Backlands (15 page)

After a northeaster blows hot, moist squalls for a few days, the air becomes still and stagnant for a while. Then, in the words of João Severino da Fonseca, in his travelogue
Journey around Brazil
, “Nature becomes still, frozen in fear; not even the tree-tops sway; the woodlands become quiet and appear like a solid object; the birds suspend their flight and hide, quivering in their nests.”

There is not a cloud in the sky. The pure blue firmament arches overhead illuminated still by an eclipsing sun. The barometric pressure falls slowly but continuously, snuffing out life. For a few moments, a compact cumulous cloud lined in dark copper appears darkly on the southern horizon. Then a breeze begins to blow with rapidly increasing velocity until it becomes a high wind. The temperature plunges, and minutes later the earth is rattled by a violent storm. Lightning flashes, thunder booms in the low-ceilinged skies, and torrential rain crashes over those vast plains, erasing in a unique torrent the indecisive divides of the waters that crisscross them, fusing the riverheads and roiling their beds in a chaotic overflow. It is a sudden assault. The cataclysm is unleashed in the vicious spiral of a tornado. Houses are unroofed; the centenary
carandá
palms bend over, moaning, and burst apart; hills become islands; and the plains are submerged in deep floodwaters.

Just an hour later, the sun radiates triumphant in a pure sky! The birds, revived, sing in the dripping foliage; the air moves with gentle breezes; and man, emerging from the dwellings to which he had fearfully repaired, contemplates the storm damage as nature is revived. Twisted trees and limbs rent by lightning are strewn on the ground; homes are destroyed, the ruins scattered; muddy floodwaters rush over engorged riverbanks; the field grasses are flattened as if trampled by herds of buffalo—fearful reminders of the storm and its horrible assault.

A few days later the winds start to build up slowly from the east once again, and the temperature starts to rise once more; the barometric pressure steadily drops and unease mounts until the still air is once again trapped in the iron grip of the pampero wind, and the killer storm comes back, raging in vicious spirals, stirring up the same cycle of destruction.

Continuing north, the climate of the state of Pará offers distinct contrasts to what we have just seen. Brazilians from other latitudes know little about this state, despite what they might have read in Bates’s
Naturalist on the River Amazonas
. Warm mornings, with mild temperatures around seventy-three degrees, surprisingly follow the rainy nights. Days that burst forth like bright revelations bring unexpected changes: Trees that were bare the night before are now in full bloom; marshlands are now meadows. And then, in an abbreviated cycle of twenty-four hours, there are complete transformations: Forests grow silent, stalks are stripped or their leaves are burned or wilted; the air becomes empty and mute; branches become widowed of their recent buds, which fall dead on the still earth under the torturous heat of thirty-five degrees centigrade in the shade. “The next morning,” says Draenert in his
Climates of Brazil
, “the sun rises in a cloudless sky and the cycle is completed: spring, summer, and fall in a single tropical day.”

The climate is so constant that it camouflages the passing of the seasons in a single day, each following the other as if on the dial of a clock, even though the annual variations in daily temperature are of only one or one and a half degrees. Thus life achieves balance with an imperturbable consistency.

Nevertheless, to the west, in the Upper Amazon, diverse conditions create a completely different environment. It cannot be denied that the inhabitants of neighboring territories find it very difficult to acclimate here. In this place, at the most intense point of the summer heat, when the remnants of easterly winds are faltering in the heavy air, the thermometer takes the place of the hygrometer in measuring climate. Human existence comes to depend on the painful cycle of drought and flooding of the great rivers of the region. These alternations escalate in a frightening manner. The swollen Amazon leaps from its bed and in a few days raises the water level to something like seventeen yards. It spreads out in vast overflows, in an intricate web of pools and channels called
furos
and
paranamirins
, or as Richard Spruce names them,
paraná-mirí
, forming a huge land-bound sea ripped by strong currents, in which emerge the
igapós
, islands of jungle vegetation.

The flood stops life in its tracks. Caught in the channels between the islands in the river, the
igarapés
, man waits with unusual stoicism in a situation he is powerless to change, waiting for the end of this paradoxical winter with its searing temperatures.
⁷
The rivers drain in the summer. This is the season when the inhabitants of the region resume their limited activities, in the only ways possible in an environment that displays such extremes and makes sustained effort impossible. In fact, the place encourages a parasitic lifestyle. It is possible to drink the milk of life by sipping from the chalice of the
siphonia
.
⁸

But in this singular climate, there are additional anomalies that are typical for the region but make living conditions even more difficult. It is not just the alternating floods and droughts that rhythmically regulate the systole and diastole of one of the biggest arteries of the planet. Other conditions render any attempt to adapt to the climate a futile exercise. Often in the height of the flood season, in April or May, on a calm, clear day in the incandescent Amazonian atmosphere, frigid currents from the south will chill the air. It is like an arctic blast. The thermometer drops suddenly by many degrees, and for several days a weather anomaly sets in.

The fortune seekers who have come to this region in search of a livelihood, and the native peoples themselves, who are adapted to the climate, seek shelter in flimsy huts, called
tejupás
, and crouch shivering around wood fires. All work and other normal activity ceases. The vast floodplains, now underwater, are deserted. The fish die in the cold waters, and the birds in the silenced forests either die or migrate, leaving empty nests. Even the wildlife vanishes, burrowing into the deepest holes it can find. Lush equatorial nature, shaped by the splendid tropical sun, takes on the desolate and funereal appearance of a polar region. The cold season, or time of
friagem
, has taken the region in its grip.

We must, however, end this brief digression.

As we have seen, the backlands of the North of Brazil have a variety of climates with their corresponding biological characteristics. There the same pendulum of the seasons, mild weather alternating with harsh conditions, has other severe repercussions. If we consider that these diverse climatic features are not the exception but the rule, from the storms of Mato Grosso to the drought cycles of the North, and that they come with the regularity of natural laws, we must agree that our physical environment displays complete variability.

It is easy to see why many who study our physiology come to mistaken conclusions because they generalize about the effects of the tropical climate. This climate does, in fact, create a unique pathology that affects the populations of the entire northern coast and a large area of the states as far north as Mato Grosso. The wet heat of the Amazon region provokes depression and exhaustion. It stunts growth and causes imbalances between the peripheral and central nervous systems. Passion overtakes reason, mental acuity succumbs to anxiety, and the body cannot repair due to blood weakened by poor nutrition and climate.

These conditions trigger physiological anomalies: Unusually small lungs place stress on the liver and cause it to become enlarged as it takes over the elimination of carbon dioxide from the system; bodies are weakened by mood swings between elation and apathy; muscle tone is reduced in comparison to that of more robust and energetic peoples. In such an environment, natural selection occurs in a reverse process of intellectual and physical development. Due to seriously compromised brain function, adaptation to the environment produces strong organisms with weakened moral fiber. Acclimatization signifies regressive evolution. This human type wastes away and passes along its decline by heredity to the point of extinction of its kind. Like the Englishman in Barbados, Tasmania, or Australia, the Portuguese immigrant in the Amazon region may evade miscegenation but even so, after a few generations, his physical and moral characteristics will be significantly changed. His complexion will have bronzed from the tropical sun and the incomplete elimination of toxins, and his temperament will be weakened by deprivation. He will be taken over by the inferior race, the savage native who in collaboration with the physical environment will conquer, crush, and eliminate him. He will die from malaria, hepatitis, and swamp fever bred by the terrible summer heat.

This does not happen in the rest of Brazil or in the South. Even in some parts of the northern backlands, the dry heat countered by strong air currents from the northeast and southeast creates a more healthy and beneficial environment.

Returning to the South, to the territory that extends from north of Minas Gerais southwest to Rio Grande, conditions are incomparably better. The annual average temperature ranges from sixty-two to sixty-eight degrees. The seasons alternate in a harmonious manner, and a more predictable rainy season in the fall and spring favors agriculture. Winter gives the impression of a European climate. A frigid wind brings light rain and mist; snow forms lacework on the windowpanes, brooks are frozen over, and frost is white on the fields.

Our history translates these environmental conditions in a remarkable manner. If we take a broad view and leave aside certain unimportant details, we can see interesting events taking shape early in our colonial period. The land was divided up under the feudal rule of fortunate proprietors who, still mesmerized by visions of the “Greater Indies,” maintained an aloof attachment to the colonial metropolis, which resulted ultimately in the radical divide between the South and the North.

There is no need to review the decisive factors that shaped the two regions. They have two different histories with opposite tendencies and movements. They were two societies in the process of being formed that became distanced from each other by rival destinies, each totally indifferent to the ways of the other, both, however, evolving under the rule of one administration. In the South new trends emerged: There was greater diversity of activities; more vigor in a heterogeneous population that was livelier, more practical, and more adventurous; and, in sum, forward progress. All of this contrasted with the often brilliant but always less productive life of the North. These sparse and incoherent captaincies remained yoked to the same routines, without character and frozen in time, fulfilling the duties required of the subjects of a distant court.

History there is more dramatic but less eloquent. Heroes appear; however their stature seems greater only in contrast with the mediocrity of their peers. Brilliant, vibrant pages of history are left incomplete because the three formative races do not share common objectives and keep separate from one another. Even in the decisive struggle between the Portuguese and the Dutch in Pernambuco, Henrique Dias’s blacks, Camarão’s Indians, and João Fernandez Viera’s Lusitanians kept to themselves in their camp tents. If they were hardly united in war, they were further distanced in peace. The drama of the Palmares colony of runaway slaves, the Indian attacks, and border conflicts of the backlands—all broke the truce that had been made with the Dutch.

Imprisoned on the coastal fringe between the impenetrable backlands and the sea, the old colonial regime has survived to this day. This is due to a stubborn and stupid insistence on centralizing government power, resulting in the ironic imposition of old social mores on a new country. It was fortunate that the South hammered against these traditions with its impetuous influence.

In the South, adaptation occurred more rapidly, in a less adverse environment, and soon the settlers gained in vigor. The backlands conquests produced mixed descendents of crossings of colonists with aboriginal tribes, and the result was the daring
mamelucos
. The Paulista, New World man (the historical significance of this name includes the sons of Rio de Janeiro, Minas, São Paulo, and regions to the south), was an independent type: an adventurer, rebel, free spirit, a man who conquered the land, freeing himself from the long reach of the old country and distancing himself from the sea and the battleships of the metropolis. He chose to make his future in the backlands, foreshadowing the yet to be written epic of the
bandeiras
.

These migratory and demographic patterns are the product of environmental conditions. There were no racial differences between the colonists from the South and those from the North. In both cases, there was the presence of elements that caused Diogo Coelho to despair and say, “Worse than pestilence on the land . . .” But in the South, the vital energies of those who had ploughed the unforgiving ocean were not depleted by an enervating climate. Rather, the newcomers were strengthened by the earth and were changed for the better. In the new land, man began to feel empowered. In this new place, where his great crimes were given a new stage, he might apply the same bravado to the formidable backlands that had launched him into African circumnavigations.

There is another point we must mention at the risk of offending our myopic historians—the mountains freed the colonizer from having to defend the coast and from the rapaciousness of the invading foreigner. The Serra do Mar, rising perpendicular from the Atlantic like a huge fortress, has played an important role in our history. The Cavendishes and Fentons vented their war lust with their fists against its cliffs. On its heights, the adventurer felt secure as he surveyed the plains. He rested safely on the immovable bulwark, which gave him protection both from the external enemy as well as from the metropolitan bureaucrat. The mountains circled the continent like arches of stone and formed an isolating barrier for both ethnic and historical purposes. They blocked the northern seaboard, a narrow swath of swamp and reefs, which held an irresistible attraction for the man of the North but offered him little. Meanwhile, challenging the incoming fleets, the mines called seductively from the interior forests.