Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (23 page)

A smell of diarrhea and vomit was in the air.

“Are you in pain? Would you like me to take you to the hospital in Porto Velho?”

I was one of Alfredo’s admirers. He had always been so supportive of me, the white Protestant missionary, and never treated me as though he distrusted me.

“No, I am dying. I told my daughter that there was no need to call you. I will be dead soon.”

As I looked at Alfredo’s dark eyes, and saw his wizened, dark body, weakened by disease, immobile in the bed he had made for himself, I could feel a lump growing in my throat. Keren had tears in her eyes. The children were still at the doorway, staring.

“But let me help you, Alfredo. Surely the doctors in Porto Velho have medicines that can help you.”

“No, Daniel,” he replied. “One knows when one is dying. But there is no reason to be sad. I am happy to end this pain in death. And I can tell you that I am not afraid of death. I know that I am going to be with Jesus. And I am grateful that I had a long life and a very good life. I am surrounded by my children and my grandchildren. They all love me. They are all here for me. I am so thankful for my life and my family.”

In his pain and his sickness and in spite of everyone’s grief, Alfredo brought comfort and communicated a maturity and a fearlessness in the face of death that I had never seen before and have never seen since. I held his right hand. His daughter was rubbing his forehead with a moist cloth and crying. She thanked us for coming. Alfredo thanked us for coming.

“C’mon, kids,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“What is it, Daddy? Is he dying?” Shannon asked.

Kristene and Caleb looked into the room, then at me.

“He is sure that he is dying, yes,” I answered, barely keeping back the tears. “People here seem to know when death is near. But I hope you were all paying attention to Alfredo. He is unafraid. He has faith in Jesus. He knows he is going to heaven. That is how I want to die.”

I felt as though I had been in the presence of a saint.

We turned down the family’s offer of coffee and cookies, saying that we needed to get to the Auxiliadora and see some people before the
recreio
came to pick us up. As I started our motor and pointed the boat downriver, I began to think again, as I often did, about the character of these caboclos. I had learned from hardship that wherever you see a house along the Amazon or its tributaries, you had a haven. That family, one you had never met in your life, would come to your aid in time of need. They would let you stay with them. They would feed you. If need be they would paddle you out to the nearest help. They would give you their last possessions.

That is a code of the Amazon. You help the person in need today, because you may be the person in need tomorrow. I have never witnessed a clearer example of the golden rule.

One thing, however, I have never completely understood about caboclos is their racism against Indians. They say to me frequently, “Daniel, we are Indians who learned how to work. We are not lazy. No one gives us anything. We do not like the Indians because they beg and they always get more help than we do.”

Interestingly, the caboclos themselves call Indians caboclos. Caboclos rarely refer to themselves seriously as caboclos. They refer to themselves as
ribeirinhos
(people who live at the river’s edge) or, more commonly and simply, Brazilians.

This caboclo attitude toward Indians needs to be taken into account if you are looking for uncontacted or little-contacted Indians in the area. Often the caboclos are the only ones who actually know if there are Indians in the region. But you would never ask a caboclo, “Are there Indians around here who still speak their language?” If you wanted to find this out, the best way to ask, at least in certain regions of the Amazon, would be:
“Tem caboclos por aqui que sabem cortar a giria?”
(Are there caboclos here who know how to “cut” the slang?) The reason for this otherwise strange circumlocution is easy enough to discover if you talk to a caboclo long enough: they do not think of the Indians’ speech as a real language, nor do they believe that the various Indian languages are in fact all that different from one another.

C
aboclos believe that they are poor, and they will go to great lengths, even risking their lives, to improve their financial lot. Like most people in the Western economy, they want to get ahead. They feel their poverty desperately. The Pirahãs, on the other hand, though they have less materially than the caboclos, do not have a concept of “poor” and they are satisfied with their material lives. Caboclo interest in money was never more evident to me than during the gold rush days in Porto Velho, in the early 1980s. In those years, gold was discovered in the Madeira River and its tributaries. This was a boom time for the cities along the Madeira, especially Porto Velho. Many caboclos turned their industry to gold prospecting and became rich, at least for a little while. Prospecting was incredibly dangerous work and extremely hard. Caboclos with no training in diving at all volunteered to wear diving helmets and descend without lights, in the pitch black, fifty feet of muddy, fast-moving water, to the bottom of the Madeira, with anacondas, caimans, and stingrays, there to hold large vacuum hoses and move them slowly over the riverbed.

The barge above them supplied their air. Other caboclos on top worked at the filtering system that combined mercury and gravity to separate the gold from the dirt, rocks, and other debris being vacuumed up. Mercury pollution of the Madeira became a serious problem.

If the diver was sending up gold, they pulled on his air hose as a signal to remain where he was. This was extremely dangerous. If caboclos at a neighboring barge saw that the barge next to them was bringing up gold but theirs wasn’t, things could get homicidal. More than one barge crew was killed by their neighbors. Then the encroachers would simply cut the air hose of the diver and send their own diver down to finish him off, if he was not dead already.

My friend Juarez, the son of Godofredo Monteiro, became a diver. He told me that the first time he descended, blood came out of his ears because of the pressure. “But you have to stick with it if you want to get rich,” he advised me.

He did make some money. Eventually he brought up enough gold to pay off his father’s debts, buy a house in town, and set himself up with an ice-cream stand and a keyboard for his budding singing career in the nearby town of Humaitá. Eventually the gold petered out, but the contributions that it made to the economy of Amazonas were only possible because of the industry of the caboclos and other poor Brazilians. The wealthy owned the barges but the poor mined the gold.

In addition to their hard work, this gold rush revealed more than once to me that caboclos have a hilarious sense of humor. During the gold rush, I saw a caboclo walking down the streets of Porto Velho in new clothes, with strings of money tied behind his back.

“What is that money there for?” I asked him.

“Filho de Deus”
(Son of God), he began his response (a common Amazonian vocative expression—intended to be ironic). “I have spent my entire life chasing money. Now that I have found gold, money can chase me for a while.”

Another example of caboclo humor comes from a night along the banks of the Madeira in the city of Humaitá. It was early evening, about 7:30, still
passear
time, when it is customary to stroll with your spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend, and visit friends. It was warm and humid, but not uncomfortable, like a pleasant sauna. Some people gathered in the little plaza. The plaza pavement was of cracked gray concrete, surrounded by low whitewashed walls topped with slick red clay tiles that people could sit on. There were couples dressed in spotless, freshly laundered clothes, often white pants or shorts and bright-colored tops hanging attractively on their hard brown bodies. They were sitting around the plaza eating ice cream, popcorn, and sandwiches. Bugs of all sorts, including mosquitoes, gnats, wasps, and rhinoceros beetles, were flying into lights wherever they could find them. Two-wheeled carts stood at strategic points around the plaza, like New York hot-dog stands, with electric lights and coals burning brightly in hibachis next to the carts, grilling kebabs. The carts carried the makings for sandwiches called
x-baguncas
(cheese messes—the Portuguese letter
x
is pronounced “shees,” which is identical to the Brazilians’ pronunciation of the English word
cheese
). At one end of the plaza an older woman sold sandwiches, while her grandson played with a plastic truck on the concrete pavement of the plaza, close by. At the other end of the plaza was the father. Both carts were doing brisk business. Their sandwiches were very good—ham, mashed potatoes, peas, mayonnaise, frankfurters, and cheese, all at once.

The little boy asked his grandmother something. She said no. He ran across to his father and cried, “Dad, Grandma says I can’t have a Coca Cola.”

The little boy was very angry with his grandmother.

His dad looked at him and after a moment of silence offered a solution: “Let’s go kill her, then,” he said, with apparent sincerity.

The little boy looked at his father, puzzled. Then he responded emotionally, “No, Dad. We can’t kill her. She’s my grandma.”

“You don’t want to kill her?”

“No! That’s Grandma!”

“OK, well, then I have to work.”

“OK.”

And the little boy ran back to his grandma. I could see the dad chuckling to himself.

T
he most influential aspect of caboclo life on the Pirahãs is their beliefs about the supernatural, conveyed in broken sentences and words borrowed from the
Lingua Geral
(the “general tongue” spoken throughout the Amazon during the early history of Brazil). The Pirahãs talk frequently about caboclo beliefs and ask me about them.

These beliefs are an amalgam of Catholic teachings, Tupi and other indigenous folktales and myths, and macumba—an African-Brazilian form of spiritism like voodoo. They believe in the
curupira,
a jungle elf (some say beautiful woman) who leads people into the center of the jungle because its feet point backward and the lost soul thinks it is leaving the jungle. They believe that the pink Amazonian river dolphin turns into a man at night and seduces young virgins.

I remember Godofredo telling me about this dolphin’s transmogrification. He related an elaborate story of how the dolphin, transformed into a pale-skinned man, but still with his enormous and elongated penis, had impregnated an unfortunate girl near the Auxiliadora. After telling me the story, he asked, “Do you believe this, Daniel?”

“Well, I am sure that many people do,” I answered.

“I do believe it,” he said, trying to pressure me with my respect for our friendship to believe him.

Godofredo had two daughters when I met him, Sônia and Regina. Sônia was about my daughter Shannon’s age and Regina was roughly Kristene’s age. When Sônia was twelve years old, during a period when my family and I lived in the state of São Paulo while I was studying for my doctorate at UNICAMP, she and a girlfriend of hers from the Auxiliadora died suddenly with terrible abdominal cramps. From the description we received later by mail (Godo dictated a letter and had a friend take it by boat to Humaitá to mail it), which included vomiting up fecal material and an inability to defecate, we thought it sounded like intestinal blockage, though it could have been botulism or any number of other things.

Godo’s diagnosis was typical of people of the region:
“Ela mixturou
as frutas”
(She mixed her fruits). Caboclos, unlike the Pirahãs, are very superstitious about what they eat—mixing certain foods, they believe, can lead to a quick and painful death. For example, one must never drink milk while eating acidic fruits like mangoes.

Once we visited Godofredo when his son, Juarez, was recovering from a near-death case of falciparum malaria. Godo had watched Juarez writhe for days on the floor in fever, pain, and nauseated agony, yet had made no effort to get medical help for him.

“Why didn’t you take him to the doctor in town?” I asked, somewhat perturbed. “I can still take him to the doctor if you like. I will pay all the expenses.”

“Look, Mr. Daniel. Everyone dies when it is their time to die. That is why one doctor dies in the arms of another. Isn’t that true? Doctors don’t control death,” came the sagacious caboclo reply.

A couple of years later, when Juarez was nearing his seventeenth birthday, I wanted to provide him with an opportunity to better himself financially. I sat down with Godo during a trip through the Auxiliadora to the Pirahãs.

“Godo, we both know that Juarez is a very smart young man. I have seen that he likes to work on record players and radios. I think that with good training, tools, and some financial help, he could start a shop and make good money. I have a friend in Porto Velho, an American radio technician named Ricardo, and he has agreed to teach Juarez his trade, to let him board with him and his wife, and then to supply him with tools when Juarez is done training. I am willing to pay for all of this. What do you think, Godo? I would like to take Juarez with me when I leave the village.”