Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Maligned Climate”
The moral disintegration of those who move to the tropics is a remarkable and necessary component
of any description of the climate of the new territories claimed under the Treaty of Petrópolis. It is an
element that makes the most obtuse psychologist outshine Hann or other kindred experts in climato-
logy. From the day of their departure these migrants brood about a return home in the shortest time
possible. They become a new sort of exile—the exile who asks for banishment, sometimes battles
to achieve it, repelling other competitors. At the same time the most mournful images inhabit their
fantasies, prefiguring the troubled paradise that attracts them. When they depart, they enter a fretful
emotional state that leaves them open to all possible maladies.
At the end of the fifteen endless days that it takes to follow the coast, they enter the Amazon.
Revived briefly by that impressive landscape, they are soon oppressed by the disheartening immens-
ity. Their eyes glaze as they take in vistas, certainly vast, but somehow blank and reduced to the hazy
outlines of the distant margins. As they press upriver, the idle days pass in the strange immobility of
landscapes of only one color, one height, and one form. They have the nerve-wracking sensation that
life has stopped. Stupefied by the dulling impressions, they find that even the notion of time is extin-
guished. The soul retreats into a nostalgia that is a yearning not just for one's native land but for the
earth itself, for those natural vistas and perspectives to which we are habituated, but which the eye
cannot uncover in the monotony of those vast plains.
They enter one of the great tributaries—the Juruá or the Purús. They arrive at their remote outpost,
and their despair is heightened. The land is graceless and sad, because it is new. It is immanent. The
forest mantle lacks the artistry of human labor.
There are domesticated landscapes we recognize as echoes of subconscious and ancestral recollec-
tions: rolling hills, valleys, coasts fretted with inlets, Even a scorched wilderness is familiar to us to
the degree that it provokes some kind of primal reminiscence. Seeing landscapes for the first time,
weareprogrammedwithanimaginativelexiconthatleavesusprimedfortheenchantmentsofinstant
“recognition” when nature offers us a feature that we had previously known in only an ideal form.
In the Amazon, no. The topographic forms most associated with human presence simply vanish.
There is something primordial in this amphibian nature, a mixture of water and earth that veils and
entirely obscures its own grandeur. And one has the sense that absent the continuity and consistency
of cultures, it will always basically be impenetrable, if it isn't rent apart in the plunder of its riches.
Those who live there are molded by its ferocity. They don't cultivate the wilderness, they don't em-
bellishit,theymerelytrytorestrainit.ThefolksfromCearáandParaiba,andtheotherpioneersfrom
the Northeast who were discarded there, unknowingly fulfill one of the greatest enterprises of our in-
nocentandheroicage:theyaretamingthewilderness.Andtheirsimplesouls,temperedbyathousand
mishaps, ensure even more than do their powerful bodies the success of this formidable endeavor.
Recent arrivals from the south are completely thrown off balance by the tumult and commotion,
and ordinarily they collapse. Dazed by the unrecognizable landscape and the society of these titanic
pioneers and nation builders, the novice feels dislocated in space and time, removed not just from his
country but from human society, led astray into some wasteland in an obscure backwater of history.
He can't stand it. His reserves ofenergyare devoted to the simple effort ofsticking it out, useless and
inert in the post assigned to him, bumbling through the simplest task. Longingly he eyes the launches
heading downstream, and he dreams of his distant home in melancholy and fearful reveries. Then un-
expectedly, in the full light of day he is seized by an abrupt and icy shiver running through his body,
and he delightedly welcomes the salvation of fever. It is a happy surprise, and in that sudden, close
nudge of death, he revives. Malaria means for him a liberating medical certificate. And thus he beats
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