northeastern Brasil, 1945-1954, part two
remember, this is all happening in once upon a time, seen and heard by let's say a four-year-old boy. so inside the boundaries of that caveat, my father knew a colonel! the colonel had a sword and a gun that I could see, but I mustn't touch, and certainly couldn't hold. oh crap! you need more background! you see, northeastern Brasil in about 1946 was much like our southwest in about 1870. there were huge ranches, small farms, towns, villages, dirt roads. people walked those dirt roads if they must. farmers had horses, but not for riding. ranchers had riding horses, and so did their employees, the vaqueiros, or cowboys. ah! and so did the bandidos, the bandits! the army was active in northeastern Brasil in 1946 mainly to put down the bandidos. into this cowboys and bandits idyll, the army and merchants had introduced trucks. trucks used the dirt roads for commerce, and every town had a gas station for the trucks. the army used their trucks to move large numbers of soldiers more quickly than bandidos could move their small bands. all this happened in an old and dried out land undergoing a twenty-year-long-already drought. (it would last another ten years, but no one knew that then.) year after year, a new year came but the rains didn't, or they came fitfully, never enough and often in the wrong place. people mostly lived where they were born, and poverty was worse for young people than it had been for their parents. almost no one just walked away. what for? they had no sustaining stories of a better life somewhere else. whatever the cities promised, if one could ever find a city and get to it, was more like slavery than improvement. and where would they find water or food? but for a little foreigner insulated from all that, northeastern Brasil in let's say 1946 was magical! a colonel! soldiers! trucks in a caravan! stories of gunfights! a jeep! and in the towns, pretty young women with loud colorful dresses and sensuous ways that he had never seen before! I have warned you: take all this with a helping of salt. especially what follows. I have no idea how I could know this, but it lives for me like a memory, not a dream. the colonel and his trucks stopped out of sight of a town. they swept out in a network that closed in on the town. the colonel rode a white horse into the town in which a soldier or two stood in every intersection and a soldier stood on the roof of the taller buildings. my father and I followed the colonel in a Jeep. the colonel met with the merchants and the town officials. I don't think he got anything but information, and probably that information was guesses. how would the townspeople know where the bandidos camped? or planned on raiding next? but this may have been what mattered to my father: the colonel introduced him to the merchants and officials. when he came back, they would remember that he had some undeclared protection by the army. I think there may have been a baile that night, and I think we and the colonel rode on the next day accompanied by the soldiers and the colonel's horse, of course. eventually we heard that some of the colonel's men found a group of bandidos and there was a big gunfight until all the bandidos were dead. I remember thinking that must be it then. no, the colonel and his soldiers had more to do, and we trailed along with them until the colonel sent us back in a truck to wherever we lived then. I think I slept most of the way, but that may only mean that that part of the trip was pretty humdrum after all the excitement. but even back at home, I dreamed for weeks, maybe months, about traveling with soldiers! it was part of the magic that northeastern Brasil was!
No comments:
Post a Comment