PIRATE FRAGMENT 2

Around the sixth or seventh day of the mining season in that village in the Upper Xingu, near dusk, I left my tent to stretch my legs and smoke a cigarette. The camps weren't so close together, and a series of gas lamps hung from the inside of dozens of canvas tents scattered around, making it difficult for the miners to see the playing cards after seven o'clock. Even so, they squinted and struggled to distinguish the red from the black.

During their free time, most of them played for real (with gold) or slept exhausted, but there was always the occasional lunatic who would stuff his nose with cocaine and go after the village's "girls." It wasn't uncommon to wake up to reports of violent disturbances there.

"I'll tell you something," said a soft, somewhat São Paulo-like voice from inside a tent I was passing. "These diamonds are going to be my downfall. I'll never understand these cards properly!"

For a moment, no other voice inside the tent responded. I held my breath, smoking, at the word "diamonds."

"You're such a jerk! With your luck at cards, you'll end up richer than me, even if you keep splitting everything we find here 50/50," the same voice continued.

Another man, previously silent, chuckled from inside.

"A real hand," he said, and laughed again.

"Brazil, this land is a giant alluvium, but here, in the Volta Grande do Xingú, with all that information gathered in Verona, there's no reason not to smile, even if your hand arrived as sad as your face. Hahahahahha! Is it the lack of whiskey?"

It sounded like the voice of a big, old, fat man.

"I'll never be able to understand the logic of these letters, damn it."

Apparently, the hand had arrived weak indeed.

There you go: they were technicians from Verona Canada in the middle of a gold prospecting operation.

"The Canadians mapped the entire Volta Grande region while I was there, in the prospecting department. But look, if I don't have a half bottle of whiskey right next to me, it's as if all my diamonds lost some of their shine. Don't you think Wilson is taking too long with the order?"

"A region rich in gold, as all these starving people here are tired of knowing, but until now, no one knew about the diamonds, and they won't know any time soon. Diamonds of excellent purity, ranging from 2 to 5 carats, worth millions of dollars a day when things really get going."

"Speaking of which, what about Vale?"

"Well, Vale should go prospect for diamonds in Brumadinho, Mariana. The process here is completely illegal. They'll need guns and small, invisible planes, just like in the Roosevelt Reserve."

I didn't even move, listening to that. I hid behind a tree, under the starry sky, a sky of diamonds over the ruminating waters of the Xingú.

"Before I resigned, Verona executives called me into a meeting with political figures from Brasília and the Army and made it clear: I was not to make any of those studies public, or my life would be in danger. There are only crazy people in there. Imagine if, from one day to the next, these prospectors discovered they were snorting cocaine and playing dominoes on top of the King Solomon Mines? Ha ha ha! I confess, however, that I was scared before fleeing here with the prospecting paperwork. I received anonymous phone calls. A car cut my wife off on the corner of the street where we live, and she returned to her mother's house in Goiânia. Her tires screeched! It was horrible. Within the company, there's a long-standing scheme among high-ranking employees selling illegal diamonds to this friend of mine—he resells them all in Minas Gerais, as if they'd been found in Diamantina or Divinópolis, one of those historic, colonial gold mines, long since exhausted, where there's a network of Belgian receivers. The guy's rich, and that's what we'll be getting into soon."

The bluish smoke from my cigarette formed a halo around my face as I calmly listened to the rest of the conversation:

"After the diversion of the Xingú River to the dam they're building in Belo Monte, in Volta Grande, the river level will be lower than ever, opening up untouched prospecting and detection. What a fantastic place it will be to prospect for diamonds, especially in the holes!"

Then they changed the subject when they noticed Wilson arriving, carrying the drink they'd asked him to fetch. They wouldn't bring up the subject again that night at the gaming table.

I finished my cigarette and returned to my tent in a daze. My clothes hung from a wire in one corner, and another corner was occupied by my backpack, the notebook open on top. I grabbed it and climbed into the hammock in my underwear. I wrote first:

"A nomadic life that will one day end with a definitive journey? Time to sleep. Greedy weeds in the mud of a swamp. Lucid fading, chloroform sleep."

I struggled to cling my consciousness to that fatal ray until the end, flipping back and forth through the notebook. Twenty pages ago, I read:

"Sirens blaring in the fog of Altamira Harbor, boat sirens. Horns, colors in the water, whistles, shapes rising from the river, rattling the screws on the rafts' rails. The throb of oil-dripping machines. Signals in the distance, in the town of the Indian Wild West. Churches, schools. Prows of invisible rumble. Tentacles shaped like giant anacondas bubbling blood from their nostrils enter through the windows and stretch nervously on the ground. Dredges."

And nine pages ahead, it read:

"LOVER --- CALL --- WRITE NOW." To release the spring inside me, I needed to talk to Joana tonight, but it's impossible. From inside the raft, part of Mr. Adamastor's --- again: the last time, inverted in the old man's retina. Money, you understand what he means, and the Federal Police looking for us up the Rio do Peixe, all that NGO trail near Juiz de Fora. To reconstruct yesterday, paper figures, newspaper clippings. Words printed on wrinkled faces at the various speeds of time, feeling the night now, the buzz of departure. Fading into the distance."

And turning to the back of the notebook, I wrote:

"WHAT A PLACE TO PROSPECT FOR DIAMONDS!" A second of despair. Something like feeling a great deal of grief for a moment. Peering into the invisible faces. A sudden urge to read the newspaper. Old smuggling bosses. And the snap of two young shadows that the wind carries far away under the moon. With a blow, the whistle of feet flees. Instead, I see myself tonight, already dawning? A chalk notice board of the future. UNIDENTIFIED STRANGER

And going back thirty pages:

"A hat over the—does he have one?—face. The continuity of life was just the body moving within time. An appearance of no doubt. Would he find Joana in Salvador later? Would she move there without telling anyone? Narrating it all here again. Slowly rubbing my hands against the muscles in my arms. I close my eyes and dissolve into nothingness—the scent of wet vegetation and a cloud of mosquitoes buzzing, entering the dark tent. Multiform verdure entering my closed eyes. And gigantic green cliffs enclosed at their edges by violet triangles of more mountains. In the forests of Pará, no intelligence counts for conversation, no social relationships. Instinct, only risking my skin with my eye on the clock, the calendar, the federal police helicopters."

And returning to the back of the notebook, I wrote before falling asleep from exhaustion:

"By God, there had to be someone else with us on that raft to hear him say that: ---MY GOLD! --- was the first thing I heard from the old man's mouth. He was standing at the stern, pointing around with his arms outstretched: ---MY GOLD! MY RAFT! MY DIVERS! MY RIVER! MY FOREST! MY MINING! MY PARÁ! --- everything was his. I had to hold my breath, expecting to hear the spirits of the surrounding forest burst into a prodigious explosion of laughter. Above our heads, the stars shone, indifferent. Everything, after all, was his (had I forgotten the stars?) And he, to whom did he belong? Just straight ahead, without turning his face to the side, his head held high, without a past, talking without looking. Were astral entities tormenting his mind? Imagining things? No, it was ayahuasca itself: a feeling of other times, and of the individual's own childhood, and of wonder, amazement, madness. A scene from the Old Testament. Only I could understand that scene. With the raft's planks firmly underfoot, surrounded by the support or dissatisfaction of his divers, walking relentlessly between the carpets of debris from the drain and the air compressors, in the secret terror of certain atrocities, of deaths on his back and psychotic outbreaks, how could anyone but me understand what particular region of primitive times the hallucinogenic effects of ayahuasca could produce in the spirit of that crazy old man?"