“Raimundo?” Juraci’s fingers tightened on Valdemar’s shoulder. “He’s here?”
“At my house,” Valdemar said. “I was starting for the clinic. I saw the doctor’s car coming. Raimundo, he’s bleeding, Doctor.”
Without another word, Juraci got up and quickly followed Bald Valdemar to his house, about a quarter-mile away. Raimundo Pacheco was sitting outside, his back against the wall. The right side of his face was lacerated, and his right trouser leg was torn and bloodstained.
“Good God, boy, what did they do to you!” Juraci exclaimed.
“I jumped. . . . From the truck.”
“And your father, Maria — ”
“No — I wasn’t with them.” Raimundo grimaced in pain, and Juraci sent Valdemar into his house to fetch hot water and clean rags.
“Go on,” Juraci urged, when he’d determined that the young man’s injuries looked worse than they were.
Raimundo told him that after leaving the Cavalcantis’ house yesterday morning, the delegacão had returned to Santo Tomás, at Anacleto’s insistence, to cut cane for the cambão. They were in the field when a friend of Maria’s, a servant in Senhor Durval’s house, came to warn them that Joazinho and his men were about to force them off the land. Raimundo had raced to the house of Carlos Mota, one of the few cane growers in the area who allowed the peasants the use of his phone for emergencies. Not knowing how to work the instrument, Raimundo had given him Eduardo Corrêa’s card and asked him to ring the number printed there. Mota said he’d have to wait, someone was on the line, but as soon as he could, he’d call.
It was while Raimundo was sitting on Senhor Mota’s front porch, waiting to be called to the telephone, that a truck drove up with two capangas from Usina Jacuribe. As they were dragging him to the truck, Senhor Mota suddenly appeared, hands on hips, face dark with fury. Who did Raimundo think he, Carlos Mota, was — an idiot? As if he’d ever call the Ligas Camponêsas!
Bald Valdemar returned, and Juraci cleaned Raimundo’s abrasions superficially, then, with Valdemar’s help, loaded him into the Packard and drove him back to the clinic at the old engenho.
“Where will your family go?” he asked, when he’d stitched up the gash on Raimundo’s cheek.
“To my half-brother Pedro’s place near Jeremoaba, I’m pretty sure. He keeps goats in the caatinga.”
Juraci had just started on Raimundo’s leg wound when they came — three capangas in a jeep, among them Joazinho Villa Nova. The head enforcer’s flabby cheeks, bulbous nose, and thick, round spectacles belied his viciousness. He had never actually killed a man, though the peasants spoke of at least ten sent to their graves by Joazinho, a reputation the capanga did nothing to discourage. He had murdered no one, but not a few had wished they were dead before he was through hammering them for some offense — cheekiness to their overseer, perhaps, or purloining sugar from the usina store. Durval Cavalcanti set strict guidelines for his capangas’ behavior, but behind his back, they swaggered around and struck out brutally at will.
“Bom dia, Dr. Juraci,” Joazinho said cheerfully from the doorway of the clinic. Juraci Cristiano was in the surgery behind the front room, but he’d heard the jeep arrive and the capangas laughing.
“O Mother of Mercy, Santo Antônio!” Raimundo gasped, his body going rigid with fright. Juraci told him to stay calm.
“Senhor Doutor?” Joazinho called, heading for the surgery.
Juraci cut him off in the front room. “He’s in my care,” he said icily, offering the capanga no greeting.
In a soft voice, Joazinho replied, “Dr. Juraci must understand, the patrão wishes to talk with him.”
“He stays here.”
Joazinho’s eyes flashed behind his thick lenses. “The doctor is making it difficult.”
Juraci involuntarily raised a fist. “For the love of God, man, what more do you want! The Pachecos are gone! Forty-four years cutting cane in this valley and all the old man has to show for it are the bruises one of your brutes gave his wife!”
“She cut Felipe,” Joazinho said defensively.
Juraci lowered his voice to a whisper, but his eyes had narrowed and he was trembling with rage. “Get out, damn you!”
“Very well,” Joazinho said, backing out of the room. “Very well, Senhor Doutor.”
The capanga didn’t intend to give up this easily. He dared not put a finger on the doctor — there’d be hell to pay from Senhor Durval — but he wanted Pacheco. His men had become laughingstocks after Raimundo’s escape.
As Joazinho stood at the jeep, talking over the problem with his cohorts, he espied Senhor Durval Cavalcanti’s car coming down the road that led into the valley from Rosário, and turning off toward the old engenho. “Aha!” he exclaimed, with a jubilant grin. “Now we have him!”
Minutes later, Durval Cavalcanti walked into the surgery.
“Where did you find him?” he asked Juraci.
“Does it matter?”
Raimundo Pacheco was sitting on the edge of an iron bed. His head was bowed, his eyes on the floor.
Durval looked at him with genuine sympathy. “Is he badly hurt?” he asked. “It could have been worse.”
“You see now, Raimundo, the trouble the Leagues bring. Your father has lost everything.”
“Yes, Senhor Durval,” Raimundo said, his head still bowed.
“Bastards!” Durval said. “Old Anacleto was a good man.”
“Yes, Durval,” Juraci Cristiano said. “And he would have continued to be, here at Santo Tomás.”
“I know what you think of the eviction. I was saying to myself as I drove back from Rosário: Dr. Juraci wouldn’t be unhappy to see the Ligas Camponêsas haul me before the court in Rosário on charges of persecuting my peasants. Well, I don’t see it that way. I have a right to protect my property.”
“I can’t speak for the Ligas, Durval.”
“What about the party, then, Juraci? Your old comrades have their hands full, trying to fill the peasants’ heads with Bolshevik theory. We’re not going to sit with folded arms while a swarm of pamphliteiros invades the countryside spreading propaganda to turn the peasants against us.”
“These people don’t need to be told by outsiders that they’re suffering.”
“When they find their voice, I’ll listen.”
“Like you listened to Anacleto Pacheco?”
For a moment, Durval Cavalcanti seemed about to explode. He exhaled noisily through his nostrils. Then, unexpectedly, he relaxed. There was even a faint smile on his lips. “Ai, Juraci . . . you have your views, I have mine.” He tapped Raimundo on the shoulder, catching the young man’s eye. “I’m sorry it was your family. I can think of a few others I’d much rather have seen go. . . . No, Juraci, don’t say anything; you won’t change my mind. Let them keep opening up the west. There’s land enough there to accommodate the landless a thousand times over. But I tell you God saw fit to give the Cavalcantis these valleys, and I intend to keep them, my friend.”
This was Durval Cavalcanti’s last word on the matter. When Juraci Cristiano walked him to his car a few minutes later, Joazinho Villa Nova scrambled forward like an eager terrier.
“You can go home, Joazinho,” Durval told him. “Dr. Juraci is taking care of him.”
“As the patrão says,” Joazinho responded stiffly.
Half an hour later, Juraci was guiding the old Packard between the hills on the south end of the valley. Raimundo had accepted his offer of a room in his house in Recife until his leg was better and he could catch up with his family.
“It’s not much of a place, the caatinga where your half-brother keeps his goats,” Juraci said lightly, hoping to convince the young Pacheco to remain in Recife.
“Oh, I won’t stay there. I just want to see my family before I go.”
Juraci looked at him quickly. “Go?”
“With the pau-de-arara.” In the “parrot’s perch,” roosted in the back of a truck, a man could ride for a thousand miles and more
to areas where there was work — and hope.
“To São Paulo?” Juraci asked.
“No, Dr. Juraci. Brasília! That’s where the jobs are.”
The Packard reached the top of the incline. Raimundo Pacheco turned his head sideways, wincing with pain, to look for the last time at the valley where he had been born. He gazed across those rolling green acres, with the clumps of forest, the small groups of laborers’ houses, the Casa Grande.
Juraci Cristiano, who had come from a place far from this lovely valley, saw Raimundo glancing back at Santo Tomás.
“Yes, son,” he said softly. “For the Cavalcantis, this is Canaan.”
Late afternoon on March 27, 1959, a thousand miles west of Santo Tomás at a construction camp deep in the rain forest, Roberto da Silva listened to a foreman explain why work had stopped on a 232-kilometer section of the Brasília-Belém highway the company had won a contract to build sixteen months ago:
“We had no warning, Senhor Roberto. It wasn’t like before, with the others who showed up at Kilometer 96. Those were pacified savages; they begged for gifts. Not these devils, senhor. We never set eyes on them. I had seven men with two Caterpillars working at the head of the road. The savages peppered them with arrows.” Suddenly he laughed, pointing to one of the workers. “Vasco there took one in the buttocks! Another boy, too, was hit. Senhor Roberto’s orders are not to shoot back. We don’t shoot back. Fine! So! When the men calmed down, I told them to go back to work. I went myself, senhor. I put presents close to the trees. The devils didn’t come for them. They let us alone for an hour or two. Then . . . ” He began to make sounds approximating flying arrows.
The incident had been reported to Roberto thirty hours earlier via the short-wave radio with which his São Paulo office kept in contact with the camps. Roberto had immediately arranged to fly up to an airstrip at Kilometer 189, a camp near the area where construction had been halted. He had landed at Brasília the previous night with his copilot, Raul Andracchio, and a passenger, Bruno Ramos Salgado, an officer of the Serviçio de Proteção dos Indios (SPI); at first light this morning, Salgado and Roberto had continued in a single-engine plane to the advance camp, five hundred miles north of Brasília.
Roberto frequently flew up to the campsites, following the new road across the cerrado, with its thickets of scrub forest. Far to the north, the vegetation became denser as the road reached the southern spurs of the great forests, until only a red vein of earth penetrated the endless green. This sight more than any other brought home to Roberto the challenge of building a thirteen-hundred-mile highway across these virgin lands. Sometimes, as the small plane drifted high above the forest canopy, it seemed almost laughable; this thin line of road — one surge of the green wave and it would disappear.
This past January, almost two years after initial surveys for the highway, teams hacking a trail through the jungle from the north and south had met up one hundred miles beyond the da Silvas’ advance camp. In the rain forest during the wet season from October to April, the torrential downpours brought work to a standstill, and stranded road builders had to be supplied by parachute drops of food and medicine. Across the cerrado, a sea of mud also slowed down construction, but wherever work could continue it did, the struggle to clear the forest the same as in ages past, inch by inch. The trailblazers were followed by six-man gangs with machetes and saws, slashing through the undergrowth, cutting loose cablelike lianas, felling tree after tree, selecting the best wood for lumber and leaving the rest for the fires, the smoke from the conflagrations visible for miles behind. Where the destruction was complete, bulldozers and Caterpillars lurched forward to shove aside charred timbers and uproot blackened stumps. Only then could the engineers and laborers begin preparing the roadbed for the gravel-surfaced highway that would link Brasília with the mouth of the Rio das Amazonas.
The roadworkers and those employed on the construction of the new capital itself were known as candangos. Among the Kimbundu taken as slaves in Africa, the word had been used pejoratively of their Portuguese captors; in Brazil, it came to be applied to the humble laborer who struggled to earn his keep. To the sixty thousand Brazilians striving to meet President Juscelino Kubitschek’s April 1960 deadline for the completion of Brasília, “candango” had become a badge of honor: It meant, simply, a man who worked hard.
As Roberto listened to the foreman’s report, he glanced at Salgado, who, was standing nearby talking with several of the workers. The SPI’s usual procedure, where there was a likelihood of encountering hostile savages, was to send in its experts in advance of the construction crews, placate the natives with gifts, and arrange for their transfer to a sanctuary where they could be prepared for assimilation with their fellow Brazilians. These arrow-shooters who refused to show themselves had been entirely unexpected.
“The gifts haven’t been touched, Senhor Roberto,” the foreman concluded.
“Shavante,” Salgado announced, raising a bamboo arrow that had been passed to him by one of the workers.
Bruno Ramos Salgado was thirty-nine, almost six feet tall, muscular, with a mane of coarse black hair and dark, almond-shaped eyes, like those of his mother, from the Paresí tribe. Salgado’s family was originally from Ceará; his grandparents had been part of the great exodus of drought victims to Amazonas in 1878. Murilo, the grandfather, had gone there to collect latex in the forests, but never once tapped a rubber tree. Instead, he worked for three brothers of Manaus, keeping order among their gatherers and taming the savages in their territory. Sewn on his deerskin belt were the ears of Muras, Mundurucu, and other enemies of “Mad Murilo.”
Bruno’s father, Izaias Ramos Salgado, was 19 years old in 1907 when a U.S. firm began construction of a 364-kilometer railroad through the jungle to bypass the rapids on the Madeira River and facilitate the export of Bolivia’s rubber via the Amazon basin. Izaias worked on the Madeira-Mamoré railroad for five years, serving beside men of twenty-five nationalities. Three times, he was carted off to the company hospital at Candelária with various ailments, but he was one of the fortunate who survived; six thousand men died during the construction. Izaias had been in the crowd at the station of Guajará Mirim, the end of the line, on April 30, 1912, when a gold spike was driven home and the work completed. Just one year later, the rubber boom collapsed, the exports from the plantations of the Far East surpassing those of the Amazon Basin. Within a decade, the railroad was abandoned.
Izaias had shown signs of emulating the excesses of Mad Murilo in his zeal to punish Caripuna, Pacaas Novas, and other natives who attacked the railroad workers, poisoned streams near their camps, and tried to tear up with their bare hands the rails laid down on their lands. Izaias took his first pair of ears off a Caripuna he’d shot at a poisoned pool.
In 1912, when his job on the railroad ended, Izaias found work with the Telegraphic Commission, which was cutting a trail for its line through the jungle to link Santo Antônio on the Madeira, with Cuiabá, the old gold mining capital of Mato Grosso, nine hundred miles to the southeast. The head of the commission, Colonel Cândido Mariano Rondon, an army engineer and explorer, absolutely forbade the slaying of the tribes whose villages lay along the route of the line. “Die if necessary, but never kill,” Rondon, himself half native, told his men. Rondon inspired the authorities at Rio de Janeiro to establish the Serviçio de Proteção dos Indios. He began a lifelong battle against those who saw the survivors of the great native tribes as bestial and deserving of extinction, especially if they occupied lands where there was rumor of gold and diamonds or where the forest could be destroyed to make way for cattle.
While working on the Rondon line, Izaias was himself pacified. In 1916, as a result of his exemplary behavior, he was put in charge of a telegraph station three hundred miles down the line — a miserable place with five huts next to a river, where Izaias also maintained a raft. Ten yards upstream from the ferry point, a huge boulder that rose in the middle of the river had long been a source of mystery to the ra
re travelers braving the jungle trail. As a youngster, Bruno Salgado — the son of Izaias and the second of his three “wives” — had ferried these adventurers across to the rock so that they might examine its “hieroglyphics”; the more hopeful fancied that the worn inscription was a clue to a hidden treasure trove:
“S e c u n d u s P r o o t 1643”
Izaias died in 1946, and no one had yet deciphered the timeworn name of Secundus Proot or the date carved there.
By the time Bruno turned fourteen, three Jesuit priests had established a mission four miles from the station. Bruno went to school there, and afterwards at a colégio in Cuiabá, where, a bright, eager pupil, his devotions had given the fathers reason to think he might be destined for holy orders. But, at twenty-four, Bruno had found another mission — the Serviçio de Proteção dos Indios — one even better suited to expiating Mad Murilo’s sins.
Roberto and Salgado had a brief consultation and agreed that it was too late to investigate. They spent the night in a trailer at the camp and were awake before dawn, leaving ahead of the trucks taking construction workers to “safe” sections along the seven kilometers. Salgado expected to make contact with the Shavante, but he didn’t expect to find them waiting for him beside the road; therefore he suggested that Roberto and the two men who’d volunteered to go with them — scrawny Fernandes Estevam, known as “Dried Meat,” and a giant of a man who rarely spoke, Garcia da Silveira — be prepared for at least a day and a night in the forest. They took supplies, gifts for the Shavante, and weapons. Salgado himself carried a .38 Smith & Wesson, which he had fired only once, in the line of duty — to defend himself against a mob of diamond hunters who had invaded the lands of a Paresí clan not far from the old telegraph station where he’d been born.
In some places beside the roadway, where a wide swath of jungle had been cleared, fire-scorched hulks of trees rose from gray fields. The rainy season was not yet over, and along stretches, the brown-to-mauve-to-red earth was churned into a quagmire by the short, furious tropical downpours. Heavy equipment — immense Caterpillars, galvanized iron culverts, gasoline drums, piles of shovels and pickaxes — stood like machines of war, primed for this day’s battle against the enemy: the Forest.
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