O AMANTE DAS AMAZONAS em inglês

O Amante das Amazonas

by Rogel Samuel

Translation by Christopher Schindler 2020

THE AMAZON

One: The Journey

It was at the crack of dawn on Christmas day 1897 that we said our good-byes by the Gate of Patos in Pernambuco - my mother and I.  I never saw her again.  The whole town turned out – people I don't want to remember.  I left with two changes of clothing in a suitcase tied up and sewn together and a stereoscope to look at views of Manaus, Belém, Paris, London, Vienna and St. Petersburg.

I rode along on a mule in a wool convoy through the Borborema and three days later I was in Timbauba de Mocós, head of the rail line, gathering place for cowboys from Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte. There I boarded a train to Recife where I found lodgings in the Brum near the Lingueta wharf and stayed for five days before boarding the Alfredo bound for the Amazon. I was still in my teens.

We traveled that day and awoke the following morning at Cabedelo. The dock was filled with anxious people out to meet fighting men from Canudos, Monte Santo e Favela, Travessia and Uauá. Spirits were high but there was also a lot of weeping and wailing. We did not linger there but went on to Natal where migrants fleeing from the Northeast were waiting for a boat to the Amazon country. Besides 500 soldiers of the Pará state police, the entire 4th battalion of infantry returning from the War, without casualties, was already settled in the hold of the ship; so, in Fortaleza, Commandant Bezerra had to have a list read aloud of more than 600 souls done in by the dry spells of the Northeast, part of a steady migration since '79 to the Amazon because it had stopped raining. The ship which not even a single crate of pigs would fit into, accommodated that horde stinking of dust, sweat, manure and urine - hammocks crisscrossing - there was stealing, drinking, rapes, fighting, knifings and death. A father caught a guy by surprise with his daughter in a livestock stall and skinned him; another, drunk, pissed right on the floor where it trickled towards a crowd of people sleeping on the floor; on top of a wicker chicken cage a man defecated, relieving himself under the light of a yellow oil-lamp full of flies. He was a soldier.

I was still in the hold when we passed the lighthouse at Acaraú and stopped in Amarração to get rid of a corpse, a prisoner and two passengers covered with smallpox. But we sailed right past Tutóia and arrived at the port of São Luís where the Alfredo was surrounded by small boats and dinghies transforming the water into a gigantic, floating market. They all climbed aboard: sellers of fried shrimp, sweets and fruit. What a wonderful journey it was! Then untied and sent off, the heavily laden Alfredo continued her run along the coast towards Belém and, as it was growing dark, we slowed down to let on the Lighthouse Bar pilot. When the Alfredo crossed the estuary of the Amazon, it penetrated the great river, pilot at the helm, with binnacles lit, as it was night and covered with stars despite everything.

In Belém I stayed at a hotel called “Two Nations” (one of its owners was from Portugal, the other from Spain). As I had to wait a month for the Barão de Juruá to go up the Amazon, my money started to run out. I slept outdoors to save money for meals and I already owed the skipper for advancing me passage-fare.
Once embarked I would arrive in Manaus without hindrance after six days at eight miles an hour. Two days later we passed Boca do Purus and 5 days later the mouth of the Juruá. We traveled all day and all night. At the mouth of the Juruá the Solimões River is 12 km wide and birds unable to fly far (the trumpeter, curassow, cujubim) could not manage to cross it but died, tired and drowning, at the bottom of waves brushed with yellow from the headwind. In eight days’ travel on the Juruá we arrived at the Tarauacá River and docked at São Felipe, a nice, clean town of forty-five houses. Nine days later we entered the Jordão River from which point the Barão, because of its deep draft, could not continue. So we went on by canoe on the Bom Jardim Bayou. We paddled upriver and came to our final destination, our node point, the terminus, the final boundary, the farthest and innermost place on this terrestrial orb – we finally got to Hell’s Bayou, the limit of the ends of the earth where we encountered the legendary, mythical and vast Manixi rubber plantation wrapped in the weight of its fame and unexpectedness – forty days after leaving Belém, three months and five days since leaving Patos.

Now I didn’t mention that I came to look for my brother Antonio and uncle Genaro who had been sent off to Manixi. No. They had been rubber tappers on the Jantiatuba for the Pixuna rubber plantation, 1,270 miles from the city of Manaus (where years later the Alfredo would shipwreck). They were staying along the Eiru river on a bend, almost a lake, really. From there they left on a barge, boat and canoe to the Gregorio river where they worked for Frenchmen. From there to the Mu, on to Paraná da Arrependida - free tappers that they were - they went up to where they say the son of Euclides da Cunha, who was a deputy, died in a tappers uprising. They traveled on to the Riozinho do Leonel, along the Tejo, Breu, the beautiful Corumbam Bayou – magnificent! – the Hudson, Paraná Pixuna, Moa, Juruá-mirim, up to the Paraná do Ouro Preto, entered the Amônea via the Paraná dos Numas, near the Paraná São João, then along a natural canal without name leading to an unknown place and there they met the boat that went to Hell’s Bayou. It left them in Manixi, in Acre, where they settled down, free tappers of the rubber plantation owner.

I confess (this whole book is a confession of my life) that I felt at that moment that Genaro and Antonio were longing to return to the brush country. The Amazon crisis was getting worse and conditions already were getting bad for tappers – so my brother and uncle fretting and wasting away in order to draw milk from the jungle without profit.

When they saw me they couldn’t grasp what I was doing there. I emerged thin, overwhelmed under my curls of brown hair, forlorn, like an apparition, from a bench under the canopy of a shed (I remember a dark, stormy downpour, night lightning and the whistling of the wind). No, they wouldn't recognize me (since I was a witness to their wretched fate); they were not overjoyed to see me, rather, they resented me. Hadn’t they left, quite young, more than ten years ago with the memory of a kid in bleach-worn diapers? Didn’t they see me as the incarnate killer of their hopes, the bold headline of one more crisis coming to this part of the country upon more bad news, renewing a complaint which already had gone on so many years, scattering the family in all directions (people that I neither knew nor knew if they were still alive) – one went to São Paulo and became a soldier, another with muscular legs left suddenly for Belém returning later via Piauí passing through Serra Grande to Teresina, then via Maranhão to Goiás, a footloose ruffian he was, then climbing the Tocantins to Bahía where he finally disappeared and there was no news of him except that he ended up in the leprosary of Paricatuba (“I have faith in a man who eats and walks armed,” he told us the day he left. “It gives you muscle and guts. With a full stomach, a gun and knife at my side I can take on any kind of wild animal!”). The other, the oldest – ah! – was dying of hunger, exhausted, worn out, because he wouldn’t leave his old mother (she loved him most of all. She died two years after I left. She despised me; I know she hated me, cursed me on her deathbed). And our sister, pretty, captivating, the youngest - her husband left to work as a drover in Vila de Santa Rita to earn something to escape the hunger of the world while the brush country was peeling with drought; yes, our whole family, screwed over  and broken, as I later saw, left me all by myself in the fear of God.

They didn't say a word. They were withdrawn and I just sat there in the dark for a long while brushing off the rain from my tied-up suitcase, crying in desertion and solitude. I wanted to leave and not be there. I wished I hadn’t come. But I had no way back. And I never returned.

Slowly from the next day on, I began to do the necessities: cooking, cleaning the hut, fishing, gathering fruit so I wouldn’t go hungry. And since I now owed the boss (whom I didn’t know), I had to start running, a prisoner of odd jobs, going along the trappers’ path with a small tin cup, doing the smoke-curing with aricury, chips of cow tree and acabu, making my own rubber balls. The milk turned black at my touch. Farming and rubber tapping don’t mix? Produce what you eat? They told me nothing, taught me nothing, like they didn’t know I was there. And they didn’t talk to each other. They had become dumb animals – I don’t think they knew how to talk. They returned at dark, like worn-out monkeys, mute and dirty, they ate and they slept, stinking. At dawn, they were back on the trail; they moved mechanically as if by some internal wire contraption. I don’t know where or for what.

But I learned to cut the trees, cure the latex, pile up rubber balls with the pervasive sound of oily bubbling from the nudging dark waters of Hell’s Bayou (which I can still hear to this day and will keep hearing until the hour of my death in this middle of nowhere).

Two: The Palácio

This narrative - a parody of an historical novel which defines my long overdue confession with sufficient accuracy - will reveal to you the quite surprising life of Ribamar de Sousa, the adolescent that I was, emerging on an unexpected day of the Amazon winter, to an extremely percussive ostinato of dense rain under the improvisatory direction of an imaginary score, in tune with the surroundings, composed of polytonal chords, as I was sitting on a wooden bench in a thatched lean-to, to the accompaniment in 5/4 time of Hell's Bayou, which flows into the Bom Jardim Bayou, which flows into the Rio Jordão, which flows into the Rio Tarauacá, which flows into the Rio Juruá, a tributary of the upper Amazon River (the so-called Solimões), to which we were returning.

I remember how, on Hell's Bayou, yet lower on the farthest line that marked the horizon on that late afternoon – there was a golden diagonal and a storm approaching on the other side of the horizon – the handsome art nouveau form of the Palácio Maxini (the mansion's name), seat of the rubber plantation and residence of Pierre Bataillon, appeared magnificently before my eyes like an outline of a scene from a detailed historical dream; we were returning then in search of that forbidden past, since we arrived at the end of the era when that mansion appeared dazzling in its multiple reflections of crystal baubles, window and door transoms transformed into bright plates of shining, vivid and delirious gold, a wild and vibrant gold, of striking brilliance, golden and frenzied, illusory and delirious, out of this world and unimaginable, brought into being by the early accumulation of nearly a century of exploration, investment and endeavor of layer upon layer of heterogeneous levels of history, in a creation of the entire sweep of the modern world, confined here, circumscribed here, centered here in permanent dependence on itself and of its lingering isolation and anachronistic testimony.

We were returning to the elaboration of our luxurious past; we arrived unconscious and fatigued in that golden, dark late afternoon,, in which the mansion in its singularity possessed all the details of an appearance of dazzling light.  The Palácio (as this structure was known, later went into decline after the rubber bust, a ruin and dead), a transparent and unexpected mansion awaited us in the tranquility of its points and angles, with which it beckoned and came to meet us, with its immortal exaltation, above sheets of dark and primitive waters originating from the life of the world: on the surfaces of Hell's Bayou glided the riches of the world's high altars, from the frontier, inevitable, indeterminate, virgin trees.  Lost, vacant, undemarcated...  So, because all its strongest codification of a building, a two-story mansion with a cellar (since abandoned), of art nouveau style, looking towards a return to civilization, surrounded by exquisite fencing of gracefully shaped iron, convulsive and violent scrolls of tendrils of elegant and effeminate contours, disguised, unseemly, decorating the twisting and bombastic marble staircase, dark and in full fruition of reproduction European villas.  Its majesty was something felt even at a distance, as from afar it made its grandeur and distinction known; a concern for taking for itself terraces and balconies that project into the air...- but all that is in discontinuous ruins, all that is no longer here today, and this description corresponds to what the mansion was many years ago in my youth and the proliferation of lost memory, ah, yes, because I am old but not senile, and the sources of wealth are still there in the middle of the forest: cultivation and substance to confirm their existence and development.  I see clearly the twisted body of that escapist nineteenth century (since pillaged) edifice on its height of terra firma, planted in relation to a truth of this end of the earth, to the account of rivers of blood and scandal of tons of pounds sterling of glittering rubber gold – oh, gods!, that luxury existed, unacknowledged or supposed, misfortune and extortion, waste of the pleasures of wealth at the seat of the Manixi plantation, far away, at the farthest reach, remote from everything, remote from itself, a distance of almost 2,000 miles from Manaus …

I do not exist in the present, but in another epoch.  I am from the time of a primitive, archaic, sumptuous capitalism, interlaced with gold and precious stones, a time out of fashion now when the Palácio was an image in search of its deeper nature.  There, a music room was arranged mainly for listening to Beethoven, with a Pleyel grand piano, the showcase where Pierre Bataillon exhibited his collection of violins (the Guarnerius, the Bergonzi, the Klotz, the Vuillaume), prints of Viotti, Baillot, David, Kreutzer, Vieuxtemps, Joachim and the death mask of Beethoven with a bronze laurel wreath by Stiasny.  The library where someone read aloud verses of Lamartine.  Rooms and rooms asking “why?”, salons, galleries and apartments interconnected by doors which opened into private halls and passageways and which closed in on themselves to the sound of Pierre Bataillon at the piano in dialogue with Frei Lothar's violin in a Mozart sonata, like someone fixing one's attention within, with a mortal, agile and terrible energy which was expressed in the painted stucco walls, by an iridescence of greenish and dark gold, in the interlaced rhythms of branches and foliage, of a hallucinated and Japanese vegetation which rose in these shapes toward the ceiling reflected many times over in beveled  mirrors and in the crystal prisms of chandeliers to evoke the remembrance of exotic pleasures.  Yes, I am an old man of another century and there I lived all those years, observing, learning and absorbing, within the magic circle and around that population of antique objects and furniture that portrayed devouring monsters: like the vision of sexual fantasies in the decoration of the Venetian commode; the Boulle armoire and its hunting scenes with defeated wild boars and dogs chewing on bloodied birds shot down by the Duc de Chartres and other aristocrats on horseback dressed in the idiocy of red trousers and black boots; in the strict silence of the English study, in the dynamics and prostituted morphology of the Delanois divan; in the unity and elliptical variations of the settee -  and in the vines, irises, thistles, diverse stylized insects, incorporating themselves in the furniture and the lines of the French panels in a neo-rococo delirium such as nature never intended: statues on lambrequins, eclectic beads and rosettes, urns on the cymas of the balconies symbolizing energy, the ontology and desire of capitalism devouring everything, spending everything, producing everything, preserving everything, needing and appropriating everything, spilling over and miscarrying into madness, misery and death – caryatids, capitals, forest foliage – a seemingly small Pierre Bataillon ate and consumed and threw away his entire immense fortune in the taste of his furnishings, sumptuous, amassed and useless, in a process of cupidinous and grasping schizophrenia, by the suction of his refined, dehumanized mouth, to put an end to the surplus of his surprising profits, in autophagic pleasure of the minimum daily expenditure of his miraculous capital, bloody and luxuriant, by transplanting to that place, at whatever cost, the whole spirit of European humanism that was transported in chartered and laded ships, to the confusion of his beautiful, exquisitely crafted but useless objects, of a vain, futile art, suicidal because unproductive, insatiable and banal.  Such is the irony of these efforts for putting gold filaments on the horizon and making the impression of distance more distinct, to defile the pestiferous history with gold – in illness, madness, deaths, impuned and imperial crimes (various native peoples disappeared), in obedience to criteria of an odd capitalistic aesthetic, in the emptiness and inocuousness of a coquettish, amoral and modern paganism. 

3. THE NUMA

I saw them on the other side of the river, two little girls, Indians, naked, among the trees. They were on the other shore of Hell's Bayou between the columns of trees; they came from the bend upstream where it flows from dark green to chalky green up to the steel skirt hem of the river's cold sheet. When it comes to beauty nothing is absolute. What makes something beautiful is the beauty of the moment it appears unexpected and surprising. As they began to come into focus their lips were none other than lovely. Wow! They had come out of nowhere. They were in plain sight. Two girls, two Numa, unmistakably Numa. A challenge, inducement, suffering. An ancient bathing ritual. They moved slowly in total silence. One was a child, the other an adolescent. They perfumed the air in which they moved, long legs swaying, virgins, tall and thin, descending upon the archaeology of the shore in delicate and cautious delight. Yes, it was all right. Now - and what smile appeared in their eyes... - delicately pointing her foot, the older one put her toe in the water. She tested the water and was filled with pleasure. Thrilled. She drew from her body its essence and transmitted it to the life of the surface. The river whimpered like a plucked, taut string. The water was dense like black oil. Melpomene on a columnar plinth on a terrace. In her minimally hastening movements, any false step would be terrible, a terminal act. Warmth, pleasure. The dull river came to life like latex the consistency of warm blood. Bending in graceful curves - stucco detail on ballroom cornices. A sudden, violent excretion of temper that dissipated. Foam of blood. My view being blocked, I could not see them. A white cloud right in front of my whole body, in solid thin pieces. They did not see me. They did not know I was there. They just disappeared. One after the other. They caressed, held hands, slipped into the air. The wind concealed me; they were not on the lookout for me.

They did not pick up my scent. But I saw them. I was the first person to see a female of the Numa people.

The waters flow from the beginning-less, secret places of their brutal narrative under two hundred foot high trees; the waters flow from the unknown places of origin of the Numa people. Waters of survival, cold, they are forgotten and left behind. The people got lost, and became dangerous, terrifying. At first where the Numa territory lay could not be precisely determined in relation to the Manixi rubber plantation. Then it became obvious. By feel. Rare, smooth markings. An arrow propped up on a tree trunk, lying across the red trail. A broken branch saying: “Go no farther”. Beyond the Tucumã Bend the crossing of the axis of the river separates. You can swim and fish this one side. Little by little the Numa infiltrated, advanced, crossed over. They went beyond themselves, not respecting their own boundaries. Crossing the river and the order imposed on the forest by it. Led on, entranced, they reached up river from where I lived. This happened through the perfect dominion that the Numa exercised over the many sides of the “S”-shaped river, an invisible (you could not see them) and secret dominion, around which the rubber tappers fanned out, the high ground, terra firma, under careful almost cordial control. Phantoms invaded the plantation every night. Everyone retrenched. Harmony above all. Restraint. At no time involuntary or violent gestures that could break the tenuous, working pact of the spirit of ready silence. Knowledge was insufficient. Be mindful of your actions, do not speak loud, ensure the peace, stealthily, as if peace depended expressly on silence. Vigilance. Do not frighten them, do not provoke them. Do not menace them with any behavior that could break the fateful, established hierarchy, because they were ghostly and mythical, at the liberty of the wind. They were like wisps. Void.

When Pierre Bataillon first arrived in these parts in 1876, he came across a little village of the Caxinauá people in fear of the Numa as if subject to their forwardness and changeability. For the time being, it was fair to that the Numa tolerated the Caxinauá, but at any moment they may decide to come to torture and exterminate them. The village of the Caxinauá was squeezed between the unforeseeable Numa and the civilized and known part of the Rio Juruá, where it was possible to meet only lost tappers, people left behind from the 1852 expedition. The Caxinauá had contact with Romão de Oliveira. But not the Numa. Since 1847 they reacted violently, when the scholar Francisco de Castenau passed through there and described them in Expedition dans les parties centrales de l'Amerique du Sud, a rare copy of which was in the library of Pierre Bataillon. Travestin, also, in Le fleuve Juruá, refers to fighting with the Numa. In 1854, João da Cunha Correa, Director of Indian Affairs, went up the Tauacá, discovering the Gregório and the Mu, without any contact. Pierre Bataillon arrived in 1876. It was as I said. In those years there were no Numa. Several years went by without them. Pierre established his dominion with ease on the territory of the peaceful Caxinauá. This was one of numerous Caxinauá villages in the State of Amazonia. Pierre imposed peace and order. He destroyed the Caxinauá culture through progress, the new god of the age, and to whom they submitted without complaint, almost happily. From then on the women and children of the Caxinauá became subjects of the plantation by the force of the Colonel's troops. And the little village, infected with typhus, malaria, measles and syphilis almost disappeared, in '91, a third of the population was decimated. The Caxinauás were reduced to a population of 84 farmers, serfs on the Colonel's fields.

Ten years later, with the return of the Numa from the mountains of Peru, the picture changed profoundly.

But not for the Numa.

Straying, on the move, on the alert, wandering from the Andes, pressed on by a perilous winter, they continued lost and free, persistent creatures, prevailing in their endurance. No and no. They reacted to agreement, to touch, to contact. Is there power where there is stamina? The Numa submitted to and took refuge in themselves. In the multiplicity of their limits of strength, insisting on existing in the unforeseeable space. They were, in the beginning, everywhere outside of the power of the plantation, in the forest network outside of domination. The Numa surrounded the plantation, restricting it to its own limits, hindering its inordinate expansion. The immense plantation (you could travel for days within it), had to halt, restrain itself, retreat, bound by invisibility, of knowing, of encountering, as if they did not exist except in the void of their numberless absence, recovered, nowhere, in the non-delineated. Often they resembled trees and birds of the air. They were not appearance but immanence, and whoever has traveled the Amazon knows what I am talking about, in the ambiguity where everything is uncertainty and unknowable, hermetic, heightened and magnified. The Numa, without revolt, rebellion, raiding, up the river, potential and improbable, mythified, solitary, violent, irreconcilable. Always ready for the attack that did not happen. Destined to kill. The Numa terrified us. They were unknown strategic points in the correlation of the power of nature of which the Numas were the guardians. They were dispersed in an incomprehensible and irregular manner in focal points of strength (it was said that they could survive under water in certain air pockets). They spread out with more density in the space of night, prepared traps with small poisonous snakes on the paths. Oh, the disruptions! Cold beings, clouded by legends from the mountains, gods that would come down to punish us for nocturnal offenses. It was if their eyes were fixed everywhere so that people felt they were being watched by those strange creatures. At times, they let themselves be seen. Many trappers tried to hunt them down and shoot them (and they were dead days or months later in cold and precise revenge). They moved about rapidly, like a puff of air, transitory; they're not there and then break out in front of us. Naked, groaning like a wounded beast, a bird. Just sound. To regroup on paths already covered, leaving deliberate footprints. They cut through the air with whistling arrows, marking their tracks everywhere, in the tenacious houses of our fear. They crossed interconnected networks within the plantation, infiltrating, traversing, arriving in defiance at the garden of the Palácio. They were there without being there. Agile, dangerous nomads. Naked men with enormous, dark phalli. Some months they disappeared, vanished, atomized, disunited, quiescent, gone away forever. Or just wind integrated with the leaves of the trees. But then, a fleeting arrow mixed its trajectory with the air to say that they never went away, they were always there, beautiful, their almond and dark eyes, large exposed sexes, in bodies of grown-up children. In a certain way delicate. But mere phantoms, they were enchanted; the prehistoric forest neutralized them, the forest of gold and milk. Bataillon had advanced into the most secret part of the forest, up the bayou. Now he skirted the imprecise boundaries of death. Between the soldiers and the forest of the Numa a tactical reciprocity of respect and fury was established. Pierre left presents for them, glass beads, knives and fruit on wooden trays. The Numa never touched them. There was no channel between the plantations and the Numas. The plantation, waiting. Observant, the Numa proscribed boundaries which they broke. Pierre avoided war, sought a political solution, held back, acted according to the nature of his single-minded principle without the risk of paying the high price of death.

That thin, short (five foot two in height) man, always elegant, stiff, erect, his head held high disguised his small stature, tiny mustache à la Carlitos, by which he appeared arrogant but without ridicule, haughty, noble, grandson of the Duke de Cellis, one of the most aristocratic families of Spain, which came from ancient Rome, intelligent, cultured, speaking several languages fluently, always with his wife, Dona Iphigenia Vellarde, catholic, illegitimate daughter of the grandee, Don Angel Vellarde, a woman who loved the Amazon and its wild extravagance, a candy maker, embroideress, in her simple and elegant clothes of warm, pink silk, with two big diamonds falling like tears from her earlobes, two frightful suns – her ancestry was used by her husband in the alliances and treaties of the Acre War, when Pierre made a clever game of duplicity with Brazilians and Bolivians, remaining in peace with the two and drawing equal advantage from both, mainly availing himself of the fact of being protected from the war by an uncrossable mass of 400 square kilometers of forest, marshes and flowers – yes, it was impossible to conceive, I tried, how this nobleman set in the forest, surrounded by all that Parisian luxury and his many books – the classics, Schopenhauer, Rousseau – like a conquistador of the Amazon, of the vast empire of latex ( - “Such is latex”, he used to say, “elastic like character. And because of that it comes out of those trees like a sticky prima materia, like viscous fluids under the body's skin, pus, white, watery plasma, gum, wild sap of mucus which makes the forest bleed clammily – such is the rubber latex: the blood of the Amazon that we collect like a strange evil and for which some day we will have to pay a very big price”) - yes, this man was not morally disturbed in his abysses and the extremes he went to to transform and fortify the plantation into a concentration camp during the Numa dominance.

No, most acutely obsessed, Pierre Bataillon had inherited the spiritual remains of the monarchy of great kings, admired by nations, or raw material of literature – as if he were anticipating as obvious that the Numa would come to prostrate themselves and pay homage to his supreme character and style – the uncommon reactions of the man, to be determining, outside the indistinct mass of humanity, belonging to the number of those who represent something exceptional, who distinguish their name with an internal image for their own use, associating themselves with the metaphysics of the creation of a peculiar superman and inscribed in the atmosphere of everyday fantasy.

About 500 yards upstream from the thatched shed there was a stretch of the river where Hell's Bayou closed in - still flowing, deep, dark and cold - the Tucumã Bend, beyond which no one ever ventured, a universe ruled by the Numa - “Don't go beyond there”, uncle Genaro said that evening. “You should never cross the river”. The boundaries projected out on the river bank overlaying marks significant to life, watchfulness and warning of danger in unfathomable and lines (“Do not cross!”). Because of this, that place, forbidden, different, attracted you all the more onto the steel blade of the repeated and interior mirage, which liberated the sharp tendency toward a leap into unforeseen trouble. So, those two men stayed like frogs in their pond on this side. I was condemned to what was some kine of family with those protagonists of the enigma of my silence and anxious gestural communication, relatives like mute animals, who justified their forsaken lives with monosyllabic grumbling, living without women or friendships, existing in a geographical prison where recall was only possible under the pressure of a savage materialism and militaristic solidarity: at dawn they left for the road as for death, impelled by a biological order, always leaving me with the daily chores: fumigate the rubber balls in the ever the same awareness that I had lost my way to paradise - yes, I cast my fishing pole which filled the idle hours, idle days, idle time, I thought without thinking - weeks, months, it would be so year after year until I died, life just this, the world merely expectation - until everything came to stagnate in the mute and null anonymity of a circular and sterile monotony, of a mechanistic life masked by impersonal catastrophe - because I knew that I would get sick - and ailing here would die without absolution. I divined my insignificant individuality in the class condemned to die of malaria in the abyss of the forest, eaten by wild beasts.

But life is a road that can suddenly branch off. And it happened one day, that day - and it was exactly 3 o'clock in the afternoon, a calm afternoon, hot and, above all, among the trees, green - at the Tucumã Bend there was a trunk I sat on, waiting - it was well before the full bend of the river: the place was good for fishing because the bayou, at this height, jutted into a rapid and free turnaround, nearly overflowing, a pool-like inlet, half-closed off and dark (a tall man could hide above the shore) below the general singing of birds with long beaks and colorful feathers - when, on purpose, surprising, in an indecorous and comical manner, there appeared those little naked Indian girls.

It was true after all, the Numa were returning from their legendary and unknown mountains in Peru. Gigantic and ferocious they were indeed returning, moving into the equally imaginary regions of the Pique Yaco River, the Rio Toro and even farther beyond. Still they never appeared, wherever they were: they were not visible, out in the open, in the forefront, distinct, unless on the bias, diffusely met with, merely suspected in the obliquity of sight. But those girls there - poetry fabricates one world, prose another - were very real, more real and human than their brothers, rebellious males. Neither was it a retaliation for all the exaction endured by the forest during the rubber tappers' occupation. Where there is power, is it exercised? For me, they were one in the other, embracing each other under the water which was so natural for their little hands that I caught sight of from my perspective of fantasy. Real, humanly real, there on the other side – the first Numa females that appeared in all the world, beautiful as the sun on the furrow of the Earth.

I choked from emotion. I cast my fishhook. I was cramped, stooped low to the ground, protected by a clump of brush. I knew the Numa were near, on the low water mark. I had never really seen any, but we knew they were around because game had disappeared! - where the Indians are there is no game, because they eat it all – pig, curassow, tapir – they killed them with arrows of strong sugarcane plume grass and bows from palm trees, the spiny peachpalm, bacaba palm, pataua, paracouba, itauba. All trumpet bush? And tapir, mostly tapir which they especially liked – tasty, always crossing their paths. No kidding. I stayed there until they left. It was enchantment! I didn't tell my uncle and brother who would have seen I was done in, if they had ever looked at me. And, in the middle of the night I dreamed intensely. I was ill and bruised. I dreamed about the older girl – her whole body in union with mine, in the middle of the night my uncle awoke to my sighs and came in, I don't know why, with firearm in hand, he shook me but went away, calmed down into sleep, snoring lightly – my uncle, a light sleeper, always with a firearm beside him.

On the following day, at about the same time, the girls reappeared and I was the navigator of my obsession and looked for the lost intimacy in the substantial benefit of that reappearance, sliding on that humid earth of the Amazon of my former days.

This, however, happened on the third day: They were there almost at the same time, bathing, and I – to see them better, closer – set myself in the foliage of a fallen trumpet tree from where I had to get out, headlong - nearly howling – helter-skelter, totally covered with a coat of carnivorous sauba ants. I jumped into the water. The Indian girls looked at me. They were not frightened. They did not budge. It was if they already were aware of me. They had already seen me, those other times before. They stayed where they were. Without fear. Not surprised. Impersonal. Covered with blood, I washed away the ants clinging to me with their barbs. I, noisy and making a scene, leg bleeding. Then laughing at my being in the water and putting my head out, I yelled to them: “Speak!” Serious, they did not reply. Statues. The unexpected dunk revived me. The two girls were there almost within reach of my hand. Tranquil. Joyous is what they were on the line of the dry talweg. I played in the water. - “Say something!” I yelled to them. The rapid and cold current of the river and my amazement carried me. To get closer, I got out of the confines of the pool and entered vigorously into the current. I swam blind. I got out farther, downstream, pulled by the current. - “May I come closer?” - I hollered, certain that they understood me. In a few strokes I would reach them. In agony, I dove down into the water and crossed. Sometimes we do what the impulse of our heart bids even if it's the last thing in our life. I emerged in front, yards beyond. I came through the reeds on the shore, naked without care, getting closer. They were not such children when I saw then. They looked at me without fear. Their bodies radiated a strong light. I, more blinded, came closer. I had never seen them like that. And I tried to see them through the light.

It was then the smaller one came up to me and touched my stomach with her tiny hand as if attracted and surprised by my white skin. It was a cute thing to see. Suddenly I reached out my hand to touch her also, on the head - and then, she bit me. A quick bite. I felt it and shouted. With pain, with surprise. Blood shot out on my hand, the swift and ferocious little creature. That was it. Thus, the impersonal attitude, then rapidly dissolved. Did they become disenchanted? I was now in front of them. The two started to laugh, and they came assure me, together, and laughed a lot. Hi hi hi they laughed. And I also laughed. They laughed and supported me laughing. It was just as I the Narrator say.

They did not appear on the fourth day.

The river was a wilderness. I had not succeeded, in the madness of the previous day, the fullness of which, that a while ago, in me, was only an obscure and nameless impulse of desire. I had risked my life. I had been capable of actually changing my life, which was worth it, which was worth life, in a surprisingly twisted equivalence – the course of life is not a straight road -, but in the initiation to the Parcae, I trace the name of “daemon” with serpents . My truth. Tamped by time. An ultimate truth to be implanted inside the head in the catalogue of the best and most ancient profundities, in the subversive imagination of terror and violence – to love them for me would be to demystify: the fugitive girls, in the quickest of action, in an instant they could not be caught, in the desirability of the gesture, in the discernment of accounts.

I awoke suddenly in the middle of the night: the whole forest was in flames! It wasn't a dream, oh no, I saw it wasn't right away and heard the shots from my uncle's firearm. Shouting and shouting. In the exposed, red clarity, among black clouds of smoke, my brother contorted in great pain, riddled with arrows of pig bristles - a pin cushion of pain! And my uncle, behind the balls of rubber, in a bad way, dying. The Numa attacked us in the middle of the night, but... I was still alive and unhurt.

Then I knew nothing more of what happened. I didn't know how I escaped and dove into the invisible water of the bayou of cold and swift darkness, and I was carried along and taken away. From afar the shots became silent at once, I no longer saw fire with its serpent flames and a dark current embraced me, enveloped me and carried me on. I hit into sticks and rocks but I kept on and on in the pitch black night, weightless, rapt and unthinking, with the stars, as if all this was the continuation of my dream in the hidden and very dull, blind night, hypnotic, horrifying, continuing thus for many hours among shadows, secrets and tears of everything in dissolution … So it was.