View of the World (20 page)

Whereas the Catholics for all their disastrous mistakes, had on the whole led simple, often austere lives, the nonconformists seemed to see themselves as the representatives of a more ebullient and materialistic brand of the faith. They made a point of installing themselves, wherever they went, in large, well-built stone houses, inevitably equipped with an electric generator and every modern labour-saving device. Some of them even had their own planes. If there were roads they had a car or two, and when they travelled by river they preferred a launch with an outboard engine to the native canoe habitually used by the Catholic fathers.

As soon as Indians were attracted to the neighbourhood a mission store might be opened, and the first short step towards the ultimate goal of conversion be taken by the explanation of the value and uses of money, and how with it the Indian could obtain all those goods which it was hoped would become necessary to him. The missionaries are absolutely candid and even self-congratulatory about their methods. To hold the Indian, wants must be created and then continually expanded – wants that in such remote parts only the missionary can supply. A greed for unessential trifles must be inculcated and fostered.

The Portuguese verb employed to describe this process is
conquistar
and it is applied without differentiation to subjection by force or guile. What normally happens is that presents – usually of food – are left where the uncivilised Indians can find them. Great patience is called for. It may be years before the tribesmen are won over by repeated overtures, but when it happens the end is in sight. All that remains is to encourage them to move their village into the mission area, and let things take their natural course.

In nine cases out of ten the local landowner has been waiting for the
Indians to make such a move – he may have been alerted by the missionary himself – and as soon as it happens he is ready to occupy the tribal land. The Indians are now trapped. They cannot go back, but at the time it seems unimportant, because for a little longer the missionary continues to feed them, although now the matter of conversion will be broached. This usually presents slight difficulty and natural Indian politeness – and in this case gratitude – accomplishes the rest. Whether the Indian understands what it is all about is another matter. He will be asked to go through what he may regard with great sympathy as a
rainmaking
ceremony, as water is splashed about, and formulae repeated in an unknown language. Beyond that it is likely to be a case of let well alone. Any missionary will tell you that an Indian has no capacity for abstract thought. How can he comprehend the mystery and universality of God when the nearest to a deity his own traditions have to offer may be a common tribal ancestor seen as a jaguar or an alligator?

From now on the orders and the prohibitions will flow thick and fast. The innocence of nudity is first to be destroyed, and the Indian who has never worn anything but a beautifully made and decorated penis-sheath to suppress unexpected erections, must now clothe himself from the mission’s store of cast-offs, to the instant detriment of his health. He becomes subject to skin diseases, and since in practice clothes once put on are never taken off again, pneumonia is the frequent outcome of allowing clothing to dry on the body after a rainstorm.

The man who has hitherto lived by practising the skills of the hunter and horticulturist – the Indians are devoted and incomparable gardeners of their kind – now finds himself, broom or shovel in hand as an
odd-job
man about the mission compound. He shrinks visibly within his miserable, dirty clothing, his face becomes puckered and wizened, his body more disease-ridden, his mind more apathetic. There is a terrible testimony to the process in the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture’s handbook on Indians, in which one is photographed genial and smiling on the first day of his arrival from the jungle, and then the same man who by this time appears to be crazy with grief is shown again, ten years later. ‘His expression makes comment unnecessary,’ the caption says.
‘Ninety per cent of his people have died of influenza and measles. Little did he imagine the fate that awaited them when they sought their first contact with the whites.’

There is a ring about these stories of enticement down the path to extinction, of the cruel fairytale of children trapped by the witch in the house made of ginger bread and barley sugar. But even the slow decay, the living death of the missionaries’ compound was not the worst that could happen. What could be far more terrible would be the decision of the
fazendeiro
– as so often happened – to recruit the labour of the Indians whose lands he had invaded, and who were left to starve.

Extract from the atrocity commission’s report:

Officially it is the Indian Protection Service and 134 of its agents that are on trial, but from all these reports the features of a more sinister personality soon emerge, the
fazendeiro
– the great landowner – and in his shadow the IPS agent shrinks to a subservient figure, too often corrupted by bribes.

One would have wished to find an English equivalent for this Portuguese word
fazendeiro
, but there is none. Titles such as landowner or estate owner which call to mind nothing harsher than the mild despotism of the English class system will not do. The
fazendeiro
by European standards is huge in anachronistic power, often the lord of a tropical fief as large as an English county, protected from central authority’s interference by vast distances, the traditions of submission, and the absolute silence of his vassals. All the lands he holds – much of
which may not even have been explored – have been taken by him or by his ancestors from the Indians, or have been bought from others who have obtained them in this way. In most cases his great fortress-like house, the
fazenda
, has been built by the labour of the Indian slaves, who have been imprisoned when necessary in its dungeons. In the past a
fazendeiro
could only survive by his domination of a ferocious environment, and although in these days he will probably have had a university education, he may still sleep with a loaded rifle beside his bed. Lonely
fazendas
are still occasionally attacked by wild Indians (i.e. Indians with a grievance against the whites), by gold prospectors turned bandit, by downright professional bandits themselves, or by their own mutinous slaves. The
fazendeiro
defends himself by a bodyguard enrolled from the toughest of his workers – many of them, in the backwoods, fugitives from justice.

It has often been hard by ordinary Christian standards for the
fazendeiro
to be a good man, only too easy for him to degenerate into a Gilles de Raïs, or some murderous and unpredictable Ivan the Terrible of the Amazon forests. It can be Eisenstein’s
Thunder Over
Mexico
complete with the horses galloping over men buried up to their necks – or worse. Some of the stories told about the great houses of Brazil of the last century in their days of respectable slavery and Roman licence bring the imagination to a halt: a male slave accused of some petty crime castrated and burned alive … a pretty young girl’s teeth ordered by her jealous mistress to be drawn, and her breasts amputated, to be on the safe side … another, found pregnant, thrown alive into the kitchen furnace.

An extract from the report by the President of last year’s inquiry commission into atrocities against the Indians corrects the complacent viewpoint that we live in milder days.

It is alleged, as well, in this investigation, that there were cases of an Indian’s naked body being smeared with honey before leaving him to be bitten to death by ants.

Why all this pointless cruelty? What is it that causes men and women probably of extreme respectability in their everyday lives to torture for the sake of torturing? Montaigne believed that cruelty is the revenge of the weak man for his weakness; a sort of sickly parody of valour. ‘The killing after a victory is usually done by the rabble and baggage officials.’

It is the beginning of the rainy reason, and from an altitude of 2,000 feet the forest smokes here and there as if under sporadic bombardment, while the sun sucks up the vapour from a local downpour.

The Mato Grosso seen from the air is supposed to offer a scene of monotonous green, but this is not always so. At this moment, for example, a pitch-black swamp lapped by ivory sands presents itself. It is obscured by shifting feathers of cloud, which part again to show a Cheddar Gorge in lugubrious reds. The forest returns, pitted with lakes which appear to contain not water but brilliant chemical solutions; copper sulphate, gentian violet. The air taxi settles wobbling to a scrubbed patch of earth and vultures go by like black rags.

All these small towns in this meagre earth are the same. An
unpronounceable
Guaraní name for a street of clapboard, tapering off to mud and palm thatch at each end; a general store, a hotel, Laramie-style with men asleep on the verandah; a scarecrow horse, bones about to burst through the hide, tied up in a square yard of shade; hairy pigs; aromatic dust blown up by the hot breeze.

Life is in slow motion and on a small scale. The store sells cigarettes, meticulously bisected if necessary with a razor blade, ladlefuls of mandioca flour, little piles of entrails for soup, purgative pills a half-inch in diameter, and handsomely tooled gun holsters. The customers come in not to buy but to be there, wandering through the paper-chains of dusty dried fish hanging from the ceiling. They are Indians, but so de-racialised by the climate of boredom and their grubby cotton clothing, that they could be Eskimos or Vietnamese. They have the expression of men
gazing, narrow-eyed, into crystal balls, and they speak in childish voices of great sweetness. Like Indians everywhere, the smallest intake of alcohol produces an instant deadly change.

The only entertainment the town offers is a cartomancer, operating largely on a barter basis. He tells fortunes in a negative but realistic way, concerned not so much with good luck, but the avoidance of bad. All the children’s eyes are rimmed with torpid, hardly moving flies. The
fazenda
, some miles away, has absorbed everything; owns the whole town, even the main street itself.

This is a place where cruelty is supposed to have happened, but the surface of things has been patched and renovated and the aroma of atrocity has dispersed. Everything can be explained away now in terms of extreme exaggeration, or the malice of political enemies, and all the witnesses for the defence have been mustered. Finally, the everyday violences of a violent country are quoted to remind one that this is not Europe.

Senhor Fulano lives with his family in three rooms in one of the few brick-built houses. His position is ambiguous. An ex-Indian Protection Service agent, he has been cleared of financial malpractices, and hopes shortly for employment in the new Foundation. He has an Abyssinian face with melancholy, faintly disdainful eyes, a high Nilotic forehead, and a delicate Semite nose. He is proud of the fact that his father was half Negro, half Jewish; a trader who captured in marriage a robust girl from one of the Indian tribes.

‘Not all
fazendeiros
are bad,’ Fulano says. ‘Far from it. On the
contrary
, the majority are good men. People are jealous of their success, and they are on the look-out for a way to damage them.

‘In the case you mention the man was a thief and a trouble maker. As a punishment he was locked in a shed, nothing more. He was drunk, you understand, and he set fire to the shed himself. He died in the fire, yes, but the doctor certified accidental death. There was no case for a police inquiry. In thirty years’ service I have only seen one instance of violence – if you wish to call it violence. The Indians were drunk with
cachaça
again, and they attacked the post. They were given a chance by firing over their
heads, but it didn’t stop them. They were mad with liquor. What could we do? There’s no blood on my hands.’ He holds them up as if for confirmation. They are small and well cared for with pale, pinkish palms. His wife rattles about out of sight in the scullery of their tiny flat. There is a picture of the President on the wall, and another of his little girl dressed for her first communion, and no evidence in the cheap, ugly furniture that Senhor Fulano has been able to feather his nest to any useful extent.

He joined the service out of a sense of vocation, he says. ‘We were all young and idealistic. They paid us less than they paid a postman, but nobody gave any thought to that. We were going to dedicate our lives to the service of our less fortunate fellow men. If anyone happened to live in Rio de Janeiro, the Minister himself would see him when he was posted, and shake hands with him and wish him good luck. I happened to be a country boy, but my friends hired a band to see me off to the station. Everybody insisted in giving me a present. I had so many lace handkerchiefs I could have opened a shop. There was a lot of prestige in being in the service in those days.’

There are three whitish, glossy pock-marks in the slope of each cheek under the sad, Amharic eyes, and it is difficult not to watch them. He shakes his head. ‘No one would believe the conditions some of us lived under. They used to show you photographs of the kind of place where you’d be working; a house with a verandah, the school and the dispensary. When I went to my first post I wept like a child when I saw it. The journey took a month and in the meanwhile the man I was supposed to be assisting had died of the smallpox. I remember the first thing I saw was a dead Indian in the water where they tied up the boat. I’d hit a measles epidemic. Half the roof of the house had caved in. There never had been a school, and there wasn’t a bottle of aspirin in the place. When the sun went down the mosquitoes were so thick, they were on your skin like fur.’