The Violent Land (13 page)

“If you don't want to, that settles it. Nobody's forcing you.”

Juca then had put in his word.

“But that's a match for you—a white lad, with schooling. You'll never get another one like him. I don't know what he sees in this girl.”

Raimunda, however, had appealed to Sinhô, and he let it be understood that the subject was closed. It was he who informed the young fellow of Raimunda's refusal, and Juca at the same time had asked what it was about that mulatto's cross-looking face that had attracted the clerk; surely she was not pretty.

Then there had been Agostinho, the Badarós' foreman; he, too, had wanted Raimunda, but she had met his advances in the same unfriendly fashion. Don' Ana had an explanation for it all.

“Raimunda,” she said, “simply does not want to leave us. I know she has that cross-looking face, but she likes us just the same.”

And Don' Ana would suddenly become tender as she thought of Risoleta. At such times she would give the girl an old dress or a bit of cheap jewelry. But these conversations on the subject of Raimunda were rare occurrences; the Badarós did not always have time to think of the “sister of the cradle.”

Antonio Victor did his best to catch Raimunda's eye. Here on the plantation a woman was an object of luxury, and his young body craved one. Making love with the whores, on his trips to town, was not enough. He wanted a body that would warm his own on those long nights during the winter months, from May to September, that constituted the rainy season.

And so he waited for her at the edge of the forest. And it would not be long before he would hear Raimunda's voice preceding her down the path. Her face might not be a beautiful one, but what Antonio Victor was thinking of was her big buttocks, her firm breasts, her shapely legs. From the twilight skies night was about to fall. The river was flowing calmly. Perhaps it would rain tonight. Already the crickets were beginning their song in the forest. Leaves were drifting down to settle on the water. People talked about the big money that was to be made in the south. Antonio had promised to come back one day, rich, with fine clothes and polished boots; but now those thoughts no longer existed in his mind. Now he was Juca Badaró's
capanga,
known for the rapidity of his rifle-fire. The memories of Estancia, of Ivone giving herself on the bridge, were blurred for him. Dreams no longer filled his head as they had that night aboard ship. He knew but one desire now: to marry the mulatto girl, Raimunda, and to have a clay hut for the two of them. To marry Raimunda and have a body on which to repose after a hard day's work, after a long trip over bad roads, after the death of someone whom he had brought down. To rest upon her body—a body on which to repose his dreamless head.

Raimunda's voice on the path. Antonio Victor half rises, ready to aid her in filling the water-pail. Night wraps the forest. The river flows tranquilly.

The men came to a stop in front of the Big House of the plantation known as the Monkeys.

The official name was much prettier than that: Auricidia Plantation, a tribute from Maneca Dantas to his wife, a fat, sluggish matron whose sole interests in life were her children and the sweets she knew how to make as no one else did. To the colonel's great sorrow, however, the name had not stuck, and everyone insisted on calling the place the Monkeys, which had been the name of the original grove, carved out of the forests of Sequeiro Grande between the great Badaró estate and that of Horacio, where bands of monkeys were to be seen scampering through the woods. It was only in the official deed to the land that the name “Auricidia” appeared; and it was only Maneca Dantas who was wont to say: “Down there, at Auricidia—” Everyone else referred to it by its popular appellation.

The men came to a stop and set down the hammock they carried slung to a pole. In it a corpse was making its last earthly journey. From within the dimly lighted parlour Dona Auricidia called out, as she lazily set her mountainous flesh in motion:

“Who is it?”

“We come in peace, lady,” one of the men replied.

A child had run out to the veranda and now came back with the news: “Mamma, there is two men with a dead man—a skinny dead man.”

Before permitting herself to become alarmed, Dona Auricidia, who had been a schoolteacher, gently corrected her young son.

“Don't say: ‘There is two,' Ruy. ‘There
are
two,' is what you should say.”

She then moved toward the door, the child clinging to her skirts. The smaller children were already asleep. On the veranda the men had sat down on a bench, while the hammock with the corpse sprawled open on the floor.

“May Jesus Christ give you good evening,” said one of them, an old man with a white woolly head.

The other took off his hat with a polite greeting. Dona Auricidia replied, then waited expectantly.

“We're bringing him from the Baraúnas Plantation,” the young man explained. “He worked there. We're taking him to the cemetery at Ferradas.”

“Why don't you bury him in the forest?”

“Well, he has three daughters in Ferradas, you see. We're taking him to them. If you don't mind, we'd like to rest a little while. It's a long way, and Uncle here is about all in,” pointing to the old man.

“What did he die of?” asked the lady of the house.

“Fever.” It was the old man who spoke. “That pesky fever that you get in the forest. He was cutting timber when it laid hold of him. That was only three days ago. There was nothing to be done for him.”

Dona Auricidia drew back her child and fell back a few steps herself. She was thinking, as that emaciated cadaver—he was an old man, too—lay there in the hammock on her veranda.

“Take him to one of the workmen's huts,” she said; “you can rest there. But not here. Just go a little farther on and you'll come to the huts. Tell them I sent you. But you mustn't stay here, on account of the children.”

She was afraid of contagion, afraid of that fever for which no remedy was known. Only years afterwards were men to learn that it was the typhus, then endemic throughout the cacao region. Dona Auricidia watched the men as they lifted the hammock, placed the pole on their shoulders, and departed.

“Good night, lady.”

“Good night.”

She stood staring at the spot where the corpse had lain. And then, of a sudden, that mountain of flesh was in motion again. Shouting to the Negro women within, she directed them to get soap and water at once and, in spite of the fact that it was night-time, to scrub the veranda thoroughly. Taking her child with her, she proceeded to wash his hands until he almost cried. And that night she did not sleep, but rose from hour to hour to see if Ruy was not feverish. As luck would have it, Maneca was not at home; he was dining at Horacio's.

The men with the hammock paused in front of one of the workers' huts. The old man was tired.

“He's heavy, eh, Uncle?” the young fellow said.

This idea of taking the body to Ferradas had been the old man's. He and the dead man had been friends. They must turn the remains over to the daughters for “Christian burial,” he had insisted. It was a journey of ten or twelve miles, and they had been trudging along the moonlit highway for hours. Once more they put the hammock down, the young man wiping the sweat from his forehead as the old one knocked with his staff on the rude planks of the half-closed door. Inside the hut a lamp was lighted.

“Who is it?”

“We come in peace,” was the old man's answer, as before.

But even so the Negro who opened the door held a revolver in his hand, for in this country you could not be too careful. The old man told his story and ended by saying that it was Dona Auricidia who had sent them.

“So, she don't want him up there,” said a lean-looking individual who had appeared from behind the Negro's back. “He might give her kids the fever. But it makes no difference to us, ain't that so?” and he gave a laugh.

The old man thought that they were about to be sent on their way a second time. He began an explanation, but the lean man interrupted him.

“That's all right, Dad. You can come in,” he said. “We don't catch the fever here. A worker's got a tough hide.”

They went in. The other men who were asleep in the hut now woke up. There were five of them in all. The hut had but one room, with mud walls, a zinc roof, and an earthen floor. This was at once parlour, bedroom, and kitchen. Their toilet was the out-of-doors, the groves, the forest. They placed the body on one of the wooden bunks where the men slept, and remained standing around it. The old fellow then took a candle from his pocket, lighted it, and placed it at the head of the deceased. It was already half burned down, having served as illumination for the dead in the early part of the night, as it was to do again when they reached the house where the daughters lived.

“And what do they do?” the Negro asked.

“What does anybody do in Ferradas?” said the old man. “They're all whores.”

“All three of them?”

“Yes, sir, all three.”

There was a moment's silence as they stood around the emaciated corpse with its growth of beard streaked with white.

“One of them was married,” the old man went on. “Then her husband died.”

“He was pretty old, too, wasn't he?” said the Negro, pointing to the dead man.

“He was all of seventy.”

“Old enough to be our grandpappy,” said one of them who had taken no part in the conversation before. But no one laughed.

The lean man found the bottle of rum and a bowl that passed from hand to hand. Another of those who lived in the hut, and who had arrived at the plantation that very day, wanted to know what kind of fever it was that had caused the man's death.

“No one knows, to tell you the truth. It's a forest fever; you catch it and you're a goner in no time. There's no remedy that will do you any good—not even a regular doctor. Not even Jeremias and his herbs.”

The Negro then explained, for the benefit of the newcomer from Ceará, that the witch-doctor lived all by himself in the forests of Sequeiro Grande, in a ruined shack stuck off among the trees. It was only in cases of great emergency that anyone went to look for him there. Jeremias subsisted on the roots of trees and on wild-growing fruits. He knew how to cure bullet-wounds and snake-bites. In his shack the snakes ran around loose, and every one of them had its name just like a woman. He had remedies for bodily ills and for lovers' ailments as well. But he could do nothing about this fever.

“I heard of it in Ceará, but I never believed it. They tell so many stories about this country; you hear some whoppers.”

The lean-looking worker asked what it was they said: “Is it good or bad?”

“Both good and bad, but more bad than good. They say there's a mint of money to be made here, and they tell how so-and-so got rich the minute he stepped off the boat; they say the streets are paved with it, that it's as common as dust. On the bad side they say there's the fever, the
jagunços,
the snakes—a lot of bad things.”

“And yet you came down here.”

The man from Ceará did not reply to this; it was the old man who spoke.

“Having money may be a bad thing in itself,” he said, “if that's all that you think of. A man is a worm if all he can see in life is money; he becomes blind and deaf when he hears them talk of it. That's why there's so much trouble in these parts.”

The lean man nodded his head. He, too, had left father and mother, sweetheart and sister, to come after money in this land of Ilhéos. The years had gone by, and he was still gathering cacao in Maneca Dantas's groves.

“There is a heap of money here,” the old man continued, “but what folks can't see—”

The candle was casting its light on the dead man's thin face. He appeared to be listening attentively to the conversation round about him. The bowl of rum was passed another time. It had begun raining outside and the Negro closed the door. The old man gazed long and hard at the corpse with its bearded face.

“Do you see him?” he said, and his voice was weary and hopeless. “He worked for more than ten years at Baraúnas for Colonel Teodoro. He had nothing, not even his daughters' company. He spent ten years of his life in debt to the colonel all the time. Then the fever took him off, and the colonel would not even give a penny to help the girls bury him.”

His companion took up the tale at this point: “He even said that he was doing a lot by not sending the daughters a bill for what the old man owed him. He said a whore made a lot of money.”

The lean man spat disgustedly. The big ears of the deceased appeared to be listening. The man from Ceará was a little alarmed by it all. He had arrived that day; one of Maneca Dantas's foremen had hired him in Ilhéos, along with a number of others who had come down by the same boat. They had reached the plantation that afternoon and had been assigned to the various workers' huts. The Negro now undertook to enlighten the new arrival, draining the bowl of rum as he did so.

“You'll see tomorrow.”

The old man who had helped carry the body then went on: “I never knew anybody who was worse off than a worker in a cacao grove.”

The lean man thought this over.

“The
capangas
are better off,” he said. “If you are a good shot,” he added, turning to the native of Ceará, “your fortune's made. Down here the only folks that have money are those that are good at killing, the assassins.”

The newcomer from the north opened his eyes in astonishment. The dead man frightened him, vaguely; here was concrete proof of what they were talking about.

“Good at killing?” he repeated.

The Negro laughed.

“A lad who's a dead shot,” the lean man went on to explain, “can live like a lord. He can hang around town with the women, he always has money in his pocket, and he never fails to collect his wages. But the worker in a grove—well, you'll see tomorrow.”

He was the second man who had spoken of “tomorrow,” and the one from Ceará was by this time curious to know what was going to happen then. Any one of them could have told him, but the lean man went on.

“Bright and early tomorrow,” he said, “the clerk down at the store is going to send for you to make up your kit for the week. You haven't any tools to work with, so you'll have to buy some. You'll have to buy a scythe and an ax, a knife, and a pickax; and all that's going to set you back something like a hundred milreis. Then you're going to have to buy flour, beef, rum, coffee, for the whole week. You're going to have to lay out another ten milreis for food. At the end of the week you'll have fifteen coming to you in wages”—the man from Ceará did a mental sum, six days at two and a half, and agreed—“that'll leave a balance of five milreis, but you won't get it; you'll have to leave it there to apply on what you owe for the tools. You'll be a whole year paying off that hundred milreis without seeing so much as a penny of your wages. Oh, maybe at Christmas time the colonel will advance you ten milreis to go spend with the whores in Ferradas.”

The lean man said all this in a jesting manner, but his tone was half cynical, half tragic and discouraged. Then he asked for some rum. The man from Ceará was silent and sat staring at the corpse.

“A hundred milreis,” he said at last, “for a knife, a scythe, and a pickax?”

“In Ilhéos,” the old man told him, “you can get an ‘alligator knife' for twelve milreis. At the plantation stores you can't get one for less than twenty-five.”

“A whole year,” the man from Ceará repeated. He was calculating as to when the rain would fall once more on his drought-ridden native province. He had planned to go back as soon as the rains came to the parched earth, planned to return with money enough to buy a cow and a calf. “A whole year.” He stared at the dead man, who appeared to be smiling.

“There's something else for you to think about. Before you get through paying off what you owe, your debt will have increased. You will have had to buy a pair of work-pants and a shirt. You'll have had to buy medicine, which God knows is dear enough. You'll have to buy a revolver, which is the only money well laid out in this man's country. And you'll never get out of debt. Down here,”—and the lean man made a sweeping gesture with his hand which took in all those present, both those that worked at the Monkeys and the pair that had come with the corpse from Baraúnas—“down here everybody's in debt; no one has anything coming to him.”

There was fear now in the eyes of the man from Ceará. The candle was burning low, casting a reddish light on the corpse's face. It was raining outside.

“I was a lad in the days of slavery,” the old man said as he rose. “My father was a slave, my mother also. But it wasn't any worse then than it is today. Things don't change; it's all talk.”