xx. Alone Together
WHEN HER CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED, morning light sparkled on the river’s gliding brown skin and Tristão sat staring into the fire he had rekindled. She went into the bushes to answer the call of nature and saw by the broken vegetation and troughs in the sand where Kupehaki’s body had been dragged away. Ants and vultures would soon reduce the faithful Tupi to nothing. Isabel’s mouth was dry, her stomach empty. “What shall we do?” she asked Tristão.
“Live, as long as we can,” he said. “We must cross the river. We must keep moving west. Behind us, there is nothing but grief and danger.”
“But Azor and Cordélia …” Tears flowed as she pictured their little pliant limbs and the trust shining in their moist wide gazes, like cups being held up to be filled. Even as hunger and weariness had poured down upon their unprotected frail bodies, they had looked to her with faith.
“We have no strength,” he said, “no power to recover them. Even if we did, how would we protect them against the hazards of this wilderness? They are perhaps better, dearest Isabel, with those who know how to survive. Had the savages meant to slay them, they would have done it on the spot.”
The rage of her helplessness surfaced. He seemed so complacent, stating their desperate situation so bleakly, so reasonably. “Why should we ourselves trouble to live?” she asked him. “What is it to the world”—her gesture reached to include even those stretches beyond the Mato Grosso—“if we die now or later? Why struggle on even for a day, Tristão?”
He looked at her warily—his head tilted slightly to one side, his eyes half-lidded—as he had when he was a mere thievish beach boy, though since those days his face had grown its first creases. “It is a sin even to ask,” he told her. “Our plain duty is to live.”
“There is no one there,” she screamed, her gesture expanded to include the sky, “to care what your duty is! There is no God, our lives are a terrible accident! We are born in a mess of pain, and pain and hunger and lust and fear drive us on for no purpose whatsoever!”
He looked grave, and spoke softly as if to pull back her outcry from the vastness of scandalized silence. “You disappoint me, Isabel,” he said. “Why is the world so elaborate, if it has no purpose? Think of the care that goes into the least little insect and weed around us. You say you love me; then you must love life. Life is a gift, for which we must give something back. I believe in spirits,” he told her, “and in destiny. You were my destiny, and I yours. If we die without a struggle now, we will never reach our fates. Perhaps our fates include rescuing your children, perhaps not. I know this, Isabel: you and I were brought together not to feed children into the world’s maw, but to prove love—to make for the world an example of love. I felt this even in the fusca factory, when it seemed I might never see you again.”
And it was true that she, submitting to his judgment, and enduring with him the coming weeks of wandering and slow starvation, felt more love than ever. Her need to make love to him had never been stronger, not even back in the hotel in São Paulo. In their desperate isolation fucking was a claim upon him, and a comforting of him, and a reminder to herself that she was still there beneath the sky, and a begging for his forgiveness, and a perverse triumph of failing strength. Since they had little food, fucking became their food. Since they were lost, their bodies became their mutual destination, their only home. They were not as skilled at gleaning the bush as Kupehaki had been, so several times they mistakenly ate poison berries, or dug up poison roots and boiled them. Fevers and hallucinations nearly carried them off; diarrhea emptied their bowels to the cleanliness of scoured marble. Emaciated, nauseated, shivering with fever so that her teeth kept clicking, yet she wanted to toy with his yam, and trace its swollen veins with the tip of her tongue, and sip the little transparent drop of nectar from its single small slit, before feeling then its rush of friction between her legs, and his back hard as a knobbed board beneath her clutching hands. If her last strength were to be yielded up in such an embrace, her life would be shaped like a flower, its soft bell open to the light of life.
And he, wondering at her passion, as superfluous and extravagant as a convolute orchid that feeds on air, allowed her to arouse him even when his vitality had sunk so low his own skeleton felt to him like heavy stones he was dragging in a thin sack of skin across the thorny chapadões and dizzily letting drop at the night’s hard resting-place. Too weak to rise from the earth, he would dreamily watch naked Isabel straddle his hips and lower herself onto his rod. Her hips and belly and her transparently furred mound of Venus were even in her emaciation rounded, her last sliver of female fat. Her cleft would slip its clasp upon him, first dry and hurtful, then moist and gluey, down to his oily black froth of pubic fur, and back up, and back down, her shrunken breasts twittering on her white chest with its ribs like the ribs of a palm leaf.
Hunger is a pain at first, a growling, gnawing interloper, and then a narcotic, an accustomed daze and dimness in which consciousness unprotestingly floats. Even the howler monkeys, in the patches of forest, drew back respectfully into the green canopy, to let their ghosts past. Damp sandy spots held fresh paca and tapir tracks, but they never saw these animals, and would have been too weak and slow to catch them. Isabel’s classes in botany enabled her to distinguish between the buriti palm, with its stiff fanlike fronds, the bacaba palm, with its very long, curving fronds and dishevelled look, the low-growing nacurý palm, the thorny, slender-stemmed boritana palm, which loves wet ground, and the even more slender accashy palm, its bole as straight as an arrow; but there was nothing of these trees to eat in this season, not nuts or palm hearts. The thriving life about them was the tormenting wallpaper of a barren cell. Once they came to an entire petrified forest, half-erect and half-collapsed in great shards like those of a vandalized temple, the shattered columns calcified in tints of mossy green and muddy rose, dead white and aloof blue. What god had been ardently worshipped here, and nevertheless had died?
When the couple was on the point of collapse, iridescent hummingbirds, called flower-kissers, with emerald backs and yellow chests and wings in a blur, would hover in the air before them, fruit begging to be plucked; Tristão and Isabel learned to reach out and seize the small birds, suppressing the churning of the frantic wings in their palms and with a flick of the thumb breaking their necks. Six or eight of them, painstakingly plucked of their exquisite metallic feathers and roasted on sticks fine as needles, yielded up a few bites of tough, bittersweet flesh. At other moments, Tristão and Isabel would find themselves surrounded by a circle of ripe cashew trees, a plantation left by some flitting, vanished agriculturalists, and would ravenously consume all they could reach, nut and thick skin both. In this way, from one evanescent feast to the next, the couple wandered on, in a thickening forest where it was difficult to see the westering sun, and where daylight was often a mere icy sparkle above the highest tier of vegetation.
They had begun their time alone together by swimming the brown river beside their fatal encampment. Each took as float a fat and fallen palm trunk, but the rotten logs absorbed water like sponges and quickly sank; Isabel had to be dragged through the last hundred yards, her white hand resting on Tristão’s gleaming shoulder like a leech on a gleaming black sturgeon. Luckily, the piranhas that nibbled their kicking ankles were not accustomed to human flesh and movements, and no random snap of their jaws elicited the drops of blood that would have tripped them into a frenzy. At his strength’s end, Tristão found sandy shallows beneath his feet; he and Isabel were able to wade, gasping, to the far bank of the river. Unbeknownst to them, they had crossed on the planalto from the region where the rivers flow south, into the Paraguay, over to the land of the Paressi, where the streams are tributary to, a thousand miles to the north, the Amazon.
xxi. The Rescue
WEEKS had passed. They had lain down to die. A little grove of wild wax palms offered a shifting, pleasant shade; through their slender undulant trunks Tristão and Isabel could gaze together
down a grassy, scrubby slope toward yet another river, this side of yet another slope in the seemingly endless chapadão. It was late afternoon; the thin shadows were weaving their soft net tighter, and the mosquitoes and tiny sand-flies were beginning to inflict those bites to which Tristão and Isabel had long grown impervious.
The lovers held hands and turned their faces to the sky; he heard her breathing sink into a rasping, slower pace, and turned once more to see her profile—the sunburnt brow where her blond hairline feathered back shimmeringly from the temples, and the outward curve of her lower face that signalled sensuality and a capacity for mischief, as he had guessed at first sight. His fingers encountered, loose on her emaciated finger, the hard circlet of the DAR ring he had once given her, and his eyes, almost as numbly, encountered the presence of, beyond Isabel’s profile, high leather boots, much battered by wear and weather. There were other boots, men’s boots with the mute, deeply used look of animals’ feet, and above them torn breeches of coarse baize in a variety of faded colors.
Tristão sat up, and felt the point of a rapier at the pit of his throat. “Stay, nigger,” a deep voice said, not unpleasantly, in a quaint and courteous accent Tristão had never heard before. A brass-colored face, plump but not soft, fully bearded, and framed by a wide leather hat, loomed beyond the embossed cup hilt of the rapier. “From thy gaunt looks, thou hast long been in search of a meal. It would take no deep prick to come out t’other side. And what vision sleeps next to thee? A fair princess, it would appear, far wandered from the court of good João Quinto. Two squares of the chessboard, come to give us a game!” And from the jubilant quality of the man’s laughter, and that of his companions as they crowded curiously around, Tristão could not doubt that some sort of fun would follow. Even when they fitted heavy, rusty shackles around his wrists, and an iron collar with a dangling chain around his throat, he felt, in his passivity and fatigue, that it was being done for his own good.
Isabel awoke with a soft cry transported, it seemed, from the disintegrating theatre of her dreams. “Tristão,” she said, “if we have died, Heaven has rough angels!”
These ruffians, of whom there were six or seven, were all bearded and clad in scuffed and tattered patchworks of leather and cloth; all wore a curious kind of chest armor, a carapace of rawhide padded inside with cotton—soft enough for comfort, she judged, and yet hard enough to withstand arrows. Their clothes showed years of weather and wear; some men wore hats of woven palms instead of leather, and some had tied kerchiefs on their heads instead of hats. Some were missing a limb or two. A number carried muskets and blunderbusses. They murmured with enchantment to hear Isabel speak, as if a tinkling, singing harpsichord had been transported from Venice or Antwerp to this remotest point of the advance of civilization. Ages had passed since they had heard the voice of a white woman. Their number was augmented by twenty or so Indians, whose costumes ranged from stark nudity to the baggy trousers and blouse of a field-hand. One scowling savage wore crossed parrot feathers inserted through his septum; others had decorated their nakedness with armlets of monkey-skin and many-stranded necklaces of pearly river-shells; but all, including the several women, who held babes in their arms or in their stomachs, appeared to be harmonized within this motley troop, and all, as persistently as eye-licking bees, gathered about Tristão, touching him clingingly, shamelessly, inspecting his parts as if he were a curious mechanism.
They were more reluctant to touch Isabel, and she attempted to use her authority to interpose her body in front of Tristão’s; but the roughness with which she was thrust aside marked a limit to the awe in which her pale beauty was held. She felt a limit, too, in the extent that her light feminine voice and Carioca accent penetrated the thick eardrums of these leather-swaddled adventurers. However, in a curious piece of deference, the leader of the band, the man with the rapier, let her hold the chain on Tristão’s neck-shackle, as if acknowledging her prior ownership.
“I am frightened, Tristão,” she confided in a whisper.
“Why? These are your people.” He hurt her by sounding hostile and bitter. A gulf had abruptly opened between them, after the long journey in which their dwindling bodies had all but merged. His voice relented a little. “At least we will be fed. These rogues are fat as pigs.”
The party walked downhill, on a broadening path, toward the river. Cleared fields and tended plantations of manioc and beans prepared them for the sight of the settlement, a straggling array of round palm-roofed huts, some opensided in the Indian style, and others walled with logs and mud to suit a European sense of enclosure. Along the river, there were scaffoldings for drying fish, and arcs of stakes set out to hold nets. Several dugout shells lay about in a state of incompletion, surrounded by chips and a few rusting iron tools. A sun-rotted bandeira, with a cross and scrolling escutcheon visible in its faded folds, drooped from a bamboo pole fixed to the roof-tree of the largest encampment structure, an open longhouse where the entire population could gather. Here the captives, after an hour of being fed and bathed by deft, insistent Indian hands, were taken before an assembly. Their discoverer led them through the excited crowd to another brass-faced man, similar but older and leaner; he sat in a basket chair whose high wicker back, ornamented with a dappled jaguar pelt that included the snarling skull, echoed the splendor of a throne.
“I have the honor to be the captain of this bandeira of brave and pious Paulistas,” he explained, introducing himself with an ironic sonority: “Antônio Álvares Lanhas Peixoto. Thou hast already met my younger brother, José de Alvarenga Peixoto.” Antônio’s beard was shaped to a long point, and in his face the yellow-brown of the familial racial mix was almost golden, a swarthy gold that gleamed on his cheekbones and along the curve of his prominent arched nose. He fancied he saw Isabel’s eye on his nose, laid his finger beside it, and said, “My mother was a Carijó and my father a new Christian, that is, a former son of Abraham, as are half the residents of São Paulo. The Holy Office of the Inquisition in Bahia never extended its blessed services so far into the south—not,” he hastened to add, “that the priests would have found us lacking in fervent orthodoxy. By God’s wounds, have we not risked our very lives and sanity for the salvation of heathen souls? Have we not roved for years beyond counting this damnèd inferno of cactuses and anthills, tormented by every manner of sharp-toothed fish and whining insect that the Maker of All saw fit to invent? Have we not been beset without mercy on every side by the very savages we seek to save, savages armed and maddened by the Spanish Jesuits, who are black-robed traitors to their race and religion both?”
The exhortatory questions seemed addressed not so much to Isabel—though even at the height of oratorical fury he kept a glinting small eye, the amorous color of amber, fastened upon her—as to the ragged band of warriors assembled at the captives’ backs.
“The robed blasphemers harbor the infidels,” he told her, of the Jesuits, “in so-called reductions, for their own profit and lechery, keeping them in idleness and nakedness, when it is we who would truly reduce them, in our settlements and the King’s aldeias, to divinely inspired religion, useful labor, and civilized decorum.”
“I have heard of kings,” Isabel said timidly, “but they ruled long ago.”
“Aye,” interrupted the round-faced José. “Long we have been in these backlands, having vowed never to return without Indians or gold. If we outlast a king or two, and find in our absence we have miraculously fathered a babe or three, what will it signify when as rich men we return to our estates, with troops of willing servants to employ and to barter for more land still? White gold is the goal, red gold is the gain!”
His brother lifted a long forefinger to silence such rapacious enthusiasm. “We enlist the heathen for their own salvation,” he reminded the company, while speaking to Isabel. “Though they strike us on one cheek, we turn the other, and merely make them captive, where they would heedlessly slay. In the dark of their Godlessness, they eat of their enemies’ brains and inner or
gans to gain prowess in combat. We correct such deluded customs, teaching them proper science and useful employments instead. Thus, amid the cruelties of battle, even as they repay us with poisoned arrows, we introduce them to the mercies of our Saviour!”
The laughter at these rotund avowals could not be suppressed; as the other bandeirantes indulged in mirthful hubbub, José confided to Isabel and Tristão, with the slyness of long acquaintance, “Unless of course they be too feeble or young to work, or the women too old to warm a man’s bed.”
“These natives around us,” Isabel asked Antônio—“are they all slaves, then?”
“Pray, child, say not ‘slaves.’ Enslavement of indigenes is forbidden by firm royal instruction, and condemned by a reiterated papal bull. ‘Administration’ is all that we intend. Those thou seest about us are our allies, Tupi and Guarani and Caduveo persuaded to our cause and therefore become our guides and loving companions. We were many of us born of Indian mothers, and conceive in the same strain. Some others, yes, would escape our service if they could. But God has not yet favored our expedition with an ample harvest of converted souls, and many of those we won to Jesus have been called, alas, to His heavenly home by fever and pox. Our chaplain has exhausted his store of precious wine, with the giving of last Communions.”
“The rascals escape,” José burst in, “they escape by dying! They are so little grateful for our protection they villainously will their hearts to cease! That is why thy nigger, my lady, is a welcome treasure here; in São Paulo itself not many can afford the luxury of pure-blooded blacks. They are a race God made to enrich their betters: the sons of Ham to serve the sons of Shem and Japheth. They do not die. They mourn their pestilential homeland and hack themselves idols and drums, and if enough collect into a pack they rebel and flee and in the wilderness form quilombos where all is license and anarchy; but they do not die on our hands, in such traitorous numbers.”