by John Updike
It was Kupehaki who, in the days and weeks of their travel westward through the Mato Grosso, showed them how to catch bats and skinks and toads, spiders and grubs and grasshoppers, how to milk the bombax tree of its water, which berries to pick and which to beware as poisonous, what seeds and nuts were worth the harvesting and the shelling, and where to find the honey stored by the stingless little bees, called “eye-lickers,” that delight in human sweat and furiously flock to the nostrils and tear ducts and moist corners of the lips. They were worse than the blood-sucking flies and maribondo wasps, these tiny bees who would die ecstatic within the fluids of the human face rather than fly away.
Nature had been turned inside out on the Serra do Buraco—gouged and uplifted and pulverized by man’s passion for gold. Here, in the endless monotonous scrub forests and spotty savanna, the dry rises of chapadão alternating with trickling brown rivers, man resumed his lowly place in the churning struggle, the ocean of hungry protein, the frothy delirium of predation. Kupehaki showed them how, with Tristão’s razor, to cut out the gray parasites that with an insidious painlessness burrowed into their legs, and how to strip in an instant when an innocent-appearing leaf would, brushed against, release a mass of tiny orange ticks that spread beneath their clothes like a species of fire; these invaders unless instantly brushed and beaten off would burrow in a minute beneath their skins. It was Kupehaki who showed Tristão how to gather deadwood from the brush and how, when their matches had given out, to ignite the night’s fire with two sticks twirled in a pocket of dry grass, and who showed Isabel how to throw together a lean-to of green palm fronds that gave the illusion of shelter if not the reality. When, just beyond the shrinking circle of their campfire, a jaguar loosed its roar, it was Kupehaki who calmed Azor with tales of a mischievous jaguar-god. She set soothing limits to the dangers around them, describing the wilderness creatures as their brothers and sisters. When the howler monkeys screamed overhead and showered excrement upon them, she interpreted this as a humorous greeting; the bite of the little vampire bats, when they fastened upon the exposed hand of a sleeper in the night, she described as a kind of kiss, that purges the blood, in moderation. By day, she gestured rapturously toward the wealth of birds—the green parakeets, the white ibis and plover, the roseate spoonbills, the jabiru storks as tall as men, the yellow-bellied bem-te-vi kingbirds and the showy troupials whose nests crowded among the violet orchids that flourished on the stately uauaçu palms. In the distance, where a marshy pond glimmered like a mirage, colored clots, pink and white islands, of flamingos and egrets shimmered in the heat. Hearing the unaccustomed sound of human voices, the great birds took wing in a soft explosion, and as they poured past overhead the air thrillingly thrummed.
Tristão was fearful of wasting the six cartridges in César’s gun. Once he fired at a heron on the wing and missed; another time he shot a sluggishly waddling anteater whose roasted oily flesh made them all sick; a third time he wounded a deer that on three legs scrambled beyond pursuit into the reaches of the savanna, there to fail and fall victim to the rapacious wild hogs, the white-lipped peccaries. The remaining three bullets he resolved to keep for a human enemy, if any should appear. Kupehaki showed them clearings, with a dusting of ash on the coffee-colored earth, where Indians had cultivated manioc, maize, and tobacco, and left a few calabash vines as souvenirs of their stay of a season or two. Of whiter men—questing mamelucos born of Portuguese men and Indian mothers—there were harsher traces, the overgrown tummocks and tunnels of aborted mining, and the rotting huts of vanished towns. Sometimes the ruins were centuries old and barely recognizable as human remnants—a row of stones that had once been a wall, a depression in the earth that had been a storeroom. Men had greedily flitted across this vastness but found nothing to root them. Many had died, and left beneath the giant sky mounded graves marked by nameless rock pyramids or wooden crosses eaten into papery husks by termites. Where the wood had been painted, the termites ate around the letters, leaving them on the earth as illegible crumbs of paint. A man’s name did not last long in the Mato Grosso.
The mood of the newest explorers, even as they moved on the edge of starvation, was not without hope. A populated town must someday appear on the horizon, or a river that would take them to a place where their labor could be useful, where their persons could be woven into a social fabric. They seemed under their loads to be moving backward in time, away from the furies that excessive population had brought to their century, into a chaste space where pairs of willing human hands would still be valuable. Isabel remembered from the maps the nuns had showed her at school that Brazil had an end in the west; it became Bolivia, or Peru. There would be white-capped mountains, and Indians wearing blankets and bowler hats, and Maoist revolutionaries who might take them in and turn them into soldiers in the war against the men in silvery-gray suits.
In the meantime, their progress through the monotonous scrub offered the daily urgency of finding food, of staying alive, of staving off the demons of illness that besieged the blood. Azor, who had been plump as a grub at the start, had grown thin limbs and a hollow-eyed stare; he had learned to walk with them, for hours at a time, uncomplainingly, though his face was passing, it seemed to Isabel, into a mummified old age. Cordélia, still suckling, had fared better, though Isabel’s milk was drying up. Isabel had lost her female roundness, and was as lean as Kupehaki, even if her skin did not hang in such loose wrinkled folds from her arms, like the throbbing flap that falls from an iguana’s throat. Isabel’s ribs became as distinct and delicate as the ribs of a palm leaf, and her calves bulged with muscle as hard as Tristão’s. Whereas she had turned a glowing brown in the daily sun, her hair bleached in dazzling contrast, he had turned dusty, his black shoulders faded like the once brilliantly orange knapsack he wore, which had become a faint, uneven pink, a rectangular banner leading the way through the aisles of grass, of scrub, of forest, as one changed into the other and back again in the endlessly repeating distances of the Mato Grosso. A kind of dullness had crept into Tristão’s skin—pale splotches like a ghostly map, on his cheek and forearms—and a few tiny circlets of gray had appeared in his dense springy mat of head-wool. He had given up shaving, to preserve the edge of his razor blade, and his beard had come in thin, finer and softer than his head-hair, and grew out an inch, and then stopped.
Isabel’s love for him was taking a new shape, an elongated shape like a great loop spinning off into the sky, the tireless vastness above and below, and then looping back, surprising her with its force, a sleeping force aroused by some sudden, seldom-seen angle of his face—from above, say, so the high square serious brow hid those eyes like windows into blackness, and the foreshortened curve of his jaw nestled in the hollow of his muscular shoulder—or by the sight of his gaunt body bent and folded, its lean outline curved into the task of building a fire, the knobs of his spine visible like the gleaming humps of a rapidly tumbling current. Sometimes, when he squatted by the fire, hunkering on his long pale heels to inspect Azor’s wasted, patient little body for ticks, lice, leeches, and worms, or when in the dead of night he would bring the sobbing Cordélia to her to suckle—since even her milkless teats consoled the infant—Isabel would all but cry out in her odd joy, joy that he had chosen her, that he had come up to her in the blinding light of the beach and stamped himself on her eyes, on her soft young fibres, and given her life definition. He had chosen her, and had taken and accepted her, and was accepting even now these children as his and as his the fate of being hunted by her father. When she looked at him as he moved about unawares, she felt him treading on her insides, so they wobbled within her watery and fearful and painfully, ecstatically stretched. And when she, with the others at last quiet—Azor and Cordélia sleeping in a tangle with old Kupehaki, underneath a single piece of netting held up by stakes—would slide across the sandy soil of the campsite to remind him of their love, he would with obliging quickness grow his yam. The impotence of his mining days had been banished, but his potency
, once fruit of their closeness like a seed sprouting in a damp crevice, now came from a distance like a mutter of thunder that disdains to make rain. In the wilderness, the only man among them, Tristão had become elusively large—a moon that appears the same size as a button held close to the eye.
“Tristão,” she softly asked him one night. “Suppose we die out here?”
His hard muscles underwent the quick contraction of a shrug. “Then the vultures will clean us up and your father will never find us.”
“Do you think he still pursues?”
“More than ever since I killed his agent, I feel your father at our backs.”
“It is not my father that hunts us,” she said defensively. “It is the system.”
“Dear Isabel, I should never have come into your life. You would be a plump society wife in Rio by now, living on the Avenida Vieira Souto.”
She put her fingertips on his lips. “You are my fate. You are what I have always wanted. I dreamed you, and then you appeared. I am truly happy, Tristão.”
Mornings, they would rise, throw dry wood into the fire’s embers, reheat what was left of last night’s meal, scout about for food to fuel the day’s trek, and move on. If there was a stream nearby, or a lake not too brackish, they would bathe, quickly, before parasites and poisonous fish became alerted to their splashing presence. Quickly lifting one of her children’s naked glazed bodies out of the night-chilled water, Isabel gazed upward and the dome of sky seemed to swing on a pivot; there was a quality in the landscape and its towering sky, where the bleached clouds stood transparently erect or else thickened to crouching masses hurrying east with their simultaneously leaden and diaphanous centers—east toward the remote coast, the remote present century—a quality of motionless movement, a gentle cruelty, a brimming absence, a haughtiness of far-flung matter that yet held a tenderness around her as an eggshell holds the nutrient albumen around the burgeoning yolk.
Travelling day after day, they seemed to be on a treadmill that, failing to budge space, had become geared to time. There was a taste to the planalto air, a faint smoky spiciness, that Isabel thought must be the smell of Brazil which had wafted out to Cabral and his ships that April day in 1500, the smell of Tupi cooking and of the red dyewood that was the vast hidden land’s initial sole treasure. She felt increasingly at home, rocked within the repeating rhythm of their journey—the rising from their entwined sleep, discovering that they all had moved for warmth into the fire of the ashes and were filthy; the bathing in the pearly, guileless morning light; the circling search for food, for berries and nuts and wild pineapples, for small animals to stun with sticks or stones, lizards and moles and orange-bellied squirrels with flagrant orange tails, a search never so fruitless that they starved or so successful that they felt full, hunger like a gas they all kept inhaling, making their heads dizzy; the loading up, amid gay and mendacious promises to fretful little Azor that soon their journey would be over; the burdened plod, single file, across the tawny distances to that western target, to that far clump of dark-green araucarias, that rosy cliff, that notch in the blue-brown horizon; and then the evening encampment. Under the trembling red gaze of the setting sun—like a glowing coal, a brasa—they made a new home, and did the gathering, the reconnoitering, and set their fire to twinkle under the first stars, as a feeble child of the sun that had set.
Isabel felt safe and snug within this recurring routine but Kupehaki noticed ever more recent signs of cultivation in the savanna. In a shallow valley they shunned, they saw a herd not of bush deer, but of horses—the mammoth, wild-eyed, servile beasts that European intruders had brought to the continent.
“Guaicuru,” the old Tupi said, but could not be made to explain what the word meant. Kupehaki merely rolled her eyes and bared her teeth, which had been filed into points when she was a girl. Her newly nervous manner infected the children, whose cries and complaints and unmeetable demands in turn irritated the weary adults.
They came to a brown river, too wide and rapid to wade across. A few rotting stakes in the water, X-shaped to support a walkway, remained of a crude Indian bridge that had been swept away. They would make a raft tomorrow, of balsa logs lashed together with lianas. Sandy terraces had built up along the river’s edge, and on the highest of these, near a dense fringe of uauaçu palms and taller, slender carandá palms, they settled for the night.
xix. The Raid
AN ANIMATED TRICKLING and splashing at the edges of the river, and the scraping cry of the frogs there, kept Isabel from sinking deeply into sleep, so it was as an extension of half-formed dreams that tall naked men, painted like playing cards, materialized in the dim light mixed of moonlight and the glow cast by their campfire’s dying embers. The language the men used with each other was harsh and rapid but not loud, even as the raid reached its quick crisis. They must have been spying, for their actions were planned. Two shadows seized Kupehaki and lifted the old woman up; while one pinned her arms the other held her hair and, sawing at her throat with the white curve of a sharp-toothed jawbone, twirled her head and pulled it loose; there was a plume, a black feather, of blood, as the body dropped. A disbelieving scream rose in Isabel’s throat and jammed. The severed head, it seemed to her then and ever after in nightmare, gazed at her with heavy-lidded calm, as if to say she had done all she could and now awaited a word of dismissal from her mistress.
Two other tall shadows lifted up the children, still curled asleep in their cocoons of mosquito netting, and disappeared with a clatter of their tongues back into the fringe of palms. Azor tried to cry but a hand must have clamped shut his mouth. Another shadow had inverted Kupehaki’s long basket and was searching among the spilled scraps for treasures, on the sandy earth beside the headless body.
Tristão had scrambled to his feet and thus the Indian assigned to approach them halted. The disturbance had fanned the dying fire into a flare of life and by its flare they saw each other. The Indian was naked but for his conical penis-sheath and the bracelets of shells and teeth on his wrists and ankles. His face, plucked hairless, so that his lashless eyes had a red and wounded look, was covered with lacelike designs of red and blue dye, and like slender white tusks three wands of bone thrust from his pierced lower lip. His hair was short and rigid with some sort of wax; when he bared his teeth, they were crooked and black. He bared them because in the same muddled light by which he was seen he saw a man darker and a woman paler than he had ever beheld and the sight was terrible and holy to him. He carried a lance of sharpened and no doubt poison-tipped bamboo but held it aloft a fatal second, as a fisher hesitates in calculating the angle by which his spear must pierce the deceptive water. Isabel smelled the sharp resinous stench that came off the stiff hair and saw that where the Indian’s ears should have been there were bird’s wings; then Tristão shot him, with César’s gun.
The attacker dropped his spear and, uttering a guttural cry of astonishment, clawed at his side, as if at a bee-sting. He tried to run, but this injury to his mechanism made his legs asymmetrical, so he ran in a circle, and then fell inward, toward the fire, still pedalling, his feet digging the sand. The other Indians, with the unembarrassed cowardice of savages, had vanished at the sound of the shot. In Isabel’s ears it had sounded like a slap, waking her at last. When had she leaped to her feet, to stand beside Tristão in their final second? She had no memory. Instead, the resinous smell had reminded her of the violin lessons that Uncle Donaciano had once arranged for her. Like all such lessons—in drawing and dance and embroidery—they had failed to take; her only aptitude had been for love.
Tristão walked to the Indian’s kicking body and pointed the pistol but failed to fire it. Instead, he fished from his shorts what must have been the razor blade and squatted to do something that his bent back prevented her from seeing. When he stood again, the murderous numbness of his expression fell on her face like dew. To be still alive was strange and humid.
He explained, “I must keep two bullets. Perhaps for you and me, i
f they return.”
The thought of being killed by him had a beautiful rightness that made Isabel’s loins clench. Then against the shining cliff of fantasy the bitter dull waves of their reality broke. Kupehaki’s body lay at her feet, detritus smelling of the excrement released in the death paroxysm. “They’ve stolen our children!” Isabel wailed, the possessive pronoun a lie.
“The Indians have horses,” Tristão told her. “Listen. You can hear the hoofbeats departing. We can never catch them on foot.” He was panting, the rampart of his brow was knotted in a scowl. He was angry, it seemed, at her.
“Oh my little babies,” she said, and fainted. The sandy earth came up to meet her as the powdery mattress of her childhood bed would float upward to her body when, in the days before her mother died in childbirth and her father became a wounded monster, he would carry her asleep in his arms from some bright exciting place they had all been together, and for just a flicker of wakefulness she would be aware of his strong arms, of the white sheets and fuzzy covers turned back, of her weariness and trust as she felt herself ladled from the deep bucket of one dream into another.
