* * *
My fazenda was small, barely four hundred hectares, while the other neighboring ranches were paced out at several hundreds of thousands of hectares. My manager Genaro, who had been a macheteiro, a drifter, drove me home from Belém in my ‘pickoppy’. He was in his sixties, of white and Indian extraction. I knew very little about him, except that he was born near Manaus on the Rio Negro; he was quiet and looked sullen, perhaps because his lower jaw jutted out, but his pale blue eyes revealed an intelligence that seemed to be belied by his habit of reclining wherever and whenever possible. He was tall, thin and wiry, extremely well-muscled for a man his age. He had high cheekbones and black hair greased back away from his high forehead. His left cheek was distended from a roll of tobacco; his front teeth were missing. Yet for all that he was a formidable-looking man. He reminded me of a condor, or some other great, ungainly bird.
We drove down the Belém-Brasilia highway, which was like driving through hell, for much of the land to either side was on fire, and in some places the flames reached toward the cracked red ground along the highway. The sky was dark with smoke. The acrid smell was overwhelming, and the heat came in waves that seemed to suck away every bit of moisture. What wasn’t burning was as scorched and dry as a desert; the burned stumps of trees reached out like props in a Grade B horror movie. All the jungle hereabouts would soon be converted into grassland, which the soil could support for five years at best. Most jungle soil is less than three inches deep. Burn down the trees and the microorganisms that feed minerals back into the soil die. Then the rain erodes the soil. The soil becomes sand. And what’s left is red hardpan: laterite. Then more jungle has to be burned to produce more farm and pasture land.
But the worst of the conflagration was over; the land had been burning for some time. I had seen firestorms in this part of the country where clouds would form over the trees and rain would fall in sheets. Lightning would snake into the trees and as one looked into the isolate darkness, it seemed as if the last days promised in the bible had finally come. I felt a pang of guilt, for my little ranch had also been burned out of the jungle, but I had used the land wisely, had not extended myself, and was determined not to cut into any more of the jungle. The jungle was like a womb for me. I could afford to sell the cattle and just live on the fazenda.
It was a moot point. I would be long gone before the soil lost its nutrients and died.
We stopped in the town of Paragominas for gas. A small, dusty town square, dirty pastel buildings, sand demons boiling into life with every gust of wind, a few bars with pickups parked in front, the sounds of loud carimbo music and laughter, a young man wearing cowboy boots and a Stetson hat leading a donkey loaded with leather bags down the main street. I had taken a pill for the pain in my stomach, and although I knew the ache was still there, I felt removed from it. The nausea remained, however. I could not yet believe it was real, that I was going to die. For as much death as I had seen during my life, now, when it was once again upon me, I refused it. I was more mature, more willing to accept life’s grim realities, when I was ten years old and part of Mengele’s zoo. I ground my teeth, a habit that my ex-wife had always complained about, and once again I began to tremble. It was already dark and rather than stay in what looked more like a ghost-town in the American northwest than a village in the jungle, I insisted that we drive on. Genaro would have probably liked to stay at least long enough to play some pool in the bars and drink a few fingers of cachaça—Brazilian white rum.
Even in the darkness, I could feel when we were once again deep into jungle. The air was stifling, wet as a warm bath; my eyes stung and sweat rolled under my shirt, down my armpits, chilly in evaporation. A Culex mosquito flew into the cab of the pickup and its high-pitched whine almost drove me crazy until I finally managed to swat it.
“We are almost home, Meester,” Genaro said at dawn, as the shadows that were hundred feet tall trees on either side of the road turned glaucous green and then finally came to life as a universe of viridescence, all the possibilities of green—celdadon, bice, emerald, beryl, aquamarine, olive green, evergreen, blue green, leek green, yew green, serpentine green, variscite green, turquoise green, mignonette, milori, chromium, terra verde, reseda—towering walls of trees and vines and air plants and ferns. I took another pill, which I had difficulty swallowing without water, and nodded. We had not talked for the entire trip; it was unusual that he would say anything at all without prompting.
“Is everything okay at the fazenda?” I asked, feeling the need for company in the wet grayness of morning. I felt lost, swallowed.
But Genaro didn’t answer, which meant that indeed everything was okay or he would have told me what was wrong. Finally, after what seemed like a long time of concentration for him, Genaro said in a slow, tight voice, as if it was very difficult for him to speak, “I know you are dying.”
“What?” I asked, shocked.
But Genaro didn’t answer.
“You must speak now,” I said, sitting forward, leaning toward him, as if he were going to whisper to me how he had found out.
His face tightened. “I knew you were dying before you left. Onca told me this. She also told me to tell you not to be afraid.”
Onca, who took care of the house for me, was his wife. Once when I had asked her why someone who was so happy and talkative and full of life would choose someone as serious and quiet as Genaro for a husband, she laughed and said, “I’m a bruxa, you know what that is? Surely you have heard of macumba and espiritisme. Yes?” I had; they were indigenous religions that worshiped and, if one believed, used spirits. They used good spirits to protect themselves from bad spirits and were not above calling on foreign spirits for help, spirits such as Yara, which was supposed to be an American Indian, or white spirits such as Maria Lunga or Pai Jacobi, which could sometimes be used to harm people or accomplish evil ends. “Well,” she continued, “I can see things. And Genaro helps me to do that. Sometimes I think he’s a spirit.” She laughed, as if she thought I would believe that bruxas were just part of the natural weave of things. And in some way I suppose I did, for I still couldn’t separate the nightmare of my time in the camps from the reality. As I remembered Mengele, seeing him that first time, I could believe he was a spirit, a demon brought into the world; and even now, I remembered him as the man who was father, god, and tormentor. I remembered the feel of his clean-shaven face as he lifted me up once when he was in a good mood; and yet he had somehow merged with his death, and that fleshy monster had become skeletal in my mind; his face became that hollow-socketed skull the coroner had held high in Embu. And in my mind he was alive and dead, a grisly memory of the reality of sweet Onca’s spirit world.
Genaro wouldn’t talk at all for the rest of the trip. He kept his eyes straight ahead, and we finally came to the open gate of the Fazenda, then down my road to the driveway. The red tile roof of the arcaded porches glowed wetly in the sun and I felt better just seeing the gardens and the white stucco walls stained with rust and dirt. I felt suddenly sleepy.
The next thing I remembered was waking up in my room.
* * * *
The sun poured through my bedroom window and I could hear the familiar screams of the pia, a small gray bird that the Indians called dai-a-pior, which meant ‘worse to come.’ The bird would softly whistle and then would break out in staccato-like shrieks. I couldn’t stand the screeing, but like the terrible and unearthly screams of the howler monkeys, it was comforting if only because it was familiar.
“Well, Meester finally wakes up,” Onca said, bringing me breakfast of milk, juice, a starchy gruel, and ice cream. Not her usual breakfast fare, nor mine. I discovered another lesion on my neck, which I would not allow myself to touch, lest it spread. I had to take my medication, I told myself, aware of the irony that here I was dying and yet I was concerned with a skin disease. But the taste of the sore in my mouth, and the constant awareness that there were
