LIVING with the DROUGHT

Extracts from Brazilian Tecquila (Augustus Young, 2009)

Gus travels with Jairo Pedrinho to his hometown in the North-East, where he is to be  the next Colonel (feudal boss). The current one has become a recluse in his dotage.  

Part One

‘Let’s go’, said Jairo. ‘Departure Salvador, destination Pedra’. His brother-in-law Modesto is driving, I’m in the back. They are in high spirits. Pressed denims, light blue shirts and baseball caps. Jairo says, ‘I haven’t been back thirteen years. The Colonel would spit on me. But now he’s gaga, he can only drool. Under his reign the town has suffered chronic drought. Ten years without rain’.

Modesto smiles at himself in the driving mirror. Film-star teeth, he likes what he sees, particularly the devilish glint of gold. He is a legend in the family. Child movie star, inventor, dealer in knick-knacks for brothels and famously a ladies’ man. Now, apparently, he has reinvented himself as an entrepreneur in water irrigation, hoping to tap into President Collor’s election promise to rehydrate the semi-desert of the sertão.                               

The outback is greener than I have ever seen it. Jairo explains. ‘It’s spring in the sertão, and the scrubland caatinga feeds the flamboyant trees with its juice. The leaves won’t last of course. They combust into purple and orange blossom which oxidize into the scorched earth releasing their moisture. Nature recycles its own salvation’ He points out the yellow flowers sprouting from the cactuses. ‘They replenish thirsting cattle. Read Euclides da Cunha’s introduction to his masterpiece Rebellion in the Backlands (1896) and you will understand the science of the sertão’s adaption to droughts’.

Surprisingly for the North-East the track to Pedra is paved. Jairo expatiates,

‘It’s an ancient route established by the Portuguese to transport rock to Salvador, the capital of Brazil until the mid-18^th century when the sugar market collapsed. Our Mount Bonita is the plateau of a massif, granite cut with marble. It’s two thousand metres up. Quarrying is made easy by winds from the serras beyond. Chilly gusts at sundown hit the white-hot boulders. They split. Crowbars can then chisel it loose releasing centuries of underground water. There is more Bonita in Salvador and Recife than in Pedra. It shrinks to build cities.’ Proud, moved, Jairo sadly adds. ‘The road is a small return. Traffic is always one-way nowadays. Politics has moved mining to the rich South.’

Pedra nestles in a quarry backed by the mountain: red-roofed whitewashed houses, verdant with trees in leaf. Jairo comes back to life and, as he grips Modesto’s shoulder and mine, his body contracts as a whole. Tears in his eyes, he murmurs, ‘Granite and marble. If it was merely the ochre clay of the foothills it would have been just uninhabited scrubland’. 

However, hunger interrupts his saudade. We stop on the outskirts at a shack which serves as an eatery. Slabs of meat hewn by a sword fortify the party before entering town. Jairo asks the patron. ‘How is it possible to have such meat in a town that has had a ten-year drought?’. ‘Anything is possible’, says the patron. ‘If you want it enough’.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pedra is a Chinese box of three squares. The inner one bosky with trees planted forty years ago. Young Jairo held the shovel. It has a plaque with his father’s name Colonel Pedro Duro, and a caption, ‘The tableland evergreens of the sertão afford shade, nutrition and botanic wisdom’. Tangled cashews, spreading mangos and tamarind bean-trees, according to Jairo, regenerate water-reserves under the granite base, while providing fruit. Birds in cages hang from branches, cockatoos, desert hens. Street birds flit and taunt them with chirps and pecks. ‘Jacu’, says Jairo. I see them as sparrows.

Old women present themselves to Jairo, ‘Do you remember me’. Old men wave their canes and say, ‘About time’. The welcome is cautiously convivial. They don’t want him to feel the town has not been doing well without him.  

The middle square is treeless, houses are distempered, modest. But Bar Chico is crowded. The young people on the terrace are dressed Rio chic, and my entrance does not stop their lively talk. I enjoy the music: down-home forro, performed with a snarl by a middle-aged man in a crumpled suit. And I’m pleased to being taken for granted as a passing stranger.  

The outer square is a sprawl of warehouses collapsing into ruins. On the periphery a shanty town has sprung up. Whether the hovels are occupied or not is uncertain. Only dogs hang around. I’m confronted by the looming mass of Mount Bonita. It blocks out the sun. Flanked by ashen rocks, its bulbous slopes are covered with drifts of black sediment. Shrieking birds of prey swoop down and I wonder for a moment if I’m interesting them. I don’t linger to find out.

As I walk back to the main square the only evidence of the drought is the pall of white sand that overlays everything like caster sugar. Jairo is still holding court under Colonel Pedro Duro. The old men remain recalcitrant on stone benches, but the women have been joined by some children. One of them asks him, ‘Where have you been?’ The roll of his eyes tells me he can’t wait to get away...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Modesto is already in the car, catlike in the passenger seat, cream on his whiskers, impeccably dressed, as ever. Jairo assumes the wheel, and says something to him. Modesto responds with his shoulders. I’d love to ask him where he has been. But he doesn’t answer questions.

On the far side of Mount Bonita, a blue lake is wedged between the mountains. Jairo takes a hand off the wheel. ‘The town reservoir. Ten years without rain and it has not completely dried up. Winter frosts on the mountains melt and replenish it.’ Beyond the town, hillocks recede, rock on rock with the frailest of vegetation. I do not believe that condensation could fill the lake. Truckloads of fresh water from the sunken Ipanema River, perhaps. It still flows.

‘Believe me.’ Jairo says, reading my thoughts. ‘Pedra is a desert reclaimed by man. Pedro Duro was The Man. He struck Mount Bonita with his rod and water gushed forth into a lake. Pedra was blessed and prospered. The calves turned to gold. But Pedro Duro had used a water diviner, and he knew from wandering the mountain it wouldn’t work again. He put aside his rod. The next drought it would have to be done The Hard Way. When it returned, he ordered a waterway to be cut in Mount Bonita, chiseling it with axes and crowbars to create a crisscross of sluices. Pedra Duro designed a descent that conformed to the principle of the spiral according to Vico’s ‘curve of enchantment’, making it complicated to trace where the whirl of intersections met. It was as though time and place at each twist and turn had marginally moved. Nevertheless, when the snows of the serra mountains melted into the Ipanema River, a channel was in place to receive a slip-stream to run water into the town. Pedro Duro was well-pleased that he had no need to raise his arms to the heavens. While there is a will there’s a waterway.’

The road to Mount Bonita winds upwards in long switch-backs: blasted heath on one side, occasional trees, fenced fields, dry-stone walls, farm houses on the other. Jairo sighs: ‘Since Pedra Dura’s death, the Hard Way had been forgotten. The creases and crevices of the waterway have eroded. The people of Pedra are back to waiting for a miracle. They subsist on the lake, and what the vegetation retains. It’s enough to water themselves, but not the land. While the desert encroaches, and the town is returning to sand, two thousand people do nothing, except look up at Pedra Bonita, and pray for the Second Coming of Pedro Duro.’ 

‘Namely you.’

 ‘If you say so’, Jairo laughs. 

 ‘Who will be your Saint? Every sertão prophet must have his sacred woman.

 ‘Ah the belle of the rain dance. Normally, Modesto would pick her. But now he has water on the brain, I’ll ask my wife.

 ‘Go on, old sport, tell Gus about your enlightened scheme.’ Modesto lights a cigarette and slow-burns his gold tinted smile. ‘Drop me here.’ At the farmhouse door a woman greets him.

 ‘What’s Modesto’s scheme?’ I ask.

 ‘Drought insurance. He’s doing the rounds of the farms.’

 ‘But where do they find the money’.

 ‘They’re saving some for a rainy day’.

 The first fazenda is a cow ranch. Shirtless boys in beach shorts round up skinny cattle. They stumble around the yard in aimless scrums. Dusty flamboyant trees lend them shade, but also flies. A youth in army fatigues tethers an ox to a cart loaded with cactus stalks. The whitewashed house with its terracotta-slated roof, and veranda of fresh-wooded slats and socles, could be a hunting lodge in a grand estate. The women flock and flutter around Jairo, drawing him into the house.  All eyes are drinking him in as though he is a water-sprite incarnate, or a savior down from the cross. He holds their gaze with a warm, almost tearful, look. A bony-faced matron in slacks and shirt takes a chair, and taps her knee for Jairo to sit next to her. She is the Colonel’s youngest sister, Ana. Jairo remarks on the changes since his last visit: the desert palms in the courtyard, melon thistles and haws in the surrounding fields. ‘Vegetation that can almost live on its own sweat.’  Donna Ana laughs ‘Or on the sweat of its workers’, and reports on the medicinal herb gathering, and the poisons used against cancer. Tidy earners. But most proudly of the cheese-making. ‘The churn is rarely idle. The cow’s milk is too thin, but there are the mountain goats.’  We are served glasses of murky water as though it was champagne. Cheese is brought to sample.

 ‘More chalk to your Salvador taste, perhaps’, Donna Ana opines.

 ‘No. It’s a cooking cheese’, Jairo approves. ‘Congratulations’. He nods to me, stands up, and embraces Donna Ana, and kisses the hands of the other women, a prolonged ceremony as he asks each about their children. Later, I say to Jairo, where were the children hidden? ‘The babies can’t be at school or working in the fields.’

 ‘Mostly grown up. In a drought the women are provident. Those that make a mistake go to live on the coast.’

Sand on the windscreen, sand even on Modesto. He is waiting for us at the cross-roads. Nothing is said. Entering Pedra, Jairo breaks the silence. ‘Sometimes, my friend, our feelings get the better of our ideas. But the important thing is to believe in something beyond oneself.’ Modesto shrugs his shoulders. ‘What do you know?’ Jairo snaps. ‘Other than money and women’

 ‘Yes, Colonel.’  The glint of gold in his smile cuts the air. 

 Part Two

 Wandering down town to the café where the young people spent their days, I sit apart in the terrace. The chestnut-like fruit in the trees shading the young people, invite my interest. I try to pick one, but it’s too high. A youth leaps up and shakes the branch, and catches one for me. and recites as though a school lesson, 'The carob is said to be the fruit of hope. In ancient times it was used to be weighed against gold, but it is more valuable. It’s a sacred tree that doesn’t need rain’. I squeeze out the pulp. The red and yellow seeds savor of plum juice, but leave a bitter aftertaste. The saliva dries up. Seeing my grimace, the young man squeezes several carobs into my glass and adds a fistful of sugar. It is mouth-watering.  

The windfall of carobs has animated the young around me. Tables are pushed together, music from a ghetto blaster is turned up.  Gilberto Gil, Salvador’s second- best gift to the world (after Jorge Amado). They watch me listening to their Gilberto.  His plum juice with a bitter aftertaste moves me. I raise my carob suco to him. And everybody looks relieved.  

 ‘How do you pass the time in Pedra?’ My question puzzles. Eager faces smile gap-toothed.

 ‘We like it here. It’s where we were born.’

 ‘Why aren’t you at work?’ I make them laugh.

 ‘No work here except for the farm boys. Not even in the quarry. The dotty old Colonel has banned it as Padre Afonso says it shows lack of faith in his cult. So, when the interior is in drought the cities suffer too. New buildings have to await the rains for the bricks.’

 ‘What do you do for money?’

 ‘Seasonal work on the coast keeps us in rollups and beer. Pedra is lucky. It has good roads to the littoral. Only four hours. It’s sixteen hours for other parts of the sertão. But we don’t like to leave for long. Tourist lackeying in Salvador or Recife is no fun.’

 ‘Most families appear to have no visible means of support. How do they live?’

 ‘They have invisible means.’ Everybody laughs.

 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Bells ring in the town as Jairo, and myself scale Mount Bonita. As sandy slopes give way to rock, we bound upwards. Longitudinal crevices roughen the boulders. We scramble and rock-skip, gulping the clear air, serious climbers competing with one another and the mountain.

 ‘Why are we doing this?’ I pant.

 Jairo pants back, ‘We’re defying Padre Afonso of the rain cult. All Pedra expects me to grace the front pew at The Weathervane Mission……

 The rage for expression disciplines his force, and he climbs authoritatively.

‘A furnace is roaring in this mountain, the heat giving birth to its own body. That’s Brazil. Extreme conditions, tortuous climbs, cruel descents, but we remake ourselves despite, and survive.’

 We collapse in a sand pit to rest. 

 ‘If you can’t change the weather, change the course of the rivers, it’s said. It would take a miracle. Padre Afonso will be telling the good people of Pedra to leave it to God. You make your own miracles. If you can’t make rain, you can sap the snow’s residue. Pedro Duro taught me to accept things as they are, but turn them to advantage. Then you can achieve the inevitable.’

 We watch a dark, promising cloud float away waterless. How many people are noticing that cloud. The hope in drought is its cruelest hand. Jairo, without knowing what I’m thinking, chimes, ‘There’s beauty in disappointment too’. Eyes moistening.

‘Why did you abandon Pedra?’

 ‘I never abandoned it. I was waiting. Waiting for the call. Jose Maria has been dying for thirty years. Of hypochondria. Now something real has caught up with him’                                           

Through the eyes of Jairo I see Mount Bonita is a bare headless torso spread-eagled under the sun. Girds of granite on its slopes shroud its yellowing flanks. Chest and groin are tortuously outlined, lumpy and creased. The cadaver is a whited sepulcher inside. Once it breathed with life, procreating vegetation: caatinga, cactuses, grasses, bushes and trees. But the forests crumbled into charcoal and the charcoal into the black ash that strews its pallid slopes.

A wooden cross on a concrete block marks the summit. Jairo and myself scramble up on its pedestal, and pose for all the world unseen below. His arm upraised, I clinging to him.   

‘The cross is new?’ I observe.

 ‘Ah! The Battle of the Calvary. Fresh cults chop down the old. They change crosses every few years. Messiahs come and go.’

 We look to the distant mountains, patched with vestigial forest. 

 ‘How come they are so green?’ I observe.

 ‘The desert has not yet claimed the serras. They still have their snows despite the drought. On the other hand, Pedra must depend on its sunken lake and versatile vegetation for irrigation. Verdure has been replaced in the valley with the dust overlay.’

He jumps from the pedestal and lands on his feet. ‘Terrible things have happened on this slab. Eighteen thirty-seven. Euclides da Cunha chronicled unspeakable events:

  ‘Mameluco, was the son of an Indian woman raped by a Portuguese soldier. On reaching the Christic age, thirty-three, declared himself the Christ of Christs, proclaiming, ‘Drought is God’s punishment for their hounding Pedro, the first Emperor of Brazil, into exile and death’, and announced his Second Coming bursting forth from the rock on the crest of a cascade, and there would be no more droughts. However, the Second Coming needed a sacrifice. The rock of Bonita could only burst open if the blood of innocents was spilled over it. 

 ‘Mothers with infants in arms crowded around and fought with one another to offer their young. Blood gushed and splattered over Bonita’s altar table, filling crevices and sandpits. Pools of blood overflowed into its base, and clotted black, breeding contagion. The damp stench of death prevailed. People fled. Even the flies abandoned the place. The ghost town became known as Pedra, ‘The Rock’.

‘It will take more than water to wash the blood away’.

 More black cloud crosses the sun. The plateau darkens. But lightens up again as it moves on to the serras. Bells ring in the town for the end of The Mission. 

 ‘What will it take?’

 Jairo points out the sluices cut in the rock by Pedro Duro. ‘The grit-filled scratches of human intervention, fossilized now. But once-upon-a-time it worked. 

 ‘My grandfather said the most beautiful sight in the world is water guttering down when the rocks are split and the drought is broken. Mount Bonita is a torrent. The sun catches it, lasers of molten gold. The grateful valley receives the gift of water and stores it for the dry years ahead. Water is gold, blue gold.

Approaching town, drums rat-a-tat-tat. The beat quickens, rats and tats merging, a clockwork tattoo. Jairo’s words are hummingbirds throbbing in my head. Ideas flit, emotions feed. Telegraph wires in the valley click. The Mission is over. It didn’t bring any rain. But the town is alive again. Blinds roll up, shutters are opened. A cacophony of voices rises from the streets. On the outskirts of town, a truck tips a load of stones. The crushing syncopations give way to concatenations of creaks, chains grinding, clunking, labored scrapes accelerating into a shriek of metal on stone. ‘Pedro Duro is at work again’, jokes Jairo. But I’m not sure it’s a joke. 

 ‘You’ll be the next Colonel?’

 ‘Yes, I’ll be back’. The faraway look in his eyes is the obverse of the moist saudade in the Mount. The gaze is clear, steadfast, like when he posed by the bust of his grandfather.  He is bracing himself:

 ‘Fear of the unknown is medieval. Fear of the known is renaissance. Fear of oneself is modern man. I’m not afraid of myself. I will revive the mines. Both modern science and ancient wisdom will be necessary. The roads from Salvador and Recife will be busy. And the rains will come back.’

I pick a yellow cactus flower, and cut my finger. Jairo examines it ‘The cactus plant is male, the flowers female. Don’t touch the flower. Her prickles enter your circulation. And poison your life. Modesto knows that but he loves his poison’.

I anticipate his laugh by saying ‘I hope it doesn’t rain for your big day’. Tomorrow is Jairo’s farewell party.