It was his duty to inform us, he said dolefully, that a motel was not a place for esteemed mothers, much less daughters brought up in the best tradition of church and family, to be exposed to. Either a hotel would be substituted or the tour would end then and there. Probably the reason Senhor José was sent as the emissary was because, talking farmer’s talk, he and Carson had become good friends from the beginning. “Juca de Botucatu,” he had said, extending a firm sun-creased hand when we’d met. And somehow the nickname suited beautifully this person who in the rugged, fertile Serra de Botucatu not only raised thoroughbred racing horses but bred some of the best Jersey cattle and grew some of the finest coffee in Brazil. He was a small man with a sunburned countenance and clear blue eyes surrounded by webs of crow’s feet made by squinting and laughter. But as he pronounced his ultimatum, those eyes brimmed with indignant tears at the possibility that we had betrayed his trust. Nor immediately could Carson convince him with his explanation that American motels were not, as were their Brazilian counterparts, pseudo–Arabian Nights palaces with secret entrances, Of Chance and Circumstance and Juca de Botucatu

49

circular beds, mirrors on the walls and ceilings, and a playmate for every man’s liking. Still, as a question of honor, he managed to persuade Seu Juca that on the morrow, he as chief of a family would accompany Carson through the portals of the institution in question. Then if the slightest suspicion of indecency were aroused, everything would be revoked on the spot. All the next day as we traveled in skeptical silence across the monotonous plains of Illinois, I visualized Carson standing amid a flurry of shredded brochures and reservations. But of course Seu Juca had only to inspect the bland and characterless inside of a Holiday Inn and emerge sheepishly to announce that the ladies might enter with no danger of spiritual or material contamination for everything to change. Everyone loved the American invention that made it possible to end a day’s journey with all the comforts and no bellboy hovering as you collapsed on the bed. From then on, sharing the front seat of every rented car with Carson as we sped along superhighways from motel to motel, Juca talked ceaselessly. He liked to come up with such synoptic questions as “Now tell me, just what sort of president was Franklin Roosevelt?” And then provide the answer himself. “Like Getulio Vargas, he destroyed people’s sense of responsibility and gave them nothing in return.” It was no use arguing. We soon learned that, if you agreed with him, you were right. If not, in some cases, you could learn a lot by listening. This was particularly true of coffee—a crop with which, amazingly after eight years in Brazil, we still had no familiarity. “It’s sensitive to everything,” he would say as if speaking fondly of a difficult child, “frost, drought, any little deficiency in the soil. It can make you a fortune in one year and spend the next five years draining you, unless you understand it well. Oh yes, coffee 50

View from the Fazenda

can put on your jacket and take off your shirt!” His intensely blue eyes would sparkle at his favorite analogy and then become serious. “That’s why not just anyone can grow it. You have to be dedicated; you have to have a tradition for it right down to the people who work for you. As soon as we get back to Brazil, I’ll take you to my fazenda to show you what I mean.”

] With its , coffee trees growing dark green and vigorous against the deep terra roxa of the Serra de Botucatu, Fazenda São Pedro was all Seu Juca had promised. During the thirty years in which it had been in his care, he had carried on a tradition of coffee growing that included whole families of ex-slaves and Italian immigrants who still tilled that very steep land with mules and hoes. And more important, they had inherited a talent for picking coffee just so. “Without,” as Seu Juca put it, “assassinating the trees.” Having since watched other people pick coffee, I can appreciate the way those experienced hands selected the ripe berries from the green boughs and dropped them into baskets from which the coffee, loaded into mule-drawn carts, was taken to great tanks for fermentation. From there it passed through huge machines, so complicated and beautifully framed by wood that each seemed to have a personality of its own. These sorted, polished, and spilled the coffee beans out to be dried on the wide brick terreiro before shipping to Santos, where coffee tasters would give his produce top rating and thus a premium price for export. After trudging through Juca’s cafèzal the entire afternoon, in the evening we sat on a veranda that looked down between mountains lined with coffee trees along a narrow valley that Of Chance and Circumstance and Juca de Botucatu

51

widened gradually into pastures of blue-green pangola and purple flowering caatingueiro grass. And while Seu Juca talked on with Carson about tradition, horses, and coffee, his wife, Dona Lisah, gave me portions of the story I’d already somewhat divined from the furniture and photos around us. The daughter of a famous paulistano doctor, “finished in England,” as were so many well-to-do Brazilians of her generation, she had never been to a fazenda until she found herself traveling first by train and then by oxcart to São Pedro. “It had rained,” she recalled, “and I shall never forget thinking of how it must have been for slaves in holds as for five hours we jounced under a tarpaulin—peeping out every so often, trying to measure how far we’d come. “A pampered frivolous girl from the city, I thought I would die of loneliness at first. But then I began to plant trees and flowers and teach the maids how to make something besides watery beans and not to wipe their feet on the kitchen towels, and soon I hadn’t time to be lonely. Then the children came, five of them, as you have. There’s nothing—is there?—like teaching someone something, planting trees and watching children grow in their midst?” So she chatted on, a diminutive, homely woman full of warmth and that calm, inner assurance that is the mark of a born lady. Added to that, a lady rare among Brazilian women, who had conquered her sense of “sadness” in the wilderness by making life on the fazenda her life. Wed to a man who was as unswerving as the wheel of an oxcart in its furrow, she once gave me a counsel which I think could be of utmost use to anyone. “When you really want something,” she said, “the worst you can do is to go on fussing about it. The best is to be quiet and keep wanting.” 52

View from the Fazenda

Whenever I have used this counsel, even in relation to myself, I have found that it works. And perhaps that is because “keeping wanting” seems to conserve energy where it belongs, to become a subtle force which subconsciously guides your actions in the right direction. Some people use prayer, witchcraft, or pyramids. I’ve always found Dona Lisah’s advice more effective and easier to carry. It was a wonderful evening, filled with the magic of circumstance and chance and “wanting” all converging upon the final moment, when Seu Juca, rising stiffly before putting out the lights, said, “By the way, I know of a fazenda, forty alqueires, eighty thousand coffee trees. It belongs to a friend of mine, Guilherme Campos Salles, who doesn’t want to see another coffee tree as long as he lives . . . it just might be the right place for you.”

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53

x

8 Fazenda

Pau D’Alho

Pau D’Alho, the fazenda that would become our way of life, was named for a handsome and exuberant tree, the bark and leaves of which emit the scent of garlic when it rains. Wherever it grows, the land is said to be fertile as far as the eye can see. That our land was “terra de pau d’alho” was part of our reason for choosing it, as was the fact that in many ways the countryside that surrounds it is remindful of the Ohio country I knew as a child. It lies amid rolling hills that slope gradually toward the Tietê River, whose course the bandeirantes of São Paulo followed centuries earlier in search of emeralds, gold, and slaves. There is about the lay of the land neither the depressing monotony of endless plains nor the confining angularity of mountains. Rather, as in Ohio, there is the gentleness and subtlety of an intimate landscape in which many scenes are contained. To find them, one has but to climb a hill and look down upon a wealth of intricacies in color and shade, copse and crop, that is different from that of the valley just left behind. From the highest hill of our fazenda, you can gain a view of all those various scenes 54

blended into one as you look across the broad Tietê Valley to the ancient winding river edged by what is left of the jungle that once covered everything. It is a view which has changed as history has changed, even in our time here. Yet like the Ohio countryside, it has a spirit and beauty of its own that I believe even history cannot destroy. I shall never forget my sense of anticlimax when for the first time I stood on the highest hill overlooking Pau D’Alho. I realize now the reason was that, rather than observe a splendid view, we could scarcely see two meters ahead amid the tangle of aged coffee trees hidden by the brush and vines that covered everything with the overgrowth of abandon. Yet the weeds—vassoura, carapicho, erva de Santa Maria, and the grasses jaragua and caatinguero, interspersed with a wealth of native legumes, were all signs of good land. As were the trees: wild fig, kapok, ipê, and the pau d’alho for which the fazenda was named. The soil itself, from which Carson took samples now here, now there, pressing each into a ball in his hand, was brown masapé, good-smelling, moist, and resilient. That evening, sitting beneath aged ficus trees in the square before the church in the nearby town of Tietê, we considered our finances and our conversations with Seu Juca. After having warned us all the way from Chicago to Botucatu that no one without a tradition could comprehend the intricacies of coffee, here he was, suddenly dead certain we should buy this shambles of a coffee fazenda. “I’ll tell you why,” Seu Juca had said with the conviction of one who had received word from divine Providence, “This year the harvest will be short. Coffee is going to put on our jackets . . . haw haw! With eighty thousand trees, no matter what shape they’re in, they may well pay off your land. Who knows if Fazenda Pau D’Alho

55

that will ever happen again? It could be the chance of your lifetime.” As it turned out, he was right. All the money we’d saved made the down payment, and the harvest paid the rest. Once again we were as broke as when we arrived in Brazil. Only this time we owned a fazenda. We were at last beginning to exercise the essence of ownership, the right to do what you see fit with what is yours. I doubt if there is more of a need for this right anywhere than on a farm. It is why big company operations don’t work so well in the end any more than do communal farms. First because to accept all the responsibilities of farming you have to care. You have to care enough to get up in the middle of the night to treat a sick animal, or run out and set the smoke pots going if the temperature falls below freezing, or plow till after dark to be ready for rain. You have to be willing to gamble on the fact that, although you’ve tilled and fertilized and seeded and watched the corn come up all even and green, a drought may wipe out everything but the loan at the bank. You have to prefer the anguish of making your own mistakes to that of making other people’s. And for you to want to do all this, there has to be continuity and an awareness that continuity never reaches completion. If anything, farming is a life of constant renewal. But for the renewal to have direction, you want to be sure that you, because you are the owner, can carry out plans that inevitably reach beyond a lifetime. You want to decide where to plant your seedlings and know that you will watch them mature into trees. You want to be the one who chooses your heifers and bulls and, year after year, selects this or that one to better your herd according to what you think as you sit in the saddle looking and considering from all angles. To do all this with the assurance that it will not be swept away by a decision 56

View from the Fazenda

made by someone else, there is only one way. That was what we’d bought. Now the question was, where to begin?

] With the harvest of eighty thousand coffee trees to depend on to pay off the land, it wasn’t difficult to decide that part of the beginning must be there. But how to pay the people who would do the harvesting was another question. By then, Carson had found a job as technical editor with an agricultural magazine called O Dirigente Rural. The job consisted of going to São Paulo twice a week to go over all the material and correct the aberrations made by city-bred reporters. The salary paid our living expenses. For the rest he went to the banks, and, like everyone else, gambled that inflation would pay the loans with which he would buy a tractor, implements, fertilizer, fencing, bricks, and cement—the infinity of items needed just to set a farm in motion. Most of the coffee trees were over forty years old, and, as soon as they were harvested, men came behind with long, heavy hoes known here as enxadões, which, much to our amusement, we would one day come upon as “obsolete tools” in a museum in Chicago. Very useful instruments all the same. The men used them to dig out the old coffee trees to be piled up and sold for firewood. Before the days began to grow long and the first rains made it possible to plow in September, those men would have dug out fifty thousand trees. We would also have begun the immense job of laying contour ditches over an entire fazenda which, indiscriminately deprived of its forest and planted up and down the hills for centuries, in many places was gradually washing its way toward the Tietê River. The corn we planted in the newly plowed land would be for thirty Fazenda Pau D’Alho

57

Duroc Jersey sows and a boar. But before we could purchase the pigs, we had to build a pigsty and a workers’ house. And before we could do either of those, we had to dig wells, the establishment of which would provide the logical location for our other structures. The wells were dug by a strong, swarthy Italian man named Moretti who first determined the water’s location by observing the movement of a strip of barbed wire supported by his belly button and attached to a string secured between his teeth. Anyone who doubts the authenticity of this system has only to see its inevitable results. In each case, at a depth of twelve meters, Moretti came upon a weeping of spring water that assured us an ample supply. In the digging he was assisted by his wife and daughter, two comely women whose balance of strength and delicacy is something that will always remain vivid in my memory. It was Moretti who labored in the well’s dark depths, filling buckets with earth; but it was the women who hauled the buckets up. While he dug, they sat by the well’s edge, like figures in a biblical scene, doing delicate Turkish embroidery, their rough hands working meticulously with the finest threads. But then, at a bellow from below, they would rise and haul on the rope with the ease and might of men. Once the first well was dug, we fenced off a square plot of ground with posts and rails taken from the eucalyptus grove at the top of our land, and Carson began to dig a vegetable garden. Then it was we who hauled up the water, and everyone who helped to lay out the beds, plant the seeds, and cover them with a layer of cut grass to protect them against the punishing sun until they sprouted. The days were still short and the weather clear and cool, and so we planted cabbages, cauliflower, broccoli, snow peas, beets, 58

View from the Fazenda

carrots, and lettuce. The earth, which had been mulched by fallen coffee leaves for forty years, was rich and friable and rendered up almost as fine a harvest as if it had been virgin soil. The first picking is recorded in a faded photo of Kenny and Christina each proudly holding a cauliflower as large as their heads. I’m glad we have those photos now. For as I sit writing and looking across the lawn to the deep-shaded grove of pecan trees, it is hard to remember how endless those rows of vine-shrouded coffee trees seemed, how many times the disk broke as it cut through the tangle, uncovering deep gashes of erosion, as gradually abandonment gave way to the ditch and the furrow and the seed.

] Yet in the middle of abandonment, we would also find beauty, as of an afternoon the children and I walked through pastures of caatingueiro, purple as heather, that bent in the winds of a long autumn that never quite turned into winter. Descending a hillside, we would come to the ravine which, cut deep into the earth by centuries of summer rains, divided the fazenda at its center. All that is left of a once-dense jungle grows up from its banks in a tangle of acacias, orchid trees, casuarinas, wild fig, and kapok, their crowns woven into a mantle by brightly flowering vines. From beneath the roots of these trees, springs flow, forming tributaries that join the main stream. Under the mantle made by the trees’ upper branches, the ravine is cool, shadowy, and ever changing. With heavy summer rains, the flash floods which rush down its narrow course carve new steps in the soft shale of its bed and throw up sandbanks to form deep pools. In the depths of those pools, minnows flash silver. Above their surfaces, dragonflies dart in the dappled light, and between the fronds of Fazenda Pau D’Alho

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ferns that hang over the water, bottle-green spiders spin dazzling webs. So many changes occur, so much is going on in the ravine, that to follow its course is an adventure I still enjoy with my grandchildren. Now as then, we begin as far up its reaches as we can and wander downward, crisscrossing the ravine on fallen trunks, sliding and splashing through the falls, swinging sometimes on lianas or the roots that grow out of the branches of aged wild fig trees. Tired, we stop to rest on a sandbank and gaze up at the infinite pattern of branches and leaves against a distant sky. Sometimes the patterns shift suddenly to turn, as if by magic, into a flock of bright green parakeets come to feast on wild figs and guavas. And if you stay still long enough you will be rewarded with the sight of a host of birds: tiny wrens and teal sanhaços; red-breasted, speckled carijós and shrill-voiced, gray-and-white-ringed woodpeckers; buff-colored robins and pale copper-colored oven birds, who build their nests of mud in the forks of branches facing northward against the wind. Tranquil by day, at dusk the ravine becomes oddly sinister. As the sun’s rays grow long, the temperature drops quickly. Bats stir upward from hollows beneath the rooted banks, and the black carrion urubus come down from their circling in the sky to roost on the bare branches of dead trees. But in those days before dusk came, we would scramble up into the sunlight and climb back uphill to where in the shade of a wide-spreading mulberry tree Carson was milking the cows. It was a level spot, halfway down the long slope that began at the top of the fazenda and extended all the way to the fazenda’s end at the road. From it we could look westward over the pastures that edged the ravine and eastward to where, between the escarpments that bordered its valley, the 60

View from the Fazenda

Tietê River followed its sinuous course through the ever-changing greens and golds of its fields. Right then, on this level shelf of land there was nothing but an ancient, weather-worn trough carved from the single trunk of a peroba tree. While the cows munched contentedly on the feed in the trough, Carson sat on a three-legged stool performing the ritual which he still says is the most soothing of the day. With his good ear close against the cow’s flank he hears nothing but the steady, rhythmic flow of milk into the bucket. In peaceful isolation, listening to the flow and thinking of nothing in particular, he tells me that decisions come to him that he may have been mulling over for weeks. And certainly this was so on the day when, emerging from the Holstein Landeza’s flank, he put the bucket out of kicking reach, released the rope from the cow’s legs, and said, “I think the house should be right here.”

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x

9 The

Casa da Fazenda

We had first drawn the design of this house when we lived in Ohio. We had envisioned it somewhat in the shape of a U with an exotic, flowering tropical tree growing out of the center and many French doors and windows giving onto the patio within, the veranda without. A light, airy house it would be, with high ceilings, stone floors, a fireplace, and a large kitchen—all built into the landscape that would grow up around it. And though we would add a few more rooms so that we could entertain guests as well as children and dogs, we didn’t really change the plan from the original we had made when we had yet to see Brazil. As was almost always the case, our logic concerning going to the expense of building it when the farm hadn’t even begun to pay was the exact opposite of those who rushed to give us advice. Our fazendeiro friends who lived happily in the proximity of the square in Tietê, comforted by music from the loudspeaker on the church steeple, warned us it was a luxury no serious farmer could afford. Our foreign friends thought we were throwing good money after bad. 62

“The way things are,” they’d say ominously, “with all this courting of nationalists and communists and threats of agrarian reform, you could lose everything. Better to hedge and buy dollars like most sensible Brazilians do.” The reason for this unsolicited counsel was the recent renunciation of President Jânio Quadros, who had been elected only a few months earlier. At the time, we had still been living at Fazenda Pagador and so kept well informed by the talk of politics on the Freitases’ veranda. As governor of the state of São Paulo, Quadros had done a notable job of sweeping out embezzlers, sycophants, and other entrenched friends and relatives left over from former administrations. And for that, most people—though not Tia Noca—had given him their vote. For Tia Noca there was something in his spasmodic gaze and autocratic pronouncements that didn’t inspire confidence. “I haven’t eaten a kilo of salt with him yet,” she would be heard to say from the depths of her highbacked rocking chair, “and if you ask me, there’s something crazy about that man.” She turned out to be quite right. For Jânio Quadros governed so erratically that even politicians couldn’t keep up with his whims. Then one day, blaming “occult forces” for his inability to deal with a normally unservile congress, he up and quit. To this day, his resignation brings to mind the eternal question: Why almost invariably are vice-presidents thrown in whom no one in his right mind could seriously think of as presidents? Even if Tia Noca had eaten ten kilos of salt with him, she would not have chosen João Goulart, who had nothing to do with anything she wanted for Brazil. As Getulio Vargas’s protégé, Goulart represented the not-yet-faded dream of syndicalist socialism. Like his mentor, this charming young man was a gaucho, bred on vast The Casa da Fazenda

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family lands in the rolling country of Rio Grande do Sul. Like Vargas, too, he possessed immense vigor, a flair for manipulating masses, and an overweening desire for power. Where Vargas had been known for being coldly rational, though, Goulart was warmer, more emotional. He hadn’t the capacity to balance all the forces that had kept Getulio in power for more than twenty years. But as long as his power lasted, his propensity for demagogy made him incapable of handling the awakening giant with all its growing pains, its forgotten human beings converging upon the cities, that was Brazil in the early sixties. It was this incapacity that would finally put Goulart out on a limb and would lead to a revolution supposedly intended to prevent his dragging Brazil with him. Meanwhile a climate for investment in productive dreams was rapidly being destroyed, and a lot of money was finding its way into Swiss banks for safekeeping. We didn’t have anything to put into a Swiss bank. We had put it all into our forty alqueires. And in a funny sense perhaps that too had something to do with our going on with our plans. There is an old expression which says, “While the politicians sleep, Brazil grows.” Certainly we were not the only ones who heeded it and went on doing what we were doing. When there aren’t enough eggs to put into two baskets, what can you do but put them into one? So, like a great many people who couldn’t wait for a right moment that never comes, we just went on doing what we were doing. Beyond that, our yearning to move into a house on the fazenda had nothing to do with cold, precautionary calculation. I think to understand what it did have to do with, one has only to experience the unfolding of a day on the land. To sit on the veranda and have a cup of coffee while everything is just beginning 64

View from the Fazenda

to stir is to know the fazenda washed and rested before it has suffered the day. In the damp, fresh air every sound is distinct, from the quarreling of the anu birds over their communal nests in the crowns of the palm trees to the bending of branches and rustling of leaves that give the first suggestion of how the day will be. From there on, the tale unfolds. Within a day so much can happen, from the birth of a splendid calf to the discovery of an unknown legume whose seed you carefully save, to a great storm that breaks a drought and brings with it a relief and optimism that perhaps only farmers are capable of feeling. Sunset is a different show every evening that you hurry to the veranda to catch. And then comes darkness and with it the astounding and comforting sense of being part of a great universe as you sit outdoors, listening to the sounds of the night under a sky full of stars. It’s a whole combination of experiences that are lost to you if you live in town and only come to the country in the heat of the day. For us, to live in town was like living out of context. Thus, no matter what, the sooner we got started building that house, the better; and so we asked around until we found Seu João Faria, who would do the job almost single-handedly. A hardy, patient man with the face of a sunburned bloodhound, João Faria was one of those artisans who become rarer as a country becomes more complex and everyone becomes more specialized. He had learned everything by experience and was willing to build anything from a barn loft to a fireplace if you explained to him what you wanted. He died a few years ago, but even when he was alive and no longer working for us, his spirit—kindly, earnest, and humorous—had already become a part of this house. I cannot think of its structure without remembering the patience and humor with The Casa da Fazenda

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which he tolerated the children’s playing hide-and-seek in his foundations and king of the castle in his sand as he and Onça, his leonine helper, raised the brick walls toward a tiled roof. I remember his skepticism at the idea of a fireplace the like of which he’d never seen; his warning that sitting before it in chill winter evenings would make us catch cold when we went to our unheated rooms. I recall too his incredulity at the crazy idea of a wooden ceiling accompanying the slant of the roof and then a whole structure of exposed beams beneath. And why on earth should we have wanted all those shutters on the outside if we never intended to close them? But despite the fact that he considered all these things inexplicable and counter to good sense, he did them. And then he stood back to look with pride upon the beautiful framework of beams and to marvel at the fire that burned briskly in the hearth, the smoke going up the chimney just as it was meant to do. Since its building forty years ago the house has settled a good deal so that in some places one has the sensation, especially after a second drink, that the floor is sinking away from beneath one’s feet. This is no doubt the result of a combination of climate, malleable earth, and Seu Faria’s craftsmanship. But rather than disturbing, I find it pleasing. For the sloping and slanting only accentuate the feeling that the house is that much more a part of the landscape to which, ultimately, it belongs.

66

View from the Fazenda

x

10 A

Step into the Past

With only Seu Faria and Onça working on it, the house took two years to build—about as long as it took for the revolution of  to come to a boil. In the meantime, we lived in Tietê in an aged colonial house that stood on what was known as O Patio da Velha Matriz. The Patio, in the oldest part of town, was surrounded by the sturdy, austere dwellings of the owners of great coffee plantations in the mid-nineteenth century. But by the time we moved there, with a Brazilian obsession with newness, the old Matriz and the market which had stood before it had been replaced by a children’s park and a square block of a courthouse, inspired by Italian architecture during the time of Mussolini, mercifully hidden by the rapid growth of trees. In tune with that trend, the house we would move out of would later be torn down and replaced by three nebulous matchboxes that, like the Il Duce–era courthouse, defile the beauty of the Patio. So now when I pass the place where it once stood I can only feel privileged to have lived in that fine old historic dwelling while it still existed. To gain a notion of our good fortune at being able to rent it, one has 67

only to consider the general response when we inquired as to the possibility of finding lodgings. “In Tietê?” came the dire response. “Only if someone dies.” Luckily our informants weren’t as well informed as they seemed. For in truth the same family who would later tear it down was fed up with its floors of polished wide boards which creaked above a slave cellar that, since emancipation, had housed nothing but hordes of mice and bats. The owners were dying to move into something cramped and modern, and we were the answer to their prayers. While we lived on the edge of the Patio, it still retained enough of an aura to make it possible to imagine how it had been when there was a fine old church, with double bell towers, deep-set windows, and a choir loft, where women began each day with mass. I could still visualize the market where horse-drawn charrettes had brought all manner of excess produce from the fazendas and sítios for the young donzelas of the great houses, accompanied by little slave girls bearing baskets, to pick and poke amid the produce— all the while discreetly performing a pageant for the benefit of young eligibles who stole glances at them from afar. Beneath its roof of sun-faded tiles, that Tietê house had massive walls of clay pounded into a framework of peroba wood taken from the forest and carved by slave craftsmen. Its tall, narrow front and back doors were connected by a long corridor which, when both doors were open, afforded a telescopic view of lichened roofs, tropical greenery, and clear blue sky. On either side of the corridor the large, high-ceilinged rooms were light and airy, with windows that looked from the front onto the Patio and from the back onto the huge orchard filled with ancient mango trees. Off the corridor as well were two alcovas which, if they had 68

View from the Fazenda

as many uses as people claimed, it would seem no house could have been without them. Some said those small windowless cubicles were made for wayfarers to take a night’s shelter and depart without being seen by anyone but the head of the family. Some claimed donzelas slept there hidden from the world after dark until they became brides. Others declared brides and grooms shared the inescapable proximity of the alcovas on their wedding night. A former occupant of the house told me that her Aunt Luiza had died in one of the alcovas during the yellow fever epidemic of  . . . most likely of claustrophobia. During our sojourn there, we used the alcovas as closets; and despite the specter of Tia Luiza, the dogs found them the safest place to hide during storms. The idea that we actually wanted to live in the house established the aura of our eccentricity from the start. It was increased by such peculiar behavior as our sleeping with all the doors and windows open and inviting people to dinner. In Tietê at that time it seemed only relatives and potential sons-in-law were ever invited to dinner. Unaware of my new residence’s folkways and mores, I became the first woman to appear in the street dressed in pants with a fly and at the Santa Casa Hospital in a sleeveless blouse. In this way I began to learn that if Presidente Prudente had been like living on the brink of the future, Tietê would be like taking a step back into the past. And that, too, was a privilege that, in the rush with which modern times have since engulfed our little town, would not be ours if we lived on the Patio today. Physically the move to Tietê was considerably more complicated than the move to Prudente or even to Brazil from the United States. For by then interspersed with all our furniture were A Step into the Past

69

three cows, two horses, thirteen sheep, and four pigs. But once we’d got the farm animals sorted and established behind fences on the fazenda and ourselves moved into the echoing rooms of the house on the Patio, we set about exploring the town. The first to venture forth was Robin, who, at eight, was well aware of the Brazilian inability to resist small children. With this in mind she buckled one-year-old Christina into her stroller and set off for the square at the center of town. Evidently the sight of the dark, curlyhaired child pushing a baby so fair she attracted light did the trick. For within days Robin had made friends with Cacia, the pretty mulatta whose mother took in washing; Rosa, the blonde daughter of Dona Rosita the hairdresser; and Neti, whose father owned the corner bar and armazém. But the real center of the children’s existence then was the Patio itself, where every evening friends converged to play the various games that belonged to the various seasons. In the spring when the acacias and flamboyants burst into yellow and red flame, it was marbles in dusty pits rounded out of the earth beneath the Patio’s wide-spreading trees. In the dry season, sledges made of old packing cases mounted on ball bearings and steered by youthful lunatics appeared from nowhere to screech across the Patio’s wide cobblestones and down empty streets that led to the river. On warm, still evenings in the rainy season the games were cobra cega (blindman’s buff) or mãe da rua (prisoner’s base), and in all seasons, with anything from an official ball to wadded-up newspaper, it was futebol, futebol, futebol. It was in the patio that Steve and Mike met Garrincha, the street-wise orphan who, whenever business was slow, put aside his portable shoeshine bench to join his friends in play. And Tú, who resembled a noble Bantu and whose long reach and passive 70

View from the Fazenda

expression made him a specialist at lifting chickens over backyard walls and selling them through front doors. Nor was Tú alone adept at scaling walls: Banana, the butcher’s helper, and Danilo, the poet’s son, and anyone else whose favorite sport after futebol was the terrifying pleasure of stealing mangoes, guavas, passion fruit, and carambola that grew in profusion in the huge yards that lay behind every house on the Patio’s edge. It was the perfect moment for our children to have lived on the Patio. For in a couple of years fortune would send some to universities, while lack of it would send others to work in fields or as servants in houses such as our own. Friends would inevitably drift apart. When they met again, they would say, “Remember the Patio?” But nostalgia could never recapture the freedom of that moment when they played, flitting like moths around the dimly lit street lamps until mothers called and shutters were closed and barred, and those who did not live on the Patio faded into the darkness of the streets leading toward the river. At about the hour when Kenny and Christina and I leaned on the windowsill watching games none of the three of us were of an age to play, Carson would light his cigar and amble up to the Clube Esportiva with its outdoor bar on the corner facing the square to take part in the hour of the aperitivo. In Tietê, perhaps this was the only gathering, aside from mass and rehearsals for Carnaval, that was scrupulously and punctually attended. Carson’s cue for departure each evening was the emergence from a solid, square house of Doutor Pericles Camargo, the judge. Solid and square himself, Doutor Pericles wore a perpetually weighty expression, as though he carried the burden of his decisions with him wherever he went. Actually this turned out to be no more true of him than it was of the famed appraiser of high-class A Step into the Past

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horses and women, Aurelio Persone, in the depths of whose gaze there always seemed to lurk something amused and unchaste. Just as these two men converged upon the Bar Esportiva, there would appear around the corner the erect, dapper figure of the principal of the Instituto Plinio Rodrigues de Morães, Senhor Cruz, whose skeletal features, creaking voice, and archaic ways had, among his students, earned him the title of O Museu, “The Museum.” Close on his heels would come the owl-faced, whitehaired Seu Zico Pires, who, having unstintingly recorded in two massive volumes every official event since Tietê’s inauguration in , could justifiably consider himself the town’s historian. With the arrival of Seu Zico and Emilio Zote, a heavy-browed, manylanded sugarcane fazendeiro, the group was almost complete. But no one would raise his glass of cachaça or cognac until a singular personality known as Janguta emerged from beneath the ficus trees that shaded the central square. Between aperitivos, as a kind of sport, Janguta was a volunteer ambulance driver. But as an individual of “independent means,” his life was really ruled by only two obligations. One was the six o’clock aperitivo; the other, daily attendance at the city council. If the clock on the new Igreja Matriz were to have stopped, people could have set their watches by the moment that Janguta started out from the city hall, his diminutive figure leaning forward anxiously as though in fear that the chair, worn to the shape of his posterior by a quarter-century’s sittings, might possibly be occupied by someone else. Once he arrived, Seu Jorge, the hawk-faced, rheumy-eyed bartender, as attentive to the conversation below as he was to the liquid needs of the conversants, would serve the drinks and the hour would begin. In defense of clean white shirts, black ties, and order in the 72

View from the Fazenda

classroom I can still imagine O Museu’s deep-set gaze, penetrating to the soul, just as I can Doutour Pericles’ stolid intransigence as he sentenced some unfortunate offender to the slave cellar gloom of the municipal jail. But just for a moment as they sat sipping their drinks while they told stories and talked of politics, crops, women, and futebol, the hour of the aperitivo became a nostalgic extension of the moment at dusk in the Patio. So much so that hearing Carson’s vivid descriptions later on convinced me more than ever that in every man there is something that remains an eternal boy. This was a conviction that could only be reinforced by their political discussions at the Esportiva, which, unlike the kind of politics discussed on Dr. Abel’s veranda in Prudente, took one back a hundred years to the days of isolated worlds. What went on beyond Tietê was treated with amused indifference. Left, right, socialism, capitalism, communism, imperialism . . . pah, stuff for poets! In Tietê the questions were still such down-to-earth ones as which family would dominate the municipal council or who would be appointed judge or have the weighty dominion of the public registry. Over these decisions, Carson was cheerfully informed by his cronies that the square they looked upon had once been the scene of some very serious shootouts. And that was why, after a time, the wise councilmen of Tietê had decided to choose a single candidate for mayor—now from this family, now from that. The candidate for  happened to be Judge Pericles. And though there was only the possibility of voting for him or leaving one’s obligatory ballot blank, the stir caused by the coming election was amazing to witness. Practically all useful public action came to a halt as ambulance sirens were replaced by loudspeakers A Step into the Past

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and campaigners went out into a countryside that seldom saw them before or afterward. On election night rockets went off all over town, sending our dogs dashing into the alcovas as if to bomb shelters. And on the day of Mayor Pericles’ inaugural speech, so many would-be dignitaries climbed aboard to be seen at his side that the podium actually collapsed. The following evening it was impossible for Carson to resist asking the new mayor how it felt to be a winner. And possibly the best effect of the entire electoral exercise was the hearty roar of laughter he received in response. But if a little boy lurked in each of the men, wasn’t that partly because the women of Tietê were mothers almost from the day they were born? How quickly they gave up playing mãe da rua to stop before mirrors and adjust gold rings in their ears, to become seductive and forbidden—until marriage transformed them into consummate matrons, pillars of the church and subtly the most powerful members of the family. I began to sense this first in Prudente when I saw wives prepare their husbands’ plates as though they could not do it themselves. Yet in Prudente women took university courses, drove cars, and wore pants with a fly, while in Tietê most women’s outside social life was carried on over the windowsill and at the open market, the hairdresser’s, the dressmaker’s, and the church. The rest of the time in the cool depths of shuttered houses the donas de casa ordered servants from morning till night, seeing to it that the floors shone with beeswax, the linen was sprinkled and spread over hedges to bleach in the sun, and the children were kept immaculate. In such an atmosphere, the little girls, designate matrons, could at the age of ten coolly give orders to servants, while the boys grew up as insidiously spoiled as their fathers. By 74

View from the Fazenda

so doing, these dedicated ladies made themselves as well the center of a universe to which, after a tiring day of shuffling bureaucratic papers, soliciting loans, negotiating crops and cattle, men could briefly return, before the aperitivo, to observe that everything was in order in a home and family in which they could take immense pride. Our first acquaintance with such a world was through Dona Olga Assunção, a gentle lady of delicate health but great fiber who, despite constant pain from an unmendable back, was seldom ever still. I think it was a pity that circumstance and tradition kept her living in the solid nineteenth-century house with its deep veranda overlooking the square rather than on the fazenda she had inherited from her father, for her heart was certainly there. She loved the plain “big house” and cattle sheds beneath great mango trees planted long ago, the cotton and corn and bean fields, the pastures of caatingueiro grass bordered by the river. She had immense pride in her memories of the teams of her father, Seu Olegarin Camargo—forty men and forty mules—a virtual brigade moving in unison to turn hundreds of hectares of earth for spring planting. She could never throw fruit seeds away without remorse, and though she could seldom walk in the orchards she loved, she paid them tribute through thick, rubicund guava paste, oranges, quince, and carambola in pale golden syrup. Because of all this, though agriculture was not considered a profitable enough profession for a smart young man, I think she secretly hoped that her handsome, romantic son Josito, who wanted only to farm, might gain his wish. And for that, like Dona Lisah, I believe she steadily “kept wanting.” Dona Olga was my professor in the making of fresh cheese, and one of the greatest pleasures of our days in Tietê was to sit down with her family over A Step into the Past

75

a “light supper,” as Dona Olga called it, although the table was replete with hot bread, cheeses, salami, hams, and all the delicacies of her larder. At that hour, her husband, Jonas, would appear from his somewhat perfunctory management of the family lands. He had a certain reputation for errant behavior that, in his square countenance, was reflected in the melancholy smile of an aging bad boy. Seu Jonas loved to tell stories in strong Tietêense accents that substituted l’s with r’s, making his laughter replete with hrarrs which were, in turn, offset by guilty shrugs, as if his amusement reminded him of something it shouldn’t have. The laughter was the best thing about his stories. And the best thing about his presence at the table was the way he looked upon his fine family with pride and on his wife with cognizant gratitude. “That boy there, Josito, wants to study agronomy” Seu Jonas would say “But I tell him, study something serious that can provide you a living.” How sad, I used to think, that though a farmer himself, his disparaging words expressed the long-held opinion that farming was a profession not worthy of study. Of the girls’ future he said nothing, expecting their fate to be sealed by the appearance of suitable husbands. Josito grimaced. Dona Olga listened, smiled, and occasionally raised an eyebrow. Then, reassured that all was as he thought it should be, Seu Jonas would vanish, sometimes for days. Yet for all Seu Jonas’s apparent male autonomy, Josito did end up farming and becoming a reputable breeder of Jafarabaldi buffaloes. And so it was with everything. No important decision concerning family, land, or business deals ever came to its conclusion without the acquiescence of Dona Olga, who, without saying so, held everything together. 76

View from the Fazenda

] That was Tietê when we went to live there. A pleasant, unhurried town where everyone had a place in the scheme of things, from the sítientes who came in their horse-drawn charretes on Saturday to sell their produce in the feira to the fazendeiros who sat on their verandas in the evening watching the “footing” in the square. This last, performed to music blaring from a loudspeaker on the church steeple, was a complicated courting process involving young men and women strolling in concentric opposing circles until mutual ogling caused the final, inner circle to be composed of the potentially betrothed. In such a scheme, even the odd ones who would be derelict in a large, impersonal city had their position in this small, personal world where everyone knew everyone. Thus did Lalo, the mongoloid boy, grow old at his father’s filling station, happily drowning cars with floods of soapy water while their occupants behind closed windows sat patiently waiting for the inevitable deluge to pass. Similarly, the hopeless alcoholic Petronio walked the streets swathed in a moldy cape, leading his best friend, a horse too old to carry him, as he wandered from house to house. A poet, he would pause before a window of his choosing, execute a bow that caused his cape to sweep a circle in the dust of the street, and recite a few phrases of his own making to be exchanged for a meal, a snootful of cachaça, or perhaps just a heartfelt acclamation. Of all, not the least was a harmless lunatic nicknamed Chibúm who by day wandered about deliciously frightening children, running at them shouting, “Chibúm, chibúm, chibúm!” And at night when the moon was full, he pierced the silence of the streets with his howling. In reaction to which our neighbor, Doutor Vicente, A Step into the Past

77

could be heard to say, “Ahh, that must be Chibúm,” and nod with a certain satisfaction as if assured that everything was in its place and all was well with the world. As for ourselves, our eccentricities were chalked up to the fact that we were Americans and therefore different. It was a live-andlet-live attitude that made it possible to enjoy the best of many worlds without belonging to any. In fact, once the curiosity of our sleeping with the doors and windows open wore off, had we not occasionally made it known, our existence might have been altogether forgotten.

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View from the Fazenda

x

11 O f

the Passage of Days and

t h e M e a n i n g o f Tr e e s

From the house on the Patio the first person I met in the morning when I set out the garbage can was our neighbor, the retired agronomist Doutor Vicente Carvalho. Dressed in the traditional pajamas and fedora that were indicative of prosperous retirement, he would pull up a chair before the door and engage in conversation with those less fortunate than he as they passed on their way to work. Beyond a jasmine-laden wall I sat writing by a window that overlooked mango trees and tiled roofs to the fields beyond. As I did, snatches of Doutor Vicente’s talk—“Things aren’t as they used to be, I tell you. Why, in my day people rushed to open gates and tipped their hats as you rode by. . .”—drifted upward to find their way into the dialogues on the pages before me. In return, the music I put on, half in self-defense, drifted downward to mingle with Doutor Vincente’s endless exchanges. Later, passing beneath my window, dressed in a spotless white linen suit for the eleven o’clock aperitivo, he would stop and say, “That was Beethoven’s 79

Fifth, if I’m not mistaken. . . . I do hope you’ll play it again tomorrow.” This symbiosis of the morning was a peaceful one in contrast to the chaos of the afternoon, when, the kombi loaded with children, dogs, books, and all the equipment required for a daily migration, we went with Carson to the fazenda. There, while Carson returned to the supervision of harvesting coffee and digging wells, the children and I established ourselves on the porch of the fazenda’s only building, an old tool shed. We set up some kitchen chairs and a table on which the elder children did their homework from the Instituto Plinio Rodrigues de Morães. But before they could do that, they were first subjected to a torture of which they had been victims for some years, their lessons in English. We wanted them to be articulate and literate in both Portuguese and English and so subscribed to a correspondence course called the Calvert School. It’s an excellent course which taught me almost as much as it did them. I highly recommend it, though not the way I taught it. For with six subjects for each of three children, and at the rate we had to go, I often felt less like a teacher endowing my children with knowledge than a French farm wife stuffing geese to produce pâté de foie gras. All of us being inherently hottempered, the inevitable explosions that came from the tool shed had a definite retarding effect on the afternoon’s coffee harvest as pickers paused to stare through the branches in sanguinary expectation. When I think back on it, I realize how crazy it was to be doing our lessons there when we could have been in the cool comfort of the old house on the Patio. Still I know we would all do it again, for there was so much going on at the fazenda, and who wanted to miss it? 80

View from the Fazenda

Even when the coffee harvest wasn’t on, there was always work to be done in the cafèzal—something that was fortunate for many of our neighbors, who came from sítios which, divided by inheritance, were too small to support them. One of these was Jonas del Pozzo, whose family brickyard provided bricks for our house out of the mud of their sítio at the end of our ravine. Another was Jepe Gonello, who had coffee of his own, a few hectares of rice and beans, and some scrawny cows just across the way. And then there was Mingo de Almeida, a proud Portuguese-Indian caboclo who, angry that he had to work for anyone, drank hard and worked hard and does to this day. All year round they hoed and fertilized the coffee by hand and cultivated between the rows with mules. But then in May when the cool, dry winds from the south began to blow steadily and the green berries turned red and yellow on the trees, the numbers needed were greatly multiplied. Then the women and children appeared in the cafèzal. Bringing their meals they came early in the morning, and most picked until four in the afternoon, when the sacks full of coffee were dragged to the end of the row for measuring and hauling to the terreiro. It is not the easiest work, stripping the berries onto tarpaulins beneath the trees, then winnowing with huge, wire-mesh sieves to free the coffee of leaves and chaff. Especially not when the fog of early morning soaks into your clothes and chills and stiffens your hands. But those women, used to chopping firewood and hauling water and wielding hoes, found it better than most jobs. And as the sun dried the mist, things got progressively more cheerful. One could tell this by the babble of gossip and laughter and singing that rose from the cafèzal as the day went on. O f t h e P a s s a g e o f D a y s a n d t h e M e a n i n g o f Tr e e s

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If we couldn’t find enough help among our neighbors, we sometimes had to depend on the gatos. Assembling enough individuals to fill the back of a truck, these came rattling out to the fazenda to offer other people’s work for a percentage. Theirs was a legitimate and necessary function. Still, I never have been able to get used to those seedy characters who, once the harvesters are delivered, spend the rest of the day sitting in trucks, picking their teeth and listening to the radio. Harvesters were paid by the measure, though by law they had to receive at least a day’s salary no matter what they picked. Watching them, one learns whom to invite back the next year. For while some are satisfied with the minimum even when the harvest is good, others manage to harvest three or four times that much. One of the best pickers in those days was a huge black grandmother named Dona Santa, with an energetic stride and a deep laugh. To my great embarrassment, every time Dona Santa emerged from the cafèzal, twoyear-old Christina would let out a bellow and run like a shy colt. I couldn’t figure out this performance until one day Dona Santa set me straight: “But of course,” she shrugged and spread her great winglike arms, “It’s because I’m so big and black and she’s so small and white.” Although Dona Santa must have been over seventy, the only one who could outharvest her was a spirited girl named Aparecida, whose arm had been amputated below the elbow. Cida would do just about anything, using that good arm and that stump—even wield a hoe. She was a proud and cheerful person who never asked for help from anyone. Whenever I think of her and Dona Santa even now, I can’t help thinking of how little recognition such people receive as they go through life, taking 82

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care of themselves and others, with no one realizing how independent and important they are. That first year was one of those when, as Seu Juca had predicted, “coffee would put our jackets on.” It may not have done that, but miraculously indeed the harvest did pay the rest that was owing for our land. The old coffee’s reward was to be uprooted as quickly as it was harvested so that we could hire a tractor to make the contour ditches and start preparing for planting in October. It took months for the men with those heavy hoes to dig out the old coffee, cat’s claw, and brush. Its removal revealed worse erosion than we could have imagined when first we walked over the land. In some places there was no topsoil at all, just bare gravel and clay. There were gullies deep enough to lose a cow in, underground labyrinths of parasol ants, and termite hills like monuments to abandonment, as large beneath the earth as they were above. The men broke up the dead termite hills and carried the cementlike rubble off to strengthen our road. With the intention of eventually putting all the highlands into pasture, we plowed and planted corn, as the croppers had done in Prudente, sowing between the rows grass and the legume lab lab, which would fix nitrogen in the soil even as it grew, twisting round the cornstalks to create green manure once the corn was harvested.

] Meanwhile, in the hands of João Faria and Onça the house rose out of a hillside whose only shade was provided by the mulberry tree beneath which Carson milked the cows. To rectify that barren situation we went to visit Professor Hermes Sousa Lima, who, at the Instituto Biológico de Campinas, had dedicated most of his life to trees. Indeed, the studies of the flora of Brazil made by O f t h e P a s s a g e o f D a y s a n d t h e M e a n i n g o f Tr e e s

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Professor Hermes are probably the most ample and precise in existence; and fortunately his writings, published over years in O Estado de São Paulo, have been bound into a book which is now a national treasure. A gentle man with dark, melancholy eyes, the professor lived in a state of perpetual despair over his fellow countrymen’s general lack of concern for nature. As a consequence he treated his trees like zealously guarded orphans whose potential parents must provide a good record before being permitted adoption. Luckily, he and I had been reading each other in O Estado for some years, and so it was as though we were old friends by the time we went to seek him in the paradise of tropical greenery he had created through his devotion. As we wandered in its midst we talked about the devastated forests of the Serra do Mar and the Amazon, which, but for the treadings of Indians, nut gatherers, and rubber tappers, was as yet a great inviolate wilderness. How could its devastation be avoided once it became accessible? The only protection it had so far was that there were no real roads in the entire region that comprised half of Brazil’s territory. But so far too, there was not even a forestry service to be prepared for the advent of roads. “Nothing!” Sitting at his desk in an office jammed with botanical books and treatises, Dr. Hermes shook his head despairingly, “The only defense against anything in the end is education, and we should have begun that far too long ago . . .” Still, the next moment, his enthusiasm revived, he supervised the loading of our kombi with seedlings of every imaginable variety of yellow flowering acacia; grevileas, eritrinas, cedars, pines, flamboyants; espatodia with flowers like flaming candles and orchid-flowered unha de vaca with pale gray leaves shaped like the 84

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hooves of cows. Each we planted with care and reverence, thinking as we did of the gentle, outraged professor. They were waisthigh when we planted them. Now people who come to visit take it for granted that the trees have always been here, sheltering an old farmhouse so well that it can no longer be seen from the road. “That’s how fast things grow here,” I still say in the same tone of wonder. Or is it really the other way around . . . that in the full, busy life of a fazenda, time passes with a swiftness impossible to conceive?

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12 W h i l e

Politicians Sleep,

Brazil Grows

Seu João Faria was setting the roof beams on the house when in March , President João Goulart reached the end of his limb and was forced to flee. A certain mythology has been built over the years regarding Goulart as a frustrated reformer. But I don’t remember Goulart and his cronies ever seeming to be interested in a solid, modern agriculture or the knowledge that sustains these things, any more than they really believed in people’s ability to think for themselves. And like many another whose ineptitude distanced him more and more from reality and the solutions it could provide, Goulart painted himself into a corner where only radicals would support him. Gradually people became fed up with the incoherence and lack of direction that affected everyone. Professionals, businessmen, farmers— anyone responsible for production, jobs, keeping things moving—were weary of never knowing what the rules would be tomorrow. They looked forward anxiously to elections two years away, even as they began to doubt that they would come about. By 86

the time their doubts were proven to be justified, there were very few who were sorry to see the hero of the Ligas Camponesas fly away to the large hacienda which—having enough eggs to put in several baskets—Goulart had bought himself, safe across the border in Uruguay. Carson and I were in São Paulo when the revolution was announced; the children were in Tietê. We took immediately to the road, wondering if we would be able to get home, but fortunately the whole thing was quite anticlimactic. All we encountered along the way were some rather doubtful-looking convoys in no apparent hurry to get where they were going and a significant number of army trucks broken down by the roadside. Who knows what it was—perhaps a cross between a Portuguese talent for strategic confusion and a general Brazilian tendency to avoid conflict, even in a revolution, that caused this one to occur without the opposing forces ever fully coming to grips. While Goulart’s firebrand brother-in-law, Governor Leonel Brizola, tried unsuccessfully to stir up a revolt in their native Rio Grande do Sul, Goulart’s escape plane broke down on departure. Yet no one as much as bothered to apprehend him while it was being repaired.

] Having lived through the years that led up to it, it is easy to understand the general euphoria as Goulart’s plane faded over the border and away. People danced in the streets. It seemed at last there would be normal conditions to work in, to think ahead without that constant debilitating sense of anxiety about the future. It seemed there was nothing anyone could not achieve, given the peace to achieve it. It was the normal reaction of people who While Politicians Sleep, Brazil Grows

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simply want to get on with their lives, especially in a place like Tietê. Yet, the other day in São Paulo, as we drove past the Hospital das Clínicas, I was reminded of a scene that did much to put the years of military dictatorship into context for me. It had to do with our son Michael, who as a boy was what one would call accident-prone. Up to the moment of that scene, his accidents had been attended to by Dr. João Rodrigues, whose years of treating people in a world that was poorly equipped for practicing medicine had made him quite ingenious. Dr. João had sewn Mikey’s tongue after a fall from the top of a mango tree; he had sewn his inner thigh after its goring by a cow. He had even extracted a bean from Mikey’s ear by floating it out with water. Till then he had never failed me. But this time, when Mikey was brought in from an automobile accident with a severe concussion, Dr. João had to admit that Tietê hadn’t the equipment to cope. What happened next turned into a living nightmare as Michael had to be rushed to São Paulo by ambulance. The driver was none other than the occasional volunteer, Janguta, and as always apparently guided by God, he made it. But on that night, the ambulance from Tietê was probably the last to be allowed through the gates of the Hospital das Clínicas. Even our eldest son, Steve, who had gone ahead with him, was not permitted to follow. And when we arrived close behind, we too were barred from entering. The trouble was that terrorists involved in a succession of bank robbings and kidnappings, having been wounded running from the military police, were about to be taken from the hospital to prison. On the inside, the terrorists awaited their fate. On the outside, their companions threatened to set off bombs unless they were allowed to go free. In the middle, amid beaming searchlights 88

View from the Fazenda

and flashing police cars, were ourselves and numerous others like us, desperate to reach our loved ones. Some defense mechanism makes one behave like a zombie in such situations, and perhaps my very blank-faced determination was what convinced the guards that I had no counterrevolutionary intentions, only the need to find Mikey where he had been all night, lying on a table amid perhaps a hundred others in an emergency room from which there seemed to be no escape. In other words, from Tietê, where a day after the generals took over, life had returned to its usual pace, we found ourselves in the great city of São Paulo caught between opposing forces in a struggle that was not of our making. It was only a moment, but whenever I think of it, I am reminded of how it felt to be caught without those recourses we all count on—think of as normal—when people live under the rule of law. On the one side, the insane indifference of extremism; on the other, the brutality of absolute power—conditions which never fail to bring to the surface all that is the worst in humans. And I am reminded too that others were not so lucky as we. Academic friends who were denounced as subversives were seized and imprisoned for no more than expressing their ideas in a moment when everything political that happened was affected by the Cold War. What a waste of good lives and precious time. Yet, despite a pseudodemocracy that passed the presidency from one general to the next for twenty-one years, things did not regress or stand still. Partly in tune to an old Brazilian saying, “While politicians sleep, Brazil grows,” life did go on, things changed and progressed. It was during this time of confusion that João Faria laid the last tile on the roof of our house. To celebrate, we slaughtered a steer While Politicians Sleep, Brazil Grows

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and threw a churrasco to which we invited Seu Faria and his family, the fazenda’s workers, Carlito Aranha, and our old friends from Malabar and Presidente Prudente, Seu Juca and Dona Lisah—nearly everyone who had played a significant part in our life in Brazil until then. It was as usual a varied group, which made it all the more fun as we ate and drank on the lawn amid trees just beginning to give shade, and later danced on the stone patio that had emerged from our Ohio design. Many toasts were made, most of them directed toward the friends without whose kindness and help we would surely not have reached the point where we were. Every so often, I mentally drink those toasts again, glad as well that we did not wait for the “right moment,” which, one comes to learn, is as nonexistent as is perfection. A few days after the party, we moved into the Casa Grande da Fazenda Pau D’Alho, and what with all the comings and goings of people and dogs, in a very few days, the house had begun to look as though it had been lived in for years.

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View from the Fazenda

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13 J o h n

the Bull and

His Harem

Yesterday the fazenda’s first calf of the year was born in the pasture close to the house. After thirty-five years of raising cattle, one might imagine the novelty would have worn off. But when the slimy, wet bundle shot from the womb and the calf broke free, thrusting his head upward like a swimmer seeking air, the excitement was as new as ever. And the anxiety was just as great as we watched him struggle to his feet, stagger instinctively in the right direction, catch hold of the teat, and butt the udder with his nose until the first milk could plainly be seen flowing down his gullet, telling us that all was well. Renato has the calf ’s parentage marked in a dirty, much-leafed notebook kept amid bottles of bloat and diarrhea medicine and cans of gentian violet in the barn. It is with a report from this rustic but reliable annotation that the calf will duly be registered by the Santa Gertrudis Breeders’ Association. Yet without looking at the pedigrees we already know by looking at him, tall and heavy-boned with a broad forehead on that familiarly long face, 91

that this son of Jandira, whose sire was Navigator, was fathered by Desastre, whose sire was Bravo. The combination should prove a good one, but as every calf is an individual, only time will tell. That is how it is in this business which has no beginning and no end, in which you pick up where someone else left off and go on selecting in the hopeless pursuit of achieving a perfect animal. Will cloning change all this? If it does, it will certainly be one more step toward taking the fun out of things. But when we began our herd in the early sixties, no such idea haunted us. What mattered most was that the grass and legumes we had planted a year earlier had closed over the bare earth into a saladlike mass which looked worthy of grazing by the beginnings of a herd.

] The cattle we decided upon were Santa Gertrudis, a breed created by the King Ranch for the hot, subtropical climate of Texas. The breed combines the tropical resistance of the Indian Brahma with the better milk-producing and weight-gaining capacities of the European Shorthorn. Having done well in Texas, Santa Gertrudis had begun to find their way to similar climes in South America, South Africa, and Australia. We had first come to admire those great, loose-skinned, dark red cattle when we lived in Prudente, where King Ranch, in partnership with Swift and Company, ran some seventy thousand hectares on which Santa Gertrudis were being crossed with various zebu breeds. The best females were bred to Santa Gertrudis bulls in a program to create purebred cattle by absorption. The bulls were used for crossing or fattening in commercial herds where their hybrid vigor was bringing them 92

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to market weight a year earlier than Nelore cattle that, on the same pasture, were generally ready at the age of three. That’s a long way to have come from the scrub cattle brought by those first herders in the s, which, if they lived that long, seldom got to market before they were eight. But when transport makes land valuable in terms of productivity, that’s the way things go. And by the time we were ready to buy cattle, not just the railroad but the asphalt had reached Presidente Prudente and was on its way to Campo Grande. So to find our cattle, in May , we returned to Rancharia, not far from Prudente, where King Ranch had its Fazenda Bartira. There was a great deal that was special about those King Ranch fazendas, with their well-tended crops and cattle ranges: their big, sprawling, comfortable houses that reflected the lives of people who loved their work and enjoyed living in the campo. Pete Emmert, the general manager at the time, was a tall, lean Texan who looked as though he’d just stepped out of a Zane Grey novel. To put himself through college, he’d ridden broncos in rodeos and was as good a rider and roper as any vaqueiro born to the saddle on the fazendas. While he was there, along with breeding up the Santa Gertrudis, the ranch also began to bring in big, sturdy quarter horses which, both for work and racing, would become one of the most highly sought-after breeds in Brazil. To promote these calm, intelligent horses with their fine instinct for herding cattle, Pete organized cutting and roping contests and barrel races and backed courses in a concept of horse training new to that region of Brazil. There the traditional manner was to snub a horse, get on, and ride and beat him till his spirit was gone. Our dear old Guaraná, whom Carson rode for twenty years, was a perfect example of the result of that method. John the Bull and His Harem

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Solid and enduring, a good lead horse, he was also a zombie as far as people were concerned. Quarter horses, bred to know the rider’s intention almost before the rider knows it himself, could be ruined by that kind of training, and so the ranch hands at the King Ranch fazendas were among the first to learn to approach horses by appealing to the strange symbiosis that has linked horses and humans from their first encounter. A symbiosis that, it is said, the Indians discovered when first they encountered horses brought by the Spaniards to roam the South American plains, but which was lost again under the dominion of Spanish and Portuguese masters. There were other highly civilized things about Fazenda Bartira, where Pete had his headquarters. Things such as the hundreds of native trees—many of them hardwoods Pete’s wife Mary Lee ordered planted in memory of the trees lost to burnings when the fazendas were cleared. And there was the school bus that took the children into Rancharia, thus assuring their education beyond the fourth grade. And then there was that extraordinarily civilized human institution known as Candido. Candido was born on the fazenda and began working at the Main House at the age of twelve. The color of pale clay, he was small and perfectly made with fine, handsome features that suited his cheerful, quick-witted nature. Beginning as a houseboy, he gradually took over the keeping of a huge house that received all kinds of people from everywhere in the world. Never missing a lesson himself, he taught cooks how to make whole wheat bread and marrons glacé. He brought thirteen-year-old girls from the lonely retiros on far corners of the fazenda, taught them how to make beds with all those sheets and blankets and pillowcases and spreads they’d never seen before, how to create 94

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exotic flower arrangements and wait on table without causing a gustatory traffic jam. And aah, when you returned to the Main House after a day of bouncing over dusty roads in a jeep, you had but to lift your hand for there to be placed in it, as if by some miracle, your favorite drink. But the pleasure of the drink would not have been half so great were it not for the equal pleasure with which Candido performed these tasks. Performed? No—performs. For numerous managers have come and gone from Bartira, but Candido is still there, a kind of monument to the civilized idea that keeping house is a highly respectable profession. Certainly no one respected Candido’s talents more than Mary Lee Emmert, who was well aware of the complexities he confronted every day. A handsome woman with clear blue eyes and a determined chin, Mary Lee had a sense of humor and imagination that made living on the fazenda, far from everywhere, all the fun it was. In her nature, along with the humor, there was also a stern, no-nonsense element that made it possible to keep things functioning at Bartira despite the trials caused by distance and faulty connections both human and mechanical. She was always organizing things—a vegetable garden, a Christmas party for the children on the fazenda, a churrasco for a cattle auction that was the event of the year for the whole countryside, preparations for the biannual visit of Mr. Bob Kleberg and the board of directors. The American visitors were actually quite reasonable in their wants; just little things like the right wines and whiskey, and toilet paper that didn’t resemble corrugated cardboard. What they didn’t realize was that to find these things required emissaries sent on four-day missions, seven hundred kilometers to São Paulo and back. Enough bottled water to protect the visitors John the Bull and His Harem

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from the “gringo gallops” would have needed a truck for its transportation. But instead that problem was resolved by a simple collusion between Mary Lee and Candido whereby the same six bottles labeled “Agua Mineral” were repeatedly filled and returned to the table with the perfectly good spring water that came through the faucets in the kitchen—one more proof of the fact that in the majority of cases what you don’t know really doesn’t hurt you. Services requiring electrical energy were something else again. No amount of collusion or subterfuge could get the poor, rattling diesel generator to support hair dryers, electric shavers, ice for the visitors’ drinks, and all the needs of a working fazenda at the same time. Thus when the board of directors was there, electricity was a question of priorities that often required sending a courier to the sawmill to advise the operator to shut down for the afternoon so the ladies’ dresses could be ironed before dinner. So the stories went, often long after Candido had served the last drink, that kept us sitting under the stars on the terrace or by a roaring fire in the big living room at Bartira. To add to those stories, the occasion of the purchase of our first Santa Gertrudis cattle coincided with Fazenda Bartira’s annual cattle sale, and to celebrate it, Carson decided he needed a group of lively companions. Somehow the idea expanded into twenty of us getting together to rent two sleeping cars on the Sorocabana Railway. The cars were to be a kind of poor man’s Orient Express which, kept on a siding at the Rancharia station, would be our hotel for the weekend. With all due respect to the Sorocabana, any resemblance to the Orient Express was purely imaginary. Not that the compartments were not clean and comfortable, or that we didn’t entertain ourselves marvelously with parties and political 96

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speeches over the railing of the caboose to the astonishedly attentive, if thinly assembled, citizenry at the stations along the way. But once we reached Rancharia it became apparent the something was amiss with the plumbing. Notified, the stationmaster, nodding knowingly, came up with the conventional verdict, “air in the pipes,” and ordered the engineer to give the pipes a blast with a hose. Unfortunately the effort produced nothing but a lot of hot air, obliging us to face the fact that for the weekend we would have to line up to perform our daily ablutions in the station’s public toilet. Reminded of the old ditty, “Passengers will please refrain from flushing the lavat’ry on the train while standing in the station Waterloo,” we lined up, thankful that by grace of God no other passenger train was scheduled to stop in Rancharia that weekend, making the public toilet a kind of private annex of our “hotel.” That resolved, our next challenge was to seek breakfast in the bar across the street. The owner, who was just passing out the morning shots of pinga and coffee, stared in momentary disbelief as suddenly his humdrum establishment was invaded by an unidentifiable tribe with a ravenous desire for scrambled eggs. But how, when in all the bar’s history nothing had ever been served that was more complicated than bread and butter rolled in half a napkin? It must be said that the limitless Brazilian capacity for “finding a way” once more came to the rescue as, within minutes, the barkeep appeared holding aloft a steaming platter of scrambled eggs laced with cheese and bristling with twenty forks. As we dug in, a crowd of curious bystanders began to gather, so that by the time we left, it was barely possible to work our way back into the street, where, thanks to the perpetual preparedness of Candido and Mary Lee, the trusty old school bus waited to take John the Bull and His Harem

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us to the sale. Such became the daily ritual of a weekend excursion which no amount of imagination on the part of the original Orient Express could ever duplicate, and which all of us enjoyed so much that we would repeat it the following year. At the end of it, we bought ourselves thirty-one head of cattle, though not in the sale, where the lowest prices were then way beyond our reach. Instead, after three days’ festivities, we stayed on to join Pete on the fence of the corral and spend a morning parting the heifers of three-quarter Santa Gertrudis blood that would suit our plans and our pocketbook. The bull we would buy from Senhor Guilherme Campos Salles, from whom, by coincidence, we had bought Fazenda Pau D’Alho and who, along with King Ranch, was among the first to breed Santa Gertrudis in Brazil. We called him John the Bull, and for us no more marvelous an animal existed until the first time we took him to a show and the Texan judge, John Kiker, lit in, declaring him to be the best example of all the defects you could find in the Santa Gertrudis breed, beginning with his dangling wang. The breath was not knocked out of us enough to keep us from muttering back and forth, “Arrogant bastard!” “Ah well, what the hell’d you expect from an ignorant tobacco-chewing redneck?” But subconsciously we must have listened, because the next time we chose an animal, somehow the choice looked like something John Kiker, who by then had become a lifelong friend, would call a damned good-looking bull. By then, too, John the Bull had done his damage, which would give us plenty to repair. It began by breeding him to that assortment of crossbred heifers whose offspring could only be as much the result of faith as of scientific selection. Still, none of that could impair our enthusiasm on the day the heifers arrived. I have a picture of all seven of 98

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us lined along the fence of the pasture as we watched the travelweary cattle spill dazedly off the trucks and, coming to life, hightail it down the hill toward water.

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14 O f

Cattle and Men

The rain was plentiful that year, the grass grew belly high. The heifers thrived and John the Bull was, if nothing else, fertile, so that within a year and a half a healthy crop of calves was born. That was the beginning, with the primary ingredients of good pastures and sturdy breeding stock. Still, to make it all come together, there was one more essential ingredient. On the farm in Ohio it was drummed into the heads of us children that, as animals were entirely dependent upon us, they were our greatest responsibility. Though that was a rule we learned to respect, we also learned from experience that responsibility wouldn’t work unless one was what my father described as “teched.” What he meant by that was quite simply that you had to have a feeling deep inside that connected you with just how animals are. Like ourselves, Aristedes, who came to us not long after the first calves were ready for weaning, was decidedly teched. He loved and understood animals; he knew that when he laid his hands on them or talked to them, in their own extremely sensitive way they 100

too understood and trusted him. Not that he wasn’t up to using a pincher on a recalcitrant bull’s nose—but never in rage, only out of necessity. Most often he could do more to control the cattle he worked with by his tone of voice than a tug on a halter, and that was because they knew he meant what he said. When he first came to us, we still had our old horse Guaraná, whose Manga Larga breed was created for transporting portly fazendeiros at a comfortable jog through their coffee plantations. With Aristedes leaning backward in Guaraná’s saddle to give balance to his large stomach, that was the old-fashioned scene the pair evoked. But should a heifer take off in the wrong direction, horse and rider would become one perfectly coordinated being, concentrated on pursuit. And over the years as his hair turned gray and his stomach increased in size, he remained, even on foot, a miracle of speed who could outrun anyone on the fazenda, even a raging cow. Indeed, one of my favorite diversions as I sat here at my writing table was to watch through the window as Aristedes drove the cows back to the pasture after milking, over a trajectory of only a hundred meters which was nonetheless fraught with perils along the way. For there was the mango tree whose fruit in season was irresistible to greedy old Meiga, and the grove of oranges whose fruit-laden branches belligerent Januária was bound to charge. As I watched I tried to keep my laughter down as Aristedes dashed in and out amid the trees on his incredibly nimble feet. Yet in this infuriating dance, I never heard him call a cow anything more insulting than nojenta, “nauseating,” a description which as well never failed to cause my wailing collapse. Not that he was a pillar of virtue who, if he hadn’t reckoned I was watching, wouldn’t have roundly cursed the cow’s mother. Of Cattle and Men

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Still, his discretion was a reflection of a nature in which dignity played a major part. In the show ring, his strong, square features set in the expression of the stern father that he was, he commanded the respect of the other herdsmen all younger than he. And be it with animals or men, that command was unquestionably his greatest tool, one he would use more and more as the herd grew and we were obliged to hit the show circuit in order to sell our cattle. Because Santa Gertrudis cattle could adapt themselves to any of Brazil’s climates, that meant traveling as far south as the chill, windswept plains of Rio Grande do Sul, or as far north as the tropics of the Amazon, or the hot, drought-stricken northeast. On all such excursions, along with Aristedes, we depended with absolute faith upon a single other individual, the trucker Waldemar Bezerra. Waldemar was a nordestino of the kind whom we had first come to know in the cotton fields of Presidente Prudente: a finelooking man, short and sturdy, with the slanting eyes and wideset cheekbones of an Indian and the full mouth and the golden skin of a mulatto, evidence of a nordestino mingling of three bloods in his veins. The first time we met him shall always remain in my memory. We were sitting on the veranda watching the sunset when he appeared to say in a soft voice, “Olá, estão descansando a ideia?” How often since, while watching the sun go down, I have thought of that apt expression: “Resting your idea?” On that evening, we invited Waldemar to join us for a drink while we discussed plans for a journey up north. It was the first of many such evenings when we would sit and talk about journeys and ideas and life. Most interesting was the life he had led as a boy in the northeastern state of Piauí, where time and again drought 102

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drove people from their tiny farms to join road gangs in order to survive. The thirty-second son in a family of thirty-four, Waldemar came south to São Paulo as soon as he could, in search of opportunity he could obviously never find at home. Experienced in the worst, he was willing to do anything, and at first he worked with a road gang using a hoe just as he’d been used to doing in the northeast. With time, learning to drive a tractor and then all kinds of vehicles, he painstakingly saved enough to buy a truck and start a business of his own. In the process, he also became a prosperous, highly respected citizen of Tietê. This last I mention because, like Aristedes, Waldemar’s most important trump was reliability. Thus when our cattle were trucked, sometimes for days, over winding roads through the interior, we could sleep easily at night, knowing those two traveled together in the front seat of an immense trailer across the back of which was painted in large letters, DRIVE WITH PATIENCE, IF YOU DON’T WANT CONFUSION. Always, we followed by car or plane, depending on distance and time. And always, we were sure that by the time we got there, our cattle would be safely installed, cared for as they were by two men from whom we’d never heard a word they didn’t mean.

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15 “ R e s t i n g

Our Idea”

Once, inspired by Waldemar with his stories of the broad valley of the São Francisco River, we followed his truck by paddle-wheel steamer. “It is another Brazil,” he would say. “You can’t begin to understand it unless you go there. And if you really want to see it, you should travel by gaiola.” Our destination that time in  was the annual state cattle show in the coastal city of Recife, Pernambuco. To reach it by following a river that wound its way through the great caatinga lands, the northeast was a bit of a detour, but this was something we had always dreamed of doing. And, as so often, we were joined by our good friends Dick and Jane Hayes, whose curiosity and sense of humor have never failed to be up to those journeys on which every step becomes a certainty only in the taking. Our boat was the Benjamin Guimarães, one of a number of paddle-wheel steamers that, no longer considered of use in the United States, had come to Brazil in the early s to live incredibly useful lives on the great rivers from the Amazon to the 105

Paraná. Until we saw it, we wondered why it was called a gaiola. But then we understood. For with the exception of the boat’s two cabins and four bunk rooms, its three decks consisted almost entirely of railings and posts, so that it really did look like nothing so much as a great floating birdcage. To embark, we arrived on schedule but soon discovered there was no need for punctuality, due to the infinite complications of boarding. When we prepared to step aboard, the last of the fuel for the boiler was being loaded by a crew who scurried up and down the gangplank like ants in a race, carrying cords of wood heavier than themselves. That done, the river folk began to move onto the lower deck as if they might live there forever, with their hammocks, mats, and kerosene-burning stoves made of old cans; their crates full of chickens, pigs, and goats; their white cotton sacks full of the month’s staples—the gaiola leaning tipsily this way and that with the shift and clatter and babble of accommodation. When the last child was swept hazardously aboard, the shouting and cackling and rocking lessened to a kind of orchestral background as next the cook, a portly black queen of a woman giving directions on every side as she came, ascended to the kitchen. That most important section of the boat was a cage within a cage of broad mesh wire netting where, from atop a great woodburning stove covered with battered but shining pans, would emerge the exact same meal—a tasty stew served with rice, beans, and collards on the side—twice a day. The last of the cook’s supplies, the meat for the stew, came in indistinguishable hunks and strips atop the same shoulders that had carried the wood, and was hung over the railing—the hunks to be consumed with a certain climatically enforced haste while the salted strips dried as we 106

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made our progression along the sunlit river. Once the regal cook was established with all her trappings, we tourists streamed up to the second deck. We were ourselves a varied lot that included a pompous, verbose judge from São Paulo; a dark-bearded young professor returning to his roots in the river town of XiqueXique; and a big, floridly handsome fazendeiro with flowing white hair who turned out to be the cousin of the legendary writer Guimarães Rosa. Our particular abode was one of the two “luxury cabins” set close to the boiler and the stack so that, by some ingenious means, our hot water came directly from the boat’s source of locomotion. The cabin consisted of a room just big enough to fit a double bed, a tiny closet, a table, and a chair. The walls were white, the bed covered with bleached cotton, and the table stood before a window. In all the world, I have never known a better place to “rest my idea” or one I was more reluctant to leave at the end of the journey. By day, I sat for hours at the table writing and watching the river world go by. By night, we slept, soothed by the sound of the boiler which breathed through its stack with the steady rhythm of a great, calm leviathan. I have never known a room that suited me better, nor one that I was more reluctant to leave at the end of a journey For there is no way to put into words the peace I felt in that clean, austere cabin, looking out upon a world which Waldemar was right in saying could only be even partially understood by its seeing. Before it was called the São Francisco, the river was named O Rio dos Currais because the activity of the towns along its course was mostly centered around the corrals to which the cattle of the valley were brought for bargain. The immense valley itself “Rest ing Our Idea”

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is part of a larger landscape of low hills dominated by twisted caatinga trees for which this region is named, their thorns so vicious that to herd cattle, men are obliged to dress from head to foot in an armor of leather. Subject to droughts that can stretch on for years, it is a harsh, inhospitable world in whose beauty there is nothing superfluous. Right then, in the dry season, the river was crystalline, reflecting a cloudless sky and creating tantalizing inverted images of everything that floated on its surface. Bright-colored skiffs with patched and faded canvas sails; dugout canoes called ubás in the language of the Indians; ajoujos made from three ubás lashed together with leather and crossed with boards reflected too the timelessness of the valley. All moved up and down the river from town to town, carrying fresh fish, salt, earthen water jugs and cooking pots, and the fruits and vegetables that flourished where they could be grown close to the river’s edge. The towns stood on embankments whose great heights caused one to think with awe of the swelling and rising, the inchoate force of the river at flood time. Januária, Carinhanha, Ibotirama, Xique-Xique, Barra. For us ever afterward, each name would bear a special memory of a blue and white church looking onto a square aflame with canna flowers; a ghostly sobrado recalling a wealth that was austere as its second story rose above the tile roofs of low houses built for smaller people along narrow streets that ended in the caatinga. In Januária lived a grave old man by the name of Guaraní who, by profession, carved carrancas, the figureheads which had once adorned the prows of the great wooden riverboats belonging to wealthy merchants and coroneis who were the owners of the land. The fierce human faces of Guaraní’s carrancas emerged 108

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from richly combed lion’s manes to confront the Surubim King, a great wormlike dragon whose fun it was to knock over boats at mooring; or to greet the fearless Mãe d’Agua, a comely mermaid, keeper of the waters and benefactress of young virgins. Nowadays the coroneis travel by plane, and there are no great riverboats in need of carrancas. But Guaraní carved these ferociously humorous creatures just for himself and for people who liked them just for themselves. And that is how Dick and Jane acquired Benjamin Guimarães, whom they named in honor of our paddle-wheel steamer. Not anxious to carry him on the plane we would finally take to Recife, they took advantage of one of those old conveniences with which Brazilians have long confronted great distances and deficient mail services and sent him home by bus. He made it with no major difficulties, apparently. But during our trip, as we sat having drinks on the top deck at sunset, we often thought of him, his huge square dentures grinning maliciously, eyes popping beneath lusty black brows in an aggressive yellow countenance as, seated between the bus driver and ticket taker, he whirled and bobbed round the mountains of Minas Gerais, forward through time to where he hangs now above the entrance to their farm, greeting all comers in a constantly changing São Paulo world. At Bom Jesus da Lapa, there is a grotto large enough to put a church in. So of course that is what has been done. People hobble and limp to Bom Jesus for kilometers across the caatinga to pray and make offerings to the image of Jesus nestled in a crevice of this great cave within a promontory that makes a bend in the flow of the river. Amid stalactites that hang from the ceiling are exvotos—heads, arms, legs, torsos, breasts carved from wood or molded from clay in thanks for miraculous cures. The entire town makes a living from the sale of images, trinkets, sleeping space, “Rest ing Our Idea”

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and sustenance for the halt and lame. There is little that isn’t sold in Bom Jesus, from bright little birds trapped in the caatinga and jailed for life to armadillos hunted for their shells and meat. One couldn’t help sensing there the intensity of a predatory existence that preys upon nature and humans alike. Yet oddly enough, in those carved offerings one sensed as well a presence of the miraculous. Looking at those carvings, I was more than ever convinced that, though we use rituals to express it, faith is something that succeeds in transcending the religions which try to lay claim to it. Certainly it is part of the people of the sertão, whose religion is a mixture of Catholicism and a lot of other things but whose very resourcefulness is a demonstration of faith. Thoreau would have loved those people who wasted nothing, could make something out of anything—canoes and carrancas from simple logs; lanterns from tin cans; coringas of clay in the shapes of birds from whose bills spouted purified water. On board, when the sailors were not scrubbing decks, stoking the insatiable boiler, or scrambling up and down embankments after wood, they were carving oars and poles and handles for shovels and brooms. Even these were beautiful in their simple utility. The pilots who steered the boat had no schooling but that of life, and for this they were called os praticos. It was a worthy name for a couple of solemnly smiling young men who, but for a few flags to mark the shallows and the rapids, had nothing but intuition and practical knowledge of the river to guide them. Often we climbed to the pilots’ deck to watch them steer. For aside from the fascination of the river’s course and their piloting, we found them to be good tellers of tales: Of a land whose harshness has had a way of producing such religious fanatics as Antonio Conselheiro, who led a following of thirty thousand out110

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casts to build a fortressed city in its heart and provoked a civil war. Of the coroneis who owned the great cattle fazendas and allpowerful political positions to the outlaw cangaceiros who paid those coroneis ambivalent homage. Of these latter, the praticos added to a long list of stories about Lampião, who, exalted and feared by rich and poor, terrorized the countryside until excessive independence caused him and his band to be beheaded and become a historic example. Lampião— romantic, fierce, and untamable—of whom, the praticos assured us, it was true that he wore gold-rimmed glasses, read a lot, always dressed elegantly, and above all always loved Maria Bonita. In the music sung and tales told of him are expressed—along with the endurance of the nordestino—that deep smoldering energy which, when not absorbed in creativity, can burst forth in a human violence as harsh as the land from which it comes. Talkative as they were, one thing our friends the praticos never did was take their gaze from the river. Even so, in their steering, intuition often had to take precedence over what they saw with their eyes. For like all rivers, the São Francisco was treacherous and deceptive, ever changing with the swelling and ebbing of its waters. Sometimes at night the tinkling of a bell somewhere just beneath our cabin warned us that a sandbar had grown in the river where one had not been before. Once we became lodged and were hauled free by the ingenious means of attaching an anchor by a cable to a winch in the stern and then dropping it upstream from a rowboat. This done, with a great deal of grunting human effort, the steamer was winched over the bar. But except for these tinklings and winchings, due more to the fickleness of the river than to human error, the praticos navigated our way northward without mishap. “Rest ing Our Idea”

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With no radio or newspapers, nor any greater responsibility than that of procuring salami and cheese to vary our diet of stew, and ice from the local popsicle machines to cool our drinks, we forgot everything but the life going on around us in a world unlike any we had ever known. We lunched daily with the cousin of Guimarães Rosa, who described the great Brazilian writer as a sensitive, gentle man, always considerate of the ways of people whom he met during his years as a doctor, roaming through the great hinterlands of Minas and Bahia. Having since read his vivid, authentic narrations and dialogues, I can just about believe his cousin Candido’s tale of how, in deference to his reticent subjects, Doctor Guimarães scribbled their responses in a notebook that— for fear of destroying a hard-earned conversation—was never removed from the ample pocket in his baggy pants. The old fazendeiro from Minas also swore with great loyalty that the sunsets on the river might be beautiful, but nothing like those he witnessed from his veranda each evening at home. Being habitual sunset watchers ourselves, we could at least agree that what we witnessed each evening as we sipped our drinks on the top deck of the gaiola was awesomely unique. As I remember it, everything—egrets gliding down to roost in island trees, cranes fishing in the shallows, a mule and his rider jogging behind a herd of scrawny gir cattle; a woman climbing an embankment, an earthen jar balanced on her head—seemed drawn in penciled outlines against a blue infinity. Then suddenly that same everything became fused and absorbed by an allconsuming fiery brilliance akin to a daily apocalyptic reminder of dominion, as the sunset enveloped the river and the caatinga in one despotic embrace.

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] At Sobradinho a dam was being built that, characteristic of Brazilian pharaonic works during the reign of the generals, would create the largest artificial lake in the world and was meant to supply energy for the poorest and most populous region in Brazil. Plans were in the making, too, for the use of its waters for irrigation, once the people of the towns that would be submerged were moved to new, planned villas on the lake’s periphery. Thinking of how that would be as we passed through this tranquil scene, we couldn’t help but feel despair at the thought that those starkly beautiful towns would disappear and with them a history and an atmosphere that could not be replaced. Nor could we help but wonder if that vast expanse of water might not, as with Aswan, cause more trouble than good. Indeed, the argument still goes on among people of experience that smaller dams, well built at intervals along tributaries, would be more thrifty and useful to more people in the long run. Beyond the rising waters of the dam lay Juazeiro, where, in , plans had been made for an irrigation project where the São Francisco curved eastward at the twin cities of Juazeiro, Bahia, and Petrolina, Pernambuco. The Brazilian government was to establish the basic water distribution and private enterprise was to use the flow on large and small farms comprising fifty thousand hectares. It was an idea exciting enough to inspire any young man who dreamed of doing something of value, and our eldest son, Steve, home from Cornell, had been lucky enough to get a job there during summer break. We came upon him, acting on the orders of university-trained technicians, sitting in a rowboat plumbing the depths of the river with a stone on a string. We “Rest ing Our Idea”

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laughed heartily, but evidently as is often the case in such matters, it was the best way to discover in the end just where the irrigation pipes should be lowered. Steve, who is never anything by half measure, was full of enthusiasm—eyes alight, his unmanageable hair standing on end with excess energy. “If I had the money, I’d invest here. Believe me, when the time comes, I’ll look for a job.” When we visited a government irrigation project at nearby Bebedouro the next day, we could understand his excitement. With the use of water, sun-punished land had been turned into a paradise. There were fields of green alfalfa that gave four cuttings a year; fine melons on burgeoning vines; tomatoes firm and red against dense, healthy foliage; people in the dappled shade of arbors picking thick clusters of green Italian grapes. They were people who were making a good living on plots that were leased long-term. The young agronomists working on the project were as enthusiastic as Steve. Their excitement and energy were in themselves like fresh water that, when channeled, could make the world around them eternally green. But unfortunately, as so often happens, the funds for continuing the work born in the heads of planners were diverted elsewhere, and the project petered out. So many plans! So many schemes! Since an extraordinarily enlightened Emperor Dom Pedro Segundo ordered a study of the entire river basin in the s, probably more studies have been made of how to make better use of the São Francisco than any river on earth. It’s hard—no, impossible—to believe that all that effort and money has yet to come to some workable conclusion. Still, last year, another drought forced thousands from their homes to join work gangs repairing roads and rebuilding badly constructed dams in exchange for sustenance that barely kept 114

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them alive as victims of what has become cynically referred to as “the industry of drought.” While they worked, most were habitually aware that, come the rains, many of the dams—built out of the dust of drought with hoes in the hands of men weak with hunger—would collapse. And as the days of drought lengthened, we here in the south opened our newspapers to see pictures of the old towns of Remanso, Barra, and Xique-Xique emerging hauntingly from the waters of the great dam at Sobradinho, as if to ask, “Is this what it was for?” Then why should one think the São Francisco Valley has a future? Perhaps because in modern times distances are bridged and new knowledge spreads with amazing rapidity. Even though Brazil consists of many worlds, they are not as separate as they once were, and it is difficult for the old inertia and indifference to resist a counterforce which comes of its own volition. Wherever they can do it without becoming embroiled in centuries-old political disputes, people are irrigating crops that were never considered before, from coffee and soybeans to cajus and melons. It’s exciting now to think that we saw that beginning even then as, our boat ride ending at Juazeiro, we flew toward Recife, Pernambuco over country where, on lands where nothing had ever grown but caatinga and sparse grasses, farmers were growing cotton, beans, and alfalfa.

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16 O f

Cattle Shows, Wr iters,

and Sculptors

The coastal highlands of Pernambuco were once covered with jungle, most of which it would have been better to leave as it was. But slavery takes its toll in countless ways. And now, nearly five hundred years since those mountains were stripped of their original variant beauty, they are still planted with sugarcane, much of it not only cut but tilled and transported by hand and mule cart—the only vehicle capable of defying the gravity of such slopes. Driving through that country, one can imagine why Waldemar Bezerra had no alternative but to migrate southward in search of a living. Our rented car passed through village after village from which people went out each day to scratch a living from minuscule patches of rice, beans, mandioca, and sugarcane—the divided and redivided inheritance of the only thing large in their lives, their families. The exact opposite of those we had seen in that oasis near Juazeiro, these people were a perfect example of what a worried Carlito Aranha had tried all his life to make people see: that Brazil’s time-worn obsession with export 117

and balance of payments generally ignores the small farmers who produce what Brazilians put on their tables every day as though they were of no consequence. As much as the droughts, it is this which dooms them to scratch the earth until it is worn out and then move on. Looming in the background, the great old plantations still dominate the countryside. Here and there are distant glimpses of deep-windowed two-story houses surrounded by passarelas where ladies once took their walks and plantation owners looked out over their seas of cane. It is a depressingly monotonous landscape, devoid of woods and pastures and ponds where one can walk or sit and feel at peace. No wonder nowadays, even if those huge, thick-walled houses were not now nearly impossible to maintain, the owners prefer the variety of life in the cities. Whenever I drive through such cane fields I wonder how the people who live and work in their midst don’t wither—if not of physical suffocation, at least of that of the spirit. And I wonder if I can be so wrong in thinking that this is not how, in the great scheme of things, farming was meant to be. On that particular day, such speculation became even more alive in my mind as, driving on, we suddenly came upon a region of terraced hillsides irrigated from small ponds to grow vegetables and fruits for the not-too-distant capital of Recife. At the sight of them, I couldn’t help imagining that someone—as in Juazeiro, a zealous young agronomist?—had been working hard there, restoring depleted soils and transforming the countryside even as he helped a few people to change their lives.

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At the end of this odyssey, in the fairgrounds of Recife, Aristedes, solid and reliable, led our cattle around the show ring. Leaning on the railing, we watched anxiously as he used all the artifices of an expert who knows how to display an animal’s attributes and disguise its defects by a cautious prod with a show stick while he attempts to hypnotize the judge with a zealous stare. Anyone who has tried to put a good bull together knows how hard it is. And every judge has his opinion of what is most important in a long list of attributes that include everything from a good set of balls to four well-formed, sturdy hooves. What’s important is that, if you listen to what the judge has to say, you may learn something. Unfortunately though, as we know from experience, the glories of winning and the agonies of losing are more inclined to bring out the little boy that exists in the heart of every man. Encouraged by the fact that, in the auctions later on, it is the winners of the highest prizes that go for the highest prices, the judging of the judges is often more passionate than that of the cattle. In this case, the judge was Bill Barrett, a tall, lean Texas rancher and journalist who was no more easily hypnotized by Aristedes’ gaze than he was intimidated by the antics of those who hooted and cheered from the grandstands or glared balefully from closer by. Used to this universal effect in the show ring, he didn’t care if, for those whose cattle won, he was a brilliant individual of international repute or if, for those whose cattle went to the fence, he was an ignorant backwoodsman. Or if, on top of that, they thought him to be a ianque imperialist backwoodsman in connivance with Carson Geld. Once away from the ring, all of this faded before the nordestinos’ incomparable ability to give a visitor a good time. When the show was over, Senhor Alcides Villela—whose cattle had done well O f C a t t l e Sh o w s , Wr i t e r s , a n d S c u l p t o r s

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for themselves—gratefully arranged transportation for Aristedes and all the handlers so that they might have a night on the town. An unusual gesture, I must admit, toward those who generally never leave the fairgrounds during the entire show. Instead, they set up their tents between the rows of cattle troughs in the huge shed where they are installed, use the communal shower room, and partake of whatever the fairgrounds have to offer. Which is not to say that the fairgrounds, with bars and food stands full of sizzling beef, lamb, and pork, and the rodeos and Brazilian country music, don’t provide them with a very good time. Not to mention the pleasures provided once they settled into their tents. Indeed, it was at the fairgrounds in Recife that the sighs and murmurs heard coming from our saintly Aristedes’ tent would become the subject of legendary tales passed along the cattle handlers’ grapevine that would delightfully round out our rather prudish, father-figure image of him forever.

] In the meantime, Bill Barrett was treated to everything imaginable, from tours of the city and snorkeling in the beautiful coral reefs that gave the city its name to speed-boating out to palmshaded islands to drink whiskey with fresh coconut milk in the shell and partake of feasts of lobsters cooked on the shore as they were drawn from the sea. On Bill’s last day, the lobster feast barely come to an end, the final act was to waft him aloft in a glider to observe the glorious panorama of ocean, islands, reefs, and city from on high. I believe he went back to Texas in a catatonic state from which he nonetheless recovered to return—lured by an atmosphere that simply could not be duplicated anywhere else. Nor was he the only one. During our stay, sometimes we 120

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followed in his wake—especially on the speed-boat excursions in pursuit of lobster. Other times we wandered on our own in a city whose lacework of canals and bridges and the tall, narrow houses along them reflect—as do the red hair and green eyes of many a mulatto—the brief presence of the Dutch. In one of those houses, shuttered against the tropical heat of midafternoon, in a room full of books that spilled from shelves onto tables and chairs, sat Gilberto Freyre, author of the classic Casa Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves). To read this Brazilian sociologist’s books is to become immersed in a history, at once scholarly and deeply human, of Brazil’s background in empire and slavery. In a colonial era encompassing three hundred years, land was granted in exchange for loyalty, slaves were a man’s greatest capital, and a bureaucratic position was the principal means of promotion. Not only did he record all these things, but he wrote of them in such a way that one could see the plump donas de casa within their great shuttered houses all day long supervising the spinning and weaving and sewing and the making of sweets and cheeses to be served first to the master, then to the boys—those same boys who suffered in seminaries, studying to become pampered young men at court. Not to mention the cloistered little girls surrounded by imported dolls and dresses as they grew up to be married to more land. There, too, are the slaves cultivating the sores on their feet to avoid being worked to death. And parallel families which would produce a mulatto middle class of teachers, accountants, and merchants as men were freed to earn from the work which, in the towns, they had always performed as slaves. In his eighties, Gilberto Freyre sat behind his desk dressed in a white linen suit made dapper by a narrow pinstripe of blue, his gaze bright and penetrating in a face lined by a lifetime of study O f C a t t l e Sh o w s , Wr i t e r s , a n d S c u l p t o r s

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and thought. I will admit that, in his presence, I was awestruck and could barely think of anything to say. Yet it was worthwhile to sit opposite and listen to him pontificate upon what was perhaps his greatest obsession: a belief that the deep blending of all races in Brazil would of its own impetus gradually do away with racism and had indeed already done more than any other factor to bind together a Brazilian nation unique in its manner of thinking and being. I have often since wished I could have met him today for, less timid than I used to be, I’m sure we’d have struck up a much better conversation. But that “audience” drew me back to Gilberto Freyre’s writings, which shed their light from a nordestino angle in itself so unique, its aura so powerful as to truly envelope all Brazil in its spell. We would be reminded of this hours later when another nordestino, Filipe Brennán, rose from the dinner table and said to us in hushed tones, “Come. I really want to show you something.” A fellow Santa Gertrudis breeder, Filipe was the grandson of an Irish adventurer who, long after the Empire had given up distributing land, had created from nothing a sugarcane empire in the late s. The descendants were many and of what the British would call “independent wealth.” In Recife, the patriarch himself had built a great house with a patio in the middle so immense that, as the story goes, he and his estranged wife had lived for years on either side without ever having to meet. As though that wonderful house with its inner passarelas and its patio—a botanical garden in itself—were not enough to feast our eyes upon, beckoning us mysteriously into his car, Filipe once more lured us away. On the outskirts of the city we approached what in a seemingly endless wall looked like a portcullis which, as though our 122

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driver had pronounced the words “open sesame,” rose to reveal an eerily amazing spectacle. Till then we hadn’t known that we were about to enter what had once been the patio of a tile factory and was now the vast atelier of Filipe’s uncle, the famous sculptor Francisco Brennán. In the open grounds paved with brick, Brennán’s larger-than-life sculptures stood about beneath a brilliant moonlit sky. Walking in their shadows, I felt in the midst of an enormous sculptured scene drawn from the entire country through which we had just traveled. We have often since returned, sometimes with our cattle as an excuse, sometimes without—always lured by those great, windswept coastal lands which stretch for thousands of kilometers from a lush Bahian Recôncavo to the tidal rivers and dunes of Maranhão, where the drylands end and the Amazon begins. Salvador, Fortaleza, São Luíz, and even more, the little places between—each with its strong, distinctive personality revealed in art and poetry, earthen crockery and delicate lace; and not the least, simply in the ways of its people. Which reminds me of a wonderful story that nordestinos rightly love to tell. It is about an American tourist who, by hard work and determination, had become rich in the fishing industry. Walking on the beach in Recife he came upon a young man sitting on a jangada, one of those amazing rafts with sails with which Pernambucan fishermen daily defy the sea. “Oh, I’ve caught all I need for this week,” the fisherman answered. “But listen,” the American said in farsighted, enlightening tones, “if you’d put all your youth and energy into your enterprise now, in a few years you’d have a fleet and be rich. Then you could just sit back and gaze out to sea.” O f C a t t l e Sh o w s , Wr i t e r s , a n d S c u l p t o r s

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To which the young fisherman replied with a shrug and a smile of contentment, “But that’s what I’m doing right now.”

] On that particular occasion in , under Aristedes’ tutelage, our cattle did pretty well in the show and thus in the sale, from which they were shipped to graze in the lush pastures of Pernambuco, while cattle from the northeast rumbled cautiously southward with Aristedes and Waldemar, achieving an exchange of bloodlines which we all hoped would improve the Brazilian Santa Gertrudis herd. Carson and I flew home, and so we were once again sitting on the veranda “resting our ideas” when Waldemar arrived with his precious cargo around dusk two days later. Coming to join us as we watched a yellow sunset with its promise of rain, he asked eagerly, “So how did you find it?” Still trying to take stock of the variety of wonders we had seen, neither of us could say exactly where to begin. “The praticos on the gaiola,” I said. “Such stories,” said Carson. “Xique-Xique, Juazeiro, Recife—each so unique!” “That’s the way it is,” he smiled with uncontainable pride. “Nothing changes. And yet, I guarantee you, no matter how often you go, you’ll always find something different. I couldn’t live there anymore. But every so often I have to go back.” Shrugging, he added, “Don’t ask my why. It’s part of me.” And often since I have found myself thinking, “Yes, Waldemar, I’m sure it is.” Just as the character of the northeast, in all its stark beauty, cruelty, generosity, and creativity, is a part of everything here—so vital that without its presence, Brazil would not be Brazil. 124

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Nor would Brazil be Brazil without this place where we live, the state of São Paulo—vigorous and energetic, with its absorption of immigrants, new blood, new ideas, mingling and flowing in all directions. The size of Italy, with benevolent climate and excellent soils, in such an atmosphere, how could anyone of a good mind and persistence not prosper? Isn’t that what Carlito Aranha said to us? Especially here in the valley of the Tietê? Yet I only have to think of people like Fina to know that this is not exactly so. Fina and her husband, Jepe, own a sítio just across the road on a hilltop above a cluster of sítios belonging to a number of relatives. Their place is large in comparison with the others; indeed, in France a lot of people make a living from smaller farms than theirs. But the way they have worked their land has caused it to grow poorer and render them less with every year. Laziness has nothing to do with it: no one could work harder than Fina, even today. And years ago, three times a week after she’d drawn water 125

from a spring two kilometers from her house, made the family’s lunch, fed the pigs and chickens, and milked the cows, she would come striding across the road to attack our mountain of laundry with the valor of an Amazon. At the same time, she had an Italian knack for being a good bargainer, smiling as she narrowed her eyes and stood her ground so that she could earn money from washing, bleaching, and ironing school uniforms while I could have more time to write. It was a pact between us which made certain that her raises in wages accompanied those of the men. Nor did Fina ever take anything for granted. From her place she brought us strings of onions and garlic and delicious sweets made from her guavas boiled in a huge copper kettle over a wood fire in her yard. She said it was because, in our crowded kombi, we took her children to school. And I always accepted her gifts with pleasure, glad that she had such gratitude and pride. Each year when the jabuticabas turned into fat clusters of shiny black fruit along the limbs, Fina, knowing how I loved to make jelly, invited me over to pick. And so, laden with baskets, I would go, presenting her jars of jelly in return. With the dampness from a spring not far away, her trees were always loaded, and with Fina’s daughter Valeria scrambling along old, smooth limbs where the fruit clung in great black clusters, I soon had my baskets full and we’d make our way back to the house. Then we would sit around the kitchen table for a rare visit over coffee black and sweet enough to make one shudder. I remember best one such occasion when Carson’s mother, Jenny, was with us. As a widow who had raised her children by working in sweatshops and looking after newborn babies, Jenny was something of an adventurer who had fallen in love with Brazil at Fazenda Malabar and had come to stay with us for several 126

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months a year wherever we were from then on. With her Romanian good looks and skin that got browned by the sun even through her shoelace holes, Jenny was always mistaken for a Brazilian until she opened her mouth. But though she never learned to speak Portuguese, and perhaps because she’d led a hard life herself, she and Fina became fast friends—exchanging recipes with dangerous wavings of spoons over hot pans and giving each other little doilies crocheted by a window in the last light of day. So when the jabuticabas ripened one year, it was inevitable that Jenny should be invited to come along to Fina’s farm. The visit was always a pleasure to me, but this time, too, I found myself oddly reminded of the erosive poorness of Fina’s world. The rooms without ceilings under a bare tiled roof, small and dark and lit by kerosene. The bare, simple furniture to which she and Jepe had added nothing since they’d married; the handdrawn water, the yard full of chickens and rooting pigs all sheltered in ramshackle structures that looked as though at any moment they might slide down the hill with what was left of the eroding farm. It was only after we departed with embraces and effusive thanks for the jabuticabas and coffee that I would realize that my renewed vision was due to my having looked at Fina’s home through Jenny’s eyes. Once we were in the kombi driving home with our load of fruit, sitting beside me, Jenny shook her head with a mingling of despair and wonder, “Now I know what it reminded me of,” she said. “Romania when I left it as a child of five, seventy years ago. I can’t believe it!” she added in staunch, American tones of indignation. “Something ought to be done!” “You’re right, Jenny,” I said, with a certain laconic note of irritation, “but I’ll tell you it ain’t that simple.” All the same as we Of Italian Immigrants and “Clubes 4-S”

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returned to our ample, comfortable house on the hill across the road we had plenty on our minds for the evening’s conversation. And then, sitting by the fire in a room full of books and music, Carson and I talked with Jenny about the Italian immigrants who came to Brazil at the turn of the century, in many ways changing things for good and in other ways changing nothing at all. Lured here to fill the gap left in a widening frontier by the end of slavery, the Italians scarcely knew where they were going as— Italy, eager to be rid of them and Brazil, eager to have them—they were crammed aboard ships to go to the New World. What was meant by America? The United States? Brazil? Argentina? For what most of them knew, it was all the same. Yet when they came out of the holds of those ships and finally boarded trains going westward, one can imagine a chilling astonishment at the jungle that came down like a dense, menacing tapestry on either side of the railroad that climbed the Serra do Mar and crossed the Piratininga Highlands. One can imagine, too, their dismay at the grim sight of the hastily done-over slave houses in which they were expected to live. Many of the owners of those fazendas where they were to be employed had no experience in dealing with paid employees. Most of the Italians found themselves in positions that threatened to keep them permanently indebted to the fazenda store. But one great advantage on their side was the fact that bargaining has always been a part of Italian culture, not to mention wiliness and charm. We who deal with their descendants daily know that circumvention is a game to them which makes direct dealing plainly boring. With immense humor and shameless bravado they put words into your mouth that may well be the exact opposite of what your intention had been when you began to bargain. 128

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Given this talent and their position in the labor market, is it any wonder, Carson always says, that many union leaders today are descendants of Italians? In that first incident of managementlabor relations on the fazenda, the meeting between immigrants and fazendeiros must have been a shock on both sides. But the chiefs of those Italian families, despite having nowhere to go, made their needs known with impressive dignity to which most of their employers would eventually have to respond in kind. Often more than in dry history books, the best place to find the truth about the past is in the memories of those who lived it. That’s why I loved reading De Mansué a Tietê (From Mansué to Tietê), in which Leda Coelho de Oliveira Batistuzzo, the descendant of an old paulista family who married one of Tietê’s Italians, made some very intuitive observations about her husband’s forebears. She said that, as strange as were the circumstances they found themselves in, they were better farmers than their Brazilian employers—who were far more used to hunting gold and Indians and giving orders to slaves. In the same way Dona Leda observed with laudable candor, “My father was a fazendeiro and owned extensive plantations. But he didn’t know how to perform manual labor and if he had, he wouldn’t have been seen doing it, much less hauling the fruits of his labor to town to sell. The Italians did all that quite naturally, which is why they did so well for themselves in the era in which they came to Brazil.” They worked hard. Using the farming methods they’d known in Italy and convincing the landowners to deal on shares, they made a lot of money for fazendeiros as well as for themselves. As a result, not only did they help “put on the fazendeiros’ jackets” when coffee prices were high, they were there to pick up the Of Italian Immigrants and “Clubes 4-S”

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pieces when the fazendeiros lost their shirts in the coffee crash of the early thirties. It was then that many of the great plantations were broken up into the Italian family-run sítios that surrounded our fazenda when we came to Tietê. The Italian immigrant farmers prospered at first. And naturally, as the families grew, many of their members moved to town to become butchers, bakers, and millers whose descendants would become in turn doctors, lawyers, and also run the many small industries of our little town. But for those like Jepe and Fina who remained on the land, the story was different, and the major reason is so obvious that it is painful to believe how even now so few people seem to recognize it. It goes back to colonial times when—as everywhere else in the colonial world from Africa to Java to South America—only the elite were afforded an education. Then it goes forward to when, incredibly and absurdly, only in the s a public school system was established in Brazil. But even then rural Brazil was ignored. Those who wished to gain a reasonable education had to move to town; otherwise they were condemned to four years in a oneroom school, if that. This being so, people like Jepe and Fina could barely read and write. Intelligent and hard working as they might be, and for all their old and deep knowledge of the earth, they continued to farm in the same way as had their ancestors a hundred years ago. Not that such farming was entirely wrong. To make our own agriculture better nowadays, we farmers are indeed taking another look at such things as manure heaps and middens and pigs rooting amidst the roots of trees. But with eight more years of schooling it would have been that much easier for Jepe and Fina and others like them to make use of modern technology which 130

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might have been offered them by those who had been to universities. What a fine combination that would have been of the man who had lived all his life on the land, his hands stained by daily contact with the earth, and the other who had never wielded a hoe but understood fertilizer formulas and how to use them. Unfortunately, though, custom and ignorance kept Jepe from even thinking of going in his horse-drawn charette to the local Casa de Lavoura to seek assistance, or for the local agronomist to drive out in his official car to offer it. Instead, in the old imperial manner, once the educated elite acquired bureaucratic positions, they had it made. That done, the more ambitious punched the clock and went out into the world to do their own business, while the less ambitious simply sat drinking endless cafèzinhos, gossiping and waiting for the humble farmer who they knew would not appear. Of course it is always someone who has the courage to go against the grain who effects change. And not long after our talk with Jenny that night by the fire on the fazenda, one such person emerged in Tietê. His name was Humberto Bortoletto, and he took it upon himself to form one of what were known as Clubes Quatro S which, mirroring the traditional American -H, had begun to spring up here and there in Brazil. Bortoletto, as everyone called him, was a young man of boundless energy and enthusiasm whose slight touch of pomposity was happily balanced by a boyish sense of humor and a genuine liking for his fellow humans. Driving hundreds of kilometers over winding backroads, drinking countless cafèzinhos over kitchen tables, he managed to gather some  rawboned, rough-handed farmers and their families for the first meeting in our big open tractor shed here at Pau D’Alho early in the spring of . There were slide shows on soil Of Italian Immigrants and “Clubes 4-S”

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conservation, and Bortoletto gave a rousing speech about working together to improve life for everyone. Sensing political leverage, a number of dignitaries appeared to speak passionately about nothing and were never heard from again. Other people mechanics, agronomists, electricians, Dr. João Rodrigues offered their help, and, taking them up before their ardor cooled, we planned how we would begin. For the men there would be short courses in soil conservation, the use of improved seed and breeding stock, and the maintenance of machinery, accompanied by competitions in the production of corn, beans, and rice. For the women we decided to start out by trying to help them to make better use of what they had at hand to feed and clothe their families and perhaps make some money on the side—skills that many had lost through decades of virtual isolation. Bortoletto’s wife, Vitoria, a primary-school teacher, calm and levelheaded with kind brown eyes, gave a complete course in pattern cutting and sewing. Selisa Ulhoa Cintra, the art teacher at the school, taught embroidery, crochet, and “arts.” I dealt mostly with what ended up on the kitchen stove. Together the three of us went careening along dirt roads in a kombi loaded with everything from a sewing machine to boxes full of empty jars for the day’s canning lesson. Our destination was always some church on a hilltop where periodically a priest came to perform those rituals that kept everyone Catholic and supposedly absolved of sin. There, in the big open shed where church festas were held, was the perfect place to gather the girls from the surrounding fazendas and sítios. I have yet to meet anyone with greater energy, conviction, and determination than Selisa. I have seen her take a vast, decaying 132

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colonial edifice with the roof falling in and virtually singlehandedly transform it into a clean, brightly painted day care center. By looking people in the eye and talking, she could get them to contribute old baby carriages, sheeting, cribs, a freezer, and gallons of paint to be applied by a volunteer painter to the old house’s insatiable walls. With the farm girls, she worked in the same way, lifting them out of the narrow routine of their lives to think and invent. Some of her inventions were pretty strange, for she could never leave anything, be it in nature or the waste basket, alone. In her frenzy to “make use,” she had the girls making purses out of old cigarette packages and floral arrangements out of fallen branches and urubu feathers sprayed with gold. The effect of these creations was a matter of taste. But talking and joking in her expansive way, she awakened girls, set them thinking and returning—if for nothing more than to see what on earth she would turn up with next. For my part, I’d long known that the task of growing vegetables in a subtropical climate was hard. Still, I don’t think I ever realized how hard until I tried to teach it. It all began with compost heaps and well-rotted manure, and eventually turned into ratatouilles, risottos, pickles, and preserves. But in between there was the business of digging the cementlike soil of some eroded hillside into raised beds and convincing the digger that these beds should be placed against the waters rather than up and down the hill. Then there was the sowing and watering with water drawn from that distant well; the transplanting and fertilizing and spraying against insects and disease. And to top it all there had to be that tall bamboo fence against the chickens and pigs which on every sítio roamed the world at random. To further complicate things, there was my compulsive desire Of Italian Immigrants and “Clubes 4-S”

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to explain. “Look,” I’d begin, “if you mix compost with the soil it becomes like a sponge. Then when you water, the minerals in the spongy soil can be taken up by these root hairs, see them? Now minerals—copper, zinc, iron—all that stuff is what we’re made of. But it’s the plants that have to turn the minerals into food . . .” “You’re getting carried away,” Carson would say, looking at my notes, “Those girls probably think if you eat vegetables you’ll turn to stone.” But actually the danger was small because usually somewhere along the way I sensed I’d left my protégés behind, dreaming of their boyfriends. Still, I went on talking as we dug, planted, and cooked—about the bad bacteria that spoiled food and the good bacteria that made cheese. How you created a vacuum in a jar by slamming on the lid and screwing it tight before the hot air that had been driven out cooled and got back in. Some got headaches and never came back. Others struggled to comprehend these things that had been discovered over centuries and pounded into other people’s heads in school until they seemed natural to them. One of these was Veronica Montoanelli, a girl with a classic Piedmontese profile and just enough Indian in her to make her dark beauty exotic. One day she approached me after a discussion of the earth’s shape to inquire what it was the earth’s dome was made of that we could look through it to see the stars. Poor Veronica, what an opening she gave me to start explaining about gravity. But she didn’t mind. Unlike many who accepted everything Selisa and Vitoria and I said as if we were priests enjoining them to believe, she questioned. And that was why she and a number of girls like her were soon able to teach others so that, after a while, the gathering in the shed of the Bairro 134

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de Rosario was duplicated by gatherings in the bairros of Garcia and Sete Fogões and so on until there were fifteen clubs, all gardening, cooking, sewing, and talking. There was always some sort of comic relief, as on the day when in the midst of a bread-making demonstration, having forgotten my rolling pin, I took an empty bottle from a shelf nearby. As I lowered it to spread out the dough, there were sudden shrieks and an insane scramble for the tops of chairs as a large family of cockroaches streamed from the bottle’s mouth over the dough and down the table legs to lose themselves amid the assemblage. Another time, trying to describe what perfect jelly should look like, I said, “When you stand it on a plate and shake it, and it doesn’t collapse, then it’s perfect.” The sudden silence, cheeks blown out with suppressed laughter was only made clear to me later when Vitoria informed me that the word I’d used for shake was generally used to describe an orgasm. But despite these collisions with a treacherous language, on those busy afternoons I’m sure the easy, friendly talk that arises naturally when you are sitting peeling oranges or turning hems was as valuable as the lessons. Talk of old Italian customs such as keeping the baby in a dark, airless room for months and binding its legs to make them straight. “How strange,” Selisa would say, “I had six babies and I left them all out of doors kicking in the sunshine. And the only bowlegged one in my family is me.” All eyes flew to Selisa’s short, crooked legs. “Is that the truth, Dona Selisa?” “Listen,” Vitoria would say in her calm, wise voice, never looking up from the pattern she was cutting. “You’ve watched the pigs and cows haven’t you? So what’s this story about getting Of Italian Immigrants and “Clubes 4-S”

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babies from a privy seat? How many children do you want? And you?” “Me?” would come a response, “I’m sick of looking after little brothers. I’m going to be a nun.” “What a price,” I’d say blandly. “Better to learn how not to have babies, isn’t it?” “But that’s a sin, Dona Eh?”—as most were prone to pronounce my difficult name. “If it is, most people I know are sinners.” Some said it was wrong to speak so. It created confusion and resulted in promiscuity. But I think all three of us had lived long enough to have learned that promiscuity is not the result of knowledge. And we were always glad of the chance that tatting and talking gave us to confront superstition with some common knowledge that others made use of every day. In turn those girls and their mothers—who in their horsedrawn charettes only went to town once a month to buy their staples—gave us tantalizing insights into a world which in its semi-isolation had its own vitality and equilibrium. To talk about illness to some ancient crone who had lived through a lot of them was to be put through an entire course in medicinal herbs: teas of eucalyptus leaves, lemon grass, and anise for the nerves; others of guava buds and a weed called quebra pedras for the stomach and kidneys; broth made of cow’s horns to rid the body of worms; erva de Santa Maria against colic and fleas and whatever else was left over. Faith in God was strong and pure in those places where few women had seen a maternity ward and where there was little else but God to resort to in anguish and pain. But it was a God close to nature, who helped them endure the blows nature could deal

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even as it made it possible for them to go out with the first rains, full of hope, to plant again. Most of those who took part in the clubs came from sítios like Fina’s that, no matter how small, were their own. As their curved shoulders and muscular arms revealed, they did a lot of field work as well as that of the house. It wasn’t easy in the midst of their infinitely busy days to find time to make skirts and embroidery and pickles. Or even convince their patriarchal fathers that it was worth an hour or two a day to look after the garden. But they did it and proudly brought their fruits to the fair in Tietê. No such fair had existed until Bortoletto came along to shake up the Casa de Lavoura. But with his undying energy, he made it into a real country fair where people could inspect the results of the grain- and stock-raising contests and the girls could display their handiwork and preserves and later sell them. With the money, one year they even managed to take a trip all the way to Salvador da Bahia, a beautiful old city well known to tourists on Brazil’s northeastern coast. I still marvel that their fathers permitted them to go. But I know they would not have, had the girls not been chaperoned by a retired schoolteacher named Dona Bení. It was Dona Bení who, at the age of eighty, with her frizzled, dyed blonde hair and her booming voice, led the chanting of the terços in every funeral procession in town. Everyone knew her and no one doubted that her saintly aura could shelter anyone in any situation. In Salvador da Bahia, she led the girls through each of the renowned  churches full of the statuary and gilt of Christendom, and on to the Museum of Sacred Art. What impressions they gained of all this is hard to say. I only know they came home laden with plaster saints, one of which they presented to

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me. I received it with tears that come so easily on such occasions and placed it in a honored corner among the plaster elephants and other exotic creatures my children used to present to me on my birthday. Glimpses of other worlds, other planets. Because of those glimpses one day some of those girls would leave the sítio. Veronica became a professional nurse. Fina’s daughter, Valeria, went on to college and is now a social worker who, from her own experience, can be of most help to those who need it. It’s amazing to think that, like those who said we talked too much to the girls about “things they shouldn’t know,” some would also say that their leaving the sítios and fazendas defeated the purpose of -S, which was to fix people on the land. I’ve often thought the same mentality, under a true dictatorship, would deny people’s right to choose their own careers. To such a way of thinking, one’s answer must surely be, “Isn’t that what learning’s all about, to give one a choice?” The other day Selisa and I, planting a vegetable garden for her day care center, were looking back with nostalgia to those days when we were always getting stuck in the mud and having to get a whole family and a couple of mules to pull us out before we could see how their vegetables were doing. What a fine thing it would have been, we agreed, if we could have kept it up, made a tradition of -S in Tietê. But what happened was the story of what happens all too often. The state government changed and people and policies changed with it. Suddenly there were no more funds, even for gasoline to get to the sítios. Bortoletto was transferred to work elsewhere, his fine talent for teaching wasted, and at the Casa de Lavoura people went relievedly back to drinking cafèzinhos. Still, nothing people do with pleasure and zeal ever fails to leave its mark. And if, for 138

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instance, there are buses today to take the rural children to the big schools in Tietê I think a lot has to do with the fact that, along with learning gardening and canning and sewing, those girls will become women more determined than ever to open the way for their children.

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While all this went on, of course, our own children were growing up with such rapidity in the busy life on the fazenda that when I think of them, their doings sometimes become confused in my mind with those of our grandchildren. I like to think this is not due to senility but to a cycle of activities that all have taken part in over the years at different times yet always in the same place. I was reminded of this not so very long ago when our grandson Andreas and I were sitting with the others beside the pond at the end of the ravine, molding clay into Christmas figures. Andreas was then a child of seven, perhaps, with searching eyes that every so often got a distant look which let you know he would like to be off on a slow walk, inspecting little things along the way: tadpoles in the water of a contour ditch, a ladybird milking aphids on the leaf of an orange tree. Once, wading in a pool deep in the ravine, he came upon a single grayish-pink mudsucking fish that resembled something forgotten from prehistory. 140

Catching it in his hands, he inspected it minutely, baptized it Pacheco, and let it go to disappear into its lair beneath the bank. Afterward, periodically he would visit Pacheco to see if there were others like him, but always the ugly pink fish remained single—his existence unresolved. On that day, leaving Pacheco behind, a disconcerting mystery in the depths of the ravine, Andreas’s curiosity traveled on down to where we sat at its end, to ask, “How did the pond get here in the first place, Ellen?” “Why, we hired a tractor with a huge shovel and hollowed out the land and, with the earth, made a wall that joined the two hillsides at the ravine’s end, just as you see it now.” And reminiscing myself, I told him of how miraculous it had seemed to his mother, Robin, then a child his age, to feel the earth grow spongy beneath her feet where the underground waters freed by our scooping out the dam had seeped to the surface. And how exciting it had been to see the gradual rising of the waters day by day as the flow of other springs all along the ravine converged behind the dam. Then we grassed the pond’s banks and planted giant yellowand-green-striped bamboo to secure the earth on either side of the flue and waited weeks for the water to rise. Once it had risen, the pond gradually became a world in itself. Water birds came to stalk in the shallows on its edge, and ducks stopped on their flights northward to the Pantanal. Egrets nested in the acacia tree, and tiny black chopim and orange-crested carijos sheltered in the tall cattails at the pond’s shallow end. Our children learned to swim there, stepping farther and farther down the muddy bank until their feet no longer touched the ground. Later, as they gained courage, they went on to climb the overhanging limb of an old acacia tree to seize a rope and swing C o m i n g o f A g e i n t h e Va l l e y o f t h e T i e t ê

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out over the water. Each had a dog whom he considered the most wonderful, but the boxer, Bessie—a universal mother and champion swimmer—was the one who chaperoned the children, swimming round and round, never leaving the pond until the last child had fallen, exhausted, on the grassy bank to rest. Then in the sunlight on the water’s edge we would sit and work soft brown clay. From this emerged imprints of the children’s hands to line our mantelpiece. And as the children’s imaginations improved, snakes took shape, and turtles, lambs, donkeys, kings, angels, and shepherds until a whole nativity for Christmas gradually grew out of that clay on the water’s edge. The same figures, made by their parents, which, with countless layers of gouache, our grandchildren repair each year. Writing of these things, years later, I am more than ever convinced of the good fortune of children who chance to be raised in the country. Where as soon as they are truly able to steer themselves, breakfast over, they’re gone—walking, riding, dogs in tow, from one adventure to another along dusty, scarcely traveled roads, through grass and leafy shadows till hunger calls them home. Or when at the age of nine or so they are seized by a sudden urge to “help.” In the country there are so many teachers and tools to show them how they can. Animals to teach them about patience, discipline, and kindness; old hands to show them there is a certain way to do everything. A way to milk cows and pull calves and work cattle in the chute. A way to dig manure into the beds of the vegetable garden, plant deep, and water gently until the earth becomes saturated. A way to load a wagon with silage and toss it into the troughs without getting oneself tangled in the forks. Not that the lessons are easy. On the contrary, our own chil.

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dren claimed their father was a tyrant, their mother a shrew. Nor do I mean that living on a farm prevents one from getting into trouble. With daring and a longing to show one’s fellows, there’s always a way for that, no matter where you live. What I mean is that growing up in the country you gradually become aware of yourself as a part of nature. And without ever having to enter a church, the link between the spiritual and the material also becomes a part of your awareness. It is there all around you in a world as orderly as a beehive and uncontainable as a thunderstorm. In which you can feel yourself to be at once an individual and also insignificant, as part of a universe that has no beginning and no end.

] Maybe sometimes, envying their city friends, our offspring didn’t think so then. But since I have often heard them tell their own children of the fun they had and the things they learned, growing up in the country and going to school in Tietê. The school, pompously called O Instituto Plinio Rodrigues de Morães, was a large building as solid and unimaginative as the instruction given therein from the first to the thirteenth year. There being no such thing as a school bus in those days, each morning our old kombi lumbered toward town, picking up along the way the children of the Gonellos, the Alves, the Pissonatos, and the Longos—like our own children, all dressed in the pleated navy skirts and white blouses or baggy khaki suits and ties required by the rules. Then as now, I fear, the learning was depressingly pedantic. Partly it had to do with the diehard Portuguese bureaucratic attitude bent on assassinating imagination. Partly it had to do with a perpetual lack of money which could well have been spent to pay C o m i n g o f A g e i n t h e Va l l e y o f t h e T i e t ê

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teachers a decent salary and to keep up with a constantly changing world. Most lessons were written on the blackboard to be taken down in notebooks. Once copied, there was generally no room for conjecture. Both questions and answers were inscribed with irrefutable finality to be memorized and believed. For years we witnessed the tedium of our children’s having to memorize the name of every station along the Sorocabana Railway, every bone and organ in the human body, without ever being taught the significance of either. The copy and memorize system even pervaded the “art” lessons, where the choice of reproductions was as painfully narrow as the mind of the professor. The true essence of this torture came home to me one night when I found Steve at : A.M. bent over the dining room table painstakingly painting ribbons and roses on a six-tiered plywood cake cut out to celebrate Tietê’s th birthday. The next morning, as we headed for school, we witnessed the replica of this hideosity fifty times over as, like parasol ants, bleary-eyed from a sleepless night, the entire sixth grade paraded along the sidewalk, each carrying his six-tiered cake. Fortunately, no matter where, even the most unimaginative school system can’t drag down a born teacher, and Tietê had its share of those as well. Professor Walter was an energetic man with flashing blue eyes and a passion for mathematics who made amazing games of numerical combinations, thus teaching painlessly the wonderful lesson in logic that mathematics should be. In the midst of all that traditional rote, who knows how many minds he so saved from falling into slots? At once timid and brave, Dona Rima had, despite acute deafness, become fluent in various languages and taken on the thankless occupation of teaching high-school English. Her difficulty in 144

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hearing made her the object of endless adolescent cruelty, yet her bravery in assuming such a task and her love of languages had a way of making her near-inaudible voice heard when she had something to say. To put life into a subject which seemed to many a waste of time, she produced plays and poetry recitals. And for those who showed interest and promise, she not only opened her own library full of good books in numerous languages but spent hours teaching beyond the time she had already spent in a school so crowded that it had to run three sessions a day. Such gifted teachers as these two gave life to what would otherwise have been a steady diet of unimaginative, near-unbearable pedantry. And yet for all its faults, how valuable the school in Tietê was for us. I could teach my children through a correspondence course quite a few things they wouldn’t learn there. We could surround them with books and music so that these would become a natural necessity in their lives. But we could never provide the atmosphere of the classroom, with schedules, exams, and the authority of teachers that is always different from what exists at home. For them it was the first taste of civil law and order without which, unfortunately, none of us can make do, or obviously we would. But better still was the chance that going to school in Tietê offered our children to live in the world which surrounded them. Without it Christina would never have become the surrogate daughter of two “old maid” schoolteachers, Donas Lecticia and Helena, who loved her as though she were their own. Who took her home to treat her to the marvels of a Lebanese kitchen even as they rescued her from hours of deadly rote by subtle hints—“No, no. Study this, Christina, . . . tut, tut, don’t waste time on that!”— concerning the subjects of the next day’s exams. C o m i n g o f A g e i n t h e Va l l e y o f t h e T i e t ê

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Her greatest friend, Marcia, nicknamed Piquira, was one of nine children of Dona Ana, the town’s most sought-after dressmaker, a true artist who never seemed deterred by what she called “difficult bodies.” Dona Ana was a beautiful woman with the smooth oval face one sees in Modigliani’s painting and the laughing eyes and good disposition of something more than a saint. Her sewing room was a puzzle of patterns and cuts of cloth that only she could make sense of as she snipped, pinned, and patted them into shape over shapeless forms while in her gentle, imperturbable voice she gossiped, laughed, consoled, and commiserated. I’m sure Dona Ana’s conversation was as healing to the frustrated and bored as the probings of any psychiatrist. I, myself a moody person, never failed to go home feeling lighter. Christina often spent the night at Piquira’s—crunched in amid brothers and sisters, avidly taking part in the gossip, cooking, and sewing that never ceased until they all dropped. Both the crowded, noisy atmosphere at Piquira’s and the decorous order at the house of the spinsters provided her with insights that would influence her way of looking at things forever. Robin’s greatest friend was Neti, who lived in an old, sprawling, colonial house on the Patio, at the end of which a huge room sheltered her father’s bar and armazém. The armazém was one of those institutions typical still in towns of the interior where laborers took their nip of cachaça before heading to work on the surrounding sugarcane and coffee plantations. On shelves behind the bar, hanging from hooks in the ceiling and spilling out into the streets, were all kinds of merchandise, from sacks of beans and rice to salt pork, hardware, and chamber pots. From a glass cabinet beneath the counter, the children bought peanut brittle and sweets of coconut to be accounted for 146

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in a notebook and paid for monthly along with vinegar, flour, and oil. It was from there as well that on my birthday they spent their savings to bring me all manner of china and plaster figurines. I still have a purple penguin given me by Robin and a red elephant with golden toenails that was a careful choice of Steve’s. In the labyrinth of rooms extending from the bar and armazém lived Neti’s family, whose six daughters existed in purdah-like custody, none permitted to leave home without one sister in tow to, as the expression went, “hold the candle.” As such it was a household full of intrigues and confidences generally centered upon how to evade a “candle holder” en route to mass, the movies, English lessons, the dentist—whatever legitimate excuse might be devised. They could, too, have been on their way to the Festas Juninas held in honor of São Pedro, who orders the weather, and Sao João, who blesses marriages. At that time, in June, in the square before the church, shooting galleries were set up, as were booths selling embroidered tablecloths and dishtowels, crocheted bedspreads, antimacassars, and a year’s production of sweets prepared by the donas de casa and their cooks to be sold in a single week of celebration. If you liked, you could ride a Ferris wheel; or for a fee, walk through a curtained bus where you could observe such unforgettable spectacles as a two-headed chicken embryo floating in an aquarium of formaldehyde or a boa constrictor in a glassed prison devouring a rat. All for the benefit of the old folks home, the orphanage, and the Santa Casa Nossa Senhora da Misericordia. In the month of June, too, bonfires were built on terreiros where sambas and arrasta-pés were danced to the music of accordions and drums, and quentões of hot cachaça laced with ginger C o m i n g o f A g e i n t h e Va l l e y o f t h e T i e t ê

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were consumed to strengthen the faith of dancers to the point at which they could perform the miracle of walking over hot coals with no visible or audible pain. Then, deep in the night, candlelit paper lanterns were loosed to drift upward and dim the stars in a chill winter sky. Our sons and daughters still smile to think they lived in a world where serenades were sung beneath girls’ windows on moonlit nights. And even when they went far away to college, they schemed ways to get back here for Carnaval, the approach of which we could sense weeks ahead of time as we sat on the veranda in the evening and heard the sounds from town. Wafting on the breezes came African drumbeats as the competing escolas de samba, O Bafo da Onça (The Jaguar’s Breath) and Urru do Leão (The Lion’s Roar), practiced in the streets leading down to the river. No candle holders were needed then, for Carnaval was a family affair in which all took part. In the process it was as if, aroused by the infectious African beat, a latent joy trapped within the soul went on a spree, infecting everyone along the way as it ran through all the extremities, coming out in rebolos of all the rounded parts—grinding every joint into intricate trepidations until there was nothing that wasn’t in motion as the escolas de samba strutted and shuffled on down the street to the elaborate themes they invented for the year. In Tietê at that time Seu Bastião the house painter was the puxa canção, who led the singing, striding backward down the street as he chanted through his oldfashioned megaphone. Nardo the carpenter was the apitador, who blew his whistle to keep the dancers in step even as he performed his own antics, leaping and spinning to land on his feet to lean backward so far as to dance horizontally all the way past the judg148

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ing stand. It was invariably from the Pereira family, who in their purity appeared to descend from African kings, that a stately young woman was chosen as standard bearer for the Bafo da Onça. Its fire-breathing jaguar in gold against a field of blue, the banner was held aloft, swooping gracefully through the air, while its bearer—her old-fashioned hoop skirt whirling this way and that—joined her partner in his colonial garb, from silver wig to buckled shoes, in a delicate pas de deux. As the parade dissolved, people melted into their respective clubs—oh yes, even in Brazil, the blacks down the street to theirs. Yet in the clubs the excitement of the evening grew and grew toward the climactic moment when the Bafo da Onça flowed into the ballroom of the Clube Esportiva. Then the temperature, already steaming, became equatorial; the room shook, floors creaked, and people became liquefied, flowing together as the joy reached its height of purity. When the Bafo streamed out again, the more enthusiastic of us streamed with them to dance in the streets for hours until, like the fantasy that Carnaval is, the Breath of the Jaguar melted into the darkness whence it had come. All through Carnaval, the “Big House” at Pau D’Alho became a huge flophouse where the revelers stretched their bodies, only awakening for meals. Actually, in those days, every weekend it was a minor flophouse full of friends who came to ride, swim, play soccer on the lawn, help with the chores, explore the ravine, and camp in the tall shadows of the eucalyptus grove at the top of the hill. They might spread out to the four corners of the fazenda, but just as when they were small, some automatic inner alarm always signaled them back for meals. Roast pork with mango chutney and applesauce, beans, rice, and garden vegetables on Saturdays; churrasco on Sunday on a terrace where a circle of eliotis pines C o m i n g o f A g e i n t h e Va l l e y o f t h e T i e t ê

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around a floor of stone continue to create their own cathedral as they keep on growing toward the sky. Clearly everyone was hungry, but maybe then as now, as important as the feast was the gathering it inspired and the lingering that ensued. In a sense all this could be written in the present tense because wonderfully, though those friends have grown and scattered to distant places, different lives, every so often they converge here to take up where they left off the last time. The feast is as ever the excuse for the convergence, but more than that I think it has to do with whatever made those same relatively serious people at one time crawl through weeds like commandos at night to saw down a B. F. Goodrich sign that was disturbing our view. Or plant pot in our sacred ravine, dry it on the roof of our guest house, and smoke it while sitting atop our water tower and looking out over the world. Now, as they tell us the stories of what they got into then, even in placid Tietê, we sometimes wonder how they survived. Just as our parents must have wondered how we survived the exuberance, daring, and rebellion of youth. But they did, probably most of all thanks to a zest for living that makes these friends from the past as interesting to each other and to us now as they were when the world for them was no bigger than the valley of the Tietê.

] For our offspring, that world widened when they were packed off to college in the United States. What a shock to find themselves in winter in more ways than one. From being Pachecos in a small ravine, so to speak, they found themselves suddenly to be small fish in a very big pond. A rather insular pond, which, if its inhabitants paid them attention at all, it was often to shrug them off as “foreigners,” too much trouble to be bothered with. 150

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“They’ll get used to it there and they won’t come back,” some would warn forebodingly. “That’s up to them,” we’d say, covering our anxiety with a shrug. “After all, we got used to it here.” Whatever happened, it seemed to us, and still does, that nothing could be better for a young person about to begin a life of independence than to go and live somewhere else for a while, to have a chance to look at things from a different perspective. Robin once said the experience had made them schizoid. But I argued, “Better schizoid than narrow and xenophobic.” Most important, she did come back, as they all did, to see Brazil in a different way, to make use of what they learned in places that were not Fazenda Pau D’Alho or Tietê. My guess is that in part the same sense of challenge that lured us lured them. There’s so much to be done here. The other part is so obvious that no one has ever bothered to mention it: they simply came back to the country they’d known as their home.

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19 O f

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One of the last labors our offspring performed during what they refer to as “our years of slave labor” was to help plant the grove of pecan trees. They were in their teens and therefore did so with even greater dramatics, throwing down their hoes and stamping off to their rooms as no slave could ever have done. But they helped all the same, and some have since planted trees on land of their own, grown from seed sprouted in the pecan grove which from my window I see now, winter-bare against a cloudless sky. The grove came into being as a result of several nights of devastating frosts which occurred in the mid-seventies. We still pride ourselves that we can plant at Pau D’Alho almost anything that is planted anywhere in the world. But every now and then a humbling frost comes along to remind us of how vulnerable we can be to a few nights of below-freezing weather. The frosts came after days of cold, rainy winds blowing up from Patagonia. As the dread weather made its way implacably northward, destroying 153

plantation after plantation in the big coffee state of Paraná, we did our best to be prepared. For years, in a kind of doubting anticipation, we had piled up old tires which now, filled with dry grass, the men and boys spread strategically at the ends of the rows of coffee to create smoke screens the way farmers once did in Florida and California before things got sophisticated there. I think we knew in our hearts it wouldn’t work. It’s too hilly here, and besides, unlike in California, our neighbors had no intention of burning tires, thus contributing to a colossal smoke screen up and down the valley. But we felt we had to try. So on the first night, when the temperature dropped to five below zero centigrade, dutifully Carson, Amadeu, and the boys went out with flashlights and boxes of matches. To no avail. Stinking, halfmelted tires amid hectares of withering coffee trees was the result of those frozen hours of suffering during which the most useful accomplishment was that of the women who stayed home and kept the beds warm. The only thing fortunate about the first night’s failure was that it made it unnecessary to try again. No matter what we might have done, it would soon become obvious that nothing could have saved our plantation from a series of frosts that destroyed  percent of the coffee in Brazil. That was the year when Juca de Botucatu’s warning proved itself in full. In a few nights of frost, thousands who had “put on jackets” growing coffee had suddenly “lost their shirts,” ourselves included. Not long afterward we at Pau D’Alho decided to cut our losses, retrench, and substitute our coffee groves with grain crops and pecan trees for which frost is a blessing, even though it would take six years for our newly planted groves to produce. It was a large upheaval on a small farm which reflected a disaster that would change the entire agricultural map of Brazil. For neither 154

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smoke nor prayer could have prevented the disaster brought on by weather that year. By one of those strange moments of chance, the great frosts coincided with the beginning of the Trans-Amazon Highway, which was to cut across the Amazon basin from Belém at the great river’s mouth to the border of Peru. As roads began to penetrate that virtually roadless wilderness which comprises half of Brazil, many a frost-stricken coffee farmer from southern and central Brazil would decide to head northward. Though we were not among them, curiosity lured Carson and me to look in upon that remarkable scene. And because it seemed to us a composite of so much that was happening then, the place we chose to see was Alta Floresta, a settlement being carved out of the jungle in northern Mato Grosso on the Amazon basin’s edge. The settlement had been planned with an eye toward the tremendous difficulty of conserving soils in the punishing climate of a tropical rain forest, once the protective forest was removed. The idea was to establish small farmers who would grow such permanent crops as coffee, cacau, guaraná, and papaya, whose cultivation required little or no open tillage by machinery, thus avoiding the baring of that fragile earth, born of the forest, to torrential rains and burning sun. Ariosto Da Riva, Alta Floresta’s developer, had already had years of experience in settling farmers during the fifties, working in partnership with Geramias Lunardelli, an illiterate Italian immigrant who, by sheer shrewdness and determination, had earned himself a fortune and the title of Coffee King of Brazil. Together they had plunged into the coffee boom of the forties that, fed by the deep, purple soils of northern Paraná, had turned a few streets on the edges of jungles into the large, prospering Of Frost and Exodus to the Amazon

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towns of Maringá and Londrina that are in many ways Brazil’s most progressive cities today. Like Lunardelli, Ariosto Da Riva was a legendary figure whose story in itself was tempting to anyone who looked upon myths and legends as part of one great reality. On first hearing his story, one could imagine why some regarded Ariosto Da Riva as an aventureiro—one who sought fortunes and, having made them, moved restlessly on. For his story began with his running away from the dreariness of life as a bank clerk to take on the perilous profession of a garimpeiro—that is, someone who legally or otherwise seeks gold or gems which exist in abundance in so many parts of Brazil—in this case, diving for alluvial diamonds in the depths of the Jequitinhonha River. But soon seeing that it was not the seeker of these stones who became rich but those who bought and sold them, Ariosto became a gem trader, riding muleback through the gem-studded hills of Minas Gerais. Then finding that too limited for his dreams of grandeur, he decided to develop frontiers. It was in this pursuit that he gained a legendary reputation for often putting his life on the line to defend the land titles that were his trade. And at least one instance of such behavior, told us by a mutual friend, would lend a good amount of veracity to that legend for us. The teller of the tale was an Israeli named Uri Admoni, who became involved in a life-and-death dispute with a partner over a coffee fazenda in Mato Grosso. When the day came to go to court, Uri found himself lying on the floor to dodge the aim of sharpshooters hired to surround the fazenda’s house. And there he would have remained had not Ariosto Da Riva defied the gunmen to personally escort him to court. Undeniably an act of cold courage in a world where the rule of law has still a long way to go to assert itself. 156

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Not long after the accounting of that tale, Uri introduced us to Ariosto, who invited us to visit Alta Floresta. The occasion was the inauguration of the Brazilian Cacao Institute’s first experimental station in the Amazon. The fact that the station was to be established there was like a vote of confidence in the struggling settlement’s future. Still, like some ominous forewarning, it had rained three hundred millimeters—about twelve inches—the day before the ceremony. Bridges were out everywhere, and the airstrip, a huge mud pie, had been made only precariously landable for the plane bringing the minister of agriculture, Allyson Paulianelli, who had come to take his part. His coming had in turn lured a sizable contingent from the press, among them two young men from the Times of London, one of whom looked hauntingly familiar to me. “I know I’ve seen him somewhere,” I kept saying to Carson, delving into the past even as far as former incarnations until Edson Dos Santos, in charge of hosting, drew me anxiously aside and said, “The Ingles, I just can’t pronounce, Lorde, Lorde Esnoo . . . is it?” Whereupon I slapped my forehead, needing to search no more. “Of course, Princess Margaret’s ex-husband! No wonder!” With a bona fide English lord in our midst, even the minister of agriculture was somewhat upstaged, so that, on the first evening after dinner, a reporter from Veja magazine sidled up to me and asked if I might not help him scoop the lorde. “If the lorde doesn’t mind,” I said. In the Brazilian manner of burdening their offspring with unsolicited grandeur, the reporter’s name happened to be Victor Hugo, and I thought it rather amusing to be interpreting Lord Snowdon to Victor Hugo in the middle of the Amazon jungle. It was a lengthy interview of Lord Snowdon, a photographer better Of Frost and Exodus to the Amazon

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known to most as Tony Armstrong-Jones, one which included his adventures in and his latest book about Africa. At last, apparently satisfied with the answers to his questions, Hugo wrote something with care on a piece of paper and, handing it to the interviewee, said in a professional tone, “I just want to be sure of the spelling.” As he read what was written, I saw Tony Armstrong-Jones’s eyes light with a glow of amusement. Nonetheless with admirable British composure, rather than embarrass Victor Hugo by punching him in the nose or assailing him with a burst of insane hilarity, he managed to understate in a hushed voice, “I think perhaps Mr. Hugo ought to start again from the beginning.” So saying, he handed me the paper upon which was written in large, precise letters PETER TOWNSEND. How poor Victor Hugo could have gone to such ends to make such a mistake can probably only be attributed to the magic of a Freudian slip. Fortunately in the “anything can happen here” atmosphere of Alta Floresta, the reporter’s mistaking the husband for the correspondent in Princess Margaret’s divorce turned into just another delightful story shared with everyone, as Lorde Esnowden and Victor Hugo became the best of pals, drinking and laughing all evening.

] Once the ceremonies were over and the crowds subsided, we would come to know Tony Armstrong-Jones in a far more flattering context. For during the days to come, our being the only English-speaking people present, the two Britishers were assigned to us like orphans without a country. They couldn’t have been better company as, slipping and sliding over rain-rutted roads and fording bridgeless streams, we stopped here for Tony to pho158

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tograph men struggling frantically to pull a mule out of murderous quicksand; there, a family unloading all the usual possessions. As much as by the drama of the mule, our friends were fascinated by the collection of items considered necessary to beginning life again. The beds made with wooden frames and leather crosspieces; an iron wood-burning stove; the glass-fronted cabinet which would again encase the time-honored wedding china and plaster images of saints. Amid these, buttressed by straw-filled mattresses, were the sand-scrubbed pots, kerosene lamps, oil cans harboring revered plants; crates of chickens and hogs; a canary sitting forlorn and absurd in a cage here in the middle of the jungle. All to be deposited beside a rancho covered with a black plastic tarpaulin that would be shared by animals and people alike until there was time and money to build something better. What these people would begin with, once they’d put their things in place, was described by the clearings which already edged the all-weather roads that the company INDECO’s crew had cut through the jungle—each one a gray, ugly defiance against the dense tangle of green from which it had been cut and burned. During the dry season the men had worked setting the underbrush afire and then felling the great trees, leaving the logs where they lay to be sold as lumber. Now as the first rains came, the same men would make furrows with mules and single-bladed plows in the flat, humid bottomlands on the edges of streams to plant rice and beans, corn and manioc, for their subsistence. Elsewhere, with long heavy hoes they would dig amid the fallen trunks and stumps to plant coffee, cacao, and guaraná in the still-rich humus left by the newly cleared forest. One hoped that one day orderly groves would stand where now all was rubble and devastation. Yet looking upon such infernos Of Frost and Exodus to the Amazon

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against the backdrop of the jungle, my feelings were, as usual, a mixture of despair and awe. At the destruction of a harmony that can never be restored. At the courage and endurance of those people who worked with their hands and the crudest of implements to create farms out of a tropical jungle. It would take a lifetime to tame such a wilderness. How could it be worth it to them? It was questions such as these that the reporters asked and we interpreted as we stopped to photograph one ugly clearing after another. Where had the people come from and why? Most had come from Paraná, where, until then, on the deep, seemingly inexhaustible red soil, they had been able to make a fairly good living growing coffee. But when their plantations were destroyed by the frost, ten or twenty hectares were not enough to support what then seemed to be the only alternative, mechanized soybeans. So they had sold out to bigger farmers and come to the Amazon, where they could now buy ten hectares for the price of one in Paraná. “But why Alta Floresta? “ “Ah, because we knew Seu Ariosto in Maringá,” came the invariable answer. “When you put everything you have into land, it’s good to know it’s really yours.” “Still,” we insisted, “You’ve been through all this before, how . . . ?” Though our reporter friends found it inconceivable, for us the old answer clearly made sense: “Who wants to work for someone else if you can have a place of your own?” “And the soil?” Carson, bending to testingly squeeze a handful, would have only begun to talk farmer’s talk when dusk signaled vicious gnats to rise in battalions, threatening to cause our blood 160

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to grow thin while the insects grew fat and idle. Making flight as well seem suddenly imperative.

] It was always dark by the time we reached Alta Floresta. The town of perhaps a thousand souls was dimly lit with electricity generated by a retired steam engine from the Sorocabana Railway. Nicknamed Moby Dick and fed on the felled trees of opening farms, this ingeniously converted spouting whale of a machine kept the town with its sawmill, mechanic shop, warehouse, hospital, snooker bar, and whatever else was basic to a budding community working with heroic fidelity. Like all new frontier towns in Brazil, the rutted streets were optimistically broad as if in expectation of becoming great thoroughfares at the crossroads of the world. On either side the faintly lit windows of dust-coated clapboard houses framed scenes furnished with those same items we’d seen unloaded at the edge of a clearing. And now that the gnats had settled for the night, coarse-grained, hardy people sat on stoops to cool themselves in the night air. It took but a few minutes to pass through this beginning of a settlement and find ourselves at the pension, where we would share a bountiful dinner of tucunaré fished from a nearby river and vegetables from the settlement’s huge communal garden. Afterward, weary of interpretation, the Britishers would fade early, and Carson and I would settle on the porch for a long-awaited quiet talk with Ariosto Da Riva. Behind the pension, there stood a grove of native castanheiras de Pará, Brazil nut trees, which with their lofty crowns had been left standing to provide shade for the seedlings of cacao trees planted beneath. By day sometimes anhumas—birds as large as Of Frost and Exodus to the Amazon

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wild turkeys—appeared in the grove looking surprised to find themselves suddenly on the edge of “civilization.” Now, at night, the moonlight made cathedral-like mosaics of the shadows cast by the branches and leaves of those splendid trees, while behind the grove the forest rose again, dense and shadowless. In the silence and freshness on the edge of the jungle’s cool depths, the whines of piums had given way to the chirping of crickets and the deepthroated song of hammer frogs. On the table beside us stood a bottle of aged cachaça which, sipped neat, was an excellent stimulant to conversation, but soon no stimulant would be needed as we became immersed in the subject of the world around us. Until just a while ago it had been a world known only to a few. Of these, most had been Indians who—hunting, fighting, burning, planting, and allowing the jungle to cover their tracks as they moved in continuous cycles—had lived in harmony with the tropical rain forest as no one could again. Or seringueiros and castanheiros who, tapping wild rubber trees and gathering Brazil nuts, had no need of fences in a primitive, extractive life which was nonetheless suitable to lands whose survival depended upon the shade, growth, and decay of the jungle. As the fence stretchers penetrated the Amazon, all that was inevitably to be changed. Yet how an understanding of the jungle could be brought to bear upon what the farmers did with their land would make all the difference. It was of these people we talked as we sat in the everdeepening stillness of the Amazonian night. Of the settlers such as those we had met on the road, who had become links in the neverending chains of circumstance that make a country’s history. None could have known the story better than the tall, lean man who sat beside us, the deep lines of his rugged features accentuated by the porch’s flickering light. Spilling tobacco from a horn 162

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into a corn husk and rolling it with care, he smoked as he talked of the people we had met along the road during the day. People whom he had known from the days of the great migrations to Paraná. “You have to hand it to these people,” said Carson. “It takes a lot of courage to start all over. And a lot of trust.” “Which works both ways,” said Ariosto. “Indeed, I went back to Paraná and chose most of the families myself. Good, serious people who I knew would endure. It’s a rough life here; I didn’t want just anyone. Often we even give them their titles before the land is paid so that they can get loans for planting.” Ariosto grinned around his cigarette. “Dealing with land is always a gamble. But when you deal with a small farmer you have to gamble that his work will pay off. If it does, I think you know as well as I, it’s not the little fellow who doesn’t pay his debts. So the key is to make sure they’ve enough to keep them going till they can. “As for them,” he put things into perspective with what we would come to call proper Ariostian logic, “where else nowadays would they find a big enough piece of land to make a living from? What is a sacrifice for those who don’t need it, is an opportunity for others. It’s their chance. If they do well, their children’s lives will be better. And in the process,” the colonizer finished with an assurance that we would eventually learn could convince almost anyone, “this place will be civilized.”

] By the time we turned in to our room at the pension, the night had reached that moment of profound stillness when even the crickets cease to sing. But rather than provide peace for sleep, the silence only served to enliven thoughts that were bouncing Of Frost and Exodus to the Amazon

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around in my mind like electrons, trying to find their proper position in an as yet undefined pattern. “What does that man mean by ‘civilization’?” I asked myself. “When he thinks of Alta Floresta as civilized, does he see the same place I do?” I knew the same words could often evoke totally opposing visions. In the process of developing Paraná, the magnificent forests of that region had virtually disappeared, causing, some thought, a climate change that had brought on the frosts we’d just been suffering. Then too, much of the land sold to the coffee growers had been sorely depleted by the old frontier habit of slashing and burning and moving on. Out of the ashes had risen Maringá and Londrina, it was true. But was that the only way? And was it what he hoped for Alta Floresta? Such questions can never be fully answered, of course. But my curiosity whetted, writing for O Estado de São Paulo, I would return again and again. And with each trip, the original image of an aventureiro would give way a little bit more. For unlike most who “directed” their colonization projects from air-conditioned offices in the great cities, Ariosto Da Riva was a consistently strong presence in his settlement’s midst. My recollections of this presence are of him standing on the edge of a clearing where there is nothing but a road camp and a sawmill, convincing a couple of newly graduated engineers that this is where they should begin their careers. Or leaning over maps in a dusty office, explaining to the Japanese of Cotia or the Dutch of Olhambra that this would provide the best future for a new branch of their cooperatives. Or backing the farmer who’d lost his mule to the quicksand for another animal to be paid for when the first crop came in. Certainly much of this had to do with the fact that the hardships 164

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and isolation of this distant place didn’t daunt him. Though he did have an office in São Paulo, he stayed there as little as possible. It was the life in Alta Floresta that he loved. Like Pepe and Claude Zayas, he was a frontiersman. As well, apparently aware that it was not only frost but bad, erosive farming that had caused much of the exodus from Paraná, Ariosto seemed determined to use his experience to make this settlement a stable world of prosperous farmers rather than a shifting one of nomads. For this, a great deal of care and attention had gone into the creation of Alta Floresta. There were trained agronomists to help in the development of the farms, and a model fazenda, run by his son, Ludovico, to seek the right way to do things and to use as an example for others. Since no agricultural research had been carried out in this region, almost everything had to be learned in the doing. Terrible mistakes would be made, not the least by the federal Cacao Research Station which would impose on the Amazon basin methods and shade trees that were being used in semiarid northeastern Bahia. As a consequence, whole plantations were lost before it was admitted that perhaps after all it was not a bad idea to shade the young cacao plants with native Amazonian trees, or even plant them in the semicleared forest. Coffee planters suffered similar disasters before it was affirmed that African Robusta coffees with their broad skirts lending shade to shallow roots were best adapted to the rain forest climate. But keeping their chickens and hogs and milk cows, and planting beans and rice and mandioca between the rows of permanent crops to sustain them till the first real harvest came in, most of the farmers managed to hold out. Proof lay in the fact that when I went there for the first time in Of Frost and Exodus to the Amazon

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, there were some , souls, and when I returned for the fifth time in , there were ,—most of whom made a living from the produce of , farms. Alta Floresta had become the center for numerous other settlements that were struggling to establish themselves along the highway and the road that INDECO’s crew had built. And in the midst of all this, on a hill that overlooked the forest and the town, Ariosto and his wife, Helena, had built a house surrounded by orchards of exotic fruits where, after years of restless wanderings, they had decided to settle for good.

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20 T h e

Wo r l d s o f A p a r e c i d o

and José

On all my other trips to Alta Floresta I had flown to Cuiabá by regular airlines and then gone on with the pilot Dorival Nunes the rest of the way. Once the single-engine plane had veered northward over lofty plateaus of the Chapada dos Guimarães, for three hours there was nothing but jungle threaded by an endless network of rivers and streams until out of nowhere there appeared the pocket handkerchiefs of cleared land, the crude defiance of crops that seemed threatened by the forests on every side. It was a good way to gain a conception of how small these settlements were in relation to the immensity of the whole. But it did not give a very good idea of how the opening of frontiers accelerates once it has begun. And so in July  when Ariosto suggested that this time we cover the three thousand kilometers by road, nothing could have suited me better. In the state of São Paulo the growth of an intricate network of roads had by then done much to make Carlito Aranha’s dream of growing anything that can be grown anywhere in the world 167

possible. But once we crossed the border into Minas Gerais and headed on north and westward through Goiás and Mato Grosso, for the twenty-five hundred kilometers and the three days it would take us to cover them, the predominant crop was soybeans, which in the dry season would be rotated with wheat or corn. This was campo cerrado, savanna land, whose sandy, acid soils were once considered only good for grazing, and even then, sparsely. But research has made it possible to change the fertility of these level lands that are excellent for mechanization. Thus to the edge of every horizon along our way lay symmetrically contoured fields broken only by homesteads and towns skirted by one granary after another—turning the whole into a scene remindful of the bountiful monotony of the American Midwest. It was this scenario of accelerating change that Ariosto had wanted me to feel by driving through it. And indeed it was breathtaking and exciting to witness this new bounty planted by Brazilian farmers to supply a seemingly insatiable world market. Yet the farther we traveled through this miraculously changed countryside, the greater grew my sense of unease and the more I thought about the reason why. The wild vegetation of the cerrados through which we were driving had been all but wiped out as “useless,” to be replaced by crops. But as usual, in their hurry to make use of every hectare of tillable land, no one had stopped to think of the worth of those vine-threaded, twisted woods as a defense against the fury of the wind or as preserver of moisture in the shallowest of water tables, where, from amid the roots of trees, springs wept out over thin soil. Nor of the incredible diversity of creatures and plants which is said to be greater in the cerrados than in the rain forest and whose presence might well be necessary to the flourishing of the crops in the fields nearby. 168

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The closer we came to the equator on this road, the greater became my unease and my sense of the need for that balance in nature which—if the people who were clearing this land right now would recognize it—might well secure their future. But obviously these thoughts were not in the heads of farmers whose whole tradition had been to look upon the wilderness as something savage to be subdued. What wood existed in these sparse forests was helping to pay for the clearing. “If we need wood later, we’ll plant eucalyptus,” they were no doubt saying, not recognizing the fact that eucalyptus is a silent forest in which scarcely a vine or underbrush will grow or a bird come to nest. And, after all, were they any different from American farmers in the Midwest who would as soon drain a stream as let it get in the way of their machinery? “This is what troubles me . . . the fixation that people have that the wildernesses are only to be considered for the value of their wood, when in truth there is so much more,” I said to Ariosto, not quite sure that even he would see my meaning. Whatever he understood, his answer was that of a realist who had learned from a great deal of experience. “It’s not easy in a place where people are in such a hurry,” he said. “On the frontier, if you’re poor you want to get rich as fast as you can, and if you’re rich it’s probably because you’ve ignored as many rules as possible.” Lifting his hands from the wheel to spread them hopelessly, he added, “And with no one to enforce the law . . .” That half-spoken comment, of course, lay at the bottom of everything. For then as now we knew laws existed, obliging farmers in new lands to preserve  percent of their property in its natural state. Arbitrary laws, like those which prohibited hunting T h e Wo r l d s o f A p a r e c i d o a n d J o s é

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of any kind, that were impractical as they were unlikely to be obeyed. It was these things we talked of as we made our way northward to where beyond Mato Grosso’s capital, Cuiabá, the rivers flowed toward the Amazon. Of how, when the military government opened the Amazon in the seventies, its main concern had been occupation of an area rich in minerals, water, and forest. In their haste, the generals in charge had offered free land to settlers and tax exemptions to large companies who would establish poles of “civilization” here and there in the Amazon’s immense “emptiness.” Yet, incredibly, they had given little thought to the infrastructure necessary for any of this to work. Road building proceeded at a snail’s pace. Forest preserves and Indian reservations had been decreed but, though a forestry service had been created, little effort had been made to establish the huge force of professionals necessary to police a region that comprised half of Brazil. Added to that, the building of a road meant to link the region of Alta Floresta with the port of Santarém on the Amazon River, providing a route to the Atlantic, was virtually at a standstill. “It is as if the idea were to send people into a vacuum and leave them there,” Ariosto said. Yet never one to wallow in despair, soon he was once more expounding on his favorite subject—the progress that had been made despite these encumbrances; the future, when everything must inevitably get moving again. When the promised road at last reached Santarém to awaken that somnolent port and make the entire western Amazon basin closer to Europe and the United States than southern Brazil was now. “Then there’ll be nothing we won’t be able to grow in the way of tropical produce. Not just coffee and cacao but dendé palm, rubber, pepper, acerola. Why, just the variety of fruits that no one 170

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has heard of! Ah, no, we have to look at this vacuum as temporary,” he went on in his strong, convincing voice. “In the meantime, we just have to shut our eyes and go ahead.” How often on my trips to Alta Floresta had I heard those words? So often they had become a refrain. Nonetheless, I told myself, the refrain of a tough old timer who had never yet been defeated. After three days of asphalt, the last four hundred kilometers to Alta Floresta was dirt road. The farther we went, the hillier it became and the more densely forested with towering trees whose wide-spreading roots were balanced by huge umbrella-like crowns that rose toward the sky above an impenetrable undergrowth. By the time we reached the Teles Pires River, darkness had fallen—the cold, inky darkness of the forest through which, in Ariosto’s pickup, we plowed ahead, losing all sense of how far we’d come, how much farther there was to go. Now and then bright eyes dazzled by the headlights reminded me of other days, other journeys, in parts of Brazil that were once a wilderness. And then at last, always strangely exciting, the lights of the town shone bravely in the dark, dark emptiness.

] Until this trip I had always stayed at the pension in the shade of the castanheiras where the first seedlings of cacao had been planted. But this time we drove through a handsome portal beyond which I was delivered to the Hotel Floresta Amazonica. Stiff from the road, interested in nothing but hot water and rest, I would only become aware of the hotel’s attributes when I awakened in the morning to open tall French doors onto a garden filled with tropical greenery. Beyond the garden stood the forest T h e Wo r l d s o f A p a r e c i d o a n d J o s é

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into which paths had been opened so that guests could wander beneath trees where macaws and toucans nested and where, from my door, as I stood watching, I could actually see monkeys in their comings and goings in the high branches. From the garden, flowering bougainvillea spilled over arbors that shaded walks between the rooms and led to a high-ceilinged dining room equipped with old-fashioned ceiling fans and a veranda which again gave out onto rich greenery. The whole was the creation of Vitoria Da Riva Dos Santos, a handsome young woman who combines her parents’ charm and energy with an intuitiveness that, barring the forest’s disappearance, had already secured the Hotel Floresta Amazonica a bright future. Before staying there myself I had wondered why anyone would want to endure the precariousness of TAPA airline’s old, beat-up Fokkers to come to this end of the world. But I should have realized that, like myself, people came because Alta Floresta had a little bit of everything that was the Amazon. Of this Vitoria had made a clever package which included visits to a gold panners’ garimpo, complete with bar and brothel; the cacao and coffee plantations at INDECO’s Fazenda Caiabí; and an overnight “ecological excursion” on the Cristalino River from which visitors returned to an evening of listening to local lore and bossa nova while sipping drinks on the hotel’s broad veranda. As for myself, after jouncing from farm to farm each day over the rutted roads of Alta Floresta, coming back here in the evening was like returning to paradise.

] Each morning I set out in a different direction, sometimes to visit old friends and to see how their lives were progressing, sometimes 172

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to pick at random someone in a new settlement whose story was just beginning within the greater story of Alta Floresta. My escort on those occasions was Antonião, a sturdy giant with the broad nose and full lips of a Negro, the solid jaw and slanting eyes of an Indian, and jug ears that made it possible to spot him from behind at forty meters’ distance. The whole gave him the appearance of someone who might have just given up boxing to become a bodyguard. But I had learned from my previous visit that once he began to talk there was no question that the space between those ears was occupied by a very sharp mind. For myself, Tonião was the perfect companion for the road because he knew everyone and therefore could fill me in on everything that was going on from the moment we emerged through the portals of “paradise” to encounter the realities of town. Alta Floresta was still raw and ugly with growing pains and stained with dust from its unpaved streets. But along those streets clapboard was gradually giving way to more solid brick and plaster and a thriving commerce that abounded in everything from rental bridal gowns and household appliances to gold panning equipment and farm machinery, as well as five banks and four granaries for the financing and storage of the produce from the plantations. Amid the usual number of corner bars and armazéns, I saw that the establishments for the sale of gold had greatly increased. “To pay for the gunfights and malaria,” Tonião remarked grimly. “The more garimpos, the more hospitals. We’ve eleven now.” A brighter statistic was the number of schools which, including those first-to-fourth grade one-room schools every eight kilometers along the country roads added up to an impressive count T h e Wo r l d s o f A p a r e c i d o a n d J o s é

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in any community. This, and the sight of the wide-spreading flamboyant trees that had survived the tumult of growth to shade every street, were the best signs to me that something permanent was coming into being here. As we moved into the country, other signs appeared in the clapboard houses that had replaced ranchos and were surrounded by the familiar jumble of pigsties, chicken roosts, vegetable plots behind bamboo fences, and fruit trees born of seeds from other worlds. Gradually permanent crops were becoming well established. The African coffee, its broad skirts heavily beaded with red berries; orange-berried urucúm used for coloring; guaraná, whose stimulating fruit oddly resembled human eyes. Rather than erosively up and down as of old, the plantations followed the contours around the hills, and in many cases, to provide green manure and secure the soil during the rainy season, farmers had planted a tenacious legume called stylosanthis. Such conservation practices should seem totally normal, especially where it can rain three hundred millimeters in a day. But to someone familiar with the centuries-old Brazilian tradition of slash, burn, degrade, and move on, to me their use seemed wondrous. On that first day, there was little question in my mind as to where we should go. I could almost see the words GOOD LUNCH light in Tonião’s eyes when I said to him, “Let’s go visit the Pereses.” I’d first met Aparecido Peres and his family in , when they were clearing forest from half of two hundred hectares they had bought with the proceeds from selling twenty in Maringá, Paraná. Since then I had returned with every visit to see the Peres land increase to twelve hundred hectares, half of which was in crops and pasture; the rest, one hoped as much due to common sense as 174

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to law, still in forest. Like so many others, the Pereses had decided to confront the Amazon wilderness because twenty hectares had not been enough to sustain a growing family. Now the fazenda accommodated three generations, and, as it had grown, so had the whitewashed wooden house expanded into a rambling structure large enough to provide room for the sprightly grandchildren who hovered on tiptoe, ready to spring into action should we make a move from the fern-hung veranda where Seu Aparecido made us welcome. In keeping with the expectation in Tonião’s eyes, we had no sooner arrived than Dona Fatima, an Italian woman of robust good looks and humor, insisted we stay for lunch. Then she disappeared into the depth of the house while Seu Aparecido sat with us and talked farming. A gentle man with the strong, stoic features of a Portuguese peasant, he admitted a certain weariness from a life in which he had twice carved a farm out of the wilderness. He was slowing down a bit now, turning over to his sons and son-in-law the management of  head of cattle, , cacao trees, and , coffee trees. On the way in, we had driven through a shady grove of cacao which, planted in semicleared forest, had reached that point where the deep shade made by its spreading branches and the dense mulch laid down by its fallen leaves had virtually returned the land to that balance in which trees gain life out of their own death and decay. The coffee had grown and spread so that its lower branches almost met between the rows. And despite the drought that had extended this year into November, now that it had rained, the new growth looked vigorous and abundant. Considering all this I said, “Coffee looks good, Seu Aparecido, senhor must be treating it well.” T h e Wo r l d s o f A p a r e c i d o a n d J o s é

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Seu Aparecido nodded and frowned half defensively. “If you mean, did I fertilize this year, I did. With the cost of things as they are and the way the drought ruined the flowering, some people think I wasted my money, putting on anything at all. But . . .” He didn’t finish his thought right then, for at that moment his son-in-law, Jader, arrived on the veranda with such impetus he almost fell over the step. He had come to invite me to go and see the cattle before it rained, and in his handsome, ruddy face, his blue eyes radiated such enthusiasm that, though it was beginning to drizzle, the invitation was impossible to resist. So with the children in tow, we climbed a hill through an orchard laden with fruit and skirted a plantation of new coffee with rice sprouting pale green out of the earth between the rows. Beyond all this, colonião grass grew tall and dense out of the decay of the felled forest, but the cattle were nowhere to be seen. “Oh you mustn’t bother,” I said, aware that to try and round up a half-wild herd of Nelore on foot was not only nearly impossible but dangerous. But Jader’s enthusiasm for his animals was not to be defied. “No, just wait, I’ll find them,” he insisted, and in an instant he had disappeared, leaving me to stand by the fence with the children, waiting, while somewhere in the deep grass, distant whoops and whistles and bellows let us know that man and beast had made contact. It was pouring by the time that, with a triumphant yell, Jader brought the cattle surging forward to stand a moment staring, torn between curiosity and fear. To my excitement, startlingly red amidst the white of the Nelore, milled four young Santa Gertrudis bulls. “I thought that would please you,” said Jader. “They’re doing well. And we’ve got some really good half-breed yearlings, half again the weight of their brothers.” 176

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“It’s like seeing part of your family find a good home,” I said— exactly what I felt. Soaked to the skin, we stood a while more, taking in the splendor of the cattle and grass with the forest in the background, all blurred by the sheeting rain until, with a whoosh, the cattle got shy and vanished whence they had come. Dona Fatima’s lunch was the kind that is served only on farms where people think it’s worth the trouble to grow vegetables and fruits and keep pigs and chickens and milk cows for their own use. It is all tremendous work, but here is sausage to be eaten with yellow-yolked eggs from chickens that scratch and peck in the orchard and turn into tasty stews themselves at the end of their lives. Here are rice and beans seasoned with garlic and served with wilted collards and hot peppers picked from the pepper bush. To drink, here is the juice of pitangas, fresh from the orchard; and for dessert, guavas in syrup with their complement of fresh cheese. You could see the effect of the matriarch’s habits on the young women and their children who, robust and healthy, had just come in from being soaked in a rainstorm to join us, ravenous, at the table. During lunch, while I gave in to greed and Dona Fatima’s prideful generosity, we talked of the things that kept people where they were—the trees and flowers you brought from other places and planted, the things you made. I gave Dona Fatima a recipe for pickled peppers; she gave me one for wild oranges in syrup. “So you never think of moving to town?” I asked, remembering the many I knew who thought the silence of country nights to be sad. “Who, me?” Dona Fatima threw up her hands. “What would I do there but sit and worry about my chickens and cows? What would these children do? Drive us crazy. While here? Most of the time we don’t even have to think about them at all. That is, till T h e Wo r l d s o f A p a r e c i d o a n d J o s é

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they’re old enough to work. Ah no, one home is enough for me. And thank God, there’s no need for another with a school bus picking up the children and bringing them back each day.” At that moment I couldn’t help shaking my head, saying, “It’s hard to believe that the first time I saw you, you were unloading your stuff beside a rancho. How long ago, eight, ten years?” “It will be ten, come October.” “And no regrets?” Seu Aparecido shrugged in that stoic way that farmers have. “Maybe you’ve noticed. Things aren’t so easy right now. Guaraná and nuts were about the only things that brought a good price this year, but they didn’t help fertilize the coffee.” Then, taking up our earlier conversation, “Some of the young people say we’re crazy to bother. Better to forget the coffee for a year and pan gold. But I’ll tell you something.” In that way that farmers have, this one’s strong back and shoulders straightened, his jaw stiffened, and beneath his frown there came that proud, stubborn look. “I didn’t come all the way out here for the misery of panning gold. In farming you just have to stick to what you’re doing. And if I lose what I’ve got, it won’t be because I don’t take care of it. Understand what I mean?” “Yes, yes I think I do,” I heard myself say. Later, on the way back to town, I found myself wishing I had made a more forceful answer. Perhaps Seu Aparecido had been disappointed. He would no doubt have been surprised at the thoughts his words, spoken with such simplicity and honesty, had set in motion. About how here was a family who had gambled everything to take advantage of what a place like Alta Floresta had to offer them. They had prospered, increased their lands tenfold, and made themselves a fazenda they could be proud of. And now, 178

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in a bad moment when prices were low and inflation was destroying their savings, instead of spreading themselves thin, they were battening down, taking care of what they had, consciously aware that to do otherwise could only ruin the land and turn them into nomads. In so many ways, to me, that was an answer to the questions I had asked myself years earlier when Ariosto Da Riva had said, “Who else but these people would come here? And if they do well, their life will be different.” “And so it is,” I said to Tonião, talking as we drove along. Though a certain apprehension made it impossible not to add, “If only they can hang on.” “If they can’t,” Tonião shrugged his square shoulders, “who can?”

] Tonião, who did these odd jobs for  while he worked to build his own farm, could not have understood the situation better. The next day he reminded me of it with one of those ontarget remarks of his as we lunched on shoe-leather sandwiches washed down with tepid beer in a fly-specked bar at a crossroads. “The Pereses were lucky,” he said. “They had something to start out with. Not like the people where we’re going now.” He shook his massive head, the pitying expression on his homely face as eloquent as anything further he could have said. We were on our way to Carlinda, the area which Alta Floresta, like all Amazonian settlements, was obliged to donate for division by INCRA, the federal government’s institute of colonization and agrarian reform (Instituto de Colonizaçáo e Reforma Agraria). None of the settlers there had sold out elsewhere to buy a plot. They were people who had nothing and nowhere else to go, T h e Wo r l d s o f A p a r e c i d o a n d J o s é

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many indeed part of that continuous migration that had brought sharecroppers to plant cotton twenty years earlier in Presidente Prudente when that was the edge of the frontier. Now Agrarian Reform was offering them land in the Amazon. The farther we drove into the government-owned terrain, the clearer it became that only desperation could have caused anyone to accept Carlinda as it was. Where Alta Floresta provided allweather roads in every direction, here in this Agrarian Reform settlement a single rutted road that resembled a dried-up riverbed made its way through jungle where, at best, trails led into the plots. At random we chose a trail and ground our way toward a place allotted to someone who introduced himself as José Benicio Bueno. I liked him the moment I met him, this scrawny, emaciated man whose handshake was nonetheless firm, his gaze open and direct. He reminded me of so many I had met as he told me the story of hardship that perhaps only someone who had nothing to lose could have borne. He’d put in his name for a lot at Carlinda the moment he’d arrived to work as a laborer in whatever there was to do, harvesting coffee, helping in construction. “With a wife and three children, I’d do anything but pan for gold. But I didn’t have to go to the garimpo to get malaria, all the same. It crept up on me right where I was. Thought I just had the grippe from working in the rain all the time until I collapsed and they had to carry me to the hospital. I got better but it scared my wife away. She took off with some gato from the north and left me with the children. Meantime, I’d almost given up on getting this lot when one day a friend came to me and said, ‘Oh José, haven’t you seen your name on the list?’ “That was when my real trouble began. There was no road at all then, so the children and I had to cut a path and carry every180

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thing the twenty kilometers on our backs. Good thing we didn’t have much to carry, eh? Even so, we couldn’t keep coming and going all that way, so we had to sleep in hammocks until we could build this rancho here. Why, once a jaguar even fell out of a tree on the children when they were sleeping. She must have been sleeping too because, thank God, she took off like a streak of lightning, as scared as they were, I’d guess.” It was the kind of story one wouldn’t believe were it not for the absolute earnestness of the teller. There he stood in his torn, earth-stained clothes and rubber-thonged sandals, wispy hair sweat-plastered to his lined forehead, sunken eyes regarding us matter-of-factly as though all the crazy things he was telling us were quite ordinary. But then in these surroundings, weren’t they? I thought of the road along which we’d come, with its narrow trails branching off into one tiny clearing after another against which the forest did indeed appear an implacable enemy. “Still, things are better now, aren’t they, children?” Seu José was saying. “At least we have a roof and some rice and beans.” We had been sitting on a bench hewn from a log propped against a rancho that reminded me of those wind cages the sharecroppers used to put up in the fields in Presidente Prudente. The children, a girl and two boys between the ages of eight and twelve, had been hopping around us like anxious birds awaiting the scattering of corn. Indeed, their legs were thin as birds’, their arms like featherless wings. Yet the gentleness that flowed between themselves and their father suggested to me that they were better off here, for all their hardship, than with the woman who had deserted them. Or than in a packing-case and tin-can structure in a favela on the outskirts of some great industrial city that had never caught up with its population. T h e Wo r l d s o f A p a r e c i d o a n d J o s é

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Again I thought, if they could only make it . . . but how? If it were just a question of work, there could be no doubt. For with his own hands this frail man who looked as though a strong wind could blow him to the treetops had cleared enough forest to plant five thousand coffee trees amid which were his subsistence crops of rice, beans, and mandioca. Unlike Seu Aparecido of the day before, Seu José regarded his coffee almost apologetically. “It would look better if I could treat it better, I know. I’ve worked with coffee all my life on other people’s land. But even if I could find the courage to pay the interest, I couldn’t borrow anyway.” Seu José bared the gaps between his teeth in a smile of irony. “Because, you know, you can’t get a loan without property to back you, and INCRA’s afraid if they give us our property titles we’ll sell out. Now that’s a queer idea, isn’t it, after all we’ve been through? Besides, who with money would want to buy land in a settlement where no one’s allowed more than twenty-five hectares?” The more he talked, the more Kafkaesque his situation seemed to become. “But who knows,” he said at length, “maybe things will get better. They’re always changing rules around here, and maybe they’ll change them again. At least we have our little piece to plant and, God willing, we’ll hang onto it.” His parting smile was one of forbearance that will stay with me forever. “God willing.” That old, haunting expression. I went away thinking that if God helps those who help themselves, none could be more deserving than that little family. But without money or technical assistance, what could they do? They would probably hold out as long as their soil resisted and then move on, leaving desolation behind them. Not because they wanted to but, as Tonião had aptly reminded me on the way over, because they hadn’t the means to do what they should. 182

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Unfortunately what I saw at Carlinda didn’t surprise me. It was typical of every Agrarian Reform project we had yet known in which, as though this just might make them disappear, impoverished families were distributed land and left to their own devices. Because of this it would become one of the most destructive elements in the Amazon, both to forest and to man. Thinking so, I couldn’t help feeling both sad and angry as we made our way back along the trail, leaving those good people behind.

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21 G o l d

in the Rivers

To come into the Hotel Floresta Amazonica from the earth-stained jumble of the town around it was also to wonder somewhat if this charming haven wasn’t a bit out of place. But that was only until one realized that Alta Floresta had a way of attracting people who were a bit out of place themselves. A good example was Vitoria Da Riva’s right-hand man, Helio Macedo, an ageless professional frontiersman who had spent years roaming, opening fazendas in the wilderness. Debonair and humorous, with his knowledge of the forest and tough command of any situation, no one could have been better suited to the role of leading an expedition up the Teles Pires River one day, and the next regimenting an eager but callous-footed hotel staff into shape. During most of my stay this time, the two were bustling tirelessly to accommodate an American group that was considering the possibility of the  Camel Trophy marathon’s setting out to find its way through the jungle from Alta Floresta to Manaus on the Amazon River. The marathon’s advance platoon consisted of a wholesome 184

young woman named Laurie and an enormous, pale, ungainly young man whose delight in crashing through underbrush and splashing in rivers had quickly earned him the nickname of Jungle Jim. Their Brazilian counterpart was an ardent Jehovah’s Witness who told me that his presence in the Amazon was due to the fact that all his actions were directly guided by God. Something I thought might well be useful to him in the arduous days to come. Interspersed with the Camel Crossers were investors come to look for land: gold panners, that is, garimpeiros, who had struck it rich and come to make literal the old Brazilian metaphor by “taking a bath in civilization.” Last of all, not unlike the old crowd at the Bar Esportiva in Tietê, there was a cast of locals who regularly took their ease of an evening over an aperitivo on the terrace. Among these might be Dr. Pedro Silvestre, who, his practice greatly increased by the disorder and malaria of the garimpos, had within eight years built himself two hospitals and become a large cattle rancher. Or Guiseppe Parini, a weathered, aristocratic-looking Italian who was gradually developing one hundred thousand hectares for the sprawling empire of O Grupo Ferrucci. Or perhaps there would appear Paul Vais, a portly, boisterous refugee from the one-time Belgian Congo, whose habit of speaking every word with an accent à droit on the final syllable had earned him the nickname of Cacaú (pronounced “caca-OO”). Each had his tale of the wilderness to tell. Jungle Jim swore he had had all his extremities deliciously nibbled by baby piranhas. This in turn induced Cacaú to describe his escape by swimming across the Congo River seething with crocodiles while the conquering Zairians—like Romans in the Coliseum rooting for the Christians—cheered him on from the riverbank. “Et tout,” he Gold in the Rivers

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concluded in his hilarious mix of French and Portuguese, “pour la plaiser de vivre neste cú do mondú!” (All for the pleasure of living in this asshole of the world!) Parini would then regale us with his favorite description of the Apiacas Indian houseboy whose cooking ritual it was to sit naked on the kitchen table pouring beans over his genitals as he sorted the good from the rotten. An account which caused Jungle Jim to murmur, “Oh wow,” as he pushed the beans to one side on his plate. In the midst of such discussions, as one evening we dined on superb piraíba fished from the Teles Pires by Helio, I thought I saw a murderous look come into Vitoria’s eyes. It was directed at Dr. Pedro, who, by my interpretation, was reveling in descriptions of the perils of garimpos. We’d begun with three types of malaria, each of which was curable but provided no immunity from the other. Then he’d gone on to some kind of rot to be caught by standing in the mud and slime of the garimpos’ stagnant waters. “Especially,” we added, “where people get knifed and buried in the embankment.” The more the brave Camel Crossers paled, the more Dr. Pedro, his own eyes bulging above his straight little mustache, felt encouraged. “God preserve us,” implored the Jehovah’s Witness. “Urrg,” Laurie shuddered, “if you listen to people in Rio, it all sounds so romantic, this search for gold. When did you say we were going to see a garimpo?” “No problem, no problem,” Vitoria put all her charming assurance into one of her most widely used English phrases. “We take people to the garimpo in the day. Knifings and mosquito bitings only happen in the night.” During most of these evenings, Ariosto Da Riva said little, pre186

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ferring to remain a listener—his silent imposing appearance suggesting a life of experience, shrouded in mystery. But that evening at his daughter’s comical remark, something caused him to turn suddenly to Laurie and say, “Tell Miss Laurie that if she wants to see an old garimpeiro, she has only to look at me. From the stories that go on around here, I think most of you know that I began my life diving for diamonds and trading gemstones?” Pausing to make sure she was listening, he went on in a strangely earnest manner. “Because of this as well, some say that I chose this place to make a settlement because I knew there was gold in the rivers. But I can tell you just the opposite is true. Because, believe me, no one knows better than I do that gold in the rivers is like a disease in the bloodstream. It turns up here one day, there another. The greater the find, the more people it attracts, though never long enough to set down roots. At least not in a place like this. “For that, you see, farming and garimpos mix like oil and water. The flow of gold through a town plays havoc with money, distorts the worth of things you live from. The garimpo lures people who would normally work as laborers, and even farmers who think a little gold will solve their financial problems. It seldom does. Instead when they’ve suffered sufficiently and gone back to their land, they find they must begin all over again from nothing. “Ah no,” and with a rare show of emotion he added, “it is a terrible life with all the suffering Dr. Pedro has described and more. So does it make sense to you that I had always hoped gold would not be found here?” By the time Ariosto had reached this point it was obvious to me that he had begun this discourse because it was a rare opportunity to explain a situation far more complex than most could Gold in the Rivers

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imagine to intelligent listeners from the outside world. It was a discussion that, once begun, went long into the night. But at last I forced myself to go and get some rest, knowing that on the morrow I had a date to see a garimpo in the raw.

] Until that day, the closest I had come to gold panning in the Amazon had been at the end of an unfinished state road that was meant to eventually link Alta Floresta with the Trans-Amazon Highway. In  that abandoned stretch had become a landing strip for planes that took off every fifteen minutes, transporting everything from jerked beef to building supplies and whores to the place where gold had been found seventy-five kilometers distant in the Paranaíta River. Perhaps this will be it, we had hoped then. Nor more gold will be found, or, by the time it is, things will have changed for the better. Then, as in the times of great coffee booms of the past, crops will be worth more than gold. But the building of the road was at a standstill and things hadn’t gotten better. And so here we were, headed for another river called the Peixoto and a scene I knew could only be depressing.

] My companion for the day was Ariosto’s son Ludovico, a big, gruff bear of a man whose humor—at least on most occasions— became better the closer he came to the  fazendas that were under his charge. If I could think of anyone who had chosen the right profession for himself it was this young agronomist who had a love and fascination for the land he tilled. One saw it in his constant preoccupation with finding crops adaptable to his tropical world, and new means to contain the soil and restore the 188

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organic matter that was once created by the growth and decay of the forest. One saw it now in the pasturelands where only the same vigilance afforded the croplands could keep an equilibrium between the forest and the brisanthone grass that grew shoulder high to the sleek Nelore cattle that grazed upon it. Between the pasture and the river, the forest rose again, and passing through its shadowy coolness and peace made all the more shocking the scene of devastation on the river’s edge. For anyone whose life is rooted in the whole concept of harmony between farming and nature, it is agony to see such mindless destruction. One wonders how anyone can live day after day in its midst, blasting riverbanks with pumps and hoses into craters large enough to engulf a ten-room house. Into these gaping holes had fallen gigantic trees whose roots had once secured tons of earth. The earth, loosed and mixed with mercury used in the refining of gold, had turned the once-crystalline, fish-laden Peixoto into an immense poisonous sewer which in turn disgorged its yellow spew into the Teles Pires, even though that river had yet to be vandalized along its banks. And so it was with the rivers and streams wherever gold was to be found. Here, up to their knees in mud and slime, four men had so far succeeded in gouging from the alluvial soil something like one hundred grams of gold a month. As we stood teetering on the edge of a crevice deep enough to break our bones if we lost our balance, Ludovico confided that the gold seemed to be petering out and, with luck, soon the garimpeiros would move on, leaving the jungle to creep down and cover the disfigured face whose wounds would never be entirely healed. Beckoning me to follow, he struggled down the embankment and, reaching out to shake hands, introduced me to one of the men who was setting up the Gold in the Rivers

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pump for the day’s assault. Ironically, they were young farmers from southern Santa Catarina. Their own farm too small to support division by another generation, they still longed to remain in their profession. But where to find the money? “It’s a shit of a job,” the boy assured me in his frank, country way. “But what salary can earn us the money even to put into savings, let alone buy a piece of land? If we’ve nothing to sell and no way to borrow, we can hardly lose by trying this.” And with inflation at  percent a month as it was then, who could argue? These were the people Ariosto had described the night before, the ones who were caught between. One could almost have wished them luck. Indeed there was little else that could be done. “We’re lucky it’s them and not a lot of desperados,” Ludovico said to me, once we’d struggled back up the embankment. “But on your own riverbank!” “They have mineral rights. And even if they didn’t, you know as well as I do, as long as there’s no one to enforce the law, garimpos are no-man’s-land. It’s funny,” he went on bitterly. “With all the talk of devastating the Amazon, the World Bank has cut the financing of roads. One supposes it is to slow migration. But what about the people who are already here? The farmers who need roads to transport their goods? Garimpeiros and contrabandists don’t need roads. All they need are airstrips.” On the way back, he roared above the pickup’s motor about how, although Mato Grosso was said to produce forty tons of gold a year, only an eighth of this was sold legally. The rest, aided by a network of clandestine landing strips, disappeared across borders in what is always the most lucrative of trades, contraband. “Politics!” he raged. “All we hear about is that we have the most 190

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advanced forestry laws in the world. But do you know how many rangers we have to oversee this particular six hundred thousand hectares? Three ill-equipped, poorly trained illiterates with not enough gasoline to run their jeeps!” Little did I know that would be the last conversation I would have with Ludovico. Not long afterward, possibly because he felt that this was the best way to try to change things, that most unlikely of individuals for the role decided to run for state congressman. On a campaign trip his single-engine plane, landing on one of those precarious airstrips, hit a fence and caught fire. Escaping, he turned to see that the pilot was caught by his seat belt. Running back to help, Ludovico was caught in the fire himself and died in a hospital of his burns. A good man who loved his land and yet couldn’t even wish ill upon people who were destroying his riverbank.

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22 T h e

Tr e e s o f t h e F u t u r e

After our day at the garimpo, I was properly depressed, as Ludovico had expected—hoping, I’m sure, that along with the good news I would take back the bad to write in my columns. For as everything in Alta Floresta was a reflection of what went on in the Amazon, so was this a reflection of the evil caused by indifference and neglect far from the source of trouble. Yet on the next day my spirits would rise again as I drove with Helena Da Riva to Fazenda Caiabí to see the castanheiras de Pará. Helena was a remarkable person, the story of whose life, if all were told, would probably be more fascinating than that of her husband. For it was she, at the age of seventeen, who married that unpredictable diamond diver who hadn’t even the money to buy a suit for his wedding. And she who, while Ariosto rode muleback through the hills of Minas Gerais as a gem trader, remained at the trading post, a crude palmetto hut on the bank of a river called the Abaeté. There she had stayed with no one for company but the rough and primitive garimpeiros and their care-worn wives. There, with the help of a midwife who soothed her contracting 192

womb with rubbings of palm oil, she gave birth to Ludovico and used an orange crate as his crib. Between the trading post on the Abaeté in Minas and the spacious house on a hill in Alta Floresta she had raised a family of four in every circumstance imaginable. And even as she cared for her own, she had taken numerous girls from her timeless hometown of Jequitaí to educate and prepare to face the modern world. In her sixties, she was thin and nimble as a spider, her large, luminous eyes direct as she fixed you with her gaze and said whatever came to mind. I had seen her elegant and at ease at social events in São Paulo, but I knew she was happier slapping around her kitchen in loose clothes and thongs, stirring great kettles of sweets made of coconut and soups of a tuber called cará, or, as on that day, traveling to Caiabí to gather vegetables from the garden, fruits from the orchard. Warmly outspoken and direct, she knew everyone and everything that happened in Alta Floresta, and so, on the way over, she filled me in on much that had happened since my last visit. Did I remember Ercio and Cleusa Liudke, the Poles from Santa Catarina who had bought two hundred hectares on the edge of town? “If I remember rightly,” I said, “they were avoiding Ariosto because they couldn’t pay.” “Ahh, but one day, knowing he was a carpenter, Ariosto caught him in the street, the fool, and asked him if he couldn’t build us some cabinets.” Helena kissed the tips of her fingers. “A perfection! Now he’s the most sought-after carpenter in town. And their little farm? A paradise. A story goes around, you might know, that Cleusa is a witch who actually converses with her plants. But I don’t think she gives a shit.” T h e Tr e e s o f t h e F u t u r e

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From there we went on to Gentil Rossi, the mild-eyed professor who, with little more than determination, had begun an agricultural school that now boarded  students who studied a complete curriculum even as they grew their own food on the school’s land. And of Valeria Brito, who had come with her fouryear-old child to start life anew as an agronomist. “A woman in the middle of all these machos, you may imagine how hard it was. But she simply ignored the difference and went about her work. Now I’d say she is the most active agronomist around here.” So we talked, scarcely noticing the rutted road until we saw in the distance the contoured hills of Caiabí. There was an air about this place—and I am sure this was Ariosto’s greatest intention—that tended to put doubters to shame. But of course it was Ludovico, the farmer, who had created this atmosphere of vitality, growth, and change in the plantations of dark green coffee, the broadleaf, sinuous guaraná; the papaya bent with their burden of huge, orange fruit; the paleleafed, bright-berried urucúm and the orchards with countless varieties of citrus and every kind of tropical fruit; and the beehives set out everywhere to take advantage of the constant round of flowerings. But what always struck me above all with a sense of permanence and continuity was the sight of the groves of cacao, their own shade a closed canopy beneath the lofty mantle made by the aged castanheiras de Pará. Those great old trees had been preserved when Caiabí was opened, the lesser forest beneath them gradually thinned away as the cacao seedlings grew. As much as anything, this had been an example to persuade the farmers of Alta Floresta to save the castanheiras, whose harvest of Brazil nuts could provide a fine income just for the gathering. INDECO had even made a campaign 194

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complete with posters and T-shirts. Proof that it was fairly successful lay in the fact that Brazil nuts were among the settlement’s major exports, even then. But because the castanheira’s tall, straight trunks were bringing greater prices in the lumber market, the battle might have been a losing one had not a new tack been taken. In Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, a government researcher by the name of Schmidt had developed a domestic castanheira which produced nuts within eight rather than the thirty years that it takes a wild tree. In , Ludovico was among the first to try them, planting eight thousand seedlings twenty meters apart within the rows of coffee bushes that had been pruned close to the ground to induce new growth. As the coffee regrew, the castanheiras were to provide them shade; and when the nut trees began to produce, the old coffee would be removed. At the same time Ludovico had provided a local nursery owner by the name of Manoel Barra with seed for germinating. A man without an education but with an instinctive genius for plants, Seu Barra had managed to increase germination from a discouraging  percent to  percent by simply allowing the nuts, as he had observed them in the forest, to “sleep,” shell and all buried in a mixture of earth and sawdust for a year. “When they awaken,” he once explained to me in his enchanting, simple manner, “they already have roots, and within a week after planting in their bamboo baskets, they are sprouting their first leaves.” From his nursery Seu Barra was supplying not only the lower, faster-growing trees for fruit, but the original tall, straight trees to lumbermen who had their own properties. That year he had sold , seedlings and hoped to double his production in the year to come. T h e Tr e e s o f t h e F u t u r e

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That afternoon, after Helena and I had gathered luscious roseate mangoes from the orchard and eggplant, squash, peppers, and green corn from the garden, we went to see how the castanheiras were doing. Planted amid hardy, competitive coffee trees, they had nonetheless held their own and now stood rather like awkward adolescents head and shoulders above their elders, row upon row, following the contours of the hills against the gathering of an afternoon storm. It is hard to describe the deep feeling of satisfaction I felt at the sight—yes, even of relief. For until then, each time I had looked at a noble castanheira standing lone against the sky, I had almost felt it was a farewell. But now for the first time it seemed to me that, with a lot of imagination and persistence, a magnificent tree had been saved from extinction.

] There is little people can’t do if they put their minds to it. Just as Ludovico worked with castanheiras and urucúm, the Japanese cooperative of Cotia, with its flair for diversity, busied itself trying peppers and passion fruit in the shade of rubber trees. In Alta Floresta, soluble coffee was being processed to save on transport and provide work for a growing settlement. Brazil nuts were being packaged for export and powdered guaraná to supply São Paulo executives with innocent highs after sleep-inducing business lunches. (Just as the same effect was sought by Amazonian cowboys herding cattle in the long hot afternoons.) From the Congo Cacaú had brought precious knowledge of how to process milk from papaya to produce papain for the tenderizing of beef and the clarifying of beer. So now hundreds of farmers were planting papaya to shade their cacao trees. Helena and I talked of all this, too, as in the late afternoon we 196

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sat in her large, comfortable kitchen eating a delicious sweet of squash with thick cream cheese made by her own hands. It was a treat all the greater for having spent the last hour jolting and sliding in the mud to get home through an equatorial afternoon rain. “Everything takes extra energy here, have you noticed?” said Helena. “No matter what you do, you end up staggering with exhaustion. That’s why every so often I go off to my valley stopped in time in Minas, to get away from all this activity and talk about the future. Do you understand?” “Oh I do,” said I, thinking of the timeless places I knew and my need for them. Then returning to the scene around us, she said, “Odd isn’t it, how some people can’t live without a challenge?” “Luckily for us,” I answered, thinking of Carson. “Like Ariosto. Imagine a man in his seventies who could have lived the rest of his life in luxury, putting his money at interest. Instead, here we are.” She laughed her deep, throaty laugh, “You wouldn’t believe a place like this unless you saw it, would you? But the thing is everybody here is doing something, so it’ll all turn out in the end.”

] In all those days of clattering along rutted roads to see people who were changing the Amazon, I had promised myself one day in which to remember it as it had been before it had been considered by the world. With Helios Macedo, guide and lover of the wilderness, I set off in a boat up the Teles Pires River. Far upstream, above the Peixoto and its garimpos, we entered a quiet inlet, moored the boat, and simply sat still until our silence allowed us to witness a small part of the intricate life of the birds, insects, and T h e Tr e e s o f t h e F u t u r e

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creatures of the forest reflected in the dark, limpid waters of an as yet unblemished river. A rustling amid the reeds revealed to us a family of capybaras of all ages and sizes, their rodents’ noses lifted to scent the air as they moved to the water’s edge to swim across. A pile of rocks on the bank shifted to become sun-baked turtles sliding into the cooling depths. Overhead we could hear the chatter of monkeys and see the flash of toucans on thieving excursions to other birds’ nests. Pointing upward, Helio showed me the hanging, conelike nest of a jupiara, who chooses wasps’ nests as neighbors for protection against the toucan’s assault. All afternoon we sat, simply watching: A bared patch of riverbank where otters would appear for an evening’s fishing, the mantle of branches and leaves high above us where most of the life of the forest is in constant action. The Amazon as we would have liked it to remain forever. For, like Helios, in my mind as well as my heart, I know this tropical world is better left alone. It is not, as some claim, a future breadbasket for Brazil. It is far too delicate an environment to support large populations, and food can be better produced in the vast regions of southern and central Brazil and the irrigated lands of the northeast. But to wish for the impossible is a dangerous waste of time in a race to save what is good, and obviously a region rich in minerals and wood which comprises half a country’s territory is not going to be left unoccupied. Better to aim toward its occupation being done rationally, working in harmony with nature rather than against it, so that the whole may be kept intact for generations. It can be done. The knowledge exists and the people who would make good use of it are not few; not to mention laws and plans elaborated and restated with a kind of deadening regularity at governmental councils and fancy international conferences. Yet 198

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the vacuum that existed in the Amazon of the s is still huge, making it difficult for anyone to gain a living from anything productive, even as it provides a perfect redoubt for illegal gold panning, logging, and trafficking in drugs and wild animals. All of which causes one to suspect that what is lacking is will. And this is not only here. For although the Amazon is one of the last great wildernesses on earth, the destruction that happens here is but a reflection of what one sees elsewhere in the world. On farms whose owners don’t see the forest as part of the whole. In cities where rivers are treated as sewers and people living in shanties are buried beneath the rubble when the bare earth of hillsides washes away with the rains. Such disasters are blamed on flood and drought though, in fact, most of the time it is the other way around. It is human greed and indifference which allow the land to be laid bare where it should not be, that drains the earth and deprives people of the means to make a healthy living where they are so that they need not flock to the cities to live in shanties or migrate to a delicate environment which cannot support them. I can never think of the Amazon without linking it to such things, though most people don’t, I know. For most, it is a symbol, comfortably remote. Yet if this splendid tropical wilderness is to be saved, it will also be because enough of us recognize that nature is not something to be taken advantage of without paying. That it must be accounted for in everything we do—if not with love, at least with respect. Until this happens, in this world of ever-accelerating change, the advantage remains on the side of the predators. Not only in the Amazon, but everywhere.

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23 A

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Going home from Alta Floresta that time, I didn’t fly the three thousand kilometers back to São Paulo but met Carson and our son Michael in Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul. It was there that Mike had had the good fortune, after graduating from the University of Wisconsin in , to land a job managing a fazenda that raised Santa Gertrudis and Nelore cattle. It was a beautiful fazenda of open, rolling pasturelands bordered by the Dourados River. Among my best memories of it are those of sitting on the porch of the small prefabricated house that was Mike’s lodging, gazing at a sky so immense that we could watch three or four distant storms going on at the same time. For Mike, as it had been for us at Malabar, the job was a first lesson in an endless education, part of which had to do with the southern Mato Grosso custom of manipulating finances through barter. “Borrow from the banks at the going rates?” Early on, Mike’s eyes glowed like stoplights at the madness of such an idea. “Only drug traffickers and politicians can do that!” Better a series of negotiations that would give people of the 201

ordinary world a headache just to think of them—trees in exchange for fence posts; logs in exchange for boards; crops for pastureland; so many hectares of pasture in exchange for so many calves born where the cows grazed. With a normal amount of beginner’s mistakes, Mike adapted quite well to this balancing act. And this, I suspect, was because the act and the cast of characters involved suited him better than the demanding precision of the big trading firms that his brothers had chosen for their careers in the great city of São Paulo. In his first years there, part of the learning too had to do with an old habit in that region of burning pastures in the spring to bring on new growth. It was the “lie in a hammock and toss a match” system that was particularly disastrous if it didn’t rain when it was supposed to. Upon arrival at his new job, Mike had found the place not only badly overstocked but suffering the effects of one of the longest regional droughts in years. The whole countryside had become kindling, and a good deal of that dry season saw Mike and his vaqueiros fighting fires that threatened the fazenda on every side. In between, as the grass gave out, they sought ways to keep the cattle going by feeding them rice hulls and pouring molasses and urea on the few tufts of grass that still grew in the swamps and on the edges of lakes and streams. They got through with remarkably few losses, and in the end it was an experience which Mike would draw on in his future work with pastures and supplementary feeding.

] In that spring too he would meet someone who, as he put it so aptly himself, filled all his empty spaces. A person romantic and

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spirited and yet of such inner strength and calm that Mike’s own dreaming nature could not have found a better balance. Marcia Fujii was the descendant of Japanese immigrants whose story is every bit as fascinating as that of the Italians who came to Brazil at the turn of the century. Like the Italians, the first Japanese to emigrate here were contracted to work on the great coffee fazendas of São Paulo and Paraná. Like the Italians too, those hard-working people were subjected to the fazenda store system which threatened to keep them eternally indebted for their passage. Serfs under the ancient feudal system in Japan, they were not about to be so in Brazil. Unlike the Italians, though, who bargained and beguiled their way out of a bad situation, the taciturn Japanese kept their thoughts to themselves. Some pulled in their belts till the belts almost touched their spines to pay the passage. Others simply slipped away in the night, turning up elsewhere in the vast emptiness which surrounded them to continue their lives on their own. Few would ever again be caught in someone else’s employ. At the most, they worked as sharecroppers until they could earn enough to rent or buy land of their own. They formed the cooperative of Cotia, one of the first in Brazil, and through it did more to diversify agriculture than everyone before them put together. And as ever, Brazilians, being as open as they can be autocratic, respected them for their knowledge, diligence, and ability. “Who on earth would grow an orchard full of peaches in which each fruit had to be enveloped in a paper sack to protect it from the fruit fly? Only the Japanese,” people would say with a mixture of irreverence and admiration. Yet if the Japanese were able to take greater advantage of their own ability than most, it was

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because, unlike other country folk, they simply would not accept ending their education with the fourth grade. We first became familiar with this fact when we lived at Fazenda Pagador in Presidente Prudente. Driving through that rough, ever changing countryside, one of my finest memories was of the sight of the Japanese children walking for kilometers along the dusty roads to town, carrying their polished school shoes in their hands, an impression that was strengthened by the same sight in reverse as they returned in the afternoon to help on the land. Like others, they grew cotton and peanuts to supply the insatiable mills. But diversity being their code of survival, they were also beginning to grow the fruits and vegetables that would soon become necessities in a frontier town becoming more civilized and sophisticated. In those days, as now, a compulsive canner, one of my favorite expeditions was to the fazenda of a family named Kakihara, whose specialties were grapes and pears. The road through the fazenda wound around hill after hill covered with meticulously arbored fruits until it reached a huge clapboard house which seemed to ramble endlessly amid mango, avocado, and orange trees with no real eye toward where, due to a growing dynasty, it might be forced to ramble in the future. Yet there was no doubt as to the importance of the central kitchen, where numerous daughters and daughters-in-law, amid clutches of robust babies, prepared meals to be cooked on four huge wood-burning stoves. A fragrance of herbs and soy sauce always hovered above a table where heaps of vegetables, pork, and chicken lay waiting to be precisely chopped for the cooking. At the center of everything Dona Yatsuma Kakihara, bent double by years of doing everything, resided. Nodding and bowing, this unassuming little old lady gave orders in soft murmurs 204

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that were magically heard despite the gossip and laughter of the young at work. And from amid this extraordinary ferment, she always managed to withdraw a steaming kettle, and with perfect grace, offer tea in Japanese porcelain. A vision of artistry derived from chaos that shall remain with me forever.

] To bring my story back to Mike and Marcia, one of these early Japanese havens from the coffee fazendas and their tyranny of debt was the town of Bastos, São Paulo, where Marcia’s father, Senhor Iotoro Fujii, was born in . From there as a young man he migrated to Dourados, where, working first as a trucker and then as a rice miller, he established himself in what was then a raw frontier town. Since, it has become a boom town on the proceeds from farming and ranching and contraband across the Paraguayan border as Brazil’s irrational tax policies have made Paraguay the exporter of far more grain and coffee than it could possibly have land for the planting. As Dourados grew, the rice miller, Seu Fujii, prospered and turned to agriculture himself, farming on a beautiful stretch of hills and streams and wooded copses not far from town. It was there that Mike, in the traditional manner expected of him, asked for Marcia’s hand. In answer, Seu Fujii, a dour patriarch of few words, informed him, “In our family women only part from their husbands dead or as widows.” That condition firmly established, it was Mike’s condition that, like other members of our family, he would be married in the open air. Something to which the Catholic Fujiis agreed, so long as a priest presided. So it was that, with all this give and take, the A We d d i n g o f Tw o Wo r l d s

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soft-spoken, labyrinthine house of Fujii and that of the outspoken, noisy Gelds were met in matrimony on the third of July, . For the great occasion, which coincided with the World Cup soccer tournament, always a monumental event in Brazil, our own family and friends had hired a bus and seen that it was well stocked for the overnight journey. In this bus, which the drivers dubbed O Bar Vascolante (The Traveling Bar), they arrived in early afternoon in time to catch a nerve-wracking Copa do Mundo game with Italy. Most of them gringo dreamers like ourselves, they poured themselves into the Fujii’s house in town to sprawl before the television, creating an embarrassingly boisterous contrast to the sedate Japanese elders who sat in their midst. But what with the euphoric atmosphere of the game and under the spell of Marcia’s mother, Fujiê, an all-time great lady and hostess, everyone soon became the best of friends. The game ending in Brazilian victory, we happily went to the fazenda to celebrate over a gaucho soup called pocherro made of beef hocks, mandioca, onions, collards, and oranges served from an enormous kettle outdoors. The next day, it was Marcia, who, having studied music and art in Paris and decorated weddings for a living in Dourados, saw to it that her wedding be accompanied by Beethoven played on a violin and a piano beneath trees hung with flowers in a grove of aged mangoes. And afterward, in true Mato Grossense style, everyone—relatives, friends, and vaqueiros alike—feasted greatly and danced to Brazilian and Paraguayan music under that boundless sky bright with stars. Sometimes before and during the wedding I sensed that Carson and Seu Fujii eyed one another through their brave smiles with certain misgivings, as if each feared that the powerful culture of one family would swallow the 206

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offspring of the other. But they seemed to have forgotten to take into account that they had both brought their children up to be independent. Nor had they considered the Brazilian culture, which, without bothering to impose itself, has made of every immigrant someone whose outlook is decidedly original.

] Dourados—with its blend of Japanese and gauchos from southern Rio Grande do Sul, its frontier sprinkling of Indians and Arab merchants, and its mineiros from Minas Gerais at the country’s heart—is typical of this original outlook. It is a big, sprawling town with wide streets and alligators in the fountains on the square; a university, ballet schools, and the Gauchos’ Club, which permeates all with its wonderful traditions of food and music and dress. Everyone there is learning what is described as “instrumental English”—a dreadful language which Mike’s sister-in-law Katia, a beautiful woman with sharp Indian features and the deep-set eyes of an Arab ancestor, was trying to explain to me the other day. And everyone is using it through their computers. Instead of burning pastures, the influx of gauchos rotate pasture with direct-planted soybeans, wheat, and corn. And Mike, working with cattlemen, preaching animal nutrition with the zeal of a humorous prophet, seems to fit right in. As the grandchildren grow older, they exchange worlds. Erin and Dustin love the openness and ease of the big frontier town free of the confinement of their great, dangerous city. Amanda and Caio and Maíra thrill to the “sophistication” of São Paulo. They don’t come often as it is a very long way. But when they do, it is a movable feast among brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, and old friends from Tietê, which compasses three A We d d i n g o f Tw o Wo r l d s

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fazendas within a radius of thirty kilometers. Mike says he has to come to Pau D’Alho to satisfy his need to shout. And certainly, though we have a reputation for being noisy, we are never more so than when he is here. They were here only a week ago, and in their wake, we are still eating leftovers of roast pork, rice and beans, and sushi-sashimi. How quickly the time has passed between the moment when Amanda was a bald-headed infant Buddha to this one in which she is a lovely, determined young lady who, like her fiery-eyed father, knows her own mind and speaks it boldly, if not quite so loudly. She is preparing to study medicine. “To take care,” she says, “of old people and little children.” “Why them?” say I. “Because I love them,” she answers me from the heart of her soft-voiced, close-knit labyrinthine world.

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24 A

Handful of Grass

As the saying goes in Israel, after the drought, it rains. And so it has, leaving behind us drought and frost we had not experienced since disaster caused us to plant pecan trees in . The rain came Friday night, as we sat by the fire reading, listening to music, listening to the wind—wondering if it was going to turn the clouds away even again. But instead there came that relieving sound, first heard falling on the flagstones of the patio, then beating on the roof with a steadiness that filled the gutters and spilled from the spouting, half drowning the hanging ferns. This morning, walking through the hay field on my way back from the horta, I came upon long, quarter-moon scatterings of mushrooms. They were not the tall thin-stemmed ones which the teenaged boys once discovered could cause the dancers of the quadrille to really dance to the fiddler in the painting above the fireplace. They were squat, beige- and pink-fleshed champignons which I gathered greedily and sautéed with basil for lunch. Then yesterday, full of plans inspired by the

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sight and smell of rain-soaked earth, we rode over the fazenda from one end to the other. For the dogs, who think pastures are made for poking into the burrows of owls and armadillos, flushing quails from their nests in the grass, or swooping after swallows in flight, this Sunday ride is always a holiday. And in a sense they are right, though there’s more to it than that. For this is the one day during the week when there is time to look over things which can only be seen at a slow pace from a saddle on the back of a horse. Usually we set off across the cow and calf pastures which, for watching’s sake, are closest to the fazenda’s center. It is here that most of the calves are born during the early months of the dry season when the weather is more stable and kinder to creatures who are just getting used to the rigors of life. Until they are weaned at six months or so, one of our greatest pleasures is to watch the calves go through a routine which is so akin to that of human beings it is laughable. Like children skipping down a road, they run in a gang—butting, showing off, leaping in the air and racing in circles for the sheer joy of being alive. Like children too, they love to be where they shouldn’t—on the wrong side of a fence exploring, sticking their noses into everything, testing their bravery by ganging up on the dogs and then exploding in all directions as William, the basset hound, emits a calculatedly terrifying “Woof!” But then comes the time when the urge to fill their stomachs and the cows’ need to be relieved of their milk causes each calf to join its mother. Satiated, they gang together again until drowsy, then collapse in a calf cluster to nap in the shade while a babá cow hovers nearby. As proof of this amazing habit, we have a photo of one such nanny, lying and peacefully chewing her cud 210

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surrounded by nine sleeping charges. It is a trait inherited by Santa Gertrudis cattle from their Indian ancestors who came from dry regions where cows have to wander far from their young to graze. Although here at Pau D’Alho there isn’t too far to wander, like the bees our cattle seem to have a predilection for the grasslands that border the ravine, and it is easy to understand why. In this place, edged by woods threaded with vines, there is always something in bloom. To the bees this means infinite possibilities for honey making. For the cattle, who like variety as much as anyone, there are all kinds of grasses and native legumes to make a salad for their grazing. The land here is too steep to cultivate, thus leaving undisturbed those legumes, with their capacity to fix nitrogen in the soil, as well as who knows how many beneficent herbs, which seem to contrive to keep the cows and calves sleeker in these pastures than anywhere else on the fazenda. Last Sunday we came upon the cows as they were settling down to chew their cuds, something more which they seldom fail to do in unison, generally at the same hour, just around ten o’clock. When we arrive at such a moment, I always find myself feeling rude, like someone who comes calling right after lunch. Though Carson, who doesn’t share my complex, has no qualms about circling among the cattle, urging his sturdy quarter horse, Jezebel, to instinctively give this cow or that a suggestive nip at the base of her tail bone, bringing her abruptly to her feet. Sunday, as Meiga, one of the milk cows, struggled upward, the size of her udder assured us that she should calve in another week—the knowledge filling our heads with thoughts of butter and cheese and milk for the fazenda as well as Seliza’s day care center in town. Such is the A Handful of Grass

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productivity of Meiga, for which she is rewarded with queen-size scoops of extra feed. Though the scenery was brown in the pastures, green shoots were pushing through and the spring-fed streams in the ravine were running clear, putting us in an optimistic enough mood to hope we can get through the dry season without great mishap. But that as ever will depend on a few lucky rains. For now at least, as the sun rides higher in the sky and the lengthening days give more light, we can expect within a month or so to be able to cut new hay. Or at least so it seemed on Sunday as, having ridden through all the pastures, checking and counting the cattle, we came out where the hay fields slope beneath the pecan trees toward the road. Having survived the frosts well, how green the fields looked against the surrounding brown of the countryside. What a beautiful contrast to the winter-bare trees that rose out of their midst in a scene which will change constantly, as in the long days to come the trees will leaf out and the grass will become a sea. Whatever the time of year, there is an assuring look of permanency about the whole which makes it all the more amazing to think that those fields have been there only a short time. Nor would they be there at all were it not for Carson’s ever-insatiable curiosity and one of those moments of chance and circumstance which have so often saved our day. For small farmers the world over, “niche” has become a byword these days. In essence it is the alternative to large-scale, largemachined agriculture which needs as well huge expanses of land to make it viable. A small farmer has to find things that will fit into his land and suit some kind of market that can provide a steady living. For us, purebred cattle had been an excellent niche 212

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long before that word came into fashion. But that was during the seventies and eighties, when hyperinflation caused people to put their money into land and cattle to “keep it safe.” “So that period was good for you,” some would say. But I would answer, “If there was any external phenomenon that caused us suffering in Brazil, it was inflation.” I actually feel chilled when I think of that “disease” which at one point in the late s had reached  percent a month. No. Hyperinflation is good for a while for speculators, irresponsible bankers, and unscrupulous people who have no qualms about defaulting on their bills. But for those who try to make a living by being productive, who work hard to pay their bills, it is just a grievous losing battle. No matter how high the prices paid by people who had stacks of money, all of us were losing. Brazil was losing. Still, the irony of the gradual shift during the s from inflation to monetary stability was that, as the people who speculated in land and prize-winning bulls gave way to those who raised cattle for a living, prices fell accordingly. It was, then, a dangerously low moment in the life of Pau D’Alho when by chance we encountered the fellow with the handful of grass. We were in Mato Grosso at the time, on one of our cattleselling trips to Dourados. By then, perhaps in the rich grain and pasturelands around Dourados more than anywhere, the old adage of “lying in a hammock and tossing a match once a year” had ceased to apply at all. As people had to become more productive to make a living from the same land, there was an ever greater need to improve pastures. At the cattle show, everyone was talking about better grasses that would sustain two animals on a hectare rather than one animal on ten and bring them to market in two years instead of four. In the midst of all this talk, an A Handful of Grass

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American who had worked with grasses for years handed Carson a bundle of shoots of a variety he called Tifton  and told him to try it out. “It’s the latest miracle grass,” he said. “Believe me, I’ve been selling it for a dollar a shoot.” Doubtful but in that desperate moment ready to give a miracle a try, Carson coddled the precious bundle until we arrived home, whereupon he went straight to the horta and planted the shoots with care. Then while they grew, he set about learning all he could —by Internet, literature, and correspondence with the experimental station in Tifton, Georgia—concerning the huge genus Cynodon, commonly known as Bermudagrass, to which this variety, alleged to be more precious than gold, belonged. What the hell, we thought, even at half the price . . . and it did look like good grass. A grass that spreads by stolons, in the warm rainy season, measured by the little stakes that Carson stuck in the ground, the Tifton Bermudagrass grew an inch a day. In a month we had a bed full, in two months we had a quarter of an acre; in three months, a hectare. Enough to see firsthand that indeed it grew well, was more leafy and more palatable than the other cynodon grasses— coast cross and the African stars—we were already familiar with in Brazil. But then as more and more people began to express both curiosity and doubt as to the true origins of the grass, it became clear what the next step had to be. Thrusting a handful into a plastic bag in the bottom of a suitcase, off we went to Tifton, Georgia. There, as opposed to Brazil, where researchers have a tendency to guard their findings as though they were military secrets, Professor Burton, the scholarly, thoughtful director of the department of plant sciences, seemed delighted to be of help. Right off he admitted that these 214

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grasses, of which there are some four hundred varieties, were indeed damnably hard to tell apart. With our sample spread across his desk, even he was temporarily stumped. But once certain that, as Brazilians would say, we’d been given a cat for a hare, he took us to the experimental plot where the true Tifton  was growing and gladly provided us with a bagful of shoots to take home. That was the beginning of a ritual whereby Carson seldom travels without visiting experimental stations and coming home with plastic bags full of shoots and letters of authorization in his suitcase, looking superior and righteous as he prays for the green light while passing through customs. So far Providence has given him the green light every time, so that we now grow five varieties of cynodon as rootstock and hay and presently have two more sending out their stolons and rhizomes amid the broccoli and cabbages in the horta. It was also the real beginning of our slowly turning all our croplands into grass and learning as we go along. Gradually, as the shoots multiplied, contour strip by strip the land was subsoiled and disked, the rootstock divided and planted in furrows by hand. Once more, as in the fazenda’s beginning, I am glad we have photos to remind us of how the weeds came on with the opening of the earth by the subsoiler. It was virtually impossible to see our struggling grasses among everything from wild turnips to a nutgrass called tiririca, whose nasty little tubers grow from roots deep in the soil, desperately multiplying to survive. Fortunately, thanks to the single-minded persistence of scientists in laboratories, a specific herbicide seeks out those tubers, attacking them as they sprout. We tried it, it worked—bringing to the surface with the weeds, as always, the whole subject of the use of herbicides and A Handful of Grass

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insecticides. At such moments one asks oneself, since the day we upset nature’s balance by breaking the earth with a stick, has there been any farmer who hasn’t had to use a poison now and then? Perhaps one day in this world of never-ending research and discovery, it will happen. But at any time what makes sense is to try to create conditions whereby they need be used as little as possible, which is what happened here once our grasses took their hold. Now the roots and stolons choke the weeds with an ever-thicker matting which is nearly impenetrable to anything but rain. By the same token, the rain penetrates better than ever, soaking through the spongelike matting down into soil now sewn by the roots against the torrential downpours that are so common in these climes. What a pleasure and what a relief to see the earth now so covered that, rather than gullies where tons of soil were once eroded with every storm, whatever surplus water there is runs fresh and clean through the matted green. In fact, now it’s rather amusing to think that the next step must surely be to try to find a legume strong enough to take root, survive, and compete with the grass. Perhaps it will be an annual called aschynomene which itself was once brought up by the subsoiler out of years of dormancy in the depths of the earth. Suddenly it appeared, and, with a knife always handy for such things, Carson dug it up to find its roots covered with those amazing nodules in which bacteria take nitrogen from the atmosphere and fix it in the earth to feed whatever grows nearby. Now, at the end of the rainy season each year, this legume covers more and more of the hills of our old pastures with heather-colored flowers before seeding itself and disappearing. “The thing to do,” says Carson, sitting on his horse and puffing 216

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on his cigar, “will be to broadcast the seed while the grass is still low, just before the first real rains begin. No harm in trying, is there?” “None.” Not only is there no harm in trying, but what else is there to do? Didn’t we get our new grasses from someone who was trying them out? Is there a single successful crop in Brazil that hasn’t been started in this way—from coffee brought in someone’s suitcase from French Guiana to the acerola fruit in the Amazon that were sold in the open market for years before someone suddenly discovered they were full of vitamin C to be exported in juice to Japan? Like the grasses, if the legume aschynomene survives, the word will be spread by a kind of agricultural grapevine that has worked incredibly well, when you think of it. Once a crop is taken up by the grapevine, next come the agricultural magazines and TV programs of which there are more and more these days, not to mention the Internet. Then amazingly and amusingly, the crop up and running, the farmers who got it started and proved its worth in the first place find themselves having field days sponsored by a belatedly interested secretary of agriculture. In the meantime, one of the best things about trying something new is the way people come not just to buy but to walk over the pastures and fields to see all there is to be seen before coming back to sit beneath the pau Brazil tree in the patio, have a cafèzinho, and talk. They come from everywhere. One day it’s a young man who is working to form a dairy cooperative in an Agrarian Reform settlement nearby; another it’s an estânceiro with thousands of hectares of pastures in Rio Grande do Sul; another, a doctor fascinated by the links between agriculture and medicine. Each has a distinct experience and set of circumstances from A Handful of Grass

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which we can learn as much as they. For in this business the old Brazilian saying “No one is the owner of the truth” could scarcely fit better. More often as well, the visitor has a story to tell about a world and a life as different as Brazil is huge and varied, causing us once more to want to pack our bags and travel. Eventually coming back to the reason for their visit, Carson suggests they try several varieties on a small scale to see which does best, if any. And then he adds as much to himself as anyone, “The thing is, we’re always looking for a miracle grass—one that, once we’ve limed and fertilized and done all the rest we need to do, will flourish forever without care. But we have a way of forgetting that grazing is like harvesting a crop. If we want the same results every year, we have to put back into the soil what the cattle take out.” “Umm, umm. You’ve got something there,” say our newfound friends before perhaps going on to comment, “So our having done everything according to the rules, it should follow that comes the rainy season, the grass should grow belly high to a cow and all our barns shall be filled. Eh, Seu Carson? Hrarr, hrarr!” “If no new surprises come along,” he is obliged to laugh back, somewhat hollowly. For if there’s one thing farmers learn as they go along, it’s that nature is full of surprises. Constantly defending itself with plagues of locusts to feed on seas of soybeans and bevies of spittlebugs and brown caterpillars to feast on the newly sprouting grass. And these in turn tempt the hungry emus and pigeons displaced from their wild homes in the savannas and forests along the riverbanks. So it seems, with every new crop, we upset an old equilibrium and so too must find a way to compensate. However that may be, with each Sunday ride it becomes more 218

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clear to me that if we want to look for miracles, we need look no farther than those which exist in nature itself. And lucky are we who happen upon a niche in their midst.

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25 T h e

Man in the Bell Jar

Though, for some, the multiplication of the grass might be likened to that of the fish and the loaves, there is much more to it than that. Most of it has to do with such people as those who, here at Pau D’Alho, tear the grass stolons apart with their hands and firm them into the furrows with their boots. People whom we depend upon and who in turn depend upon their physical labor for their daily living. Seu Pedro is one such person. Why everyone calls him Seu Pedro instead of just Pedro, no one has yet been fully able to explain. Perhaps it’s his stature, tall and erect and plainly dignified. Perhaps it’s the way he sits in the back seat, smoking his corn husk cigarette and reading the freshly fetched newspaper, while I drive him from town to work. Or it might be because, apparently preferring silence to the lunch-hour gossip under the rancho, he sits at a distance under a tree. Amadeu says he hasn’t the malice required for gossip, and I’ve a feeling this is true. But if there’s one thing of which I’m absolutely sure it is that, in his sixties, beneath a broad straw hat, Seu Pedro can still put in a full day 220

hoeing weeds, all the while puffing on his precious cigarette as though it were his prime source of fuel. He and Mingo, who make an inseparable pair. The one silent and aloof; the other full of malice encouraged by drink which nonetheless does not interfere with his endurance. How well the fazenda must know the measured tread of these two as they walk through the day, from : A.M. to : P.M., hastening only to reach the sacred lunch and coffee hours between. And yet, the one holding the post in place while the other socks the earth in around it, over the years since we all came here they must have restrung parts of every fence on the fazenda at least a hundred times. Now and then I can’t help wondering if these two have never had dreams, or if they have always been simply content to spend their lives here hoeing, planting, building as the weather and seasons demand, year after year after year. If so, I suppose that’s a fortunate thing. For what if, like Amadeu, everyone had dreams? And yet, of course, it is Amadeu’s being a dreamer that makes his story more interesting than most. The way he tells it, it all began in the sixties in the caatinga lands of Bahia when, about midway through a drought, there was nothing left for his family to eat. At that moment Amadeu’s father made the huge decision to leave their little piece of land and join a truckload of others going southward to find work clearing the forests for coffee planters in Paraná. During the two-week journey, they traveled in a truck with benches on the sides and a rack in the middle to hold onto—seating arrangements commonly known as the “parrot’s perch.” No wonder then that, on this suffering trip, Amadeu’s mother died in childbirth. Nor is it really so surprising that, in the manner of people who suddenly The Man in the Bell Jar

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discover that their neighbors have less than they do, a fellow traveling mother took over the baby. Once established in a crude rancho in the Paraná forest, Amadeu’s father and older brothers went to work chopping down trees, while ten-year-old Amadeu became the cook who, to help pay expenses, found himself serving up rice and beans and xarque as well for other laborers who had no families. But that was only until he was twelve, when his ten-year-old sister took over the cooking and he was set to felling trees and planting coffee with the men. “It was a terrible life,” he once told me as we looked out over the terreiro where his own children were playing tag. “No child should ever have to endure it. The worst for us Baianos who came from the hot, dry lands of the northeast was the cold of winter. The sun never seemed to reach us before it went down again. I was never warm except when I was cooking, and then only the front of me. Sometimes I could hardly bend my fingers round an axe. We never had enough clothes, enough covers, even with all of us in one bed. To bathe we had to get up courage to go into the streams where my sister and I washed the clothes. But neither we nor the clothes ever really got clean. The red earth stained our skin and dyed our shirts. The mosquitoes and piums ate us alive until we got so we didn’t even feel them. I don’t know how we stood it, but when there’s nothing else for it, it’s a miracle what you can do.”

] Having survived those years in the forest and much more, Amadeu came to us as a young man in his late twenties. I remember him, solid as rock in appearance, with the barrel chest and 222

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rounded shoulders of one who had performed herculean labors even as he grew. His features were equally strong and, though his face became boyish when he laughed, his brilliant dark eyes were keen and curious. In fact, we quickly learned that was just what he was—what people here call a curioso. That is, someone with an inquisitive mind who, without the help of formal instruction, learns by looking over others’ shoulders. In truth it is what most skilled people are here, from carpenters and electricians to those amusing young boys who help us with our computers—compounding computer confusion as they go along trying this and that. Saying as they do, “Don’t ask, just be glad when it works.” In Amadeu’s case, we soon found his leaning was toward mechanics. In fact his capacity for repair often extended into the realm of invention. As a result our tractor shed soon became a haven for old machines that still worked with obsolete parts molded by Amadeu’s hands into new ones. In the same manner his yard is populated with objects of his own creation: a sugarcane press carved from a log; an irrigation system composed of leaking hoses and corks; a wooden propeller atop a post that not only spins but swivels with the wind. We would also discover that his approach to repair was not only invariably original but accompanied by a temerity that often carried him to astonishing lengths. So it was on the day when, unable to flush air from the laundry pipes by any of the usual means, he lay down and sucked on a hose attached to the faucet until a blast of water rewarded his effort with a shriveled, pipe-shaped mouse. I am sure if Amadeu had gone to school, his life would have been different. For there he would have learned certain basic concepts which you and I take for granted but which help us understand why the sun rises, the rain falls, or what makes an electrical The Man in the Bell Jar

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circuit. The basic knowledge would have provided that inventive mind with a more consistent logic to use in dealing with everyday complexities. Without it, it often seems that ignorance has built a bell jar around Amadeu that distorts his vision and frustrates him at every turn. “Electricity is a mystery,” he says. But this doesn’t prevent him from having countless theories as to its manipulation. One of these is that the best way to keep electrical machines from burning is to remove all the fuses—thus avoiding obstruction by untrustworthy devices of the current’s natural flow. In part because such devices are untrustworthy, and in part because no argument can convince him of the purpose of a fuse, he and Carson have come to a compromise on the subject. It consists of unscrewing all the fuses when we switch a machine on and screwing them back in when we switch it off . . . so that in a storm? God knows! The whole thing, in turn, often makes me wonder if we did understand what we learned in school after all. At any rate, this is just one of a series of compromises in the life of Amadeu that, despite the bell jar, has always been full of dreams. One of these was to have been a truck driver and thereby, like Waldemar Bezzera, to have come to know what he describes with a forward thrust of his chin as “the world out there.” But as with so many other things, such as being able to read instructions, street signs, and the newspapers his children bring home, his illiteracy denies him the chance. A greater dream has been to have a piece of land of his own to do with as he sees fit. Indeed, because Amadeu loves the land with the heart of a true farmer, it pains me to think that, like so many we know, without collateral to borrow on, the most he has been able to do is buy a house in town. Once in a while, frustrated and 224

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angered like a caged creature, he decides to go and live there— retire or quit and get a job in town. But his wife Miralda says, “And do what? Work in a guava paste factory? Be a carpenter’s helper? Away from your chickens and yard full of trees on the fazenda? From the work you like to do? You crazy?” Luckily for everyone, she convinces him of what he knows about himself. He does love his chickens, which, like himself, rebel at being cooped and spill out to roam the fazenda, healthy and happy—dropping their eggs amid the hay bales, scratching and pecking for bugs in the fields and for antibiotics in the manure. He loves all birds, for that matter, and trees. His pleasure in them sometimes makes me wonder if having taken part in the destruction of great forests hasn’t sewn within his being a veneration for these things. Certainly, if I want to know the name of a bird or a tree, I ask Amadeu, and, with the memory of those who can’t read and have to keep what they value in their heads, he never fails to tell me what I have to write down to remember. Nor does he miss an opportunity to plant a tree. The purple ipê trees that line the roads of the fazenda, the avocados, acerolas, jabuticabas, and pitangas that thrive in our orchards all come from seeds carefully saved, laboriously brought to fruition by the hands of Amadeu. At one moment, full of wonder and hope, the next, angry and exasperated at his own ignorance, he is useless to argue with, causing Carson, in equal exasperation, to throw up his hands and walk away, saying near prayerfully, “Jesus, I told him he was putting that part in the wrong way. But no! He had to take the baler out and see it running backwards himself!” Stubborn as he is, fortunately, he is a humorous man, who, though he won’t admit his mistakes, somehow manages to laugh at them as though they were someone else’s. One who, if he can’t The Man in the Bell Jar

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always do what he wants, at least does what he likes. Who, confronting his tormented dreams, climbs up on the tractor and goes out into his “best of all possible worlds”—the fields and pastures around him. Fortunately too, soon he’ll have plenty to do as, from the growing strength of the sunlight and looks of the trees, one can see that spring is in the air. It is unmistakable to me now, although in the early days of our life in Brazil, I, who came from a northerly world of four distinct seasons, could scarcely distinguish the changes here. I missed the longing one feels in Ohio for spring or autumn, the coming of which somehow confers a distinct sense of time. It took a while to appreciate those changes in a subtropical clime, where the sense of time is blurred as the seasons creep up on you. Then gradually I came to see that, subtle as they were, the transitions possessed a rival beauty. On the Tropic of Capricorn it is in the spring—September and October—that the leaves change color. As the days lengthen and the sunlight becomes more harsh, against the dry background of a winter countryside the woods and copses take on vivid shades of pale bronze and verdigris which darken, as the leaves bud and grow in spring, into the sombre greens of the long summer days. It is then that the greens of the trees, in turn, form a solid contrast to the brilliant colors of their own exuberant flowerings and those of the vines that creep uncontainably over everything. Here, almost without one’s being aware, the rainy summer season—Christmas to Easter—is upon you. Everything is burgeoning and we are trying to keep up—tilling and harvesting between the torrential downpours that come out of clouds that pile up each evening into glowing sunsets and terrifying storms. It is a season of plenty—of apples, figs, peaches, pears, plums, 226

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grapes, mangoes, figs, avocados, blackberries, acerolas, jabuticabas, pineapples—not to mention humble bananas of every variety, so good our five children devoured at least twelve dozen a week among them when they were growing up. So many fruits they make you nervous. So many crops, from sugarcane, soybeans, and cotton to the staples—corn, rice, manioc, and beans. Plenty of everything, including weeds. It is also a harsh season in which rainfall upon bare earth can be more destructive than it is beneficent. Even when farmers build ditches and plant on the contours of the hills, ditches break and turn overnight into rivers of topsoil—gone for good from your fields to choke the streams below. Ask us. For when we first came here, like everyone else who planted corn and rice and beans, we made contour ditches and we plowed. But knowing what would happen just the same, rather than be soothed, we spent many a sleepless night, tormented by the sound of torrential rain. At this time too, the sun’s effect can be equally deadly. A week of drought in the Brazilian summer can do more damage than can months in the winter when sunlight is thin. For in this season the merciless intensity of the sun’s rays simply bakes out the organic matter, leaving sandy soils hot and sterile and clay soils hard as cement. Even in the horta, where Carson with his long, heavy hoe works compost and manure into the ground every time he makes a new bed, you can see this leaching effect. Witnessing this in the horta, here on the Tropic of Capricorn, we think of the Amazon and the northeast—the equatorial regions of Brazil— and shake our heads in worry, and we are more aware than ever of the truth that, especially in our world, no land should be left bare at any time. The Man in the Bell Jar

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That is why for a long time now our plow that once turned the earth over and laid it bare has been retired and we use a subsoiler which cuts deeply through the soil, leaving the trash of other seasons’ plantings on the surface. And it is why we are so happy with our grasses, which provide a permanent cover even as they create new organic matter with the rotting of their roots. But even so we must constantly work to maintain the balance that keeps the soil alive, spongy, resilient. Every bit of manure from our barns goes onto the land, and still we buy another great source of organic matter and nitrogen, the liquid residue from the refining of molasses and sugar. For centuries this “waste” was dumped in the rivers by the sugar mills, destroying the life therein by absorbing all the oxygen. Then such behavior was prohibited, causing sugar producers to use their imaginations in new ways. Now it is a kind of liquid gold that is spread on all the cane fields right after the harvest. A note of progress that should not go unnoticed. It rained a few days ago, not much, but enough for Amadeu to take advantage today of the damp ground to run the aerator over the fields. As the machine’s long, sharp teeth perforate the matting of grass and soil, unearthing worms and stirring up insects as it goes, the flocks of birds come swooping in. This time not parrots, but field birds—plovers and seriemas and caracarás and the little ones—swallows and doves and black and red cardinals who indeed look like what Amadeu calls sarjentos argentinos. Oh yes, and hundreds of those white egrets which, though no one knows why, emigrated to Brazil from Africa some fifteen years ago. Since their arrival, like daily workers themselves, the egrets have come—flocking in at sunrise to spend the day picking the ticks off the cattle and scavenging for bugs in the fields, flying away at dusk to their nests in the trees along the Tietê River. 228

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They are going home later as the days get longer, and, once it has crept up on us, spring and summer will be as much of a marathon for the farmer here as anywhere. Indeed, now, besides “belly high to a cow,” we have a new measure for the growth of grass. When it’s neck high to an egret, it’s ready to cut for hay. That will be soon. And then everyone will spend many days in the fields until dark.

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x

26 A

Timeless Place

It is in an interim such as this, between the dry season and the rainy when there’s still not so much to do, that one often gets a hankering to be somewhere completely different from the constantly changing valley of the Tietê. Somewhere that, for exact opposite reasons from those mentioned above, seems destined to remain unaltered. One such place is the great floodplain of the Paraguay River—known on the Paraguayan side as the Chaco, on the Brazilian side as the Pantanal. Flying over the Pantanal from the height of soaring vultures, one looks down upon a seemingly endless maze of forests, open campo, and savannas broken by round mirrors of lakes that are strung together by labyrinths of streams which in the rainy season swell to join the great rivers and cover half the land. A world at once harsh and fragile, dominated less by the hand of man than the ebb and flow of its waters. None, of course, know this better than those who live there, the pantaneiros, who must also live by the floodplain’s rules. One such person is Belkiss Rondon Rocha Azevedo, who introduced me to the Pantanal on a September day 231

in , not without suffering, and went on to teach me to ride in its waters. Like most pantaneiros, Belkiss has a good measure of Indian blood in her veins, in this case mingled with Greek and Portuguese to create a fine-featured woman with skin the color of honey, a full, sensual mouth, and a constitution of iron. Small and erect in posture, whether dressed for the theater in São Paulo or to ride herd in the Pantanal, she is elegant and imposing. Indeed, perched astride her big stallion with a pistol strapped to her belt, though she be a woman in a man’s world, there is no question as to who owns the final word. And I for one, when riding by her side, always do my best not to miss a word she says. I did this on my first visit because I didn’t want to fall off my horse or lose my way; later, because I wanted to learn everything I could from her in order to write a novel. Now, though the novel is finished, I still return whenever I can to the Pantanal. For the more I go there, the more I see there is no end to learning in that place where for centuries herders have lived in an extraordinary harmony with nature. Sometimes I catch a ride from “nearby” Aquidauana with Timoteo Proença, a cattle dealer. If so, the trip entails twenty minutes of swooping by plane to calculate the size of herds and the depth of water as we cover the  kilometers to Belkiss’s Fazenda Fazendinha. Other times, I ride in the back of a truck carrying supplies. Then it is usually Seu Caco, the handyman, who drives, aided by Zezinho, the horse trainer, who, standing in the back beside me, peers into the distance with a navigator’s eye and, thumping warnings on the cabin’s roof, skillfully guides his partner round bog and mire. Then, on a trail only a pantaneiro could

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define over terrain that only God could invent to defy the will of man, the same trip normally takes ten hours. Once when things were extra wet, the truck had to be met twothirds of the way by a tractor and a wagon which traveled much of the remaining distance through water up to its floorboards. How a trail can be found in the bottom of a lake is something I can only attribute to a pantaneiro’s seventh sense. Though as always in case of emergency, a winch and ropes nestled amid the supplies that surrounded us, we had no need to use them. That time the trip took fourteen hours well counted by me, at the end of which, as I staggered up the steps of the porch, Belkiss’s husband, Geraldo, said reprovingly, “How could you have done that, Belkiss?” To which she replied, laughing mercilessly, “What better way to get the feel of the Pantanal in the rainy season?” Geraldo, with his smooth, aquiline features, is the picture of superior, old-world Portuguese-paulistano aristocracy. Yet his unfailing sense of humor and ability as a storyteller have stood him in good stead throughout a long and not always easy but deeply loving marriage to the Pantanal. A veteran now of years of trekking, he has a habit of saying, “The first thing I did when I met Belkiss was take up endurance riding as a sport.” On that evening as I collapsed into a porch chair, without further comment, he came forward with a bottle of cachaça. As the cachaça went down, my spirits rose, and soon I was ready to agree that no experience could have been better than floating along amid sacks of rice, drums of diesel oil, and vaqueiros who sat, elbows on their knees, their gossip about town with its bars, women, and knife fights uninterrupted by the water flowing over

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our feet. Obviously for them, Belkiss assured me, safe arrival was a foregone conclusion. It was merely a matter of time. One of the first lessons the Pantanal teaches you is to take pleasure in not being able to hurry. The distances and terrain are such that for the most part the only way to get anywhere is by boat or on horseback, and to get there and back before dark, one must arise at : A.M. I soon learned that to awaken at this hour no alarm is needed, for it is also the hour when the bats come home to roost under the roof, their safe arrival heralded by the whisper of their wings as they dive beneath the porch. Lying there listening, one can hear as well the clanking of pots against iron as in the kitchen, sturdy, heavy-set Indian women stoke the fire in the woodstove and set the pans to simmering. Then comes the booted tread of Magno, the manager, as he steps under the rancho between the kitchen and the house to sip his chimarrão of hot maté through a silver siphon from a guampa carved from a horn before seeing that all is ready for the cattle drive ahead. Rising, I dodge the bats on my way to the shower. There, under a stream of hot water from the coiled pipes in the woodstove, I prepare my soul for breakfast, a powerful spread of hot bread, mandioca, fried beef, and eggs, all to be downed with the knowledge in mind that lunch will be something made for gnawing, hung by a forward rider at some strategic point, from a tree.

] That time in  when I first accompanied Belkiss and the comitiva on a drive, they were moving the cattle to lowlands where they would graze the nutritious grasses that grew out of that alluvial soil until floods once again covered the land. The difference in altitude between the highlands, or terras altas, where the main 234

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house stood and the low brejo where we were headed was but a matter of less than a meter, yet it wouldn’t take me long to discover how important that matter was. Right then, after months of grazing, grass was sparse where we were; while in the brejo even though here and there it was still floating on buoyant alluvial islands, grass was more than abundant. Thus the hurry to take advantage of every day’s grazing before the floods returned. I could hear it in the talk over breakfast between Magno and the capataz, Oticelio, who oversaw the work of the vaqueiros; talk of signs such as the height of the watermarks on the trees, the size of the calves in relation to the depth of some of the streams they would have to cross. It was really only a rehashing of judgments already made, because once a drive of some eight hundred to a thousand animals is set in motion, there is no turning back. Although we had risen early, by the time we had breakfasted the comitiva was already far ahead of us, hunting the half-wild cattle in the vast expanse of the surrounding cerrado, as they gathered them into a herd. In the lead, Basilio—accomplished in the art of lowing through a berrante made of horn—lured the cattle ahead to reach the rodeio, a circle of salt troughs which would be our first stopping place. This being a slow and arduous job in which we would take no part, the pleasure of having no need to hurry gradually took hold of me as the sun rose higher and morning unfolded before us. Whether in the back of a truck or on horseback, there is never really a moment’s boredom in the Pantanal. Yet the tread of a horse in the shallow grass lends itself far better to the observation of life and movement that is everywhere, particularly at this time of year, when the trees on the waters’ edges are heavy with the nests of birds. In the baías fed by the streams, every wading bird in existence A Timeless Place

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seems to have found its way in search of the abundance of fingerlings grown out of the season’s spawning. Bald-headed storks wade like fusty old gentlemen beside elegant, plumefeathered herons. Spoonbills fly up in bevies, and from nests large enough to hold a man in the crowns of towering jatobá trees great red-wattled jaburu storks glide down to the water’s edge. In their midst, speckled and brown cormorants of infinite variety, like their cousins the egrets, divide their time between diving for fish and stalking the insects stirred up by the cattle’s grazing. Amid reeds in the shallow ends of the baías, fat wood ducks dip and swallow while tiny brown sandpipers leave their floating nests to paddle on spindly legs in search of spiders. Nor, of course, is the stirring only that of birds. From their own nests along the water’s edge, alligators slide down to part the water into rippling arrows, while just up the bank, a whole family of rodent capybaras stands frozen, waiting for danger to pass. On the edge of a grove of bacuri palms, an anteater, caught with his snout in a rotted log, spreads his flag of a tail and flees. And as one rides along, the Indian names of all these birds and beasts—batuira, arucura, jaburu, jacaré, tamaduá—chant like a song in one’s head paced by the rhythm of the horse’s tread. At the rodeio, a circle of troughs carved out of the trunks of trees, the salt poured into the troughs, as much as a mineral supplement, is a lure to gather the cattle into one place for the purpose at hand—branding, curing, counting. On that day while the cattle milled and licked hungrily at the salt, the vaqueiros, still on horseback, sat resting under their straw hats. At first sight one could almost imagine them to be asleep, but that is not to know these men in most of whose veins flows the blood of Guaicurús. Centuries ago, that tribe captured the stray horses of Spaniards 236

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who first came up the Paraguay and, as the sole equestrian Indians, held sway over the other tribes of the plain. Later on, subdued by priests and soldiers, their blood mingled with that of gold seekers and settlers, they remained mounted to catch, brand, and herd the mixed-breed cattle known as Tucúra, which had grown hardy themselves, straying in the wilderness. Most of these vaqueiros know no other world but that of the Pantanal, and perhaps in this they are lucky. For theirs is a life rooted in the past of a people who lived according to nature in a place where time was measured by the movement of the stars and the ripening of wild fruits, the days spent traveling between one place and another, depending on the weather. Once hunters, now herders, they eat more beef and lamb than game, and they only fish or hunt for variety. Once nomadic, within the great realm of the Pantanal, when they weary of one place, they pick up their gear and go—often like their nomadic ancestors, to end up years later, welcomed and refreshed, in the place they had left behind. No. Slumped in their saddles in the shade of their hats, they were not sleeping. A corner of their minds instinctively alert to the shiftings of the herd, all that was needed was the whim of some ornery critter bent on straying for rider and horse to become one in a sudden explosion of pursuit. Right then the drive waited while a couple of men rode darting and swaying among the twisted trees of the cerrado forests in search of animals not yet brought into the herd. Animals bred up from the Tucúra over half a century to become the tall, white Nelore best adapted by their long legs, sturdy hooves, and extreme maternal fierceness to the world where one must be a little wild to survive. Nearby on the flank of the herd grazed the sinuelos—fat, lazy steers raised close to the corrals and brought along on drives for A Timeless Place

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their calming effect. Once the hollering of the riders and the barking of the dogs announced a find, the sinuelos would be driven, at their lumbering, steadying pace, to join the stray cattle to the herd. Then we would be on our way.

] Behind the slowly growing, slow-moving herd, we traveled all day—Belkiss perched high like a Grecian Indian queen on her formidable stallion; I, down there on my trustworthy pantaneira mare, listening as she talked to Magno of the swampland known as the brejo, where we were headed—the height of the grass and how long it would take some three thousand head to graze some seven thousand hectares down. Midway we paused to chew on a bit of jerked beef tough as a shoe sole but strangely satisfying. From a stream, Magno dipped water with a guampa of hollowed horn to make a tepid maté which, passed from one to another and sipped through a silver siphon, was, like the jerked beef, unbelievably gratifying. And, ahh, best of all, to get out of the stirrups and sit on the ground—copy the others as they soaked their straw hats in the water and pulled them down again, cool and dripping, over their heads. But only for a moment, before, there being no way to hurry, we would ride slowly behind the herd to reach our destination before dark.

] Baía das Antas, the retiro which lies at the mouth of the brejo, consists of a weathered clapboard house, a cluster of corrals, and a roça, or field, on the edge of a stream. There lives a solitary couple, Seu Odair and Dona Assunta, who, Seu Odair having been

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a hunter in the old days, are used to solitude and do not mind living at this distant point of the fazenda, the last that can be considered highland—that is to say, relatively safe from flooding. In the roça, Seu Odair plants bananas, corn, manioc, sweet potatoes, and squash—half for himself, half for the fazenda. By the stream, Dona Assunta plants collards and lettuce, parsley and shallots. And these are complemented by wild fruits in season: genipapo, macauvas, and the round fruits which hang in strings from the bocaiúva palms which, sweet and crunchy, have long been known as “Indians’ chewing gum.” Spare and wrinkled in her seventies, this venerable Indian kept the kind of house only a trustworthy woman could keep: pots and pans scrubbed with sand to glow as they hang from the wall against a spotless, sunbleached cloth embroidered on its edges. When we arrived, she was marching about on bowed legs, cooking atop the woodstove a huge stew to be accompanied by arroz carreteiro—onions, garlic, parsley, and tiny bits of sun-dried beef sautéed and then simmered with rice till dry but loose and delicious. My stomach rumbled at its rich fragrance as I tried to walk as straight-legged as Belkiss from my horse to the house. But before the meal, heaven awaited us in the corixa, one of the countless streams which flow between, connecting lakes and rivers in an endless, bewildering labyrinth. Hidden by a dense grove of bacuri palms, our corixa flowed into the broad, shadowy lake, the Baía das Antas, so named for tapirs, who, when darkness fell, came down to its edge to roll in the mud of its shallows. Along the stream’s course the waters were so clear you could see the sand and the minnows shifting and catching the sunlight in its depths. After a long day’s ride, heaven,

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then, was to lie in the kind of natural Jacuzzi of its current, our aching muscles soothed by the cool water’s flow and the bold nibblings of minnows. Refreshed, we sat on the porch, sipping cachaça and watching a kingfisher bash its catch against the limb of a lauro tree in preparation for feeding to its young. In the bare earthen yard before us a wild piglet suckled with a litter of pups on an adopted mother hound dog while a maitaca parrot waddled on its spindly legs, eating leftovers from the dog’s bowl nearby. A funny scene, so characteristic of the curious symbiosis that so often seems to exist among the creatures of the Pantanal. Having settled the horses and cattle in the paddocks and bathed in their own corixa, the vaqueiros appeared to heap plates with Dona Assunta’s tasty mixtures so that for a while there was no sound but the scraping of spoons against tin. Then, the men rested and fed, their heroic dogs sprawled at their feet, as the sun’s last rays made fiery paths across the baía, the storytelling began. It is at such moments that one is reminded of the value of observations made by people who daily live the life of a world contained. People such as Seu Odair, who as a zagaieiro in his youth had actually brought down jaguars with a lance in the manner of the Terena tribe of which he was a seed. Listening, suddenly one could envision this most splendid of animals, whose smooth-muscled pace is like the flow of a river; and imagine its anguish and anger at having been treed—the dogs somehow respectfully silent now, panting below. Nowadays the hunters circle the tree, pass around a cachaça, choose who among them shall take what is meant to be the fatal shot, the zagaéiro standing by with his lance in case the shot is not so final. Only rarely does the zagaéiro, as did his ancestors, crouch below the tree waiting 240

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for that moment when it truly seems, as Odair describes it, “death decides.” From such tales as told by the exalted and highly respected old zagaéiro, the talk inevitably moved on to stories of coureiros, who, despite laws which universally prohibited the killing of wildlife, were slaughtering alligators by the thousands for contraband. Almost every day somewhere in the vast areas of the Pantanal that are impenetrable to cattle and their herders, you can see the smoke from the camps of these poachers who strip only the fine belly skin of the alligators, then stack and burn the rest. “Who would tangle with them?” The men asked each other, “Desperados, well-armed and used to living a life no decent man would live.” “No one,” Belkiss would later assure me. “Not even the police, who had neither the arms nor the fuel for boats to go after them.” And there, as in the Amazon, lay the crux of a great trouble which remains unresolved. On that depressing note, the evening’s conversation drifted, dissolved into the night as everyone—well fed, weary, and thinking of the day ahead—faded from the scene. A mosquito-proof hammock awaited me, hanging between a porch post and the lauro tree. The hammock, when zipped, resembling nothing so much as a burial shroud, I had been dreading this moment all evening. But fortunately, the mosquito population being tolerably low, I was able to avoid that final claustrophobic act. Instead, lying in my open hammock, I looked upward beyond the trees to see, brilliant against a cloudless sky, those stars, mythical both to Greeks and to Indians, the Pleiades whereby the Indians measure their seasons and amid which the spirits of their warrior heroes wander. I listened to the sounds of the night, the A Timeless Place

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cries of owls, the stirrings of waters. Seu Odair claimed an aged and much-esteemed boa constrictor dwelled amid the rushes at the far end of the baía. Could all that splashing have meant the demise of some imprudent anta come out too far for its roll in the mud? Or a capibara, even an alligator, entwined in the constrictor’s muscular length? Who knew? Somehow at that moment it was simply good to know there was nothing to be done but lie there, sensing myself to be no more than a helpless part of the universe. Not so the next day. Before sunrise we were awakened by the echoing cries of the bujio monkeys emerging from their hollows in trees and the “gadagadoon, gadagadoon” of fat-breasted curicaca birds who, nesting on the edges of woods, were always the first to herald whatever came. Yesterday the tropeiros had arrived with a second string of horses, a belled madrinha mare leading the way. While we ate another reinforced breakfast the horses lined up, rears to the fence in a formando from which each rider would select his steed for the day. Belkiss chose a big, lively son of a cross between her stallion and a pantaneira mare. I as usual sought the dullest, most reliable of steeds. A sturdy little horse, like so many she suffered from an anemia, which is chronic in the Pantanal but which nonetheless did not prevent her from spending much of the day with water up to her belly, though she carried a foal inside. Brave, undaunted little pantaneira mare. As we moved into the brejo, where the waters were still high, it promised to be a longer day than the one before, on soggy ground that was uncertain territory. It is not easy to detour a herd, especially one of cows constantly in search of their calves, but it was necessary—now to avoid a perilous bog, now in streams still 242

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swollen far beyond their banks—to find a ford shallow enough for the smaller calves to pass. In the strong, fast-flowing waters it was wondrous to see the cows standing hard against the flow until the calves, sometimes swimming amid swirling grass and flowers, struggled to get a footing on the opposite bank. It was always the lead horses and Basilio lowing through his berrante who showed the way, seeking firm ground beneath the water. “Keep an eye on the horse in front of you,” Belkiss advised. “But if you fall in, the best is to grab your own horse’s tail.” Sensible advice which, in view of its implications, I did my damnedest at first to follow. But there were so many distractions. As we descended the slopes toward the baías, the shades of green changed from olive to bronze to the pale emerald of mimosa grass before ending in waterborne carpets of purple hyacinths alive with springing, hopping insects and frogs that vanished into shallows, where from amid the reeds rose brilliant flights of redcapped cardinals. The beauty and variety of the Pantanal can never be absorbed all at one time. One must return again and again, always to be caught off guard by the sight of a great, wide-antlered swamp deer amid the shadows of tall, fan-shaped buriti palms—within his realm, waiting, watching as you watch. Another time it may be the carefully balanced baskets of japú nests hung like Christmas ornaments from a smooth-limbed agua pomba tree; or a herd of peccaries, rooting wild ginger out of the soft, sucking earth of a swamp. In the brejo there are islands of higher land, dense with richearthed forests, which provide refuge from the floods. Here noble trees—tamburiú, angico, and piuva—rise straight toward lofty crowns that, threaded and supported by tangled flowering vines, A Timeless Place

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spread high above a humus- and moss-carpeted floor. In this canopy, coatimundis, sloths, possums, porcupines, and more species of monkeys and birds than have yet been counted prey and are preyed upon in a teeming life at once exuberant and cruel. But of course, as on that day, at the sound of Basilio’s berrante and the thundering of cattle’s hooves, such a silence falls in the forest that life seems nonexistent. Perhaps it was because, having completely forgotten Belkiss’s admonishment, I was so intent on peering into the forest’s depth in search of life that, striking my head on a branch, suddenly I was covered with the swarming life of bees. Tangled in my hair, as terrified as I, they stung in merciless desperation while Belkiss, close behind, shouted “RUN!” I did run, but not as would a pantaneira, on horseback swaying with my horse amid the trees until the bees, confused, were lost in their surroundings. No. Against all sensible instinct, I dismounted and, slapping my hat on my head where the bees were already entrenched, I ran on foot. Luckily I ended in mucky swamp water which produced the proper effect. Next thing I knew, there was Belkiss, stalwart and unruffled, kneeling beside me with her finely manicured nails, removing one stinger after another from my head. “You all right?” “Sure.” Indeed at the moment, my worst feeling was an allconsuming shame. “Good, because there’s really nowhere to stop here.” “No problem. I’m so sorry, Belkiss.” “Tush, you think you’re the only one? Let’s go, then. Soon we’ll be at the rodeio, where we’ll leave the cattle to go their way.” At the rodeio, a change of horses, xarque, a round of tereré, and 244

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we set out, with no cattle to herd, bent on reaching the Casa Sede before dark. It was on the return—the most useful of defenses in accidents, shock, having abandoned me—that I began to feel like I’d been stung by a hundred bees. Of a sudden the stink of mud and decayed leaves stirred by the horses’ tread filled my throat and lungs. Floating hyacinths, grass, and lilies swirled like nauseating kaleidoscopes in the suffocating heat of midday. We reached some high land just as I thought green slime was going to erupt from my gut. Instead, I heard Belkiss’s calm, positive voice, “I think we should stop here and rest a while.” So saying, she dismounted and spread her poncho on the ground beneath a tree. And there, while she sat patiently, I fell asleep and remained so for two hours. Once back at the Casa Sede, with no more ill effects than weariness, as we passed around a soothingly hot chimarrão, Belkiss told me there was a reason why she had said, “You’re not the only one.” Then she went on to recount the story of her cousin Elcy, who had lived on a fazenda all her life and known well the Pantanal’s ways. Out fishing with her husband one day, her line caught in a tree, disturbing the hive of African bees whose notorious ferocity had not yet, as the story goes here, been diluted by crossing with Brazilians. As it was, swarmed over from head to foot, the only means of escape was to jump into the river. But unfortunately, like many a woman of her generation, Dona Elcy didn’t know how to swim. Coming to her rescue, her husband managed to pull her to safety before disappearing only to be found hours later, bones picked clean by piranhas. Having been given that food for thought, I once again fell into a deep sleep from which I awakened the next morning in fine fettle, the swellings on my lips and cheeks all but gone. Even so, A Timeless Place

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whenever I think of that day, I feel again subdued by the thought of Belkiss’s calm patience which had caused her to sit quietly, letting nature take its course. Though I still feel like an imbecile at the memory and though her sense of humor is great, she never made fun of my stupidity. That and the fact that she invited me to go along again has ever since been proof of the bigness of her heart.

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27 T h e

M e a n i n g o f a Wa y

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I have gone along many times since, wanting to know the Pantanal in all its seasons. Sometimes the water is so high that the only way to check the pastures is by boat. Sometimes it is so low there is no escape for the fish, which, at flood time, are left by the rivers to spawn in the baías. Then all the birds and beasts of the world seem to descend the parching slopes to have their feast in the fish-laden waters. At times when the Rio Negro is contained within its banks, we have spent the day fishing, pulling out pacú and dourado and corimbatá to wrap in banana leaves and bake over a fire built on the sand. Always, more than fishing, I find pleasure in watching the life along the river’s edge which describes with such eloquence the intricacy and delicacy of this plain that, like a great lung, drains and renews the countless rivers that flow through it. No matter how often, the trip on the river provides me with a surprise, such as on the day we came upon the jaguar. I heard Belkiss take in her breath and silently pull out her 247

camera before I saw him fishing from a beach in a curve of the river—unaware of us and unafraid, large and powerful beneath his perfectly designed spotted coat. We watched, transfixed, until, seeing us, he turned and soundlessly vanished into the forest whence he had come. We hadn’t really frightened him, apparently, because later, coming back downstream, we saw the jaguar again, this time with his mate, swimming across the river just ahead of us. It was a stunning moment. When we talked of it later, even Belkiss, who has taken part in jaguar hunts since she learned to use a gun, would say that her feeling right then was entirely different from the excitement of the hunt. It was, she told me, as though she had been granted a great privilege. For myself, perhaps the best I can say is that, having shared the privilege of seeing those splendid, fierce creatures at peace in their own surroundings, I can never recall the scene without pausing, as well, to reflect upon the grandeur of creation.

] From an afternoon’s fishing in the Rio Negro or a day’s ride to some distant retiro, how good it is to have somewhere civilized to come to at the end, where the boundless diversity of the great plain is gathered in, contained, and given order. It is a rambling house of clapboard with a tiled roof and porches on every side. Behind it is a baía on the edge which if you take a walk of an evening you may well encounter all the wildlife you have seen during days of riding, from alligators amid the floating hyacinths to otters fishing from a wooded island at the baía’s center. Curicacas, the warning birds, and anu, the cattle birds, nest in nearby trees, and often, in walking, you may encounter longlegged emus and even those huge black-winged, white-breasted, 248

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red-wattled storks, the jaburus, mingling with the chickens where corn is tossed in the yard. They are not afraid, as though by experience they know it is the chickens who end up in the cooking pot, not they. Near the corrals there is a dead tree which Belkiss will nevertheless not allow to be felled because it is the favorite perch of as many as twenty royal blue hyacinth macaws who, for their own undivulged reasons, assemble there each evening before flying off squawking to their separate nests in the crowns of palms and the hollows of jatobás. Before the house, a salina lies in austere contrast to the lush, exuberant baía behind. Like a great mirror framed by the wideopen campo land which surrounds it, this saline lake is surrounded too by legends. As the first Spanish explorers would have it, once the Pantanal was covered by the Pacific Ocean, spilled, as it were, through a gap in the Andes. The salinas, it follows, are what is left of that sea which, in honor of a long-gone Indian tribe, bore the name of O Mar dos Xaraiés. However that may be, within its salty ridges the salina is almost eerily bare of vegetation. So clear and crystalline are its waters that one would imagine them to be sterile were it not for the fact that, of a sudden on a midwinter’s night, the planktons that come to life therein seem to set those waters afire with shades of topaz and sky-tinted greens and reds. At any time of the day or year, to walk by its still, clear waters is to know a refreshing quietude that is not to be found amid the burgeoning life and activity that is everywhere else. For though the Casa Sede is a place of gathering in, retrenching, and restoring, it is hardly ever silent. Under the wide porch where—chasing off bold starlings as they approach the rice— most of the meals are taken, nearly every afternoon there is a gathering of women and children. Some have brought babies for T h e M e a n i n g o f a Wa y o f L i f e

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a three-in-one vaccination or a worming; others seek medicine for a pain in the head that responds to one in the liver. For these women, every ache in one place seems to have a corresponding pain somewhere else, as though the entire body were wired, and who knows if they are not right? At any rate, intermingled with conventional modern medicines are herbal remedies for just about everything one can think of: ipecacuanha as a cathartic; quebra pedras for kidney stones; roots of cambará guaçú to cleanse the liver; buds of guava for the intestines; tea of lemon grass for everything. Sometimes, as much as anything, I think the women of the Pantanal are afflicted by what is called in those parts o mal do moral, which is to say, a sadness born of a hard life lived in near-constant isolation, the medicine for which is often just an afternoon under that wide porch, discussing ills and other things while Belkiss applies cornstarch to a baby’s raw bottom or replaces a little girl’s braids with a stylish haircut like her own. On the back porch there is a TV set which, run precariously as everything else on the rat-tat-tatting diesel generator, every so often provides the same group with a glimpse of the fantasies of a distant world they will probably never know. One evening I watched children who live daily in the paths of snakes and alligators cover their eyes and scream, “I can’t look! I can’t look!”— terrified at the sight of Snow White’s wicked stepmother surging before them on the screen. So too Dallas appears on Fazenda Fazendinha’s back porch, causing the great-granddaughter of a Guaicurú to be named Sualem—a phonetic translation of Sue Ellen, which turns the last name into “beyond,” creating indeed a perfect conception for someone who watches Dallas from the Pantanal. Between the kitchen and the outbuilding, which houses a saddle 250

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room, storeroom, and pharmacy, there is a large structure covered with wire that is meshed wide enough to let in the sun’s rays and narrow enough to keep out everything from parakeets to wild dogs, wolves, and jaguars. There lamb, pork, and beef are butchered to be divided among the people of the fazenda. Sometimes the pork is of pigs that wander with the chickens and emus beyond the bamboo fence surrounding the sandy yard. Sometimes they are peccary or the Portuguese porcos monteiros, brought centuries ago and set loose to go wild in the brejo. These the vaqueiros have a habit of lassoing, castrating, and turning loose again to shoot when they have grown fat rooting amid the ginger and reeds. On wide tables in the netted enclosure, the pork is made into sausage with a delicious combination of lemon and herbs, then hung to cure in the smoke from the woodstove. There too beef is cut thin, salted, and dried by wind and sun to be used in every way imaginable; while on frames outdoors, the hides are stretched, cured, and cut into strips. These, in turn, are braided by true artisans into beautiful headgear, reins, and whips. What better occupation to soothe the animus of the wildest of men than to sit on a doorstep weaving a tale while he braids leather into a handsome bridle? For, no denying, there is a certain wildness. Something deep and primitive which the priests, who had no patience for the beliefs of others, succeeded in burying deeper; something not in keeping with an age of reason which, as Belkiss and Geraldo would say, if not recognized can cause irreparable misunderstanding. And so, despite a relationship that is also deep and in its way intimate, the necessity for certain rules. That is why at Fazenda Fazendinha, no one climbs the porch steps unless invited. And at the end of a long cattle drive, cachaça T h e M e a n i n g o f a Wa y o f L i f e

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is carefully measured out by the capataz in a dose called the mata bicho, literally, the bug killer. Anything beyond that is taboo for fear of the offender’s blood heating to raging temperatures which could draw from the back of a belt a well-sharpened multipurpose knife. Anyone caught in such a state of inebriety is immobilized till sober and sent upon his way. So, Belkiss tells me, when a Paraguayan fence builder got drunk and danced up the porch steps, calling her his mother, she had no choice but to order him lassoed and tied to a tree till morning. And yet, in accordance with established rules, festas are an essential part of the otherwise lonely life of the Pantanal. Birthdays, weddings, the Feast of Santo Antonio, the patron saint of herders, which is held every year on a different fazenda and to which people will come great distances by oxcart, horseback, boat, and plane. In preparation, the women cook for months, making sausages and sweets and liqueurs of jabuticabas, genipapo, carambola. The men build grandstands for racing and roping contests and practice their horsemanship every day. During the days of feasting and games, wagers in that world of barter can be made with anything from an esteemed mule to a couple of bars of much-treasured perfumed soap. Pits are dug for roasting, which produces a constant stream of everything from ribs and steaks to spitted testicles and mammary glands morning, noon, and night. Then at night, there is the music of accordions, guitars, and drums, and, despite the mata bicho’s careful measuring, joyous dancing under the stars. Everyone who can walk, from the smallest child to the oldest crone, dances—the partner chosen less by sex, age, or beauty than by skill. That is how, on the occasion of Belkiss’s birthday, I found myself again and again honored to be the partner of the cook, 252

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Iracema, with whose steps—though she be short and squat and I tall and square—mine found miraculous rapport. But of course, as anywhere, there’s a rapport of another kind which has no need for the atmosphere of a party. In the Pantanal when day is done and there is nowhere to go, there is plenty of time to sit by the dying coals of a roasting fire, passing round the chimarrão and talking. Then it is that stories surface—some of them legends passed on by word of mouth from generation to generation, such as of the origins of the Guaicurús, who were hatched from the egg of a caracará. Yes, that same hawk that struts around feasting on nuts dropped by parrots from our pecan trees in Tietê. But who, in Guaicurú mythology, is the councilor of gods, who tempers divine decisions with a reminder of the worst in human nature. Who, aware of human laziness, greed, faithlessness, and ingratitude, warns, “Never provide anything ready. Give the seed but not the harvest, the cotton but not the thread—for the lazy must have something to do. Only illusion is gained without suffering. Humans don’t do anything for nothing.” Then there are stories told of shamans who are born with special powers to communicate with spirits and who, when necessary, so they say, put those spirits back where they belong. Listening to such stories it is easy to wonder if shaman is related to the word sham. Even so, one hears of ordinary men whose bodies “closed” by shamans could not be affected by medicine yet could resist the poisons of tarantulas and snakes. So where, as always, does belief end and knowledge begin? In all of this, though, the most interesting and absorbing to me are the stories of hardship and endurance and the history of old pantaneiro families such as the Barros, the Correias, and the Rondons. And oddly enough, it is in the telling of these that T h e M e a n i n g o f a Wa y o f L i f e

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Geraldo Rocho Azevedo glows. A São Paulo lawyer, he cannot always share Belkiss’s need to live the life and spend much of her time in the Pantanal. But accepting and respecting that need seems to have created a fascination, and with his lawyer’s mind, his own need to know details that matter. And so in detail Geraldo tells of how the first Rondons to settle in the Pantanal in the mid-s chose a spot where navigation, begun at the mouth of the Riode la Plata in Buenos Aires, came to its end on a tributary of the Paraguay River, the Aquidauana. Here they founded a city which they also named Aquidauana. It was a time when any man considered loyal to the Empire could lay claim to as much land as he declared he could handle. So as the story goes, the Rondons started off with Indian guides from Aquidauana and rode in different directions setting signal fires and laying claim to all that lay between. Laying claim is one thing, keeping is another. In a world where yellow fever and malaria were rampant; where one moment your cattle could be sucking slime from a parched stream bed; the next, floating belly up in waters raging toward the Rio de la Plata and the sea, it is hard to imagine what possessed those people in the first place. Overwhelming to think of how they survived to build their ranchos and corrals and populate those lands with cattle, but they did. Rough and ready people, they worked and rode side by side with those sons of Guaicurús who tamed and trained those wild horses with a mingling of cruelty and loving patience. Some of the cattle they herded were brought on barges up the Paraguay and its tributaries from the south. Others had wandered across from the Paraguayan Chaco to roam wild and become the property of anyone who could capture and brand them. Herding and increasing these Tucúra cattle, the Rondons 254

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fixed their families on the very plain that the Guaicurús had once dominated.

] Times changed. In the early s it was Belkiss’s great-uncle Marechal Candido Rondon, an army engineer, who was charged with stretching a telegraph line across the roadless wildlands of the Pantanal. A brilliant and far-seeing man who had been educated in Rio and had accompanied Teddy Roosevelt on his expeditions along the Rio das Mortes, Marechal Rondon was an expert at sorting out what changes in the world beyond did or didn’t suit the world in which he lived. The telegraph wire across the Pantanal was a necessity, its stretching a feat he could never have accomplished without the help of the Indians who lived therein. But working with them, he came to give true value to the culture of those people who knew and understood the floodplain’s secrets, rather than dismiss that culture, as had the priests and slave hunters before him. Haunted by what he had learned, he created the first Indian Protection Service in Brazil. The second heir to be educated in Rio, Belkiss’s father, Senhor Totó Rondon, must have been a man both romantic and stern. At least this is what I gather from tales told by those who knew him. A bon vivant far beyond his “educative” years, he must only have settled down when he married the daughter of a Greek merchant who had somehow found his way upriver to Aquidauana, Sofia Diacopolis, who was certainly the love of his life. When I first met the widowed Dona Sofia, she was a regal and handsome woman ruling over a great, sprawling house full of books and furniture from the outside world mingled charmingly with the rustic craftsmanship of Aquidauana. At the T h e M e a n i n g o f a Wa y o f L i f e

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age of seventy-six, she came and went between the world beyond and the Pantanal, never failing at Carnaval time to be in Rio to join her favorite escola de samba on its frenetic perambulations through the streets. It was in this house that her children were born and from which she and Senhor Totó came and went as they built a fine casa grande at the center of their Fazenda Tupanceritá on the plain. As a part of his life, she told me, she joined him in everything, whether it be living in a crude rancho, bathing in a corixa on the fazenda, or taking the children on educative tours of Brazil or for a “bath of civilization” in Europe. The war years, with millions of battle-starved stomachs to fill in Europe, were prosperous years for cattle breeders in Brazil. Taking advantage of the market, Senhor Totó brought Nelore bulls to turn the old mixed-breed Tucúra herd into tall, white Nelore cattle; Thoroughbred and Arabian stallions to cross with those valiant little pantaneiro horses who were surely the descendants of Andaluzes brought centuries ago in caravels from Portugal and Spain. Thus on the great floodplain—building fine and solid houses and herds, dealing in thousands of head of cattle, always with a cattleman’s stern trust in another’s word—he consolidated and civilized an enormous domain. “Civilized?” one might ask. “In this wild place where it is admitted that savagery lies just beneath the skin?” To which I would answer, “Where doesn’t it? Some rules apply in some places, others in others.” What I mean by civilized here is creating and keeping a good and stable way of life. One in which, by living with the ebb and flow of the waters and taking care not to overgraze the sparse campos and the rich alluvial brejos, for centuries now, pantaneiros have achieved a balance between man 256

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and his surroundings that so far has provided space for everything. In a world of diminishing frontiers this is not an easy balance to keep. There are always those who believe that “for the sake of progress” anything is valid. Such as straightening and deepening the Paraguay River for heavy shipping, despite the fact that this could turn the river into a huge ditch which could drain the floodplain of its life. There are others who always think the only practical thing is to “occupy, intensify, diminish size, and increase productivity.” But ask any pantaneiro and he will describe to you how all things in nature are linked in such a way that to disturb one link is to upset the whole. How dredging the Paraguay for deep-water shipping could seriously affect the fields to the west and south where the abundant grains for shipping are produced. For the Pantanal not only behaves as a great filter for the fields and pastures of those bordering lands, it harbors a wealth of plants and wildlife whose immense value is so far known only to those who have always dwelled in their midst. So how to keep this immense store of fresh, clear, flowing water, fish, birds, and beasts amid untold varieties of plants—this treasure of indescribable beauty—as it is? Many pantaneiros have made their nongrazable lands official wildlife preserves. Good. Even if there are few rangers to protect them, at least these wild places are more likely to attract researchers who, while they do important work, can just by their presence spook a few poachers. Ecotourism is coming into fashion, and that too is good. For the more people who come to love our earth for its beauty and variety, the better. Some licensed hunting? Listening to the likes of old Odair the T h e M e a n i n g o f a Wa y o f L i f e

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zagaéiro, though I could never enjoy it myself, I have come to understand a little better the desire of some to prove themselves as brave and skilled hunters. And this, if treated with intelligence, can be of great advantage. For, after all, the ultimate hunter is always man, and if he wants to hunt again, he must pay to take care that there is game. Still again, ask any pantaneiro and he will tell you that there, where numbers of men must also be few to fit the landscape, it would be foolish to think of the main way of gaining a living as being anything but what it is: the extensive raising of cattle, ten hectares to a head, that has for centuries now kept that exemplary balance between man and his surroundings. As though to remind me of this, the last time I was there, at the end of the dry season, Timoteo Proença the cattle buyer had flown in to sort out the yearlings which would be driven to Aquidauana for shipping to fattening pastures in the rich lands to the west and south. Timoteo is a stocky, vigorous young man with a sturdy jaw and laughter in his penetrating blue eyes. He is good at telling jokes, good at striking a hard bargain. When he comes, all day he sits facing Belkiss above the gates as, wielding whips and yelling, the vaqueiros funnel surging waves of fence-shy yearlings from the corrals through the chutes. One of the rare moments one sees vaqueiros on their feet, it’s a wild dance in there, where most of those cattle have never seen a corral. Once I asked Magno why they didn’t chase the yearlings on horseback. In response he laughed and looked at me askance,“Because horses can’t climb up the fences!” While Magno works the gates, Belkiss takes note of Timoteo’s choices. “Vae, não vae; vae, não vae.” Some to be rejected with a disapproving thrust of the buyer’s stubborn jaw; others approved 258

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with a nod which says they are sturdy enough to go with the cattle drive, which will grow as it moves through one fazenda after another toward its destination. Slowly, ever so slowly the drive will travel, stopping for hours by day to graze, at night to rest— the herders taking turns to circle and keep vigil, talking in low voices, avoiding brusque movements, the sudden strike of a match, for fear of the herd’s exploding. Vaqueiros—men of worthy skill who are really only at home in the saddle on steeds that are adequate to the task. In the mind of Timoteo, the most adequate of these are a certain kind of mule which his father began to select years ago and which have almost become a breed in themselves known as the Proença’s Red Mules. They are huge mules, at once powerful and gentle and of an extraordinary stamina. So impressive that, if I close my eyes at any time, I can visualize them exactly as I first saw them. It was just about dusk, the sun a great fiery ball in the red glow of the bruma seca made by the dust and smoke of the dry season. All the same height, one as handsome as another, the glow of sunset reflecting from the silver links of their bridles, the mules looked themselves to made of burnished copper. And astride them, proud in their saddles, their riders looked indeed to be a part of their steeds—as it is said the Guaicurús, those first tamers of horses on the plain, had long ago taught themselves to be. Part of the mules, part of the Pantanal, without which, one senses, the meaning of their lives would surely cease to be.

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One Who Know s . . .

May the Pantanal remain forever as it is, as I know the world we live in can never do. When I go there, I certainly “rest my idea,” as our trucker and friend Waldemar would say. Having done so, when I return I am more than ready to be once more a part of this world of change in which I live. On the edge of an asphalt road that was doomed to become busy, winding as it does through a fertile countryside whose deep soils and amenable climate are destined to foster earnest farmers, progressive cities, universities, and constant change. I am ready for the comings and goings of Pau D’Alho— weekend visitors, family, people coming to see grass and cattle; work becoming more frantic as the days lengthen and the grass begins its relentless growth. At moments like these, when the workers get hard pressed, I am sometimes summoned to drive the tractor that pulls the hay wagon. When that happens I can literally feel the vibrations as Amadeu’s son, Nilson, shudders and braces himself at my approach. For though I try not to, sometimes returning from a distant thought, I start up with a jolt 260

which is decidedly unsettling for the fellow who’s stacking the wagon behind me. Volleys of vituperation from Carson, who slings the bales from below, cause me then to shape up and watch my step, because I do so enjoy being in the hay field. How good the sunlight feels on one’s arms and back. How rich the scene as the baler under Amadeu’s steady direction thuds rhythmically along while Seu Pedro and Mingo walk behind, puffing on their corn husk chimneys as they stack the bales in the field, birds flying up in all directions. The ciriemas stalk at a safe distance on long, spindly legs, bending like mechanical birds to pluck tidbits from amid the fresh-mown grass. As is their way, every so often these miniature emus stop to face each in a different direction and cry out, throwing their voices to the four winds. In such a setting there is an enormous sense of well-being and rightness with the world. A feeling which, albeit, lasts only as long as the machinery doesn’t break down. But while it does last, I sit up there in its midst thinking of all kinds of things—at peace, knowing too that the kitchen I left in chaos will be in order when I return—thanks to one who knows as well as I where everything belongs. When I came in this morning from a walk with the dogs, I found this person staring contemplatively at the china figure of a rooster lying on its side on the dining room table. The explanation was simple. Carson was away last night, and when I am alone, I use the rooster as a book prop while I eat my supper, invariably forgetting to put it back where it belongs. But certain that nothing so simple had occurred to her, I asked, “What do you suppose, Miralda?” “É uma simpatia?” she answered, with her usual suggestion of a fetish. The One Who Know s . . .

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“Ahh, não,” I laughed, and explained the mystery, much to her disappointment, I am sure. For certainly she was hoping to add this to the collection of simpatias that virtually rule her life. Among them, the pair of scissors she leaves open on the table to ward off spirits when the house is empty; the reza she makes when something is lost, which I admit invariably leads to its finding; or the fortifying of the doctor’s medicines with the laying on of the hands of a benzedeira whenever the children are ill. When she and Amadeu and the family came to live here, we thought at first that they had two boys and a girl. But eventually we would discover that the pretty creature with the long braid was a boy who at the age of two months had been a victim not only of the measles but his mother’s prayers. If he lived, she had promised, she would not cut his hair until he was seven years old.” It was terrible for him,” she admitted. “But if he’d died, I would have lived with the blame forever.” “But why didn’t you put the penitence on yourself?” I wondered. “Ahh, because on him it was much stronger.” That it must have been. Although—perhaps because this fairly common promise has caused numerous little boys to be seen roaming the countryside with braids down their backs—Davi has survived to become a normal, if somewhat passive, young man. Yet superstition is only a part of a character so complex that even Amadeu’s is simple by comparison. Malice? Just let her get started on Teresa, the rather dim-witted giantess who comes to help out when the house is overflowing and the going gets rough. “Look at how she dusts!” the muttering begins. “Never sees a lamp shade or a picture or a cobweb on the ceiling, meu Deus. But 262

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then what can one expect, when all Teresa can think of is getting out in time for the dance at Dito João’s bar? Do you know what she wears?” Miralda’s fine blend of Indian, Negro, and Italian features reveals strong white teeth in a malevolent smile that I can’t resist. “No, tell me.” By now her body, which best resembles a walking waterbed, is shaking with high-pitched, infectious hilarity. “Listen to this! A red satin dress, slit up to her behind, spiked heels, and a shoulderlength purple wig!” I’ll confess I am swept away. My vision of Teresa thus magically transformed for the ball almost makes me die. But Miralda always has something more. “I’ll tell you, that woman’s not just stupid, she’s dangerous,” she said not long ago, with sudden warning in her tone. “Why, if there were a snake under the rug, she’d leave it there for me to find on Monday.” “Oh come now,” I say. “Poor Teresa, she wouldn’t intentionally hurt a flea.” Why I bother, I don’t know, because no matter what I say, I know as well that Miralda prefers believing to thinking. And this is so even if she becomes ill as a result, as she has on more than one occasion. When this happens, though I try not to, it is impossible not to recognize the symptoms: a loss of weight, dark circles under the eyes, until I feel obliged to ask, “Something troubling you?” The last time I ventured this question, she appeared the next day clutching what looked like a piece of junk mail. It was from Magda, a haunting-looking woman with a mean face and a penetrating gaze who appears on television, offering to read the future of anyone who has the courage to hear. In the letter, Magda claimed to know Miralda well and have something of utmost The One Who Know s . . .

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importance to tell her. There was no fee for her knowledge, only the small cost of the chair on which Miralda would have to sit in the overflowing waiting room of the “institute” in São Paulo where she proffered her advice. I’d read of this woman in the newspaper. She’d been taken to court but, due to the intricacies of freedom of expression, could not be condemned any more than could an evangelist for the bartering of salvation. I told Miralda this, finishing with, “It’s just a hoax, forget it.” Of course I should have known better. “I would, except that . . . ” “What?” “Before this letter came, I saw her on TV, and I swear, she looked me straight in the eye.” “You and two million others.” “And the letter?” “Want to bet she got it out of a social security list or something?” Not satisfied at my lack of credulity, as I knew she wouldn’t be, Miralda took the letter to her priest. “Senhora sees?” she said the next day. “Not only did I get a letter, but so did three professors.” “They didn’t happen to be retired, did they?” I said. “Didn’t I tell you that woman got the names from a list?” But clearly, having found herself in such prestigious company, Miralda was even less ready to accept my logic. “Just imagine,” this time she beamed, “me and three professors.” So again I shrugged my shoulders, and again Miralda went to see her priest, who in the meantime, no doubt having consulted Providence, settled the problem with the same advice to all four ladies involved. 264

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“The letters are evil, as is this Magda woman,” the priest told them. “The thing to do to rid yourselves is to tear the letters into little pieces, return address and all, and throw them into running water. But before you do,” he cautioned with an air of canonical mystery, “you must leave them with me for a week.” The entire mystical process thus legitimized, in the company of her prestigious colleagues, Miralda did as she was told. At the end of the prescribed week, she brought home the letter, tore it up, and flushed it down the toilet. The next day she told me about it with such certainty I could all but see little devils streaming out and swimming for their lives. “Crazy!” I laughed and she did too. But all the same, thank God, it worked. In a few days, credence once more victorious over logic, I was as happy as she to witness her recovery. And it was about then that, once more admitting to myself the power of belief, I decided to take Miralda just as she was. Something which in itself is quite enough. Malicious and vindictive, she is also sensitive as radar, a fact that has taught me to steer clear of her when I am in a bad mood for fear that, sensing my gloomy vibrations, she may fling off her apron and march home, reminding me that no one should be obliged to bear the weight of someone else’s depression. Yet just as she will walk off at the tone of misplaced anger, so most of the time she is there—ready to help no matter what the task. On Mondays when I sit writing, it gives me a great sense of tranquility to know that Miralda is somewhere stolidly plowing through the chaos left in every room by the comings and goings of friends, family, and their dogs. “How many people for lunch today?” she asks on a Saturday morning. The One Who Know s . . .

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“I think about twenty.” Then, knowing the habits of our family and still measuring the rice, she adds realistically,“And how many dogs?” Fortunately she is as fond of dogs as we, talking to them as she steps over their lolling bodies in the kitchen; making little dolls out of Carson’s odd socks for William, who takes them off to store in his “closet” beneath the hibiscus bushes; going to look for Moses, who is old and deaf and must be found for every meal. When we talk about them, the conversation verges on psychoanalysis. “Poor Moses,” Miralda sympathizes, “when senhora goes away, he gets so depressed. Must be why he goes off chasing porcupines.” As a precaution against the consequences of Moses’ depression, I keep anesthetic, an injection needle, tweezers, and a pair of pliers in a drawer that only Miralda knows about. And though she is more squeamish than I, I know she will help Amadeu use them if Moses comes back bearded with quills from his night of psychological revenge. Can there be any greater comfort than to know that, when one is gone, one’s best friends are so well looked after? With the same solid reliability, Miralda is the corner post of a home of her own which once caused a passing tramp to raise his hands toward heaven and say, “Dona, senhora lives in paradise!” Certainly there is about that home something alluringly earthy and mystical. Like Amadeu, she is a great planter who never throws anything away, so that from old kettles hanging from the porch beams, ferns trail and vines creep outward to climb along the smooth limbs of guava and loquat trees from the forked branches of which aerophytes and parasites crowned with exotic blooms create a kind of overhead jungle known to shelter pos266

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sums, porcupines, and now and then even a sloth, lost on its way from a nearby ravine. Beneath this jungled mantle, amid wild lemon, acerola, and jabuticaba trees, their limbs loaded with sweet black fruit, salvias, geraniums, old-fashioned creeping roses, nasturtiums, rosemary, and lemon grass creep out in a kind of extended garden which follows the fence from one tree to the next that Amadeu has planted between the fields and the road. She is, too, a compulsive saver, so that sometimes things I am ashamed to give away sit on the kitchen table until I find the courage to say, “If you think you could use . . .” To which she answers, “Ahh, sim.” And very soon, from an arbor of grapes or a ropy xuxú vine an old teapot or an umbrella will appear hanging upside down, adding a mysterious air to the whole which she can’t even explain herself but which draws our grandchildren the moment they arrive at the fazenda to run to Miralda’s as though to an enchanted garden. Most of all, she is a mother for whom her children are more precious than life. When they were small, one saw it in the way that, even when they played in the dust, they didn’t have that dust-stained, abandoned look that so many have, but the look of children zealously scrubbed once a day. Stern in her discipline, there was nothing she would not do for them. Knowing her, I can easily imagine her going to their defense with a machete, as she told me she did instinctively one night when she heard “footsteps” beyond the door (fortunately the footsteps of her own potent imagination). Or on another occasion I could see her, at the instructions of the sixth-grade science teacher, suppressing her terror of darkness to gather them close and step out into the night to search earnestly among the stars for Halley’s comet. In a world where too many take schooling lightly, to Miralda, The One Who Know s . . .

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who can barely read and write, it is the way into a modern world full of hope and out of the narrow, dim world fraught with fear and incomprehension that has held her prisoner all her life. So much so that, some years ago, I witnessed a mental and physical struggle to overcome that world’s barriers when it came time for her little girl, Cristina, to enter the first grade in school. At her unrelenting insistence, the boys had all managed to bridge the gap which, in so many ways, is more considerable than just the six kilometers between the fazenda and town. But as Cristina’s moment approached, I could see that the story was a different one. It was Miralda who was petrified at the thought of her little girl, who had never gone anywhere without her mother, suddenly being swept away in a bus full of rowdy students to a town full of streets and strangers, a huge classroom full of city children with their superior ways. It was no use to say that Cristina would have three hulking brothers as escorts and that countless little girls before her had survived the same ordeal upon reaching the age of seven. “She’ll be fine,” I said almost every day of the preceding year, adding truthfully, “She is so pretty and smart and poised.” “Ohh, I don’t know.” A hen with only one chick to protect could not have been more doubtful. “She doesn’t know anything.” “Well then, let’s teach her something,” I said. Robin, whose Stefan was born on exactly the same day as Cristina, gave me the workbooks from Stefan’s school in São Paulo, and Davi brought the teacher’s manual from Tietê. Every day before I sat down to write, Cristina appeared with her books and pencils and crayons. My not being her mother rendered it a painless reminder of the old days of the Calvert School. Just play. But she learned to curve her hand around a pencil, make her let268

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ters and numbers, draw pictures, and, with an imagination worthy of her parents, describe them with the most incredible stories. Such a bright little girl, with her father’s beautiful, alert, penetrating gaze and her mother’s warm, spontaneous smile. “She’ll be a teacher herself some day, you’ll see, or an international secretary,” I’d say. Miralda’s whole being would glow with pride. But even so, as the beginning of the school year drew near, in a familiar manner she began to lose weight, complain of dizziness, torpor. When dark circles appeared beneath her eyes, I said, “Look, I think you should take some weeks off and attend to your health, go see a doctor.” She did and the doctor pronounced her anemic which, by then, I’m sure she was. But the cause, I knew, was neither overwork nor malnutrition. In a few days school would begin. “Just forget about everything else, do what you believe is right,” I said, praying as I did that belief and common sense would coincide. And so they did, but in Miralda’s way, which meant that every day for a month, when the bus full of rowdy students set off from the stop by the fazenda, there, hunkered down in their midst, sat Mother Hen. And when the bell rang to enter the classroom, despite the inevitable jestings and whisperings, in marched Miralda to squeeze herself behind a desk and stay till the bell rang at noon. In the end it was Cristina who declared that she could quite well brave it all herself—a declaration of independence that was further enhanced by a kind and understanding teacher’s affirmation that Cristina was a model student who could handle a pencil as well as anyone from town. The ordeal must have been stupendous, but it was the only way Miralda, knowing herself, could overcome her fear by doing what she believed was right. The circles disappeared from beneath her eyes, her anemia slipped away. The One Who Know s . . .

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“Everything is easy now,” she told me, “as though a huge cross was lifted from my shoulder.” I can’t imagine Amadeu’s bearing such a cross, which is why I am sure that as the children grew, he left most matters concerning them strictly in the hands of his wife. It was she who dictated the discipline; she who, with fear and misgiving and determination, sent the boys off to agricultural school in nearby Itu to earn diplomas as technicians. In the normal course of things, Nilson is the only boy to stay here on the fazenda. Like his father he has a flair for mechanics, even to the point of building little battery-run airplanes. But the normal course of twelve years of schooling as well has placed him outside the bell jar so that he can read an instruction book and follow it. Amadeu could learn to read and write if he wanted to. There are courses nowadays to try to make up for lifetimes (and centuries) of neglect. But it is easy to understand why he considers this compensation too little and too late. Easy as well to imagine how he is prevented by a mingling of apathy, impatience, and pride—the last of which cannot be easy to swallow as he works beside his literate son every day, listening as he reads the instructions. So the seasons slide into each other and the years go easily by. On that night when Cristina was born, I remember Amadeu rapping on the windowpane, his voice anxious. I struggled into my jeans, nightgown and all, and away we went to the hospital. As a bureaucratic nun signed Miralda in, I remember feeling something strange at the level of my ankle and discreetly bent down to pocket a pair of undies that had found their way out of my pant leg. Every so often we still laugh. Cristina is eighteen now, a fine girl with a great sense of humor and a tranquil beauty which, like that of many Brazilians, harmo270

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nizes the best of three races. Gilberto Freyre, that great champion of intermarriage, would be proud of her. Our grandchildren love her, and I think she would make a true teacher. Of all of Miralda and Amadeu’s offspring she is the only one who has gathered the courage to dream of going to university. Once again with her notebook under her arm, she comes here, this time to put sense into her English by reading and discussing Aesop’s fables. Because education is one belief that Miralda and I truly share, I hope this will help Cristina pass entrance exams geared for an elite who went to private schools. But if she makes it, more than anything it will be thanks to the person who, as we read “The Fox and the Grapes,” we can hear rattling pans in the kitchen. The one who knows where everything belongs.

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29 T h e

Ohioans and Paraná

As burgeoning as the grass in the rainy season, the gardens, the orchards, and the briars give no rest. We are constantly pruning, tying, harvesting, pickling, and preserving. After sitting a few hours at my desk, it is as refreshing and peaceful for me to tie up the vines of cucumbers as it is for Carson to plant them; or pick baskets full of jabuticabas and oranges to turn into jellies and marmalades for all our family’s breakfast tables. It gives me a sense of bounty and security which only a farm can provide. I feel blessed, in turn, with the pleasure of being able to give these things away—to Selisa’s day care center, to friends who come and pick everything fresh rather than limp from having been trucked hundreds of kilometers to the market. Then too, there is that Nordic compulsion which, at the sight of a hedge full of berries, fills me with a sudden sense of duty. A feeling I can all the same put aside if an opportunity comes my way. Such as when, in February , sixty-five farmers from Ohio decided to take a trip through the Paraná River valley and invited me to go along. Then my adaptable conscience had no trouble 273

with allowing a week’s harvest of jabuticabas and mangoes to provide an extra feast for bugs and birds.

] The Ohioans lived on and farmed the rich lands which formed the basin of a winding river known as Darby Creek. There, assailed on one side by urban sprawl and on the other by environmentalists who tend to regard farmers as nature’s prime enemy, they had created an organization called Operation Future whose purpose was to get all these apparently opposing forces together to keep Darby Creek the beautiful, pristine river that it was. Dennis Hall, the principal coordinator of this herculean effort, worked for the Ohio State Department of Agriculture. Perhaps because he was a farmer in the valley himself, and certainly because he was a lively, imaginative man and a natural leader who liked what he was doing, the whole thing had worked very well. People who wanted to live in the country but had no idea of what that entailed had learned a lot that was useful, such as making middens, planting the right things in the right places to retain the flow of water. Preservationists had learned about farming and farmers had learned a lot of conservation practices. The end result was and is a rich, sustainable agriculture on the edge of a clear-running Darby Creek that abounds with wildlife and fish as proof of what can be done. Because Dennis Hall liked to travel, he had also cooked up this other idea which was good for everyone concerned. That was to take a group to observe a different river basin every year. They had visited the Mississippi basin and the Potomac and the Rhine. When it dawned on Dennis to try South America, he recalled that Louis Bromfield’s daughter lived in Brazil. We were soon busily 274

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exchanging e-mails. Most of the farmers being planters of soybeans, wheat, and corn, it seemed obvious that the best valley to visit was that of the Paraná, which gathers the flow of the rivers of central Brazil before joining the Paraguay, eventually becoming a part of the Rio de la Plata and the sea. Once we’d fixed on that region, rotting jabuticabas meant even less to me as I realized that the course we were to follow would be almost the exact same one Carson and I had taken nearly forty years earlier when most of that valley still lay covered with virgin forest.

] It was in  that we had traveled with our good friends Hans and Helga Scavanius, whose lively and beautiful daughter Eva would one day bring her Danish heritage into the stewing pot of our family by marrying our son Steve. Hans Scavanius is a forester who once grew cacao in the shade of the jungles of the Serra do Mar, and it was he to whom Ariosto Da Riva had appealed for advice when the farmers of Alta Floresta had begun to make their plantations. Yes, the same Ariosto who, it seemed, had learned for the Amazon from the mistakes of Paraná. Hans has a passion for trees and for seeking solutions which could keep forests standing eternally, so no one could have been a better companion for that crazy trip in . Bundling our children into two Volkswagen vans that could best be likened to sardine cans on wheels, we drove from Presidente Prudente through Paraná and Santa Catarina till we reached the seaport of Florianópolis, two thousand kilometers hence. Today all those roads are paved, and Florianópolis is an increasingly bustling outlet for agricultural produce. In those days nothing much was going on at that port, and all the roads were dirt trails winding The Ohioans and Paraná

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beneath the great trees that had yet to be felled for the sawmills which laid the way for the coffee boom to come. Thinking back on it, we have often laughed because who would believe that anyone in his right mind would travel thus for two weeks, the sardine cans groaning and whining as we forced them to labor over those hilly roads, one moment tunnels of dust, the next rivers of mud; holding our breath as we crossed rivers on cable barges—making signs of the cross along with all the other passengers as we reached the other side. One night, I recall, certain we could not reach the next destination before dark, we decided to sleep where we were. I think of Amadeu now as I remember how cold the forest became after dark. The vans had no insulation and the combination of cold, damp forest outside and warm human bodies heaped within caused the humidity to condense and drip as though we were sleeping in a cave. Still, we were young and strong and it didn’t bother us, and I know that we would repeat that trip today, if we could. But of course now we can’t, nor can anyone else, because the forests are no longer there. We can only remember with a sad reverence the splendor of that jungle which had surrounded us then on every side. Out of the dense undergrowth of lesser woods and vines which bound and broke their fall as they grew old and died, the massive trunks of red cabriúva, yellow peroba, pale marfim, mahogany, and angico rose toward the sun. Beneath their crowns that spread as wide as their roots, we paused to have our picnics in a shadowy, secretive world that now and then gave us the wondrous pleasure of spotting deer in a glade, a family of coatimundi scurrying to the safety that still existed far beyond our narrow reach. Sometimes a sunset penetrated the forest roof with slanting rays of fiery light that caused the fronds of palms to glitter as they 276

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turned in an updraft of forest-trapped air. How lucky to have been able to have shared such moments with Hans and Helga, who dreamed of planting teak in their own jungled lands in the Serra do Mar that tumbled down toward the sea.

] That was in , and it not only saddens but angers me to think that virtually nothing of those forests remains today. That during the opening of Paraná’s lands for planting coffee in the fifties and sixties, indifference and complacency on the one hand and ignorance on the other saved scarcely anything of those splendid forests from the slashing and burning process that had been the fate of frontiers since the time of the Portuguese Empire four hundred years earlier. The thought never fails to remind me of a sad observation my father once made. “No matter where,” he said, “it seems that good farming only begins when there are no more frontiers to conquer.” And then I think, if only my father could have been here to see how perfectly his words were borne out by the sequence of events in Paraná. For there, in the seventies, when so many sold out to migrate to the Amazon, others remained to restore the ruined land. One of these, whom I immediately thought of as I planned my trip with the Ohioans, was our good friend Manoel Henrique Pereira, a farmer of Ponta Grossa, a long-settled region of southern Paraná. It was in the mid-seventies that Nonó Pereira, as he is best known to everyone, began to restore some two thousand hectares that he had inherited from his family. So eroded and depleted was the land that some had advised him to sell out for whatever he could get and put his money elsewhere. But Nonó was one of The Ohioans and Paraná

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those whose patience was rooted in a bound determination to find a way to do what he wanted. He had read a great deal about an interesting new system called no-till that was being tried with success by a number of farmers in the United States—among the most articulate of these, Louis Bromfield. In the steep, rock-strewn land that Nonó farmed, the idea of abandoning the conventional plow that bared the land to erosion and using a chisel to plant in the trash of last year’s crop seemed worth a try. But how, in Brazil, where scarcely any knowledge, let alone equipment, existed to make the change? Fortunately, Ponta Grossa was the home of Batavo, a large agricultural cooperative of which Nonó was a member. The co-op had been established by Dutch emigrant farmers who, having had the courage to come to Brazil, were also unusually adept at trying new ideas, and some were also reading and talking about no-till. Nonó was young and inexperienced, but even then in his quiet, soft-spoken way, I am told, he had this amazing power to convince. Without his leadership, perhaps the talk would have come to nothing. But with his urging, Batavo backed a number of its members who gathered the courage to swap their conventional plows for strange, imported machines which cut the furrows and drilled seeds directly into their stony ground. As always with agricultural innovations, it took a long time to adapt everything, from the crops planted to the machinery used, which was not manufactured then in Brazil. But with that amazing Brazilian capacity for finding a way, bit by bit machines were devised that could be drawn not just by huge tractors on huge stretches of land but by animal traction on countless small farms. In lands that had been depleted by the slash and burn and move on system and then eroded by conventional plowing, they sowed 278

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their seeds in the trash left by the last harvest. Rotating soybeans, corn, rye, wheat, oats, and various legumes whose straw and leaf matter were left to decompose, gradually they restored the organic matter to the soils. With this, they created a live and receptive structure which absorbed the rain so well that contour ditches were no longer necessary. A structure so good that productivity increased even as the need for fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, and machinery diminished. In this way, the farmers of Paraná gradually developed their own system of what they called “planting in the straw.” So obviously profitable has this system shown itself to be that, at the time when I traveled with the Ohioans through the Paraná Valley,  percent of the farmers there were cultivating their land in this way. In his matter-of-fact, unassuming manner, Nonó Pereira still describes his experiences in such a way that others gather to listen and work to adapt planting in the straw even beyond Brazil’s borders to such diverse places and conditions as those of Paraguay, Argentina, Spain, and Madagascar. In fact, just before our visit, Nonó had been invited by the World Bank to go to Washington to talk about backing sustainable farming in Brazil. From the start there was no doubt about what the Ohioans wanted to see. Clearly it was what other farmers were doing here, especially the competition, in the second-largest soybean growing country in the world. Such had been their curiosity that nothing had deterred them from coming. Rather than miss the trip, several of them, embroiled in some family dispute at home, simply traveled in separate buses. One young lady risked a bout with pneumonia and ended up spending two days in a hospital in Curitiba before rushing to catch up with us in Cascavel. An elderly geologist had recently lost his daughter to the mindless The Ohioans and Paraná

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violence of our era. But he still wanted to live, to see what was happening in this strange, unimaginable land. This being so, they were wonderful to travel with—these people of the land who wanted to know everything there was to know and had no trouble asking questions. As always, Nonó and his lively and charming wife, Cleide, their daughter Isabel, and their big, rangy son Mané greeted us with open arms, served all of us coffee and cookies, piled us into wagons, and took us to the fields. Our first stop was to see Nonó’s famous “before and after” cut in the soil to show how things had once been in comparison to now. Then we traveled through fields of soybeans ready for harvest that sent a nervous, admiring murmur through the company at hand. Finally we watched Nonó’s magic lantern show, depicting how it all started with Os Clubes das Minhocas (The Earthworm Clubs) which, by using the presence of earthworms as a measure and a symbol of good soil, turned so many of Ponta Grossa’s young farmers in a new and inspiring direction. It was a funny trip, despite the fact that we traveled in big, comfortable buses on asphalt roads, in a way as arduous a trip as the one I had taken with the family in that Volkswagen van years ago. For, not quite aware of the distances to be covered, the Ohioans had prepared an itinerary of marathon-like proportions that perhaps only hardy farmers had the stamina to survive. Whirling and swaying through the countryside, I don’t think I ever talked so much in my life, sitting with someone different every day, trying to describe this world of ours to people whose curiosity was such that, even when we stopped for gasoline, they spilled out of the buses to question Brazilian truckers about grain transportation! With all those people arriving at once, the lobbies of the hotels 280

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were like undersized corrals filled with unaccustomed herds, each member of which needed a personal vaqueiro to get him through the chute. But they were a jolly herd. In fact the only complaint I ever heard from any of them was that the hotels didn’t furnish what they called “warsh cloths.” But once I’d described to them the greater need, in Brazilian showers, for rubber sandals as protection against bare-wired electrical annihilation, they quieted down. And after a night’s collapse on their narrow little beds, at dawn they were always fresh and ready to pick up their gear and be back on the road. The course really was the same one we’d taken in . From Ponta Grossa we went to the falls of Iguaçu on the Paraná River, where, protected by a national park, great tumbling waters wear away sandstone cliffs in the midst of the forest. Standing and looking over the falls, I was taken back to that time when we really did stand in the midst of what seemed an unconquerable wilderness. But that sensation quickly subsided when we left the park and drove on to see Itaipú, the hydroelectric dam just below the falls. Like so many other things Brazilian, Itaipú is the largest dam in the world. With its  generators producing . billion kilowatts ( percent of Paraguay’s energy and, all the same, only  percent of Brazil’s), one must admit that it is impressive. A huge reception center provides a very good film which describes it, along with the Eurotunnel and the Golden Gate Bridge, as one of the seven wonders of the modern world, though naturally it doesn’t mention some of the things preferably forgotten. Such as submerging one of the original seven wonders of the world, the splendid falls of Sete Quedas on a tributary of the Paraná, the Guaíra River. There was a great deal of opposition to the drowning of Sete Quedas, which a good many knowledgeable engineers The Ohioans and Paraná

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claimed was unnecessary and more costly than if, as modern engineering has proven, several smaller dams had been built farther upstream. Or the countless people who in exchange for their farms were given land and nothing else in the Amazon forest. But the generals were in charge at that point and patience with opposition was not a part of everyday living as it is today. Such was the foolish waste then that is always part of unlimited power. Still, though the original beauty, diversity, and secrets that lay therein can never be restored, it was heartening to see that a large reforestation program using native trees had been begun along the lake of Itaipú and the banks of the rivers there. It was good to know, too, that in  a six-kilometer fish migration canal (characteristically, the world’s largest) had been built so that the fish of the Paraná River could take up their reproductive migration where it had been severed by the indifferent builders of the dam twenty years earlier. These are reparations which, even if not admitted as such, kindle a new respect for those protesters who, though hushed at the time, had the courage to persist and be heard enough to cause acts which would change attitudes in the future. So it was, in many ways, throughout our entire journey. Along those that had, forty years earlier, been trails in the great shadows of subtropical jungle, now on asphalt roads we passed fields where machines were harvesting soybeans and corn, heavy with bounty, leaving behind a trail of stalks and leaves that would nourish the wheat, oats, and rye of winter planting. Guaíra, Cascavel, and Campo Mourão were huddles of clapboard houses on the edge of the jungle the last time I had passed through. Now they are big, bustling towns on the roads that lead to the increasingly flourishing ports of Florianópolis and Paranaguá that are ship282

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ping grains all over the world. In Campo Maurão and Cascavel, we visited cooperatives that are not just financing the farmers but encouraging them to diversify back into small operations of coffee and fruits and livestock to balance their dependence on grains, giving them the technical assistance they need to improve rather than deplete their soils. Everywhere we went, in true Brazilian manner, people took us in, eager to talk, exchange ideas, show us everything they were doing, from Guaíra to Londrina, where the university has its own programs now in sustainable farming and, at last, forestry. As if in belated recognition, the cities of Londrina and Maringá, which were built out of the destruction of the jungle, are full of parks and walking streets and greenery. Surrounded by a bountiful, agriculturally productive countryside, they are good places to live for everyone, no matter how humble their living may be. And yet it was in the midst of Paraná’s newfound bounty that our bus, on reaching the top of a hill, suddenly came upon a hauntingly different scene. There below us, spread over a level stretch of land, was an encampment of some hundred black plastic tents. As the bus slowed to make a curve, mouths fell open, necks craned to see better. People came and went among the tents, from which here and there smoke rose through a rent; clothes billowed from lines. Yet unlike the tents of the settlers in Alta Floresta, there were no pigs and chickens, no sign of permanence, but, as in refugee camps, rather that of waiting. As we flashed by, to the querying sounds of the Ohioans, our official guide waved his hand dismissively. “Vagabonds,” he said. But I said, “Wait a minute.” And taking up the microphone, I found myself stuck with the question of where to begin. There The Ohioans and Paraná

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might be some vagabonds among them, I told my captive audience, but most had joined the Movement of the Landless in the hope of gaining land promised them through the agrarian reform. Most had lived on the land before as farmworkers or small holders—members of large families a few hectares couldn’t support. Many were nordestinos, such as those we had known in Presidente Prudente, who had yet to earn enough to buy their promised land. Many had come this way via huge cities such as São Paulo, where they had swarmed in hope at least of giving their children an education, a better life. But there, amid the cities’ uncontrollable growth, they had found themselves living in the squalor and danger of favelas where a new kind of tribal life existed, steeped in ugliness and envy and powered by drugs, which was presently causing everyone, rich and poor alike, to live imprisoned and in fear. Well organized, disciplined by determination and hope and strong leaders, it is a sad irony that O Movimento dos Sem Terra (The Movement of the Landless) is far from a bad alternative to the grimness and horror of the favelas, the terrible fear of leaving one’s children alone at the mercy of pais da rua, “street fathers,” the drug-trafficking Fagins of our times. Indeed, provided food by the government until land can be allotted, they often work in the surrounding countryside while they wait things out. Far from passive, they are organized and willing as well to invade, knock down fences, destroy crops and pastures, and slaughter cattle to force expropriation. The lands they invade they claim to be unproductive and thus eligible for division. “Often this is not so,” I told my listeners. “And in either case we farmers abhor the lawlessness of invasion, we dread and are infuriated at the thought that suddenly we might wake up one morn284

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ing to find an encampment in the hay field at the bottom of the hill. And yet, after centuries of political promises, most of us are not surprised that an organized movement should force government to begin to see the small farmer who already owns land as someone who could be of tremendous worth where he is.” At that point, the history of agrarian reform becoming the complicated history of Brazil, which could certainly not be related between Londrina and Cascavel, I returned the microphone to the guardedly bristling tour guide. But though the encampment faded, swallowed by the bountiful scenery that surrounded us, the haunting glimpse gave us a lot to think and talk about as we drove over the next hill and the next. We were farmers, after all, and therefore none could know better than we what it took to sustain a piece of land and make a living from it. In the modern world, not everyone can or even wants to be a farmer. Many of the people in that encampment and others like it the world over were there because they had nowhere better to go. So what to do to provide the essentials in search of which people everywhere have migrated since the beginning of time—the dignity of good work in decent surroundings? Indeed, it was a question these people with their Darby Creek project had been thinking about and working on for some time. Could they not—if anything simply by talking and exchanging ideas and experiences—help us to do a better job here, to learn from what they’d learned? Even in this world which now surrounded them of open spaces and scarcely touched frontiers? Are we humans eternally condemned to learn by our own mistakes with all the waste and sorrow involved? Sitting beside one and then another, I told the Ohioans this was for me rather like reliving scenes from a history during which, The Ohioans and Paraná

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within two generations, Paraná had become a rich frontier that had created fortunes in coffee and land speculation. But during which as well, here as everywhere else, its resources had been depleted by primitive, ignorant agriculture which had eroded the bared land and fed on the soil until it could no longer provide a living. It reminded me of another of my father’s deeply instilled sayings, “Poor people make poor soil.” And Paraná, with its displaced people, was a perfect example. Fortunately its deep, red soils were resilient, and those who had managed to do well by them in the first place now had better education, greater means and ability to restore those lands, make them more fertile than when they had found them. Many of these farmers were the descendants of those people who two generations ago had lived in huddles of clapboard houses where Londrina and Maringá now stood. Remembering this, I couldn’t help feeling once again proud at what they had done and cautiously hopeful about some of the people I knew of who at this moment were creating new frontiers in central Brazil, in places like Maracatins along the banks of the great, shining Tocantins River, where, right from the beginning, it was said, farmers were planting in the straw. Or the savanna lands of northern Mato Grosso where our son Steve, who deals in grains, had become great friends with a family of farmers and traders, the Magis, who had gone north from Paraná to Rondonópolis, a dot on the map twenty years ago. From there this family had sent their young ones farther north and westward still to found a community called Andrelandia—named for their patriarch, of course. These, in turn, have become grain and cotton farmers on sixty thousand hectares of what is known as cerradão—dense savanna. And out of this distant semiwilderness they are now trucking their pro286

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duce eight hundred kilometers to Pôrto Velho on the Madeira River, from where it is barged some one thousand kilometers to docks they had built themselves at Itacoatiara on the Amazon. In other words, twenty years later, the Magis had realized the dream that Ariosto Da Riva had been unable to achieve during his lifetime—river transport via the Amazon to the Atlantic. “So do you see,” I said, at once excited and vaguely alarmed by what I had just described, “how things accelerate in these times, once they’re started?” In response, to my amazement, some of the Ohioans wanted to know about the idea of investing in the new frontierlands. One of those with whom I sat on my rounds of the buses was Bill Hudson, an articulate teacher and agricultural extensionist with an obvious flair for adventure, who was thinking of perhaps leading a tour through those new lands in the year to come. I could imagine his fascination with what was happening, but looking around at those solid, well-established people who seemed to me agricultural pillars of American prosperity, I couldn’t help wondering why any of them would think of investing, let alone settling, in Brazil. “Inheritance taxes, for one thing,” Bill answered me, “Why do you suppose so many good farms are going into urban developments in the States? Because it costs a fortune to pass your land on to your kids,” he now answered himself. “That leads to the problem of space. What romance is there in factory farming?” Convinced that romance was a necessary ingredient, indeed one that had made us come to Brazil in the first place, I answered, “Yes, I can see that. And still . . . ” Of a sudden I began to feel a bit guilty, as if, like a promoter, I’d made my picture of new frontiersmen all brightness and no The Ohioans and Paraná

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shadow. Even as I did, I found myself visualizing Ohio as I often do, with its fine infrastructure and immediate assistance whenever it’s needed—be it mechanical, technical, market-related, or otherwise. In my mind I saw all the organizations and governmental agencies which helped these people to make their Darby Creek Project viable. Agencies that were there to study and help you to work out your problems, do something useful that would in the end benefit everyone. “You people have so much in place that I almost wonder if you don’t take a lot for granted,” I had to say. “While here . . .” As an example, I told him about our friend Tom Leal, an American of Portuguese descent who, years ago, tempted by an article in the Saturday Evening Post entitled “Paraná, the Land That Smells Like Money,” left a secure and prosperous life in California’s San Joaquin Valley to put everything he had into a piece of land in Maringá. To make ends meet while Tom cleared the forest and planted coffee, his adventurous wife, Irene, transformed the porch of their clapboard house into Maringa’s first ice cream parlor—a great success till the generator burned and the ice cream flowed into the dirt road. Not much later, Irene gave birth to their first daughter with the help of a midwife who sat on her belly to hurry things along. By then, seeing drab days ahead, they sold out to a speculator who made a fortune from what is now the center of one of the richest towns in Brazil. “What I’m trying to say is you not only have to be a dreamer and a gambler on these frontiers, but be willing to suffer,” I said (something Carson and I had decided against years ago). “Just about everything you’ve seen on this trip, people have had to put in place by themselves. It’s taken generations and it’s far from

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over. You’re on an asphalt highway here, but go a little farther and there you are—on the dirt, living in a different era.” “So maybe that’s the fun of it,” Bill retorted, apparently undaunted by my darker shadings. “I’ve noticed on this trip, wherever we go, people seem to be enjoying themselves.” “It’s a national trait, thank God,” I said, and my guilt at last overcome by my own curiosity, “Then next year, let’s go look at the new frontiers?” “It’s a deal,” he grinned. “I’m going to work on it, soon as I get back.” The tour ended at Fazenda Pau D’Alho, where our daughter Christina, who so enjoys cooking, had prepared us a huge feijoada. Originally slaves’ food, feijoada consists of black beans cooked with garlic and the ears, tails, and hocks of pigs, to which nowadays are added the delicious sausages and smoked meats that make this, eaten with rice, collards, and pepper sauce, Brazil’s most fashionable Saturday dish. It was delicious and the Ohioians did love it, but there is a reason, Carson reminded me as he often does after the fact, why feijoada is served on Saturdays. It is that afterward you’re not supposed to go anywhere but to the nearest hammock, preferably out in the open. And here, after warm and effusive good-byes, these poor people were going off to spend the next twelve hours in a modern mode of transportation, which reminds one of nothing so much as that old Volkswagen van we used to travel in, with the fearsome addition of wings . . . “God help them,” Carson said with roguish pity as we settled into our own hammocks for a peaceful sesta beneath the trees.

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Bill Hudson did work on another trip, and for a time e-mails drifted back and forth between us, but the excursion to the new frontiers has yet to materialize. Could it have been the feijoada? Or was it, as I imagine, that those farmers went home from Brazil with a greater respect for what they really do have in Ohio? Still, I hope as well that they carried with them a vision one seldom sees on television or in the newspapers, even here, of a country full of youth and vigor and inventiveness. One which, far from the maddening crowds of great cities, stretches from Tietê and Maringá to Maracatins and Itacoatiara.

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30 T h e

Heifer of the Future

I had scarcely settled in after that trip before it was time to begin to prepare, with a mingling of cheerful anticipation and dread, for our yearly Festa da Novilha do Futuro. The Heifer of the Future, as it is called, is another of those schemes which are a result of thought-flow released by Carson’s hoeing amid his vegetables. One day, some eighteen years ago, of a sudden it came to him that it would be not only fun but good business to have a big cattle sale on our small farm. But how? More digging came up with a special attraction. It was a contest in which, to participate, Santa Gertrudis heifers would be required to be between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two months of age, pregnant, and beautiful. The contest, we hoped, would lure breeders from the Amazon to Rio Grande do Sul to bring their very best animals. And the sale would make it worthwhile to come and trade these fine animals, thus exchanging the best of different bloodlines. So far it has worked so well that recently bulls from the ages of eighteen to twenty-four months were included to

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create a Novilha e o Touro do Futuro. Why not? Distances are great and the price of the truck is the same. Though “marketing” was the original motive, thanks to an inborn Brazilian love for making a festa out of everything this sale has had an increasing tendency to combine the atmosphere of a Barnum and Bailey production with a real country fair. The entire event takes up a weekend which can include field days on pasture and livestock management, barbecues in the shade of the pecan trees, and dinner dances in the patio beneath the pau brasil. Most of the hard work of preparing and serving the food and drink is done by a charitable group who at the same time collect entrance fees to be contributed to their school for exceptional children in Tietê. Good, reliable people who seem to enjoy themselves as much we do. I can sense the first stir of this production in the air when I hear Carson on the phone lining up backers and auctioneers. Then comes the hammering and sawing as the fazenda gets its yearly facelift: fences fixed and buildings repaired and whitewashed; zinnias and marigolds planted to be in full bloom on the proper day. A few days beforehand, we stake out a show ring on the lawn beneath the trees, and the auctioneers send out a tent to be set up in the pasture nearby. The tent is a huge blue-and-orange striped affair rented from a traveling circus which sends its own roustabouts to do the job. Odd, gypsylike people full of stories to tell the children, they work into the night, lights aglow and radio blaring as they pound stakes into the ground and slide up and down poles until the whole—with its auctioneer’s stand and tables and chairs for the bidders—is in place, and the tent offends the peaceful scenery of our countryside with its glowing gaudiness. But these are only 292

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final preparations behind which everything has to do with bringing good animals into the show ring, with creating and maintaining a useful breed.

] One may think it is easy to be a beautiful heifer, but in the critical eye of a cattle judge this means the animal must look as though she is not only fertile and a good producer of beef but will be able to give birth to a calf without assistance and defend and sustain it with plentiful milk in the harshest of near-wild tropical pasturelands. As he walks up and down eyeing the heifer from every angle and watching her walk in turn, he’s taking in everything, from a feminine head and smooth shoulders to a balanced udder and sturdy, well-placed hooves and enough loose skin to spread the sweat and keep cool in tropical weather. To be a handsome bull is even harder. For not only must he have a masculine head, be fertile, and sustain a heavy and powerful frame, he must also be light on his feet while he’s at it. That’s hard enough, but harder for a bull with an Indian background is to keep that loose skin without having a dangling wang to be snagged by every thorn in the very thorny Brazilian campo. So it is that the moment a calf staggers to its feet to nurse for the first time, all eyes fly to the underline, where its future may be decided then and there. So it is as well here at Pau D’Alho: a great deal of riding, cigar puffing, and contemplation go on until the contenders are chosen. What with all this, veterinarian Roberto Lopes is here today to check the bulls’ semen and palpate the heifers to determine whether our candidates for the Heifer of the Future are safe in calf. Through the window I can hear whooping, hollering, lowing, and The Heifer of the Future

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a slamming of gates on the chute, which tell me that large appetites are in the making. It also tells me that lunch will be lively, because years ago we were not wrong in our assessment of the light in Roberto Lopes’s eyes. He first appeared at Pau D’Alho in  when, fresh from veterinary studies at the University of Botucatu, he was roaming the countryside offering assistance to whatever cattle or horse breeder might have the courage to take on a young, inexperienced vet. A sturdy physique and strong square hands suggested that he was capable of dangerous and hard work. Besides, there was that humorous look in his eyes that, just for the fun of knowing him better, made us decide to give him a try. Right off, we could see that he was “teched,” an essential in a profession in which one has to diagnose and act upon a patient who doesn’t speak your language. We also soon saw that he had enough self-confidence to be able to admit error and accept advice, something which many a young university graduate with a lot of theory and no experience often has a hard time doing. Aristedes might have a fourth-grade education, but Roberto has stood by and watched with attention as, hands lathered with kitchen oil, Aristedes has stuffed a prolapsed uterus back into a cow and sewn her up. Along with this power of observation, Roberto was soon able to display for us a veterinary’s oft-needed talent for improvisation. It happened for the first time on a night when Carson’s and Aristedes’s efforts to turn a breached calf had come to naught, and Roberto had to be called. He came quickly as he could, but, unable to begin before dark, none of us shall forget watching in wonder as on the ground of the corral, by car lights reflected in a mirror, the veterinary made an incision half a meter long from which he withdrew a struggling calf, whose first bellow was 294

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distinctly one of indignation. It was the only cesarean we ever needed and poor Roberto’s first operation, which we all celebrated soon after with double scotches on the rocks. Ever since, Roberto, who is now a grandfather, has come periodically to give us assistance in a world whose mild climate takes its toll in the proliferation of insects and diseases which would otherwise be virtually controlled by the rigors of long and merciless winters. How good it would be not to have to substitute winter kill with baits and systemics and sprays. But if we didn’t, the hides of our cattle would be festering villages of cattle grubs and colonies of ticks fat as grapes ready for the picking. Our pastures would be cities of termite hills and tunneling, leaf-cutting ants that can make the sophisticated underground labyrinths of Montreal look primitive by comparison. One marvels at nature’s wonders, yet one also wonders at the perverse complexity which causes the grub fly to lay its egg on the house fly which in turn deposits that egg on a hide, preferably beyond reach of a tail or a tongue. But as Mark Twain was wont to point out, Noah’s Ark was not complete until the arrival of the flies. And with them such leveling afflictions as undulant fever, tick fever, tuberculosis, black leg, and hoof and mouth disease, just to name a few. In the Northern Hemisphere, hoof and mouth was supposedly done away with by strict elimination of contaminated herds. In the Southern Hemisphere, where warm climes tend to lessen strict attitudes, one doubts that would work. Still, since the time we settled on Pau D’Alho a lot has certainly changed. In those days, so many animals came down with the disease, even with vaccination, that a lot of people actually believed the vaccines were the cause of the illness. When our own cattle caught the The Heifer of the Future

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disease after exposure at a cattle show, we felt more inclined to attribute it to poor refrigeration. God knew how many times the vaccines had been left outside a refrigerator by some nonbeliever before they got to us. The effect, at any rate, was to cause our animals to come down with a disease which—even if they didn’t die of starvation due to the festering sores in their mouths—could leave them crippled, stunted, and sterile. With more medicine, revaccination, and loving care, none of the sick died. But a year’s struggle to recuperate them set us back several years in time and expense, while certainly the worst was their pain and suffering. Nowadays refrigeration and hygiene are better, and no cattle are permitted to travel without a veterinary’s signed bill of clean health. But as in everything else, learning and common sense have done the most to cause people to vaccinate regularly, as we have done ever since we’ve had cattle. So that is why Roberto is here today, working with Mingo’s son Renato—a teched young man with a spring in his step clearly inherited from a lively, indomitable mother who fought to send him to school. Aristedes is retired now from a job well done in a life that has been burdened with the sorrow of losing three beloved children. Each died in separate automobile accidents, leaving all of us stunned and incredulous. Yet we marveled at the way in which, as in everything else, he bore each cruel blow with amazing fortitude, accepting our sympathy with a quiet dignity which asked no pity. Best of all, he succeeds in enjoying life, still coming here whenever we are hard put, to do work he has always enjoyed and taken pride in. During the days leading up to the Novilha, he never fails to help Renato teach the bulls and heifers the judgedeceiving tricks of the trade as they rehearse, walking up and

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down the road and around the lawn before this window where the show is to be held. Last year, to award a prize to the best cattle handler, our veterinary, Roberto, was chosen as judge. Not surprisingly he gave the prize to Aristedes, an act which caused not only his own but a general flood of tears. For who could have doubted the merit of this portly, gray-haired herdsman who had taught everyone including Roberto so many things? Then, as Aristedes received the prize with that plain, proud smile of his, for my part I couldn’t help thinking of how this, too, was one of the rewards for remaining in one place and knowing the same people for so many years.

] In all this I sometimes suspect that Carson has a predilection for tempting fate. Else why each year should he choose a moment so daringly close to the Ides of March for this event? Quite without need of Shakespearian rhetoric, it is a moment to beware as—having done with Christmas, New Year’s and Carnaval— politicians return to politics, thus arousing among ordinary folk a latent sense of apprehension which cannot help but cause them to think twice before reaching for their wallets. Then too at this time between the rainy season and the dry, nothing could more untrustworthy than the weather. Our necks get crooked as everything we do is done with an eye toward a fitful sky. And yet, although it may be rash to say, São Pedro, who orders the weather, has been more than benevolent on this last Friday of March of every year. As the day approaches, the first trucks with license plates from São Borge, Rio Grande do Sul; Itapitinga, Bahia, and other points

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north, west, and south begin to roll in, bringing cattle and their herdsmen equipped with hammocks to sling in the big feed room by the barn. For these herdsmen it is a get-together too, encountering as they do friends with whom, between hours of caring for the cattle, they squat on their haunches or sit on the railing of Miralda and Amadeu’s back porch—gauchos passing their chimarrões of maté to be sipped through silver pipes while they talk. At that time too, Miralda leaves us to the mercy of the likes of Teresa while she remains at home to complement Amadeu’s own barbecues with rice and beans from huge kettles on her woodstove. Sometimes these are supplemented by a lamb brought by the gauchos from the south or—not to be outdone—a goat by the nordestinos to be roasted over the coals in the evening to the accompaniment of Pernambucano cachaça. Gradually the fazendeiros with their families begin to filter in to fill the traditionally musty rooms of the hotels Quitello and Gloria in Tietê. And our own family comes to fill the house, set up tents under the trees for the children, and contribute to the general confusion. So many scenes come to mind. I have recurrent dreams about that evening when, heading for the veranda to relax and watch the sunset after a harrying day, I came face to face with the current roustabout, his expression equal to his sagging pants as, nodding knowingly, he said, “Something told me those ropes were rotten.” Wonderingly, I turned to the scene behind him where the tent lay like a large deflated pancake, totally collapsed. Feeling faint as the full implication came over me, I could barely gather the strength to answer, “Good thing it happened today.” Or the day when, apparently taking umbrage at the booming voice of the auctioneer, a bull broke loose and dove from the auc298

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tion block, parting people, chairs, and tables like Moses parting the Red Sea, and equally miraculously harming no one as he plunged toward light and the open pasture beyond. Or that night when, preparing Hungarian goulash for three hundred, I plugged in my ancient electric oven, thereby blowing out the entire electrical system just as the bidding in the auction tent was at the height of its frenzy. To fully appreciate this disaster is to know that the atmosphere of most auctions in Brazil resembles nothing so much as a show in a fancy night club. As waiters liberally serve drinks to the audience seated below, the cattle—dressed in their prize ribbons and sometimes even sprinkled with stardust and enveloped in clouds of dry ice vapor—make their entrances to blaring soundtracks capable of rendering anything from heavy metal’s latest hit to the triumphal march from Aida. To achieve these effects truckloads of sound equipment are brought in to be connected to poor, cringing wires accustomed to providing electricity for water pumps and feed grinders at the most. Even if the lights haven’t blown out by dinnertime, the sound system is banned from the patio. Indeed, in an atmosphere almost hushed by comparison, one evening there beneath the pau brasil we even managed to achieve the ambience of a chamber music soirée. Though that was not before atmospheric conditions in the air around us all but caused a disaster worse than that created by plugging in the old oven. It was the year when Robin’s friend John Spindler, who played the violin in the São Paulo Municipal Orchestra’s String Quartet, suggested we describe our Novilha do Futuro as a “cultural event,” thereby making it eligible to provide some before-dinner entertainment at we taxpayers’ expense. The broadly defined request officially granted, the quartet arrived at The Heifer of the Future

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dusk on the evening of the auction. But as I opened the door, I found myself greeted by a majority of three in a state of rebellion. It seemed that John, vague about everything but his music, had neglected to inform his companions that the concert would be held outdoors. Confronted with the news, Ziggy Koblovski, a Hungarian of temperamental nature, stared at me in indignation. “I am sorry, senhora, but you cannot not expect me to expose my cello to the evening mist! You must understand,” he added, his voice grown suddenly soft with reverence, “it is seven hundred years old.” “Seven hundred?” For a moment I stared at the venerable cello, transfixed, half expecting it to disintegrate in the night air. But then I began to come to my senses. “Believe me, senhor, the indoors is no more dry than out here tonight. You could light the air with a match.” “Supposing it suddenly dampens?” Senhor Ziggy said distrustfully. “Of course it won’t,” I answered rashly. Perhaps sensing that my awe over the cello was beginning to give way to desire to take it and bop the cellist, Robin came to the rescue. “Go get dressed, Ma,” she ordered me, and added with the deep-rooted confidence in Brazilian innovation, “I’ll find a way.” When I returned, dressed and ready for the evening come what might, the center of the patio had been transformed as if by magic into a parlor of the old-fashioned kind one might envision as a setting for a staid evening of chamber music. There were chairs, tables and rugs, and a lamp for Ziggy Koblovski to play by. In the enchanting surroundings, the fact that the dogs—our own and the children’s, ten in all—had made a beeline for the rugs the moment they were laid down seemed not to matter. Pacified, 300

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Senhor Ziggy sat, his ancient cello sharing the corner of a rug with the old boxer, Bessie. Winking and murmuring a soft “Amen,” John Spindler lifted his violin. As he did, a further miraculous hush fell over our chattering guests and the sounds of Mozart and Haydn interspersed with occasional canine snores and farts wafted upward on the desert-dry night air. After dinner a group of local musicians led by Seu Almartine Lins, whose bowed legs create an ideal frame for his bass fiddle, exchanged places with the string quartet, who joined us to dance sambas, forrós, and lambadas till the small hours of the morning. Among the many scenes of that evening, a most memorable one was that of Ziggy Koblovski, buoyant with relief, dancing hand in hand with two little girls, Amanda and Erin, all dressed up in starched party dresses and thrilled to have such a distinguished partner.

] So it is that the Novilha has been going on long enough by now to be considered traditional—at least by New World standards. I can measure the time by the growth of the big old mango tree which stands in the middle of the lawn where the judging goes on. Only large enough to accommodate one grandchild when this exercise began, its strong, meandering limbs now provide balcony seats for at least the eight youngest while its shade covers half the ring. There, like a well-composed landscape, all the points to be considered by a judge really do create beautiful animals and a splendid scene as the cattle are paraded by their handlers. As often as possible we try to bring in a judge from other countries where we trade in Santa Gertrudis cattle bred in climates similar to Brazil’s. He may be a Texan from the rugged mesquite The Heifer of the Future

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country or an Australian from the sparse, dry, yet fertile outback, both similar in their climate and soils to the caatinga lands of the Brazilian northeast. Or it could be a South African from the cerrado-like veldt; or an Argentine or an Uruguayan from the fertile plains so like those of Rio Grande do Sul just across the border. Of all, perhaps eager to take advantage of the great distance they must come, the Australians seem to be the ones who find their way around best in Brazil. Always full of questions and ready and able to go anywhere, once they establish a beachhead, they send their offspring, who, like the Aborigines, take walkabouts from fazenda to fazenda. By all of us here best remembered are two young ladies who had already made their way backpacking through Argentina and Peru before they got here, two whom vaqueiros on fazendas from São Paulo to the Pantanal shall always recall as as belas meninas seemingly from another planet, as, speaking in sign language, they helped with the roping and branding and joined in the Sunday games of soccer. Engraved forever in my own mind is the moment when Renato, placing his milking stool and turning to reach for his bucket, found himself face to face with a bright-eyed, charming Amanda White, who, giving him the friendliest of smiles, bent her fingers as though around a cow’s teats and pointed encouragingly toward her ample bosom. As his mouth fell open, empty of words, I came to the rescue. “She means she’d be glad to do the milking.” On the other hand, for short-term appreciation there are none like the Texans. Can it be religion? In our easygoing Latin Catholic surroundings, some of these fellows go berserk, become glassyeyed Don Juans—the more dangerous for their courtliness—who could well cause a Texas Methodist to put the judge’s bedroom off 302

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limits. Not all, mind you, but some. And none until they have shed the grave responsibility of placing all those fine cattle. Within the ring, the lawn beneath their boots is sacred ground and their faces are like churches as they judge. Most of them are men who have worked with cattle all their lives. Unlike many who are watching, they have a handler’s knowledge as well as an owner’s. Having covered it themselves, these Texans know the rugged terrain in which the animals must survive, the great expanses over which they must often wander to find water. Therefore, along with the qualities of fine conformation, they look for such things as sturdy legs and hocks, the splay of hooves, the smoothness of shoulders which calves will need for an easy birth, and the width and give of the place from which those calves must emerge. The handlers see this and are all attention. And the owners who lean forward in their chairs and listen to the judge’s talk, even if they don’t agree, invariably learn something new. There is Milton Nacimento, with years of tradition behind him from his estância in the southerly windswept pampas of Rio Grande do Sul. And there is Coreliano Cury, from his droughtstricken, fertile caatingas in the valley of the São Francisco. Or Luiz and Anita Baanwart, who live not far away and could be no more happy without their cattle raising and farming than could we. Yet whenever I think of these people, among them a single image emerges, attentive, yet concentrating all her powers of persuasion upon the judge all the while she listens.

] How beautiful Dona Zita Campos Salles must have been when she, a pampered paulistana used to old family luxuries, married her vigorous, irascible Guilherme in the mid-forties. Certainly, The Heifer of the Future

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with eyes the color of sapphires beneath a high, pale brow, her fine, classic features became if anything more exquisite with all the years we knew her. She must, too, have been very much in love to have gone with Guilherme to carve a coffee fazenda out of the wilderness near a frontier town called Garça, where the Sorocabana Railway line was pushing its way westward. And so she remained, taking part with her fazendeiro in everything—not with her immaculate hands but with her heart and mind as she walked about the cafèzal in the early morning, always with a parasol to shade her fine, pale skin from the merciless sun. Until the day when Guilherme, in a fit of rage at boorish governmental meddling in the coffee market, declared he’d never plant another coffee tree. Making good his word, they sold out and became the first Brazilians to buy stock from Swift-King Ranch, already established here, and breed Santa Gertrudis cattle. Sadly, they had no children. And so whatever affection was left from their own for each other they lavished upon their animals— a passel of dogs who followed them everywhere, a hundred canaries hung in cages round the veranda, and first and foremost, the Santas. It was from them we bought our first bull, who, by modern standards, would be considered a disaster. But with concentration, hard work, and diplomacy, they greatly improved and promoted the breed. By “diplomacy” I mean that they took their Santas to shows all over Brazil and made friends with everyone who was anyone. Senhor Guilherme was best man at more weddings and Dona Zita godmother to more children than anyone we know. Whoever came looking for bulls and heifers to improve their herds were invariably invited to lunch in a house which Dona Zita, who knew her cattle every bit as well as did her husband, also found time to 304

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keep impeccable. Uniformed maids serving at a table set with Sèvres china—the works. Watch what she does, Carson warned our eldest, Steve, the first time he took him to buy another bull. And still he all but fell into the finger bowl wondering what to do with the rose petals floating there. Perhaps because it was hard to hear above the trilling of the canaries, the Campos Salles both talked in booming tones which were nonetheless as persuasive as Dona Zita’s eye upon the judge, making it rare for anyone to leave without a purchase. In defense of what they called with exclusive pride “the breed,” they were charming, proud, and sincere. They were also fierce, unyielding, and superstitious. In a room full of glowing trophies, a glass of salted water stood on a windowsill, constantly refilled to absorb the gaze of an evil eye. And God help anyone whose evil wish was brought to light, especially concerning championships and the like. To be ostracized by the Campos Salles was to be stigmatized. At the age of eighty five, Senhor Guilherme passed on— one hopes to green pastures full of red cows and calves—though not entirely. For Dona Zita always swore his spirit hovered, protecting and urging her on. And so she continued raising cattle, going to shows and on tours which took us to those exotic parts of the world where our exotic animals thrived. With a sense of humor and spirit she could make any expedition an adventure. By her regal appearance and nature, she seldom failed to have her and our way. In such a manner, her righteous, astonished “Ave Marias!” were enough to convince Australian customs officers inspecting the fingers of her elegant gloves that she had naught to do with trafficking. Or dissuade Texas authorities who mistrusted foreign “hoof and mouth–free testimonies” from compelling our Brazilian group to The Heifer of the Future

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tread the Houston fair grounds with our shoes clad in plastic bags. The embodiment of the seasoned Brazilian ruse, “Is senhor aware of whom he is speaking to?” expressed wordlessly in a baleful, blue-eyed stare, it was not only courtesy that caused her companions’ insistence that Dona Zita always be first in line. A power to be contended with, she was also the kindest and most loyal of friends. Indeed, we shall never forget her kindness at a very low time in our lives. It had to do with that losing battle with inflation. Not that we didn’t have a good time during those years, but Carson, who always said he didn’t worry about things he couldn’t change, had spent many a sleepless night all the same, haunted by the thought of our farm, our life, going down the drain. An inner turmoil which, we are sure, lent itself to a cancer which was successfully removed along with the bone of his right heel. So it was for us that, in the midst of his recovering as he hobbled about with a cane, there one day appeared in our driveway a cattle truck bearing a handsome bull, accompanied by a letter. “This is Honesto,” the note introduced the bull in elegant convent-school script. “I have bred him to so many cows I can use him no more. So I thought of you. Use him all you can. I’m sure you will find him to be true to his name.” True he was, and the sire of many a fine calf, thanks to a goodhearted woman who not only thought of but actually did what she might do to help in a difficult moment. A woman as well who bred cattle because that was what she loved to do, selecting them with the criteria of a judge to create the best. Caring for them and the land which fed them with the greatest zeal; seeing that her pastures were never overpopulated and thus never overgrazed. Knowing that there was always that day when she would have to send her cattle off for good, yet taking that sadness as the oppo306

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site side of the coin, looking upon it as the inevitable part of a design. One in which forest and desert, field and pasture, and all the creatures therein have a place which it is man’s responsibility to maintain. Until she died at the age of eighty-three, wherever there was a Santa Gertrudis event, there she was. And even now at the Novilha, we can feel her spirit among us as though she were still seated beneath the mango tree on a chair especially provided, surrounded and attended like the grande dame she was, dispensing amusing stories, terse remarks, and wisdom as the moment demands. Then becoming suddenly silent as the cattle line up for judging, aware in the midst of fun and laughter of the solemnity of the moment at hand.

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31 D o n a

Zezé and the

Schoolhouse by the Road

Dona Zita, regal, malicious, loyal, unforgiving, is but one of many women I have described in these pages who might generally be classified as staunch. Some, like her, have been sheltered all their lives until, suddenly alone, they have had to take over. Others have struggled all their lives to keep things together—a family in particular—with little to defend them but their own strength and imagination. Such a woman is Dona Maria José, without whom the old one-room school just across the fence at our neighbor’s would certainly have fallen into ruin. Abandoned when busing country children to school in Tietê was at last put into practice, the schoolhouse had been a place occupied by possums, lizards, birds, and an occasional tramp who made his fire in the middle of the brick floor and slept in a corner beneath its leaking roof. Then Dona Zezé, as she has affectionately come to be known, appeared from nowhere with her nine children and an old dog and moved in. 308

In the beginning there was the usual disparaging speculation among her new neighbors. A woman with no man and all those children? Must have been up to no good in her life. Besides, she was black and she limped. Mark the words of her detractors, malicious Miralda among them, she wouldn’t last long in one place, but while she was there, with that world of kids, she’d be asking for everything you could think of. As it turned out, though, she did last and did not ask for anything but a job. Furthermore, limping and without a reference, she found work in a big weekend house by the church up the hill. As Miralda—embedded in racial prejudice, despite her own mixture of three races—once said to Andreas as he burned his morning eggs, “Try the iron pan, Andreas. It’s black, but it works.” So, quite clearly, it was with Dona Maria José. She kept the job and went on limping up the road every day not only to clean the weekend house but to keep a garden and a sizable orchard in order. And gradually the small talk gave way, first to grudging admiration and then to a near-reverent awe as little by little her own garden grew. Gradually too, her story was revealed to me as now and then I paid her a visit, carrying some plant or other to add to the increasing beauty that surrounded what we have come to call “her land.” “But may I ask where you came from in the first place?” I asked her one day while she placed a yam I’d brought her in a can of water to sprout. “Ahh, from Minas,” she said, immediately stirring my imagination with visions of that mystical place at the geographic heart of Brazil. “When we married, there wasn’t no more room for us there,” she said with a regretful shrug, “so we came to Pôrto Feliz.” For years she and her husband had worked and raised their family on a fazenda in the hilly lands around our Dona Zezé and the Schoolhouse by the Road

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neighboring town, twenty kilometers away from Tietê. In the old manner of things, they had earned little but had a solid house, a yard to plant in, plenty of room for chickens and pigs, and a communal pasture where they could keep cows and at least one horse. “If you wanted to, you could live well. It was a good place to be.” As she spoke, looking around me, I could see how she must have taken advantage—planting every square inch, milking her cow, keeping her chickens . . . the fazenda itself had had a dairy, grown coffee, cotton, beans, and rice. There’d been work enough the year round for the whole family as the older children grew. But then those same frosts that had caused us to plant pecans had combined with a sugar boom to change the scenery. The boom was shortlived, but by then a lot of the big fazendas had rented their land to the sugar mills. For many who were weary of keeping up the old patriarchal structure of a worker’s colony and all that went with it, it was easier. Money came in regularly without having to think of cropping, prices, weather, and workers. What these former fazendeiros do think about nowadays would be hard to say. But for Dona Zezé and many like her, the change was a disaster. The worker’s colony was abandoned. Sugarcane provides work, but not the year round. It meant moving from place to place, living in hovels on the edge of towns. With no garden to keep, no animals to tend, for the men there was little to do but go to the gimcrack bar in the midst of the hovels. Dona Zezé isn’t the kind to blame people for their sins. “My husband couldn’t endure . . .” She shakes her head sadly and one can almost see her husband’s disintegration; imagine his final disappearance, somehow swallowed by everything around him. What to do but leave the eldest one with the smallest ones, take the others along, and go cut sugarcane herself? 310

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That was what she did until the day when, passing the empty schoolhouse in the bus that took the workers to the fields, the idea came to her as a revelation. “God told me what to do and I did it,” she once said to me with that serene look of one who daily talks directly to her Maker. “I went to the prefeitura and said to the mayor, ‘Seu Milarê, the old empty school’s going to fall to pieces. And here am I, a widow with nine young children who would take care of the house and the land if senhor would let us live there.’” Somehow, with that way of hers—neither grousing nor groveling, but so simple and true as to be impossible to ignore—she managed to convince not only the mayor, a kind and reasonable man, but our neighbor, the wily old coffee broker Seu Pedro Dorigello, that this was indeed a heaven-sent idea. Twelve years have passed since then. Most of her children are grown and, having taken the bus from the old schoolhouse to study for at least eight years in the big schools in town, should be better prepared to face the modern world. Some have been, some haven’t. One son has done quite a bit of time in jail. “Life is that way. Some people can’t keep out of trouble no matter what you do for them,” Dona Zezé shrugs sadly to emphasize a common truth. And still she lives there, now with the grandchildren of her wayward son, in surroundings it has taken originality to create. Once in Ohio I was invited to what was called a “rage” where people piled up old furniture and sat drinking beer while they watched it burn. Not here . . . as Miralda says, “there is always someone poorer.” Someone who can perform miracles with what elsewhere might be burned in a “rage.” In the schoolhouse down the road, beneath a high, tiled roof that once sheltered four years of learning, two bedrooms are cordoned off by curtains discarded Dona Zezé and the Schoolhouse by the Road

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from the house where Dona Zezé goes to work each day. In a communal kitchen and sala, with pleasurable nostalgia I recognize old furniture covered with my castoff spreads and cloths neatly pieced together in ways that fill me with wonder at her ingenuity. A gas lamp flickeringly illuminates a shelf full of old schoolbooks, kept as treasures by a woman who cannot read. Painted by a son is a mural of a sunburst with egrets, green-winged red-breasted parrots, and fierce-eyed hawks captured in flight. “Why, he’s an artist!” I declare. “No, just a person who likes to paint,” she replies offhandedly. But the greatest wonder is the garden. With a certain knack for water divining, Amadeu helped Dona Zezé find a vein, and in the same spellbinding way that she acquired the schoolhouse she persuaded the prefeitura to dig her a well. Now when she comes home from work in the evening, she draws water from the well for whatever most needs watering: a bed of lettuce, seedlings of trees, a newly planted cutting of bougainvillea which will one day climb a dead tree to flower bright orange in the sunlight. Two worn paths lead away from the house. One to the road, one to half a hectare of lowland where bananas, manioc, beans, and sweet potatoes still grow for the whole family to come and gather on Sundays. Along the stone-lined path to the road, old oil cans and buckets rot and become a part of the earth, decomposed by the growth and decay and new growth of ferns and bromeliads, salvias and amaryllis. In the shade of towering acacia, the kapok and purple-flowering ipê trees, red and yellow blooming hibiscus, azaleas, and hydrangeas clamber over neatly clipped box hedges as, with no respect for borders, Dona Zezé’s garden spills down the embankments along the edge of the road to create an earthly paradise where children and now grandchildren can run and play. 312

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How she manages to get anything to grow in that eroded subsoil laid bare and left by the indifference of road builders is still another miracle to us all. People shake their heads, at once glad and wondering, how and why? “It does me good,” says she, looking down at incurably swollen knees that keep her constantly suffering. “Sometimes they hurt so much I can’t help crying. And people seeing me walking down the road and crying must think, ‘there goes a crazy.’ But when I get home I pick up my hoe and start working, and for a while it helps me forget. “One day,” she goes on with a poor person’s sense of premonition, “I’ll have to go from here. But, do you know? When I do, I’ll say, ‘Thank you, God.’” In the meantime I can’t help thinking it is we, her neighbors, who should give thanks. All of which reminds me it is time again to pay Dona Zezé a visit. Take her a yellow and red flowering tree of China and some shoots of blackberries to plant in the damp earth beside her spring, no less for the pleasure of giving her something than of knowing that, with her magic, she will cause it to flourish.

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32 T h e

Heart of Brazil

In all our conversations over the years, the one thing Dona Zezé told me that certainly gave me no surprise was that she came from Minas Gerais. For I am not the only person who would swear that people who come from this difficult mountain land at the heart of Brazil have an aura which is truly unmistakable. Ariosto Da Riva, who began his fortunes there as a diamond diver and gem trader, once said to me in all sincerity that, more than location, it is what Minas is made of that would make it the heart of Brazil no matter where it was. It is something, he said, which has to do with the formation of those somber green mountains where the seismic shiftings of rock and the flow of magma into empty spaces have left seams and pockets of aquamarines, amethysts, topazes, tourmalines, diamonds, and gold scattered in an enthralling, maddening manner. “It’s as though,” he told me with the conviction of the seasoned, “the cosmic forces between the stones and stars get hold of a man and don’t let go. Once that’s happened, you can’t help seeing things from a different angle that affects everything you do. Think 315

about it. Ever meet a Mineiro who didn’t have something odd about him?” I thought of the Mineiros I knew, like Dona Zezé and my publisher, Emediato; and the famous ones I knew of such as the great writer Guimarães Rosa, President Kubischek, and Aleijadinho, a fingerless cripple who, carving saints out of soapstone, became Brazil’s greatest Baroque sculptor. In the midst of my thoughts, Ariosto said challengingly, “If you’d really like to see what I mean, you should go to the valley of the Jequitinhonha. I have an old friend there, a diamond trader who lives in a town called Datas.” I don’t recall exactly when it was we went there. I only know it was, as usual, some free time between planting and harvesting when, curiosity whetted by Ariosto’s words, Carson and I found ourselves driving through open country where silver promissora grass bent in winter winds on hills which rose toward the dry, clear sky of Minas Gerais. A data in the old language of miners was a measure of land twenty meters by forty used by prospectors in staking their claims. The town of that name stood atop the cold and lofty heights of the Serra do Espinhaço, whose streams form the tributaries of the Jequitinhonha River. Only  kilometers from the huge industrial town of Belo Horizonte, Datas was more remote in time than in distance. I remember, even as we approached the little town, the strange sense of enchantment that began to take hold of us at the sight of a single church from whose twin steeples angels heralded the coming evening with flutes. The church dominated narrow, black cobblestone streets along which solid old houses, the dense taipa of their walls sometimes exposed through cracks in the plaster, seemed to doze in thin sunlight. But for the sight of a few sagging electric wires, it was as though suddenly we’d found ourselves in the seventeenth century, when 316

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Portuguese colonialists had held sway. An impression that was only enhanced by the appearance of Ariosto’s friend, Seu Guedes. His store faced the church square, its heavy-beamed door open to a stream of children who entered carrying bouquets as if for a festive ceremony and exited counting money, like grave, di-minutive businessmen. Against the stream Seu Guedes waded out to meet us, the little businessmen, forgetting business, flocking behind him full of childlike curiosity. “So Seu Ariosto sent you?” The trader’s wide mouth widened even further into a welcoming grin. “A friend of Ariosto’s is a friend of mine.” And then with a sudden frown of disapproval, “Tell him it is a long time since he has touched stone here.” A man in his seventies, he bore the solid squareness of Portuguese mountain people who, transferred to Minas in the s, had weathered comings and goings of paulista bandeirantes and Portuguese envoys, trading openly or clandestinely, according to the rules of the day. He still traded in diamonds and gold. But did we know where the best money was? His light eyes smiling avidly and affectionately upon the children, he told us it was in dried flowers, plucked from their abundance in the surroundings hills and exported to somewhere called Paris. He led us inside to see the flowers—buttonettes of semprevivo, fuzzy-headed cabelo de negro, bushy-tailed rabo de raposa—neatly tied in bundles and stacked from the floor to the ceiling. “This is money one makes without headaches,” he said, tucking some ragged cruzeiros into a drawer. “A dried flower is a dried flower in anybody’s language. You don’t have to guess and gamble on its worth as you do with every cursed stone.”

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Like most people we would meet along the way, it soon became apparent that Seu Guedes could do what he liked with his day. That afternoon, closing his door to further trade, he set off with us into the hills. Together we climbed dizzying inclines, peered into brush-covered holes where slaves had once burrowed for gold, followed ancient wooden viaducts that skirted the steep hillsides. As we did, close on Seu Guedes’s trail, it also became obvious that more than sixty years of performing such antics had only served to improve the old man’s nimbleness. Striding along briskly, at last he led us to a bleak hilltop from where the beauty of our surroundings gave way suddenly to a veritable inferno of erosion, heaps of displaced earth and rock converging upon a rushing stream where sinewy, barefooted men stood in freezing water doggedly shoveling gravel from the diverted waters into sluices. Grimly I was reminded of the waterblasted riverbanks of Alta Floresta. Only this time we would actually watch this herculean effort to its end. While we did I thought of Ariosto’s description of a great difference. “There in the Amazon,” he said, “the garimpeiros are either rootless adventurers, following gold from river to river, or people who hope one strike will pay for debts at the bank, a piece of land. While in Minas? Why, people’ve been in the valley of the Jequitinhonha for centuries, doing the same thing. If not digging and panning, then staking. The whole thing’s a part of their nature.” It is impossible to remember the exact arrangement of those sluices and filters and pans. But unforgettable is the fact that all that was produced in the end by such back-breaking work and those water-scarred hillsides and mountains of debris was a pyramid of fine gravel about waist high around which we and a number of local onlookers stood as if in a magic circle. 318

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All stared hypnotically as, with a flat wooden blade, the chief garimpeiro sheered off layer after layer of gravel. His lean features seemed themselves to be carved from stone as he concentrated, never once shifting his gaze, until suddenly, like a bird spotting an insect, his hand darted forward to seize between thumb and forefinger a smooth pebble, milky white and the size of a grain of corn. At first I could only stare unbelievingly at the opaque diamond, the object of the devastation around us. But then I saw the broad smile spread across the garimpeiro’s heretofore immobile features and heard the shouts of jubilation around us, and for a moment, at least, sensed the excitement Ariosto had often described. “You have to feel the magic to understand it,” he’d say. “Most of the money will go to someone in Amsterdam or New York. The rest will filter down little by little until the dregs reach the fellow whose obsession it is to do the seeking. And by the time he finds another, he’ll be poor as he was till now. But he’ll never give up.” “What do you think it’s worth?” Carson was the first to speak. In response, Seu Guedes’s expression become as opaque as the stone. “Ohhh, I would have to examine it, feel its weight, study its inner light. These stones have a life of their own . . .” “You wouldn’t even guess?” Guedes’s face became wooden. “Bad luck to guess, Seu Cacio.” Understanding that the guess, if there was one, would remain behind that wooden countenance, Carson conceded. “Then tell me, how often do people make a find like this? “Sometimes several times a week, sometimes not for months.” “Sounds more like madness than magic,” Carson said, looking again upon the ruin of the stream below. The Heart of Brazil

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“I s’pose you could say that,” said Seu Guedes with a knowing expression remindful of Dona Zezé. “But that’s the way it is.”

] In Datas there seemed to be one of everything: one church, one gem trader, one bar. That night on the steps of the only Pensão Nossa Senhora da Eterna Esperanca, we sat between the stones and the stars. And though I’d already come to believe people who swore the stars that shone on Brazil were the brightest in the world, in the clear, dry atmosphere of those Minas mountains, I could have sworn they were even brighter. Beneath them a strange congregation gathered on the steps around us. The priest, a tall, handsome mulatto who sat listening and saying little; a street sweeper grown hunchbacked over his broom; the local artisan who whittled a mythical animal out of gamela wood while he talked; the local drunk who now and then broke into a wavering Mineira cantiga. We had not been sitting there for long when our assemblage was joined by still another. Out of the darkness there suddenly appeared a man so black that, by contrast, the moonlight seemed to gather in the whites in his eyes. Cheerful eyes they were that displaced the moon with their own friendly glow as he shook hands all around, introducing himself to Carson and me as Seu Baltazar, keeper of the town’s electrical system. By then my own gaze had slid downward to become transfixed by the sight of a costume so memorable it shall remain with me forever. It consisted of a hunter’s hat with ear flaps, a plaid flannel shirt, and baggy striped pants, over which was worn a frayed, rusty black frock coat reminiscent, possibly, of past colonial splendor. The whole ended in a pair of black rubber boots which, as we stared, 320

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he assured us he never removed, even to go to bed. Not since his “death” through electrocution induced by being barefoot in the act of connecting wires on a wet night. “I didn’t believe, but I do now,” he said, “and I’d not be alive if it weren’t for my great good fortune!” With that he went on to describe his resurrection by a healer whose cosmic magnetism had withdrawn the offending currents from his vitals. “So what does senhor believe in now that you didn’t before?” Carson leaned toward him, more transfixed than ever. “Why, clearly! The cosmos and these,” he responded, patting the boots, the moon now reflected by his white teeth bared with the fondest of smiles. Yet that amazing tale, told with long-fingered gestures that graphically described the magnetic extraction, was but an introduction to what would come next. Stirred by the enthusiasm of a new audience, Seu Baltazar seated himself and, resting his elbows on his knees, pinpointed Carson with a knowledgeable gaze. “This place is as full of tales as the ground is full of promises, and some of them are even true . . . did you ever hear about where diamonds come from? No? Then listen well.”

] So we did, as the stars augmented and diminished in their splendor, forgetting the cold of the night and the hardness of the steps as the old black man in a tarnished frock coat and a hunting cap recounted the legend of the Acaiáca. “Once long ago,” he began in the traditional manner of stories told by word of mouth, “this most splendid of trees rose out of a wooded bluff which overlooked the entire valley of the Jequitinhonha. The Acaiáca, as it was called, was a sacred tree which, as The Heart of Brazil

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long as it stood, assured the Puri Indians their good fortune and happiness. But should the tree be felled, so would the tribe fall into disgrace and dispersal. Revered and undisturbed, the Acaiáca stood for centuries until Puri country was invaded by those hunters of gold and diamonds and slaves, the paulista bandeirantes, who, told by a traitor of its power, took their axes to the tree. “As with deathly creaks and groans the great tree crashed to the ground, the Indians rushed to find it where it lay surrounded by the forest it had broken in its fall. But instead of uniting to vent their rage and despair upon the bandeirantes, the Puris fought among themselves until all were dead but their medicine man, Piracassú, who, warned by the screech of an owl, came running from his distant retreat. “At the sight of his dead brothers, Piracassú cast a curse upon the bandeirantes, promising that the fortunes they found would turn against them and they would be routed from the valley to live in hiding in the hills. Then in a frenzy of anguish, he set fire to the tree and threw himself into the flames. “Just as he did, a great storm arose. And it was then that from the still-burning tree, odd-shaped cinders were lifted on the wind.” At this point, Seu Baltazar raised his long, thin hands toward the sky and swung them in circles in such a way that he might have been the tempest seizing the cinders in his grasp and flinging them earthward, to end his story with a final, dramatic “And so the cinders of the Acaiáca were scattered over the land to become the diamonds that have been the sorrow of this valley ever since.” “Sorrow?” we wondered. “Was that what senhor said?” “Yes, it’s that I said. Look around and you shall see.” 322

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And though we would have liked to question him further, it was not to be. For as though wearied by the telling, the storyteller slowly rose and politely shook hands all around before, as suddenly as he had appeared, he faded into darkness whence he had come.

] An Indian legend, told with the zeal of a bard by an old black man in a frock coat and rubber boots as we sat between the stones and the stars. But perhaps most amazing is how history has come to bear the legend out. For, not long after the discovery of diamonds in the s, the Portuguese imperial government, in its usual short-sighted manner, would establish what was known as the Diamond District, in which only the chosen were permitted to prospect. The discoverers of those precious stones were driven into the hills, where their clandestine excavations came to be known as garimpos and they as garimpeiros. Appellations which, there in Minas as in the Amazon, have clung until today to those who go on in the same way as they did two hundred years ago, seeking the stones and gold clandestinely or otherwise, depending on the rules. That night, having listened to our bedtime story of the Acaiáca, we retired feeling ourselves to be rather like adventurers in some enchanted tale the end of which was yet to be revealed. By now it seemed some obsession of our own would cause us the next day to follow Seu Guedes’s directions in pursuit of one José Canudo, who lived in the town of Felicio dos Santos down in the foothills of the Serra do Espinhaço. “You say you want to see the inside of one of those tunnels?” he looked at me doubtfully. “Then José Canudo’s the one to look for. He’s a farmer, but like most people The Heart of Brazil

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who don’t dig themselves, he can’t resist staking some fellow who does. And if I’m not mistaken, he’s got a man looking for aquamarines right now.” And so we set off along a dirt road which wound from grassy highlands down through somber forests and across streams where below sparkling rapids lone garimpeiros worked their primitive dams and sluices. Through country where not just gold and diamonds but emeralds, tourmalines, amethysts, sapphires, aquamarines—countless sorrows, if you looked at it that way— lay buried here and there and everywhere in the heart of this or that mountain. Deep in one of the many valleys which joined that of the Jequitinhonha, we found the little town. Later we would discover that Felicio dos Santos had been named for a judge who, during the time of the Diamond District, had written a wonderful book which would fill in countless blanks for us even as it verified the effect of Piracassú’s curse. Just then, though, it was enough to find our way to the house of Seu José Canudo, next to the armazém on the town’s only square. Thinking to buy ourselves some emergency bread and cheese, we went first into the armazém, where the cheerful, rotund proprietor informed us that he had seen Seu José Canudo depart for his fazenda early in the morning. “But no matter, it’s easy enough to find him,” said the storekeeper, and leading us outside again pointed to the road. “Those are his tracks. Just follow them to the first gate.” As we scrutinized the only pair of tire tracks besides our own, he added with reassuring logic, “There’s no other road, so if you wait long enough he’s sure to appear.” Continuing in our trancelike state, that is what we did until at length we came to a gate leading to what we saw to be the usual 324

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ordered chaos of a Brazilian farmyard. Finding there a widespreading gameleira tree, we seated ourselves and were about to dig into our bread and cheese while we waited, when there appeared a donkey train coming toward us. The donkeys, driven by two lowing and clucking drivers, were tiny jegues—members of that admirable breed which can carry twice its weight while living on next to nothing. Straw jacas filled with corn were strapped across the backs of all but of one of these steeds, astride which rode a gray-haired, bespectacled gentleman who, drawing his little donkey to a halt, dismounted and, regarding us with veiled curiosity, extended his hand. “José Canudo.” “Carson Geld,” as two square, farmers’ hands met, Carson quickly came forth with the password. “Seu Guedes . . .” “Guedes, ahh! That old rascal.” Immediately the reserve gave way to welcome, followed by an apology, “Though if you want to see stones . . .” “Not necessarily. What we’d really like to see is a garimpo. Seu Guedes said senhor had one somewhere up in the hills? Aquamarines, I believe. You see, my mulher here has this obsession.” While I, Carson’s woman (as wives are often referred to with utmost respect) stood there, looking and feeling more and more like a victim of some mental illness, Carson went into one of his merciless explanations about how I was a writer and, to be authentic, felt the need to see what the inside of a garimpo was like. Merciless for me, but as often happens, something in Carson’s directness seemed to charm the stocky fazendeiro. After all, what was this world ruled by if not obsession? Even so he seemed to feel obliged to say, “Minha senhora, believe me, the inside of a garimpo is better imagined than seen. That’s why I The Heart of Brazil

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never go into one,” as, surrounded by their gold rims, his eyes twinkled wryly, “because if I did I might stop staking garimpeiros. Still, if you’re sure . . .” He shrugged amiably. And then, as though suddenly reminded of something, he turned to look at the drivers, who, having unburdened their jegues, sat in the shade of the corncrib concentratedly spooning up rice and beans and sausage from their aluminum lunch cans. “Only now it’s time for lunch.” There are many sayings among other Brazilians about Mineiros. One of them is that all the dining tables in Minas have drawers in them to hide the food should someone knock at the door. A myth we can roundly refute after that day, having heaped plates that could never fit into a drawer with tutu mineira made of beans and spicy pork, okra stewed with onions and tomatoes, and tiny bananas rolled in manioc flour and fried. All were served by a bustling, pleasant lady, introduced to us by Seu Canudo as “minha mulher,” Dona Zuleia, who, in the manner of the last century, hovered more than she sat during the entire meal. José Canudo and Carson talked of farming—some coffee on the hillsides, corn and rice and beans and manioc planted in the lowlands that bordered the streams. “It’s not easy to farm in these hills, as you can see,” said Seu José. “Not enough flat land for machinery, so everything has to be done with mules and jegues and hoes. The riches here are buried in the earth or in the bottoms of streams, but the mining rights belong to the government, so the land on top isn’t worth much. Still we lack nothing, so we can’t complain.” Certainly there was no note of complaint in his tone as he said these things. Like Seu Guedes and our nocturnal friends on the steps of the pension, he merely seemed to be stating things as they were—if anything, with a certain air of pride at having discovered 326

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that the real secret of life was to be content in a world that had no sensible possibility of change. Like the Pantanal in a way, I have often thought since, and yet very different. For on the floodplain one was compelled to conserve one’s energy, move great distances, exert oneself to the maximum when the moment permitted, be ever alert and agile to survive. While here? The way Seu José Canudo saw it, but for the subtle changes of seasons, one day was the same as another, every moment to be unhurriedly enjoyed for all its worth with no need to think anxiously of what comes next. At least not for José Canudo, whose simple needs were well supplied, a man of contentment if there ever was one . . . Right then, made somnolent by a full stomach, he rose from the table, ambled toward a corner of the sala where a hammock was slung, and sank into it with a sigh. Simultaneously, Dona Zuleia beckoned to the veranda where, in other hammocks, we dozed gratefully, wafted by the afternoon breezes, until Seu José, vigor restored, stomped out onto the veranda and said, “Vamos?” In the jeep of the unmistakable tracks, we drove through lowlands where rice was turning golden for harvest and diminutive inbred cattle grazed on sparse grasses. We must have forded at least five streams that flowed, sparkling clear, from the mountains. There were houses of taipa amid papaya and jabuticaba trees, and here and there some neatly planted plots of garlic. “Something the extension service is trying to get people to do to get their minds off the stones,” Seu José commented indulgently. “A nice idea, but just let them hear of a good find and that’s the end of that. It’s in their blood, you see.” From the road we turned onto a trail that rose sharply till it reached a kind of shelf halfway up a mountainside. There the vegetation abruptly came to an end, and with it the idyllic beauty The Heart of Brazil

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of our surroundings. On the shelf, a crude rancho sheltered everything from tools to beds to the cooking pots necessary to sustain the meager life of a garimpeiro and his family. How different the setting, but how similar the life to that on the riverbanks in Alta Floresta . . . or anywhere. A pale young woman stood in the doorway, hands and feet thick and knobby from working and walking in cold streams and along rough, stony paths. She watched us with the dull expression of one who had perhaps lost the energy to be curious. From behind the shed a young man appeared, small and well made, the beauty of his smooth mulatto features sadly impaired by the absence of his two front teeth. His name was Severino. He must have been about twenty, the two younger brothers who worked with him, no more than twelve. All looked as though the yellow clay of the mountain into which they tunneled had become a part of their skin. They had been digging into this particular one for three months without finding anything spectacular, it appeared. But today . . . “Senhor must have divined,” said Severino excitedly, “that just this morning we found something. Senhor doesn’t want to see?” His excitement was contagious, but not enough for Seu José. “It’s you who’s the garimpeiro. Whatever it is, when you bring it out, it’s soon enough for me. But,”—and was I wrong in noting a hint of deviltry in his smile?—“here are some people who want to see the inside of a garimpo.” “Is it true?” I could have sworn Severino’s expression became one of incredulous joy. “But Senhor José, why then don’t you come too?” “God forbid.” “But nothing ever happens.” 328

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“Only now and then, eh? Listen Severino, I’m seventy-four and if I’ve come this far, it’s because I have judgment.” During this banter between experts, my courage had been sinking; as I looked in the direction we were headed, it seemed to reach my knees, all but causing visible trepidation. I, who have always been petrified by heights and can hardly bear a room with closed windows. And yet, as Carson was wont to point out, it was I who most often got myself and others into these irreversible situations. It wasn’t he who wanted to learn about garimpos. And now the top half of the mountain rose a hundred meters above us, divested of its vegetation, a giant termite hill catacombed with tunnels. Between where we stood and the ultimate tunnel, I noted that nothing, not a twig, existed—only smooth, slippery clay. “Coming?” said Carson with a familiar light in his eyes. No doubt his bowels were paralyzed with fear, but revenge would be worth the ordeal. “Don’t look back,” he said. “Rest assured,” I answered. Severino led the way while his little brother brought up the rear, pushing a wheelbarrow full of picks and shovels, rattling cheerfully on the edge of the abyss. Studying the placement of each footstep, my gaze only lifted now and then to see Severino scurrying ahead like a cave spider. It seemed we would never get there, but when we did my relief was short-lived. Backed against the wall carved from the mountainside, I took in the magnificent view of the valley as though it might be my last before Severino, lighting an acetylene lamp, darted into a hole. The tunnel was only wide enough to accommodate the wheelbarrow and not high enough to accommodate Carson, who was obliged to lean provocatively over my shoulder. As we proceeded forward, darkness closed behind us. As I halted, paralyzed, The Heart of Brazil

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Carson’s voice echoed ominously, “Don’t lose sight of the lamp. If it goes out, it means lack of oxygen.” Indeed, anything but lose sight of the lamp. My feet obeyed. The light flickered against damp, unshored clay that might have been hollowed by the claws of a burrowing armadillo. The air became laden with the queer, sweet odor of burning acetylene. As one foot followed the other and the wheelbarrow rattled behind us, the sense of distance and time receded. Now and then an assurance of where we were and what we were doing returned to us as Severino, holding the light aloft, pointed out a fissure in which pale crystals shone from the country rock. Then suddenly the light disappeared. “Oh Jesus!” Quite certainly, I was praying. “If you faint,” came the knowing voice behind me, “No one will go anywhere.” “And how do we go anywhere without that damned . . . ?” “Senhora is frightened?” The light reappeared. Above it Severino’s toothless grin mirrored innocent surprise. “Oh no, imagine!” It was just at that moment when I felt I might fall into screaming pieces that the garimpeiro cried, “Look!” and taking a step forward, swung around to reveal a chamber carved out of the earth and rock. Possibly my relief at coming upon a space in which we could actually stand at a distance from each other and look around augmented in my imagination the grandeur of that tiny space no larger than a foyer. Yet if it was an illusion, I am all the same glad that there will always remain with me the enchantment of that chamber from which wheelbarrowfuls of earth had been painstakingly removed to bare encrustations that in the unearthly light resembled galaxies embedded in the firmament of 330

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the underworld. To me, their glitter didn’t reflect, but shone with a strangely hypnotic light born of the stones themselves. Were these the cosmic forces Mineiros always spoke of so proudly, which penetrated their lives and made them, as Ariosto Da Riva claimed, “different?” These stones that, even in a tunnel deep within the earth, seemed linked to the entire universe? I thought of these things only later, but certainly the feeling of them was with me then, unburdening me of my claustrophobia and fears. Seating ourselves on a low ledge, for a long time we simply gazed around us in a speechless awe, no doubt doing our best to absorb any number of impressions wrought by a scene totally strange to us, until suddenly the silence was broken by the voice of Severino, curiously dreamlike, as he said, “Senhora is from beyond the sea?” “More or less,” I said, mystified. “Why?” “Because,” he said “I’ve heard that the sea is without depth and without end. Can it be true?” Shamefully my response was inadequate to the poetry of those words pronounced in a chamber fifty meters beneath the surface of the earth by a garimpeiro, far from an ocean he would never see. “In a way I suppose it is,” I said. “At least they say that all the rivers of the world flow into it and all the shores are washed by its waters . . .” “Ahh,” he smiled shyly, showing the gaps between his teeth, thankful for my answer but not exactly satisfied. Nonetheless, as we rose to return along that dread tunnel whence we’d come, Severino reached into a niche in the chamber’s wall to produce for me a rough piece of aquamarine crystal. “Uma lembrança,” he said simply. A remembrance. The Heart of Brazil

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And so it was. For when we got home, Carson had the stone clasped in gold so that I could wear it on a chain around my neck. I wear it often because it is very beautiful, simple and uncut as it is, its light indeed hauntingly remindful of light in the depths of the sea. Then too, I have only to look at it for Severino’s handsome face with its gaping smile and his haunting question to return to me; and as if by the work of a good genii, the entire galaxied scene in the depths of the earth is recreated for my pleasure.

] That night we climbed again to the valley’s rim to sleep in Diamantina, which had been the center of the Diamond District when official contractors and clandestine garimpeiros were vying for the riches that were buried in the riverbeds and the hills. It is an amazing town that, only three hundred kilometers from the iron kilns and booming industry of Belo Horizonte, has not been swept into the ugly disorder that is called progress. Yet rather than having grown decadent, Diamantina seems to have made its past a part of the present. And because of this it seems as well quite natural that the streets are still of a rain-shining black basaltic cobblestone and that there still exists a Mercado dos Tropeiros with a rancho where the jegue and mule drivers, who come in from the farms with their produce, may accommodate themselves for the night. On the hillsides above the market the handsome seventeenthcentury houses with their Moorish ironwork balconies are solid and well kept. And if you glance along the walkways that lead to back gardens rich with fruits and vines, it is easy to visualize, now as ever, ladies living cloistered lives on the verandas of inner patios. As easy as it is to imagine their husbands stopping here, 332

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before the aperitivo, to look in on their “official families,” while after the aperitivo, they stop in on their “natural families” in the modest one-story houses on the hills below. Such were the customs in the time of the Diamond District, and so, many say, they remain. No wonder then that, in such a setting, a touch of the supernatural, or at least of oddness, seems not only essential but almost a matter of honor. For instance, where else can you find a cross that has grown into a tree simply to force its unbelieving wood carver to have faith? But there it stands, for everyone to affirm, in the Largo do Rosario. Or where else does one take a tour of a museum guided by a cheerful, prancing dwarf? Spreading his short arms and speaking in bombastic tones, he marvels over replicas of imperial jewels and shows off a throne with a sliding chamber pot known as “the sick man’s chair.” Then with gruesome glee leads you to see the tortura do beiço, an ingenious iron clamp once used on the lower lips of slaves to encourage the disclosure of hidden gold. A tourist agency had recommended a modern hotel designed by the famous architect Oscar Niemeyer. It perched on a hilltop, as soulless as the edifices he’d designed for Brasília, but here it was pathetically out of place. At the sight of it, we kept walking until we came to the Hotel Imperial, whose old-fashioned caneseated marquesas, frayed damask drapery, creaking corridors, and hollow-eyed mulatto proprietor offered just the right cobwebby atmosphere from which to saunter out into invitingly haunted streets. For Diamantina seethes with ghosts. Walking in the dim light of old-fashioned streetlamps, you can hear them scurrying over the cobblestones in search of bottles full of treasure buried between the roots of jabuticaba and carambola trees or tiptoeing The Heart of Brazil

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up the steps of churches to seek wooden saints whose hollowed interiors, uncorked, spill entrails of gold and diamonds. In a bar on Rua Direita, a couple of law students, home from the university in Belo Horizonte, joined us over aperitivos. With each new glass of low-grade kerosene described as conhaque, another story came to mind about ghosts, miraculous occurrences, and luck. One of the students, a sharp-featured, intense young man named Sergio, told us of an aunt whose blindness had been cured by the famous Arigot. How to explain this healer who claimed with a sincerity hard to deny that, when practicing, his being was possessed by the spirit of a nineteenth-century German surgeon? A man who was said to perform operations with his bare hands and, during his lifetime, to have cured thousands. Certainly thousands from everywhere in Brazil had flocked to him. “I can only speak for my aunt and be glad,” said Sergio. And gazing at the mirror behind the bar as though he saw her sightless and then seeing reflections in its dark expanse, added thoughtfully, “More than anything, what has stayed with me is the conviction that there really are things that cannot be explained.” We drifted on to other oddities, among them a strange church we had seen with a steeple at the back. “Ahh, on the Rua do Carmo,” Sergio nodded, smiling, and proceeded to tell us one of countless stories about Chica da Silva, the legendary black mistress of the eighteenth-century imperial official, O Desembargador João Fernandes de Oliveira. “To understand why the church has its steeple where it does,” he began, “you must also know the unwritten rules of those days. And although some kind of proximity had certainly produced a considerable population of mixed origins, one of the rules decreed by the bishop of the time was that no black person was to 334

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step beyond the steeple of the white people’s church.” But João Fernandes, who had built his beloved Chica a fine house in town and a palace in the country with a lake on whose waters floated a life-sized replica of a Portuguese caravel, was not to be intimidated. The solution—at once a delightful affront and a habile commentary upon the society that surrounded him—was his own unique church with its steeple at the back, providing ample space between it and the portals for whoever cared or dared to enter. “Deu um jeito,” concluded Sergio. He found a way. One more brilliant example of the Brazilian talent for overcoming the worst in man by circumvention. Fortunately the unspoken rule about churches lost its hold with time, along with slavery and the tortura do beiço. Proof that even if human nature cannot be changed, the human mind has a redeeming bent for enlightenment. Fortunately too there still remain in Minas such things as the beautiful music composed by talented slaves at the orders of their masters—cantos now sung by choirs everywhere. An unusual respect for history which maintains splendid old towns intact. And amid these somber, immutable hills, a mood. A mingling of assuredness and caution. As Mineiros say of themselves, “We are known to move with one foot forward and the other behind.” Moving all the same with a mystical air which touches everything and causes one to pause and think again. They are strong people, Mineiros—those who stay, like Seu Guedes and Severino, as much as those who leave, like Emediato, Juscelino Kubischek, and Dona Zezé. People who come from the heart of Brazil. If I have described this phenomenon poorly, it is because Ariosto Da Riva was right. You have to go to Minas to see. Yet I The Heart of Brazil

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have only to talk to Dona Zezé for a while or look into my blue stone and see the pale light from the depths of the sea for my faith in strange auras to be restored.

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33 O f

Roots and Ideas

It is the same kind of faith I have in the uniqueness and durability of Brazil. So huge and diverse, living in different eras at the same time—one often wonders what holds this country together. And yet something does. It is not because people pledge allegiance to a flag every day. They don’t. Or think this is the greatest place in the world. Quite to the contrary. “Brazil’s different,” Brazilians say with a kind of fateful cynicism. “What works in other places doesn’t work here.” And yet curiosity and an eagerness to “be with it in the modern world” have a way of leading to some means to twist things so that they can work in Juazeiro, Datas, Paraná, here. Dar um jeito, find a way. It’s a tradition born, as with every country, of all the things that have made Brazil what it is. Though Minas is very different from Tietê, there are similarities which bind them together, surrounding you with an aura of openness and hospitality, irony and humor, that is quite simply Brazilian and which makes you feel, wherever you go, that you have a second home. One where, on returning, you can take up where you left off, talk of what has happened in 337

between. For even in the timeless places, things keep happening and people are not immune to change. So, inevitably, has Tietê changed since we came here years ago when a dirt road wound through, farmers drove horse-drawn buggies into town to trade their goods for sugar and cloth, and women wore long sleeves in church. Nowadays the streets are filled with cars. No one holds a candle for her sister at the movies. The plunging necklines of bridal gowns would horrify old Padre Emilio, and the movies have given way to the eight o’clock novela, which brings Tietê into greater sync with the world both in truth and fantasy, good and evil. The name of our river, the Tietê, in the language of the Tupi Indians means “the true river.” And indeed nothing could be more true than its course, which, rising in crystalline springs in the Serra do Mar, flowing inland, carries with it as well the course of history; bearing adventurers in canoes in search of gold and slaves, and, centuries later, transporting coffee, sugar, and grain. When we first came here, we dove from boulders to swim in the Tietê’s swirling currents. Then the city of São Paulo, through which it flowed, grew beyond its bounds, turning our beautiful river into a disgusting sewer, symbolic of an entire world in desperate need of repair. Yet in our town that bridges the Tietê there is at the core a kind of stability that stubbornly holds on. To go to a shopping center, you don’t have to drive to some ugly strip on the outskirts of town. Instead only Tietê’s citizens could possibly tell you where the shopping center is, so prudently is it installed in the place of the old movie theater behind the Igreja Matriz. In the same way you must seek the guava paste factory with your nose, obscured as it is behind a big old house with an outdated slave quarter that is 338

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perfect for a “clandestine” industrial activity. Thus it is with the mechanic’s shop in a mango grove giving onto the river; the saddler’s behind a wall just below the monastery. A whole “parallel” world, unnoticed by the tax collector, which I often suspect is what really keeps Brazil going. Last Friday night began Cornelio Pires week, in celebration of Tietê’s famous local and colloquial poet. It was held at the Clube Esportiva, where the descendants of O Museu, the school director, and Seu Zico Pires, the historian, still take their six o’clock aperitivo with the immortal Janguta of the town council. While the audience sat patiently swallowing their yawns, the principal speaker, Doutor Roberto Machado de Carvalho, president of the São Paulo historical society, recounted the life of the illustrious poet year by year from birth to death at a ripe old eighty-nine. That over, in company with the long-suffering and worthy Professoras Zazá and Anastacia from the Instituto Plinio Rodrigues de Morães, the well-known bass fiddler Lin Casetto, and Tietê’s oldest public functionary, Chiquinho Cardia, who still digs graves at eighty-five, I received a medal which told each of us that we enriched the life of our community. Considering that Carson and I have been taken totally for granted for the past forty years, what afforded me this honor will puzzle me forever. I only know that I did feel deeply honored. And I wished that Tietê could possibly know how much it has enriched the lives of all of us so that wherever our family goes, the town is a part of us. Or how glad Carson and I are to have it near. This place from where, driving out of town, we are immediately in the country—headed for the fazenda on the hill which looks out over farmlands toward the river where it winds through an old and broad valley. Of Roots and Ideas

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It is mid-July again, one of the most beautiful times of the year. The pecan trees have shed their leaves, lending a wintry air to the scenery. The twin kapoks before this window are also bare, their huge green pods having fallen and burst, scattering their fluffy cotton to be gathered by kapok enthusiasts such as Miralda for the stuffing of quilts and pillows. Before their leaves begin to sprout, a large, russet anu bird with a pattern in browns and beiges designed by God for his tail feathers will appear amid the branches. His name is Alma de Gato, and with his shrill call, which could well indeed harken from the soul of a cat, he will announce the coming of spring. At his signal, the leaves will burst forth overnight and the oven birds, puffing out their amber breasts and making a lot of self-important noise, will build mud houses with their backs to the rainy winds. But for now through the pattern of pods and bare branches one sees a sky empty of clouds and brilliant in its blueness, from which the thin light of Brazilian winter pencils stark shadows on the land. A slanting light that as well softens the browns, golds, and greens of a world that never becomes quite dormant. Exhilaratingly cool, it is also the best time for walking. So, each day just before sunset, the dogs and I go out for a walk, the dogs zigzagging with their noses to the ground while I look out for swarms of bees amid winter-flowering vines or a new calf hidden in the hollow of a hill. I don’t need to look at my watch to see if it’s time for our walk because if the sun’s slanting rays fail to tell me, the dogs never do. William, the basset hound, without yet rising from his beanbag poof by my desk, alerts me with a progression of well-timed squeaks and moans, subtle and penetrating as laser beams. Moses, the big brindle boxer, thrusting his gray muzzle into my lap, heaves voluptuous, snuffling sighs, while his 340

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daughter Lola, trembling throughout, assails me with the trills of a mezzo-soprano running over her scales. The knowledge that they have been lying, waiting all afternoon for this supreme moment to activate their instincts is enough to outweigh my guilt at leaving a thought in midsentence. I save, I’m out, and we’re off. Last evening all the world seemed washed clean. A rare winter rain had been going on for days, gentle and benevolent, soaking into the soils, replenishing aquifers, not a drop wasted. Ozoneladen breezes turned the damp fronds of the palm trees, causing them to glisten in the yellow sunlight. A cold south wind had come up through the wind-bent grasses. We went toward the place where, for as long as we have lived here, a family of owls has burrowed. Could it be the same family? Has the burrow been passed on from generation to generation with inherited squatters’ rights? However it may be, it is a reassuring miracle to me that the burrow is still there, unfailingly occupied. It lies halfway down the hillside that slopes toward the wooded ravine—the hard-beaten earth around its entrance a sure sign of occupancy. Always, soon as I come close, the guardian owls fly up, circling and crying in harsh affliction, at length settling atop a fence post to stare me down with fierce, unblinking eyes. Yesterday the owls chose a fence we built around a deep and troublesome gully which torrential rains have long been working to gouge out of the hillside. In the never-ending battle with erosion, we must have fenced it off about ten years ago. I remember this because Erin, our sixteen-year-old granddaughter, was a little girl then. On one of those Sunday excursions which involve everyone, we had carried seedlings of tipuánas, sturdy leguminous trees of the cerrado which thrive just about anywhere, to be Of Roots and Ideas

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planted along the gully’s borders. While the children scrambled around the pastures filling baskets with dried cow dung for fertilizer, their father, Kenny, dug the holes. A childhood victim of his own father’s constant naggings, he took his turn to grumble now, “If you’re going to do something, you should do it right!” That day, we were definitely doing everything wrong—digging shallow holes with the only instrument handy, a simple hoe, not giving the manure time to incorporate itself into the soil before the seedlings were planted. Yet having long lived with the lowly position relegated to tree planting on a busy farm’s list of things to do, I retorted that if we waited for the day when we could do it right, the trees would most likely not be planted at all. From that day hence the tipuána seedlings grew to give shade, their roots to bind the soil of the gully, the winged seed of their flowerings to scatter on the wind, bringing new life and variety to the old, debilitated forest beyond. And so it was yesterday, that while I sat looking at the trees we’d planted, it occurred to me that in their planting I had, by chance, made some wisdom available which my son could make good use of. For now our sons have fazendas of their own, where fruit orchards in carefully tended, regimented rows are first on the farmer’s list; while tipuánas and cebiperúnas and iritrinas and all the incredible variety of wild, flowering trees with which Brazil has been blessed are second—to be planted when there is time. Yet if the job is not done exactly right, it is done all the same with equal love and joy in the knowledge that one day these trees will shade the house, lean over the pond at the bottom of the hill, add variety and beauty and sustenance for countless wild creatures which live in the woods along the river. And this will be so because those who do the planting could live no other way, so 342

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ingrained in them through generations have certain habits become. Then, still sitting there near the old owl’s burrow, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Now what do I mean by that?” And looking at the tipuánas heavy with seed I thought, maybe this is how we weak and vulnerable human beings, we careless, inconsistent, easily ignitable parents manage somehow to be vehicles of things worthwhile. Perhaps it is like those seeds which, once ripened, go spinning in the wind. Millions of seeds fall and rot, discarded as worthless except as soil to feed that which by its excellence takes root, grows, and regenerates. Maybe that is what distinguishes the more useful truths which—nurtured by books and music and unmindful words spoken amid the greenery beside the paths we tread—sort themselves out and survive. By the time I came to this conclusion, the owls were framed in the yellow glow of the fading sun’s rays and the moon hung pale in the eastern sky as though waiting in the wings for darkness to settle. Rising, I called the dogs and we set off for home, skirting the ravine, which in the cold shadow of sunset had taken on its usual eeriness. Then as I followed the cow path along the fence that edged it, it seemed to me that, somewhere in the old gullies which lead down amid the deep tangle of trees and vines, I heard the sound of new water. Perhaps, I thought, the rushing torrents that come with summer storms and change the ravine’s profile with every year have at last worn their way through to some abundant spring. Who knows? At any rate, leaning over the edge of a chasm, our ears cocked attentively, the dogs and I heard the distinct sound of that water from a new direction, and looking down through the trees, we caught glimpses of a mysterious, slow-flowing stream. It was too Of Roots and Ideas

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late and too dark to descend into that eeriness then. Still the whole idea filled me with excitement, causing me to lay my plans for the next time the young ones come. Then we shall set off— Sofia, Julia, Lisah, all able now to navigate alone—entering the ravine near the place where once a poor old cow slipped and plunged to her death, suggesting to the children the exhilaratingly morbid denomination of O Burraco da Morte, “Death’s Abyss.” From there we shall ease our way down with the help of saplings and vines, sinking into sand and mud, slipping and sliding over moss-covered rocks and down waterfalls carved from shale, disturbing bats in their hollows and ducking spiders in their webs until we reach the main stream. All the while cautiously and eagerly anticipating what lies beyond the next turn.

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Glossar y of Portuguese a n d I n d i a n Wo r d s agua. Water. agua mineral. Mineral water. ajoujo. Boat made of three ubás lashed together. alho. Garlic. alqueire. Unit of area, in two measures: the Mineira (twelve acres) or, as in this book, the Paulista (six acres). alta sociedade. High society. ama. Nursemaid. anta. Tapir. apitador. In a Carnaval parade, the man who directs the motions of the dancers with a whistle. armazém, armazéns (pl.). Warehouse or large dry-goods store that sells everything from alcohol to rice and implements. baía. Small lake fed by streams. bairro. Neighborhood. balsa. A simple ferry boat attached to a cable stretched across the river and propelled by the force of the current. bandeirantes. People who in colonial time carried out explorative expeditions into Brazil’s interior. 345

benzedeira. A woman who cures by means of prayer and laying on of the hands. berrante. Horn for calling cattle. boiada. Cattle drive. brejo. Lowlands which flood in the rainy season. bruma seca. Smoglike haze made by smoke and dust. bugre. Slang for Indian. caatinga. Semiarid region vegetated with thorn trees, which are also called caatinga. caboclo. A person of white and Indian ancestry. cachaça. Rum made from sugarcane. cafèzal, cafèzeis (pl.). Coffee plantation. campo. Open grasslands. campo cerrado. Grasslands with sparse shrubs and trees. cangaceiro. Outlaw of Brazil’s northeastern bad lands. capataz. Head herdsman. caracará. A large hawk, important in Brazilian Indian mythology. carranca. A wooden carving on the prow of a riverboat meant to ward off evil influences. Casa de Lavoura. The state agricultural assistance office. casa grande. Big, or main, house. caudilho. Autocratic political leader. cerrado. A region of acid soils vegetated by low, twisted trees. chapada. Plateau. chimarrão. Hot maté. churrasco. Barbecue. cobra cega. Literally, “blind snake”; the game blind man’s buff.

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comitiva. Group of cattle herders with all their accompanying mule drivers, cooks, etc. coringa. An earthen jug. corixas. Streams connecting lakes (baías) with rivers. coronel, coroneis (pl.). Politically powerful owner of extensive lands. coureiro. Alligator poacher. cruzeiros. An outdated Brazilian coin. desafio. A challenge; a debate made up in the course of singing. Dom. Title of a high-ranking priest or nobleman. Dona. Highly respectful title for a woman. donzela. An old-fashioned expression meaning young, upperclass, unmarried lady (thought to be virgin). escola de samba. A samba group in a Carnaval parade. estancieiro. Rancher in southern Brazil. ex voto. A statue of wood or clay depicting a part of the body cured through prayer. fazenda. Ranch, large farm, or plantation. fazendeiro. Fazenda owner. feira. An outdoor fair, mostly for marketing fruits and vegetables. flagelado. Punished one; a person punished by the droughts of Brazil’s northeast. futebol. Soccer. gaiola. Cage; also, a paddle-wheel steamer, so nicknamed for its resemblance to a huge birdcage. garimpeiro. Miner or panner. garimpo. Mine or panning area.

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gatos. Labor contractors. gaucho. Man from the southern plains of Brazil. Guaicurú. Brazilian Indian tribe of the Pantanal floodplain of the Paraguay River. guampa. A drinking vessel made from a horn. guaraná. A bush the seeds of which produce a substance used in a stimulating tea or a soft drink, also named guaraná. horta. Vegetable garden. igreja. Church. jaca. Large basket for carrying corn, etc. jegue. Small donkey. madrinha. Godmother; also, a lead horse. mãe. Mother. mãe da rua. “Mother of the street,” indicating the game prisoner’s base. mar. The sea. mateiro. One who works in the forest. museu. Museum. nojento. Nauseating. nordestino. One who originates in northeastern Brazil. novilha. Heifer. pais da rua. Street father; one who organizes children in drug trafficking. pantaneiro. Pertaining to the Pantanal. passarela. Balcony walkway. pau. A general expression used to describe trees. pinga. A common name for the raw drink made from sugar cane and also known as cachaça. prático. One who is familiar enough with a riverbed to be able to steer a boat by experience. 348

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puxa canção. One who directs the singing in a Carnaval parade. queixada. Saw-toothed wild pig. quentões. A drink made with hot water, ginger, and cachaça. rancho. Primitive house or shed. rebolos. Rhythmic hip movements. retiro. Headquarters of a section of a fazenda. reza. Prayer made either individually or in a group to ward off evil. rodeio. A circle of salt troughs in the open range where cattle are gathered. salina. A saline lake. sertão, sertões (pl.). The savanna lands of northeastern Brazil. Seu. Country manner of saying senhor. Also possessive his. simpatia. A ritual or object used to cure ills. sinuelo. Tame cattle used to guide the less tame. sítiente. Owner of a sítio. sítio. Small farm. sobrado. Two-story house. surubim. River monster. têrço. The third part of a rosary. tereré. Cold maté. tia. Aunt. tortura do beiço. Torture instrument used to press the lower lip in days of slavery. touro. Bull. tropeiros. Drivers of horses or mules. Tucúra. Mixed-breed cattle of the Paraguay River basin. ubá. Small boat used on the São Francisco River. Glossary

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vaca. Cow. vae. To go. vaqueiro. Cowboy. xarque. Sun-dried meat. zagaieiro. Man who uses a lance.

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