Sergio's Journey Part 5

Cambas come in different qualities.

She prided herself in being a Camba of one of the best families of the city of Santa Cruz, and after a while the self-pleasing one had to confess to being from a smaller town some hours east of Santa Cruz, Riboré. That created a status difference, which he took gently as a matter of fact while at the same time setting out to prove his worthiness. He asked Marya what street in Santa Cruz she was born in, and then started to mention people he knew in the same street. Marya reacted with a slight aloofness to this, acknowledged that those people did live there but made it clear that her family was the main one among the other ones. He duly assented to this, but he knew that he had approached Marya all the way to her street; now it was all a matter of getting to the door and knock for a coffee visit.

And I am pretty sure he got there, because after having proved his acceptable social stance he let his wits go more freely and turned into an even more congenial and intelligent conversationist. Mayra, for her part, went on with the story of her heart. After the Brazilian husband was dead, and a proper time of respectful mourning had elapsed, she started dating a Koya, a trader from the highlands who had come to Santa Cruz and settled there. He was a bad man, she said, for he was aggressive, dissolute and a hard drinker, but he loved her and was a man of talent. He always kept his business booming, and treated her like a princes when he chose to. For her part, she confessed to us that she felt for him what she has never felt for anyone. She put it in terms of passion, an unrestrainable desire that burnt her even as she learned better and better that he was not a man to stay with her. I mentioned her husband, and she looked at me as if I were an innocent child. There was no need for her to explain things any further. I made her understand that I saw the value of passion. In a way, I only wanted to make sure that she did not have any need to conceal that desire overruns commitment, responsibility, justice, even the cult we pay to our dear dead. Once this apparent misunderstanding had been cleared, Mayra and I felt closer.

Our friendship was to last only a night train ride, but it was founded on a radical and also painful reduction of love to passion. To her, this realisation was by then painful because the Koya finally left her. She told us that she had been looking for that passion in other men, with no success. She said this with perfect equanimity and not the in least in the tone of a confession. Mayra was a woman in perfect command of her sexuality and an earned right to speak about it openly. The self-pleasing one treated this tale with the outmost respect, as a man who knows deep in his heart that he does not produce that passion in the woman who talks about it, and thus must conform to being an interlocutor, perhaps eventually a lower surrogate of the bygone lover. He did his best at that, though, and through conversation found his way deeper and deeper into the stated invitation for coffee. In the end, he was drawn by Mayra to talk about his wife, a change of subject for which he was as well prepared as for any other. The absent woman became the object of innocuous manifestations of respect for a short while, after which the train was announced to be approaching the town of Riboré. There was no exchange of telephone numbers, addresses or appointments. The conversation had been just an entertaining game to pass the long hours on the train. In Riboré it was all over, for good.

When Mayra and I were left alone, it was time to sleep. With the same spontaneity she had when talking about her sexual life, she offered me half of her blanket. By then, I was intrigued about the dichotomy between Cambas and Koyas she had insisted so much upon. Beside us on the train there travelled a Koya family composed of grandmother, daughter and grand-daughter, the last of them a baby no more that a year old. The baby girl had not cried once during the long trip; when she was on the verge of doing it, the grandmother threatened her and even slapped her gently but firmly on the face. The rest of the time, the mother played with her and kissed her in the most tender and passionate way. The grandmother dressed in the traditional Indian fashion of the highlands, with countless layers of cloth in her colourful skirt; on top, she wore an elaborate shirt that brought to mind the Spanish baroque, and on her head a tall black hat. I asked Mayra about the Koyas, and what she thought of them. She said that they were a different people, who spoke Quechua or Aymara and behaved in a way quite different to the Spanish customs of the Cambas. Perhaps drawn by my interest in the Koya women, she addressed the grandmother as to the best way to clean the baby?s face and to keep her away from infections. She did this in an aloof way, yet as a person who cares for another and knows herself to be close enough to contribute advise. To this, the old woman replied very politely, if in a dignified tone, that she knew all that. Mayra turned to me and started talking of how the Koyas come to Santa Cruz to stay. I asked her if that meant any sort of conflicts, to which she looked at me with her intelligent eyes and replied: ?No. We are all Bolivians?.

After that, we managed to get some sleep, some hours later interrupted by broad daylight illuminating our rocking dreams on the Death Train. The cold was gone and the landscape finally visible. A thick dry forest lines the tracks, and on the left hand side some escalated elevations can be seen; they are rocky and never attain any serious height. This did not surprise me at all, because I remembered from my 1992 trip that the descent from La Paz to the northern lowlands is extremely abrupt. In fact, the 14000- feet-high capital of Bolivia lies on the verge of a colossal abyss; the snow-capped massifs of Illimani and Illampu open the way for a roller-coaster ride down to the Yungas, where the production of coca leaves and corn has kept the highland economy running for many centuries. The Bolivian altiplano is both the broadest stretch of the Andes and the one that plunges most dramatically into the lowlands. For this reason, the towering range is not yet visible from Santa Cruz, and it must have come only late to the sight of Raposo and his men.

They came to it from the northeast, where the Guaporé joins the Mamoré. Instead of the dry lands we saw from the train ? ultimately an extension of the Gran Chaco ? Raposo came down a lush valley that often gives way to yet more swamps. And, before he came into contact with Chanes and western Guaraníies, he must have dealt with Amazonian groups. It was in that region that Lévi-Strauss did his ethnography of the Nambikwaras. There, too, in the 1930?s, the Brazilian government embarked in a massive project to convert southern Amazonian lands to economic uses. It was launched during the first government of Getulio Vargas, placed in office after a military coup against the traditional alliance between the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. These two States had controlled the Brazilian First Republic over forty years, thanks to the thriving coffee economy of the first and the ranching economy of the second. The Great Depression brought the so-called café com leite  (coffee with milk) alliance to a deep crisis, and the army placed the gaucho Vargas in office. The new government could not do without the economic and political might of the Paulistas, and compromises where struck.

The most interesting one from our perspective was the upgrading of the Paulista national myth to a national status, and there the figure of the bandeirante was central. As has been explained, the word bandeira was used to denote solely the punitive expeditions sent throughout the eighteenth century by the Crown against rebellious Indian communities, but myths can be anachronistic. The entradas of the seventeenth century were named bandeiras ever since. On the other hand, the myth was to be put to practical use, and the Vargas government launched a modern bandeira in the frame of a new ideology of progress and westward expansion. Cassiano Ricardo?s book Marcha para Oeste (Westward March) resumed the spirit under which the Bandeira Anhangueira was sent as a scientific, economic and political mission to ?civilize? the Guaporé valley. Lévi Strauss?s structuralist understanding of  Nambikwara culture and his subsequent coinage of the idea of cultural relativism, grew to dimensions that far transcended the remote valley where they had their ethnographic origins. The Brazilian government just wanted the valley.

We did not visit the Guaporé, a most unfortunate if necessary compromise in our route. In 1992, however, I had come down from La Paz to the Mamoré River, into which the Guaporé flows; from there, I proceeded to Porto Velho, the Brazilian city on the Madeira. This was precisely the general route followed by Raposo and his men after they came into violent contact with the lowland Indians of present-day Bolivia, the Spanish empire and the mighty Andes. Vieira?s letter is obscure about this part of the expedition, perhaps because the priest and royal advisor did not feel any need to publicize Paulista provocations to Spain after the recently acquired Portuguese independence from the Spanish Hapsburgs. This obscurity has created a void open to legend, to the point that later chroniclers and hotheaded Paulista patriots in the 1940?s sustained that Raposo had crossed the Andes and dipped his sword in the waters of the Pacific Ocean in the name of João IV. The meticulous historian Taunay settles for multiple engagements with independent Chanes and Guaraníes as well as with Spanish troops, which in the end led Raposo to take to the rivers. Raposo had indeed reached the fringes of a land of silver, but it was Alto Perú with its well-known Potosí, and it had long being Spanish.

Raposo retreated along the rivers instead of simply going back the way he had come. Vieira?s lack of explanation about this decision has also opened the way for speculation as to whether he did this knowing where he was going or simply as a desperate solution. Jaime Cortesão relies on previous explorations of the Madeira River as evidence in favour of the hypothesis that Raposo knew where he was going, but that perhaps he hid it from his men, as he knew roughly how long this would take. Indeed, José Gonçalves de Fonseca had prematurely sailed up the Madeira in the 1550?s, leaving only the problem of how far west the river laid. As had been the case with sea faring in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the real problem of any sort of land or river expeditions in the continent was the accurate measurement of longitude. Latitude measurements had been solved by the astrolabe, but no instrument but the clock existed to estimate degrees east or west. The problem was not whether the Madeiras led eventually to the Atlantic Ocean (or the Mar Océano, as it was then called), but which of all the great rivers that flowed from south to north it was, and how long it would take to sail its length. Here, we come back to the problem of the expansion of the Ilha Brasil, that Indian legacy to the Portuguese understanding of their American domains. To the Portuguese Crown and to its explorers, the larger that ?island? the better, and in Raposo?s time the Madeira was still independent Indian territory ? that is, not settled by Spaniards ? and therefore open to incorporation by Portugal.

So was the north of present-day Bolivia, then inhabited by what the Jesuit missionaries called the Moxo Nation. In the seventeenth century it was to become another Jesuit missionary province, like Paraguay, but in the sixteenth it was still the Moxos?. Cortesão follows Vieira?s description of a river lost in sand banks and then resuming its course northwards, towards the Mamoré. Raposo?s men told the priest when they were living in the Maranhão, that they had descended a river like that. Cortesão explains in his book how he contacted the Bolivian Institute of Geography, asking them about such a river, and how they replied that it must be the Grande, which flows some twenty miles east of Santa Cruz. We crossed it on the Death Train, shortly before our arrival in the city. If this hypothesis is correct, Raposo and his men must have had engagements with Spaniards from Santa Cruz, and from there on ? on their way down the Grande and Mamoré rivers ? they must have faced the Moxos (which was just a Spanish name for a number of different peoples among which were counted the Chane and Tupi-Guaraní groups already mentioned).  After crossing this hostile territory twice ? from the Guaporé to the Grande, and back to the Mamoré ? Raposo?s expedition was much diminished, and embarking in the rivers that led to the Atlantic was nothing but an act of survival.

It took Raposo a year and a half to make his way into the land of the serranos ? as Vieira calls them ? and to leave it. Back in 1992, together with three friends, it took me five days to travel the less than six hundred miles between La Paz and the Brazilian border at Guayaramirim. This territory is called El Beni, a mixture of tropical forest, savannah and some ranching enclaves near the towns of Rurrenabaque and Riberalta. Travelling in this region is done by bus throughout the dry season and only by private cargo trucks at any other time. The road first plunges from the high peaks that fringe the northern side of La Paz down into the Yungas; after that, it winds its way into El Beni avoiding any major streams, because there are very few bridges. Rivulets, on the other hand, can swell after sudden rains up in the mountains, and trucks and buses must either wait for the water to descend or to risk a crossing with wholly submerged tyres. Not only did it take us five days, but also one complete bus fare, two truck-ride deals and a final fling on a dashing pick-up.

At one point the bus driver did not dare pass after a whole day waiting in a long line of very large vehicles. A truck driver announced his intention to pass and dozens of people clung to its sides. We did not even bother to use the bus?s door; from its windows we jumped into the truck, just like that. The truck passed, but it stopped in Rurrenabaque. There we joined a party on a smaller truck leaving for Riberalta, and I must say that it almost made it. Some kilometres before the town, it stuck in mud for the n-th time (we had used the first one for pushing and a mud bath, and the second for fishing piraña in the flooded manors off the road). This time, it stuck for good. We walked to the town, and there arranged with another 12 people for a packed ride on a Chevrolet pick-up. Its driver, ?El Chino? Rivera, was reputed throughout the region as the best driver on mud ever born from woman. His technique was simple: momentum. He drove his pick-up at 90 miles per hour, literally flying over the puddles and not giving time for cranes, storks and the like to fly off our way. It their turn, the very tall birds flew over our heads, broken and dead. At a point in this frenetic ride, a lady summoned the courage to hit the glass panel behind Rivera?s head, demanding that he stopped. He did, and then he asked in a perfectly calm and deceivingly polite manner whether she wanted to stay where we were. She looked around to the endless expanses of savannah and occasional forest, took a deep breath and got back onto the pick-up. That is what it was like to travel in El Beni in the five-hundredth anniversary of the European arrival in America. Just as Brazil keeps growing to the west, Bolivia does it to the north and east. In fact, every Latin American country grows on at least one of its sides. Today, those regions are destinations of guaranteed satisfaction for the daring traveller. At Raposo?s time, however, they were deadly. Getting to a great river and building barges did not guarantee salvation, but at east it offered a way out from the land-locked country of Chanes, hostile Guaranis and harshly territorial Spanish reconnoiterers.

DOWN THE FRESH-WATER SEA

In his 56th letter, Father Vieira writes that Raposo?s men told him that they had remained eleven months oaring their way down the rivers. One good day in September 1651, the remains of the expedition reached what looked like a Portuguese fort. It was so indeed, they knocked at its gate and the largest in scope of the Portuguese entradas in America was over. The fort went by the name of Gurupá, and it was the furthest Portuguese outpost up the Amazon River, a result of that intense wave of expansion known in the history books as the Conquest of the Maranhão. Father Antonio Vieira was to the Maranhão what Bartolomé de las Casas was to Chiapas and the Caribbean: a defender of the Indians against encomenderos and slave drivers and a humanist who put his knowledge to that cause. De las Casas had done it throughout his whole life, Vieira indulged in that saintly chore only by the end of his. He arrived in Maranhão in 1653, and he met a number of Raposo?s men who had preferred to stay in this new land of opportunity instead of returning to São Paulo.

Back in 1992, I joined Raposo?s route in the Bolivian town of Guayaramirín, where ?El Chino? Rivera had drove us in the maddest and most precise of ways. The crossing of the frontier over the Mamoré is a tricky one, as it is a route of coca leaf traffic. Four young Colombians did not cast a very good impression, a prejudice eventually taken up by any frontier clerk in the world. Accordingly, we dressed up as tourists, with socks to the knee and cameras hanging from the neck; moreover, we clumsily stormed the checking post asking silly questions about where exactly Brazil was. Five minutes later we were on a speedboat to Guayaramirim, the Brazilian namesake town across the river. A bus sped us to Porto Velho along an impressive motorway, in such a contrast to the bridgeless mud roads of the Beni that we immediately understood how national growth of a different kind came pushing from the east. In Porto Velho, we boarded the wooden, two-storied, hammock-ridden boat that over the next four days would sail us down the Madeiras and up the Amazon to the city of Manaus.

In the light brown waters of the Madeiras one feels like in the middle of a great lake. Its banks look from the boat like green stripes, and they appear to enclose the flow far ahead the prow and behind the stern. This is the effect of the river?s meandering course, which from the air must look like a snake of mythological proportions wriggling against a sea of green. Several times per day, a steel-grey blanket of clouds rushes upriver coverinig the boat in a thick passing rain. The showers last no more than ten minutes and if one looks over the stern, one sees the cloud crawling past the boat on its way upriver, where all the waters meet.

In the high-water season of the year 2001, we arrived to the Amazon by plane. We flew from Santa Cruz de la Sierra to Manaus, profitting from a Lloyd Aereo Boliviano link that suited our route requirements perfectly. If Porto Velho can be proud of the mighty Madeiras, Manaus can boast a sea. Not that the core of the city is actually by the Amazon, as it lies by the Negro River. But its industrial ring reaches south-east to the place ? if only it were a defined place ! ? were the Negro flows into the Amazon. The meeting of the pitch black waters of the Negro and the light brown ones of the Amazon looks almost still to the eye, with only a minimal riptide. An inmensity of bicoloured water fills the horizon to all sides. An apparent stillnes hides the gigantic flow. We had entered at last the Fresh Water Sea.

Manaus, proud of its achievements as it is, is essentially a large, paved and built-in void of trees. A clear in the green mantle of the Amazon rainforest. Only this large-scale approach can explain the thick and wet layer of heat that wraps it, and the perpetual green smell that penetrates concrete, steel and smog. The city may be heralded as the conqueror of the rainforest, but the truth is that it cannot escape being its green-locked prisoner. Manaus does its best to liberate itself, and this is why its port is such a busy hub of river communications. Boats of all sizes and colours festoon its waterfront and links can be made with all the major tributaries into Colombia, Peru and down to the Atlantic.

In the last years, the idea has taken force that the Aamzon basin has been such a busy system of communications fot over ten thousand years. About ten years ago, Jeanne Kennedy, a North American arqueologist, made some momentous discoveries in the middle course of the Amazon, near the present-day city of Santarem. She unearthed ceramics whose sophistication was unprecedented in the region together with evidence that the baks of the Amazon River system were much more thickly populated in ancient times than it had been customarily believed. The early Spanish and Portuguese chroniclers who went up or down the rivers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ? members of the expeditions of Francisco de Orellana, Lope de Aguirre or Pedro de Texeira ? described places along the river where thousands of canoes would gather to trade or present battle. Those early testimonies were always discarded as feverish exaggerations on the part of the the chroniclers, but they appear to match well with the recent arqueology of the region.

Not only was the Amazon basin home to a thriving civilization since pre-Iberian times, but it was there that many Indian groups retreated as the Spanish and the Portuguese conquistadors took by force the Andes mountains and the Brazilian coast. Among these groups can be counted the Tupinambas of the south-east of Brazil, whose flight from the Portuguese would last over a century. Ultimately, they fell in despair realizing that no matter where they went the white men would eventually appear up the course of a river or across the mountains. The history of the flight of the Tupinambas epitomizes the destiny of the whole ancient Amazonian civilization. The thousands of canoes were not to be seen any more once the white man?s deseases spreaded up the rivers.

Kennedy?s discoveries are of paramount importance to the whole field of Native American studies. Until the 1980?s it was believed that the only civilizations that had achieved high population concentration, extended networks of trade and complex political organization had been the Andean and Central American ones. The discoveries in the Amazon have been dated much before the apogee of those civilizations, up to ten thousand years back. This means that the first complex American civilization flourished in the lowlands and at a much earlier time than it had been believed. This would give a new meaning to the common-held Inca assertion that their ancestors came from the lowlands. More than mythology, this idea was part of the Inca historical culture. It may well be the case that in 1650, Raposo and his men witnessed a better preserved remnant of this ancient civilization; better at least that it would be when the Portuguese expansion reached Santarem, decades later. According to Kennedy?s arqueological findings the heart of that ancient civilization was in the vicinity of Santarem, where the blue Tapajos River flows into the Amazon.

Our boat arrived in Santarem early in the morning after two days and their nights downriver from Manaus. The contrast between city and town overran the fact that both shared the Amazon rainforest all around. Santarem lies right by the spot where the waters of the two rivers meet; blue lies to the right, brown the left. Its fish market is perhaps the best collection of Amazonian fish one can imagine, some still catching their last dry breaths, others slit in two for instant cooking. Lines of nineteenth century buildings still line the most beatuful streets, along the waterfront. People seem to enjoy life here, and they all talk about Altar do Chão. After much misunderstanding, we finally got it that not far up the Tapajos River an altar-like hill rises in the middle of the jungle, and at its feet golden beaches fringe a currentless bulge of the river?s bank. They spoke of good fish restaurants and Academias de Sucos (fruit juice stands). It sounded like paradise, and there we went.

The piracuru fiish and the succos were indeed exquisite, the beaches golden, the fresh water transparent blue, the view from the hill? a dream ! I climbed it in my bathing pants and barefooted. The rocks on the way up made me feel the hill at every step like the demanding caresses of a teluric god beneath. Sweat and sun took the place of the dripping water of the Tapajos on my body. As I climbed, the rainforest gained more and more size. When I reached the top, a green world laid at my feet. The broad blue stripe of the river

meandered its way out of sight to the south; the brown Fresh Water Sea could be discerned to the north. There was not a sign of human habitation, not even the few bathers below, covered as they were by the rock. The sheer sight brought tears to my eyes and emotion made my breathing irregular. I understood at last why this hill has been named as an altar formed by the land beneath. It affords to the climber a view of a world without us humans; it compels him to ponder what we are and what we are not. Altar do Chão is a window to nature as it is to humanity; the oldest idols and spirits have retreated to its summit.

When Colombus saw the mouths of the Orinoco in his second crossing of the Atlantic, he recorded in his log that he had seen the golden river Ofir coming down from the Garden of Eden. On his latercrossings, he never sailed up the river in search of paradise, but he might as well have done it. We did not go up the Tapajos, where the innermost heart of Brazil lies. Raposo did not either, which was most unfortunate for him since gold, diamonds and emeralds were to be found in its headwaters some decades after his expedition. The Tapajos was the river of gold. To us, it represented the unreached part of our own expedition. The alluring place that grows almost magical because it remains unattained. Before we left Altar do Chão we met two Spaniards, both by the name Javier. They told us of their plan to buy a small diesel boat and sail the tributaries of the Amazon for at least a year. I proposed starting with the Tapajos and asked them if they could take another man on board. They said yes.

Next day we were on our way down the Amazon towards the city of Belem. The Tapajos was left behind for the last time, now that we were bound for the Atlantic. For two peaceful days we met plenty of Brazilians with whom to take the sun on the boat?s upper deck and watch the banks of the river ? at times at close range, at times lost in distance. To them we told some of our Brazilian stories and of Raposo. They told us about the river. Early in the morning of our last sailing day, we saw the town of Gurupá from a great distance in the middle of the river. Raposo had arrived there by the end of the year 1651 after three whole years circumventing the Island Brazil. He and less than a fifth of his original men knocked at the gates of the fort, the furthest Portuguese outpost up the Amazon. They were saved.

That afternoon we arrived in the port of Belem, the capital city of the Amazon to the extent that the rainforest and the rivers can be said to have a human capital. An Amazonic atmosphere covers the city just as it does Manaus. All the produce of the forest that man has learned to use makes its way to the city market of Ver O Peso. The Museum Goeldi does its best to put the dumbfounding richness and variety of Amazonian nature at the level of human  understanding. It also showcases the recent finds from the Santarem Civilization. A small zoo brings the jaguar, the massive piracuru fish, the manatee, the tapir and the macaw to the city dweller, as a reminding of who his immediate neighbours are. All the winds caress and batter Belem from the nearby Ocean, but it is the Amazon that supports it from its back.

EPILOGUE

Alfonse d?Taunay, author of the most encyclopedic work on the Portuguese entradas and bandeiras, writes about Raposo?s return to São Paulo from Belem: ?How Antonio Raposo returned from Gurupá to São Paulo, is what we do not know, and it will be quite difficult ot discover it. The tradition says that he arrived home so disfigured that the members of his family did not recognize him. When did he die ? Nobody knows?.

By 1658 he was already dead, as it is shown by an inventory of his possessions signed by his son. Between 1651 and 1658 no honour or payment was accorded to him, as the same inventory shows. Antonio de Pereyra, the expedition?s second in command, was knighted after 1651. The officer Souza de Silva, another member of the expedition, was made Captain Major of the provinces of the Portuguese possessions of São Vicente and São Paulo. Raposo received nothing and died in his adoptive town of São Paulo as the commoner and adventurer he had always been.

It is clear that his expedition had been a failure in terms of the grand objectives it appears to have had. Salvador Correia de Sá, the most influential courtisan of the king of Portugal and governor of Rio de Janeiro, reccomended the policy of not financing any more expeditions into the sertões, because ?their services to the Crown have not proved deserving and have not been brought to a satisfactory result?. He wrote this to the king in 1653, and it is almost certain that he had Raposo?s entrada in mind.

Posterity, too, would condemn Raposo to oblivion. Jaime Cortesão explains in his book A Bandeira de Raposo Tavares that this was due to hatred the Jesuits ? both Portuguese and Spanish ? felt for him, and to their having erased him from their histories. Antonio Viieira, himself a high advisor to the king, wrote his 56th Letter in ambivalent terms. ??No party of Calvinists, nor Lutherans, not even Turks, ever left on much smaller an expedition, either by sea or land, without taking with them the ministers of their religious sects. But, in account that this expedition was truly one of the greatest ones that has ever been achieved, it would be a great thing to know the route they followed, but these men lacked the proper instruments and therefore can not say with certainty where they went?. He among his fellow Jesuits was in a priviledged position to understand the magnitude of Raposo?s attempt, but he could not help keeping a grudge and even abhorrence with regard to the Infamous Raposo Tavares, raider of missions, enslaver of the Guaranis and killer of priests. His 56th Letter was edited out from his complete works and from the collection of his letters, until João Lucio Azevedo discovered it and included in his own edition of the Jesuit?s works, published well into the twentieth century.

The Jesuits had a great influence in the Iberian historical writing of the Barroque, and Raposo was their enemy. His actions ? even when coopted by the Portuguese Crown and intended to serve its expansionist and merchantilistic interests ? radically contradicted the scheme of the Catholic Monarchies in America. This scheme was the the most perfect solution to the problem of legitimacy of the Iberian rule over the new discoveries and conquests. On the other hand, Raposo?s expedition was an outright failure in terms of the quest for a new Potos[AH1] í and the construction of a Portuguese polity in Brazil in the manner and with the means of the Spanish domains. Raposo?s entrada was another risky bet played by João IV under the shadow of war against Spain and in his plan to strengthen Portugal?s independence.

Raposo made it back home, but he did not bring gold nor did he tame the huge sertão he tackled. In Spanish we say that he who grabs too much cannot squeeze hard. The backlands that Raposo crossed, remained wild sertão; as for El Dorado promised by Indian peoples to lie further on, it did not materialise. Gold and emeralds were to be found not far from Raposo?s route fifty years after his expedition. Luckier men would do it in present-day Goias and in the headwaters of the Tapajos. In the following centuries and all the way to the present, the taming of the Brazilian sertão was to continue. In the eighteenth century, new entrepreneurs undertook the Monçoes, or populating bandeiras. They would ultimately change the face of Brazilian human geography, but they could not have been possible without the experience accumulated by men like Raposo. Today, the taming of the sertão continues to the expense of the rainforest and the Indian peoples who inhabit it. Nobody can predict the result of this latest advance of the bandeirantes.

ÔÔÔ

As for us, we reached Rio separately. In Belem, I received a rather unexpected visit, which meant that I needed to leave Rolando and Rosalba with the agreement that we would meet along the way or perhaps in Rio. Raposo?s expedition had split right from the beginning for practical reasons. Pereyra went to Itatim and Raposo to the mountain of San Fernando. Moreover, after the expedition reached Gurupá, many of its men decided to stay in the new open frontier of the Maranhão, while others decided to return to their native São Paulo or simply dispersed along the Brazilian coast.

For as long as we kept to Raposo?s route, we did not split, but in Belem we were through with the essential part of our project, and free to explore Raposo?s journey back home with the liberty afforded by historical obscurity. The main reason of our split, however, was the visit that I received, which required full attention and some delicate procedures on my part.

Before coming back to this, I must say that travelling together for a month was not always easy for Rosalba, Rolando and me. Expectations, rhythms, ways, needs, thresholds were sometimes different. Brazil meant different things for the three of us. Travelling too. We had difficult moments a couple of times; it is good that we always managed to talk later in the evening in order to clarify misunderstandings or come to practical agreements. There was something, however, that we could never solve. At this point, I do not know what it was. I believe that travelling on at a par with living together as the ultimate challenge to relationships. For a considerable period of time, it involves living together; that is, eating at the same times, sleeping the same hours, partaking almost every minute of a routine, even if it is a moving routine. To this, other stresses must be added. Choosing where to go and how, what to skip, what standard of travel to keep. Danger and tiredness play their role too; everyone?s reactions to these two are different. If, besides all this, there is an intellectual task to perform, different approaches, methods and even ideologies may have the effect of creating conflict. Perhaps there was a bit of everything, perhaps even more things. If asked to choose one reason, I would pick rhythm. We live at different speeds. The truth is that we performed well together for a month, and then we were quite prepared to depart ways. Them two to be together; I, to attend to my visitor and the difficult issues she brought with her.

That visitor was my ex-wife. She had demanded that I went to Colombia, where I come from and where we had lived together. It was time to finish things, she thought, and a meeting was required. I proposed some place in Brazil, since I knew that I would be just about everywhere in the country. Belem was agreed upon, which, seen in retrospective, was an ideal solution. There we met and I realised that things were not going to be so simple. Perhaps I had known it deep down inside all along.

I showed her all the things that I had seen in the city; she liked them. We thought that divorce business could be postponed for a while, and we talked about our recent lives. As there was no reason to hide anything anymore, our conversations were interesting and lively; at times they turned painful, hit as we were by pangs of anachronistic jealousy. We moved on. Fortaleza del Ceará was there with its nearby beach of Cambacú, a place beyond words. White dunes clutched by the blue of sea and the blue of sky; solitude but for us; breeze and tiny needles of sand raining over my body; my body protecting hers from a magnetic distance; warmth in the sea and in the air, but not between us. And then, lobster for dinner, washed by two-pint bottles, escorted by crab mousse, all crowned by a falling sun that turns colours into shines. Even divorces are to be beautiful ceremonies under North Eastern Brazilian skies.

And on we went. Salvador de Bahia ? the ebony jewel encrusted with all the precious stones ? took us for the definite part of our negotiations. Not that these were to be as clear-cut and cold as more profitable transactions usually are. Bahia casts dreams from its walls, pavements, streets, faces? and dreams are bad for business. We left each other in Bahia, but the city and its people, its drums and its colours, distracted us so much that we did not do it well. Doubts kept coming back, as if decisions had been snatched from our consciousness by the charms of Bahia. It just happens that Bahia sings, it scintillates, it seduces, it intoxicates. Olodum drums, Dendé Oil in the food ? fish moquecas or sururú broth-, churches of gold, people touched by grace as if of an act of magic? they all have the power to enthral. Sylvia and I left each other in Bahia once again.

Now that I think? perhaps the place was not ill chosen, just as Belem ? where Raposo had finished his fruitless quest? had been good to start. This I say because Belem, Cumbucú and Bahia stand in growing order of inebriating power. Bahia reaches a maximum, and what better stage to play mutual abandonment than an unsurpassable setting? What has been seen has been seen; what has been lived has been lived. Bygone things better be good; if they are not, they keep coming back for what they miss.

Now I think of the Tapajos River. I think of it because I think of Carine. Rivers are mysterious things, but when they are blue, you have only seen their golden ends and they lead to the heart of Brazil, they are magical. Rivers like that are seen to be beautiful at once. Bathing in them shows that they feel good, taste good, smell good. Watching their meandering course from nearby hills, shows that they are voluptuous and voracious. Staying by their side for a while feels like home, no matter where. Things like these, one does not only love, one wants to love them because one feels proud to love them. The Tapajos River makes me think of Carine. They both aim piercingly to the heart.

Perhaps Carine and I will join the Spaniards in their boat; perhaps we will do it alone, like a clique of selfish lovers. Perhaps we will do it this year; perhaps the next. There is no chance missing the mouths of the Tapajos. Across the Ocean one goes; up the Amazon new sails; on the look out for blue waters, golden beaches, altar-like hills and endless green banks? once there, turn left!

Raposo saw the Tapajos but missed to turn. I will not make the same mistake.

ôôô

AN INFORMAL NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY

AND FURTHER READING

The seminal text  to reconstruct Raposo?s entrada is Antonio Vieira?s 56th Letter, written in 1654 and addressed to the Provincial General of the Jesuit Order in Brazil. It was edited out of his complete works for almost three hundred years, until João Lucio d?Azevedo found it. It can be read in the third volume of Alfonse d?Taunay?s Historia Geral das Bandeiras Paulistas. This work is the most comprehensive study on the historical phenomenon generally referred to as Bandeirismo. It dates from the 1940?s and incorporates the best of the Paulista understanding of the topic. In English, a collection of brief articles on the issue was compiled and introduced by Morse in 1967, under the title The Bandeirantes.

As for Raposo?s expedition, the best and most comprehensive study is by far Jaime Cortesão?s A Bandeira de Raposo Tavares, in which the author keeps both the Iberian and the local perspectives of explanation. The end result is that Raposo?s expedition is understood both as related to the Iberian and European history of the first half of the seventeenth century, and as deriving from the local and partially isolated SãoPaulo.

For an understanding of the importance of entradas, bandeiras and monções in the history of Brazil ? as well as for many other important issues ? Sergio Boharque de Holanda?s Monções is fundamental reading.

A most enjoyable general history of Brazil in colonial times, and with the taste of eighteenth century historiography, is Robert Southey?s History of Brazil. Southey was a personal friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth and a poet himself. He writes much in the manner of Gibbon, and his gigantic work on Brazil?s past remains and will remain a classic. It has the great advantage that it does not stop at the confines of Brazil, but tells also the stories of the exploration, conquest and settlement of Paraguay, Uruguay and much of Bolivia and Argentina. Its detailed index makes its consultation very confortable.

About the Jesuit missions in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Argentina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a large bibliography is available. Among the modern works, Magnus Mörner?s The Political and Economic Activities of the Jesuits in the La Plata region ? The Habsburg era, is a most informative and intelligent work. Among the ancient works, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya?s Conquista Espiritualis both a first hand account and a Jesuit manifesto. The film The Mission shows the amazing nature where Jesuit missionary sites were located, at which writers come necessarily short.

About early expeditions and explorers in the Amazon basin, Antony Smith?s Explorers of the Amazonmakes for good reading.

TheBrazilian Reader, edited by Michael Levine, is a varied, easy to read and very original introduction to Brazilian issues, from bandeirantes to bossa nova composers, and from race issues to brasilidade.

 [AH1]