Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  Aruanã was trembling.

  “Does Naurú wish this boy kept from the search for the feathers?” Tabajara asked.

  “No, he must go,” the pagé said immediately. “But I am curious, elder, why you still have the father in your maloca. It is bad for the village to be reminded of the shame he has brought. He may not be seen, but he is among us.”

  Tabajara knew that the death of the nameless one was being demanded. He saw the agony in the boy’s face and wondered if, young as he was, he realized it.

  “What you have said, Naurú, rests heavily with me. I will beseech the ancestors to help one who should have been more wakeful.” Tabajara was determined that the matter be taken no further this night, and shifted his talk back to the boys. “Go — sit with the others!” he told Aruanã.

  He saw Naurú scuttle away, pushing through the crowd toward the hut of the sacred rattles. Tabajara’s opinion of the pagé wavered between dread of his powers and disgust at the manner in which he sometimes abused them. Naurú had had many opportunities to address this problem of Pojucan but had waited until tonight, when he could raise it before the village.

  Until his last battle, few men could match Pojucan as warrior or hunter. He seemed destined to be the next leader of the maloca.

  Two Great Rains past, the men of the clan had attacked their enemies’ village. The battle raged for hours. Many on both sides were slain, until the clan’s warriors were driven back into the forest, leaving the dead and those captured by the enemy, Pojucan among the latter.

  Three sunrises after the clan had returned to the village, Pojucan came wandering back. He had escaped from the enemy, and it was this flight that damned him.

  Prisoners were always killed but it was a glorious death that promised entry to Land of the Grandfather. To flee was to banish all hope of reaching this warriors’ paradise and to become a man without a country — a nameless no-warrior.

  Tabajara had found Pojucan’s behavior inexplicable, and the memory of it troubled him greatly.

  He accepted a gourd of beer passed to him and drank deeply.

  The boys, not knowing what was expected of them, sat motionless as others began to drift away from the clearing, until Old Mother, bringing a fresh supply of beer, saw them and erupted with laughter:

  “Aieee! What foolishness! Are you to sit until Macaw calls? Get up! Go to your hammocks and ask your fathers how you must hunt Macaw.”

  Aruanã’s eyes adjusted to the smoky atmosphere inside the longhouse. Twenty families dwelt here, their hammocks slung on either side of a central walkway. Their disregard for possessions, other than the fine works of feather, was evident in the few items stored within this area — earthen pots, bows and arrows, clubs, stone axes, a digging stick. Each family kept a fire burning day and night, its glowing embers as much for cooking as for warding off malevolent spirits.

  It made no difference where he went or what he did, Aruanã thought sadly: his father’s trouble followed. He had heard Naurú; still he could not understand what Pojucan had done so terrible as to make him a no-warrior. How could one so fearless and brave be a man without honor?

  When he approached his family’s hammocks — hung the farthest distance from Tabajara’s place since his father’s return — he saw Pojucan making an arrow. Two were next to him on the hammock — arrows of a kind Aruanã would need for Macaw. Seeing this, he was suddenly happy. When had his father last taken an interest in anything that concerned him?

  Pojucan greeted the boy, and continued working on the arrow. Unlike those used against men or in the hunt for meat, it ended in a small, round knob, not a point of bone or sharpened reed. Its snub-nosed head was designed to stun, not kill.

  “A boy needs a swift arrow for Macaw,” Pojucan said, “one that will fly true and fast.”

  “With such an arrow, I will be the first to shoot Macaw,” Aruanã said eagerly. “I will find more feathers than all the rattles can wear.”

  “When I went on my first hunt, I was afraid of the forest.”

  “And so it is with me, Father. But this fear will not stop me.”

  “There is no need to go beyond the forest of our people. Many macaws live there.”

  “I remember the signs and will look for them.” He was referring to the markers with which the clan defined its territory: a broken branch across the trail, a slash on a tree trunk. “You have been beyond these, Father, a longer journey than others. I will also remember this, for I am your son.”

  “There are things in the forest even the bravest warrior has no eyes or thoughts for.”

  “You led the hunt. You saw the trail as the animals do.” Suddenly Aruanã implored, “Oh, Father, why has it changed?”

  “It was a long time past,” Pojucan said. “It was the other life.”

  Pojucan still did not know what had come over him when he was a prisoner. He should have danced before his captors, and mocked them, until they brought the slaughter club. Why had he, on the second night, looked up at the stars and thought that life held more than a death of honor?

  “You must look for Macaw in the middle branches,” he said abruptly. “There he makes his home.”

  But Aruanã did not want to lose this chance to hear his father. “I do not know this other life you speak of,” he said.

  “Think only of the sunrise and of what must be done for Naurú. It is your first hunt. Sleep, so you will have eyes for Macaw.”

  “My father is Pojucan, the Warrior. Pojucan, the Hunter. This I will always honor.”

  Pojucan, a deep ache in his heart, swung himself into his hammock and turned his back on his son.

  Naurú was going to have him killed; of this he was sure. His death would come without ceremony, a group of warriors ambushing him in some quiet place in the forest or seizing him here in the maloca and dragging him beyond the stockade.

  But why should he allow old bent-back Naurú to decide his life for him?

  He was not so stupid as to seek an open confrontation with Naurú. He would be a twice-condemned man if he dared defy Naurú before the elders.

  He dreaded Naurú, but there was something else, a fire within him that had begun as no more than the faint embers at the end of night in a maloca.

  It was heresy, the denial of a glorious way of dying among the Tupiniquin, and he was the first man to think it.

  Aruanã lay awake for a long time, listening to the insects in the thatch, the creaking of hammock poles, the conversation of those still awake. He heard the cries from the jungle, so very close late at night.

  Aruanã’s people were Tupiniquin, one of the great tribes of the forest. The Tupiniquin lived beyond the farthest rivers, up to the lands of the Tupinambá. He had heard the names of other tribes as well, but he could not remember them all, and called them, mostly, The Enemy. Whenever there was a war, there would be prisoners, and they would always boast about their own villages, how much greater they were than the clan’s. He never believed a word of this, but he listened to them, and learned about the tribes and lands they had come from.

  Twice in his own lifetime the clan had moved its village.

  The last move had led to a startling discovery for Aruanã.

  One morning soon after the clan had raised its new malocas, the men left the village at sunrise and made for the river, where they boarded three dugouts.

  “Where are we going, Father?” Aruanã was to ask this question again and again, but each time Pojucan only laughed and told him to wait.

  They paddled downstream. After a bend, the river began to widen, and there was a low, rumbling noise.

  “Father, what is it?” he asked uncertainly.

  Before Pojucan could reply, the river was gone, and the earth itself was fast disappearing as they swept forward, onto the widest, bluest, most expansive stretch of water.

  Behind him, Aruanã saw white sand backed by tall, graceful palms; behind the palms the earth rose, with patches of forest on the heights.

  Between the w
hite sand and the place where the water met the sky lay a line of foaming white. At sight of it, the men shouted from one canoe to the other, warnings to turn back. This was done, but the first craft to paddle toward the land was almost at the white sands when it was swamped.

  The canoes of Pojucan and Tabajara raced toward the scene, but so close to shore had it occurred that by the time they got there, the warriors were already on the sands, laughing at their misfortune and delightedly pointing out that “Bluewater” had turned the urucu dye on their bodies a deep mahogany hue.

  Aruanã fell asleep this night remembering a glorious day when he first saw Bluewater that flowed to the end of the earth.

  He awoke before anyone else in the maloca but did not rise from his hammock, and was lying there when he saw Aruanã stir. His son also did not get up immediately but sat in the net, clearly uncertain as to whether or not he should set out for the forest, since it was still dark outside. Pojucan did not let the boy see that he was awake. Go now, he willed the youngster. When the fat and the lazy have wiped the sleep from their eyes, you will be across the river. Go now, my son!

  It pleased him that no sooner had his thoughts ended than Aruanã climbed out of the hammock. He watched the boy squat by one of the pots at the fire and throw back mouthfuls of manioc. Then Aruanã lifted the bark container with his arrows, slung it over his shoulder, and took up his bow. He paused briefly and looked back toward the hammocks. Then he made for the low opening at the end of the maloca, pushed aside the woven mat that covered it, and was gone.

  Soon after Aruanã left, Pojucan swung out of his hammock: One man there was who was permitted to speak to a no-warrior, and Pojucan went to seek him at a neighboring maloca.

  The man was at his hammock, and greeted Pojucan cheerfully enough. He was lean, with light, almost yellow skin and a sharp nose that had earned him the sobriquet Long Beak in the village. His real name was Ubiratan. Whether he was a prisoner of the village was moot. Some elders held that he had been captured by their canoes; others argued that this “capture” had occurred after the strange craft he’d ridden into the bay at the end of the clan’s river had been destroyed in the white waters. As the prisoner theory had prevailed, no one paid much attention to Ubiratan’s talking with no-warrior, particularly in the beginning, when he could not properly understand his dialect.

  Ubiratan came from a people he called Tapajós, who had never made war with the Tupiniquin. Ubiratan was not clear about the distance between this place and his village, but he had been gone four Great Rains and the stars themselves had changed their place in the sky.

  He regarded the Tupiniquin as a simple people compared with his own. The Tupiniquin thought themselves a great nation, but their malocas were buried in the forest, they had little trade with one another, and, what surprised him most, they had never talked of a great chief, one man who directed the affairs of all the tribes. At the head of his own Tapajós was such a person, a man of authority, whose word was obeyed throughout the land, who could call upon the warriors of every village, and whose name was honored wherever the Tapajós lived — and feared by tribes who dwelt farther along Mother of Rivers.

  It was an order of this great chief that, indirectly, was the cause of Ubiratan’s present misfortune. A skilled potter, he had been sent to the farthest village in the land to fetch the blue earth that Tapajós potters used for their finest vessels. The field of clay lay beyond the last Tapajós settlement, in a no-man’s-land. Here a band of enemy warriors attacked Ubiratan and took him captive, dragging him to their canoes and riding the powerful currents to the very end of Mother of Rivers.

  One day the headman of the village where he was held captive announced that he was taking two canoe parties on a long journey, and selected Ubiratan to join them. Instead of heading upriver, the boats went far beyond the largest island and down along the mainland. One disappeared in a storm; Ubiratan’s was wrecked in a bay.

  Separated from his companions, often near starvation, he struggled down the coast till he found a clan of fishermen whose canoes were like none he had ever seen.

  These jangadas were built of six to eight balsa logs, roughly equal in size, laid side by side and lashed together with lianas. To catch the wind, a great woven mat was suspended from two mangrove wood poles erected upon the log platform in an A-position and supported with lianas. Within a short time, Ubiratan had mastered this wind-canoe and could send it rushing across the water as fast as the best of them, directing its course from the stern with the great paddle positioned there.

  Ubiratan would sometimes take a jangada out by himself. The last time he did this, he was caught in a sudden squall and driven to the white waters, where the jangada was lost and the Tupiniquin captured him.

  It was this man to whom Pojucan now turned for help. “You were in the clearing last night?” he asked.

  “I heard Naurú,” Ubiratan replied.

  “I expect Tabajara to act, even before this sun has gone.”

  “You show no fear?”

  “I am not afraid: I have lived two Great Rains since my last death and am ready to face this one.”

  “Ah, yes, it is so,” Ubiratan said. “But how have you lived?”

  Ubiratan had found it strange that a man could be an exile among his own people for the reason Pojucan was: To live to fight an enemy again must surely be more worthy than to be slain before the women and children of his village.

  They walked beyond the village, heading toward the canoes, until they arrived at a place on the river where the mist was beginning to rise.

  “My boy is already in the forest,” Pojucan said. “Gone before any other. He will be first to get Macaw’s feathers, the son of no-warrior.” He laughed joylessly.

  “Tell me, Ubiratan, is it so different for you? Wandering from the Tapajós, away from the sight of your people?”

  “In my spirit it is the same, I agree.”

  “Must Ubiratan, son of the Tapajós, lost from his people, stay among the Tupiniquin, forever gone from Mother of Rivers?”

  “What else?”

  “You can return,” Pojucan said directly.

  “I remain only because I know how many lands lie between this place and the one I left.”

  “Only because of this?”

  Ubiratan nodded. Until now, he had shown little emotion, but he could see what the Tupiniquin was leading up to, and a keener note rose in his voice: “It is a long and terrible journey, beyond even those stars that mean so much to you.”

  “But did you not make such a journey, my friend?”

  Ubiratan had often thought of heading up along the white sands or into the forest, and there had been many opportunities, but not for a man alone.

  “There is nothing for me here,” Pojucan continued, “but dishonorable death.

  I will go with you, to your village.”

  Ubiratan leapt forward and embraced Pojucan, clasping him to his chest. “Oh, my friend! What I said about the dangers is true, but with two of us they can be overcome.”

  They agreed that there was no time to lose. They must go that night, when people were about in the clearing, make their separate ways to the small forest behind the clan’s fields, and start from there.

  Aruanã was out of scale in the forest, dwarfed in this twilight world, where the simplest ferns and shrubs grew to a height twice his own and patches of light played through the latticed branches in the canopy far above, filtering through the lower trees and making strange shadows dance before his eyes.

  Cautiously he slipped between writhing shapes of trees held in the grip of the strangler fig or hung with the tendrils of great lianas, vines too thick to encircle with both hands. It was a soggy, dripping world, mostly silent now that the waking chorus had stilled, but there were occasional cries from various levels above, parrots and toucans shattering the quiet with maniacal conversation as they took to wing, a cacophony of screeches and squawks that rose until, abruptly, they ceased. In the distance, a pack of
howler monkeys started up.

  The boy was nervous but also experienced a strange elation the deeper he walked into the forest. His life had begun in such a place: When his mother had felt the child, she had gone beyond the village to the trees, where she squatted on the damp cover to give birth.

  Little happened in Aruanã’s world that was not bound up with the jungle. The forest was mysterious and dangerous, and if its luxuriance and fecundity were not held back at the edge of the clearing, the trees and shrubs would invade the malocas.

  In the forest were animals and plants that provided food, medicines, shelter, and weapons, more than man could ever need. But this paradise was also a land filled with a fantastic parade of evil.

  Several times before crossing the river at dawn, Aruanã had inspected the dye smeared over his body. It was his only protection against Caipora, whom he feared most, and the others: The forest demons were unlikely to see a human who wore the red paint. And then, once on the other side, he had abruptly stopped, his heart beating furiously as he awaited a dreadful apparition. But there had been nothing, and he had walked on, a little bolder.

  When a group of large brilliant blue butterflies flew in front of him, he dashed after them. Entering the forest where the fragrances were especially heavy, he paused and breathed deeply of the exotic perfume, examined strange insects, and plants growing high on the trees themselves, splashes of color flowering amid the dark green clouds of leaves.

  Twice already he had caught a movement in the middle branches, where his father had told him to look for Macaw. The first time he’d watched in disgust as a turkey thrashed to the ground. The second time it had been a brilliantly feathered macaw, and he’d got a shot off into the trees but missed, and the arrow was lost. He stood there trying to attract Macaw by mimicking his call. Macaw screeched back, mocking him from very close, but he never saw him again.

  He’d gone on, humiliated and reminded that there was much to learn before he could read the signs of the forest.