Backlands (12 page)

And the backlands are a paradise. . . .

Appearing again at the same time are the resistant fauna of the
caatingas
. Spreading in great numbers in damp, low-lying spots are the skittish peccaries. They pass over the stubble fields in herds with a strident noise of cutting jaws, wild boars of reddish cinnamon color. Swift rheas run across the high tablelands in bands as they spur themselves on with the energy hidden under their wings. There are crested
seriemas,
with their mournful voices, and the vibrant wood rails singing in the brush beside the marshes where the tapirs come to drink, standing stock-still for a moment from their lumbering gait.
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They go along in an inflexible straight line through the
caatinga
, knocking down trees. The panthers terrify the alert
mocos
, giant guinea pigs nestling in pairs in their burrows in the rocky ground. The cats spring out of the tall weeds where they have been lying in wait for a nervous deer or a stray calf. . . .

Mornings without equal follow one upon the other. The rays of the rising sun tint the purple of the coral trees and make the multicolored tassels of the bignonias stand out more clearly as they garland the purpled bark of the
umburanas
. The backlands become alive with a flapping of swift, rustling wings. The notes of a strange bugle cut the air. In a tumult of random flight the wild doves pass by in their migration back and there is the gurgling chorus of the strident
maritacacas.
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All the while, happy at having forgotten his woes, the rustic goes along his crude paths, driving his fattened cattle and singing his favorite song. . . .

This is how the days go by.

One, two, six months in succession pass with the land’s exuberance until, quietly and imperceptibly, in some kind of evil rhythm, the days break off little by little and the leaves and flowers fall as the drought can be glimpsed once more by the dead branches of the deciduous trees. . . .

Let us sum up and spruce up these scattered items.

Hegel laid out three geographic categories that worked with other forces in the creation of the ethnic differentiation of mankind.

Steppes with stunted vegetation, along with vast arid plains; profusely irrigated valleys; and coastal lands and islands.

The Venezuelan llanos, the savannas that give the Mississippi Valley its breadth, the endless pampas, and the Atacama Desert spread out along the Andes, a vast terrace of undulating dunes, can be said, strictly speaking, to be among the first.

In these, in spite of their long summers, their formidable hillocks of sand, and the onslaught of sudden downpours upon them, there is nothing incompatible with life.

And yet they do not have a hold on people to stay there.

Their rudimentary flora of grasses and sedges flourishing again after the rainy season attracts pastoral life, the nomadic society of shepherds moving about, pitching their tents, and taking them down in a constant roaming across those plains as they quickly scatter with the onset of summer’s heat.

These lands do not attract people. They always display the same distressing and monotonous setting, the only variant being one of color. They lie as stationary oceans without shores or waves.

They have the centrifugal force of the desert: They repel, scatter, and disperse. There is no link to humanity through the nuptial bond of the furrows of the plow. They isolate ethnic groups the same as mountain ranges and the sea, just as in the steppes of Mongolia, trodden down by turbulent bands of wandering Tartars.

The backlands of our North, however, which at first glance might seem the equal of these places, have no place in the German thinker’s scheme.

A person going into them in summer thinks he is entering that first subdivision, while on crossing them in winter he thinks they are part and parcel of the second.

Savagely sterile or wonderfully flourishing . . .

At the height of the droughts they are most certainly a desert, but when these do not reach the point of bringing on a painful exodus, men, like the trees, struggle along with the reserves stored up during the times of plenty and in that fierce, nameless, terrible dark battle, engulfed in the solitude of the flats, are not completely abandoned by nature. She takes care of them for quite a time beyond the desperate hours when the last waterholes have dried up.

With the coming of the rains, the land, as we have seen, is transformed in a great variety of changes in contrast to its previous desolation. Dry gullies become rivers. The once bald hillocks stand out in a sudden green color. Vegetation carpets them with flowers over wide gorges as it covers up the harshness of their banks and rounds piles of disjointed rocks into hillocks. In this way the broad flatlands, crisscrossed by connecting gulches, are held together in softened curves that extend up to the higher plains. The temperature drops. Without the intense heat of the sun, the abnormal dryness of the air is no more. There are new tones to the landscape. The transparent air makes for more delicate lines in all the variants of form and color.

The horizons become broader. The sky loses the heavy blue of deserts and becomes higher, farther away, over the expanding revival of the land.

The backlands have become a fertile valley. They are a vast orchard that has no owner.

And then all this comes to an end. The time of torture returns. The atmosphere becomes stifling, the soil stony, the vegetation naked. And in days when summers come one after the other there is the frightful spasm of the drought.

Nature is playing a game of antitheses.

These, then, make for a special category in such a period. It is one of the most interesting and expressive of all, coming at a point between minimally fertile valleys and extremely arid steppes.

Leaving its meaning as a factor of ethnic differentiation for other pages, let us have a look at its role in the economy of the land.

Nature does not normally create deserts. She fights against them, repels them. They are sometime and inexplicable gaps in the defining astronomical lines of life’s great exuberance. The classic type can be seen in the Sahara, which stands as a generic term for the wasteland that is spread out from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, passing through Egypt and Syria, bringing along with it all aspects of the great African depression to the burning Arabian plateau of Nejd and proceeding on to the sands of the
bejabans
of Persia. All this is so illogical that the greatest of naturalists thought he saw in its genesis the tumultuous action of some cataclysm, an irruption of the Atlantic Ocean as it poured out its swirling waters in an unrestrained whirlpool of currents across North Africa and they denuded it in their fury.

This explanation of Humboldt’s, even if presented only as a brilliant hypothesis, does hold a broader significance.

Without any center of heat and with a normalization of climates, from the extreme north to the extreme south, starting at the uninhabitable poles, the existence of vegetation progresses to the line of the equator. In this zone we find the greatest growth, where the bushes of other regions become trees and the climate varies between two seasons only and lays out a uniformity that is favorable to the evolution of simple organisms under the direct control of variations in the environment. The astronomical circumstance of the inclination of the ecliptic, which places the earth under biological conditions inferior to those of other planets, is scarcely noted in regions where a single mountain can take on all the climates of the world from base to summit. Nevertheless, passing through and interfering with the ideal frontier of the hemisphere, the hot equator, is a most disturbing path of the inflections of life, dividing up into singular points where life is impossible, passing from desert to forest, from the Sahara pushing north to opulent India, after touching the tip of poverty-stricken Arabia, leaping across the Pacific in a long stride through a rarefied string of naked desert islands and coming ashore with a slow drift to the south and the awesome rain forest of the Amazon.

From extreme aridity to extreme exuberance . . .

The morphology of the land is, in fact, in violation of general climatological laws.
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But every time the geographical facies does not fight them off completely, nature reacts. It is a mute battle, the effects of which are far removed from the normal course of historical cycles, although in a rather moving way for someone who manages to catch sight of it over the countless centuries, dulled as it always is by adverse agents and yet, tenacious, unconquerable, in sure evolution the land, like an organism, is transformed by intussusception, indifferent to the elements in the tumult facing it.

So, eternally condemned, broad depressions like Australia remain sterile while at other points deserts are extinguished.

The red-hot temperature itself ends up giving them a minimum of pressure that attracts rain, and the moving sands, streaked by the winds, for a long time fight off the grip of the most humble plant as they become gradually immobilized and held by the roots of grasses. The unreceptive ground and the sterile rocks decay under the imperceptible action of lichens, which are a preparation for the arrival of fragile leafy plants and finally naked plateaus, llanos, and pampas with scant vegetation, and savannas and the life-giving steppes of Central Asia arise in a crescendo of successive phases of wondrous transformation.

So it is that the backlands of our North, in spite of lesser sterility and contrary to the natural criterion, might be said to make up a singular point in a regressive evolution.

Let us imagine them as they were a short time back, in a retrospective view in which, of course, fantasy must rear its head in opposition to serious science, as they emerge geologically modern from a vast Tertiary sea.

Along with this absolutely untenable hypothesis, however, what is certain is that a complex of circumstances has made a continuous regime more difficult for them, favoring a more flourishing flora.

Let us first sketch out a few of these.

We must not lose sight of one notable geological agent, however—man.

In fact, he most usually has had a brutal effect upon the land and, if we might say so, has famously assumed along the whole path of history the role of a terrible maker of deserts.

He began all this through a disastrous indigenous legacy.

In the primitive agriculture of forest dwellers fire has been a fundamental instrument.

Having cut down trees with their sharp diorite
dgis
, they gathered up the wood to dry out and then made bonfires where flames were picked up by the winds. They would then dig trenches around the tree trunks and fill them with hot coals from the fires. An area of ash was left where once there had been flourishing woodlands. They would cultivate the land and follow the same procedure the next season until that spread of land was completely exhausted, useless, abandoned, left as
caapuera
, a “dead forest,” as the Tupi language calls it, lying there irremediably sterile forever after.
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It is worth noting that the plant families that subsequently rose up in the calcified terrain were always some type of stunted bush, completely different from the plants of the primitive forest. The aborigines would keep on opening up new plots, new clearings, new cultivations, expanding the circle of damage with new
caapueras
left behind as they went on to create others farther off. What was left was a kind of barren with stunted growth that was inadequate to react against outside elements. As they spread out they aggravated the rigors of the very climate that was beating down upon them, with a tangle of thickets and a smothering of weeds, with the occasional sickly look of the sinister
caatanduva
along with the convulsive wildness of the whitish
caatinga.

Settlers came later and copied the same procedure. They made conditions even more deadly as land in the central areas of the country, away from the narrow band of coastal cane fields, was given over almost exclusively to grazing.

Beginning with the start of the seventeenth century, in the abusively apportioned backlands they opened up huge fields and pasturelands with no dividing boundaries all across the plains.

These were cleared in the same way, with fires lighted everywhere and no firebreaks. The fires engulfed wide areas as they were turned loose into the violent gusts of the northeast winds. Along with the settlers came the greedy, bold pioneers in search of native slaves and gold. Engulfed in the depths of a stupendous growth that limited their vision and hid the dangers of unseen Tapuia Indian ambushes or spots where dread jaguars might be hiding, they cut it down and destroyed it with flames in order to uncover the horizon, bringing into view the mountains as they loomed over the cleared plains and served them as beacons to guide the expeditions called
bandeiras.

They attacked the land with their digs as they searched for riches under the open sky. They sterilized it with their dredges, wounding it with their picks, degrading it with the wild waters of their sluices, and what they left, all around, forever lifeless, were the wastelands that had turned red with the bright color of the overturned clay. It was a place where no plant could possibly thrive. These great diggings, sad and empty, have a look that suggests huge, ruined, and dead cities. . . .

These barbarous activities can be found all along the course of our history, right up to the middle of this century, as the inhabitants of villages along the banks of the São Francisco attest. The explorers who had arrived in 1830 left the bank of the river behind and went forward, lighting up their way and opening a path as they devastated the land in the same sinister way of clearing it with fire. For months on end the red glow of the burnings could be seen to the west as they lingered on into the night.