The Invisible Mountain (10 page)
Just before the border, Artigas met Bicho and Bronco, brothers from the town of Treinta y Tres. Their family had disowned them for cryptic
reasons, and Artigas was more than happy not to probe. They rode beside him. They shared lean physiques, quick smiles, and a fascination with Artigas’ name, which evoked images of the heroes who had followed the first Artigas in the war for independence.
“We’re like those old-time rebels,” Bronco said. “Ha. Lead us into battle!”
“Are you leading us into battle?” Bicho eyed Artigas from under his hat’s brim. “Or just into Brazil?”
“I’m not leading you anywhere,” Artigas said. “We’re just headed in the same direction.”
Across the border, they found wilder and wilder roads. They traveled along the edge of the rain forest, a terrain so dense and moist and fertile that it seemed, to Artigas, as if inhaling might turn him green. On their eighth morning in Brazil, Artigas woke alone. The brothers were gone. They had taken his horse, his guitar, his meager pesos and parcel of clothes, even the
facón
he kept sheathed in his boot. He would kill those boys. He would die of terror. He had nothing and didn’t know this place, he would be attacked by a snake or entrapped by vines, he would drown and die and rot in the bright, aggressive density of the forest.
He pressed on.
He traveled by foot. Song kept him sane. He sang every ballad he knew, one after another, as if they could stave off death, predators, and the maul of hunger. He sang under his breath, alert to sounds around him, the hum of creatures easing through their trees. On the third day, he finally went mute and listened to the forest. The place unfurled its sounds for him: wet. Thick. Exploding with green, relentless life, crying bird and shaking vine, a hymn of jaguarian grace.
He drank from delicate streams. He ate leaves and, soon, the earth itself, bringing worm-filled handfuls to his mouth. The first time, disgust allowed him to take only a small mouthful; the second time, he gave himself to the forest, kneeling in the dirt and scooping clumps, licking his fingers, feeding from the same place as the trees. He prayed that nothing he ate held poison. He prayed for life. He did not know, nor did he care, to whom or what he prayed. Days later, in an open plain, he found salvation: two iron tracks cut the landscape side by side. Train
tracks. Artigas knew about trains, had seen their beams laid out in Uruguay, strange new creatures, faster than galloping steeds. He bent to kiss the shiny metal, then lay down beside it and closed his eyes. Time passed. His ears pricked. A train approached: a rumbling from the southwest, heading toward Rio. Clanks and growls grew louder and the long iron thing roared toward him, huge and fast and wormlike, its brown snout emitting a gust of steam, and suddenly the hulking cars of the train blurred past him, tall wheels churning with blinding speed, and No, he thought, I can’t do it but I must he held his breath and leaped.
Wind and iron filled his ears. He clung to the side of a freight car, found a railing with his feet. He looked down and wished he hadn’t—the ground rushed by. There was a sliding black door about a meter away, cracked open. He shimmied, carefully, slowly, toward it and held his breath as he lunged in.
A powerful stench surrounded him, the stench of shit. The car was piled, three meters high, with crates of manure. The high summer heat made them redolent with a smell that could invade the smallest pore. He thought of running out, but was frozen by the memory of speeding ground. Shit permeated every part of him, skin and under skin. He explored the narrow corridor between crates, but each step stank, there was no use and no escaping it; he slammed the side of a crate in revulsion. Behind the crate, someone gasped.
He steeled himself. He longed for his
facón
, but would defend himself without it if he had to. He raised his fists and rounded the corner.
A family huddled among the crates: two young children, a compact young man, a woman with a baby in her arms, and an old man with silver hair.
Indios
, by their faces, which were full of fear. He lowered his fists. The boy shut his eyes. The girl stared up at him, eyes wide as moons. The woman glared.
The young man stood and raised his hands into the air, pleading with Artigas in halting Portuguese. “I won’t hurt you,” Artigas said. “No, no hurt.” He kept repeating this phrase to the man, who was still explaining, gesturing urgently at his family. Finally, Artigas said, “
No soy del tren. Yo,”
pointing at his chest, “
no,”
shaking his finger, “
tren,”
gesturing around him.
The man turned back to Artigas. “
Quem são você, então?
”
“Artigas. You?”
“Galtero.”
They conversed in a stilted mix of Spanish and Portuguese. Galtero and his family, Artigas learned, were Guaraní people from the south of Brazil who had lived on Indian land for countless generations until last month, when men in strange suits had come from a place called Zaffari Supermarket Company; they claimed to own the land. They had no legal papers and no proof, but the government did not stop them. The men from Zaffari mowed down houses, razed field after field of manioc and corn, and left hundreds of families without home or harvest, scattered to the four winds.
The woman pulled out a
mate
gourd. She filled it with tepid water and offered it to Artigas. The thought of imbibing anything in this place revolted him—and yet, there it was, the reach of
mate
, that old gesture of friendship. His heart could split in pieces at her generosity. He accepted the gourd, held the
bombilla
to his lips, and drank. It tasted like manure smeared over grass.
That night, Artigas lay on the rumbling floor beside the little girl. In her sleep she sidled up to the crook of his arm. Her thick black braids reminded him of Pajarita. Where was his sister now? Loneliness heaved through him and pushed him down toward sleep. He dreamed of great green pastures ripping open and flooding with rivers of shit.
The next day rankled by to the clank and chant of metal. Galtero’s story turned in Artigas’ mind like an iron wheel. The cruelty of it crushed his thoughts. He told Galtero this.
“But that’s not new,” Galtero said. “How is it in your country?”
“We don’t have such problems.”
“Really? Indian land is respected?”
“No. … It’s just …” He started to say
we don’t have Indians in Uruguay
, but the sentence felt suddenly shameful. “We just don’t think about it.”
“That’s amazing,” Galtero said, “that your tribe doesn’t have to think about it.”
Artigas opened his mouth to correct the man, then closed it in confusion. At home he was not
indio;
nobody was. Galtero was wrong—or was he? Weren’t there echoes of his own skin and hair and nose and shoulders in this man? Echoes could be faint and still reverberate, as they did now, jarring him, making something clatter in his mind, a story rising, the one about the miracle of 1700, exactly two hundred years before his sister appeared in a tree, when Guaraní songs had filled the New Year’s air with lost strains he’d never heard before, nor had he heard the story of how such music had been lost, and at what cost. The clatter moved into his blood and ran through him, loud and red and sparkling, pushing something open in his body.
When the train reached Rio de Janeiro, Artigas and Galtero embraced, quickly, fiercely, and left the cargo car in separate directions, Galtero with his family, Artigas alone.
The streets were steep and raucous. He wandered, gaping at his first city, rife with people, ringed with a shock of verdant mountains. Under the blare and talk and hawking he heard music, drum and song that shook and penetrated him. He ran toward it, down the incline, around a corner, and it grew louder, rhythms locking tightly with one another, from many drums at once, dramatic, shattering, another corner, not the right one, he turned again and there they were, his destination, a troupe practicing for Carnaval, shaking the sky with their music, catching darts of sun in sequined costumes, mouths wide with song that surely was composed of divine voices from the strange sharp land itself, and he approached them, arms open, starved to sing.
The crowd parted fast around him. Dancers and drummers backed away in disgust. He stood alone in a sudden clearing.
“You stink,” a lanky man said.
“Oh.” His skin went hot with shame. “Sorry.”
“Go away! Wash off!”
The man pointed and Artigas saw, down the hill, the crowded beach, and beyond that, the ocean. He ran.
The ocean was more vast and blue and marvelous than anything he
had ever experienced. He gawked at it. He ogled. He fell to his knees at the lip of a white wave. It surged around his knees and licked his calves and toes, then washed back down as if to pull him in. There were crowds on the sand, clustered half naked in strange clothes and laughing at him, but he ignored them. Somewhere on the beach more drums were pulsing, urging, crying over and over,
Sí, sí
. He crawled into the water, salt spray on his tongue. Clean, cerulean water wrapped his body. He immersed himself completely and the waves rushed, deep-throated, keening, in his ears. He was engulfed, enfolded, an oceanic creature with a shock of salt at his lips. Shit shook out of his skin and clothes, shit shook from his bones, sorrow teemed from his heart and dissolved in saline water as the vast and ciphered body of the ocean held him in its great wet sway. He floated to the surface and let it carry him, basking in the sun, little tongues of water rippling on his body, and though he had no place to sleep, no cash, no friends nearby, no possessions that were not on his back or in his skin, a word washed through his mind and stayed there. Home.
He had two goals: to survive, and to study the drums. The drums had stayed with him, rang in his mind, shook him on the loud streets and in silence. His guitar was lost on the jungle roads. There was no turning back, no bringing his old music to the rich polyrhythms of this city. He longed to stroke the skin of this land’s instruments, longed to feel their pulse against his hands.
For his first goal he found a job washing dishes and a rat-ridden room. The second goal led him to João, a tall man with hands that moved like hummingbird wings. João’s hut stood on the slope of a lush hill. From its door Artigas saw the city spread below, from the sudden peak of Pão de Açucar to Copacabana’s white curve. Twice a week, he climbed the steep path to his teacher’s one-room house and sat in a small circle of men beneath hot stars, reaching for complex beats, sounds like bright and nimble fish his fingers longed to catch. He kept quiet while the men and women of the hill shared the adamantine stories of their days. He was different here: not
negro
, not Brazilian, just learning Portuguese and the language of the samba. He was an interloper, and yet each time he came there was a wooden crate somewhere that he could sit on. And drums. And Ana Clara.
Months passed. Artigas worked and studied. He developed slow, perennial friendships with João and his neighbors, and set out to earn the love of Ana Clara. This enterprise took him four years to accomplish, since Ana Clara took her time. She was a woman who meant what she said and said what she meant, even if it meant saying nothing at all. Her smile could outshine twenty candles, but she only smiled when she was truly happy, a state Artigas bent his world to create. He brought flowers and fresh pineapples, ballads and thatch to repair her father’s roof. He listened to her words and to her silence. “There are things,” she once said, “that I only tell the ocean. Go home, get out of here, before I tell them to you.” He obeyed this order and descended the hill to the rank little room he called home. He lay in the dark and tried not to think of his other home, the family in Tacuarembó, his stiff, defeated father, Tía Tita’s steady arms, his sister, Pajarita, sleeping in the hides without him, dreaming, perhaps, of the letter her wayward brother never sent. He hoped that she was furious at him for his silence, rather than hurt or sad, possibilities that shamed him. He had investigated the neighborhood for letter-writers and had found one who could take Spanish dictation, but Artigas never went to him, telling himself he didn’t yet have the money, but how could that be when he had money for pineapples and thatch? It wasn’t the money; it was something else, an inability to place the right words in the right order to convey how he was doing to a sister whom he couldn’t see or smell or hear. He had never dictated a letter, but they seemed terribly formal, each word placed indelibly on the page and then gone on train or horse, beyond your power to adjust them. The more time passed, the more elaborate and perfect it seemed the letter had to be. And also, once he did write, he should be prepared to say he’d visit, as he’d always thought he would, but now that he was here in the city,
with its sharp edges that could cut you open and shine in the sun at the same time, he could not imagine trekking home. He would write, of course he would, he just needed more time, he told himself, night after night, year after year.
Within four years, Artigas had secured João’s blessings and Ana Clara’s acquiescence for his courtship. The more time they spent together—hand in hand along the beach, side by side feeling papayas for their ripeness—the more Artigas lived the song of her name, Ana Clara, Ana Clara, a lissome melody with endless variations. They married. Artigas built a second room on the side of João’s hut, where he and Ana Clara made love and slept on a woven mat on the ground. They made love quietly, since her father was just across the wall, so Artigas tuned into other signs of his wife’s pleasure: the shake of her thighs, her fingernail brutality, the expression on her face as if she were watching God and all the demons congregate behind her closed eyelids. He came alive at night in his quests for her pleasure, their pleasure, a pleasure that could have burned down their whole neighborhood. When she became pregnant, their sex turned gentle, oceanic, like the touch, Ana Clara said, of Iemanjá, the African mother goddess of the sea. She gave birth on a long hot night that Artigas spent relegated to his father-in-law’s room, listening through the wall to his wife’s growls and the aunts and female cousins who surrounded her. He lay awake in a steady panic until he heard the baby’s voice. They named her Xhana, and in the years that followed, Artigas learned that love—for wife, for child—was an abyss with no bottom, an open space you hurl yourself into, willingly, constantly, ready to give your life, but you don’t die because there is no floor to break against, no limit, and so you simply fall and fall and fall.
He had so much in those years: his new family, the drums, enough work to eat at least once a day, the ocean he had come to call Iemanjá. The rumors began to intrude in early spring of 1930. There was an army gathering in the south. The man in charge was called Getúlio Vargas. He planned to overthrow the present government. Soon his soldiers would sweep north.
“The madness of politics,” João said, scraping flesh from goatskin. “Two rich white men squabbling with each other.”