Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
out from the left bank of the river in a clearing. It was the cadaver of an Amahuaca women. She had
been killed for vengeance, it was later vaguely explained. No one thought about the incident, which
was trivial and insignificant in the remote camps of these people who only cross but never populate
this land, leaving it even more dismal with ruins of their forsaken trading posts.
These abound on the Upper Purús, appearing depressingly in all their varied aspects, which range
from the humble shacks of the peons to the once august abodes of the barons. A bit above the Sham-
boyaca, one particularly impressed us when we descended the river. It had been a trading post of the
first rank. We leaped out to examine it, and barely had we scrambled up the scrubby bluff when we
discovered, above the old road invaded by brush, the yard where now impenetrable thickets were en-
shrouding mounds of garbage and debris, cloaking bits of machinery and tools left by the other, de-
parted inhabitants.
The main house was half rotted, the roof caving in, the walls collapsed and about to pull down the
moldering beams, so that it appeared to be held up only by the lianas that had penetrated every point,
poking through the roof, wrapping around the sagging supports, and lashing them to the closest trees,
which thus impeded the total collapse. The nearby outbuildings, embowered in exuberant floriferous
vines, were decaying, disappearing bit by bit in an irresistible constriction as the forest reconquered
its original terrain.
We did not pay much attention, however, to the magnificent regenerating thrust of the flora that
with corollas and garish bunting festooned that deplorable relic. This ruin was not entirely uninhab-
ited.
In one of the most maintained of the outbuildings, the last occupant awaited us. Piro, Amahuaca,
or Campa, one couldn't distinguish the native origin. The actual features of the human species were
transmuted by the repulsive apparition—a deformed torso swollen by malaria seemed to take up his
entire figure, in sharp contrast to the thin arms and bent and twisted legs, like those of a monstrous
fetus.
He cringed in a corner and gazed at us impassively. At one side he had all his belongings—a large
bunch of green bananas.
Thisindefinablething,whichbyacruelanalogysuggestedbythecircumstancesseemedlessaman
than a forgotten ball of caucho thrown in the corner by the caucheiros , answered our questions in a
hoarse and fading voice in a completely incomprehensible language. Finally, with enormous will, he
lifted an arm and extended it forward as though to indicate something he had been following for a
long time, something beyond all those forests and rivers. He babbled and, letting his arm fall heavily
as if he had lifted to a great height a heavy burden, murmured, “Amigos.” 24
This: friends, companions, comrades of the busy days of harvests, who had left for other places,
forsaking him to absolute solitude.
Of the Spanish words he learned, there remained only that, and thus the forlorn one murmured
it with a touching gesture of longing. With poignant sarcasm he unknowingly castigated those vile
adventurers, who even then continued in their routine devastation—opening new areas with carbine
shots and slashes of machetes, regions that they would leave as they had left here. The final record of
their tumultuous works would be scrawled in the crumbling shacks or written on the pathetic figure
of the brutalized native. These were the monuments of those builders of ruins.
In contrast to the caucheiros , da Cunha's sertanejos come onto the historical stage as ar-
chitects of a Luso-tropical civilization.
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