without saying goodbye to anyone

 That's how CURRUTELA appeared on our path, as the only possible place where we could now get gasoline: the gasoline we had was no longer enough to return to the town where we had left. Spread out and worked on both banks, the currutela was a jumble of brown houses made of bamboo, mats and leaves, a type of vegetable-material architecture, sprouting from the brown soil on the banks of the muddy river. Some of those huts were real indigenous huts, although there were no Indians there, but rather ruined gold mines, left-behind sick people, cadaverous call girls and all kinds of fugitives from justice. The lodgings were like nests of a contaminated aquatic race. Here and there, huddled together like little ridges of brown roofs falling to pieces under the relentless vertical rays of the sun, which affected the infected lungs of the people with the inspiration of the nostrils and soaked into the skeletal limbs of the body of each unfortunate inhabitant, I was sure that this was the nearest place to hell that I had ever set foot in.. As soon as our crew was all crammed into one of those empty quarters, shortly afterwards Mr. Adamastor returned from the warehouse in Currutela saying that we were going to have to hold out there for fifteen or twenty days, because their gasoline had run out and they would only return to refuel within that time frame. "'What bad luck, son (...)'', he said and lit a cigarette, as if he was already expecting what happened next. One of the crew's natives (he had been sick for days and kept asking Mr. Adamastor when we were going to return home, increasingly out of his mind) got up from the floor where we were sitting, took a knife from his pocket and went for the old man, clearly ready to kill him: 'BASTARD (!)'', and fell on top of Mr. Adamastor, who let the cigarette roll to the floor and closed both hands around the guy's neck. In less than ten seconds the guy already seemed to be nothing more than an inanimate weight on Mr. Adamastor's cracked body with veins and veins protruding from his neck. Before I and the other natives arrived to try to break up the fight, Mr. Adamastor rolled the guy's body to the side and got up without making any effort at all. The guy was dead, with a repulsive foam running down the corners of his mouth. Mr. Adamastor ran his hand over his shirt to smooth it out and before lighting a new cigarette, he made the sign of the cross and spat on the dead man. No one said anything. No one said anything. Half an hour later, they took the dead man out of there and took him away in a boat upriver. I spent the next four days locked in a dark room, alone, in a state of shock. No one talked at all anymore. Mr. Adamastor had disappeared, the other men spent most of their time drunk in the bar in the backwoods, playing pool and waiting their turn with one of the cadaverous girls from the dilapidated dive on the other side of the village. I didn't eat, drink water or sleep well. I had run out of cigarettes on the first day of my confinement. No one came to call me or update me on the situation. It seemed that a malaria epidemic was taking down all those people outside my bedroom door. Until a hoarse female voice burst through the walls of the room, tapping lightly on the hollow wood of the door."Mr. Adamastor sent me here to talk to you," she said from behind the door. I opened the door more out of desperation, so as not to starve to death or go completely crazy. But this is a gold mine, my friend, so we burst inside like rotten melons and nothing happens. We vomit our own guts and fight over who can have the highest fever without dying, and the healer doesn't come running; delirium, fainting, violent allergic reactions and nothing. Maybe we're already dead. How can we be sure? She was carrying a plate of food, a bottle of water and a pack of cigarettes: "Mr. Adamastor sent me to bring you some (...)," she said, placing everything on the bed. She was a brown-skinned brunette in her early thirties, very thin and with dark circles sunken into her face that looked like black holes that would swallow her eyes at any moment: a real animated corpse. That made me nervous. moved me to the point that I took some money out of my backpack and gave it to her without even thinking about what I was doing. Her eyes lit up with the gift and then we became friends. I wouldn't have to leave that room again until the gasoline arrived, that was my only thought. During those days of the epidemic, no one came into my room. I had decided. The few times they knocked on the door, I usually didn't answer at all. But I knew it could only be her or Mr. Adamastor. I answered him once and it was as if nothing had happened. Seventh, eighth day. "Another one has died (...) if it continues like this, we'll return to the city with the empty ferry (..) you and I are the only ones who won't get sick yet, my son (...)'', he said, and widened those bloodshot eyes that seemed to be searching my every thought at that moment. I tried to cling more to the concern for the health of the crew that he tried to show, but I knew that behind those words of concern was boiling the old man's damned greed in all directions of his pirate spirit with a skull flag buried in each of his two lunatic eyes. "I brought you (..)'', he said, and handed me a small plastic bottle with a dark green, somewhat muddy liquid inside. ""What the hell is this, Mr. Adamastor (?)'', I asked, hesitating to take the bottle from his hand. "Daime(...)'', he said, and pushed the bottle against my chest. I grabbed it in fright and he walked out the door without saying another word. The most ill-looking and tough-skinned men I had ever seen in my life were walking around there. You could say that a good portion of them were fugitives from justice or outcasts psychoticized by the life of addiction and suffering in the big city who came to spend the rest of their miserable lives in the middle of that henhouse of bad elements. I limited myself to going out in the morning to the front of the hostel to get some sun, so as not to get sick. She would disappear and reappear days later with a black eye, bringing me bananas, boiled potatoes and cigarettes. I didn't care anymore, rereading for the seventh time in a row the only book I had in my backpack: a book of detective stories by Raymond Chandler. I came back from the bathroom thinking that not every prospector in that slum should be a beater of drugged whores, and I watched from afar a maroon bump on her forehead and cheekbone. I had absolutely nothing to talk about with her. I was lying on the bed eating the fruit she had brought and leafing through old magazines and newspapers thrown into a basket. They were dated from the beginning of the occupation, ten years ago. I made no explicit mention of the bruises. Neither did she. Fruit was plentiful and was a natural symbol of dreaming around us in the room, immersed in the shadows and dim light, when suddenly a visibly distraught individual burst into the room with a pocketknife in his hand and yelling a jumble of curses and death threats so violently at her that the poor thing cowered in a corner behind the bed like a little mouse. Now I was between the two of them, with no time to think about anything. "Get out of my way, faggot (!)", he shouted at me, putting his legs on the edge of the bed. Almost vomiting with so much hatred, he almost imperceptibly lowered his hand with the pocketknife in my direction and I immediately kicked his hand and the pocketknife flew away, I jumped up and punched him in the mouth with the back of my hand. He fell. I ran and picked up the pocketknife from the floor. Those days confined inside a dark room while everyone outside was vomiting their guts out with fever had messed with my head, I had gotten sick. He was still on all fours on the floor, dizzy from the blow to the mouth, when I ran towards him and hit a goal kick right in the middle of his head. A large amount of blood and some rotten teeth flew against the wall of the room. At that moment, I sincerely wished he was dead. I don't know how he managed it, but he got up and ran out of the room and disappeared through the door of the dormitory. She was still huddled behind the bed, calmer now. In the little house there was only that, every day was a day to die alive in the suffocation of the room. Before ten at night, there was only a kind of unbearably scorching limbo outside. The occasional figure of a prospector wandering aimlessly in search of a violent dose of something, or of falling dead in his hammock or bed or falling into a coma with a fever. For days without receiving gasoline, boats from the city, nothing or anyone. Today I was heading to the hot and inert void where the ominous abstraction of the room was dragging me like a diesel ferry dredge. After lunch, that afternoon tetanus would set in inside my soul and there was no way out. I couldn't fraternize with anyone at all, and I could swear that my raft mates didn't either. The agony dragged on slowly through the afternoon, reaching a kind of nervous redemption at dusk... and everything dissolved into fever, cachaça and death again. Through the window, down below, dogs among the palm tree beds and garbage cans in front of the accommodation. The setting sun came to soothe the inflammation of the scorching landscape and color everything with its orange worthy of a fleshless peach there, where nature distilled the world of men with virulent forceps. That vast expanse of water shining in front of us like a fire lost in the depths of the red horizon. But there was something apocalyptic in those ominous sunsets that I saw slowly falling over the currutela and coloring the passage of time a little. The room was a dramatic square of apprehensive unreality defying the twilight with its semi-shipwrecked nothingness in the mouth of the night. I was debating all that nauseating routine of the lodging, when suddenly she enters the room with the bags overflowing with more fruit. I repeat to her ten times thank you and ask if the guy came after her again. "No(..)", she said... ""They killed him last night(.)". I didn't have time to absorb it properly, I turned my face to the side and wiped the imaginary blood from my mind with my hand. Several toilets are discharged at the same time in the room, the sound of which is quickly swallowed by the repulsive breath from her half-toothless mouth. It's something that turns my stomach. I look at the watch on her wrist. It's six twenty-one. I get up, close the curtain and light a cigarette for myself and one for her. She lets out a low, expectant grunt, waiting for me to say something. What do you want me to say, my dear? 'Don't say it(...)', I said, a nervous laugh forming in the corner of my mouth... 'And how, who was it(?)' From the moment she walked through the bedroom door until the moment I left her with a frozen face with my indecisive and abrupt movements, like someone who's already going a little crazy, there was no time to say anything. No news from me. Only hers. 'Mr. Adamastor(.),' she answers dryly. Or is it simple indifference. Complete acceptance of the cold, hard objectivity of the facts. But she seems to be happy. "YOUR ADAMASTOR(!)", I repeat in a surprising scream and burst into a diabolical laugh that floods the room with the contagious substance of my madness... Mr. Adamastor had given up alcohol forever after having killed a man in his youth with an armbar as he was leaving a brega bar in a city in the North. The fight was solely because of alcohol, he told me one day. With that, as far as I could tell, that was already three deaths under his belt. ANY ONE WOULD WORK FOR ME, YOU SON. ONE WHO COULD LIFT UP HER SKIRT AND HOLD ON FIRMLY, YOU KNOW... AND HE CAME TO ME JUST WHEN I WAS BITING THE BLACK GIRL'S NECK. IT WAS THE THIRD TIME I WAS ABOUT TO EAT HER AGAIN WHEN, YOU SON OF A BITCH, HE FELL WITH HIS CLOSED HAND ON A PIECE OF GLASS ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE. IT OPENED A SPOT OF BLOOD ON MY BLOUSE, BUT IN THE SCARED I GRAB HIS WRIST AND STRETCHED IT AROUND MY NECK DIAGONALLY... IN ACTUALITY, THE BLOW WASN'T REALLY LIKE THAT, AND THAT'S EXACTLY WHY HE DIED, HIS NECK WAS "ACIDENTALLY" BROKEN... I couldn't believe it any longer, it was too much for my nerves. It was like a nightmare coming out of the other one every day, at a slow and maddening pace. ''You know what, young lady(...)'', I turned to her and said inadvertently ""Thank you for everything you've done for me, but now I have to be alone(...)'', I told her in the most polite way I could and she understood immediately and left through the bedroom door without any sign of resentment for my abrupt reaction of distancing. Three days later the gasoline arrived and we left with three less men in the crew and without saying goodbye to anyone.