by John Updike
“He is no slave!” Isabel exclaimed.
Antônio’s baroque eyebrows, in which curving gray wands were mixed with brassy strands, lifted in gentle surprise. “What is he, then?”
“He is my man—my companion, my husband,” Isabel said. She braced herself to withstand a wave of mockery, since it seemed absurd to speak so of a stubbornly unspeaking creature held in collar and chain like a dog or monkey; but her words fell into an astonished silence. “I love him,” she said, into the silence, in a small voice that faltered, so many miles had she carried this love, like a piece of Dresden china, across the breadth of Brazil.
Antônio leaned forward, still gentle, his amber eyes intent. “Tell us thy story,” he commanded.
“We have been travelling west for more weeks than we can count,” she explained, “escaping my father’s displeasure at our match and searching for a place where we can settle and perform useful work. A fortnight or more ago, our little party was attacked by painted savages; they killed our faithful Tupi woman and kidnapped our two children, and rode away on gigantic horses.” At this brief recounting, the sum of her burdens bore upon her emaciated spirit, and tears spilled down her cheeks, while her throat ached with the suppression of sobs.
“Ah, those were Guaicuru—devils incarnate,” said José eagerly. “They have taken to Arabian horses like magicians, using neither saddles nor stirrups; they mount up in a single leap. Their women, to keep the tribe mobile, exterminate their children in their bellies, with violent self-injuries that leave them forever infertile; to make up their shortage of children, they steal them where they can, to raise as their own, in the ways of Satan. So unnatural these buggers are, they keep some men in women’s dress, men who piss squatting down and once a month suppose they have a flow of blood. Their sacrileges know no bounds!”
Isabel addressed Antônio. “Sir, might my children”—her voice broke in her aching throat—“might you and your stalwarts rescue my children?”
The captain of the bandeira leaned forward toward her in the manner of a loving father. “The Guaicuru are many, and ferocious,” he sadly said. “We were three times our present number, before our battles with the Guaicuru.”
“And their brothers in deviltry the Paiaguá,” José busily interposed, sweating indignantly in his thick leather carapace.
“They have not horses but canoes, in which they skim the water like birds! They swim like fish, with cutlasses in their mouths!”
“Did not,” Antônio asked Isabel, his amber gaze and his pointed grizzled beard bearing upon her with a pressure that reminded her of her father’s lumpy, leaning forehead, “he whom thou pretend is thy husband strive to protect the children that were his as well as thine?”
This was scarcely the moment to explain that the children were not beyond doubt Tristão’s. The confusion of the raid—the children wrapped in the netting like larvae, the Guaicuru in his red and blue paint, the thin white bones raying from his lips—returned to her horrified vision, as she explained, “He did. He shot one of them, but there were too many, and the children were already carried away.”
“Shot, thou sayest?”
José interposed, “We found this mechanism among their belongings, sire. It appears marvellously made, and we took it for a Dutch toy or an Italian snuffbox until scrutiny showed it to be a pistol, but squared off and cleverly shrunk, and lacking a wheel-lock.”
He handed over César’s gun. Antônio inspected its silky-smooth machined surfaces and, with a debonair gesture befitting an old-fashioned musketeer, aimed it over their heads, but not far over, and squeezed the trigger. The acrid slap of its report and the singing flight of the bullet transfixed the longhouse, without leaving a visible hole in the roof thatch; amused, the captain fired again, and then produced a click. Those had been the two bullets Tristão had been saving for Isabel and himself. Now they must live.
“As thou sayest, brother, a children’s toy. Its barrel wouldn’t hold enough shot to bring down a beija-flor.”
Antônio spoke then to Isabel, in a tone of concluding disposition. “This black slave is no longer thy husband, my dear child. Slaves do not marry. Do not despair. I am a lonely man, and not as ancient in my faculties, thou shalt discover, as has first appeared to thee.”
Tristão’s stubborn silence at her side was a kind of thunder, like the beating of her own amazed, persistent heart.
xxii. The Encampment
THE OLD bandeira chieftain took Isabel as his wife—his third wife, since two aborigine women, Takwame and Ianopamoko, already catered to his needs. They did not appear to resent her addition to his household; her hands lightened their own work, and for her first year they were greatly spared service in Antônio’s bed. She became pregnant, and in the second year produced an amber-eyed son, whom she named Salomão, in the hopes he would grow to become wise, and to honor her father; perhaps thus his pursuing fury would be placated. When she smuggled word of her decision to Tristão, by way of Ianopamoko—the younger of the Indian concubines, younger even than Isabel; a dainty Tupi-Kawahib beauty with cylindrical, waistless torso and slender, graceful limbs—Tristão sneered, and cursed his wife. “May the child devour her heart,” he said, and Ianopamoko’s dainty face, as she endeavored to imitate the black man’s full-lipped sneer, was so ferociously contorted as to be comical. A lacy pattern of indigo paint covered Ianopamoko’s rather flat features, the dotted lines and fishhook-shapes full of meaning known only to the wrinkled crone who renewed the designs when they faded, and who was herself near the great forgetting, or immense remembering, of death.
Perhaps Tristão’s curse took hold, for her new baby was curiously quiet and limp in her arms, where Azor had kicked and pushed with his fat little muscles from his first weeks.
Tristão, wearing a leg-manacle to prevent his escape, had been set to work in the fields at first, the burned-over fields planted in manioc and maize, sweet potatoes and groundnuts, tobacco and gourds and black beans—but then, as the mechanical skills he had developed in the fusca plant and in the gold mine became apparent, he was reassigned to carving the canoes for the bandeira’s eventual move downriver. The canoes must be substantial and wide, to discourage Paiaguá warriors swimming underwater from capsizing them, and needed the biggest of chestnut, mahogany, and araucaria trees, to be painstakingly hollowed and shaped by the encampment’s single, rusting iron adze. The Peixoto brothers hoped this river would lead to the Madeira, where Indian villages, earlier expeditions had reported, were as thick as grapes on a vine, begging to be plucked, and thence to the Amazon and by sea back home to a paradisiacal old age in the province of São Paulo, surrounded by domesticated, grateful former heathen.
Lying beside Antônio, on the bed beneath his tall, fascinatingly detailed crucifix—every fingernail and toenail and nail-head and rivulet of blood realer than real—Isabel heard the tale of the bandeirantes’ long journey: How they had set out with high hearts and ample supplies, wives and children and banker-backers cheering and waving them through the first miles of well-trampled roadway; how they had arrived forty days later, their ranks thinned and bedraggled but hardened, at the Paranapanema and the Guairá Missions, only to discover that the missions, with their docile Christianized tribes gathered like corralled sheep, had been so plundered by previous bandeira raids that the dastardly Spanish Jesuits had moved on, with the survivors, to the south and west, beyond the Iguaçu Falls, on the Paraná; and how they reached and crossed the Paraná, after months of hardship, only to face several terrible battles, since the Spanish authorities had at last permitted the Jesuits to arm the Indians with guns. The easy triumphs, yielding thousands of captives, of the famous Antônio Raposo Tavares and André Fernandes belonged to a more innocent past. The Peixoto bandeira retreated west and north, into the swampy Pantanal, where the pickings were thin. Slaughter, disease, and plagues of jaguars and caimans feasting upon the enfeebled Indians had preceded them. Starveling remnants, a mere family or two, would no sooner become ca
ptive than, one by one, with much obnoxious farting and coughing, they would die. “Arriving at a village, we would encourage the inhabitants to complete the harvest of their plantation, and ourselves demonstrate a patience equal to the task; when harvest at last eventuated, I, having permitted my men a night of feasting and debauchery, would give the command to move on, carrying the remainder of the victuals, in this way intriguing the Indians to follow and swell our party. As José told thee, my dearest Isabel, the heathen tended to perish, if not of agues to which their spirits made no resistance, or of the excesses of pinga which the men mischievously pushed upon them, then of sheer bewilderment—sheer savage incomprehension of what it was we were trying to achieve. When we mentioned gold, they conjured up cities of the stuff, beyond the next mountain range, as if to hurry us out of sight, and cities of diamonds likewise, when these gems were described. Never, though, did we come to an end of wilderness. Wet season followed dry season, blue river followed brown river, and still our band failed to arrive, as under the Southern Cross we travelled toward the North Star.”
“How long ago was this, my lord? How many seasons have you been travelling?”
“There is no telling, dear child. My brain has taken into itself the white fog of distances.”
However long they had been mired in this encampment, the hope of moving on still burned in her master’s brain, and stirred his waggling chin-whiskers to an excitement that sometimes spread to his gnarled and delicate loins—the hope of reaching that Madeira River which would spill its healthy inhabitants, anxious for conversion to the Brazilian way of life, into his possession, and transform his fazenda back on the terra roxa of São Paulo into Heaven on Earth.
Holding her unresponsive son in her arms, and finding in his bloodless face barely the strength or wit to suckle, Isabel would weep, and weep doubly at the thought of Tristão, her proud lover, chained to the interminable task of hollowing out a fleet of broad-bottomed canoes with swings of a dull adze. For the Indians, who before his arrival had desultorily worked on the canoes, now thought it beneath them, and their duty to consist only of whipping the black slave to faster labor.
Ianopamoko pitied Isabel; a sisterly love had grown up between them, and a mutual language woven of Ianopamoko’s sparse Portuguese and those phrases of her native language—a tongue whose words ended with the sharply accented syllables zip, zep, pep, set, tap, and kat—that Isabel gradually acquired.
“You know,” Ianopamoko one day told her, when the listless child of Antônio’s delicate loins was over a year old, “magic still exists. The invaders have not yet destroyed every shred of our old compact with the spirits. There remain far places where the”—and she used a word, ending with zep, which derogatively designated the Portuguese as “eaters of armadillo entrails”—“have not placed their polluting step. A shaman exists, seventeen days’ walk to the west, who might—”
“Free Tristão?” Isabel eagerly asked.
Ianopamoko hesitated; a small twitch of a frown moved beneath the blue lace of her facial adornment. “I was going to say, who might give your baby the brains other babies have.”
“Oh, yes?” Isabel tried to sound interested, as a mother should. But as a former Brasília University student, who had taken courses in psychology, she knew that a brain could not be so easily bestowed, in its billions of interconnected neurons. And Salomão’s feeble-mindedness, his refusal to crawl or begin even the rudiments of utterance, had deflected affection back onto her husband; Tristão’s curse had proved to be stronger than her father’s name and her captor’s seed, and so the child’s defects served as a secret link with the African slave whose tireless, angry adze-swinging filled the encampment, dawn to dusk, with the sound of percussion.
“Magic,” Ianopamoko explained carefully, as if to bridge the gap she felt between their priorities, “has its rules and limits, like the nature from which it derives. To take, we must give. If your baby were to become intelligent, it is possible that you might have to give up some of your own intelligence, just as his body in your womb ate food your mouth had chewed.”
“I am prepared to sacrifice myself in part,” said Isabel, with a frankness and care matching the other woman’s. “But I cannot conceive of myself as less intelligent, without ceasing to be myself.”
“It will be a long trip to the shaman, not without danger. Nor is he immortal. He is very old, and very sad, as he sees and foresees the fate of his people.”
“If he has authentic power,” Isabel asked, “why has he not reversed the tide of death and defeat that came with the Europeans?”
“Magic cannot be general,” Ianopamoko explained, not in the least impatiently. “It cannot be”—and this long word ended in tap—“political. Its arena is the personal soul, not a nation or a people. There must be a personal petition, and procedures, and a consequence to which must cling some ambiguity. As in nature, you do not get something for nothing. Among many Indians”—the word, ending in kat, literally meant “decent people; those who are not indecent or unclean”—“magic has become too exhausting. The shaman is shunned, and receives little business. But for you, whose arrival among us had the quality of an apparition, and whose sorrow has the tranquil depth of an enchantment, I thought a magical solution might be in order.”
“You would come with me, Ianopamoko?”
“Yes. I would have to. You would never get there otherwise.”
“But, darling, why?”
The slender young woman averted her face, as if to avoid a glancing blow of possible indecency. Her shortish hair was stiffened with a mixture of ashes and resin into the shape of an inverted bowl. “I love you,” she said, approximately, in her intricate, snappy tongue.
The casual touches, as soft as thin anthers brushing bees’ golden-haired legs with velvety cocoa-colored pollen, with which the prior wife had welcomed Isabel into the bandeira chieftain’s household, had evolved, through the many nights, into more prolonged and purposeful caresses, carried on in view of the others, in the innocent style of a race to whom nudity was full dress. If at moments the playful cuddling produced a secret shudder, a dew of happiness upon the petals of femininity and a fluttering wish to reciprocate as far as the mysteries of flesh permitted, what shame could attach to Isabel’s heart, suspended awkwardly as it was between an elderly lover and a shackled one? Yes, the two wives loved each other, and made love.
“And Salomão?” she asked. “Must we take him with us? The journey might kill the poor weakling.”
Ianopamoko’s answer was solemn: “That is true. He must stay. Just you and I will go. Takwame and her daughters will care for Salomão, feeding him a nutritious gruel of manioc and banana. I have noticed your flow of milk has been ceasing, and in any case your son never thrived upon it.” Did Isabel hear a hint of reproach in the other woman’s voice? What did this little sepia female, no bigger than a child, know of mothering, its dead patches and natural callousness? Though for a time Antônio’s favorite, she had remained barren, at her deepest level impervious to male charm.
xxiii. The Mesa
THE FOREST to the west, across the river (which they traversed, on the dawn of their escape, by means of one of the small dugout canoes the encampment fishermen kept tied to the bank), could fairly be called jungle—selva, or mata. From the sun-parched, masculine scrub of the great mato they passed into a lusher, dimmer, feminine world. Thin paths that Isabel’s eyes could never have followed wound through a world of green shadow heavy with flowers and fruits. The trumpet-note of the jacu and the screeching and skittering of unseen spider monkeys accompanied their flickering passage through this dense tapestry, whose top-most canopy of branches admitted only slender shafts of sunlight, swirling with a dust of insects. Between the monotonous smooth gray trunks of trees stretching skyward, festooned with vines and buttressed by uplifted roots, the growth underfoot was sparse; for miles the two women walked upon a brown pavement of dead seed husks and palm fronds, as upon the uneven tombstones of some di
m deserted cathedral redolent of rot’s sweetish incense. Chestnuts and Brazil nuts rained down upon them when Ianopamoko prettily skinned up a trunk and shook the branches; gliding barefoot from dawn to dusk, the travellers feasted upon the purplish, cherry-sized fruit of the araçá, which smells of turpentine and makes the saliva in one’s mouth fizz, and the pods of the ingá, which are stuffed with sweet-tasting down, and wild pineapples whose flesh abounds in big black seeds and tastes of raspberry, and the pears called bacuri and that even greater delicacy named the açai, which overnight curdles into a fruity cheese. All these sweetmeats hung waiting for them, in an Eden without inhabitants. Creation felt young, and full of tentative, ornate forms; like many another artist, God had achieved His most elaborate and fantastic effects early.
At night the two women lay together in a single cocoon of mosquito netting, and in the morning unfolded themselves like damp butterflies. They clung ever more closely as the night chill sharpened its bite; for they were climbing gradually higher through this cloistered green world, and broke out on the sixteenth day into hillside fields of tall grasses, irregular terraces pulsating with the onrush of silvery wind-shadows and leading up to a rocky mesa down which a number of waterfalls threaded their glittering way. These tear-trails on Nature’s face, at spots indistinguishable from frozen veins of quartz, were set in broad ribbons of algae and moss. Several Indians, speaking a language Ianopamoko understood with difficulty, warily greeted them in the tall grass. They stared at Isabel as if she were unhuman. Ianopamoko’s voice gently tapped and zipped on and on, explaining, pleading, demanding. At one point she lifted Isabel’s long shining hair in both hands, as if weighing it, and at another she briskly rubbed her moistened fingers over Isabel’s skin, demonstrating that its pallor was not painted on.