The Cloud Forest

by Peter Matthiessen

  While in Buenos Aires, I traveled to Punta del Este on the coast of Uruguay and, though I passed twice through Montevideo, formed no opinion of it. Punta del Este is the chief summer resort of the continent, on a pretty pine coast south of the peaceful Uruguayan pampa, and its interest for me was much enhanced by the presence off its shore of the Isla de Lobos, where sea lions in great numbers gather on the rocks, as well as a few remnants of the much persecuted southern fur seal; on one bright day, fishing for anchoa, I was lucky enough to see a solitary elephant seal sprawled on the beach like a dead whale. I spent a happy week in Punta del Este, the guest of Argentine friends, Jean and Tony Deane, whose lovely house was set off by a fine swimming pool. The acknowledgments with which this book begins can in no way repay the kindnesses received in time of need from these people and many others, in various localities in South America.

  São Paulo, in Brazil, where I paused for a day to visit the fine snake farm at Butantan, is perhaps the most truly modern of all the cities that I saw; it is not a handsome place, but there is a sense here of experiment and life which is well suited to this huge new nation. The modernity of Rio de Janeiro, on the other hand, struck me as illusory, though with its harbor, airport, and ocean beach all but surrounded by the city, and a setting almost legendary, it seems a living prototype, a working model, of cities to come. One thinks, What a beautiful city, but it is not the city which is beautiful. The arrangement of cones and headlands, of beaches and blue bays against green mountains, makes one envy the first navigator to enter the harbor from the sea.

  I arrived in Rio in time of Carnival, and I swam at Copacabana Beach, which is infested, I’m sorry to say, with some sort of aggressive sand worm. The Carnival, like Rio itself, is colorful and flimsy and very good fun for a very few days. In 1960 rain fell much of the time, causing the cheap gilt and paint of the outlandish costumes to run away down bare brown dancing legs, but this factor in no way discouraged this frenetic people, and as for myself, I was often to be seen, tall, fair-skinned, and soberly suited, bringing up the rear of an oblivious, swaying line and reeking happily of the watered perfume which young girls squirt at passing merrymakers: the wild TUM-ta-pa-ta, ta-pa-TUM-ta-pa-ta, ta-pa-TUM of the brincar rhythm, resounding above the car horns day and night, stays with one for weeks afterward.

  En route to Mato Grosso I traveled to the celebrated new capital of Brasilia, in the state of Goiás, which our illustrated magazines, with their false wonder and their art shots taken at night, have shown to us as the ultimate realization of twentieth-century advance. But Brasilia was a political inspiration, erected too fast and at appalling cost in an economy which, as yet, cannot afford it; the heavy, modern-type edifices do not soar in confirmation of the government’s ideological barrage but stand mired in the raw, red clay of a drab landscape, different but not original, and tricked out in desperation with non-integral architectural gimcracks. I saw Brasilia, it is true, during the rainy season, some six weeks before its official inauguration, and doubtless it will look better when the oppressive litter of construction has been replaced by grass and floral borders; it will look better still when the poverty and famine has been relieved in the country’s northeastern states, where the money used to fly in to Brasilia vast quantities of cement might have been better applied. But despite its grand design and modern technics, a cathedral shaped like a sombrero and an immense man-made lagoon, Brasilia is less inspired than pretentious, a brave new city cunningly disguised as a World’s Fair.

  5

  Mato Grosso

  OF ALL THINGS in Nature, the one that most abhors a vacuum is a cartographer, and the most dread vacuums in all of mapdom, aside from the Seven Seas, are the interiors of Australia, Siberia, and the Estados Unidos do Brasil. A good map of Brazil’s interior will show, nonetheless, any number of locations of apparent importance—the same importance, to judge from the print, as that awarded such places as Baltimore and Beirut—when in fact, of course, even the great cities of the region—Manaus, Cuiaba, Goiania, and, as of the moment, the new capital, Brasilia—are probably exceeded in size, if not in population, by a suburb like Greenwich, Connecticut. And this is true even though the interior of this one country is so enormous that it might almost be called the interior of South America.

  The interior may be taken to include four of the large in land states, or all that country lying north and west of the fifth, Minas Gerais: “General Mines,” which is rich in farmland as well as in minerals and jewels, lies directly behind the small, populous states of the Atlantic coast. Of the four states in question—Pará and Goiás in central Brazil, and Amazonas and Mato Grosso in the west—only southeastern Goiás could remotely be called settled, and even this is a phenomenon of the last three years: new villages have sprung up, and old villages become towns, as a result of the decision to transfer the nation’s capital from Rio de Janeiro to a barren Goiás plateau. The construction of Brasilia is still in progress, having begun three years ago from nothing: for reasons quite apparent when one looks at it—the location has no visible advantage, scenic or otherwise—this neck of the woods has never before been frequented by man.

  The nearest city to Brasilia is Goiania, a hundred miles away, and the road between them is also new, the first leg of the much-publicized Brasilia-Belém highway, which slices through sixteen hundred miles of jungle to the port at the mouth of the Amazon. (Goiania is southwest of Brasilia, while Belém lies to the north; why the highway should go to Goiania before turning around like the curve of a fishhook and starting north again is the kind of logical question one soon learns to avoid asking in South America, for fear of the confusion on both sides which the answer might bring.) It starts off past the first of the myriad bill-boards—Mercedes-Benz—which soon will block the new city from view, and continues on across impoverished plateaus cut by ravines. The grassy land, grown up in varying densities with shrubs and tree scrub, is rather lifeless in appearance; the absence of birds and animals is marked, with only a rare kestrel or caracara on a low treetop. The most notable feature of the landscape, once Brasilia has been left behind, and perhaps before, is the number of huge anthills like irregular reddish cones, some of them of the volume of an oil drum. There are also ant nests fastened to the limbs of the scrub trees; occasional trees are bent by their huge fruit.

  The road descends gradually, and near Anápolis the land rapidly improves. There are sloping fields of upland palms, quite startling here, and the ipé tree with its bright yellow flowers, and a lumber tree called the peroba, and jacaranda. The ravines and roadsides are a lustrous green, and flop-eared Brahma cattle wander through the brush. Then, in a valley, a pattern of baked roofs: these tiles, with the prevailing rufous clay, make the color red characteristic of towns throughout South America, and Anápolis, when it appears, is no exception.

  An hour beyond Anápolis is Goiania, the capital of Goiás; Goiás is still the frontier state of Brazil, and its central plaza has a statue of a bandeirante, or pioneer. At Santa Leopoldina, a hundred miles away, the country’s roads to the northwest come to an end on the banks of the Araguaya; beyond lies the northern Mato Grosso, all but unpopulated.

  In Orizona, a village some hours east of Goiania, lives Clayton Templeton of the New Tribes Mission, whose acquaintance I had made a few months earlier on the Venimos. I left for Orizona the next morning on the five a.m. bus—the five a.m. bus is the only bus all day—and dawn came eventually as we lurched down the dirt road. Against a black-silver sky the silhouettes of exotic trees stood stark and unfamiliar. Here and there swayed a tall, solitary palm: this tree, leaning against an early sky, is the loneliest tree imaginable.

  Then it was day, and everything was unmysterious and plain. The road trails on across dull country, a brushy open cattle range. We passed lone huts, and once a herd of cattle with its vaqueros on sheepskin saddles. Peering darkly from beneath broad felt sombreros, these cowboys in low boots and homespun clothes, mustachioed, with thin, dirty beards, are the picture of band
itry, lacking only the cartridge belt slung across the chest and the villainous smile. Occasionally the bus crashed through an adobe village, the driver leaning on its wild country horn, but the chickens, aged, and low-slung dogs looked bored when they bothered to look at all. Pedestrians in the provinces of South America, both animal and human, are apt to be more sophisticated than the drivers; the latter, because vehicles are still relatively uncommon, consider themselves a race apart and are determined to draw attention to themselves, whatever the risk to life and limb.

  Four hours out of Goiania the bus humped to a halt in Vianápolis, and here, while changing vehicles, I encountered Templeton, who was making the same transfer, but in the opposite direction. There was nothing to do but return with him to Goiania; from there we went on to Anápolis for the night, going back to Orizona the following evening.

  While renewing acquaintance, I told my friend of a violent argument I had gotten into with a man in Brasilia, to which his response was an inquiry as to whether or not I carried a revolver. “If not,” he said, “you’re the only man in the countryside outside of the very old or very poor, and Clayton Templeton, who doesn’t.” He went on to say that he had never seen or heard of a fist fight in all his ten years in Goiás: all disputes, even the smallest, are settled here with knife or pistol, and not uncommonly both. He recommended that I obtain a gun and carry it at all times in the interior, and while at first I thought he must be exaggerating because of his own uneasy position (as a Protestant preacher in a fanatical Catholic backwoods, he has had his life threatened more than once; only two weeks ago three men stopped him in the street, and he came away from the discussion with three red marks on his belly where a a stiletto had emphasized their points), I realized very shortly that he was not.

  In Goiás, for carrying a weapon where people can see it and beware, one is speedily arrested, while a concealed weapon is considered inoffensive. Similarly a Brazilian here who commits an offense of any sort, whether or not he means to confess, hightails it from the scene of the crime: should he wait on the spot to give himself up, he is considered to be a flagrant offender and may be jailed indefinitely, or until time of trial. On the other hand, if he waits twenty-four hours before turning himself in, he is usually set free until his trial comes up. This sort of justice, like the law against exposed weapons, seems eminently logical to the people of the interior. Every man carries a long knife beneath his shirt and if possible a revolver as well; foreign guns, less apt to explode in one’s own face, are very much in demand, and among these the favorite is the Smith & Wesson .32, or “smitch.” (The word “smitch” has acquired a local connotation of superior quality, and is sometimes used as a general adjective: a thing is either “smitch” or it is not.) The law being the graceful thing it is, both knife and pistol are used on one’s opponent without the smallest hesitation, especially under the influence of the local white lightning, a cane alcohol called pinga (in Spanish America, kachasa); listening to Clayton, I recalled the advice I’d gotten in Belém, three months before, from a man well traveled in the back areas of Brazil. “Brazilians are all right,” he said, “most of the time. But they can’t handle their own pinga, and when they’re on it stay the hell away from them—they all got knives.”

  Murders are common and usually go unpunished, unless the bereaved take the law into their own hands; otherwise, after a few weeks’ cooling period in jail, the murderer is often shown the door. If he has money, he may be home for dinner on the day of his arrest, and if he has a lot of money, the chances are that he won’t be arrested at all—assuming, of course, that he is not a skinflint. The late Colonel Fawcett remarked on this legal phenomenon, and things have not changed much since his day. (I don’t mean to single out Brazil in this regard. Money pretty much has its way throughout all of South America, to a degree quite startling even to a mind grown hardened to the spectacular graft and corruption in the United States. One wonders at times why the Communist Party hasn’t made more progress, Church or no Church, because it is the peasants who are getting it in the neck. But one forgets about the appalling ignorance which stands in the way of constructive resistance, an ignorance which the Church itself, with its use of mystique and sacrament, tends to perpetuate—I hesitate to say “encourage,” but the fact is that in backward countries or communities ignorance appears to be the Church’s handmaiden; at the very least, the two are often seen in company.) The only murderer Clayton knew of who was punished by the community was the husband of a woman we talked to the following night, at the Anápolis station. This fellow, having killed his eighteenth victim, was adjudged to have gone too far and was hunted down in the woods and killed by a committee of his townsmen. Two weeks ago, near Orizona, a man killed the killer of his son and is now temporarily in jail; Clayton saw the body of the dead man, the second one, that is, which contained, in addition to four bullets, fifteen stab wounds. And a girl who worked formerly for the Templetons is at present in the hospital in Anápolis, also with four bullet wounds, administered by her husband. But in view of my own role here, the story I found most affecting concerned a journalist in Goiania, who wrote in his paper that the local jefe of the electric works had the fuerza turned on especially, during a shortage, in order that dental work might be performed on his own mouth. The charge was true, but nevertheless the jefe felt affronted, and shortly thereafter the journalist was seized in a café, dragged into the street, and executed. No one preferred charges, nor did the man’s newspaper consider the item newsworthy. As in the Wild West, which is much admired here (I’ve heard the term used as a single word, “wildowest,” an adjective meaning “authentically western,” I suppose: a very “wildowest” holster; and some of the younger men in the villages wear their sombreros pointed in the front, gunslinger-style), the man with power, political or otherwise, is the law, and the policemen are philosophers. Clayton, a very mild man, would carry a gun himself were it not for the fact that using it—in the unlikely event that he used it effectively—might compromise his evangelical aims. Nevertheless, he intends to get one to keep in the house.

  The Templetons live with their four children—a fifth is studying in the United States—in a large former store, one room of which has become a simple chapel. The place is somewhat in a state of siege, since worshipers of the enemy faith keep threatening to tear it down. At least, they threaten to attack the roof, from the top of which, at appointed hours, two loudspeakers carry music and the Baptist message to the Catholic townspeople; the people, with their roofs of tile and thatch, are defenseless against exposure to the Word, and this mild infringement of what we would think of as their rights (forgetting for a moment that they have no rights) may annoy them as much as the outlandish dogma. Apparently, however, they enjoy the musical fare, which includes numbers like “Brilhando, brilhando …” (“A sunbeam, a sunbeam, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam …”). And something of the message, in addition to the kindness so pronounced in both Templetons, has made “believers” of forty-eight Orizonans in the two years the mission has been here, despite considerable social and ecclesiastical pressure in the opposite direction. For the first three months Clayton preached to a room occupied only by his family; there then came to hear him a solitary prostitute—a beautiful woman, Clayton says—but her interest would have to be called ambiguous, for a month later she committed suicide. A start like this would have defeated most men, but Clayton kept at it, and the people came to him one by one. At first they fled every time the Protestant Bible was read, and the children were instructed by their priests to avoid the Templeton house at peril of their souls, for it was inhabited by demons, but gradually even these obstacles were overcome. As I walk around the village with him, it is obvious that the great majority like him, however leery they may be of what he stands for.

  Orizona is a typical red-clay-and-adobe-brick village of the provinces, with its full complement of dejected dogs, thin chickens, roving hogs, and vultures; these compete for existence under the hot sun with human beings wh
o are less indolent than worm-ridden, less unambitious than without hope—their contentment is resignation. Change is suspect, and everything is taken at face value. A team of twelve great oxen screeches into town (“screech” is not used here to denote excessive speed, but rather the actual noise made by a wood axle turning against a cart bed—the local belief is that this hair-raising noise keeps flighty oxen calm) pulling a ridiculous little cart of logs; they were hitched up to impress the people who do not have twelve oxen, and the people are, quite sincerely, impressed, as they will be again the following Saturday. These same people, resigned for centuries to the status quo, have always built their tiny houses with the shutters swinging in, thus cramping their small interior when the sun is shining and insuring rain on the floor when there is rain; Templeton’s efforts to discourage this structural aberration have been met with the stiffest sort of resistance, though one man who finally tried one window with the shutter swinging out is now ecstatic over the newfangled arrangement, and wants to convert even his doors.

  One afternoon Clayton’s son Vance took me on an expedition into the countryside; we were joined by a missionary who may be called Harry Croft. Croft had worked formerly among Indians on the Tocantins River but had to give it up because of chronic dysentery. He is a quiet, gentle man, still young, but there is a terrible air of defeat about him, and a dazed, suspicious glance from his bent head, as if he thought that at any moment one might crucify him. He watched with a strange intentness, even relish, as a big drunken, unshaven vaquero in a floppy sombrero pitched out of the roadside brush, dragging and kicking at a bleeding steer which had been ringed cruelly through the nose; when the steer refused to go farther, the man drew a pistol from a green embroidered holster at his belt and shot it neatly in its tracks. Later the steer was butchered and lay on the roadside weeds in great rolling islands and puddles of joints and entrails, attended by flies and ants and a pack of cadaverous dogs.