He told Joam:
“You’ll find I’m a Frenchman. A social anthropologist. I’m studying the Indians they are about to destroy so blindly with their dam.”
Joam pulled the plastic sheeting aside and rummaged through the dried food, medicines, clothing, pulling out the bag containing Pierre’s carbine and tape recorder and his papers.
The dance-chant of the Xemahoa rang out abruptly among the branches, as he touched the playback switch. The other man and the woman hadn’t seen what he was going to do. They brought their guns up.
“Good machine,” Joam grunted, flipping it off.
From the bag he took Pierre’s passport, field notes, and diary.
He handed the passport over to Iza. She read through it carefully.
“So you only entered Brazil a few months ago—but you speak excellent Portuguese. Where did you learn it, Portugal?”
“No, Mozambique.”
“There’s no visa for Mozambique.”
“There’s a visa for Tanzania. I went over the border into the free zone with your comrades in arms, the Frelimo guerrillas.”
“So you say,” muttered the woman, doubtfully. “It may be true. We’ll find out.”
Meanwhile Joam flipped through the pages of Pierre’s notes and diary, reading random passages.
Pierre leaned towards him, urgently.
“These notes are written about a people who are going to be destroyed. Who know it. Who fight back in the only way they can. In terms of their own culture.”
“There are other ways of fighting,” snapped Iza.
“Precisely!” sighed Pierre. “There is the way that you and I can fight. There is the political fight. But for these Indians to adopt a political stance would be meaningless. Ah, it was so different in Africa with the Makonde people!”
“Come along then, Monsieur—tell us about Mozambique and Frelimo. In detail.”
Pierre smiled wryly.
“To establish an alibi for myself?”
“You have nothing to fear if you’re a man of good will.”
So Pierre told about the Makonde people who straddle the frontier of Tanzania and Mozambique—of the independent African republic, and the colony which the government in Lisbon insisted year after year was an integral part of metropolitan Portugal, using, as powerful arguments in their favour, Huey Cobra gunships, Fiat jet bombers, Agent Orange crop defoliants, and napalm raids. In the towns and cities posters of particoloured white soldiers holding particoloured black babies in their arms proclaimed ‘WE ARE ALL PORTUGUESE’. Yet three-fifths of the land had been out of effective Portuguese control for a decade and more. Pierre told how he crossed the river Ruvuma by dugout into Cabo Delgado province on what was by now a guerrilla milkrun, so far from Portuguese control was this free zone of villages and dispensaries and schools. It was guarded by Chinese ground-to-air missiles that made low-level helicopter sorties or jet attacks virtually impossible. The main danger came from high-level bombing raids—spasmodic, meaningless raids that blasted holes in the wild bush and occasionally filled the dispensaries up with broken bodies and the bomas with gutted bellowing cattle. Pierre told them, joyfully, of attacks on the Cabora Bassa dam on the Zambezi which had delayed that project of exploitation for so many years, upping the ante intolerably for that tiny peasant empire Portugal. Told them how he had gone on one such raid.
Finally, they believed Pierre and relaxed and handed his papers and even his carbine back to him.
“Your Indian friend did you a good turn, Monsieur,” Iza said. “That Captain you saw may have been Flores Paixao. That one is a vicious swine—well-trained by the Americans in counter-insurgency techniques. A torturer. A professional sadistic beast. Keep out of his way.”
“Does the fact that you’re here mean you are strong enough to carry the struggle into the whole of Brazil?” Pierre asked her eagerly.
“The whole of Brazil!” Iza echoed his words, sounding sick and sad. “Who can deal with the whole of Brazil? Don’t be foolish. All that our puppet government can do to govern this Amazon is to flood the whole area, so that the problem disappears! We are here to destroy such an illusion. Our government has mortgaged the whole Amazon basin to America. Built roads for Bethlehem Steel and King Ranch of Texas. These ‘Great Lakes’ will split our country in two parts. One part, an American colony looted of its minerals to maintain U.S. technology. The other, a Vichy-style régime for us Brazilians—the passive consumer market.”
Pierre thought sadly: these people are as near to the end of their tether as I am myself. Yet their enemy is my enemy.
“We shall let the world know what real Brazilians think of this ‘civilizing’ venture!” Iza cried passionately. “The tricks are endless. To impoverish us. Drain our resources. Stop us from using our own wealth ourselves. North America needs it desperately. Such are the ironies of so-called aid that in fact Latin America is aiding North America to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars annually! The cash flow is always one way. North! These Amazon dams are the greatest conspiracy and perversion yet. So we strike at them.”
She fell silent, sick and tired. Her energy supply snapped abruptly. Her eyes burnt with fever—not the fever of a sickness, but a terrible exhaustion, mixed up with a fervent despair.
“I know,” said Pierre gently. “The dam has to be destroyed. It is destroying… wonders, in the jungle here. Wonderful people. Washing them away into the concentration camps of priests. Their language is… a wonderful cultural discovery for me. I’m sorry, this might seem like a minor problem to you people. But I assure you it isn’t. And yet—I’m torn two different ways, meeting you.”
“Why were you going North?”
Pierre shivered.
“I don’t know rightly. I had no fixed idea. It frightens me, now I’ve met you, my aimlessness. My instinctiveness. This obsessed journey. Talking to you reminds me of such a different world—one that means nothing here among the Indians. I feel with you, I think with you. But what can be done? Can the dam be destroyed so easily? Surely it must take lorry loads of explosive to destroy such a thing?”
“There’ll be explosives there,” Iza promised. “And the flood pressure will assist us. We shall also kill the American engineers and their lackeys.”
“Other dams will be under attack too,” the second man—Raimundo—added hotly. “Even at Santarém itself. Whatever happens, the lie of this Amazon development will be shown up before the whole world.”
“What sort of weapons have you got?”
Iza hesitated.
“You think of this as suicide in your hearts, don’t you?” Pierre asked flatly.
Joam shrugged.
“The terrain is not so favourable.”
“These attacks are tactically vital!” Iza burned with an end of the tether passion that broke through the crust of her weariness every time that the obsessive pressures built up in her afresh. “We have to make our presence known, in a shocking and symbolic way. Back in the early days of our struggle Carlos Marighella wrote that there was no timetable for us and no deadlines to meet. But the situation has changed. This yanqui scheme for the Amazon is a monstrous distraction from reality. A fire extinguisher that may quench the realities of revolution for years! The Amazon is the pressure point of imperialism, today. It is our job to panic the Americans. Here where they believe themselves safely protected by their flood. Hidden away from the violence of the cities and the coast.”
Kayapi had been sitting idly all this time. Now Pierre turned to him.
“Kayapi?”
“Yes, Pee-áir.”
“These people are going to attack the dam. Shall we go along with them?” he asked in Portuguese.