PIRATE FRAGMENT 1

The rabble of six hundred illegal miners who met at that remote point on the Xingú River was already organized enough to deserve the name of a village. It was mid-2012, and as Mr. Adamastor had told us, it was a large "village" compared to other mining camps we had encountered throughout our lives. All the sites were covered by canvas tents reinforced with coconut fronds, and the entire structure was made of wood taken from the surrounding forest, where there were waterfalls and trails recently cleared with machetes and sickles. To make their daily lives easier, all the miners opened accounts at the village's eight grocery stores. Food, entertainment, and wages for most were paid for with their own gold. A meal, for example, cost a tenth of a gram of gold, around R$3.40. The price per gram of gold always varied daily, but at the moment, according to this story, it ranged between R$34.00 and R$35.00. As Seu Adamastor had also anticipated, a gram of gold was enough to buy seven cans of cold beer, or pay for a date with one of the twenty or thirty prostitutes who had come to work in the village, some of them Indigenous. Drug trafficking, as I had already imagined, had long since arrived in the area, and the drug most commonly consumed by most of the miners was cocaine paste—a small packet sold for half a gram of gold. Before we left for the river, on the morning of our arrival, I checked with grocery stores to see if any environmental or federal authorities had yet inspected that mining site, and they all said no.

Not that I intended to jot down thoughts and describe crazy situations in my notebook during those scorching days, diving in and out of the river in my wetsuit. But leafing through my notes in my spare time somewhat alleviated my crazy habit of talking to myself out loud, which often provoked suspicious reactions from those around me. One or another caboclo from our crew had already come to tell Seu Adamastor about this. And Seu Adamastor saw me strangely drawn in those looks:

"Oddities and trifles! Against rumor and confusion," said the old man to the restless crew, "only the seriousness of the immediate concrete." Following the idea, the boy composes himself in the rareness of that suddenness of his. Recounting things here doesn't make a noise. My breath of reality here is antlike. Through censorship, the manner and speech soon arrange themselves into prose of remembered light, oral news. The boy has a furtiveness, a far from home that keeps talking to himself. Nothing, it's his flesh to continue here."

So I tried to devote myself to the notebook, before everyone went crazy---whenever my shift at the bottom of the river ended, and one of the caboclos would take me back to the camp in the village aboard the voadeira (a small motorboat that usually accompanies the navigation of the mining rafts upriver to expedite the transport of men and supplies). I would spend long periods lying in a hammock inside the tent, with the notebook open on my chest, writing, reading, and rereading what I'd written, and mentally and dreaming about it.

May God bless me here. And considering that this is a big place and that I have two eyes and a hammer, my metalwork, and I invent, and I understand a lot of things, I believe that sooner or later, probably somewhere between your house and college, there in Juiz de Fora (and for a second I think I might lean over here and kiss you), I will reappear strong and not decadent, still capable of a mutant, nomadic nonconformity, with enough temerity to confront, deny, or attack fate; being a man and still in my twenties, naturally I won't be wasting my time trying to get closer to you, Joana. My reputation there is already that of a GOLDEN GLOVES who indeed brings with him a path apparently invented in the middle of nowhere, that no rival could imagine such a well-arranged set of advantages. I'm certainly aware that, at least while I'm trapped here, in this backwater, the jealousy of a single moment could well generate a dangerous lifelong fiction, and deprive me of any reason to believe that you still like me. However, while I'm here, I'll have to dedicate myself to imagining other things, without letting anyone perceive the real content of my concerns.

(continued)