Six: Julia
At the apogee of the price of rubber, it was quoted on the London Stock Exchange at 655 pounds per ton, a speculative quote which benefited the interests of British companies in the Orient. It was the last year of the Amazon Empire. Subsequently, the Teatro Amazonas closed its doors opening only once two years later for Villa-Lobos to give a cello concert on June 12, 1912. Immediately after the tragedy, the junior Bataillon arrived from Paris and received Antonio Ferreira on board: there he sold the Manixi plantation, except for the Palácio, in a transaction that was never made clear. As he always did, José left for Hell's Bayou without setting foot in Manaus.
Pierre's son Zequinha was a handsome young man, wild, educated, delicate, strong, Apollonian body with soft, golden tan skin, mysterious, very dark almond-shaped eyes. His fine hair fluttered in the air. To some, a half-Indian, to others a Parisian snob who used to go deep into the forest with Paxiúba and his men in search of adventures, like the time he forayed into the mountains of the Pique Yaco River in search of Numa, without coming across any. He was not married and did not have a girlfriend other than Maria Caxinauá. Paxiúba slept at his feet like a dog. Maria bathed him. He was born in the middle of the river in 1890, on board the Adamastor, a birth foretold by shamans as that of a god coming from a distant star named Thor. In 1854, Visconde de Mauá barred foreign nations from sailing the Amazon and held out until his fall. The Santa Maria de la Mar Dulce met up with the Adamastor a few months after José was born and, to save him from malaria, which was decimating the children of the area, he was taken and shipped with his mother via England to Strasbourg where he was left with his uncle Levy, with whom he lived his infant years, first on the Place Kleber No. 9, then above the Pharmacie du Dome until 1894 when he returned to Manixi. He stayed another three years before leaving for Paris in '97 where he lived on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. He did not return until he was 15 years of age, in 1905, shortly before the attack of the Numa, which was in the middle of November. In 1906 he was back in Paris for his studies.
After the massacre, Maria Caxinauá hid and stayed for some time in a thicket of brush near the Palácio, totally alone. She thought of dying and did not want to be seen anymore. Pierre had about five hundred men in the vicinity, hunters, foresters, rubber tappers, balata gatherers, freelance tappers, escorts, field workers, fishermen, laborers, servants, housemaids. No one. No one saw her. To be invisible when one wants to be is the same as being invisible. How we were easy targets of hurled snakes, arrows, darts and blowguns. The blowgun discharges a very small and fast dart into the air and is very precise and lethal; it is poisoned with a type of curare made with uirari vine and venom from snakes, flies, spiders and scorpions mixed together in a kind of ritual. It paralyzes the nervous system and kills by asphyxiation. Some Indians use snakes as weapons. A certain Othoniel das Neves, from Juruá, famous for his cruelty and murders, died bitten by a rattlesnake found under his pillow. Painted with special herbs, the Indians elude the best hunting dogs. In the Numa massacre only charred bodies were found. Almost dead, Maria had to be taken quickly to Manaus by Frei Lothar and Zequinha. It was the worst war in the region up to then. After that, Pierre Bataillon, who liked witty expressions, and to lift the morale of his troops who were beginning to respect and fear the strength of the Numa warriors' resistance, in spite of the difference in weapons they were using, came to call the Indians “ new Ajuricabas”, a reference to the hero of the Manau who in 1723 confronted and defeated the soldiers of the Portuguese crown under the command of Manuel Braga.
“Now we're declaring war on the “Ajuricabas”, he said to João Beleza, a hired assassin and perverse and cruel bandit who was his war commander.
Ajuricaba lived on the Hiiaá river, at the left bank of the Rio Negro between the Padauari and the Aujurá in the district of Lamalonga. When he went to rescue his son, he fell into an ambush and was taken prisoner by the Crown in 1729, which wanted him taken alive to torture him with punishment and death. On the way Ajuricaba got loose from the clasp which was fastening him and with manacled hands and feet started killing Portuguese soldiers before suddenly hurling himself into the dark waters of the Rio Negro which condemned him. Because of that the waters of this river are sterile, there are hardly any fish in them. But soon after, Belchior Mendes de Moraes went on a shooting rampage of 300 Indian villages, in a sacrificial killing of twenty-eight thousand Indians on the shores of a river which came to be known as the Rio Urubu. Artillerymen under the command of a priest with a pious name – Father José dos Inocentes, later the name of a street in the red-light district of Manaus – dispersed contaminated clothing that disseminated an epidemic that devastated forty thousand Indians with smallpox, an infectious, contagious disease whose virulence rots the body still alive with eruptions of pus and rachialgia, papules, pustules, blindness and the agony of a slow bacteriological death; the corpses are devoured by flies, gnats, giant mosquitos, matuca flies, beetles, rove beetles, horseflies, catuqui gnats, wasps, suvelas, venomous beetles and mainly ants. Man-eating umbrella ants can devour a cadaver in twenty minutes. On the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad in 1908, corpses were spread out on the road to be buried (30,430 workmen interned in the Candelaria Hospital) and when the locomotive returned there were only dry bones, cleaned and eaten by umbrella ants. Also, fire ants, swarm ants, stinging ants, manhura ants, sauba ants, red-brown ants, worker ants, tree ants, tracuá ants and the worst, the tucandera ant, furry, enormous, poisonous, a single bite is all it takes to kill a man, with acute pain and fever – and it was used by the Indians in the male initiations of boys, who had to stick their arm in a gourd full of tucanderas and endure to prove they were men. And the leaf cutting ant, the sauba, the warrior ant and the army ant. Von Martius describes whole populations fleeing from ants. Sugar ants could make an army retreat!
A week after the death of the wife of the rubber tapper Laurie Costa and immediately right after the massacre of the Caxinauá village by Numa warriors, Pierre Bataillon formed a military unit under the command of João Beleza to confront the invasion. Then regulars began to march in pursuit of the enemy. The possibility of a frontal attack by the Numa was not dismissed and an emergency drill was carried out since the majority of the men had never been under fire; they were north-easterners who swore by the success of their knives. The Manixi garrison had about 150 men armed with 45-caliber English Webley II revolvers and Winchester 94 American repeating rifles of eight 44-caliber cartridges. They were dressed in boots, bandoliers, rawhide breeches and vests to withstand thorns and snakes. Equipment followed on mules and canoes. Recruits, armed men, swift Caingangue bushmen determined the location of the Numa camp and active troops advanced quickly in barges attacking repeatedly in rapid incursions and achieved significant victories, killing some Indians and keeping the Numa under fire inside the forest. But the Numa fled and disappeared.
João Beleza, who was lame, still pursued and sought them out for a week, but only caught up with old people and women carrying children who could not run and were immediately executed. Lock, stock and barrell, they were all killed thus in cold blood crushing the heads of the children who were running from the discharge of bullets.
One day João Beleza, who was camped in the evening on the shores of the Pique Yaco river to wait the Acre with new provisions and as the day began to dawn, ordered commandos to proceed forward along the river advancing slowly with mules and canoes that were carrying heavy combat equipment, when a white-skinned man named Julio, who was walking ahead, stopped and, cocking his rifle, lifted to take aim, fired a shot that echoed in the vast Amazon atmosphere. Then, a scream of a woman in agony emanated from a thicket of brush; she went running toward the forest; she was carrying something, a kind of ball that she was holding with both arms to her breast, hiding it from the pointed rifles of pursuers ready to shoot. She ran quickly until up ahead she fell stretched out on the ground, dead by the barrel of João Beleza himself. João Beleza cut her down in the space between her hiding place on the water's edge and the border of the forest. But the Indian woman, upon the impact of the 44-caliber bullet that crushed her ribs and shoulder, let go of that ball wrapped in straw from her arms onto the ground from where it went rolling down toward the river.
It was a baby girl. A new born that the Indian had just delivered. João Beleza took it and held in the air, saw that it was a girl and lifting her up said, “You will be called Julia!” - and she was placed in a fiber hunting bag between the bullet cartridges on a raincoat. When the commando returned to Manixi, they carried her to the shack of João Beleza, who wanted her to bring up.
Oh, I remember that little girl, how I remember her! From when she was a tiny infant, a child barely two feet in height and different in everything – she never cried or whimpered, she did not talk or make any noise whatsoever. No. She was not happy or sad, just a being, a being who observed, a mysterious being who looked without fear or terror, as if she saw nothing with her dark enigmatic eyes. Yes, that was Julia, I neither invent nor lie – she did not get sick, beg for food, and stayed motionless in a corner, without moving, not requiring care, growing up, growing up strange and mute as if she knew what would happen. When she was still a little girl, a piranha from Lake Quati hollowed out a spherical piece of her thigh, tearing away a chunk of soft flesh. Julia just laughed and laughed, “hee, hee,” she kept laughing under her breath, as if the wound gave her pleasure.
João Beleza treated her like a daughter. Years later, Julia prepared meals for him, cleaned the shack, took care of the animals and tamed them. And she must have been an extraordinary lover as João Beleza always slept with her.
Seven: Disappearance
The reader is not going to believe what I am going to relate, as I have seen wonders that even now surprise me. How, not returning to Paris to finish his studies, José Bataillon (he would be twenty-eight years old in 1918) remained on Hell's Bayou and led a strange life, by whimsy, removed from normal customs and expectations; the tappers withdrew several leagues from the Palácio, next to the Caxinauá and what remained of them within the boundaries of Amazonia. Let us now descend into this unknown world.
Apart from Maria Caxinauá, at Manixi there now lived the strapling caboclo Paxiúba, the boy Mundico and his mother, the cook at the Palácio, Isaura Botelho (the mother of Benito Botelho who was living in Manaus, taken, as I said, by Frei Lothar and then left in the care of Padre Pereira at the Vassourinha orphanage). I, Ribamar de Souza, also stayed on at the Palácio, still a young man, having come from Patos in search of my brother Antonio and our uncle Genaro – now both dead. There was as well the Indian Arimoque, whose fantastic stories still spread throughout the region even today. The lame João Beleza and some men of the guard stayed at the big shed at a certain distance. The Maacu Ivete was married to Antonio Ferreira and lived in Manaus, - Ferreira separated from Glorinha “the Dullard”, daughter of Commander Gabriel Gonçalves da Cunha, and was frequently mentioned in the social chronicle of the Amazonas Comercial with a certain irony. The proprietor of the newspaper, Abraão Gadelha, a political enemy of the Commander, had been on the brink of ruin but was saved by the intervention of Dona Constança das Neves, wife of Juca das Neves who disbursed a fortune in social works.
But let's not waste time.
When the urutu viper bites, it causes severe pain and the flesh swells up; it becomes a dark purple until appearance of hemorrhaging and death. Now the rattlesnake bite attacks the central nervous system, the pain goes away, vision becomes blurry, the victim slowly becomes blind and starts to lose movement in the body, at first the fingers and toes. Then come pains in the neck, ever stronger, paralysis will ensue, the death process will be seen to progress from the extremities to the center, the body becoming rigid, hard, death comes with clammy rigidity, by asphyxiation when the diaphragm hardens. Death conquers the body. The coral snake, like a jeweler's creation, is beautiful, red-yellow, brilliant colors and short fangs but rarely bites. This beauty should not delude since biting, it kills. But the worst of all is the bushmaster, large, aggressive, strong and, unlike the others, it comes on the attack. It contains a good quantity of venom and remains in ambush on the dark edges of rivers and lakes.
But, reader, we continue silent, alone.
So from what I could gather from newspapers of the time and letters of those close to him, the disappearance of Zequinha Bataillon on the shores of Hell's Bayou occurred in January of 1912. If this was not a work of fiction I could cite in footnotes at the bottom of the page the sources from where I obtained such information. But the disappearance of the son of Pierre Bataillon, a man who lived from the riches in the Alto Juruá, remains shrouded in such mystery, an event forever mythologized in the popular imagination of Amazonia and Acre, and all the hypotheses raised then could not justify, nor explain, at least for me, the reason why I later had recourse to those alternative sources that I had the good fortune to come across, sources still alive, testimony of the main persons involved that I must omit, unfortunately, but which ingenious readers may soon discover if they know my family. In the meantime I know and I said it before that this is merely a work of fiction and as such mendacious, among the several which exist in the literature of the Amazon, but a surprise awaits the reader, in spite of this, by what the thread of destiny will reveal. All the facts disclosed here were significant realities and actually happened for my imagination and, if not exactly as I describe them, perhaps they would be even more extraordinary if it was not I who were writing them in the passages of the sections of the composition of this complex narrative.
Eight: Rats
We come to the point in this road where I should state that, at a certain time, I remember well seeing a dark streak between the floorboards. It was something that went by like a moving, dark straight line. A cinematographic dash, continuous. Then it looked like a straight, tiny snake infiltrating itself between the cracks of the worn-out structure, something passed through time, traveled across the world, flowing as if it were gliding to bore and hollow out the earth. Then it appeared as a larger body, a solid body – an end, a tail. Indeed, it was the tail of a rat.
Perhaps a big rat came out of there ahead of me from its rats nest. Maybe. Ratania of Pará. Maybe a large rat, an enormous rat, like a water rat, a swamp rat, gnawing, chewing under ground, eating away husks, nibbling and gnawing on crusts, consuming, devouring, in constant mastication. Or more. Or the black back, or dark gray, with a tail nearly six inches long, leather, tail of leather and a field mouse, murids – and behind, others are coming, house mice, small rats, and another black rat with a bristly coat, a rather fat mouse, maggot mouse, spiny mouse, palm mouse, spring mouse and more. More. And there were many more rats entering the big shed, vermin, varmints, tens, hundreds, thousands – Manixi was being consumed by rats and not only at night but even at any time of the day.
I am telling that this happened in those years, later, as I witnessed the process of decline and death of Manixi. To describe what I saw then, I will say that rats, daring, voracious, famished, were multiplying, aggressively. All the earnest efforts of João Beleza, who was managing the property, all his struggle against the rats furthered nothing, the rats did not disappear and they increased day by day; it was like there was nothing that would rid us of them, as even cats were unsuccessful; the cats could do nothing, they ended up dead, corpses of cats pillaged and eaten by hungry rats, avid, manifold, as if it were the last judgment.
Taken over by his fury, João Beleza got a boa constrictor to frighten them, the rats, and rid the big shed of them, but the snake disappeared and then the trader Saraiva Marques, a man the worth of many men, showed up; he recommended and sold João Beleza a rat poison having a base of Prussian green arsenic. João Beleza proceeded thus to feed the rats every night serving them food in a large pan. The rats were eating a puree of manioc for days, each time more and more until they were sated and on the last day they ate the poisoned puree.
Julia was laughing. She was the first to make known their demise. She smiled then, and guffawed, high pitched, nervously, “hee, hee, hee”, deliriously; the rats were dying in front of her. She watched them die with an amiable interest, one by one, and looked upon them with affection; Julia dealt with them, crazed and enraptured, saw them die in the light of day, touched them, nestfuls here and there, on the bank of Hell's Bayou she started to laugh outright – the rats seeming to decorate everything, a collar of dead rats lining the water's edge, and there were tens and hundreds and thousands of dead rats; Julia laughing at those moribund beings, she took hold of them by the tail, speaking tenderly; she showed them off and bundling them together, laughing, she threw them into the condemned waters of Hell's Bayou.
Afterwards there was a strange peace at the Manixi plantation.
It came about that João Beleza woke up sick.
He had colic; he went to the latrine but could not defecate, his bowels were burning inside him.
He spent the day like that and ate the soup that Julia gave him. When night fell he was worse, his stomach swelled even more and his arms and legs were falling asleep; they became cold. His vision started to become blurry and darkening; he was dying slowly with pain and putrefaction, since Julia had poisoned him with the rat bait arsenic and on the following day he was completely dead, indeed.
For the first time ever, Julia started to cry. Julia started to cry, and she cried clasping her hands; she cried to the sky and she poured out tears made tender by her immense misfortune.
So it was that she left, without anyone seeing her, and disappeared into the forest without allowing anyone to come near her, like an enchanted being. No one heard anything of her again. No one. She was a young woman when this happened some years later. I don't know exactly when, I just don't know, no, don't know...
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