In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  Most of the other structures in the vila have disappeared with time, but the house is still standing, the worn white paint clinging to the wooden boards beneath. The Old Man himself is now long gone, his heart giving out soon after his fregueses succeeded in forcing him off the river. These were dramatic events that took place almost twenty years ago now. But they were struggles, I’ve realized, that have never really ended. And in the run-down white house at the river’s mouth they have their site of oneiric condensation. That house is now a haunting, with all the dangers, transgressions, and seductions that brings. Because, despite everything that has happened, despite the changing of regime and the entry of a new order, there are still Viegas living there, plying the river, muddying its already turbid waters.

  EXILE AND RETURN

  Raimundo Viega, the Old Man, the patrão, came to Igarapé Guariba for the timber. The late 1950s were a propitious time for entrepreneurial Amazonians. With newly aggressive state and federal policy directed at territorial integration, the first major road was constructed to the north of the country (the Belém–Brasília highway, 1956–60), and a rudimentary development infrastructure put in place via the Amazon Credit Bank and the Superintendência do Plano de Valorização Econômica da Amazônia—early intimations of what was to become a fearsomely opaque bureaucracy.16

  Viega had other commodities in mind—animal skins, oilseeds, bananas, watermelon, cattle—but it was the timber that drew him out along the Canal do Norte, the northern channel of the Amazon estuary. And, as we might expect, one of his first projects in Igarapé Guariba was the sawmill.

  It was a simple setup: just one circular saw powered by a gasoline-fired generator. It was so simple, in fact, that it limited him to trees of less than 48 inches in diameter, and, because of the poor quality of the cut, restricted his sales to the domestic market. Like most operators in the interior, he was also unable to “peel” trunks large enough to exploit the lucrative veneer and plywood markets. He cut cedro, andiroba, açacu, and muritinga, separating out the larger pieces and the high-quality woods and sending them off to Macapá for processing, or else bartering them on consignment to river traders. Such practices gave him ample capacity, and despite buying all the wood he could from his fregueses in Igarapé Guariba, he was still able to take in greater quantities from outside.

  Viewed from the city, the Old Man’s operation looked like any one of the hundreds of inefficient, shoestring operations that sprang up at the time.17 Octávio told me it was a “brinquedo,” a joke, a toy. But in Igarapé Guariba, even today, that river mouth complex with its large white house remains a powerful mnemonic, what Mikhail Bakhtin called a chronotope, a temporal-topographic metonym that condenses time and space into place.18 Again and again, the structures of the vila become real in conversation, organizing narrative, paradoxically referencing both the positive attribute of great movimento (liveliness and activity) and the darker memories of what is understood as escravidão (slavery). The sawmill, the store, the warehouse, the boatyard, the white, tile-roofed house: they now act, in Bakhtin’s memorable phrasing, as “places where the knots of narrative are tied and untied…. [Places that] make narrative events concrete, make them take on flesh, cause blood to flow in their veins.”19 And even more than this. For all kinds of people who lived in Igarapé Guariba in those days, these remain sites of such energy that events occurring elsewhere “appear as mere dry information and communicated facts.”20

  When things fell apart for Viega, they did so catastrophically. He lost the upstream land in a legal action brought by his own fregueses, and he soon faced open competition on the river from the boat-owning Macedos, one of the families whose futures he felt himself to have assumed in trust. The pleasure he drew from the modernization of his community drained away. His affection for the place turned sour and the heart condition that had killed his four brothers began to plague him. He holed up in his house in Macapá, physically withdrawing from the interior. He took regular trips across the estuary to Belém to visit his doctor. Direct supervision of the store and warehouse business lapsed. Soon, the manager disappeared with the takings somewhere out in the open expanse of the Amazon rio-mar.

  After Raimundo’s death in 1983, Igarapé Guariba and the other properties went to his children. Within a few months, they had reneged on what residents say was the Old Man’s promise to let them stay where they were and had sold the north bank of the river, the side opposite the vila, to an absentee landlord in Brasília.

  The new landowner was an air force colonel21 who immediately petitioned the federal environmental agency IBAMA for authorization to cut the açaí groves that dominated the forest opposite the vila. The groves were the product of more than twenty years of farmer management for the rich palm-fruit that forms a central part of people’s diet in these estuarine communities. But the Colonel had other interests. With technical advice from IBAMA, he implemented a project for the “sustainable extraction” of açaí palm-heart, a product derived from the growing meristem, and most commonly harvested by killing the tree.

  The Colonel’s açaí was shipped to a canning factory upstream on the Amazon toward Macapá. Even though this was a sad, part-time operation suffering from the disappearance of the açaí groves under harvest pressure and the diminishing size of the extracted hearts, the palm-heart industry itself was still highly profitable for well-capitalized landowners and entrepreneurs.22 In recent years, however, there has been a boom in fruit prices as urban consumption of the thick liquid made from the purple berries has rocketed, and açaí itself has come to claim an ever-greater share of rural incomes. Logically enough, these shifts have been accompanied by the emergence of a powerful anti-palm-heart discourse in many rural communities. One result of this is that the work of the traveling buyers who tour the estuary encouraging farmers to sell their standing stock for ready cash has become increasingly difficult, and they now often settle for the unwanted stems removed during annual thinnings. The açaí palm has become intensely politicized, embedded in rhetorics of class and political economy, and an ambiguous symbol of conflicts between “local” and “global” economies. In Igarapé Guariba, palm-heart is associated with rich landgrabbers. People there identify it as a luxury food, selling overseas for preposterous prices. Vinho de açaí, by contrast, the purple “wine,” is emblematic of an honest, simple life.

  IBAMA’s contribution to the Colonel’s project was primarily aesthetic. In a familiar story, the land was divided into uniform, rectangular lots separated by narrow trails. Aluminum plaques were tacked to the trees at the front, and square boards decorated with the IBAMA logo stuck into the bank of the river at suitable intervals. The Colonel sent in four workers (employed at piece-rates) and a manager to whom he gave a leaky old boat. Ivan, the manager, built a simple wooden house to which he attached a sign that read “IBAMA: Palm-Heart Project Manager.” Then all five started cutting trees so enthusiastically that within a few years there was not even enough açaí to feed themselves.

  Everybody else—“the community”—had long before taken their belongings, given up their gardens, and moved across the river to what remained of the Viega family’s land. The indemnification finally agreed on by the Old Man’s heirs had cost these siblings all the profit from the land sale—despite its inadequacy in the minds of the displaced—and had sedimented the increasing bitterness on all sides.

  Although the Viega children will not say this, all the residents of Igarapé Guariba agree that everything went to pieces after the heirs got the land. For a few years the vila at the river’s mouth was entirely silent. Then, one morning in mid-1989, Miguelinho, the Old Man’s grandson, arrived with his wife, Sônia, at the entrance to the boarded-up store. “We arrived on the 29th of July 1989,” Sônia told me, taking in the tidy, well-stocked room with a sweep of her arm. “We opened the doors. There was nothing. Just empty shelves and spent gun cartridges. Just a whole bunch of old stuff.”

  Miguelinho was already drinking heavily by the
time he came back to Igarapé Guariba. People out here knew him well from Macapá, and from his reputation for sudden and unpredictable violence. I was fascinated by the Viegas’ big white house that everyone watched, silently, as we went by on the river. When I finally passed through its doors, I stayed for hours, engaged in a long, long conversation that took me deep into another Igarapé Guariba, a different history and a different sensibility. It was late at night, and we were still sitting in the flaring shadows of Miguelinho and Sônia’s ramshackle front room. We had been talking about Miguelinho’s grandfather and his memories of the river, and the talk had become noticeably tense. Miguelinho had just dug out one of the court documents that the Old Man had served on Tomé during the dispute that led to the patrão’s departure. Abruptly, Miguelinho broke off: Didn’t I know? He had been listening to news radio earlier that evening, and the Cubans were shooting down American planes. Suddenly he was right in my face. How did I feel about that, he was shouting, CIA liar that I was? And what the hell was I doing on his grandpa’s land anyway?

  Necessarily, it was Sônia who ran their household. At first, they nearly didn’t make it, she told me. Miguelinho was a liability. Even though he had grown up in Igarapé Guariba and had been in school here with José Macedo and his brothers—the new leaders of what had then been his grandfather’s world—he kept picking fights with everyone, boasting about his rich family. Then he shot and nearly killed a man over a drink, and the couple had to face down a boycott. For a while, the community closed ranks and no one would trade with them. While Miguelinho drank and ranted, Sônia would pick up their four children, often in the middle of the night, load their sputtery 10HP boat, and go to work alone, up and down the neighboring rivers, trading with anyone who would do business with her. Burdened with the family name and an unpredictable husband, her one strategy—exasperating to the upstream leaders in Igarapé Guariba—was to undercut her competitors, shaving her profit margins and pushing her boat to the edge of disaster, gradually building up her trade in the same fish, bananas, and açaí through which the Macedos sought to overcome the history that she so materially reinstated.

  The sawmill and the store sat next to each other at the mouth of the river and were the persisting emotional core of the community. In the vila, Viega had built a school, a small chapel, a workshop where manioc flour was processed, and a few houses for the mill-workers. And he had brought in part-time electric light in a gesture that iconicized his project of paternalist modernity. But by the time Miguelinho, his grandson, returned to Igarapé Guariba, the school and chapel had slid off the crumbling bank into the expanding river, the lights had long since dimmed, and the forest was growing back around the houses.

  The arrival of these new Viegas was a sudden and perverse irruption, a revival of all the contradictory fears and longings, the experience of movimento and escravidão, that had so agitated the river’s banks in the past decades. Suddenly, the memories of that time took on flesh once more, and, in what seemed to the Macedo family the most calculated and insidious affront, Sônia at once opened a cantina, an all-hours bar, in her front room, enticing the men who lived on the nearby stream to come sell their produce, to exchange it for liquor and for Miguelinho’s rowdy company, to lounge around the pool table, schmaltzy dance music blaring out across the deserted river.

  These were days of tremendous anxiety in Igarapé Guariba. Having moved across stream and surrendered their açaí to the palm-heart project, residents now found themselves facing new crises. The Viega heirs who still owned land on the Rio Preto began sending in workers to cut palm-heart in Guariba itself. This was the beginning of a dispute that was finally resolved in 1993, when the Macedos led groups of men in the formal demarcation of community land. For a time, though, the atmosphere of violence was palpable. The Macedos talk about threats and insecurities. Dona Rita Viega, the Old Man’s widow, now living in Macapá, describes buffalo hacked with machetes and left to rot, fetid, by the river. The formation of the Residents’ Association that united the ex-fregueses was decisive. Lene Viega, daughter of the landlord, tells me that everything changed when the Association—a pawn of the Rural Workers’ Union, she says—forced itself into their world. The memory of this breach in the social contract that came with the entry of these hostile outsiders is, more than any other, what provokes her acrimony. When the map was redrawn, finally, in a court of law, the Viegas were left with nothing but their upstream cattle ranch.

  Yet, why is it that there are no truly new beginnings? Why must everything be always tainted with the histories of its own birth? There was to be no getting rid of that corrosive mote in the Association’s eye, that persistent, alternative, negative modernity. Although the land on which Sônia, Miguelinho, the store, and the cantina were on now belonged to the Association, they were nonetheless there. And they had no intention of going away.

  FEELING DEBT

  Nestor Viega: In those days everyone had a patrão…. Let me explain this in a way you’ll understand. You’re working for a university: someone tells you what to do; you tell someone else what to do. They tell you to go and do this research; you tell them to read your research. This is exactly the form business takes in the interior.

  Hugh: But it’s not the same, because in my line of work….

  Nestor: Look, it’s cultural. It’s no different at all if you take the trouble to analyze it head-on. If you analyze it, you’ll see that it’s fundamentally similar. What I’m explaining to you is a hierarchy—okay? Isn’t it obvious that you have the soldier, the sergeant, the colonel, the general? Business is the same. Business in the interior is exactly the way I’m explaining it to you. The guy who supplied us out here, for example, we had to go and find him in Belém, his name was Mário Alves. He sold to papai, papai sold to the caboclo, the caboclo sold back to papai, papai sold to Mário Alves…. What I’m saying is that this type of business was a society … it was a family thing.

  It was not simply the corruptions of history that exasperated José Macedo and his brothers. It was, more irksomely, their own inability to escape its bounds. I was never quite convinced that even without Sônia and Miguelinho’s presence on the river, José’s consciousness of bad faith, his sense that present politics were patterned by a past he despised, could have been easily disavowed. There was too much overlapping practice. In this small place, they were all caught too deeply in the particular translocal intimacies of Amazonian river trade.

  Consider debt, for example. Indebtedness is a potent means of social control in Amazonia and has long been a defining feature of aviamento, the intricate system of credit relations that emerged during the nineteenth-century rubber boom and involved large numbers of intermediary merchants moving capital (in the form of a variety of transformable goods) from places like Liverpool to other places like Igarapé Guariba, and back again.23 Despite many theorists’ consignment of it to the dustbin of pre-capitalism, aviamento persists, transfigured, throughout the region.24 And, in its characteristic personalization of economic transaction, aviamento ensures that Amazonian indebtedness is shot through with ambivalence. Inseparable from the coercive character of debt is an interdependence that can offer security to people working in isolated areas with few direct social relationships other than the periodic visits of traveling traders.25 It smacks of compulsion, yet, as we have seen in Chapter 3, the everyday hegemony of the patrão is self-consciously authorized through the intimacy of personal association. In this way debt becomes one more terrain in which contemporary politics uneasily cohabits the past.

  Back in the days when Miguelinho was still a schoolboy and the vila was the economic heart of his grandpa’s community, each household had its own notebook in which the store clerk kept a running transactional account. The book entries were coupons, replacements for money and accepted only in Viega’s store. They were the means of controlling exchange that represented the accumulating debt of the fregueses—in the red from the moment they received the goods with which to build their f
irst house. Benedito Macedo, José’s father and an old man himself now, laughs as he tells me how he likes to think of all that uncollected debt totaled neatly but pointlessly in those columns when Raimundo died. But then, changing register, he points out that, unlike other families who allowed Viega to keep their books in his store, the Macedos insisted on holding theirs at home so they would always know the state of their finances.

  Members of the Viega family—Miguelinho, Sônia, and the wealthier relatives now living in Macapá—today unanimously diminish the coercive significance of historical debt, emphasizing instead the virtues of paternalism and the positive lubricating role of patrão-dependent credit networks in easing the flow of goods. Seu Benedito, in contrast, talks about the success of his family in managing the pitfalls of cash-poverty through those times: never taking more goods than they knew their resources could cover, always frugal and conservative, always within their narrow means, refusing to succumb to the temptations of cane liquor, positioning themselves for the hour independence would be within their grasp. As a negative exemplar, Seu Benedito describes his old friend Pedro Preto, drinking away his hard labor and now living hand-to-mouth, without even fishing nets of his own.

  But, inevitably, debt is ambiguous even for the Macedos. José Macedo is a hard-working man with a large family who worries continuously about the future of Igarapé Guariba. When he and his father look at Sônia, they see a moral continuity with the old patrão in her erosion of community integrity, most shamefully in the seductive use of cane liquor to enforce relations of indebtedness. Yet they, too, run a small front-porch store, and they, too, sell alcohol, though almost clandestinely and only for consumption off-premises. Moreover, their public discourse echoes the one Nestor Viega and his siblings attribute to their papai: to advance merchandise on credit is to help neighbors through the bad times. There is some agile reconciling afoot. Sônia’s credit is a destructive force in the community; theirs is a cohering mutual aid.