“Ah, but then I wouldn’t be here with you,” Sebastien pointed out. “And I’m enjoying this trip.”
“So far,” his friend said, a bit pessimistically, by way of qualification. “Let’s hope your fortitude holds out.”
The boat was passing low rocky cliffs, an unusual sight in this predominantly flat landscape. Another cattle boat approached from astern, its bell ringing to alert them of its proximity. As it drew up alongside them, the sailors shouted greetings and Paolo waved and called out to his fellow gentleman rancher, who swung in a hammock on the deck.
“One of my neighbors,” Paolo explained. The man was headed for his own ranch on Marajó, but his slower boat would take at least six hours longer than the Cândido Rondon. That explained why he was wiling away time in the relative comfort of his hammock.
They soon left the other boat behind in their wake. As the only three passengers on board their own vessel, Sebastien, Paolo, and Guglielmo did their best to get comfortable on the open deck.
No one else on board the Cândido Rondon was in a position to indulge in any such relaxation. The men of the crew worked hard, and they seemed tireless. They had just come back from a trip a long way up the Amazon, Paolo explained. He reminded Sebastien that the distance between Manaós and Belém alone was a thousand miles by river. They had experienced stormy days, which were always a source of anxiety in these waters, and they had enjoyed comparatively little rest in the night time, either. But as yet they showed no signs of fatigue. These big dark-skinned men were no doubt the direct descendants of slaves, once held captive either in Brazil or the islands north, but there was no hint of servility about them. They seemed to realize that they were the objects of Sebastien’s curiosity as they went about their work.
The deck hands were virtually all barefoot, which seemed to be by choice rather than by necessity, for their discarded footwear tended to be quite up-to-date imported name-brand sneakers and running shoes. They dressed for comfort in the heat and humidity, in baggy shorts, loose trousers with the legs rolled up to mid-calf, and a variety of brightly colored tank tops and T-shirts, which almost invariably bore the logos of international sports teams. Straw cowboy hats, and bandanas tied loosely around the necks, completed the ensembles. Wearing the similar hat he had purchased in Belém, Sebastien felt that he blended in reasonably well.
The captain, over six feet tall and muscular, managed to keep an eye on his crew as they busied themselves, even while he steered the ship. He was at the wheel at the moment, his large, expert hands making it revolve as delicately as a much smaller and more refined piece of machinery. As the afternoon wore on and began to yield to the first signs of dusk, he leaned forward, his eyes intent on catching the shapes of trees and banks in the fast-approaching night. The river here was so narrow that a slight swing to either port or starboard might run the boat aground.
Sebastien and Paolo sat on the roof of the engine room, which seemed the best place to catch the occasional breeze, and there Guglielmo joined them, to spread out the evening meal. As Paolo’s valet, Guglielmo wasn’t about to allow anyone else to serve either his master, or his friend, if he could help it. There was meat and rice and little rolls stuffed with chicken, as well as oranges and bananas, and even a bottle of good white wine. The ship’s cook finally managed to slip past Guglielmo’s vigilance. He approached their little group, smiling, and leaned toward Sebastien, his hands held together and outstretched before him. Sebastien looked down into their huge shadowy depths, and saw a small cup made from thick white china, filled with steaming hot coffee. He took it, thanking the man.
The stars came out and the ship’s forward light fell upon the close banks, now right, now left, bringing the leafy masses of the trees into clear focus. The supper things were cleared away, and the three white men stretched out flat on their backs on the roof. They were jerked forward suddenly, and almost tumbled over the edge. They heard surprised ejaculations from the crew, and the captain’s voice, raised in anger. The boat was aground. For one short moment so that he could drink his coffee, the captain had called upon one of the crew to take the wheel. Now, he cursed the poor sailor luridly for his carelessness. Nor did the captain confine himself to words. He gave the man a sharp cuff on the side of the head with the flat of his hand.
Sebastien was tempted to intervene on the crew member’s behalf, but a warning look from Paolo made him think better of it.
The engine was reversed, but to no avail. They were, quite literally, stuck in the mud, and they would have to wait for the rising tide to lift them free. The crew did not seem to care much. They gathered in the bow, one of them with a guitar, and to his strumming they sang songs—Carnival songs, Paolo told Sebastien.
The Carnival, Paolo reminded him, would begin in about a month. The serious preparations for it had begun just as Sebastien and Paolo had left Pará. It was too bad Sebastien would probably miss it. Carnival days were undeniably the most festive of the year, especially for the poorer members of the population, who had few other diversions and made the most of the great annual national holiday as a result. Sebastien thought about the travel agency in Manhattan, and the poster in its window advertising trips to Rio de Janiero. He smiled. Since that snowy morning, he had made quite a journey.
The crew members continued singing as they waited for the tide. They were interrupted by the sound of a motor, and the other cattle boat slipped past them, almost touching their hull in the narrow way. The other crew members laughed at the predicament of the temporarily stranded sailors, with the Cândido Rondon’s men responding in coarse language that they’d beat the other boat yet. The good-natured rivalry was strong.
The men, tired now, had ceased their singing and were stretching out on any horizontal plank about the ship. Sleep came quickly to them, for the restless tossing and turning indulged in by urban dwellers accustomed to softer beds was outside their experience. They rolled up anywhere, and slept.
Paolo finally suggested that they follow this example. He led Sebastien down a narrow gangway, to the lower deck.
“Yours things are stowed away in this cabin,” Paolo said, indicating a door. “Guglielmo and I are bunking here.” He gestured toward the door on the opposite side of the cramped passageway. “If you need anything during the night, just call out. Try to get some sleep.”
“I will. Boa noite, Paolo.”
“Buona notte,” the other man said, reverting to his native tongue. He gave Sebastien a leisurely kiss on the mouth.
The cabin was small. Sebastien’s luggage took up most of the available floor space. He stripped, climbed into the bunk, and pulled a blanket over himself—for the first time since his arrival in Brazil. Here on Marajó, on the water, the night air was surprisingly cool, and seemed exaggeratedly so after exposure to such prolonged heat during the daylight hours. He drowsed, without ever really entering a state of true sleep, and was soon aware that the floor above which he lay was once again trembling in sync with the vibrating engine. This meant that the tide had come in and the boat was free and moving in mid-stream. Half asleep again, Sebastien raised his head from his pillow to look out the porthole, and watched the banks passing by—so close that the white tree branches caught the ship’s light and looked like long emaciated arms reaching out to touch the vessel.
Curiosity overcame him. He got up, pulled on trousers and a shirt, and, taking the blanket with him, he went back up on deck, barefoot. He seated himself on the engine’s roof again, wrapping the blanket around him, and from this high vantage point, observed the boat’s progress as it made its slow, steady way through the night.
The captain, who seemed indifferent to any need for sleep, was once again at the wheel—and the crew member he had berated earlier was by his side. The two men were once again friends, speaking together in low voices punctuated by the occasional burst of laughter.
Now and then the river would broaden suddenly to half a mile across, and the wide stretch of water would be dotted with clumps of trees, only the up
per parts of which were visible. Sebastien searched his memory for some of the other information he had absorbed from his reading onboard that other boat, the Kirsten Flagstad. This, he remembered, was savannah land, completely flooded now that it was the rainy season. In another six months’ time, this same river would have dwindled to a tiny stream, and the innumerable creeks feeding it would be dry earth.
Even in the darkness of the night, he could see that people had settled all along the river banks, either in isolated houses, or in larger enclaves. The houses were all on stilts, so to speak—raised high above the water on pilings, to allow for the river’s fall and rise. They were accessed by flights of rickety-looking wooden staircases, or directly from the river by means of built-in ladders. They had verandas or porches, shadowed by their thatched roofs. Sebastien was astounded to see more than one floating chicken coop tethered to the pilings. The cages, set on rafts, contained brightly-feathered fowls who seemed perfectly at ease, living on the water. There were few lights burning in any of the riverside dwellings at this late hour.
He must’ve fallen asleep at last, because he woke up with rain spattering down upon his face. The engine was quiet beneath him, no longer making the deck planks vibrate. The night was quite dark, darker than it had been when he had drifted off to sleep, for the stars were now gone, obscured by dense clouds, from which the rain was coming down very fast.
Sebastien followed his instinct to move quickly under cover, but once he was below again, in the small cabin, the heat was so intense that he decided he preferred the open air and the rain, after all. Then, belatedly, he realized that the boat was no longer moving. But why had they stopped here, in the middle of the night?
He engaged one of the crew members in conversation and learned that the antique diesel had been overworked and was now protesting. The engineer, a small charcoal-skinned, was sweating in the hot engine room, removing screws and nuts, scraping, hammering, trying to persuade the parts he had dismantled and cleaned to go together again. Other members of the crew went down to help.
Feeling particularly useless, Sebastien huddled under a piece of awning to keep out of the rain, and peering at his watch in a sliver of light escaping from the engine room, he saw it was three o’clock. Even the birds seemed to be asleep. The air no longer resounded with their cries.
He remained where he was until his limbs began to feel so cramped from being immobile that he had to move them. He got up and went below in search of Paolo. He was awake and emerged from his cabin in response to Sebastien’s light knock. Even without Guglielmo’s assistance—the valet was still asleep, Paolo told Sebastien in a whisper—Paolo was neatly dressed and turned out, at four o’clock on a black morning on a cattle boat. He led Sebastien to the engine room, to consult the engineer and get a progress report.
The delay was serious. Paolo’s cattle ranch would not be reached until noon, and all the loading of livestock would then have to be done in the heat of mid-day. This gave Paolo some concern, and then, too, the other cattle boat would get there first, which meant a certain loss of face. Resigned to the unavoidable, Paolo shrugged.
They withdrew to the comparative comfort of the deck and waited in the dark, wet night. The cook came through the downpour, once again offering them coffee in sturdy cups. The time dragged along slowly. The mosquitoes had not only found the boat and descended on it, but had begun feeding on any uncovered body part they could find. Sebastien remembered that once, in the distant past, malaria and yellow fever had been constant threats in this region—and were by no means dangers to be taken lightly, even today.
It was nearly six o’clock before the dawn was bright enough to see by, and then the daylight came as quickly as the night had fallen.
The Cândido Rondon’s engine was working again, and they moved forward, through water transformed into a molten gold by the light of the rising sun.
“I warned you that we would be roughing it,” Paolo reminded Sebastien, with a smile. “And now, on top of everything else, this annoying delay.”
“Oh, I don’t mind any of this. It’s an adventure.”
“Are you adventurous by nature?”
“No,” Sebastien admitted. “Which may be why I’m enjoying myself now, in spite of everything.”
It was eight o’clock and already hot. The trees were thinning out on either side of the river, and wide-open fields of grazing land stretched out, utterly flat, as far as the eye could see. The occasional houses on tall stilts looked like gigantic long-legged birds wading in the high waters. Each house had tied up beside it a canoe, rowboat, inflatable raft, or some other means for transporting the inhabitants. The children played in the water as they might in a grassy field. The little boys were all naked, but the little girls were decorously draped in one-piece shifts. They waved and called to the boaters by way of greeting, and some of the bolder and older boys, swimming out, tried to catch hold of a loose rope swinging from the boat.
A bell which had a familiar ring to it was tolling, and Sebastien looked up and saw that the rival cattle boat was already returning, full. Her crew were quietly triumphant. The Cândido Rondon’s were chagrined.
Lago Arary now stretched out before them—a sheet of bluish-gray water covering the earth, surrounded by the low, green trees.
Only on the far side was there a break in the trees, and through this gap could be glimpsed a bright vermilion spot—the tiled roof of Paolo’s house. Guards were posted on the river at the beginning of his land to prevent thieves from making off with his cattle down the convenient waterways. Such cattle rustling was, at times, quite a business. On this trip, Paolo would make his headquarters with the family of one of these guards, whose house was farther inland, closer to the actual cattle lands. This man now came out to meet him—a huge black man with a deep guttural voice and fierce gleaming eyes. He made a formidable guard, no doubt, but didn’t Paolo have any concerns for his own safety?
This time, Paolo said in response to Sebastien’s question, he would stay twenty days or so, perhaps as long a month, with no other white face to look upon, except for the valet who accompanied him, unless some occasional encounter broke the rule. He had to inspect all of his stations, and the last one was two days away by horseback.
“Aren’t you ever afraid?” Sebastien asked.
Paolo made a gesture toward his hip. “I always go armed. I have my revolver packed away in my luggage, down below. Guglielmo, too, is an excellent shot.”
At first, he explained, taking over the ownership of a fazenda had been difficult. The men were wary of working for a foreigner. “But now they like me, and look forward to my visits. I always bring them and their families many little presents. They are like children.”
Perhaps they were like children, but at the moment they were performing a far from childlike task. The Cândido Rondon had finally reached the spot where the cattle had waited for so long for the loading, and they were now in the process of being brought aboard. They were animals bred and raised on Paolo’s property, and they had been sold to other ranchers, farther downriver. The transfer was a procedure that seemed to Sebastien to be both primitive and painful, for both man and beast. The cattle had been driven into a fenced enclosure, from which a walled runway led to the ship’s edge. One by one, the cattle were forced along this way by yells and prodding from the men—cowboys now, although they had been sailors only a short while ago. When an animal reached the ship, a lasso was thrown about his horns, and then by a pulley system, man-worked, he was hoisted into midair over the ship’s side and lowered into the space below.
It did not always go smoothly. There were kicks, attempted retreats, further pushing and prodding, loud beast cries—and the shouting of the men seemed animalistic as well, wild and primitive. The heat had risen to one hundred thirteen degrees Fahrenheit, according to a rusty old outdoor thermometer nailed to one side of the bridge. There were no trees here to provide shade, and the boat became a surface of blistering paint. The heat penetrated S
ebastien’s shoes as though their soles were non-existent, and he was astonished that the barefoot sailors, in spite of the obvious toughness of their feet, did not find the boarded runway agonizingly painful to stand on. Their only concession to the broiling sunlight was to dip pails into the river and dash the water over the planks, which absorbed it rapidly and were soon as dry and scorching as they had been before, requiring the wetting to be repeated.
Some of the men took quick breaks during which they dove into the river in their clothes, drenching themselves in order to cool off. Sebastien had been so careful to bring a supply of bottled water with him that seeing this disturbed him, because it scarcely seemed possible to immerse oneself in the muddy river water like that without ingesting at least a minute amount of it. He felt envious, too, of such hardiness, because even though he would have given almost anything for a cooling bath, he was revolted by the thought of immersing himself into the river, for fear of parasites and diseases. He poured a little of his precious drinking water onto a bandana and wiped his burning face and neck with it, and felt hopelessly weak and incompetently civilized.
There was one cowboy who, at intervals, simply fell off the boat into the water, with his huge palm hat still in place on his head, and came up again with it dripping a shower bath all about him. The cool drops continued to rain down for quite a few minutes while he went about his business of hauling cattle. But the cattle themselves seemed to be in an agony of heat and terror. They struggled not to be forced into the runway, and when one was finally driven to its end, and suddenly lifted into the air, his tongue lolling from his half-open mouth, his eyes would bulge in his skull until they rolled up and showed the bloodshot white beneath. His forelegs bent at the knees were raised before him in a futile gesture of supplication. And this was all repeated—fifty times, until the boat was full.
Paolo walked about, offering suggestions and issuing orders. His face, despite liberal applications of sunscreen, was flushed almost purple beneath his broad straw hat, and he would repeat, apologetically, for Sebastien’s benefit, “It’s all rather difficult, more so than usual, because of the great heat. If only the boat had gotten here in the cool hours of the morning, as we intended. Well,” he added philosophically, “if you’re going to live on Marajó, you have to be prepared to rough it, some of the time.”
Brazilian Cattle Baron (Siren Publishing Ménage and More ManLove) Page 13