View of the World

by Norman Lewis

  ‘Not all fazendeiros are bad,’ Fulano says. ‘Far from it. On the contrary, the majority are good men. People are jealous of their success, and they are on the look-out for a way to damage them.

  ‘In the case you mention the man was a thief and a trouble maker. As a punishment he was locked in a shed, nothing more. He was drunk, you understand, and he set fire to the shed himself. He died in the fire, yes, but the doctor certified accidental death. There was no case for a police inquiry. In thirty years’ service I have only seen one instance of violence – if you wish to call it violence. The Indians were drunk with cachaça again, and they attacked the post. They were given a chance by firing over their heads, but it didn’t stop them. They were mad with liquor. What could we do? There’s no blood on my hands.’ He holds them up as if for confirmation. They are small and well cared for with pale, pinkish palms. His wife rattles about out of sight in the scullery of their tiny flat. There is a picture of the President on the wall, and another of his little girl dressed for her first communion, and no evidence in the cheap, ugly furniture that Senhor Fulano has been able to feather his nest to any useful extent.

  He joined the service out of a sense of vocation, he says. ‘We were all young and idealistic. They paid us less than they paid a postman, but nobody gave any thought to that. We were going to dedicate our lives to the service of our less fortunate fellow men. If anyone happened to live in Rio de Janeiro, the Minister himself would see him when he was posted, and shake hands with him and wish him good luck. I happened to be a country boy, but my friends hired a band to see me off to the station. Everybody insisted in giving me a present. I had so many lace handkerchiefs I could have opened a shop. There was a lot of prestige in being in the service in those days.’

  There are three whitish, glossy pock-marks in the slope of each cheek under the sad, Amharic eyes, and it is difficult not to watch them. He shakes his head. ‘No one would believe the conditions some of us lived under. They used to show you photographs of the kind of place where you’d be working; a house with a verandah, the school and the dispensary. When I went to my first post I wept like a child when I saw it. The journey took a month and in the meanwhile the man I was supposed to be assisting had died of the smallpox. I remember the first thing I saw was a dead Indian in the water where they tied up the boat. I’d hit a measles epidemic. Half the roof of the house had caved in. There never had been a school, and there wasn’t a bottle of aspirin in the place. When the sun went down the mosquitoes were so thick, they were on your skin like fur.’

  He finds a book of press-cuttings in which are recorded the meagre occasions of his life. A picture shows him in dark suit and stiff collar receiving a certificate and the congratulations of a politician for his work as a civiliser. In another he is shown posing at the side of Miss Pernambuco 1952, and in another he is a paternal presence at a ceremony when a newly pacified tribe are to put on their first clothing. There are ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of the tribal women, first naked and then in jumpers and skirts, not only changed but facially unrecognisable from one minute to the next, as if some malignant spell had been laid upon them as they wriggled into the shapeless garments. The few cuttings scanned through out of politeness speak of Senhor Fulano as the pattern of self-abnegation, and the words servicio and devoçao constantly reappear. ‘My pay was one hundred new cruzeiros (£12) a month,’ he says, ‘and it was sometimes up to six months overdue. In the first year only, I had measles, jaundice and malaria three times. If it hadn’t have been for the fazendeiro, I’d have died. He looked after me like a father. He was a man of the greatest possible principles, and among many other benefactions he gave 100,000 cruzeiros to a church in Salvador. I see now that his son’s been formally charged with invading Indian lands. All I can say to that is, what the Indians would do without him, I don’t know.’

  Fulano is nothing if not loyal. ‘Fazendeiros are no different from anyone else,’ he says. ‘They try to make out they’re monsters these days. You mustn’t believe all you read.’

  It was certain that no one would be found now in this town to contradict him.

  For a half-century rubber had been the great destroyer of the Indian, and then suddenly it changed to speculation in land. Rumour spread of huge mineral resources awaiting exploitation in the million square miles that were inaccessible until recently – and the great speculative rush was on. Nowhere, however remote, however sketchily mapped, was secure from the surveyors sent by the fazendeiros, the politicians and the real-estate companies to measure out their claims. Back in São Paolo, the headquarters of the land boom, the grileiro – specialist in shady land deals – went into secret partnerships with his friend in the Government, who was in a position to see that the deals went through. A great deal of this apparently empty land was only empty to the extent that it contained no white settlements, and the map-makers had not yet put in the rivers and the mountains. There might well be Indians there – nobody knew until it had been explored – but this possibility introduced only a slight inconvenience. In theory the undisturbed possession of all land occupied by Indians is guaranteed to them by the Brazilian constitution, but if it can be shown that Indian land has been abandoned it reverts to the Government, after which it can be sold in the ordinary way. The grileiro’s task is to discover or manufacture evidence that such land is no longer in occupation – a problem, if sincerely confronted, complicated by the fact that most Indians are semi-nomadic, cultivating crops in one area during the period of the summer rains, then moving elsewhere to hunt and fish during the dry winter season.

  A short cut to the solution of the problem is simply to drive the Indians out. Other grileiros quite simply ignore its existence, offering land to the gullible by map reference, sight unseen, and hoping to be able to settle the legal difficulties by political manipulations at some later date.

  The grileiro with his manoeuvrings behind the scenes was kept under some control while President João Goulart was in power, and it finally became clear to the big-scale land speculators that they were going to get nowhere until they got a new President. Goulart, although a rich landowner himself, held the opinion that Brazil would never occupy the place in the Western Hemisphere to which its colossal size and resources entitled it, while it limped along in its feudalistic way with an 86 per cent illiteracy figure and the land in the hands of an infinitesimally small minority, many of which made no effort to develop it in any way. The remedy he proposed was to redistribute 3 per cent of privately owned land, but also – what was far more serious – he announced the resuscitation of an old law permitting the Government to nationalise land up to six miles in depth on each side of the national means of communication – roads, railways and canals.

  This would have been a death blow to the speculators, who hoped to resell their land at many times the price they had paid, as soon as it was made accessible by the building of roads. One such firm had advertised 100,000 acres of land for sale in the English Press. The land was offered in 100-acre minimum lots of £5 an acre. An initial purchase of land had already been sold, the company announced, ‘mainly to investment houses and trusts, insurance companies and a number of syndicates.’ A charter flight would be arranged for buyers from Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Liverpool, and representatives of Kenya farmers who had already bought 50,000 acres. ‘There is little hope,’ said the promotion literature, ‘of any return from the purchase of the land for a few years yet.’

  But in 1964 the speculative prospects brightened enormously when a coup d’état was staged to depose the troublesome Goulart, and the land rush could go ahead. A promotional assault was launched on the United States market with lavishly produced and cunningly worded brochures offering glamour as well as profit, and phrased in the poetic style of American car advertisements. Amazon Adventure Estates were offered, and there were allusions to monkeys and macaws and the occult glitter of gems in the banks of mighty rivers sailed by the ships of Orellana. They had some
success. A number of film stars took a gamble in the Mato Grosso. In April 1968, in fact, a Brazilian deputy, Haroldo Veloso, revealed that most of the area of the mouth of the Amazon had passed into the hands of foreigners. He mentioned that Prince Rainier of Monaco had bought land in the Mato Grosso twelve times larger than the principality, whereas someone, stabbing presumably with a pencil point at a map, had picked up the highest mountain in Brazil – the Pico de Nieblina – for an old song, although it would have taken a properly equipped expedition a matter of weeks to reach it.

  This was doomsday for the tribes who had been pacified and settled in areas where they could be conveniently dealt with. Down in the plains on the frontiers with Paraguay it was the end of the road for the Kadiweus. In 1865 in the war against Paraguay they had taken their spears and ridden naked, barebacked, but impeccably painted – a fantastic Charge of the Light Brigade, at the head of the Brazilian army – to rout the cavalry of the psychopathic Paraguayan dictator Solano Lopez. For their aid in the war the Emperor Pedro II had received their principal chief, clad for the occasion in a loincloth sewn with precious stones, and granted the Kadiweu nation in perpetuity two million acres of the borderland. Here these Spartans of the West – poets and artists who practised infanticide, adopting the children of other tribes when they were old enough to ride horses – were reduced now to two hundred survivors, working as the cowhands of fazendeiros who had taken all their lands.

  It was doomsday too for Lévi-Strauss’s Bororos. The great anthropologist had lived for several years among them in the 1930s, and they had led him to the conclusions of ‘structural anthropology’, including the proposition that ‘a primitive people is not a backward or retarded people, indeed it may possess a genius for invention or action that leaves the achievements of civilised people far behind’. He had said of the Bororos, ‘few people are so profoundly religious … few possess a metaphysical system of such complexity. Their spiritual beliefs and everyday activities are inextricably mixed.’ They had been living for some years now far from the complicated villages where Lévi-Strauss studied them, in the Teresa Cristina reserve in the South Mato Grosso, given them ‘in perpetuity’, as ever, in tribute to the memory of the great Marshall Rondon, who had been part-Bororo himself.

  Life in the reserve was far from happy for the Bororos. They were hunters, and fishermen, and in their way excellent agriculturists, but the reserve was small, and there was no game left and the rivers in the area had been illegally fished-out by commercial firms operating on a big scale, and there was no room to practise cultivation in the old-fashioned semi-nomadic way. The Government had tried to turn them into cattle-raisers, but they knew nothing of cattle. Many of their cows were quietly sold off by agents of the Indian Protection Service, who pocketed the money. Others – as the Bororos had no idea of building corrals – wandered out of the reservation, and were impounded by neighbouring fazendeiros. The Indians ate the few cows that remained before they could die of disease or starvation, after which they were reduced to the normal diet of hard times – lizards, locusts and snakes – plus an occasional handout of food from one of the missions.

  They suffered, too, from the great emptiness and aimlessness of the Indian whose traditional culture has been destroyed. The missionaries, upon whom they were wretchedly dependent, forbade dancing, singing or smoking, and while they accepted with inbred stoicism this attack on the principle of pleasure, there was a fourth prohibition against which they continually rebelled, but in vain.

  The Indians are obsessed by their relationship with the dead, and by the condition of the souls of the dead in the afterlife – a concern reflected in the manner of the ancient Egyptians by the most elaborate funerary rites: orgies of grief and intoxication, sometimes lasting for days. The Bororos, seemingly unable to part with their dead, bury them twice, and the custom is at the emotional basis of their lives. In the first instance – as if in hope of some miraculous revival – the body is placed in a temporary grave, in the centre of the village, and covered with branches. When decomposition is advanced, the flesh is removed from the bones, which are painted and lovingly adorned with feathers, after which final burial takes place in the depths of the forest. The outlawing of this custom by an American missionary reduced the Bororos to despair, but the missionary was able to persuade the local police to enforce the ban, and the party of half-starved tribesmen who dragged themselves two hundred miles on foot to the State capital and presented themselves, weeping, to the comissario were turned away.

  Final catastrophe followed the devolution by the Federal Government of certain of its powers – particularly those relating to the ownership and sale of land – to the Legislative Assembly of the Mato Grosso State. This at once invoked a law by which land that, after a certain time limit, had not been legally measured and demarcated, reverted to the Government. It was a legal device which saddled Indians, many of whom did not even realise that they were living in Brazil, with the responsibility of employing lawyers to look after their interests. It had been employed once before, and with additional refinements of trickery, in an attempt to snatch away the last of the land of the unfortunate Kadiweus. On this occasion it seems that only two copies of the official publication recording the enactment were available, one of which had been lodged in the State archives, and the other taken the same day to the reserve by the persons proposing to share the land between them.

  Hardly less haste was shown in the occupation of the Teresa Cristina reserve. It was a muddled, untidy operation, and it turned out in the end that considerably more land had been sold on paper than the actual area of the reserve. This was before the final demoralisation and collapse of the Indian Protection Service, and local officials not only challenged the legality of the sale but called in vain for State troops to be sent to repel an invasion of fazendeiros supported by their private armies carrying sub-machine-guns.

  The state of affairs that had come to pass at Teresa Cristina only five years later, in 1968, is depicted in the testimony of a Bororo Indian girl.

  There were two fazendas, one called Teresa, where the Indians worked as slaves. They took me from my mother when I was a child. Afterwards I heard that they hung my mother up all night … She was very ill and I wanted to see her before she died … When I got back they thrashed me with a raw-hide whip … They prostituted the Indian girls … One day the IPS agent called an old carpenter and told him to make an oven for the farmhouse. When the carpenter had finished the agent asked him what he wanted for doing the job. The carpenter said he wanted an Indian girl, and the agent took him to the school and told him to choose one. No one saw or heard any more of her … Not even the children escaped. From two years of age they worked under the whip … There was a mill for crushing the cane, and to save the horses they used four children to turn the mill … They forced the Indian Otaviano to beat his own mother … The Indians were used for target practice.

  Thus were the Indians disarmed, betrayed, and hustled down the path towards final extinction. Yet in the heart of the Mato Grosso and the Amazon forests, there were tribes that still held out. Classified by the Government manual on Indians as isolados, they are described as those that possess the greatest physical vigour. Nobody knows how many such tribes there are. There may be 300 or more with a total population of 50,000, including tiny, self-contained and apparently indestructible nations having their own completely separate language, organisation and customs. Some of these people are giants with herculean limbs, armed with immense longbows of the kind an archer at Crécy might have used. A few groups are ethnically mysterious with blue eyes and fairish hair, provokers of wild theories among Amazonian travellers, that there is one tribe supposed by some to have migrated to these forests some 2,000 years ago from the island of Hokkaido in Japan. One common factor unites them all; a brilliant fitness for survival – until now. For 400 years they have avoided the slavers and lived through the epidemics. They have armed themselves with constant alertness. They have been ready to
embrace a new tactical nomadism. They have made distrust the greatest of their virtues. Above all, their chieftains have had the intelligence and the strength to reject those deadly offerings left outside their villages by which the whites seek first to buy their friendship, then take away their freedom.

  The Cintas Largas were one such tribe living in magnificent if precarious isolation in the upper reaches of the Aripuaná River. There were about five hundred of them, occupying several villages.

  They used stone axes, tipped their arrows with curare, caught small fish by poisoning the water, played four-feet-long flutes made from gigantic bamboos, and celebrated two great annual feasts: one of the initiation of young girls at puberty, and the other of the dead. At both of these they were said to use some unknown herbal concoction to produce ritual drunkenness. They were in a region still dependent for its meagre revenues on wild rubber, and this exposed them to routine attacks by rubber tappers, against whom they had learned to defend themselves. Their tragedy was that deposits of rare metals were being found in the area. What these metals were, it was not clear. Some sort of a security blackout had been imposed, only fitfully penetrated by vague news reports of the activities of American and European companies, and of the smuggling of plane-loads of the said rare metals back to the USA.

  David St Clair in his book The Mighty Mighty Amazon (Souvenir Press, 1968) mentions the existence of companies who specialised in dealing with tribes when their presence came to be considered a nuisance, attacking their villages with famished dogs, and shooting down everyone who tried to escape. Such expeditions depended for their success on the assistance of a navigable river which would carry the attacking party to within striking distance of the village or villages to be destroyed. The Beiços de Pau had been reached in this way and dealt with by the gifts of foodstuffs mixed with poisons, but the two inches on the small-scale map of Brazil separating these two neighbouring tribes contained unexplored mountain ranges, and the single river ran in the wrong direction. The Cintas Largas, then, remained for the time being out of reach. In 1962, a missionary, John Dornstander, had reached and made an attempt to pacify them but he had given them up as a bad job.