Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  CHAPTER 32:

  The Tropical Tilt

  As the last vestiges of the Matacão were but a fine powder drawn up in the sigh of an indecisive whirlwind, Chico Paco’s body—encased in a hermetically sealed and ornately carved box of jacaranda and followed by Gilberto’s similarly encased remains—arrived at its seaside birthplace of multicolored dunes.

  Chico Paco arrived as he had always traveled, on foot, on the shoulders of devotees and votive pilgrims.

  The long procession, which gathered mourners and momentum as it proceeded from the Matacão toward the sea, took most of an entire day before it even vacated the Matacão and was several miles in length as it snaked its solemn way through the now-muted forest. A torrent of rain snuffed out the candles and followed the mourners, rivulets flowing into the raw road, soon a river awash with slogging feet and red clay silt. Large plastic tarps draped the caskets, born deftly on the uncomplaining shoulders of a constantly changing guard. The procession marched on, day and night, sleeping briefly on the roadside and nourished by the human poverty it encroached upon, continuing for weeks through the festering gash of a highway, through a forest that had once been, for perhaps one hundred million years, a precious secret.

  Retracing Chico Paco’s steps, the mourners passed hydroelectric plants, where large dams had flooded and displaced entire towns. They passed mining projects tirelessly exhausting the treasures of iron, manganese, and bauxite. They passed a gold rush, losing a third of the procession to the greedy furor. They crossed rivers and encountered fishing fleets, nets heavy with their exotic river catch of manatee, pirarucú, piramutaba, mapará. They crowded to the sides of the road to allow passage for trucks and semis bearing timber, Brazil nuts, and rubber. They passed burning and charred fields recently cleared and parted for frantic zebu cattle, long horns flailing and stampeding toward new pastures. They passed black-pepper-tree plantations farmed by immigrant Japanese. They passed surveyors and engineers accompanied by excavators, tractors, and power saws of every description. They passed the government’s five-year plans and ten-year plans, while all the forest’s splendid wealth seemed to be rushing away ahead of them. They passed through the old territorial hideouts of rural guerrillas, trampling over unmarked graves and forgotten sites of strife and massacre. And when the rains stopped, they knew they had passed into northeast Brazil’s drought-ridden terrain, the sunbaked earth spreading out from smoldering asphalt, weaving erosion through the landscape.

  Chico Paco’s weeping mother was helped along the procession. She had insisted on walking barefoot, and despite her strong constitution, had to be carried through the last weeks of that exhausting trip. As she caught sight of the dunes laced in undulating shades of orange and purple and the white tips of the waves beyond, Chico Paco’s mother thought sadly that her son should never have left this place, but she said out loud, “This is the way he always wanted it. He wanted to be buried here, near the sound of the waves.”

  Batista Djapan walked with his guitar, the only possession that had not been touched by typhus or ravaged by bacteria, to the middle of where the Matacão was no longer and to what had once been Mané Pena’s small unproductive farm. Batista knew that Tania Aparecida was coming home. He knew because he himself had written it down out of habit for the weekly pigeon message. Having lost all his pigeons, Batista stuffed the small piece of paper away in his pocket.

  A band of children were chasing each other. These few children, having escaped the typhus epidemic and the DDT, had crept cautiously from their homes to find great sport in tossing pebbles at the Matacao, taking turns at biting off the brittle remains and sliding down the sides of this widening valley. Now that the Matacão had disappeared, the children remained, habitually meeting in what was now an enormous pit. Today, the children had brought a soccer ball, and Batista watched them scramble after it in an uncontrolled jumble of scrawny bodies. The children were all covered in red mud, celebrating every goal by jumping and sliding into large eroded puddles which marked the perimeters of their playing field. Beyond the excited shouts and cries of the children, Batista could see a small figure emerge on the horizon, the figure of a dark-skinned, saucy woman he knew so well. He propped the guitar into the curve of his body and strummed for his life.

  Kazumasa and Lourdes had not waited to see if the Matacão would follow the ignominious course of the disintegrating ball. The day after my death, Kazumasa and Lourdes with Gislaine and Rubens, anxiously slipped away from the Matacão, filled with a mixed sense of relief and longing. The loss of the ball to Kazumasa was strange, as if he had undergone radical plastic surgery. People no longer recognized him; even Hiroshi was taken aback by the enormous change. Perhaps it was because some part of his face had always been obscured by me or that no one, not even Lourdes herself, could observe his facial characteristics without blinking or flinching. In this newfound sense of anonymity, Kazumasa’s old happiness about love and life in Brazil began to return. He immediately moved Lourdes and the children onto a farm filled with acres and acres of tropical fruit trees and vines and a plantation of pineapple and sugarcane, sweet corn, and coffee. Rubens wheeled happily around the guava orchards, and Gislaine sat in the branches of a jaboticaba tree, sucking out the sweet white flesh of its fruit from their purple-black skins. Kazumasa ran around Lourdes like another child, filling her baskets with miniature bananas, giant avocados, and mangos, which seemed to him to reflect the sunset. Lourdes put her baskets down on the rich red soil of their land and embraced Kazumasa, who now stood casually with a rather newly formed posture, the sort to accompany, quite naturally, the tropical tilt of his head.

  But all this happened a long time ago.

  Now, you may look out across this empty field, strewn with candle wax, black chicken feathers and those eternally dead flowers, discarded jugs of cane brandy, the dirt pounded smooth by hundreds of dancing feet. Press your face into the earth where the odor of chicken fat and blood and incense still lingers and the intense staccato of the drums still quivers long after the gyrating bodies of dancers—spinning until their eyes glaze over in trance, sweat spraying forth from the tips of their hair, from the drenched outlines of swaying spines and laboring loins—are gone. The acrid stink of tobacco churned in human sweat and cane brandy still saturates the morning air.

  On the distant horizon, you can see the crumbling remains of once modern high-rises and office buildings, everything covered in rust and mold, twisted and poisonous lianas winding over sinking balconies, trees arching through windows, a cloud of perpetual rain and mist and evasive color hovering over everything. The old forest has returned once again, secreting its digestive juices, slowly breaking everything into edible absorbent components, pursuing the lost perfection of an organism in which digestion and excretion were once one and the same. But it will never be the same again.

  Now the memory is complete, and I bid you farewell. Whose memory you are asking? Whose indeed.

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  Funder Acknowledgments

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  New and Reissued Works by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Letters to Memory

  Brazil-Maru

  Tropic of Orange

  Through the Arc of the Rain Forest was typeset

  by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services.

  Text is set in Arno Pro.