Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  It was past noon when the women started in on them again. Four warriors restrained Amador as the women shaved his head, his beard, his eyebrows. Segge offered no resistance. One grandmother snatched the pearl Segge wore in his right earlobe, popped it into her mouth, and swallowed it.

  They were then pulled to their feet and led toward the men’s meeting place.

  A great fire blazed at the meeting place. Ipojuca stood near it with the elders.

  “No!” Segge screamed. “No!”

  As Segge watched, the Tupinambá proceeded to burn his sketches, paper, crayons, drawing pens. Everything taken from the hut was thrown into the flames.

  Women were readying Yware-pemme, anointing the slaughter club with gum and crushed eggshell and preparing a feather garland for its long shaft. Others had gone to the cerrado to fetch stout poles for the boucan, where the flesh of the prisoners would be grilled.

  These preparations were in progress when Ibira addressed Ipojuca and the warriors with the suggestion that the slaying of the Portuguese and Yellow Beard be postponed.

  He began with a question: “When their skulls are split and their meat roasted, what use will they be to you?”

  “We will be free of the spell he cast over the Tobajara,” Ipojuca said. He was seated on the ground and raised an arm to indicate Segge, who stood close by. Then he pointed at Amador and jabbed the air angrily. “He is our enemy on earth. His death will please the ancestors.”

  “I agree,” Ibira said.

  “If you agree, storyteller, why do you question my decision?”

  “There is a different way,” Ibira said. “Let them live for a while. They can be of more —”

  His words were drowned out by an uproar from the warriors. One stepped up to Ibira: “Why do you speak for them, storyteller?” Ibira did not reply. “Why does he speak?” the warrior asked his cohorts. None answered. “Does he speak because he wants to join them when Yware-pemme sings?”

  “No!” Ibira said. “I am Tupinambá!”

  The warrior eyed him suspiciously. “But one who lived with the Tapuya. They are our enemies. Have you become our enemy, too?”

  Ipojuca intervened: “Let us hear him.”

  “It is true that I lived with the Tapuya — and the Dutch, too,” Ibira said. “With both, I saw that there is a better way to use your enemy.”

  The warriors shifted restlessly. Ipojuca quieted them with a wave of his hand. “Speak, storyteller.”

  “I was a young man when we came through these lands. We fought Tapuya in bloody battles where many Tupinambá were killed. With the Dutch, I saw Portuguese prisoners kept alive. The Dutch gained much more by this than if they had slaughtered the men.”

  “How?” Ipojuca and several elders asked simultaneously.

  “They gave them to the Cariri and other enemies. ‘Here is meat,’ they said. ‘Meat from friends.’ So learn from the Dutch. Let these two live. Let them grow fat like the cows of the Portuguese. Lead them along your route. If there is an enemy who threatens you, offer him this meat.”

  Segge groaned loudly and made an open plea to the Lord. Amador was quiet as Ipojuca got to his feet and stalked around them. “Cows,” the pagé said, several times. The idea clearly appealed to him.

  In September 1641, the Tupinambá continued their migration, wandering slowly toward the west until the rainy season stopped the column in January 1642. They halted again for four months. Though striking west, they drifted farther and farther south. One year after leaving the camp in the cerrado, where Amador and Segge had so nearly come under the blows of Yware-pemme, the Tupinambá reached the northern edge of a great marsh in the heart of the continent.

  There had been clashes with pesky bands of Nambikwara hunters and a serious ambush by warriors of a Shavante village, whose fields they had raided for manioc. Thus far the Tupinambá had given a good account of themselves, and it had not been necessary to offer the two men as security for a safe passage. Instead, they pampered them, now anticipating a feast with Yellow Beard and the Portuguese when the clan ended its migration.

  However, there had been some critical days in the first week of May 1642 when a disturbing event again raised the possibility of an immediate dispatch of Yellow Beard and the Portuguese. The storyteller Ibira was murdered.

  After Ipojuca had accepted Ibira’s proposal to spare the lives of the two men, the storyteller’s prestige soared, and he was held in the same esteem as the senior elders. This led to a bitter rivalry between Ibira and Jupi. After a night of drinking during which the two had argued, Ibira was found with his skull crushed by blows from a club.

  His death was never fully explained. Ipojuca and other elders strongly suspected that Jupi and another elder were responsible. Ipojuca had been aware of Jupi’s jealousy toward Ibira at the meeting place, but had no proof of his guilt.

  When the column resumed their march, however, they found evidence of Tapuya in the vicinity of the camp — ashes of a fire, the remains of a curassow bird. Ipojuca, not wanting to create dissension in the clan by condemning two of their elders, accepted this as proof enough that Ibira had been slain by Tapuya.

  The dream of finding El Dorado and the Amazons had died for Amador and Segge the day they stood naked before the Tupinambá. They rarely spoke of their original quest, and then with bitterness at what had become of it.

  Segge more than Amador had spoken of flight, but escape was impossible. Everything they owned had been stolen — weapons, clothes, trade goods, supplies. Amador mostly paraded around as naked as his captors, but Segge had not lost his modesty. He had made himself baggy deerskin breeches and a coarse jerkin cut from peccary hides.

  They had bows and arrows and an accumulation of possessions — hammocks, gourds, baskets, bone fishhooks, some colorful feathers — but whenever Segge spoke of fleeing, Amador argued against it: “We’ll succeed only in throwing ourselves into the arms of other savages, who won’t accept that prisoners should be preserved for the enemy . . . Every day offers hope, Segge. These Tupinambá sing of a land without Portuguese. But the storyteller Ibira knew otherwise. He was a young man when our slavers were at the Rio das Amazonas. Twenty years ago, Segge, and already they were chasing natives out of those forests. Perhaps this savage band marches to where our men stand ready to receive them. Then, my friend . . . we run!”

  Slave raiders had been working their way up the Rio das Amazonas ever since the foundation — on December 3, 1616, the day of St. Francis Xavier, whose image was raised to commemorate the event — of the settlement of Nossa Senhora do Belém, on the Rio Pará, below the estuary of the Rio das Amazonas.

  With the establishment of Belém, the French, who had made several attempts to settle in the area, allying themselves with the Tupinambá as they had done elsewhere, were finally expelled from the north. But for three years the local Tupinambá continued the war against the Portuguese, because they feared that they would be enslaved. In 1619, they were defeated, and one victor of this campaign, Bento Maciel Parente, marched overland from Pernambuco to effect the triumph.

  On one occasion, upon the word of an old woman that the subjugated Tupinambá near Belém were fomenting an uprising, Bento Maciel seized twenty-four chiefs. These Tupinambá were taken to the river, where cords were attached to their hands and feet. Then each man was suspended between two canoes. At a signal, the paddlers pulled with all their might in opposite directions, and the bodies of the condemned chiefs were torn apart.

  By 1637, Bento Maciel had been rewarded for his services to the Crown with the Order of Christ. He was made a fidalgo and the lord donatário of lands on the north bank of the Rio das Amazonas. The following year, he rounded off his triumphs with his appointment as governor of Pará’s sister captaincy to the south, Maranhão, these two territories being regarded as a separate state from Brazil because of their remoteness from the Bahia.

  The prospect of meeting the likes of Bento Maciel Parente had not encouraged Segge, nor had he been optimistic of e
ven reaching those northern lands. “The Rio das Amazonas lies far above us, Amador. We’re marching south. What hope is there?”

  “As long as they’re moving, we have a chance,” Amador had assured him. “Perhaps the Lord will lead these heathen into the arms of His servants . . .”

  When they reached the marshes in September 1642, they were more than twelve hundred miles from the Atlantic coast and some fifteen degrees below the equator. On a straight line through the forest eight hundred miles to the north lay the Rio das Amazonas. São Paulo de Piratininga was a similar distance, directly southeast. Amador and Segge had no way of knowing this, though even without such knowledge, Segge had little faith in Amador’s belief of rescue by slavers or priests.

  The two men experienced the blackest depressions, their minds flooded with images of being butchered by their captors. But it was a tradition among the Tupi tribes that a prisoner not immediately felled by Yware-pemme be treated with the utmost kindness. The day of his execution, he would be taunted and tormented all the way to the “place of slaughter,” but until then, he had to be cared for. Because they were rare prizes, Yellow Beard and the Portuguese were honored guests.

  The best food, the freshest beer, sweet wild fruits — nothing was too good for the cows Ipojuca wanted fattened. And the Tupinambá also gave their daughters to condemned men. Amador demonstrated that he was more than willing to oblige. Yari lived with him as his wife; Yara was there, too, but showed that it was Yellow Beard she wanted to comfort. Amador did not confine his attentions to Yari; he regularly led four other women to the bushes. So lustily did he perform that he earned a nickname among the Tupinambá: “Big Penis.”

  Despite his protests about Amador’s behavior and his own puritanical attitude toward the Tupinambá women, in the third month of their captivity, Segge had amazed Amador by announcing:

  “My friend, I am in love.”

  Amador first thought of Joana Cavalcanti. Under threat of death, Segge had gone to his memory of the senhorita to fill his heart with love and longing.

  Then Amador saw the look on Segge’s face as the girl Yara came toward them. “This one?” he asked.

  “A sweet girl,” Segge said, “so natural and loving.”

  “By the blessed Saints, Segge Proot, your eyes have been opened!”

  “I feel the purest love for her.”

  “Dear Jesus! Who can understand a Dutchman?”

  “She’s a fine young woman, Amador,” Segge said, almost defensively.

  “Truly, my friend. The daughter of fine savages, too. What on earth would she know of Christian love?”

  Yara, who was nineteen now, came up to them, swinging her hips.

  Amador clapped a hand on Segge’s shoulder. “Love her, Segge — love your small savage!”

  A few mornings later, a smiling Yara told Yari that Yellow Beard had led her to the grass. Yari promptly spread the good news among the women. The grandmothers were pleased. “Now Yellow Beard will not be sad when he sees Yware-pemme,” they said.

  At the marsh the rains had not yet come, but the water level was high, flooded by the previous wet season. The Tupinambá were halted on the edge of a damp, grassy bog when their scouts returned to announce that they had seen villages to the north and south, but that the route directly across the marsh was clear.

  On September 7, 1642, the Tupinambá moved off, picking their way along dry land between the marsh inlets. Soon they were in a gloomy, insect-infested jungle, muddy and watery and choked with beds of floating plants. The two hundred people were strung out over half a mile.

  Late on the fourth afternoon since entering the marsh, after a forced march of ten hours, slogging through spongy land, they again reached firmer ground. Within four days they were at a valley with clear, tumbling streams and a forest where game and wild fruits abounded. The crossing of the marsh had exhausted the Tupinambá; if the scouting parties reported positively, this would be a good place to pass the approaching Great Rains, the elders decided. The scouts did not begin their long-ranging patrols immediately, but opted for a few days’ rest at the halting place.

  One aspect of Tupinambá life Segge had come to adopt was their daily bathing. Like other Europeans, Segge had regarded this as hazardous to one’s health. But the long, hot marches changed his attitude, and when Yara came into his life, he found pleasure in frolicking in the water with her.

  Midmorning this day, he called her away from her place with the women of the elder Jupi’s shelter and led her to a river a mile from the encampment.

  After bathing, they made love, Segge performing in his customary hasty, anxious fashion. When it ended, Yara got up and went to sit on a small rock at the edge of the river. Occasionally, she would cup her hand beneath the surface and pour the cool water over her body.

  Segge lay on his stomach opposite Yara, his hands propping up his chin. Segge studied Yara fondly, admiring her fine breasts and full figure. “What are you thinking of?” he asked, seeing her pensive expression.

  She smiled at him. “I am thinking that the sun is shining.”

  What else are you thinking, my Eve? he wanted to ask, but he did not wish to spoil the moment.

  He dozed, resting his head on his folded arms. When he opened his eyes, Yara was in the water, near the opposite bank, a vertical incline some twenty feet high. He got up and started across to her. He started to swim, with strong, even strokes. Yara was balancing on a submerged rock, and he playfully swept her into an embrace. She tried to squirm away, but he held her tightly and planted kisses on her lips and cheeks.

  Suddenly he felt her go limp in his arms and saw a look of fright on her face.

  “What — ”

  She did not answer.

  He followed her gaze to the red earth of the riverbank.

  An old man and a small girl stood grinning down at them.

  The venerable native on the bank was taller than the average Tupinambá and handsomely adorned with a feather headdress. The small girl, whom Segge reckoned to be about five, wore an apron of blue and gray feathers that hung to her knees.

  Segge felt Yara trembling. He smiled back at the man and shouted a greeting in Tupi-Guarani. The man gestured that he did not understand, but indicated that they should climb the bank.

  “Let us flee!” Yara shrieked, tugging at Segge’s arm.

  “A very old man and a child? They can’t harm us.”

  “Please! We must leave!”

  “We’re going to them,” Segge said firmly, and grabbed Yara’s arm.

  She started to cry, but resisted only weakly as he pulled her off the rock. The riverbed sloped upward toward the bank. Segge could walk here, making, it easier for him to lead the reluctant Yara. Repeatedly, he assured her there was no need to be frightened.

  At the top of the bank, Segge wondered if he had been terribly mistaken.

  Between the trees stood a large group of warriors bearing long spears and bows.

  Yara began to moan.

  The old man gave an order to the warriors. Instantly, they melted away into the undergrowth.

  Segge was overjoyed. “See? They’re friendly.”

  Yara continued to moan loudly, and pressed close to Segge, who tried to comfort her by placing a hand on her shoulder. She sank to her knees opposite the child, who ignored her and stared at Segge with astonishment.

  The old man proceeded to inspect Segge, and clucked with pleasure when he stroked his beard. Segge saw that beneath his feather diadem the man had more hair than a Tupinambá, though his upper lip and chin were as beardless. His cheeks were unscarred, only his lower lip and earlobes perforated. His face was painted with a black pattern on red urucu, which covered the rest of his body, and his shoulders and chest were powdered an ash gray color. He wore a straw sheath on his penis.

  What impressed Segge most was a dark green object that hung from a leather thong around the man’s neck. Segge considered the stone similar to jasper. But it was its shape that most fascinated Segg
e — that of a Maltese cross.

  The elder was delighted at Segge’s interest in the stone. He pointed to the cross. “Paresí,” he said, and gestured toward the northwest.

  Segge took this to mean that his name was Paresí. He grinned. “Segge,” he said.

  The man had difficulty trying to repeat the name. He gave up and again pointed north. He touched Segge’s arm, indicating that he should accompany him.

  Segge hesitated. What if he found himself among worse savages than the Tupinambá? He would be alone, without Amador at his side. On the other hand, already he was under sentence of death, with little real hope of escape. And nothing suggested that the old man’s friendliness was anything but genuine. The elder had sent his warriors away and seemed happy to show Segge his cross. Had Almighty God, in His mercy, led him to a tame race of natives who would spare his life?

  Segge indicated to the old man that he would follow him. If, by God’s mercy, he was saved, he would find a way of returning for Amador. He looked at Yara, still whimpering at his feet. He could not send her to Amador, for she would alert the Tupinambá.

  Segge became aware, then, of his nakedness. He pointed across the river to where his jerkin and breeches lay on the opposite bank, and touched his body. The old man laughed and tapped his penis sheath; he was an arm’s length from Segge and put out his fingers to gently stroke Segge’s skin. As he did so, it dawned on Segge that he was the first white man the old native had ever seen.

  “Yara,” he said. She looked up at him. “I’ll fetch my clothes.” She grabbed hold of his leg. “You’ll stay,” he demanded, and shook himself free. “The old man is not our enemy.”

  “They will kill us.”

  He left her lying on the ground, quickly retrieved his clothes, and returned. Before he put on the breeches and jerkin, the old man examined them, and then again when Segge was dressed.

  They set off, Segge gently forcing Yara through the trees.

  They marched out of the valley and through two others. By midafternoon they came to open savanna and soon, to Segge’s astonishment, they reached a road, a straight path five yards broad and stripped of all undergrowth. A few miles farther, they were in sight of a very large village. On the outskirts, Segge saw extensive fields of manioc, maize, beans, and other crops. To reach them, they crossed a river by way of a simple but well-constructed wood-and-vine bridge.