The region is still known as Bico do Papagaio, even though other things have changed since then on the map of Brazil.
The name (“Parrot’s Beak”) comes from the shape of the Araguaia River as it flows into the Tocantins, where three Brazilian states meet. In the years that Chico and Manuela spent there, they were Pará, Maranhão and Goiás. They are now Pará, Maranhão and Tocantins, because of the reformulation of the states. But Bico do Papagaio is still there. The land has been flayed and the borders altered, but the rivers haven’t changed course or dried up. The mountains are in the same place.
You go chop firewood in the forest, then bring it to the base, Comrade César told Manuela, a few days after they had arrived. It’s physical training. You stay in shape and carrying firewood is like carrying weapons or the body of a wounded companion. And nobody’ll think anything of it; we’re just chopping firewood.
(What on earth were women doing getting caught up in politics, and becoming guerrillas to boot, in an era in which they were still expected to stay confined to the home and domestic life? Communist whores. That was the nickname they heard in the torture sessions. Against the homeland there are no rights.)
At night, César would sometimes pick up a guitar and sing something by Noel Rosa. Chico didn’t sing, as he was chronically tone-deaf, but he watched Manuela from afar. Manuela felt his moist stare within the walls of the hut, and it felt nice, magnetized, pointed — just as he pointed his guns at a target and never erred. Chico never erred, ever.
What are you doing here, girl? He went and sat by her in the clearing, where a camp fire was lit to keep the mosquitoes at bay.
The same as you.
You’re so young.
And you’re not?
Their hands were cracked and blistered. Their clothes were dirty and their skin covered in insect bites. The forest animals were making noise. The firewood that Manuela had chopped that morning crackled on the camp fire. The crackling was almost hypnotic. But Chico and Manuela wouldn’t be hypnotized by the fire and its crackling, because their attention wasn’t on the camp fire.
You’re pretty, said Chico.
She laughed.
Stop kidding around.
I’m serious.
She looked at Chico, who had studied at the Peking Military Academy, who knew how to use (and make) weapons and would come to be one of the most skillful woodsmen in the detachment.
She said: You know what they say about Osvaldão, that he’s immune to danger?
Yeah.
I think you must be too. I think it’s thanks to people like him and you that this is all going to work out.
Osvaldão, the commander of Detachment B, the most popular leader among the guerrillas and adored by the locals too, wasn’t immune to danger. When the military finished him off years later they hung his body from a helicopter so there would be no doubts. But who could have predicted this, at that point in time? Osvaldão seemed indestructible. He was a six-foot-tall black man and former boxing champion. He liked to help. He made friends.
At that point in time, before Pedro was captured and before the first military campaign on the Araguaia, everything was going to work out.
At that point in time, the Party believed the population was going to get involved. The 1969 resolution said: There is no other alternative for Brazilians: to rise up in arms against the backward army and the imperialist Yankees or forever have to endure the country’s reactionaries and foreign looters.
But why that, Fernando? Why go into the middle of the forest, far from everything, without contact with anyone, I asked one day. Weren’t you studying to be a geographer? Why didn’t you stay there, studying to be a geographer in Brasilia, it was in Brasilia, wasn’t it? You could have gotten involved in politics there in Brasilia, couldn’t you?
Fernando looked at me. The bus barely jiggled on Denver’s smooth streets.
Do you really want to talk about this?
I did. I wanted to know everything that had happened to him, I wanted to see those ghost-days of his past in front of me, before my eyes, I wanted to know if the ghosts really did any haunting or if they were just ghosts for lack of an alternative.
I really did want to talk about that subject. Lots of people didn’t, they thought it was best kept out of the official history, but sometimes questions gnaw at you like insects. And they really do gnaw, patient little silverfish scuttling between letters, numbers and stamps in the guerrilla files kept secret by the Armed Forces. Where was the missing son, and under what circumstances had he disappeared? Where was his cadaver buried, and how had his healthy body become a cadaver?
Were there no rights against the homeland? As time passed, the parents of those who went missing on the Araguaia also died, one by one. They died one by one without ever knowing what had happened to their guerrilla son, to their guerrilla daughter.
But as the commanders of the Armed Forces told their subordinates during the repression of the guerrilla movement, the orders were to watch, listen and stay quiet.
Ideally, the guerrillas should disappear, an old widow forgotten in her room. Closed windows, closed door, a tiny, frail heart beating behind flaccid muscles, drooping breasts, wrinkled skin. She had been nothing, didn’t represent anything, what use was there in rubbing salt into the wound? The military group Terrorism Never Again would come to define it as:
A truly small residual group’s adventure.
An illegal, underground party’s deranged, incoherent idea to start a people’s war without the support of the people, in order to impose socialism on them.
A Quixotic group’s actions, further jeopardizing themselves, lost in the jungle and in the tangle of their own errors.
A few decades later, in the south of Pará, where Fernando used to live, there is no more forest. Back when it was still there, Brazil’s official history was called the “Brazilian Miracle.”
One of the most sensational things of all, in those days, was the Brazilian National Team’s recent victory in the FIFA World Cup, in which it had become world champion for the third time. Oh, the 1970 World Cup! It was a team that had Pelé, Gérson, Jairzinho, Tostão, Rivelino, and Carlos Alberto Torres as captain. A team that has never been rivaled anywhere at any point in history. After missing out in England in 1966, why not raise the Jules Rimet Cup in all its glittering gold in Mexico’s Azteca Stadium? Why not? Even if some clairvoyant supporter had known that the cup would be stolen and melted down years later, it wouldn’t have diminished Brazil’s excitement over the victory in the slightest.
Which ran parallel to other national sentiments. My history teacher may have explained this on one of those days when I was watching the pigeons outside, the dirty pigeons of Copacabana and their cooing and occasional deformed feet. But it was Fernando who summed it up for me, as the bus barely jiggled on Denver’s smooth streets. The economic policy of the dictatorship brought down inflation and unemployment, and the country grew. (It would all get out of hand when an oil crisis came along to put a dampener on things. In the year of the military coup, Brazil’s foreign debt was little more than three billion dollars. By the end of the military dictatorship, in 1985, when General Figueiredo asked everyone to forget him, it was over ninety billion.) At the same time, the country was told that the cake had to rise first before everyone could have a piece. And that was how minimum wages plummeted mid-Miracle. And the poorest members of the population became even poorer. In the mid-1970s, more than half of the Brazilian population was under- or malnourished.