This is an excerpt from Journey on the Estrada Real: Encounters in
the Mountains of Brazil, by Glenn Alan Cheney (Academy Chicago, 2004,
ISBN 0-89733-530-9)
Introduction
The Royal Road
In 1697 or so, the Crown of Portugal ordered a road built from the port
of Praia dos Mineiros, where the Rio Inhomirim met the Atlantic, to Diamantina,
where creeks were exposing diamonds to daylight. The Estrada Real, the Royal
Road, was to surmount the Serra do Mar that stands steep, dark-green, and
misty about Guanabara Bay, then probe north into the region known as Minas
Gerais - General Mines. The Royal Road was to connect the cities producing
gold and diamonds as nowhere else on earth. Tunnels dug into hillsides were
turning up just about every type of gem known to man. São João
del Rei, Tiradentes, Congonhas and Vila Rica were already thriving cities.
Vila Rica was becoming the largest city in the Americas, and its name would
some day change from Rich Village to Black Gold Ouro Preto. Diamantina,
in northern Minas, was rising from the muck of a diamond mine in a gully
to become a Portuguese outpost worth the wealth it was sending south to
Praia dos Mineiros - Beach of Miners later to be called Rio de Janeiro.
From there the wealth of Brazil sailed to Lisbon.
This winding dirt road connected some of the world's most miserable
people to some of the world's wealthiest - the slaves in the mines of Minas
Gerais to the Portuguese Crown, the ultimate beneficiaries of everything
that could be stripped from the land of the brassy-colored brasa
wood - Brazil.
The Estrada Real was to restrict as much as facilitate transportation
into the interior. The Crown did not want Brazil to develop industrial capacity.
It was to continue completely dependent on Portugal for food, metals, tools,
nails, ammunition, equipment, and supplies. The Brazilian economy was to
be based almost exclusively on the export of gems and gold. The Estrada
Real, therefore, was to facilitate the inward delivery of manufactured goods
to the interior while speeding the outward flow of mineral riches. The Estrada
was also to remain the only route of transportation, making it possible
for Portugal to control development and exploitation.
In a certain sense, the history of the Estrada Real is the history of
Latin America. Unlike the settlers who came to North America from industrial
nations, the colonizers of Latin America came from feudal lands. They came
neither to build nor to stay. In Portuguese, the verb explorar means
both explore and exploit. The language has no other word for either activity.
As if by lingual necessity, the Portuguese did both at the same time, exploring
a region so vast that even today it has not yet been fully mapped, exploiting
the land and ungodly number of native and imported people. Once the gold
and jewels were gone, the people who remained were left with magnificent
churches and abandoned mines but no infrastructure for any but an agrarian
economy.
That situation hasn't changed much. At the beginning of the 21st century,
the Estrada Real of the 17th century is still there. Most of the road is
dirt, dust, or mud, though it becomes cobblestone as it passes through towns
and villages. Many of the villages have a toehold on the 20th century -
undependable electricity, a single phone, two television channels, visiting
doctors with medical degrees - but the lives of the people there haven't
changed much since the 17th century. They still cook on open wood stoves,
and they travel by horse, mule and foot. They treat their ills with roots
and herbs, and they pray for rain. They live in houses built by their grandfathers
and sing in churches built by slaves. They still have no infrastructure
for any but an agrarian economy.
This is the cradle of Brazilian culture. It all started here, in the
mountains of Minas Gerais. As urban Brazil struggles into modern times and
the global economy, its slow, quiet past still lives along its first road.
How has it survived? How long can it survive? Should it survive?
What, if anything, can save it? The search for the answers - a walk down
the road - turns up the seeds of an odd revolution. People who have yet
to benefit from the global economy are already struggling against it. Some,
poor as dirt, ignorant of the world, are satisfied with the happiness they've
found in God. Others, more aware, appreciate the wealth of their ancient
culture. And some, of course, want to trade their antiquated ways for the
commerce and industry that brings the money that buys the stuff that promises
to make life better.
This book is about the people, culture and history of the Estrada Real.
The people are changing, some by resisting change, some by embracing it.
The culture is in the balance. The history is there, as immutable as it
is unfinished.
Chapter One
Bento Rodrigues: A Good Night in the Good House of a Good
Man
I begin my journey on the Estrada Real in Mariana, Minas Gerais, for
two reasons. One is that once upon a time I lived here, trying my hand at
banana farming. I never knew that from my front porch I could see the oldest
road in the Western Hemisphere rising over a hill to the east and north.
The other reason is that there is no map of the entire Estrada Real, no
guide book, no signs along the way. There is, however, a rough and often
erroneous guide for the road from Mariana to its northernmost point, Diamantina.
So, after 15 years away from the place, I return, look up an old friend,
Lázaro, tell him my plan, and spend the night at his house.
My brother-in-law, a highly domesticated apartment dweller in the state
capital, Belo Horizonte, calls my plan a programa de indio, an Indian
plan, by which I think he means a plan that is not especially well thought
out, more an idea than a plan. But what kind of planning can you do when
you're going to place that has no map? I load my knapsack, the same one
I used on Boy Scout hikes 35 years ago, with toilet paper, a change of clothes,
a sleeping bag, an umbrella, a bottle of water, a few other essentials,
and a little duct tape just in case of disaster. Lázaro takes me
into town to buy a straw hat. The spring sun is hotter than usual, he says,
and the rains have yet to arrive.
But they arrive that very night, a ripper of a thunderstorm, an inauspicious
introduction to a long hike. I awake when the neighborhood roosters start
to crow, which must have been about 3:00 a.m.. I roll around in bed in unquenchable
anxiety, imagining the many ways in which I might be bushwhacked on the
Estrada Real. Everyone, without exception, has warned me not to go walking
alone in the outback. The crime rate in Belo Horizonte has risen 94 percent
in the past year, and the daily newspaper, the Estado de Minas, always
features a story of a purposeless murder. I think they have a special page
reserved for reports of homicides and daring robberies. The rural areas
are not subject to the same type of urban crime, but the Estrada Real does
run through a region still relatively rich in gold. That's exactly why the
road's there. The gold's in scant supply these days, but prospecting is
still a last resort for men who can't find jobs. They muck around in the
streams, panning for infinitesimal specks. Long-term investment in infrastructure
is the last thing on their minds. To survive, they need gold, and if they
don't find enough - and no one at any time in history has ever found enough
- they are perfectly willing to steal gold from anyone else who has been
lucky enough to find some. And of course the gold miner's code of ethics
is silent on the issue of robbing tourists on a road far from town. Even
a grubby, tattered backpack is worth more than the air in their pockets.
Or so I have been warned by those who know.
I have a lot of faith in humanity, especially in Brazilian humanity,
but I also know that all it takes is one bad apple - and Brazil has no shortage
of those - to ruin a trip and leave a gringo dead in a ditch for buzzards
to eat. Buzzards hold a strong presence in my pre-dawn fears, and they are
also waiting at the place where the dirt road of the Estrada Real meets
the paved road that goes out of Mariana toward the Timbopeba and Samarco
hematite mines. If I were writing a work of fiction about a trip down this
road, I would never dare have the protagonist begin his trip under the gaze
of a dozen urubus that are standing on rocks and fence posts, enjoying
the stench of something dead. They look like glum funeral directors who
have been interrupted in the middle of a meal. They stare at Lázaro
and me as we shake hands and slap each other on the back. He takes my picture,
then drives away with a toot and a wave out the window, I swing my pack
up to my shoulders. The urubus watch me as swing my pack to my back
and trudge toward points north. I can say with authority that the gaze of
a buzzard is palpable on the spine.
It takes me all of ten minutes to forget about being murdered. The tight
weight of the pack is as welcome as a fatherly embrace. Birds chatter in
the low, dry brush on the hills on both sides of the road. The only other
sound is the crunch of my feet on the quartz gravel of the road. The road
climbs through a series of switchbacks, then tips trough a pass that looks
over a wide view to the east. The downhill side of the road is dense with
old eucalyptus and, farther down, the general mata of natural forest.
Way down there, monkeys hoot up a mad orgy of excitement that suddenly quiets
down, then rises into a another frenzy.
At the highest point I stop to take a few notes that might improve the
SENAC guide book. It's already apparent that its author wasn't a very intelligent
person and may well have been inebriated as he described the route. He refers
to things that weren't there, such as the Fazenda Gualuxo and the bridge
over the Rio Gualuxo do Norte. He is inconsistent in references to such
landmarks entrances to farms, sometimes noting them, sometimes not. He writes
little paragraphs such as "Turn left. Go straight. Keep right,"
without reliable reference as to where these turns might be made. Often
"turn right" seems to mean "don't turn left." In most
cases, "Stay on the main road for the next ten miles" would suffice,
and that's exactly what I do. Still, a little confirmation now and then
would be comforting.
I soon give up trying to correct the guide book. I also give up trying
to describe the scenery. I can generally describe the road as winding along
the side of hills. The view to one side is usually a vista of ten or twenty
miles over hills of varying shades of green that gradually blend into hazy
purple. The other side of the road is the mountain I am walking around,
usually a moderately steep incline with lots of rock, dried grass, low brush.
Sometimes, though never for long, second-growth forest crowds in from both
sides. By ten o'clock in the morning, cicadas crank up their whine. The
road surface varies from red clay to white sand to brown gravel. On this
first stretch of road, from Mariana to Camargos, half a dozen cars go by
in four or five hours, raising dust in their wake. The passengers seem to
be Mariana people on their way to picnics or the little farms, called sítios,
that Brazilians often keep just outside of town. I wave at them all, and
they all wave back. A couple slow down and offer a ride by holding an up-pointed
thumb out the window, but I wave them off with a wag of my forefinger.
Coming into Camargos, some ten or fifteen kilometers from Mariana (the
guidebooks says 22, but I'm sure it's wrong) the road forks. I choose the
one that doesn't go uphill. Camargos is just a hamlet of a few dozen houses,
a town without sound. I soon come to a man who was fooling around with a
bucket at a public spigot. A church, large but simple, stands atop a hill
on the other side of the road. I ask the man where one could eat a meal
in Camargos. He said there is nowhere. We talk a bit. His name is Fernando.
He tells me Camargos was the first district of Mariana making it one of
the oldest towns in the state. The church, Nossa Senhora da Conceição,
is over 300 years old. It's locked until the priest comes, which won't be
that day. Still wary of thieves, I haul my pack up the long, steep stairs
to the church, poke around, then come back down and continue on my way.
I soon come to Fernando again, now with another man. He expresses his regret
that the town has nowhere to eat, but he says he has some coffee, if I want
some. Hungry and weak, needing the sugar, I accept and step into his house,
which is flush up against the road. It's a simple and immaculate place many
decades old. The floors are of a hardwood that no longer exists, at least
not in the width of his floorboards. His living room walls have pictures
of a saint, a cross, a prayer in a frame. Fernando explains that he gets
his lunch from his "companheira," and therefore he has no cooked
food in the house. He pours me a generous dose of hot, sweet, strong coffee
from a thermos and insists that I take at least three crackers from a pack.
We chat a bit about the wealth of the United States. And then off I go.
I soon come to a sign that says "Honey for Sale." Being a
beekeeper, I want to go see. Honey for lunch is better than no lunch. I
poke around a little lane that winds through the grass along a brook. A
dump truck stands at the brook, its motor running, apparently there for
the water. I ask a kid if he knows about the honey. He doesn't, but I see
another sign that points over a pair of logs that cross the brook. I go
across and head toward the only possible place with honey, a kind of shack
next to a kind of corral under a kind of roof, a functional, slap-dash kind
of place. I clap and call out, but no one appears until a few seconds after
I turn around to leave. It's a tall, bearded man, dirty with work in the
sun, his arms thick from the kind of work that might well include the cutting
of trees, the pounding in of fence posts, lifting of calves.
"Do you have honey for sale?" I ask.
"I have.'
"You're the beekeeper?"
"I am."
"I'm a beekeeper, too."
That gets me a big smile and a strong, gentle handshake of apiary brotherhood.
His name is Fernando. He says, "Come on!"
He opens a barbed wire gate, takes me back to his little shack, along
the way asking, "You had lunch?"
As a matter of fact, I hadn't. I smell wood smoke. His shack doesn't
quite qualify as a shack. I guess it's more like a hut, just some corrugated
asbestos planks over a frame of poles, some plastic and sheet metal and
cardboard around the sides. In one corner he has a jury-rigged, waist-high
wood stove of sheet metal that once served for something else, a functional
mess, a lot of stuff not out of place but hung and stacked wherever it goddam
well belongs. His bee hat and veil are on top of a stack of stuff too vague
to identify. His pots and pans are upside down on a plank of wood outside,
black on the outside, shiny on the inside.
Lunch is a mexido of rice, beans, okra and herbs all mixed up
in a pot, a delicious expediency typical of Minas Gerais. The first Portuguese
bandeirante adventurers who came here carried shovels and muskets
but no food or plows. They had come for gold. They had no time to plant.
They learned about living off the land from the Indians, a people without
alimentary taboos. They ate fruits they'd never heard of - pitanga, araticum,
bacupari, jatobá, guava, pequi, cagaita. They ate fiddlehead
ferns, wild squash, bamboo shoots, gooseberry leaves. They ate tanajura
ants and bicho-da-taquara larva. They ate fish wrapped in leaves.
They ate their corn raw, ground, boiled, baked, or roasted. They hunted
alligator, monkey, quail, rabbit, dove, deer, armadillo, paca, wild pigs,
snakes, lizards. The ate manioc root baked, roasted, boiled, sweetened,
ground, souped. From the urucum seeds they made medicine, colored foods,
decorated their bodies and defended themselves against bug bites. Of all
these foods, only the bicho-da-taquara larva have fallen from the
mineiro menu, though it was once a delicacy. They were mashed and boiled,
their fat skimmed off for a tasty butter. As they were an ocean away from
their women, the men suffered insomnia caused by "excesses of love."
To get a good night's sleep, they ate dried larva with the intestines intact
but without the head. The meal gave them wonderful dreams of brilliant forests
where they ate delicious fruits.
Mineiro food, famous throughout Brazil, was born of hunger, first of
the bandeirantes, then of the slaves. The slaves ate leftovers, the
hooves and ears of the pig, the guts of the cow, the collards that grew
in easy abundance, the corn mash that the horses didn't finish, and spices
that came from the woods. Hunger necessitated invention, and the African
women were culinary geniuses. The best foods on the contemporary Brazilian
menu were concocted in miserable kitchens of slave quarters.
Fernando's mexido is manifest proof of the flexibility of mineiro
food. He assures me that the pot is dirty on the outside but clean on the
inside. I can help myself, have all I want. He rinses off a plate at a spigot
fed by a tank up on the hill. It's good, hearty stuff, truly delicious.
I've never tasted the herb that's in it, and the cook doesn't know what
it's called.
Fernando lives in Mariana but comes out here on the weekends. He once
wanted to build a house here, but his family doesn't like the place, so
he comes here to be alone and is happy here, happy as a pig in mud, a man
in his place. He used to work with a company messing in some way with environmental
issues, but he lost the job, and now, it being hard to find another job,
he spends his time on his little plot of land in Camargos, messing with
a few cows, some bee hives, an organic garden. "Sou homen do mato
mesmo," he said - a man really of the woods. He loves his grubby
little place. I can't say it's dirty though I'm eating thirty feet from
a corral with a cow in it. The big box of fine soil beside my foot, I'm
told, is full of worms. But worms are not dirty, and I'll take cow-dirt
over diesel fumes any day.
Suddenly I remember a beekeeper I used to know, an old guy named Ciro
who sold his honey at the Saturday market in Mariana 15 years ago. Ciro
surprised me by speaking English when I complimented him on his honey. He
was Brazilian but had worked for GM in Michigan for many years. Then he
raised bees in a hamlet an hour outside of a town that was two hours from
a state capital that no one outside of Brazil has heard of - Camargos, the
place I have just walked through. Now Fernando tells me that Ciro died a
few years ago. He praises Ciro very highly as an intelligent man who did
things right. With deep nods over his plate of mexido, he emphasized
how Ciro was good and smart.
Before he fetches some honey, Fernando rinses off a ladle and brings
out a pot of milk still warm from his cows. It's good milk, creamy and earthy
and warm. The only honey he has is a plastic container of one kilo, about
four times the weight I want to carry. I pay him five reais, which is cheap.
As we discussed earlier, raising bees isn't easy, and honey cannot be too
expensive. Like all beekeepers in Brazil, Fernando raises killer bees. I've
had that pleasure, too, and therefore know that five reais two and
a half bucks - really is too little for a kilo of honey. Any amount is too
little.
Fernando tells me there's no hotel in the next town, Bento Rodrigues,
but there's a little restaurant run by a guy named Juca. Juca is a fine
fellow and will see to it that I don't have to sleep in the mato.
And off I go. Within a hundred yards I come to the most delightful little
cascade, clean water pouring over rocks worn smooth. I change into trunks
and wade into the main flow, which bounces horizontally through a sluice
in the rock. I let the water pound down on my shoulders, which feels mighty
good. Over to the side a lower flow sends a flood of bubbles swirling around
under a pummel of water.
Along comes a young man with a very pretty young lady on his back. She
strips to a tiny bikini and enjoys the water. He invites me to a place a
few yards upstream, where they and some friends are cooking meat and drinking
Cuba libres from an aluminum cup. With ice. They insist I sip a little.
The coldness of it is very fine. They give me some chunks of chicken shaved
from a spit. That is fine, too. The girls slide down a sluice in the rock,
slowly, giggling, ignoring all orders and advice from the guys who are attending
to the meat and the rum.
Then I take what I later find out was the long road to the village of
Bento Rodriquez, a hot and winding road that curls high around a sierra.
It's too high for tall trees, which means nice views but no shade. Much
of the road surface is fine, white sand, which reflects the early afternoon
sun up into my rapidly toasting face. What a glorious feeling it is to come
around a bend and see Bento Rodrigues at the far end of a deep valley, still
far away but within sight. With the Igreja São Bento at the center
of town and fields all around, it's just as cute as can be, a place for
Hobbits or fairy tale people. My feet hurt as I plod into town. At this
late moment it occurs to me that I haven't walked this far in one day since
adolescence some 35 years ago. Teetering with exhaustion and thirst, I pull
up to the first bar and order a Skol before I even take off my pack. Then
I sit down and drink it. It is good. I watch as rowdy a group plays pool
and pretends not to notice me.
I inquire about Juca and am directed up the street to a bar that is
just a small room that is filled to capacity by about ten guys playing a
boisterous game of cards. At the crucial moments of laying cards on the
table or transferring funds or resolving a dispute they're loud to the point
of hurting my ears. They rather effectively pretend not to notice that a
stranger has just walked in. At the little counter in back I introduce myself
to Juca, make the connection with Fernando and in that instant obviously
gain Juca's favor. When I ask him if he has beer, he gives me an answer
that I've often heard and always thought would be a good line in a commercial
for Antarctica beer: "We only have Brahma."
Brahma's the exact same thing as Antarctica, Skol, Kaiser, Bohemia and
every Bud, Busch and Miller made in the U.S.A. - a light, hop-free, rice-based
beer that is very, very good if too cold to taste on a day too hot to tolerate.
Beer's a rich man's drink in the interior of Brazil. The guys playing cards
are drinking cachaça, a drink so cheap that it rhymes with de
graça, which means "free." It also with desgraça
- misfortune with implications of disgrace. Rich guy that I am, and hot
and thirsty, I opt for the Brahma and take a seat on a bench just outside
the front door. I am sitting there, writing notes and resting my poor feet
and wondering how to go about asking where a person can sleep around there,
when along came an old, skinny black man with eyes that obviously can't
see much and a knot of mutilated teeth at the front of his black and ragged
gums. He asks if I am a "gringo" and offers his hand, which wavers
about eight inches off course. He is not only half blind but three-quarters
drunk. I shake it. In his garbled, gummy peon lingo, he asks if I'd buy
him a cachaça. I cannot say no to a man who looks so poor and miserable.
He should be have every drop of cachaça he can hold. I tell him to
tell Juca I'll pay for a dose. He goes in and tells Juca. Juca comes out
to confirm. He has a game leg that isn't good for much except as a prop
to keep him from falling over. To walk he has to swing it around with one
hand. I tell him I'll pay for the drink if he wants to sell it to the guy;
it's up to him. So he goes and gets a half a glass of it - a good four or
five ounces - but he holds the glass out into the street so the guy has
to physically leave if he wants to drink it. The guy downs it in one gulp,
thanks me and, to my relief, leaves.
I then use Fernando's reference to ask Juca where a person can sleep
in Bento Rodriguez, strongly implying that Fernando has passed this responsibility
on to him. He indicates a Manoel Muniz, who lives down a grassy lane that
runs beside the church. My weak and shaky legs stagger me on over there,
arriving just as Manoel is coming through his gate with four plastic milk
pails. A certain semi-mute I had seen in the first bar, who talks by huffing
and squeaking and waving his arms around, is there with Manoel, apparently
advising him of my imminent arrival. Manoel eyes me up and down a, I explain
myself and my mission and give Juca as my reference, strongly implying that
I am here at Juca's request and recommendation. I recognize Manoel as a
good man, the type with Christian love in his eyes, an older guy who still
gets to do things with milk pails.
Manoel is a little concerned that he'll have to feed me. I say I'll
eat at Juca's. He asks if I'm alone. Yes, I am. He asks how long I want
to stay. I say I'd be out of there by dawn. I tell him I only need a little
space on the floor. I just don't want to have to sleep in the mato.
And in case he can't tell, I also need a shower, though I can certainly
wait until he gets back from his milk business.
Well, he reckons he can put me up, so he takes me through the gate and
around to the back of his house to where his wife is pushing coagulated
milk into round cheese molds with her fingers, making the famous queijo
mineiro - cheese Minas-style, a soft, salty cheese that can be anywhere
from dripping wet to grainy dry. She is old and heavy and coughing and waving
flies off her cheese. She shows no reaction to my presence. Manoel takes
me to a bedroom, then leads me to the bathroom, a rather convoluted trail
through the living room, kitchen and dining room. He shows me where all
the light switches are, in case I have to get up at night. He explains that
the hot water comes from a serpentina, a pipe that runs through the
grill of the fogão de lenha wood stove, then up to a tank
over the ceiling. The boiling water circulates itself up to the tank while
drawing water down from the same tank. He doesn't need to explain that the
supply of hot water, therefore, was limited but would be plenty hot. He
also didn't need to tell me that the toilet might need an extra flush or
two to really do its job. I can tell by looking at it.
It's a nice, clean, casa mineira with tile roof and blue trim
around the doors and windows. The windows have no glass, just heavy shutters
to swing shut at night. In this house, they swing into the room to open.
In some houses, they swing out. The living room furniture is cheap and simple,
just a leatherette couch a chair, and a coffee table with a big Bible on
it. The walls sport pictures of Nossa Senhora da Conceição
and Santo Gabriel, a battery-operated clock in antique style, five starfish,
a heavy-duty, oversized, only-for-show rosary, a picture of Jesus with arms
held out to a nice lake, and the inevitable old photos of a husband and
wife. I think just about every house in the interior of Minas Gerais has
one of these pairs of photos in an oval frame. They are strange photos from
deep in the past, often with formal clothes painted below the photo of the
face. Someone told me that the photos are blown-up prints made from tiny
contact prints. The rosiness in the cheeks is water color. Manoel tells
me the photos are of him and his wife, taken fifty years ago, just after
they were married. By the looks of the wife, she's been in a bad mood since
day one.
Not just a bad mood, it turns out. Manoel tells me she's got mental
problems.
It turns out I'm not the first foreigner to stay in this house. A guy
from Germany, a backpacker who looked a little like me, was here not long
ago, and a couple from Europe somewhere, and a whole busload of people from
São Paulo who called beforehand and arranged to rent his whole house
and quintal, where they slept and camped. They were friendly, peaceful
people, members of a church. They had their pictures taken beside him beside
his flowers, his chickens, his house and the little cow barn.
Manoel has a great quintal, a word for which there is no translation
besides, inadequately, backyard. The quintal of a rural house in
Minas Gerais is a lush area planted with food and flowers. In Manoel's case,
it includes not only bananas, jabuticaba, lemons, limes, oranges, pitanga
berries, mulberries, tangerines, and a lot of flowers but five dairy cows,
three pigs, and twenty-one piglets that have been timed to reach table-size
by Christmas. The jabuticabas are ripe, an event that takes place once a
year for about two weeks and only in a rather narrow area of Brazil (though
I hear they have the same fruit in Australia). These odd, black-purple berries
grow right from the trunks of the many-stemmed tree, and a given tree produces
far more than a family can consume. They can't be frozen or stored, though
they can be made into a liqueur or jam. You have to eat them when they're
ripe. They're an good fruit for eating outdoors because they involve a lot
of spitting. You take each berry, which is a little larger than a marble,
bite it hard enough to break the skin, then suck out the insides. You squeeze
it to get the pit and pulp out, suck the pulp off the pit, then spit the
pit out. There's probably a delicate way to do this, and I suppose it could
be done indoors with a bowl on a table, but it's far more efficient and
satisfying to project the pit into the great outdoors. As if the taste were
not enough, the guilt of having a tree full of jabuticaba drives everyone
to eat as many as possible. As with potato chips, it's hard to eat just
one, or even just a pound, though as you binge toward a kilo, a certain
limit is reached, usually all of a sudden. After two weeks of this, everyone's
glad the season is over.
Manoel is seventy-six years old. He has a head of hair thick and black.
One lens of his black-frame glasses is dirty and spotted with what seems
to be white paint. He lives in a house with a roof that's a hundred years
old, the house where his father was born. He's a fine fellow who loves his
wife, his fruit trees, the chickens and ducks that peck around his sandaled
feet in the quintal as he flicks corn scooped up in a blue plastic hard
hat. He loves the piglets he will sell come Christmas. He loves Fernando
of Camargos; he loved Ciro, the smart beekeeper who died, as I now learn,
of a heart attack at the gate of his farm as he was about to leave for Mariana.
Manoel loves his twenty-one grandchildren and the great-grandson who just
turned one, at which point he had his little existence confirmed and glorified
in a laminated card the size of a post card with the young cad bright-eyed
and optimistic, looking for all the world like someone destined to become
the mayor of a place with pavement.
We sit at Manoel's big dining room table, eating crackers and his wife's
requeijão , a queijo mineiro that comes out soft and
almost spreadable because at some point in its making it has been boiled.
We also eat creamy doce de leite caramel that originated in his own
cows. He gives me some manioc soup that had been warmed all day on his wood
stove. We drink coffee which I believe he thinned down with water so there's
be enough for both of us. His wife, suffering from a fever, keeps to her
bedroom.
Ever-so-sore from my long hike, I sleep in exquisite soreness, window
wide open, barely aware of the chilly fog that wafts in. It takes four hours
of cock-a-doodle-doo, starting long before dawn, to get me up. For breakfast,
Manoel makes me strong coffee - much stronger than that of the night before
- with cheese and requeijão and store-bought cookies. It's
good. He also boils me two eggs, serving them in a state barely beyond raw,
which is the way I like them. One of the eggs had a greenish shell, the
other a splotchy tan, both typical of the ovos caipiris, the eggs
of truly free-range chickens who live off not chicken feed but whatever
they can scratch up in the quintal. I contribute some of Fernando's
honey, but it turns out Manoel has honey from a grandson who messes with
bees. He has a vial of store-bought propolis, too, for medicinal purposes.
Before I leave, I ask if I can fill my two-liter plastic guaraná
bottle. (Guaraná is a popular soft drink made either from
a certain root or from an artificial version of it. It's the only drink
in Brazil that outsells Coca-Cola, though the Coca-Cola company has now
come out with a guaraná drink of its own.) Of course Manoel
is glad to provide me with water. In fact, he chills it for me by bringing
from his freezer a block of ice in a war-torn aluminum pot. He draws water
from his clay filtro tank and lets it cool over the ice before he
pours it into my bottle. We fill the bottle in two batches, but that isn't
enough. He uses a hammer and a lot of thumping to get the block of ice out
of the pot. Then he cracks it into slivers that he slips into the mouth
of the bottle. Presto! Cold water for my journey.
Then I ask him what I owed. Well, really, he says, nothing. If I write
a book and bring more tourists to Bento Rodriguez, maybe some great-grandchild
of his might someday open a little hotel in his house. It would be a great
thing if that happened.
But I insist, and he finally says that any little thing would be fine.
I slap him around the shoulders and tell him what other foreigners - the
German, the Europeans, the church people in the bus - have told him: He
knows how to work but he doesn't know how to charge. I give him ten reais
- about five dollars - and he says it's too much and won't take it so I
press it to the granite of his kitchen counter and tell him that's how much
he gets.
And off I went with five pounds of cold water and the comfort of knowing
I have to walk only nine kilometers to Santa Rita Durão. It's mostly
uphill, however, and before I am a tenth of the way, I stop, dump my pack
to the ground and drink as much of the extra weight as I can. A man comes
up the road from behind me, a scythe and axe over his shoulder. I offer
him water. He says he's hard put to swallow water. Just can't do it. I joke
that cachaça is better, but he tells me he used to drink too much
of it. A little dose (three or four ounces) in a glass wasn't enough. He
needed a full glass, to the top. But then he decided to become a man again.
He said that if you drink too much, you trade your friends for cachaça.
So he stopped, and now he's going up the road to cut some firewood.
Chapter Two
Santa Rita Durão:
The Superlative of Tough
The walk becomes agonizingly long. I'm still tired and sore from the
day before. Most of the trip is uphill, curving around a mountain, and then
the extended decline is just as painful. I'm still tired and sore from the
day before. Most of the trip is uphill, curving around a mountain, and then
the extended decline is just as painful. Most of the walk is through a forest
of eucalyptus that has been planted for use as charcoal. The road of wide,
smooth dirt passes no houses. Every half hour or so a truck stacked with
logs goes by. I'm walking toward the imposing range of the Serra do Caraça,
a massif of semi-naked rock stretched into a series of vegetated peaks.
Near a mine of the Vale do Rio Doce company I pick up dusty asphalt that
goes into Santa Rita Durão. I pass the Igreja do Rosário,
the church built for slaves in the 18th century, then the Igreja da Nossa
Senhora Nazaré, where the white people worshipped. Not far beyond
is a little restaurant, the Restbalanche Restaurant, so named because, the
owner, Sr. Edval, tells me, it used to be a restaurante, bar
and lanchonete. But the bar part was creating too much trouble, and
the luncheonette wasn't worth the effort of offering snacks all day, so
the place now just serves one meal to anyone who walks in.
The meal this day meal includes a formidable amount of food served on
individual stainless steel platters: rice, beans, beef, spaghetti, collards,
stir-fried cabbage, a fried banana, a few leaves of wet lettuce with two
slices of a tomato that seems to have led a long, sad life in a town whose
last name is the superlative of "tough." That, with a dose of
cachaça and a beer, costs me $2.15. I chat up the waitress, a solid
mulatta with wide hips, love in her eyes, and a warm smile that reveals
her need of dental work. She, it turns out, is the wife of Sr. Evald himself.
I ask her where in town a person can sleep. She says there really isn't
anywhere, though just up the street a certain Dona Cota used to take in
boarders, though the place is of dubious living condition. Worst case, she
says, if necessary, I can sleep on the floor of the restaurant after they
close.
Hoping to decline that offer, I leave my pack in the restaurant and
go look for Dona Cota. Her house, a humble two-story building on the Nossa
Senhora Nazaré, is run down to the point of seeming uninhabited.
Steps in front lead up to the second floor, but the doors and windows look
like they haven't been opened in years. I poke around the side and find
the ratty remains of a door so full of holes that I can see it leads to
a dim place in serious degradation, a place a lot like an old basement.
I bang on the door - carefully - and soon a shy but smiling little girl
creaks it open. She's wearing a school uniform that's the same deep blue
as the trim on most of the houses in town. She says her mother's working,
won't be back 'til around five o'clock. I ask if her father's home, and
the answer is as I expected. She has no father.
So I wait around all day for Dona Cota to come home from work. Back
at the Restbalanche, a nice guy named Inhô (I think), offers to take
me up to the Igreja do Rosário to see if it's open. The carved altars
there, he says, are themost beautiful in all of Brazil. We go, but the church
is closed. Deathyly sore, I need to lie down, so I go around to the back
of the church to lie in the shade of the eave of the roof. I try to make
my muscles sleep. Meanwhile, people are arriving and climbing over the wall
behind the church to pick jabuticaba berries from several tall trees in
somebody's yard. They climb back over with a lot of chatter to the effect
of hold this/let go/ now the other leg/ leave me alone, I can do it. I ask
a lady for some jabuticaba, and before I can stop her, she just about fills
my straw hat. She doesn't want money - after all, she's basically stolen
them. But her labor was worth something, and getting her stout body over
the wall had surely cost her something, so I press a couple of coins into
her hand. She says God will pay me.
I eat too many of the addictive little fruits, a process of cracking
the purple skin with my teeth, sucking out the pulp and pit, and spitting
the pit as far as it will go. I make quite a mess. Then I teeter my aching
bones back to Cota's. She's still not home, so I retire to a shady patch
of grass beside a trickly fountain in front of the church, which is surrounded
by barbed wire and with a sign that says"Entry Prohibited." A
mangy horse and some mangy dogs keep me company. The horse looks pretty
bored, but the dogs are engaged in complex and mysterious canine politics.
There I lie in stuporous anguish for as long as I can stand the tickle of
ants that apparently were waiting for somebody to come along and lie down
on the ground. I reflect on the apparent fact that in Santa Rita Durão
there is not one book, magazine or newspaper for sale anywhere. Not one
piece of writing is for sale. No one in this town reads.
The town also has only brand of cigarette, Broadway, which I've never
seen anywhere else. And it has just one beer (Skol), just one place to eat,
and one place to sleep, maybe. There's one bar with one pool table, and
another bar that has nothing but a concrete counter to lean against as you
down a cachaça, of which there are several kinds, none with lables.
One is flavored with health-inducing herbs, twelve cents for all you can
take in one gulp.
All afternoon I keep checking back for Dona Cota. I really need to take
a bath and lie down on something soft. Each time, the little girl tells
me not yet. I ask where Dona Cota works. The little girl tells me, "lá
no mato," out there in the woods. As the day wears on, I
feel sorrier and sorrier for the poor woman. I wonder what she does out
in the woods.
I drag on over to the bar with a pool table to get a cold Skol to help
me feel sorry for poor Cota. I notice how everyone here needs to chatter
all the time, like the flocks of parrots that swoop around town to raid
jabuticaba trees. Such simple lives they have, yet they have so much to
tell each other! From the bar I watch six or eight people chattering as
they pack themselves into a VW bus, on their way to a 4:00-12:00 shift at
one of the mines. No doubt they do this same thing every day, yet it takes
an unbelievable amount of talking and shouting, passing bags in and out,
people trading places, deciding to go or not to go, dashing across the plaza
to resolve an issue with someone peripherally involved in the trip. Then
they finally drive off, their huffy VW engine whistling into the distance,
their tires raising more dust than you'd expect to come off asphalt.
Darkness seeps into Santa Rita Durão. I go back to the Restbalanche
to maintain my relationship there, the one which might win me a spot on
the floor if things don't pan out with Dona Cota. I have dinner, another
overkill of six or seven dishes, twice what I need. The evening novella
- a soap opera that lasts for months - comes on the TV. It seems to be counterposing
life in the jungle with life in the urban upper-middle class. The scenes
alternate. Now it's people arguing in a house witha swimmingpool. Now it's
a couple of hunky guys in loin cloths chasing a buxom woman in a wet t-shirt
through Amazonia, with an occasional comic intervention by a fat Indian
chief and a pair of Indian maidens in grass skirts and no shirts, their
modesty saved only by their long hair. The novella is called "Uga-Uga."
Just up the street, the minuscule one-room Igreja do Evangelho Quadrangular,
has cranked up a mid-week celebration of its personal version of God. The
door's wide open. Inside, a dozen people clap a regular beat and sing the
glories of Jesus and the certainty of peace hereafter. The preacher, short,
black, clean-cut, in a tie, leads from up front. Three little girls in dresses
help him. As I pass, I smell soap. The Church of the Quadrangular Evangelism
is the sweetest smelling place in town.
Cota arrives while I'm sitting on the doorstep of the Restbalanche.
I'm sure it's her. She carries a stack of long logs on her head, balanced
with one hand as she moves forward at a slow, onerous plod. She's barely
five feet tall, stocky in the way of peasant women. I watch her to see if
she goes into her house. She doesn't seem to, but when I show up a while
later, the logs are leaning beside her door.
She doesn't seem too pleased at the possibility of a guest. The place
is dirty and unarranged, she says. She really isn't in the business anymore.
People kept staying there, then leaving without paying. They stole the blankets
and mattresses. I'm not one to insist, but I plead my case with a certain
desperation. Its hard to hold her attention because she's trying to hold
a five-year-old still enough to dump some medicine down his throat. He whines
and runs away. She chases him and drag him back. She finally asks how long
I'd be staying, warning me again that the place hasn't been cleaned. Giving
up on the sick kid, she takes up a thermos and shakes it. It's empty. "Sure
would be nice if I came home and had some coffee waiting for me," she
says. "Everything's on my shoulders, the firewood, the rice, the sugar,
it's all on me." She slams the thermos down. I offer to get her a coffee
from the bar across the street, but she won't hear of it. She and two kids
take me outside and up the stairs to the second floor to the former dormitory.
It is indeed grubby. It was grubby long before it got to the state of needing
cleaning. The wooden floor is thickly littered with dead bugs and flecks
of paint from the woven taquara bamboo ceiling, which is frayed with
age, stained with roof water, and sagging with the weight of antiquity or
dead rats. The two beds in the biggest room look like cadavers. One has
a foam mattress in the late stages of disintegration. It makes the other
one look good. Cota and the kids take the clean mattress downstairs to beat
the dust out of it.
Cota has pretty much given up on trying to run a dormitório.
The last time she had people here, two men, they ran up a big bill, then
left without paying. Whenever she made a little money, she always had to
spend it on something of more pressing importance than the business. Now
the place is run down just about as far as a place can run. The roof leaks.
The big concrete sink in the back is all globbed up with some kind of compound.
The brass faucet is stuck into a PVC pipe and secured there only by a string
that's about to rot through. A section of garden hose leads from the faucet
to the faucet of the twin basin, where a complex arrangement of rags and
plastic and an old stainless steel tea tray minimize drips and feed what
escapes into the other basin, no doubt because the plumbing below also leaks.
The feeder hose comes in through a window from a PVC pipe that wends its
way down to a lean-to kitchen on the back of the building, where the pipe
trickles constantly, filling a big, old five-liter cooking oil can on a
counter next to the wood-burning cook-stove.
The electrical system is just as precarious, with wire of extension
cord quality strung expediently from point to point by the shortest route
possible, even if only neck high across the center of a room. Its insulation
is cracked and graced with dusty cobweb, and the wire itself is just twisted
around connection points without benefit of insulation, joining a light
bulb socket to a wall switch and then up a wall to snake through the ceiling
over to the next room.
The electric shower head is part of this jury rig and itself has been
stripped to a minimum, the housing over the electrical part having no doubt
been stolen by the same guys who took the blankets and mattresses. The wires
connected to the heating element are exposed, and the little brass knob
that turns the water on and off is layered with a thick wad of electrical
tape, probably because the shower is grounded to the plumbing. Which means
that if I get a little too exuberant in the washing of an armpit, I could
electrocute myself and die in the slime of guys who swipe blankets and don't
pay their bills.
I feel so sorry for Cota. She works harder than anyone I know, gets
ripped off by her few customers, and has three young kids, one with a wicked
coiugh. When I tell her she should fix the place up, she says her husband
always said, "You need to have money to make money."
Cota and a couple of kids sit on the bed with the rotten mattress while
she tells me these problems. I egg her on, hoping to find out what had happened
to her husband, though in all likelihood he just run off and probably hadn't
even been the kind of husband who is actually married. Before I get to ask,
the lights go out. The whole town goes dark. Cota says it's strange because
there are no thunderstorms around. She fetches a candle from downstairs,
though by the time she returns, I've got my own lit and melted into place
on the windowsill. In a globe of yellow light, at a pace slow enough not
to blow out a candle, she shows me around the dormitório.
There really isn't much to show - some empty rooms, the odd deployment of
light switches, the grimy bathroom. With a yank of the string, she flushes
the toilet, though it really doesn't need it. It's just a gesture, all she
can do on such short notice.
As soon as she's gone, I light a mosquito coil and collapse on the bed.
All night long I keep rolling over, groaning as I adjust my bones. The smoke
of the mosquito coil, undoubtedly carcinogenic, makes the inside of my lungs
itch. Morning takes a long time to come.
Next day, I meet Inhô at the little restaurant. I'm not sure how
to spell his name, but neither is he, and besides, his real name is Raimundo.
The poor guy has very bad teeth. The few that remain, protruding from isolated
places in his gums, are tilted and black. He offers to take me up the mountain
that stands above the east side of town. There's a tunnel up there, he says,
dug by slaves in the search for gold. He can take me to see it. Despite
my sore muscles, I agree to go. We walk out of town and uphill for as far
as I care to go, following a path of packed graphite bordered by hardscrabble
grass and weeds. Inhô points out a gulch two or three hundred meters
long slashed straight up a cliff of rock. The bottom of it ends at a swampy
stream. The tunnel, he says, cuts diagonally up to the top of the gash like
this - he holds his arm at a 45 degree angle. The slaves dug out
the tunnel and dumped the rock down the gulch into the stream. There the
rock was crushed, washed and separated from the gold.
Just above the swamp, we probe into a dense little jungle of trees,
vines, spider webs and brush. After a few false forays, we find it, a rather
perfectly carved door-shaped opening in the rock, an oval as tall as a slumping
slave and wide enough for two of them to pass each other. It's too dark
inside to go more than a few meters, the floor strewn with fallen rubble.
Inhô tells me it's blocked. Disappointed, I figure that's the end
of it, but Inhô leads me up a narrow path across the side of the cliff.
It rises at the same angle as the tunnel inside. My legs are wobbly, so
I cling cautiously to every tuft of grass and knob of rock I can reach.
Soon we come to a gash in the rock that reaches in to the tunnel. The opening
is 50 feet wide, six feet high or so, its ceiling supported by quartzite
pillars that the slaves chiseled around. The tunnel passes at the bottom
of the gash, too far in to see. Inhô heaves a rock into the gash.
We listen as it tumbles into the darkness. Inhô marks the thumps with
his hand while his eyes tell me to listen. Each thump seems to be the last,
but then there's another...and another...and ...another. It's a deep gash,
but Inhô's been down there. Vale do Rio Doce, which owns several mines
in the region, hired him to accompany some geologists into the mountain.
They were assessing the site for gold. Their painted marks on the walls
and pillars still remain. Inhô rappelled into the mountain with them.
They poked into every nook and crack, mapped the whole thing. He knows the
mountain inside out. He shows me three types of rock that make up the mountain:
very hard quartzite, something soft and red, and sandstone. The gold is
in the quartzite.
The mountain holds a lot more gold, Inhô is sure. The Portuguese
dug one tunnel and cut out a few slices that lead into it. But it's a big
mountain. They got only a little of it.
CVRD did not treat Inhô well. Once he cracked open a piece of
quartzite and showed a certain golden chunk to the geologists. They said
it wasn't gold, but they put the rock into their pouch, and that was the
last he saw of it. When he asked a geologist about it, the geologist said
that he shouldn't ask questions like that. If he'd asked anyone else, the
geologist said, he'd have been fired on the spot. Asking questions hinted
that the peon might be interested in doing a little mining himself. Inhô
didn't like that attitude. He figured the geologists should have taught
him geology so he could help more.
One time he found a big, wine-red rock. The geologists said it was nothing,
but they put it in their pouch. He was sure if they'd cracked it open, they'd
find a topaz inside, worth a lot of money. He's sure the geologists sold
it.
As soon as the geologists were done with their survey Inhô got
laid off. He thought that was pretty rotten. He'd worked well, taken risks,
and offered expertise that few others had.
He takes me farther up the cliff. My legs get wobblier as we go. A slip
to my right would send me tumbling a hundred feet almost straight down,
at best slowing myself by grabbing grass or digging my fingernails into
rock. We stop at more gashes. At some points we can see the tunnel below.
We toss in more rocks, hear them tumble down, down, down.
I say, "Imagine how many slaves died in there."
A lot, Inhô says, his face crushed with seriusness. "Muitos."
We squat on the path, look out and down across the unending green waves
of hills of the state of Minas Gerais. Smoke rises from a broad area three
or four hills away - a charcoal operation turning eucalyptus trees into
fuel for steel mills.
Inhô tells me that his great-grandfather, who might have been
alive not long after slavery was outlawed in 1888, told him how the Portuguese
disposed of slaves who didn't work well. Down in the tunnel they unchained
them and brought them up to where we are now squatting. There, as Inhô
demonstrates, they put a foot on the slave's back and pushed him over the
cliff. Down below, other slaves received their dead and buried him somewhere
out in the mato. Inhô sweeps his hand over a vast area to show
me where thousands of unmarked graves lie. It's the slow, broad gesture
of a priest blessing a congregation.
Farther up the path, we come under a rock from which hangs a strange,
white substance the size and shape of a large pillow. Quartz? No, Inhô
whispers - bees. The white stuff is honeycomb, and the dark stuff killer
bees. He cautions me to walk and speak softly.
"Muito africanizados," he says. "E bravos."
Very Africanized, and mean.
All wild bees in Brazil are, to come extent, Africanized. NonAfricanized
bees would be the relatively docile Italian bees that are raised, and wild,
in North America. But in 19--, a laboratory assistant in São Paulo
mistakenly released an African queen bee, thinking that it was just a pest
that had wandered into the lab. It was the only African queen bee in the
Americas and was being studied for its unique characteristics. Among those
characteristics are stamina, aggressiveness, and a tendency to attack en
masse. The African bees are stronger, so when an Italian queen is in heat,
it is inevitably an African that catches her in her mating flight. He's
sorry, of course, because it is his genitalia that get ripped out once he's
filled her spermatheca, but his offspring are half African, and theirs will
inevitably be three-quarters African, and as the generations purify toward
the African, they get just as mean as can be. I once raised these bees in
Brazil, and I know how they can be quite docile one day, but another day,
maybe due to internal politics we can never know, they don't want you anywhere
near their hive. Every once in a while somebody gets killed, often not by
the stings but by their desperate attempt to flee. In this particular case,
on the side of this particular cliff, the escape route is either over the
cliff and down to the swamp, or into the gash in the mountain to hide in
the darkness, where bees will not go. Or one can whisper and walk softly.
Thanks to the sweat and blood of a thousand slaves, we are able to get around
the hive by going through a hole that has been carved through an outcrop.
During this hike up the mountain and back down, Inhô keeps stopping
to talk. He tells me things several times, and he acts a lot of it out as
if in charade. This is good because he's hard to understand. In quick, Mineiro
peasant dialect, he rattles his words fast, smearing the vowels and using
peasant slang that I often don't understand. He talks a lot about the rotten
deal he and everyone else got from working with the CVRD mining company.
They really worked hard. They went down into these gashes, hauled up bags
of sample rock on their backs, slipped along the path when it was raining,
got paid little and only for temporary, contracted work, without benefits,
and had his undoubtedly valuable rocks stolen by the geologists. He suspects
he got fired for inquiring about his topaz. He recently became entitled
to retirement payments form the government, but he's been waiting for his
check for five months. He leads me into the same conclusion I'd thought
of earlier, one which I didn't think he'd figure out: that slavery has not
ended. Maybe they don't push you off a cliff when they're done with you,
but destitution is basically the same thing.
He also talks a lot about his desperate financial situation. He has
five kids, all of them sick with a flu of the chest, no doubt the same one
I've been feeling for the past three days. Sometimes he doesn't have food
for them. Crying, they ask for food, but he has to explain that he doesn't
have any, not 'til his retirement check comes in.
But he won't steal! Não senhor! he wags his leathery
finger at me and raises his chin with pride. His father on his death bed
told him not to steal, that something stolen never leads to anything good.
Inhô is priming me, of course, for a generous payment for his
services, and of course I'm glad to make my contribution. Halfway down the
mountain, he points across Santa Rita Durão, over to the section
on the other side of the river, where the little houses are hard to see
under the trees. A van from CEMIG, the electric company, is parked next
to a utility pole, and there's a guy in a yellow hardhat up there doing
something.
"They're here to shut off my lights," Inhô says. "I
got my last warning yesterday."
We have lunch at the Restbalanche, and then I go looking for some nice
sponges. I need them to pad the shoulder straps of my pack. The straps appear
to have had padding back when I was a boy scout, but the last 35 years have
turned it to something with the consistency of mushy sand. The years haven't
been much kinder to my shoulders, and the 20-mile hike into Santa Rita has
rubbed them raw. They feel bruised. So my plan is to tape some sponges to
the straps. But just try to find a decent sponge in a town like this! There's
just one store, and its sponges are only a quarter-inch thick. The store
has a few fruits and vegetables, however, so I inquire about limes. I want
to make a caipirinha with the little Coke bottle of cachaça somebody
gave me at the Restbalanche, the product of his father, made from a recipe
that goes back at least three generations. It is indeed very good, with
a secret ingredient, possibly jabuticaba. The conversation associated with
the transfer of this fine stuff circled in on the likelihood of that ingredient
being jabuticaba. There are no limes in evidence, however, so I ask. Limes,
it seems, have just gone out of season, but the store owner thinks he may
have one or two on his tree at home. He dispatches a small boy to lead me
there, just up the street and around the corner. An older boy at the house
leads me into the quintal, where we shake a tree for the last of
its limes, just three or four that have blackened on the outside but not
rotted on the inside. They are an orange kind with a flavor that is good
but have the flavor of neither a lime nor a lemon nor an orange. The store
owner refuses to accept payment for them.
Back at Cota's I borrow a glass. She takes a long time to find one that
is worthy of her guest. Before I go up to bed, I ask her how much I owe.
I plan to leave for Catas Altas as early as possible the next morning so
I can arrive there before the heat of noon. Dona Cota has no idea how much
to charge. She really doesn't want anything. I get her to tell me how much
people used to pay, or would have paid if they hadn't skipped out. She tells
me it varied, depending on whether it was CVRD or the individual guest that
was paying. She vaguely remembered something around the equivalent of four
or five dollars a day, depending. So I pay her twice that, figuring her
kid's got a cough and that it sure won't break me. I wish someone would
give me the job of walking down the Estrada Real and handing out spare change
to people who need it, except of course that's everybody, and if I ever
finished that project, there'd always be Bombay and Ouagadougou needing
it just as much.
In my room, I set up shop at a little table that's about a meter square.
I squeeze the lime into the glass, add a couple ounces of cachaça
and a big spoon of Fernando's honey and mix it up. It's warm and littered
with little seeds but tastes and feels very good. I like it because the
cachaça has a secret ingredient and no brand name, the lime did not
come from a store, the honey came from a guy who gave me lunch, and I'm
drinking this fine stuff from a jelly jar.
I like my little office-of-the-day, too, my little table and the section
of log on which I sit, and the single unfrosted light bulb that hangs by
a wire from the ceiling. The table has a history of labor spread across
it - a field of old white paint with some areas of light green and some
intriguing blotches of red that isn't paint. It has been scratched with
knifework and general use. It's a bit sticky where I sliced my lime. The
top is of two wide boards, one of which has split. The nails are old and
rusty. Maybe it's the cachaça, but I think that if you hung this
tabletop in a nice museum, people would have a hard time telling it from
art. And if we can assume for the moment that it is indeed art, placed here
in Dona Cota's Museum of the Unstolen, we would nod slowly and call it beautiful.