Along the Endless River

by Rose Alexander

  Katharine was fascinated by the sight of so much rubber, and somewhat repelled by the seringueiros who gathered it. They were rough, tough looking men, thin from a poor diet, excessive drinking and the hours spent traversing the estradas. In the mornings, they would make the slashes in the bark, returning in the afternoons to collect the sap, and in the evenings sit over smoking palm nut fires to solidify the latex into bolachas. Most worked alone or in small groups, but some had families with them, women with rotten teeth and hunched backs, undernourished children clutching at their legs.

  Despite the money to be made from rubber, it was immediately obvious that not a single one of these people was rich.

  ‘They are generally indebted to their employer for their food and other supplies,’ explained Charles. ‘The manager sells to them at an inflated price – five times the real cost – and they have no choice but to buy. There are no shops deep in the jungle. And the amount they receive for each bolacha is one-fifth of its true value. They can never hope to pay off what they owe – so they work until the jungle or the drink kills them.’

  Katharine thought for a while before replying.

  ‘So they are little more than slaves, though slavery has been abolished?’

  Charles shrugged and made a moue of resignation. ‘Not really. They are free to leave – although, if they do, they are unlikely to get far.’

  Katharine ran her hands down the skirt of her dress while considering her response. It felt damp, and the hem was dirty and mouldy. The climate got at everything, creeping over it, into it, tainting and disfiguring. She fingered her arms, the lumps where the reaction from bites she had got on the first boat still lingered. Sweat dripped from every pore and the accumulation of moisture had given her rashes in her elbows, behind her knees and beneath her breasts.

  The Amazon could be a cruel and hard environment. But many of the people in it were, it seemed, even crueller and harder.

  ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘The answer is in the question,’ Charles replied somewhat enigmatically. Then, reluctantly, he continued. ‘It is a duty, be it legal or moral, to repay a debt, so the rubber barons will ensure that this is fulfilled. However, the methods by which they can extract payment are less well-defined and perhaps here is where the powers of law and order have little jurisdiction to ensure that things are done by the book.’

  ‘But why should they be held to a debt they had no choice but to incur and cannot hope to repay?’ Katharine continued insistently, watching a group of seringueiros on the nearest bank sharing a bottle of cachaça, strong alcohol made from sugar cane.

  A brief smile of cynicism mixed with humour flashed across Charles’ face. ‘I see that you do not give up easily,’ he said and then, with a narrowing of the eyes, ‘a trait which could serve you well – or not.’

  Katharine leant on the railings and stared down at the water, black and turgid. She could hear the voices of the workers squeezed onto the lower decks, the ones who had been hired to labour for them. She was suffocating with the heat even here on the spacious top deck. She couldn’t imagine how unbearable conditions were for those down below.

  ‘Mrs Ferrandis,’ Charles continued quietly, ‘do not worry yourself about a situation you did not create and cannot hope to change. This is how the system works here.’

  And with that, the conversation was over. Charles went to discuss some matter of planning with Anselmo, and Katharine was left alone with her thoughts.

  * * *

  In Iquitos, a grubby little town huddled on the bank of the river, Anselmo, Katharine, Charles and Laure went to dine on another steamer, the Bolivar, which had come all the way from Liverpool. When they got back to their own boat, which was due to set sail again before first light, they found a huge commotion afoot.

  Anselmo and Charles went ahead of Katharine and Laure to find out what was going on. Half an hour later, Anselmo came back alone to accompany the two women on board. From the expression on his face, Katharine could see that something serious had happened.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked anxiously. She couldn’t understand what could have gone wrong in the short time they had been absent.

  Anselmo remained tight lipped until they had negotiated the wobbly gangplank. Then he flung his hat down on a table and ran his fingers through his already thinning hair.

  ‘Labour, that’s what’s wrong.’ He gestured resignedly to the stairs that led to the lower decks, on which had been housed the migrant workers. ‘They’ve jumped ship, every last one of them. Frightened of the forest, so word has it. Frightened of hard work, more like.’

  ‘So, what are we to do?’ Katharine realised how utterly ignorant she was of the number of men needed to run five hundred estradas of rubber trees. Was it ten? Twenty? Two hundred? Two thousand? She really had no idea and hated herself for her ignorance. The heat and the humidity had enfeebled her, taking her energy away and allowing her to sit back and leave Anselmo to it, not questioning him enough, not learning enough about this new life, their new enterprise. Regardless of her sense of discomfort at the seringueiros’ working conditions, there was no doubt that they needed such workers. And now disaster had struck and she didn’t know how to help him.

  ‘We recruit when we get there.’ Charles’ firm, steady voice intervened. ‘This is not an unexpected event – it’s often this way. Few immigrants want to go so far as the Rio Poderoso; it’s so isolated, so far from anywhere. We will use local labour, the Indians, instead.’ He paused, his forehead creased in thought, before adding, ‘It will just take a little longer to, er, round up the number we need.’

  Katharine saw bewilderment then doubt then relief sweep over Anselmo’s face.

  ‘Charles,’ he cried, his voice over-loud with sudden happiness. ‘I knew I’d picked the right chap in you.’

  Katharine joined in with weak congratulations. Somehow, she was not convinced it could be that simple. And the hesitation she had spotted in Charles’ reply only served to reinforce her uncertainty.

  They went to their hammocks. Katharine had learnt how to lie diagonally and keep one foot on the floor to gently rock oneself back and forth. Now she was used to it, she found it as comfortable as a bed – almost. But that night she rocked for longer than usual, sleep eluding her. Charles’s words ‘round them up’ reverberated through her mind until she fell into a fitful slumber.

  He made it sound so easy – but what, exactly, did he mean?

  Chapter Five

  Lagona, 1890

  It took six long weeks aboard the steamer, toiling against the strong downstream current, to reach Lagona, McNamara’s forest home. Anselmo had had to pay a considerable amount extra to persuade the captain to add so many additional miles to his journey. The river continued to astound; sometimes so wide that the shore on either side was a narrow line far in the distance, other times no bigger than the Thames. Katharine thought often of her father, hard at work on the docks, loading and unloading cargo from all over the world, with never a thought of ever visiting the exotic locations from which the produce originated. She was still incredulous that she herself was here, a lowly working girl from London, now a rubber baron’s wife.

  When it didn’t terrify her, it made her smile to herself in disbelief.

  As they progressed, the water level became lower in advance of the rainy season and the river strewn with hazards that could not be seen: hidden rocks, submerged tree trunks and whirlpools that could seize a small steamer such as theirs and spin it as if it were light as a cork. It took all of the captain’s skill and experience to pilot the boat safely. And it wasn’t just the river that caused fear. Trepidation built in Katharine day by day at the thought of finally encountering Patrick McNamara. She imagined an ogre, a man with a tongue as strident as his wife’s and a bloodlust to match.

  But when they at last clambered off the boat, legs wobbly after weeks away from dry land, the infamous gentleman’s appearance took Katharine by surprise. He
was short and compact, with sandy hair and a handsome, freckled face from which shone out a pair of startlingly blue eyes. He was smiling broadly in greeting.

  ‘Welcome to my humble abode,’ he said, waving his hand expansively around him at the two-storey villa surrounded by well-tended gardens and a small vegetable patch. Katharine was impressed; it all looked enchanting and she was already planning in her mind’s eye how she would make her home as welcoming and pretty as this place. For a moment she forgot how sweaty she was, the raw and chafing skin of her armpits and inner thighs, the unpleasantness of the onboard makeshift toilet and lack of washing facilities. The discomforts melted away and she imagined a sunny future, her and Anselmo, building their business, earning enough money to go home rich, showering their largesse on each and every member of their families, and never having to work again.

  A large and handsome dog came bounding eagerly up, completing this idyllic picture. Katharine bent down towards it, ready to pat its back and fondle its ears.

  Without warning, it leapt towards her, emitting a bloodcurdling snarl, yellow teeth bared and ready to bite. Katharine recoiled in terror, finding Anselmo and clinging desperately onto him as the dog continued to threaten, making small, aggressive jumps in her direction, accompanied by low, rumbling growls.

  ‘Down, Hamlet, down,’ ordered McNamara fiercely, grabbing at its collar. ‘So sorry,’ he continued, turning to his guests once the dog had been restrained and the bloodthirsty growling reduced to intermittent, angry yelps. ‘He is a guard dog, after all. We have to be vigilant.’ He snapped his fingers and an Indian servant appeared instantly and led the dog away.

  As it passed Katharine, it took its chance to lurch towards her anew, lips curled back in vicious contempt, jaws chomping and slathering. Katharine froze. Her heart, which had been pumping at ten times its normal rate, now seemed to stop completely.

  It only restarted when the dog was finally out of sight.

  Trembling, she glanced fearfully over her shoulder. The trees had been cleared for some way around but that only seemed to make the forest, when it began, darker, denser and more forbidding. She and Anselmo had to brave that forest, to set off into its deepest depths, to places few, if any, white men had ever trod – and they didn’t have a Hamlet to guard them.

  And once the three to four week journey had been accomplished, she and Anselmo, Charles and Laure, and Philippe and Clara would be quite alone; six Europeans stranded amidst a galaxy of untold numbers of trees, all around them savage tribes of head-hunters and poison arrow bowmen, not to mention the fierce Aráras of the river Madeira, the Majerónas cannibals of the Jauarí. Stories were told of travellers killed, roasted like pigs on a spit and feasted upon. And on top of that there were deadly jaguars and anacondas, spiders and centipedes.

  Danger lurked everywhere.

  Katharine knew that to be a true Victorian was to be an adventurer, to travel bravely and intrepidly to the furthest reaches of the earth for the sake of Queen and empire.

  She just kept having the awful feeling that she wasn’t up to it.

  * * *

  They didn’t see much of Patrick McNamara for the first few days at Lagona, but towards the end of the week a few visitors arrived from a different branch of the river, and so, on Friday night, they were quite a party for dinner. Their host was genial and personable, as affably welcoming as the Irish were always said to be. Despite Mr Phee’s ominous warnings, Katharine found she liked him. She had been placed next to him at the table and took advantage of that to ask numerous questions about life on the Amazon, what jungle plants and berries could be eaten, how to keep supplies away from insects and whether it was really true that, in the forest, the Indians wore no clothes at all. He answered in detail; in fact, he talked so much that Katharine began to suspect that he didn’t get much chance at conversation most of the time, so was making up for it now he had company.

  ‘And how often do you travel to Manaus, Mr McNamara?’ she asked. ‘You have such a beautiful home there – although Lagona is lovely, too, of course,’ she added hastily, in case he should think her rude, ‘but your wife is in the city, and your friends. You must miss them all.’

  ‘Please, Mrs Ferrandis, everyone calls me Mac and I insist that you do, too.’ He took a long draw on a huge Cuban cigar and exhaled the smoke in a choking cloud of wispy tendrils that floated in front of her face, making her nostrils flare in distaste. ‘You are right that it can be hard to be away from home comforts. But my wife does not like the primitive way of life here, nor the isolation. And, given that I have control over all the routes to the interior, and have been charged by the government with opening them up to the flow of rubber, then it’s important that I am on hand to police who gets to use them. And who does not.’

  He smiled at her. Katharine smiled back, the warmest, friendliest smile she could manage. It was crucial that she and Anselmo were in the ‘use’ category.

  ‘And on what basis is such a decision made?’ She kept her voice light, trying to keep out of it the urgency she felt.

  ‘A strong woman with – how shall I put it? – personality, is always an advantage, so it is.’ Mac’s eyes twinkled and his Irish burr became more pronounced. Katharine almost spat out her mouthful of wine in surprise; was he flirting with her? Immediately, she dismissed the thought. The very notion! She’d been travelling for too long, and he’d been isolated up river for too long, leaving them both prone to misjudging social situations.

  Mac took another lengthy draw on his cigar. ‘Seriously now’ – and Katharine immediately relaxed; he had just been teasing – ‘I feel sure that we can come to a suitable arrangement. As sure as ever I could be.’

  Katharine took a deep breath as relief flooded through her. If Mac was on their side that was at least one hurdle cleared.

  The meal ended and the dinner guests drifted off to various pursuits: card playing, stargazing, more drinking. Mac and Anselmo huddled in a corner, talking business Katharine supposed. She excused herself to visit the bathroom, which was some way from the house, and the tiny Indian servant girl who had been assigned to her for the duration of their stay scuttled after her. It was such a strange thing, and one Katharine found hard to get used to, but in the Amazon she’d discovered that your servant accompanied you everywhere, even to the lavatory, and slept by your bed at night, at least one or two of them, their gaze always upon you.

  This one, whose name was Esperanza, beguiled and horrified in equal measure – she was sweet and pretty but painfully thin. And very, very young – not more than eight, Katharine reckoned. She reminded her of Mabel, and that made her love her instantly. Immediately on first seeing her, Katharine had wanted to take care of her, to find out more about her, to dote on her as she did her sister. But Esperanza never spoke a word, whether she couldn’t or didn’t want to, Katharine had no idea.

  That night, in bed, she turned to Anselmo. ‘He seems nice,’ she whispered, conscious of how thin were the partitions that divided rooms in this house, and of Esperanza’s listening ears.

  Anselmo took her in his arms and then quickly released her. It was too hot for any prolonged close contact.

  ‘You sound surprised,’ he replied, too loudly for Katharine’s liking. ‘What did you expect to find?’ Without giving her a chance to answer this question, he rolled over onto his back, looking straight above him as if addressing the lofty ceiling, with its wooden struts and zinc roofing. ‘He’s a fine fellow and, what’s more, not only has he signed on the dotted line regarding moving our rubber down river, he’s given us rights to use the passage over the isthmus. All for a charge, of course, but he’s been very generous, all things considered. And – I’ve leased a small steamer from him on very favourable terms!’

  Katharine paused; her brow furrowed in concentration. Mac and Anselmo had clearly been even harder at work after dinner than she’d thought. ‘That’s great news.’ She considered some more before adding, ‘I mean, really great. Your achievements are very
impressive – I’m sure lots of people back home didn’t think we could do it. I wasn’t as confident as you were from the beginning – but now I, well, now I see that the two of us together – we can do anything!’

  Anselmo grinned happily. ‘Well, my darling, you are prone to pessimism, are you not?’ he replied. ‘But I never had any doubts. I just know it’s all going to be marvellous. And with Mac on our side – we cannot fail.’ He sat up, leant in close to Katharine and whispered in her ear, ‘I’ve heard he’s mortgaged to the hilt, though. That’s why he couldn’t buy the land I’ve secured for us – didn’t have any more cash to leverage.’

  ‘Right,’ Katharine said. And then, feeling that this was the first time since they’d arrived in Brazil that she and Anselmo had really talked about everything that was going on, added, ‘So how are you – we – affording all of this?’

  Anselmo dropped a kiss delicately upon her nose. ‘It’s very complicated, a matter of borrowing from one bank to put down money in another and then borrow even more from another, and so on. It’s how the whole rubber shenanigans are funded, a kind of pyramid system. We were lucky to have your father’s generous gift to give us exactly the deposit we needed to get the process started.’

  Anselmo fell back onto the bed and stared up at the rafters again. In the moonlight, Katharine could just make out the satisfaction etched upon his face.

  She opened her mouth to speak, shut it again, then began once more. ‘My father’s gift.’ It was a statement rather than a question. ‘What do you mean?’