Meanwhile, the cargo Paolo had brought with him from Belém had been unloaded and transferred to a waiting truck, along with his luggage. Finally, satisfied that all this had been taken care of, Paolo approached Sebastien, with a rather sad smile on his handsome face.
“This is where we must part,” Paolo said. “Unless…are you sure you will not come with me, and stay at my house overnight, or longer? Then you could go on to Saõ Martinho over land. One of my men could drive you. Some of the roads are rough, but you would be in an air-conditioned car, if that would be any consolation.”
“You know I’d like to, Paolo, but now that I’ve come this far, I feel as though I need to see it through. I’m impatient to get there. I think I had better stay on the boat.”
“I understand. And Marajó is not a wilderness, after all. We do have telephones. I hope we will see each other again, before I return upriver, to Belém, and then back home, to Manaós.”
“I hope so, too.”
“I have told the captain to take good care of you. I’ve warned him that he will be answerable to me, if anything happens to you.”
As a concession to the presence of the—presumably—heterosexual men all around them, Paolo and Sebastien limited themselves to shaking hands, followed by a quick man-to-man hug.
“Farewell, dearest Sebastien. Remember me. Remember that you have a friend here in Brazil.”
“Addio, Paolo.”
“No, we must say arrivederci. I am sure we will see each other again.”
“Arrivederci, then.”
Sebastien shook hands with Guglielmo, as well.
“Arrivederci, senhor Leon. May you have the most pleasant journey.”
“Thank you, Gugelielmo. Take good care of your boss.”
“Oh, you need not concern yourself, senhor. Remember, I speak the English very well.”
“That’s most reassuring.”
Paolo and Guglielmo remained on the dock, waving, as the boat cast off and moved slowly out of sight.
Despite the presence on board of the solicitous captain and his crew, Sebastien suddenly felt very much alone. He tried to distract himself by continuing to observe the river banks as the boat passed between them.
Now, the faint chugging sound of the engine was almost drowned out by the constant lowing and heavy breathing of the imprisoned cattle. Occasionally, one of the beasts would emit a louder, more raucous cry of protest.
The evening was falling, still and beautiful, because the black rain clouds had not yet released their burden. He lay on the roof again, so tired that he felt as though he had loaded each and every one of those fifty cattle himself. The men who had actually done all that work were still at it, prodding the cattle with foot and stick. The animals had to be turned properly, their heads pushed low and tied in place. Sebastien soon saw why this was necessary. A steer fell down, onto its side, and the others trod upon him, their sharp hooves digging painfully into his vulnerable fleshy body. The sailors hurried to the animal’s rescue.
The hot night air surrounded them once again, thick and heavy, and the stillness of the grass and trees, without a hint of moving air to stir them, added to the sense of intense expectancy of the coming storm. For the time being, the earth about them seemed to be suspended inside a gigantic glass ball, from which all movement was excluded. The slight ripple which the boat left upon the water was the only exception.
Sebastien was invited to share the crew’s evening meal, which consisted of beans, noodles, rice, and chicken, the latter seasoned with garlic. For dessert, coconuts were split into halves with a machete and passed around. One used a spoon to scoop the soft, gelatinous meat directly out of the hemisphere. The fresh coconut tasted infinitely more delicate than the dry, shredded pulp Sebastien has familiar with.
The sky turned to blackness, and the glass ball was shattered by rain, descending hard and fast. It was too wet, this time, even to huddle under a piece of sail. Sebastien went below and stretched out as he was, fully dressed, on one of the bunks. On the other side of the partition he could hear the cattle stamping about in restless, futile motion and moaning. The smell of them penetrated the wall, too, but by now Sebastien had become accustomed to the earthy odor and no longer found it unpleasant. In any event, he had more immediate concerns. Despite liberal applications of both insect repellant and sunscreen, he had acquired several itchy insect bites, and a mild sunburn on his face tingled enough to make him search his luggage for a bottle of moisturizer, with which he slathered his face and neck..
He fell into a sort of stupor, rather than a true sleep, which provided nothing in the way of a real repose for either the mind or the body. All of the sights and events of the past day and night were still vivid in his recollections. He dreamed, fitfully—one moment, he was being trampled by the stampeding cattle or impaled upon their horns. Next, he was alone and frightened, having somehow gotten lost on the island, and was struggling to make his way on foot through a waist-deep swamp. Finally, he was lying on the roof of the engine room as the boat slid under a nearby tree. The overhanging branches came toward him too quickly to avoid, scratching against the boat’s side, and one of them brushed him bodily from the ship, sending him falling in the eerie, silent slow motion of a dream until he landed in the river. With the typical weird unreality of a dream, the water was not wet, but seemed to surge up slowly all around him like a flexible but dry object resembling a shroud, entrapping his limbs and weighing him down.
He woke up with a start, suppressing the urge to cry out, and found himself on the narrow bunk, trembling in a hot sweat. There was a high piercing cry echoing in his ears, but it had not emerged from his own parched throat. He heard it again, less distinctly. Then there was silence.
He got up and, without bothering to turn on the light, went out onto the dimly lighted deck. It was still raining, but gently now, and the cool drops felt good on his face. There was no repetition of the strange cries, and he thought they must have been part of his confused and upsetting dreams, after all.
The boat was tied up to a dock upon which a few people moved in the dim light. Two of them were women, large dark ones shrouded in modest dresses and shawls, who were selling the crew members snacks and refreshments out the baskets they carried. A man carrying a suitcase passed by them, spoke to the captain, and came aboard. He was dressed in city clothes, a white suit, and small straw hat. Sebastien rose to let him by, and with a polite lift of his hat, the man passed him and entered the only other stateroom. Now, with Paolo gone and only Portuguese spoken on board, Sebastien was not too sure about anything.
It was only a few minutes past midnight, although it seemed to him that he had been in that state of restless half-sleep for several nights in a row. It was marginally more comfortable to be out in the open air, so he sat there in the rain, wondering exactly where he was, and when, if ever, he would reach his destination. He pulled out a box of dry biscuits—another product of The Lion of Lisbon Food Corporation—offered them to the other passenger and the crew members who were nearby, and drank some of his bottled water. The rain began to come down so hard that he was forced to go below and crawl into one of those blistering bunks. This time, sheer exhaustion brought him sleep.
Chapter Eight:
The Mestre of the Fazenda
A horizontal shaft of sunlight coming through the porthole woke Sebastien, and he looked out at a clear sky. The boat was once again neither moving nor vibrating, which meant they had reached some other stopping point along the route. But through the porthole, Sebastien saw nothing resembling a town—only a dock at the foot of a hill which sloped gently down toward the water, with the angles of a derrick sprawling high above the pier. In the distance, through the gaps in the foliage of the dense growths of trees, he could see a few storage sheds, old and badly in need of repair.
The crew was making preparations, apparently for unloading some of the cattle. Those beasts which had settled down during the night were being coaxed, or coerced, into stand
ing upright again.
Sebastien now heard repeated that sharp cry of the night before, but in the full light of day it did not seem so terrifying. It almost had a homely, reassuring sound about it. He went up on deck, made his way toward the source of the noises, and, peering through the loose canvas covering, which spread over the cattle space to shield its occupants from the rain or the sun, he saw down below several new animals. Two crewmen were tying the legs of one of these in preparation for its delivery up above, and it was emitting its most piercing squeals as it wriggled its plump, sleek-skinned body in protest.
Pigs! Sebastien realized. They’re just pigs! And he laughed—feeling both relieved and somewhat ashamed as he remembered the hot sweat of fear that had covered him the first time he’d heard the squeals.
He left the ship to explore the immediate vicinity of the dock. There were rows of crude wooden pens, filled with a thousand cattle from the near countryside and from the far Amazon as well. He walked a narrow plank runway above the heads of the cattle to look down at them. They formed a slowly undulating surface of soft hides pressed together as closely as the confined space would allow. The sunlight fell slantwise across them at this early hour, making every ridge of backbone and sharp hip stand out clear and hard. The brightly lit areas of the animals’ bodies gleamed white or tan or iridescent black. The shadowed pockets were dark pits into which even the color of the hides was lost. The curves of the wide-spreading horns wavered in syncopated motion like a repeated pattern above the light and shadow of the body masses.
One of the crew men, who was smoking a cigarette, nodded to Sebastien by way of greeting, then, with a gesture, drew his attention to the most prized sections of the pens. One of these contained gray-white zebus, whose progenitors had been imported from India. Their great lumps of fat above the shoulder blades rose like something more suggestive of reptilian anatomy.
The occupants of a neighboring pen were as great a contrast as one might hope to find among animals so closely related. They were native water buffalos from the far reaches of the Amazon. They were broad-backed and broad-headed, and their crinkled horns stretched out wide on a horizontal plane. Their coal-black hides were smooth and shiny. These water buffalo—the crew man informed Sebastien, speaking volubly in Portuguese—maintained a certain aloofness on a cattle ranch, and would not mate with the domesticated stock, as did the Indian zebus.
A small, dark man now approached, stepping onto the dock. He looked first at Sebastien, then at the captain, who was standing on the deck, also enjoying a smoke.
“Bom dia. Is there a senhor Sebastien Leon on board?” he asked.
“Yes,” the captain replied. “There is the gentleman,” he added, nodding in Sebastien’s general direction.
Sebastien spoke up. “I am Sebastien Leon.”
“Welcome, senhor. I am Duardo, the harbor master here.”
Since Sebastien couldn’t see anything that even remotely resembled his concept of a harbor, he couldn’t help wondering why the services of a harbor master were required. But he shook the man’s proffered hand.
“Anibal Rocha, the foreman of Saõ Martinho, telephoned here yesterday evening,” Duardo went on. “He asked me to telephone back when you arrived here, so that he will know when to set out from the fazenda, to meet you at the next landing.”
“And how far from here is the next landing?”
“Not far, senhor.” It was the captain who provided the answer. “We will be there in another two hours or so, three hours at the most. If the engine give us no further trouble,” he added, clearly hedging his bet.
“My journey is almost over then,” Sebastien said, thinking aloud.
“If you will do me the honor of coming to my poor house,” Duardo said in very formal Portuguese, “you may sit down there and rest, while I telephone to confirm your arrival.”
Sebastien did his best to reply in the same language and tone. “You are most kind.”
“You, too, must come,” Duardo invited the captain, who was evidently an old acquaintance.
The three men went on shore and walked across a narrow strip of brown sandy beach to Duardo’s house, which was a typical thatch- roofed structure raised high on stilts. They climbed the wooden stairs leading to its single floor—steps which, Sebastien saw, showed signs not only of exposure to dampness, but of recent immersion. The boards were weathered and warped, and streaked with green algae.
“I understand that the houses here in the riverbank are raised on stilts because of the floods,” Sebastien commented. “Does the water often rise high enough to cover these steps?”
“It has sometimes been known to rise high enough that we can step out into a boat directly from the porch,” Duardo said, with a smile. “We are accustomed to it.” He gestured for Sebastien and the captain to precede him into the house.
“I have the only landline telephone in the vicinity,” Duardo explained, with unashamed pride. “Many of my neighbors come here to use it, and many people call to leave messages for those they know will pass by here on the river.”
Duardo did indeed have a telephone. In fact, he had an old-fashioned telephone booth, right there in the main room of the house. The phone, however, was not mounted on the wall of the booth. It was set on a shelf, above a stool, and it was an equally old-fashioned desk phone, bulky and black, with a rotary dial.
“I’ll make the call myself, if I may, since I have the number right here,” Sebastien said, taking a small notebook from his pocket and consulting it.
Sebastien dialed what he now knew was the main number of the fazenda’s office building and soon heard the familiar voice of Joaquin Medeiros.
“We are relieved that you have had a safe journey,” Medeiros said, after Sebastien had explained where he was calling from. “We will come to the next landing to meet you. Everyone here on Saõ Martinho is eager to welcome you.”
“Really? I only hope they won’t be too disappointed,” Sebastien replied, using a bit of wry humor to mask his lingering anxiety about exactly what the inhabitants of the fazenda would think of him.
Duardo, of course, had been standing there by the booth, close enough to overhear the conversation. After Sebastien hung up, Duardo offered him and the captain coffee, which they drank while they looked out the windows and watched the unloading and loading, new cargo being exchanged for the old. The harbor master also insisted that his two visitors partake of some breakfast, which consisted of avocados, their flesh deliciously sweet, and orange palm fruits.
When it was time to leave, Sebastien shook Duardo’s hand, and he and the captain got back on board the boat. The final stretch of the journey, for Sebastien, passed quickly and without incident. The morning was a hot one, with a fiery orange sun climbing steadily higher in a cloudless, blue sky. The next landing place consisted of nothing more than a large wooden pier, L-shaped, with the longer part of the L parallel to the shoreline. Nearby was another house rising out of the water on stilts, virtually identical to Duardo’s.
Several men emerged from the house and walked out onto the pier, to assist in the tying up of the boat.
“Are you the new mestre of Saõ Martinho?” one of the men asked when he caught sight of Sebastien standing on the deck.
“I don’t know about that,” Sebastien said, modestly. “I am Gilberto Leon’s nephew.”
“Are your people coming from the fazenda to meet you?”
“Yes, I called them from the last landing place.”
“Then you will not have long to wait, senhor. The people here are good at estimating exactly how long it takes for a boat to travel between the landings.”
“What direction will they come from?”
“From there, senhor,” the man replied, with a gesture toward inland. “That is the road to Saõ Martinho.”
The “road,” Sebastien saw, was unpaved, essentially a dirt track worn through the grassy fields. It didn’t look particularly prepossessing.
Sebastien waited, watching
the now-familiar process of cargo being unloaded and loaded.
The heat was searing. The iron-blue sky poured down invisible molten lead onto the earth. There was something impenetrable and foreboding about this sky. The blinding white rays of the sun seemed to have been split across the few clouds which had formed and were absorbed by them. Sebastien took the precaution of putting on his sunglasses, and studied the landscape. There were arid patches of ground scattered here and there in the midst of the otherwise lush vegetation, and on them the pitiful, meager and rusty grass was motionless and dry.
The only creatures which seemed comfortable in this environment were birds and insects. Chattering parrots and parakeets, all brilliantly green in hue, perched on the tree limbs, or took flight and traversed the sky. There was a steady, subdued hum of insect noises coming from the grass and the undergrowth, and Sebastien watched blue morpho butterflies dart restlessly among the bushes.
“Ah,” the man who had spoken to Sebastien exclaimed, suddenly. “It is as I told you, senhor. Here they come.”
All Sebastien saw at first, when he looked up the dirt track, was a cloud of blurred, yellowish dust. Quickly, though, it grew nearer and larger, and it also became more transparent, allowing him to see what had stirred up the dust.
In the vanguard was an open Jeep, which had new tires with deep treads. But its body, which may once have been white, was a mottled pale bluish-gray and pale beige, the result of the original paint job’s long exposure to the sun. Behind the vehicle was a little procession of three men on horseback, one of whom led by the reins a fourth horse, which was saddled but had no rider.
Brazilian Cattle Baron (Siren Publishing Ménage and More ManLove) Page 14
