Brasyl (35 page)

From the Arquipelaga Anavilhanas I proceeded to this more
promising camp at the confluence of Black and White Rivers where I
have undertaken a series of tests of the waters and substrata of the
two rivers. Both rivers are exceptionally deep and show a distinct
stratification in the species of fish that live there. However
lead-line soundings from the Rio Negro show a dark sediment, rich in
vegetable matter, in its bed while the Rio Branco's is soft,
inorganic sift. An immediate speculation is that both rivers rise
over differing terrains: the Rio Branco being hydrologically similar
to the Rio Solimões which rises in the Andes cordillera, it
seems a reasonable conclusion to draw that it too rises in a highland
region, as yet uncharted but in all likelihood situate in the vast
extent of land between the Guianas and the viceroyalty of Venezuela
....

Dr. Robert Falcon set down his quill. The voice of the forest
deceived; many times in river camps he had thought he heard his name
called or a disstant hallo, only, on closer listening that verged on
a hunter's concentration, to perceive it as a phrase of birdsong or
the rattle of some minute amphibian, its voice vastly greater than
its bulk. Again: and this was no bird flute or frog chirp. A human
voice calling in the lingua geral that his porters and paddlers, from
many different tribes, used among themselves. A canoe in the stream.
What should be so strange about that in these waters to set his men
a-crying?

Falcon carefully sanded and blew dry his book. His gauze canopy, only
partially successful against the plaguing insects, was set up just
within the tree line. A dozen steps took him down onto the cracked,
oozing shore, the river still falling despite the recent violent
thunder squalls. Never had he known rain like it, but it was still a
drop in the immense volume of the Amazon rivers.

His men were arrayed on the shore. The object of their attention was
a solitary canoe, a big dugout for war or trade, drifting on the
flow. Falcon slid on his green glasses for better discrimination, but
the range was too great. He turned his pocket-glass on it; a moment
to focus, then the canoe leaped clear. An immensely powerful black
man sat in the stern, steering a coutse to shore. Falcon knew that
form, that set of determination: Zemba, the freed slave Luis Quinn
had taken into his mission up the Rio Branco.

"The camp!" Zemba cried in a huge voice. "Is this the
camp of the Frenchman Falcon?"

"I am he," Falcon shouted.

"I require assistance; I have a sick man aboard."

Look for me by the mouth of the Rio Branco.

Falcon plunged into the river as Zemba steered the canoe in to shore.

Luis Quinn lay supine in the bottom. His exposed skin was cracked and
blisstered by the sun; the seeps and sores already flyblown and
crawling. But he was alive, alive barely; his eyelids flickered; rags
of loose skin trembled on his lips to inhalations so shallow it did
not seem possible they could sustain life.

"Help me, help me with him, get him up to the shelter,"
Falcon commanded as the canoe was run up on to the shore. "Careful
with him now, careful you donkeys. Water; get me clean water to
drink. Lint and soft cotton. Careful now. Yes, Luis Quinn, you have
found me."

"What world is this?"

Dr. Robert Falcon set down his pen on his folding desk. The tent
glowed with the light of clay oil lamps; fragrant bark smoldering in
a burner repelled those insects that had infiltrated through flaps
and vents. Those outside, drawn helpless to the light, beat
mechanically, senselessly, against the stretched fabric, each impact
a soft tick. On the long nights he had sat vigil by the hammock
Falcon had imagined himself trapped inside a monstrous, moth-powered
clock: a great Governing Engine.

"Might I say, Father Quinn, that is a most singular question.
What day is it, where am I—that would not be unexpected. Even,
who are you? Bur 'What world is this?' That I have never heard."

Luis Quinn laughed weakly, the laugh breaking into dry, heaving
coughing. Falcon was at his side with the water sack. When he had
half the bag down him, swigging immoderately, Quinn said, voice
croaking, "You certainly sound like the learned Dr. Falcon I
recall. How long?"

"You have been fever-racked for three days."

Quinn tried to sit up. Falcon's hand on his chest lightly but
irresistibly ordered him down.

"They will be here, he is coming, he's very near."

"You are safe. Zemba has told me all. We are beyond the reach of
your Nossa Senhora da Várzea, though I admit I should be
intrigued to see such a prodigy."

A flash, like lightning in the skull. A moment of lucidity, Zemba
running the canoe out into the dark water and lying in the bottom as
the current carried it away from Nossa Senhora da Várzea. "I
have you, Pai, you will be safe." Staring up into the starry
dome, past exhaustion, past sanity, the black filling with stars, and
then constellations appearing behind those constellations and ones
beyond that, and beyond that, black night filling up with alien
constellations until it blazed, more and still more stars until the
night was white and he was not staring up into forever but falling
facedown toward the ever-brightening light, infinite light. Quinn
cried out. Falcon took his hand. It was yet fever-dry, thin as
parchment.

Three days, working with Zemba to dress the burns with paste the
Manaos prepared from forest leaves, removing blowflies one by one
with botanical forceps, bathing sweating brows and shivering lips,
forcing spastic jaws open to pour in thin, poor soup or herbal mate
to see it moments later spewed up in a stream, hoping that some
fragment of good had gone out from it. Water, always water, more
water, he could not have enough water. Nights of fevered ravings,
shrieking demons and hallucinations, prophecies and stammerings until
Falcon thought he must stop his ears with wax like Odysseus or go
mad.

"It has always been so," Zemba said as they bound Quinn's
hands to the hammock ropes with strips of cotton to stop the priest
putting out his own eyes. And then the roaring ceased, that silence
the most terrifying, when Falcon crept to the hammock not knowing if
sanity or death had claimed Quinn.

"Zemba ... "

"Outside, waiting."

"He saved me. There are not thanks enough for him .... Listen
Falcon, listen to me. I must tell you what I have seen."

"When you are rested and stronger." But Quinn's grip as he
seized Falcon's arm was strong, insanely strong.

"No. Now. No one ever survived; this may not be the end of it. I
may yet succumb, God between us and evil. This may be only a moment
of lucidity. Oh Christ, help me!"

"Water, friend, have more water." Zemba entered with a
fresh skin; together the two men helped Quinn drink deep and long. He
lay back in the hammock, drained.

"For a hundred leagues along the Rio Branco the emblem of the
Green Lady is an object of dread, the Green Lady, and the Jesuit
dress. My own black robe, Falcon. He has made a desert land, the
villages empty, rotting; the plantations overgrown, the forest
reclaiming all. All gone; dead, fled, or taken to the City of God, or
the block in São José Tarumás. The friars at São
José said nothing; that is their price. Plague is his herald,
fire his vanguard: whole nations have retreated into the igapó
and the terra firme only to be annihilated to the last child by the
diseases of the white men. But he sees the hand of God; the red man
must be tried by the white, must grow strong or perish utterly from
the world.

"From the City of God to the Rio Catrimani is five days, and
eight farther to the Iguapára. I had not thought there could
be so much water in all the world. Endless, empty forest, with only
the voices of the beasts for commpany. Manoel had passed into a
silent, trancelike state of introspection; even the Guabirú
guards were mute. I have heard that the indios may will themmselves
to stop living and very soon pass into a melancholic decline and die.
Many have chosen to escape that way from slavery. I believe Manoel
was on the edges of that state; such were the rumors of what the
Iguapá would work upon us.

"The Iguapá are a nation of seers and prophets; pagés
and caraibas. They are consulted only on matters of the gravest
import and they are never wrong. Thus they have lived a thousand
years unmolested by war, famine, or disease. Their legend is that by
Amazonian forest drugs they are able to see every posssible answer to
the supplicant's question and so select the true. But the price is
terrible indeed. Very soon after the climax of the ritual trance the
caraiba descends into confusion, then to full hallucination and a
final collapse into insanity and death. They see too much. They try
to understand, they overballance, they fail, they fall ... I outrun
myself. At such a price, the Iguapá do not sacrifice their
own. No, their prophets are prisoners of war, hostages, rivals,
criminals, outcasts. And of course the black priests of an alien,
ineffectual faith. What is our weak prayer, our unseen hope, our
whimsical miracles, compared with their iron certainty of the truth,
that there is an answer and they will always know it? We could ask
them about the mysteries of our God and faith, and they would answer
truly. Dare we ask that? Dare we let it darken our imaginations?

"For five days we camped at the designated shore, leaving the
signs and markers, invisible to me but as obvious to a native of
these forests as a church cross to a European. When you have need of
them, they will come to you. On the sixth day they came. They were
wary; they have always been jealous with their secrets, but in this
time of dying and vast migrations through the várzea they have
grown more cautious. Like spirits out of the forest, so silent they
were among us, their arrow-points at our hearts, before we knew it. I
did not think they were of this world, so uncanny was their
appearance: their faces shone gold; they habitually apply the oil of
a forest nut they call urocum, and their foreheads, which they shave
almost to the crown, slope sharply backward to resemble the shape of
a boat. They bind the skulls of their infants with boards and leather
while they are still soft and malleable. Manoel and I were bound and
led by the hand; the Guabirú guides blindfolded. Their
interpreter, a man named Waitacá, told me this was a recent
courtesy: the eyes of all but the questioner would have formerly been
put out with splinters of bamboo. We of course were never expected to
return capable of speech.

"I do not remember how long we stumbled through the forest—days,
certainly. The Iguapá trap their forest trails with snares and
pitfalls; they could hold at bay an entire colonial army. As we
detoured around the strangling nooses, poison arrows, and beds of
spines, one question vexed me, what did Gonçalves wish with
them? So simple a thing as conquest? The triumph of the tyrant is not
his aim. He styles himself a political philosopher, a social
experimenter. Were there questions—questions like those I dared
posit on faith and the nature of the world—to which he required
infallible answers? He believes himself a true man of God: did he
seek that prophetic power to destroy it? Or is his overweening vanity
so great that he seeks that power for himself, to know without faith,
to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

"For all their cunning defenses,
their village was poor and mean, foul with the filth of peccaries and
dogs, huts sagging, thatch rotted and sprouting. There was not a
child there that did not bear sores and boils or sties of the eye and
lip on their golden faces. A special maloca was reserved for the
caraíbas, as we sacrificial victims were known—a title
of great honor, I was informed by Waitacá, though I had by now
picked up the gist of their own, quite singular language. The hut was
the vilest in the village, the thatch raining insects and spouting
rain in a dozen places.

"In my wait I learned the basic tenets of Iguapá belief.
They worship no God, have no story of creation or redemption, no sin
nor heaven nor hell. Yet their belief system—it can never be a
theology—is complex, thorough, and sophisticated. Their totemic
creature is a frog—neither the loudest nor the most venomous
nor the most colorful, though its skin has a beautiful golden sheen
which they copy in their face-painting. This frog, which they call
curupairá, was first of all creatures and saw the first light,
the true light of the world—or should I say worlds, for they
believe in a multiplicity of worlds that reflects every possible
expression of human free will—whole and entire. It retains that
memory of when reality was whole and undivided, like the pages in a
book before they are cut. It still sees that true light, which is the
light of all suns, and by the grace of the beings that inhabit those
other worlds beside our own, can give that sight to humans. It is the
extract of the curupairá, which is slowly boiled to death in a
sealed clay pot with a spout, that induces the oracular vision.

"The ceremony seemed designed to lull both petitioners and
victims alike into a near-ecstasy. Drumming, the piping of clay
ocarinas, circle dancing, figures passing repeatedly in front of the
light from the fire: all the old tricks. We were dragged from the
hut, stripped, anointed with the golden oil—I bear traces of it
still—and lashed to St. Andrew's crosses. I remember it
raining, a punishing downpour, bur the women and children danced on,
shuffling around that smoking fire. Their pagé entered at the
tail of the dance, the flask in his hand. He came to Manoel, then to
me, forced our mouths open with a wooden screw, and poured a jet of
the liquid into our gullets. I tried to spit it out but he kept
pouring, like the old water ordeal."