of these islands.
At one of them, we stopped.
Semi-naked men and children circled our ship with small boats, waiting for us to throw coins into the water. Then they would collect them from the bottom of the sea. In this maneuver, they showed extraordinary skill. A nickel was thrown into the water, and a swimmer would dive into the spot where it landed, disappearing for a few moments. Then he would return, carrying the coin sparkling in his white teeth.
The arrival in Rio de Janeiro was a feast of light and color.
Captivated, everyone beheld the marvelous tropical city in Guanabara Bay, which looked so happy at that early morning hour as if it were in love with its own charms.
With languid and measured movements, the waters wove a broad white lace of foam to cloak the elegant nudity of the beach’s sensual curves.
An agent of the colonization association, whose secretary I would become years later in Porto Alegre, came to receive us, taking us to the Isle of Flowers where we would stay for some days, recovering from the long and arduous sea journey.
Chapter 3
From the Isle of Flowers, we continued to Erebango in Boa Vista do Erechim, our final destination.
Of this last stage of our journey I have no memory apart from the cold and rainy night we arrived in Erebango where we were picked up by a settler who lodged us in his house until the day the immigrant barracks, then under construction, were finished.
One of the first visits we received in the new land was from Death who carried away forever my youngest brother.
My parents had gone to visit a family that lived at quite a distance, and they had taken him with them. Returning, they went the wrong way and got lost in the woods, where they were forced to pass the night. The following morning when they arrived home, the child was feverish. Days later he passed away.
I still remember well the day of his death.
Seated in the yard on a pine log, Mama cried. Near her, letting heavy tears fall silently over the boards he was nailing, Papa was making the funeral coffin for his dead son. Each time he put a nail into the wood it was as if he were burying it in his own heart. At a little distance, without understanding, my brother Daniel and I observed that painful picture.
Mama called us. She embraced us. She squeezed us tightly against her heart, hugging us close. And after covering us with kisses mixed with tears, she raised her eyes to the pristine, serene sky and sent a fervent plea, asking God to spare us.
The coffin ready, we placed the corpse inside. Luiz, the oldest of my brothers, mounted the horse and Papa brought the casket bearing a piece of his life that was leaving to be buried.
Once Luiz started for the cemetery, which was very far away, Mama’s laments burst out even stronger. With loud cries she called for her son, exclaiming,
“Don’t take my boy. . . . My sweet little one, my darling, why are you leaving your poor mother?”
Papa hugged her and took her inside the house. Both took off their thongs, sat down on the hard-beaten dirt floor, their chests swaying back and forth, and began to pray, intoning in Hebrew the saddest song I ever heard in my life, the old funeral chant of our people.
We were moved to the immigrant shelter once the sacramental days of mourning, part of the Jewish funeral ritual, were finished.
This was a wooden barrack that sheltered, under its ceilingless roof, eight families, more or less. It had no real interior divisions. Rather, these were made with sheets that the occupants stretched out in the guise of walls so they would have a pale illusion of privacy.
But communal life in the shelter wasn’t always sad.
One night, a baby about a year old, awakened in the darkness by hunger, set out to find the breast of his mother who slept at his side. And by mistake, he raised his greedy little mouth to the bosom of a young maiden. Feeling the voluptuous pressure of lips on her chest, she let out an instinctive shout that woke up the whole shelter.
This mistake shows the great space that separated the occupants at night.
We waited for the demarcation of our homestead for many months. And while we waited, we were spending what was left of our meager savings, since the trip from Russia had been at our expense.
When the day we took possession of our lands arrived, we boarded a wagon pulled by a pair of horses and headed out.
The day was gloomy, threatening to rain.
As we reached the main road, a strong downpour burst out, drowning a brood of chicks that we were carrying in a pail hung from the back of the vehicle.
Papa came to sit in the front of the wagon to guide the animals. At his side, curled up and silent was Mama.
As the rain stopped, the clouds frayed, giving a glimpse of washed patches of sky. And the sun reappeared, spreading the joy of a recovered patient over the wet fields.
After many hours of travel, we entered a forest by a narrow trail, recently opened. At a certain point, I don’t know why, the horses were frightened and took off, unbridled, threatening to turn over the vehicle at any moment, which miraculously remained upright.
Mama threw herself to the back, grabbing us, while Papa pulled the reins, shouting, “Hold up, hold up. . . . ”
Birds fled in terror. Reptiles quickly crossed the road and hid deep in the woods. Whizzing branches that had been spread out on the road pounded our heads and faces.
When we reached a small incline in the middle of a field on the other side of the forest, the horses were obliged to stop. During their flight, we had lost a basket full of sweet buns brought from Russia. Later on, we truly regretted this loss because the bread that the settlement gave us was quite bitter. . . .
We rested a little, and then we continued our trek, arriving at our destination a little before nightfall.
Various men, seated around some wooden logs burning over a handful of charcoal embers, were sipping mate tea that they passed from one to another.
Not knowing how to speak Brazilian, Papa greeted them with a timid flick of the head to which all responded. Right away, a dark-skinned half-breed, with a thin graying beard and a gentle gaze that inspired confidence, stood up and came to shake our hands.
Papa gave him a letter from the company’s management, which presented the bearer as the owner of the lands this dark-skinned man occupied.
After reading the letter, the man pointed to a place near the fire. The circle in front of the pan of embers opened up a little, to give us some space. And the men resumed the conversation that had been interrupted by our arrival.
One of the hands unhitched the animals and carried our baggage to the shed.
Night was falling.
In the sanguine sunset, the afternoon shed its last glow. The first shadows leaving the valleys and the wetlands dragged themselves through the rolling grasslands and slowly covered the hills. A great silence, slightly broken by the gurgling murmur of a nearby brook, by the doleful peeps of lost birds, and by the harmonic
