Colonel Roosevelt (76 page)

CLEARING SKIES
AND
baking heat. Rapids, rapids, rapids. Portages too numerous to count. Rare fish dinners, but still no meat. Evasive tapirs. Grilled parrots and toucans. Monkey stew. Palm cabbage. Wild pineapples. Fatty Brazil nuts. Disappearance of fifteen food tins. Three weeks of rations left.
Oxford Book of French Verse
. Mountains crowding in. Men hit with fever, dysentery. Malcontents multiply. Daily chapter-writing. How to describe the utterly worthless
camarada
, Julio de Lima? “An inborn, lazy shirk with the heart of a ferocious cur in the body of a bullock.”

On 27 March, Roosevelt was standing with some other principals below an especially violent rapid. One of the pontoons came down empty, guided by two paddlers, ran into a curl, and overturned. Then the current hurled it into deep water and jammed it against some boulders. He was the first to jump into the river and try to help the paddlers save it. Cherrie and other expedition members followed. They slipped and stumbled as they hacked at the lashings of the pontoon, with waves seething round their chests. Six or seven naked, screaming men, including Kermit, clambered onto an island and threw down a rope to secure the separated canoes. Eventually both vessels were dragged free and moored. But in the struggle, Roosevelt cut his right leg on a rock.

Twelve years before, as President, he had been riding in a barouche that collided with a speeding trolley car. He had been thrown to the side of the road, unhurt except for an ugly bruise on the left shin. It had developed into an abscess serious enough to mandate two operations and several weeks in a wheelchair. The surgery, involving a syringe probe and scraping of the periosteum, had left him with a permanent feeling of fragility in that leg. During his second term, he had rapped it while riding, causing such an inflammation that the White House physician had considered another operation, to remove atrophied bone. And
in the summer of 1910, there had been a recurrence of osteoperiostitis, oddly accompanied by Cuban fever.

This insult to Roosevelt’s other leg caused an ache that would not go away. He began to limp and his color reddened overnight. Next morning,
three black vultures sailed over the camp. Then Rondon came back from a reconnaissance trip downriver. Cherrie could tell from his expression that he had terrible news.

There was a three-kilometer gorge ahead, Rondon said, full of rapids and falls, and so precipitous (it dropped more than thirty meters) that none of the canoes could be roped through. Nor, in his opinion, could they be portaged. The forested banks were too dense and too steep. All six vessels would have to be abandoned. Every man except Roosevelt must transport as heavy a load of necessities as he could carry along the rim of the gorge until it came to an end and more canoes could be cut.

The Americans overruled him. They insisted that time and supplies were too short to permit the construction of a new flotilla. Kermit was sure he and Lyra could coax the canoes at least some of the way by water and the rest by land, winching them up one side of the gorge if necessary.

Rondon agreed to let them try. But his pessimism was contagious, worsening the expedition’s morale. Each principal had to pare personal baggage down to the lightest minimum.
Roosevelt kept only the helmet, clothes, and shoes he stood in, plus a change of underwear and one set of pajamas. He clung to his black manuscript box and rifle, as well as a few other essentials: “my wash-kit, a pocket medicine case, and a little bag containing my spare spectacles, gun grease, some adhesive plaster, some needles and thread, the ‘fly dope,’ and my purse and letter of credit, to be used at Manáos.” He made a single bundle of his folding cot, blanket, and mosquito net, and crammed the veil and gantlets he needed for writing into his cartridge case.

Cherrie accompanied him on the high trek on 30 March. Roosevelt began to show signs of coronary stress. He kept sitting down and begging Cherrie to climb on ahead of him. But the naturalist was afraid to leave him unattended.
Together at the crest, they looked north at a range of mountains unmarked on any map. The Dúvida (nobody had gotten used to calling it the “Roosevelt”) shone here and there amid the dark trees like an arrow of light. The way it vanished into the distance filled them both with foreboding.

When they descended to the camp that Kermit had hopefully established as a “port” overlooking the gorge’s worst rapids, Roosevelt had no strength left. He lay flat on the damp ground, trying to still the tumult in his chest. He could not begin to help his son with the canoes, nor Rondon in cutting a corduroy road beyond the last cataract. The most he could do, when he recovered, was wash Cherrie’s shirt for him.

As if in some vast conspiracy of fate, mountains, river, and weather combined to subject the expedition to its worst punishment yet. Rain drilled down as the men started work on the skidway. Kermit and Lyra stumbled around
upstream in rotting shoes, roping the dugouts down meter by meter. One boat smashed, but the other five got safely to port. Then began the Sisyphusian labor of hauling them, and the rainwater they received, up Rondon’s muddy road.

By the time this operation was complete, April had begun, and all but three of the
camaradas
were broken in body or spirit. The expedition encamped halfway down the rapids. The deluge that night amounted to solid water. Its weight collapsed the only two shelters available to the principals—the little medical tent in which Roosevelt now slept alone, and the balloon-silk fly shared by his five colleagues. Wrapped in a damp blanket, he managed to get some sleep, but fears about him increased.

The following day’s advance amounted to less than three meters of aneroid “drop,” and subjected him to another portage. His cot was set up in a gorge even narrower than the one he had just quit.

“
Worried a lot about father’s heart,” Kermit wrote in his diary.

THE NEXT MORNING
Roosevelt had reason to believe he was in the valley of the shadow of death. The jawbone of a
Pachydermata brasiliensis
protruded from the sand. Rock walls that could have been sliced by civil engineers blocked the sky. Kermit and Lyra lost yet another canoe, reducing the flotilla once more to just two pontoons. A reconnaissance party came back with news of rapids continuing as far as the eye could see. Or the ear to hear: for four weeks now, the roar of broken water had sounded almost uninterruptedly ahead of them, like a pedal note denying any hope of final resolution.

Rondon took some men ahead to hack vines, while others, supervised by a huge black sergeant named Paixão, got the stores ready for transportation. Roosevelt was resting by the river when he noticed Julio de Lima, the pure Portuguese he had long recognized as a spoiler, drop his load, pick up a carbine, and walk off muttering. It was not unusual to see a
camarada
hunt, since everybody was half-starved. Julio alone remained fleshy and healthy-looking.
He was a known food thief: Paixão had several times caught him in the act and beaten him. But his muttering today was peculiar.

Several minutes later, there was a shot outside the camp. Brazilians ran back shouting, “
Julio mato Paixão!
” Julio had killed Paixão. Roosevelt, careless of his leg, hurried to the scene of the crime with Cherrie and Dr. Cajazeira. They found the sergeant dead in a pool of blood. Julio had shot him through the heart at point-blank range. A scurry of foot marks ran into the jungle, frantically circled, then disappeared down the gorge.

Roosevelt sent for Rondon and insisted on frontier justice.
“We must go after Julio, arrest him, and execute him!”

Rondon saw that he was highly excited, and tried to calm him. “That’s against Brazilian law. Criminals are jailed, not put to death.”

“In my country, whoever kills has to die.”

“It’s useless to pursue Julio,” Rondon said. “A man vanishing into the forest like that.… You’ve a better chance finding a needle in a haystack. Meanwhile, he deserves his fate.”

Roosevelt’s concern was that Julio, having gone berserk, might return under cover of darkness and steal food or kill someone else. But when the murder weapon was found further on, he accepted that the second alternative was unlikely.

França, the cook, was confident that Paixão’s ghost would seek revenge. He darkly observed that the sergeant had died falling forward. That meant the killer was doomed. “
Paixão is following Julio now, and will follow him till he dies.”

Roosevelt quoted this remark in his account of what had happened. The writer in him responded to the expedition’s second funeral ceremony.

LATE THE FOLLOWING
afternoon, Roosevelt felt the first, unmistakable symptoms of Cuban fever.
He had to endure a hailstorm, and further heart tremors, as he limped a few hundred yards down the boulder-strewn gorge to a new camp at the foot of the rapids. His colleagues saw that he was very ill and pitched his tent in the driest spot possible, a stony slope that shed at least some rain. Roosevelt was unconscious of the tilt as he took to his cot and the malaria hit him with full force. His temperature rose to around 104°F.
He became delirious, reciting some lines of Coleridge over and over again:

Kermit, Cajazeira, and Cherrie took turns watching over him.
The doctor laced him with quinine, at first orally, and when that had no effect, by injection straight into the abdomen.

In terror, Kermit registered the details of that night. “The black rushing river with the great trees towering high above along the bank; the sodden earth underfoot; for a few moments the stars would be shining, and then the sky would cloud over and the rain would fall in torrents, shutting out sky and trees and river.” If his father was the epic hero Kermit believed him to be, then nature seemed to be in a state of hysteria at the prospect of losing him.

Toward dawn the quinine brought Roosevelt’s temperature down, and he summoned Cherrie and Rondon. The Brazilian was taken aback at his grim expression as he said, “
The expedition cannot stop. On the other hand, I cannot proceed. You go on and leave me.”

He grew agitated when he saw they would not obey him. Rondon countered with a gentle appeal to his sense of responsibility.

“Let me point out that this is called the ‘Roosevelt-Rondon’ expedition, so we cannot possibly split up.”

A reconnaissance after breakfast brought semi-encouraging news. There were two more rapids in the offing, but beyond them was a large affluent which gave promise of smooth water further on. If Roosevelt could stand another forty-eight hot, humid hours in
the sunless gorge, he would see why Rondon had named the confluence “
Bôa Esperança,” place of good hope. There, the expedition might at last become waterborne again.

That day’s portage proved to be a long one. Roosevelt’s temperature resurged. His leg showed signs of erysipelas, a hot, shiny, streptococcal inflammation of the skin. He labored past the first rapid with ineffective help from Cherrie and Lyra, both of whom had dysentery. Kermit floated him down to the next one in a canoe, but he was more dead than alive when he got to a halfway camp Rondon had pitched.
Dr. Cajazeira noted with concern that although his pulse had accelerated, his blood pressure had dropped. At least he did not become delirious again overnight.