The Testament (21 page)

“When the floods stop,” Jevy continued, “we have the dry season. Grasslands, marshes, more lagoons and swamps than anyone can count. The cycle—the flooding and the dry season—produces more wildlife than any place in the world. We have six hundred and fifty species of birds here, more than Canada and the U.S. combined. At least two hundred and sixty species of fish. Snakes, caiman, alligators, even giant otters live in the water.”

As if on cue, he pointed to a thicket at the edge of a small forest. “Look, it’s a deer,” he said. “We have lots of deer. And lots of jaguars, giant anteaters,
capivaras
, tapirs, and macaws. The Pantanal is filled with wildlife.”

“You were born here?”

“I took my first breath in the hospital in Corumbá, but I was born on these rivers. This is my home.”

“You told me your father was a river pilot.”

“Yes. When I was a small boy I began going with him. Early in the morning, when everybody was asleep, he would allow me to take the wheel. I knew all the main rivers by the time I was ten.”

“And he died on the river.”

“Not this, but the Taquiri, to the east. He was guiding a boat of German tourists when a storm hit them. The only survivor was a deckhand.”

“When was this?”

“Five years ago.”

Forever the trial lawyer, Nate had a dozen more questions about the accident. He wanted the details—details win lawsuits. But he said, “I’m sorry,” and let it go.

“They want to destroy the Pantanal,” Jevy said.

“Who?”

“Lots of people. Big companies that own big farms. To the north and east of the Pantanal they are clearing large sections of land for farms. The main crop is
soja
, which you call soybeans. They want to export it. The more forests they clear, the more runoff collects in the Pantanal. Sediment rises each year in our rivers. Their farm soil is not good, so the companies use many sprays and fertilizers to grow crops. We get the chemicals. Many of the big farms dam up rivers to create new pastures. This upsets the flooding cycle. And mercury is killing our fish.”

“How does mercury get here?”

“Mining. To the north, they mine gold, and they do it with mercury. It runs into the rivers, the rivers eventually run into the Pantanal. Our fish swallow it and die. Everything gets dumped into the Pantanal. Cuiabá is a city of a million people to the east. It has no waste treatment. Guess where its sewage goes.”

“Doesn’t the government help?”

Jevy managed a bitter laugh. “Have you heard of Hidrovia?”

“No.”

“It’s a big ditch, to be cut through the Pantanal. It is supposed to link Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay. It is supposed to save South America. But it will drain the Pantanal. And our government is supporting it.”

Nate almost said something pious about environmental responsibility, then remembered that his countrymen were the
biggest energy hogs the world had ever seen. “It’s still beautiful,” he said.

“It is.” Jevy finished his coffee. “Sometimes I think it’s too big for them to destroy.”

They passed a narrow inlet where more water entered the Paraguay. A small herd of deer waded through the floodwaters, nibbling at green vines, oblivious to the noise from the river. Seven deer, two of which were spotted fawns.

“There is a small trading post a few hours away,” Jevy said, getting to his feet. “We should be there before dark.”

“What are we shopping for?”

“Nothing, I guess. Fernando is the owner, and he hears everything on the river. Maybe he will know something about missionaries.”

Jevy emptied his cup into the river and stretched his arms. “Sometimes he has beer for sale.
Cerveja.
”

Nate kept his eyes on the water.

“I think we should not buy any,” Jevy said, and walked away.

Fine with me, thought Nate. He drained his cup, sucking down the grounds and grains of sugar.

A cold brown bottle, perhaps Antarctica or Brahma, the two brands he’d already sampled in Brazil. Excellent beer. A favorite haunt had been a college bar near Georgetown with 120 foreign beers on the menu. He’d tried them all. They served roasted peanuts by the basket and expected you to throw the hulls on the floor. When his pals from law school were in town they always met at the bar and reminisced about the old days. The beer was ice cold, the peanuts hot and salty, the floor cracked with hulls when you walked, and the girls were young and loose. The place had been there forever, and during each trip through rehab and sobriety it was the bar Nate missed most.

He began to sweat, though the sun was hidden and there was a cool breeze. He buried himself in the hammock and prayed for sleep, a deep hard coma that would take him past their little stop
and into the night. The sweating worsened until his shirt was soaked. He started a book about the demise of the Brazilian Indians, then tried to sleep again.

He was wide awake when the engine was throttled down and the boat moved close to the bank. There were voices, then a gentle bump as they docked at the trading post. Nate slowly removed himself from the hammock and returned to the bench, where he sat.

It was a country store of sorts, built on stilts—a tiny building, made of unpainted boards with a tin roof and a narrow porch where, not surprisingly, a couple of locals were lounging with cigarettes and tea. A smaller river circled behind it and disappeared into the Pantanal. A large fuel tank was braced to the side of the building.

A flimsy pier jutted into the river to dock the boats. Jevy and Welly eased along the pier carefully, because the currents were strong. They chatted with the
pantaneiros
on the porch, then went through the open door.

Nate had vowed to remain on the boat. He went to the other side of the deck, sat on the opposite bench, stuck his arms and legs through the rail, and watched the full width of the river go by. He would stay up on the deck, on the bench, with his arms and legs locked in the rail. The coldest beer in the world couldn’t pull him away.

As he had learned, there was no such thing as a short visit in Brazil. Especially on the river, where visits were rare. Jevy bought thirty gallons of diesel fuel to replace what had been lost in the storm. The engine started.

“Fernando says there is a woman missionary. She works with the Indians.” Jevy handed him a bottle of cold water. They were moving again.

“Where?”

“He’s not sure. There are some settlements to the north, near
Bolivia. But the Indians don’t move on the river, so he doesn’t know much about them.”

“How far is the nearest settlement?”

“We should be close by morning. But we can’t take this boat. We must use the little one.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“You remember Marco, the farmer whose cow was killed by our plane?”

“Sure I do. He had three little boys.”

“Yes. He was there yesterday,” Jevy said, pointing to the store, which was disappearing around a bend. “He comes once a month.”

“Were the boys with him?”

“No. It’s too dangerous.”

What a small world. Nate hoped the boys had spent the money he’d given them for Christmas. He watched the store until it was out of sight.

Perhaps on the return leg he’d be well enough to stop and have a cool one. Just a couple, to celebrate their successful journey. He crawled back into the safety of his hammock, and cursed himself for his weakness. In the wilderness of a gigantic swamp he had had a near brush with alcohol, and for hours his thoughts had been consumed with nothing else. The anticipation, the fear, the sweating, and the scheming of ways to get a drink. Then the near miss, the escape through no strength of his own, and now in the aftermath the fantasy of renewing his romance with alcohol. A few drinks would be fine because then he could stop. That was his favorite lie.

He was just a drunk. Run him through a designer rehab clinic at a thousand bucks a day, and he was still an addict. Run him through AA in the basement of a church on Tuesday nights, and he was still a drunk.

His addictions gripped him, and desperation settled around
Nate. He was paying for the damned boat; Jevy worked for him. If he insisted that they turn around and go straight to the store, they would do so. He could buy all the beer Fernando owned, load it on ice below the deck, and sip Brahma all the way to Bolivia. And there wasn’t a damned thing anyone could do about it.

Like a mirage, Welly appeared with a smile and a cup of fresh coffee. “
Vou cozinhar
,” he said. I’m going to cook.

Food would help, Nate thought. Even another platter of beans, rice, and boiled chicken. Food would satisfy his tastes, or at least divert his attention from other cravings.

He ate slowly, on the upper deck, alone and in the dark, swatting thick mosquitoes away from his face. When he was finished, he sprayed repellent from his neck to his bare feet. The seizure was over, only slight aftershocks gripped him. He could no longer taste beer or smell the peanuts from his favorite bar.

He retreated to his sanctuary. It was raining again, a quiet rain with no wind or thunder. Josh had sent along four books for his reading pleasure. All the briefs and memos had been read and reread. Nothing remained but the books. He’d already read half of the thinnest one.

He burrowed deep in the hammock and went back to reading the sad history of the native people of Brazil.

________

WHEN THE Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral first stepped on Brazilian soil, on the coast of Bahia, in April of 1500, the country had five million Indians, scattered among nine hundred tribes. They spoke 1,175 languages, and except for the usual tribal skirmish they were peaceful people.

After five centuries of getting themselves “civilized” by Europeans, the Indian population had been decimated. Only 270,000 survived, in 206 tribes using 170 languages. War, murder, slavery, territorial losses, diseases—no method of exterminating Indians had been neglected by those from civilized cultures.

It was a sick and violent history. If the Indians were peaceful and tried to cooperate with the colonists, they were subject to strange diseases—smallpox, measles, yellow fever, influenza, tuberculosis—for which they had no natural defenses. If they did not cooperate, they were slaughtered by men using weapons more sophisticated than arrows and poison darts. When they fought back and killed their attackers, they were branded as savages.

They were enslaved by miners, ranchers, and rubber barons. They were driven from their ancestral homes by any group with enough guns. They were burned at the stake by priests, hunted by armies and gangs of bandits, raped at will by any able-bodied man with the desire, and slaughtered with impunity. At every point in history, whether crucial or insignificant, when the interests of native Brazilians conflicted with those of white people, the Indians had lost.

You lose for five hundred years, and you expect little from life. The biggest problem facing some modern-day tribes was the suicide of its young people.

After centuries of genocide, the Brazilian government finally decided it was time to protect its “noble savages.” Modern-day massacres had brought international condemnation, so bureaucracies were established and laws were passed. With self-righteous fanfare, some tribal lands were returned to the natives and lines were drawn on government maps declaring them to be safe zones.

But the government was also the enemy. In 1967, an investigation into the agency in charge of Indian affairs shocked most Brazilians. The report revealed that agents, land speculators, and ranchers—thugs who either worked for the agency or had the agency working for them—had been systematically using chemical and bacteriological weapons to wipe out Indians. They issued clothing to the Indians that was infected with smallpox and tuberculosis germs. With airplanes and helicopters, they bombed Indian villages and land with deadly bacteria.

And in the Amazon Basin and other frontiers, ranchers and miners cared little for lines on maps.

In 1986, a rancher in Rondônia used crop dusters to spray nearby Indian land with deadly chemicals. He wanted to farm the land, but first had to eliminate the inhabitants. Thirty Indians died, and the rancher was never prosecuted. In 1989, a rancher in Mato Grosso offered rewards to bounty hunters for the ears of murdered Indians. In 1993, gold miners in Manaus attacked a peaceful tribe because they would not leave their land. Thirteen Indians were murdered, and no one was ever arrested.

In the 1990s, the government had aggressively sought to open up the Amazon Basin, a land of vast natural resources to the north of the Pantanal. But the Indians were still in the way. The majority of those surviving inhabited the Basin; in fact, it was estimated that as many as fifty jungle tribes had been lucky enough to escape contact with civilization.

Now civilization was on the attack again. The abuse of Indians was growing as miners and loggers and ranchers pushed deep into the Amazon, with the support of the government.

________

THE HISTORY was fascinating, if depressing. Nate read for four hours nonstop and finished the book.

He walked to the wheelhouse and drank coffee with Jevy. The rain had stopped.

“Will we be there by morning?” he asked.

“I think so.”

The lights from the boat rocked gently up and down with the current. It seemed as though they were hardly moving.

“Do you have any Indian blood?” Nate asked, after some hesitation. It was a personal matter, one that in the United States no one would dare ask.

Jevy smiled without taking his gaze from the river. “All of us have Indian blood. Why do you ask?”

“I’ve been reading the history of Indians in Brazil.”

“So what do you think?”

“It’s pretty tragic.”

“It is. Do you think the Indians have been treated badly here?”

“Of course they have.”

“What about in your country?”

For some reason, General Custer was the first thought. At least the Indians had won something. And we didn’t burn them at the stake, or spray them with chemicals, or sell them into slavery. Did we? What about all those reservations? Land everywhere.