Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  The young men in scarlet dye were first to reach the village, and they carried the buriti palm to the meeting hut of mature men. The boys were not far behind, and carried their log to the hut of the winning group.

  When Segge pounded into the clearing, crimson-faced and drenched with sweat, Amador stood there, his hands on his hips. “So, Hollander!” he called out, grinning. “What’s it like to be a savage?”

  The afternoon passed swiftly. The Green Palm group went off to prepare a shelter of leaves and branches next to the place where they had made their fire that morning. Other Tapuya erected a new bachelors’ hut for boys of the tribe’s youngest group, who would occupy these quarters for the next five years, a meeting place to be used for ceremonies and the lessons the boys would hear from their elders.

  Toward dusk, the young men who had carried the first log into the village began to move from one hut to the next, singing that the Green Palm group were ready to receive their brides. The huts this happy choir approached were smaller than the malocas of the Tupiniquin or Tupinambá, circular and flimsily constructed, reflecting the Tapuya’s frequent seasonal migrations, though Nhandui’s tribe had become more sedentary since its alliance with the Dutch.

  When these men finished their singing, an older warrior group — men in the prime of life — moved to the leafy shelter the initiates had built. Thirty girls to be given as brides this night were waiting with their mothers, just beyond the openings of their huts. When the warrior group was in position outside the shelter, the mothers led the girls toward them. Chief Nhandui, the elders, and the pagés watched from a distance but had no role in the ceremony.

  The first mother to reach the warriors handed them a gift of a small cake of manioc and was given permission to pass into the boys’ shelter with her daughter. After a few minutes, they stepped out together. This ceremony was performed quietly, until the last two betrothed were taken into the shelter. They were girls of three and four. And their screams reached far into the clearing.

  “Beloved Lord, what’s happening?” Segge asked.

  “They’re being married,” Rabbe said unconcernedly.

  “But those are children. Surely — ”

  “What happens in there cannot harm them.”

  “The screams . . .”

  “The hut is strange to them; it is dark and unfamiliar.”

  “What happens . . . with these unions?”

  “The young men lie with their backs to the entrance.” He stopped, gazing toward the shelter.

  “Yes?”

  “In that hut, Heer Proot, the boys lie quietly, their eyes closed. The mothers make their daughters lie down behind the boys for a brief time. The boys must not move or gaze upon them. The mothers take their daughters away. That is all.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “When the girls are old enough, the boys will sleep with them.”

  “Will there be a celebration tonight?” Segge asked.

  “No. Not until the girl is ready to have babies. Then they feast with the bones of the dead.”

  Segge stared at Rabbe.

  “It is their religion, Heer Proot. Have I not explained this?”

  “No, Jakob, but I’ve seen the burial urns in their houses.”

  “For the bones of the dead, yes. The flesh, Heer Proot, they eat.”

  “Beloved Jesus!”

  “When an infant dies, the parents devour it. With an older child or an adult, all the family expects a portion of the body. The skull and bones are preserved, ground to a powder for a holy cup at their feasts.”

  “Amador Flôres is correct: They’re the worst of barbarians.”

  “With them, it is an act of love.”

  “You can’t believe this.” Segge had an expression of horror on his face. “Rabbe, you haven’t . . .”

  “I am a member of the tribe, Heer Proot. They are my people.”

  “You’re a civilized man, Jakob Rabbe. Such behavior — ”

  “It revolts them,” Rabbe interrupted.

  “What?”

  “The knowledge that civilized men inter their dead in the earth, where the remains are corrupted.”

  “No more, Rabbe — I wish to hear no more.”

  “They never take prisoners, as the cannibal Tupi do. They do not eat their enemies — only those closest to them.”

  Later, Segge wandered toward the hut he shared with Amador. When he reached the hut, he found that Amador was inside with a native. “We have a visitor,” Segge heard him say, as he entered. “Ibira.”

  Rabbe had told him much already about this Tupinambá. Ibira, “The Wanderer,” was a great storyteller. He could hold his audience spellbound with tales of the deadly beak of the tucano-yúa bird; the water serpent boia-asú; Rudá, cloud warrior, whose mission was to give man longings for home when he was absent and cause him to return to his tribe.

  Rudá’s powers had not worked for Ibira. He was from a clan that had originally lived at the Bahia. During the previous century’s reprisals and massacres by the Portuguese, these Tupinambá had abandoned their stockade and fled west, traveling until they came to the headwaters of the Tapajós.

  Ibira was with an advance party that went upriver. They were captured, first by a Tapajós clan, later by Portuguese slavers who were beginning to work their way up the Rio das Amazonas from a settlement established on a tributary below its mouth in 1616 — Belém do Pará, the Bethlehem of the Rio Pará.

  Inside the hut, a strong smell of freshly brewed palm wine and the heavy fumes of tabak suggested that Amador and Ibira had been together for a long time.

  Segge sat down opposite them, settling his big frame into his hammock, his legs dangling over the sides of the net. “I’ll drink, too.”

  “Captain Jakob told me you came from the Rio das Amazonas,” Segge said.

  “Yes, my Chief. Far beyond, too.”

  “A teller of stories.”

  “The best there is at this village.” Ibira was chewing a wad of tabak, and dark juice issued from the empty plug-hole below his lip, drooling down his chin.

  They sat drinking and Segge questioned Ibira in depth about his people. Amador showed little interest in the Tupinambá’s story. But he began to listen attentively when Ibira mentioned a tribe of warrior women:

  “When the rivers are low, men enter their territory in canoes. They are not contacted until they are deep in the lands of the warrior women. Then the women appear on the riverbank and order the men to beach their canoes.”

  “Are these men Tapajós?” Amador asked.

  “They are from the forest below the Tapajós villages,” he said, after a long pause.

  “Have you seen them?” Amador asked. “The Tapajós know them.”

  “Let him continue,” Segge said.

  “The men show that they come peacefully. The warrior women lay down their spears and clubs and run to the canoes. Each takes the first hammock she finds and carries it to her house. The man to whom it belongs will be her lover.”

  Segge had heard about the warrior women. Stories had been brought to Europe by Spanish explorers who had descended the great river. In 1542, when Francisco de Orellana, a kinsman of the Pizarros, traveled down the Mother of Rivers, his men were repeatedly told of a tribe of fair-skinned warrior women who ruled a territory in the forest. They lived in stone houses dedicated to the Sun, where men were forbidden except when the women sought to become pregnant. When the women were with child, the lovers would be expelled from their realm. Orellana and his conquistadors recognized the female warriors of Greek legend, the Amazons, and reported on the “River of the Amazons” when they returned to Spain.

  Ibira described a capital of broad avenues, houses of stone, and five temples, filled with jewels, dedicated to the worship of the Sun. Virgins were the custodians of these temples.

  Questioned further, Ibira said that when the warrior women went into battle, they wore a jaguar skin angled over one breast, making it easier to draw their bows. Their ar
rows were tipped with poison; their javelins, golden-hilted with iron shafts and blades that could pierce brass armor. Tribes near their territories were their vassals and owed them service and tribute, the latter to be paid in gold.

  The two men interrupted Ibira to ask where the Amazons’ territory lay. “Below the lands of the Tapajós, in the direction my father’s people traveled,” the Tupinambá replied.

  “He means south,” Amador said. “But you don’t truly know, do you,

  Tupinambá — no more than any other savage with such a story.”

  “It is not my story alone. It is known to many men.”

  “Yes, we heard the same from the Tupiniquin and the Carijó at São Paulo.

  Wonderful lies about mountains of emeralds and Paraupava — the lake of gold.”

  “There is a lake.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  Ibira said nothing.

  “Then, how can you say this?”

  “The Tapajós and all the people at Mother of Rivers know that it exists.”

  Amador picked up the flask of cachaça. “More drink, Tupinambá. More drink and you may remember where these things are.” He turned to Segge, who was picking paint off the handle of a long brush. “Do you believe these fantastic lies?”

  Before Segge could reply, Ibira said, “There is a lake close to the lands of the warrior women, where the boys made with warrior women are sent. Once a year they, too, hold a ceremony. One boy is chosen to be Son of the Sun. When the Great Rains end and the Sun is strongest, this Spirit Man is covered with gold dust. He is taken to the lake and bathes in it. Every man of those lands must also offer gold to the water.”

  “The man the Spaniards call ‘El Dorado,’” Segge observed.

  “No such man exists,” said Amador. “Many have searched for him. All have failed.” He took Ibira’s gourd. “Drink more cachaça, Ibira! Indeed, you’re the best storyteller! Lies, all of it. But, Ibira, your stories are the best!”

  Segge tapped Amador’s shoulder with the end of his paint brush. “How do you know he lies?” Segge turned the brush round and round in his fingers. “Imagine for a moment, Amador, that you’re a Spaniard. You’ve landed with Pizarro. A native tells of a fabulous highland empire with stone highways and gold and silver treasures. Would you believe him, conquistador?”

  “Mmm . . . yes,” Amador said, unsurely.

  “But you wouldn’t know it was there, Amador — the city, the mines, the treasures. You’d be listening to a story like the one we’ve just heard.”

  “Then, I wouldn’t believe it.”

  “But you’d be wrong, my friend! Pizarro found Cuzco, capital of the Incaic Empire, exactly as the natives described it.”

  “True.”

  “Then, why deny what Ibira says?”

  At last Amador got the point. “If Pizarro and others hadn’t believed, if they hadn’t accepted the word of the savages, they might never have found Cuzco.”

  “Precisely, Amador.”

  They kept talking until dawn. Amador climbed into his hammock then; before he dropped off, he said wearily, “Had I been a conquistador, I might not have believed . . .”

  Segge lay in his hammock with his eyes closed. Dreamily, he imagined himself back in Amsterdam at the salons of the Magnificat, the group of the city’s richest families.

  “Imagine,” they will say, “Rembrandt van Rijn wanted to banish him to obscurity — Secundus Proot, artist, voyager, discoverer of the Queen of the Amazons!”

  There is no forgiveness in the caatinga, the white forest. When the rains fail and the earth cracks in the riverbeds, the parched northeaster roars between thickets of scrub, cactus, and leafless, misshapen trees. The wind blasts eroded hills, howls between rocky outcrops, swirls through dust-filled depressions. The northeaster passes, and there is a profound silence. Nothing moves in the airless furnace.

  The green forest to the west is fecund, alive, its canopied plants seeking light. The white forest clings to the earth, its strangulated growth shrinking from the sun.

  There is a metamorphosis when it rains. Turbulent rushes of water feed the clotted earth; the tangle of gnarled, stunted trees is transformed into a low, flowered forest; succulent grasses thrive magically in the thin soil. But always the great droughts return; the rains fail and the rivers disappear. This gray monotony of tinder-dry vegetation is deceptive, for it hides the true nature of the caatinga: a creeping desert.

  In February 1641, twelve days after departing the village of Chief Nhandui, Amador and Segge were lost in the white forest.

  It was six days since a Tapuya escort had abandoned them to flee back to the village. They had been left with three natives: Two had been prisoners of the Tapuya; the third was the storyteller Ibira, who had inspired this journey.

  Ever since that first talk of Amazons and gold, Segge and Amador had repeatedly plied the Tupinambá with questions, their excitement mounting until they determined to find the fabled lands. Captain Rabbe said they were madmen to contemplate such a journey. “ Go beyond the village into the caatinga and you’ll wish you’d never heard of Ibira. It has not rained in those lands for three years.”

  After the Tapuya had fled, Amador led his party in a southwesterly direction. Their route was based on what they had heard from Ibira. According to every report, Ibira. said, the Amazons and the lake of gold were in the forest between the headwaters of the river of the Tapajós and the Rio das Amazonas.

  Amador accepted this theory for several reasons: Bandeiras had pushed north from São Paulo into the backlands behind the Bahia and toward Belém do Pará, but the results of those expeditions had been inconclusive. The notion that Brazil was a vast island formed by the waters of the Paraguay, the Rio das Amazonas and their tributaries was not yet disproved. Amador knew that no Paulistas had ventured as far west as Ibira’s Tupinambá had migrated. If the savages accomplished this journey, he believed, so could he. And if those warrior women were there, he would find them, just as Pizarro had found Cuzco.

  It was a dream Amador and Segge shared with many men of their time. Even so experienced an explorer as Sir Walter Raleigh had been a believer in El Dorado. In 1617, already under sentence of death, he had been released for an expedition to the north coast of South America and up the Orinoco to find the gold of El Dorado. He failed, and on his return to England was walked to the chopping block.

  Amador breathed the burning air, felt the sting of scratched and bleeding hands where they’d come up against walls of thorn.

  For a time, the caatinga had been getting denser.

  “Far enough!” Amador cried suddenly. Without turning toward the others strung out behind, he went to sit down.

  They had been moving since dawn. It was midday and the sun was at its zenith. Later they’d march for a few hours before dark. The night would be chilling in contrast to the furnace of the day, but they did not dare wander the caatinga after sunset.

  They sat listening to the three natives move around in the brush, cracking and snapping dry plants as they worked their way through the undergrowth. They did not talk, because in the six days since the Tapuya ran off, they had said everything there was to be said about their predicament. After the Tapuya had gone, they made good progress for three days through patchy caatinga and over several riverbeds. Then they came to this thick scrub. They had expected to pass through it in a morning. Three days now and still no significant break. They were not at all sure that they weren’t moving in a circle.

  Burdened with the loads the Tapuya had left, they were making no more than ten to fifteen miles a day. They had food, but had drunk the last of their water the night before entering this choked caatinga.

  Amador and Segge heard the others coming toward them. Ibira was at their side first, his arms cradling roots and cacti lopped off with a machete. He dropped these at their feet and Segge grunted appreciation. Both men grabbed for the roots and cut them with their knives; then they gnawed and sucked at the tuberous growths, the
ir only source of moisture.

  “Three days now . . . it must soon end,” Segge said, flinging a root away.

  “It must end, yes, but where?”

  “If we turned east, we could reach Pernambuco and the coast,” Segge suggested.

  Amador wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, streaking the dust on his skin. Despite the ferocious heat, he wore his father’s war jacket from force of habit. “We’re not defeated,” he said. “Give it two days. If we don’t break out of this, we’ll go east.” He lay back and closed his eyes. “To go east, we have to come back this way — every step.”

  Segge swore in Dutch. He stretched out his big frame, snapping and crushing the dry plants.

  They came to places where the scrub forest thinned. At the first of such openings, they cheered and quickened their pace. But half an hour through the break and the stunted trees began to multiply.

  The second afternoon, they did not stop as darkness approached. Amador chopped and slashed at dry branches with frenzied movements; when the tangle of thorn and cacti became impenetrable, he swung to the left or right, making probes to find a way ahead. But at last he gave up.

  “It’s useless,” he said, moving back to Segge. “We’ll turn back in the morning.”

  “God knows, we tried,” Segge said.

  First one, then the other of the natives who had been prisoners of the Tapuya came to stand near them. But not Ibira.

  “Where is he?” Amador asked.

  The two natives, both Tobajara from coastal Pernambuco, did not reply.

  “Ibira! Ibira!” Amador shouted. Silence. He turned to the Tobajara. “Where’s Ibira?”

  “He was behind,” said one.

  “How far back?”

  The native looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “When did you last see him? Where?”

  “He walked behind us. We did not see him.”

  “Jesus!” Amador unslung his musket and prepared to load it. “Yours, too,” he said to Segge. “If he’s lucky, he’ll hear our shots.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”