Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  Fernandes, at the wheel of the Jeep, drove maniacally, his foot jammed down on the accelerator, swerving from side to side to avoid deep ruts, roaring at full speed along the side of a cutting. No, Senhor Roberto, he had assured the man sitting rigid beside him, eyes focused straight ahead, not to worry; he, Fernandes Estevam, was the son of a great motorista who had driven a bus in the sertão of Bahia!

  When they stopped at the end of the roadworks, Bruno Salgado and Roberto got out and approached the trees cautiously; Fernandes and Silveira were told to wait at the jeep. To wile away the time, Fernandes entertained the laconic Silveira with grisly tales he’d heard about the savages, beginning with Kayapo hordes who, in 1950, on the Araguaia - a river about ninety miles west of their section of the road — had killed or injured one hundred settlers. And the Shavante? “Nossa Senhora, preserve us!” said Dried Meat, crossing himself.

  There were grounds for Dried Meat’s trepidation: Not until the early fifties had peaceful contact been made with bands of the semi-nomadic Shavante, inhabitants of the cerrado and the forests of northern Mato Grosso since time immemorial. For three centuries explorers, adventurers, madmen had ventured into this sertão, the incursions increasing as groups of land-hungry pioneers began to take their chances near the appropriately named Rio das Mortes, along which the Shavante held sway. The river flowed into the Araguaia at a point some two hundred miles south-southwest of the da Silvas’ advance camp.

  As recently as 1934, the Shavante had slain Padres Sacilotti and Fuchs, two Salesians who had gone up the Rio das Mortes to befriend them. Seven years later, they butchered an entire SPI expedition. The Shavante were also believed responsible for the disappearance of the British engineer and explorer Percy H. Fawcett and two companions, who had marched in the direction of the Rio das Mortes in 1925 seeking a fabled lost city.

  Despite the tragic setbacks, the SPI and the Salesian fathers had persevered, and in 1953, largely due to Bruno Salgado’s involvement, the first community of Shavante were settled at a post the SPI had established beside the Rio das Mortes. By 1958, there were seven Shavante settlements along the river, where, with varying degrees of success, the savages were being assimilated.

  Bruno Salgado had spent the past two years going from one to another of these settlements, living among the Shavante, learning their dialect and customs. It was during this period that he first met Roberto da Silva, and at meetings between SPI officials and representatives of the road-construction companies, Salgado had found Roberto to be one of the strongest advocates of peaceful relations with natives along the roadworks.

  Assigned to the SPI’s São Paulo office the first week in February, Salgado had immediately got in touch with his new friend Roberto, and when, two days ago, da Silva told him of the trouble at Kilometer 96, Salgado had instantly offered his services.

  The gifts the foreman said they’d left at the edge of the forest were now gone. There had been a thunderstorm since they were originally placed there, but human footprints were still discernible. Salgado walked slowly from one side of the clearing to the other, then back to the trees on their left. He picked up three arrows at the abandoned Caterpillar and confirmed his suspicion that they were crafted by the Shavante. After fifteen minutes’ more scouting, he told Roberto he was also certain the Shavante had not crossed the roadway but had turned back to the west.

  They entered the forest, Bruno Salgado in the lead and Fernandes bringing up the rear.

  Salgado was an expert tracker and moved quickly and stealthily through the undergrowth, his eyes darting in all directions searching for clues to the route the Shavante had taken. Nervous excitement compelled Dried Meat to joke about the terrors — the one-legged Caipora and other demons — waiting to greet them. To Roberto da Silva, the forest was far less alien: On visits to the Mato Grosso cattle ranches, he had often joined his vaqueiros hunting the wildcats that were a menace to the herds.

  As they plunged deeper into the humid twilight world, the eerie stillness, broken only by the hissing concert of insects and a few shrill bird calls, gave way to a riot of sound that closed round them like a solid net as monkeys screeched in the branches above and wild beasts crashed through the brush at the men’s approach.

  Two hours after leaving the road, they discovered the remains of a Shavante camp: three low shelters of saplings and palm fronds; the ashes of the nomads’ fire; the feathers of a macaw; the bones of a slaughtered peccary; discarded bits of plant and tuber. The shelters suggested a band of a dozen or so natives, Salgado said. They had probably made camp here on their march in the direction of the road, but if they were retracing their steps now, he reasoned, they hadn’t stopped here again; the rotting animal bones were several days old.

  It didn’t take Salgado long to pick up the Shavantes’ trail. The forest began to give way in places to more open terrain, dotted with shrubs and tall grasses. Forty minutes later they came to a river, a yellowish flood swollen from the great rains. The broken reeds at a canebrake showed that the Shavante, too, had come this way.

  Salgado headed directly into the canebrake, heading straight for more than a mile before turning off to the left toward firmer ground above the riverbank.

  “Silêncio!” Salgado hissed suddenly. Roberto and the other men froze. “Wait there!” Salgado ordered.

  “Has he found the savages?” Fernandes whispered, but neither Roberto nor Silveiro said a word and instead shushed him with their hands.

  Salgado went farther, up a steep slope, and then halted, looking down toward the river. He turned his head quickly as a cane snapped behind him: Roberto was coming up as quietly as he could.

  “Shavante?” da Silva asked softly, from the edge of the canes.

  With a slight motion of his arm, Salgado beckoned Roberto forward.

  A lone Shavante stood on the opposite bank, motionless, his eyes turned toward them. A young warrior in the prime of manhood. His naked body was streaked with urucu dye. One hand held a long bow; the other, a war club.

  From the high ground, the men watching him could see a narrow bend in the river half a mile away, strewn with rocks that afforded a safe crossing. No other Shavante were in sight, either along the bank or at the edge of the trees behind the warrior.

  “Stay here, Roberto,” Salgado said. “I’m going down.” He handed da Silva his Smith & Wesson.

  “Alone? Unarmed?”

  “It will be all right,” Salgado said calmly. “At least for now. He’s just as curious about us. His friends, too, wherever they’re hidden. Later, after a meeting, things can change.” He didn’t elaborate, but was adamant that Roberto stay where he was and make certain the others kept out of sight. Then, Salgado started off toward the riverbank.

  “Maluco!” Fernandes exclaimed, when he caught sight of Salgado. “The man’s crazy!”

  The Shavante was already at the crossing-point. Salgado raised his hands in a gesture of friendship, indicating, too, that he had no weapon. The Shavante stood absolutely still for several minutes. Suddenly he lifted an arm and pointed upstream.

  Salgado began to cross the river. Four Shavante armed with bows stepped out of the trees behind the lone warrior.

  Unconsciously, Roberto put his hand on the holster at his side. But just at that moment big Bruno Salgado, his mane of black hair flying, leapt along the riverbank, pounding the earth in a short, impromptu dance. Two Shavante offered a similar demonstration, running along beside him.

  Half an hour later, Salgado signaled his party to come down to the river. The rest of the band of Shavante, nineteen in all, had emerged from the forest and stood or sat on the open ground beyond the crossing. Like the young warrior, the six other adult males were naked but for penis sheaths; their heads were closely shorn and their eyebrows plucked; in their earlobes, they wore ceremonial plugs. The five women all bore large baskets with the possessions the group had taken with them on this trek from their village.

  When Roberto and the others reached the river, Salga
do shouted that only one of them should cross over with a pack of gifts Silveira was carrying.

  “Hand me the pack, Garcia,” Roberto said. “I’ll go,” the taciturn Silveira offered.

  “Yes,” Dried Meat quickly agreed. “The danger to the senhor . . .”

  Roberto just stared at him, and the caboclo added lamely, “I wouldn’t want to see the senhor harmed.”

  “Oh? Well, then, you can go, Fernandes.”

  “Me, senhor?” Dried Meat gasped, blanching.

  Roberto, laughing, took the gifts from Silveira and crossed over to Bruno Salgado.

  “For a while there, my friend, it didn’t look good,” he said. “Until you began to dance like a savage!”

  Bruno grinned. “It wasn’t a dance. I was telling them I know the Shavante are great runners. I’ve seen their log races.”

  “Where is their village?”

  “Far west of here. They say they’ve been on trek for weeks. The scleria plant flourishes around here.” Seeing the look of total confusion on Roberto’s face, Salgado explained, “The seeds are what they’re after. See that one’s necklace? The tiny beads are made from the scleria seeds. Sacred regalia.”

  The Shavante stood a dozen feet away, behind the elder and the young warrior. They fell silent as Roberto opened the pack. Salgado removed a pair of scissors, an assortment of mirrors, fishhooks, bandannas, cheap jewelry, and other trinkets — all hastily purchased by a secretary at Roberto’s office. Salgado delighted the Shavante by snipping off a long strand of his hair. The elder’s hand immediately shot out to indicate that he, as leader of the band, merited this prize. Salgado gave him the scissors. The old man cautiously began to work them, studying the shears intently as they opened and closed.

  Other Shavante began to demand their presents, and Roberto quickly obliged them, doling out fishhooks and mirrors.

  When the gift-giving was over, Salgado spoke for a while with the elder and then went back to Roberto. “We’ll go now,” he said, “to our side of the river.” Roberto gave him a puzzled look. “The Shavante will camp here, and discuss my offer to settle them at one of our posts. In the morning, we’ll talk again.”

  They returned to the high ground above the canebrake, where they prepared to spend the night. Dried Meat worked feverishly collecting wood for a fire, alarmed by a remark from Salgado that the friendly mood of the Shavante could change in a matter of hours, as suggested by the massacre of the SPI expedition in the forties. It was known that those men had been carrying gifts for the savages, too; bits of broken mirror were found on the ground beside their bodies.

  Darkness came, deep and intimate, with clouds obscuring the moon. Imperceptibly at first, the night chorus rose, until the very air seemed to vibrate. Every once in a while, there would be a sharp, jarring sound above the drone of insects. Dried Meat stirred uneasily in his sleep at these noises, but Silveira dozed soundly nearby; they were to keep watch after midnight.

  Gazing across the canes and the river to the flicker of light from the Shavantes’ fire, Roberto asked, “What will happen to them?”

  Bruno stared into the embers of their own fire. “They will be civilized.”

  “The way you say it, it sounds like a curse.”

  “I’m not sure it isn’t. Sorry to sound morbid, but I’ve seen it happen too often.”

  “What?”

  “Within a year, a quarter will be dead,” Bruno said flatly. “Disease. Dejection, I suppose. We ask too much of them. We take a stone ax out of their hands, give them a shirt and trousers, and expect them to step into our world just like that. The Vilas Boases know what they’re talking about when they say it takes fifty or sixty years for a tribe to adapt its way of life.”

  The three Vilas Boas brothers had founded the Xingu Indian Reservation along the river of that name in northern Mato Grosso. They had first entered the region in the early forties with a government expedition Getúlio Vargas had proclaimed as “Brazil’s march to the West.” The brothers had contacted a dozen small tribes in an area of more than 10,000 square miles, living with them and gaining their respect — and beginning a struggle not yet ended to have the region declared a federal reservation protected from encroachment by land grabbers and prospectors. In this fight, they had earned the disapproval of missionaries keen to work with the Xingu natives but who were forbidden entry to their villages by the Vilas Boases. They were acting in opposition to the official goal of quickly assimilating the 200,000 or so natives remaining in Brazil; but the brothers argued that it was destructive to throw the survivors into the melting pot when there was no place for them yet in the structure of Brazilian society.

  “We at the SPI feel pity and want to help them,” Bruno added. “Too often things go wrong. And yet we continue to drive them off their land in our march to the North and the West. Today it’s the road to Belém. Next year, Cuiabá to Porto Velho — there’s talk of that already.”

  “I pity them, too, Bruno. But we have to open the interior for development.”

  “Development? Or ransacking?”

  “Development,” Roberto said firmly. “The new roads will open areas of settlement for millions.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Why so pessimistic?”

  “Two reasons, my friend: One” — he scuffed the earth beneath his boot —“the forest soils are poor. That’s why these Shavante and other tribes are nomads, planting a clearing for a season or two and then moving on.”

  “And your second reason?”

  “Settle millions out here? The landless masses? What do we see happening? Speculators running to buy up millions of hectares. Brazilians. Foreigners. There’s a wild fever to get a stake on this last great frontier.”

  “Yes, Bruno — this is the last great frontier. And there’s room for all who come to settle the sertão.”

  The next morning before sunrise, with Fernandes Estevam striding up front, the four of them made their way down past the canebrake. Mist lay banked up along the river, so thick it obscured the view of the opposite bank. Bruno crossed over alone. A few minutes later, he had returned.

  “They’ve gone,” he said simply.

  “You want to go after them?” Roberto asked.

  “I’ll write a report at my office. In time, the SPI will locate their village.”

  The look in his dark eyes told Roberto da Silva that Bruno Salgado hoped it would not be soon.

  “I agree, Grandpapa, it’s a terrific expense,” the girl said, “but why shouldn’t we have it?”

  Mariette Monteiro da Silva posed the question as if she was considering an extravagant purchase. The oldest of four children of Roberto and Sylvia Monteiro, she was nineteen, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with an oval face and full red lips. Senhor Amílcar would sometimes glance at Mariette and at the painting of his own grandmother, Teodora Rita, and note the strong resemblance of these two strong-willed, vivacious women.

  Mariette, a second-year law student at the University of São Paulo, was sitting in the Jeep next to her father, who was driving. Senhor Amílcar sat behind them. It was the afternoon of April 19, 1960. Earlier that day, Roberto had fetched the two of them from Brasília airport, along with Dona Cora and Roberto’s wife, Sylvia, a small, attractive woman of thirty-seven, only three years younger than Dona Cora. Cora and Sylvia were at an apartment in one of the new blocks where Roberto had arranged for all of them to stay during the inauguration celebrations at Brasília.

  “The Turks have Ankara. Le Corbusier is building Chandigarh in the Punjab,” Mariette said, when her grandfather remained silent. “Why shouldn’t Brazil have her new capital?”

  “Because, my dear girl, we can’t afford it,” Amílcar said, as he’d been saying for four years. “Five hundred million dollars already, and that won’t be the end of it!”

  “But don’t you agree, Grandpapa, it’s so magnificent! So absolutely grand!”

  Amílcar da Silva made a sweeping movement with his hand, embracing the entire vista to
the right of where Roberto had just parked the jeep. “Who on earth could deny that!”

  Roberto had pulled up along a six-lane ramped boulevard that crossed an 820-foot-wide civic mall flanked by identical ten-story ministry buildings. At the top of the mall, the Plaza of the Three Powers was dominated by a pair of slender, twenty-eight-story skyscrapers, at the base of which were two gleaming white domes, one of them inverted, the roofs of the Congress and Senate chambers. In the distance, behind the concrete, glass, and marble, the sun caught the waters of Paranôa, a fifteen-square-mile artificial lake.

  Workmen were clearing up the site where for the past year battalions of candangos had labored twenty-four hours a day to meet the deadline set by President Juscelino Kubitschek and Novacap — Companhia Urbanizadora de Nova Capital — the government body with overall responsibility for construction. “We’ve got five years to build Brasília,” Dr. Israel Pinheiro, one of Novacap’s directors, had said at the outset. “If we take longer, the jungle will overrun what we’ve won.” Dr. Pinheiro, a Mineiro like Kubitschek, was talking figuratively, there being no great forests in the cerrado, but his meaning was clear. It was now exactly thirty-seven months since Novacap had approved the pilot plan for a city of 500,000.

  This was Mariette da Silva’s first visit to Brasília, and she was enthralled by Oscar Niemeyer’s supremely graceful structures and by his mentor Lucío Costa’s winning design. (No fewer than twenty-six Brazilian architectural firms had submitted proposals in an internationally judged competition.) To Mariette, the outline of the capital resembled a mammoth airplane with swept-back wings; where they came together was the commercial district, and within their span, sweeping north and south, were one hundred superblocks of housing, each eight hundred feet square; at the top of the “fuselage” was the Plaza of the Three Powers.