The Night Will Be Long, page 29
It is part of divine love.
Life—what value does it have? Long ago, in the mines or in the fields, you used to see the garimpeiros, weather-beaten people. The men had wrinkled faces and clothes torn from labor. They had scars from fighting, sometimes with jungle animals and sometimes with each other. Each scar told a story. Everything you saw in them recalled something, and that was their portrait. Things have changed now. Clothing is sold already torn, and since people don’t have scars they get tattoos, wanting stories they haven’t suffered inscribed on their skin. How can they suffer when they don’t savor life? That’s the big question I wonder about. The people who work in the mines are greedy. So am I, because it’s my business, and most of all because it’s what I’ve always known how to do, since I was a kid. Maybe you’ve heard of a dowser, which is someone who can detect water beneath the ground. I can do something similar. I sink my hands into the rocks, touch the soil. I smell the manganese. I soak it in and rub it into me. And suddenly I see it. Something tells me, It’s over there, and the machines go looking for it—can you imagine how much it would cost to do it blind? You have to wring out the earth and break it in half like a cookie, and the metals pour forth. You have to drag it out with dredges and buckets. It can take days. Gold is the last metal to become solid, and its veins meander without any logic. When you find it, you have to know where it’s coming from and where it’s going. I know how to see that. Thanks to my ability, I survived in Minas Gerais.
That’s who I am: the man who knows where the gold is going.
“And you don’t think,” I said, “that gold increases man’s greed? Aren’t you afraid of destroying everything because of that greed?”
Fabinho finished his mineral water with lemon and called the waiter over. He ordered a Coke with ice.
“It’s all part of the same thing, which is divine love,” he said, taking a long sip. “We shouldn’t worry about things that don’t worry nature. The earth contorts and cracks. When the continents formed and Africa separated from the Americas, the soil layer cracked and the two parts moved away from each other. That’s nature, and we are part of it. People say we’re destroying it, but you can’t really say that. The history of the planet is the history of its fractures and holes and its infinite chasms and the collisions of its tectonic plates. When this happened for the first time, where was man? Running away in fright. Man is part of nature and will die in it. You have to understand creation. To build a church, you have to topple trees, just as you do to erect cities, hospitals, schools. Should we stop doing that? Now man, who used to be naked, has machinery and dynamite and can bore deep into the surface. It’s not the end. A fly can’t topple a wall by flapping its wings faster.”
I broke in, trying again. “But the same scientists who made machines to perforate the earth and do fracking say it too: today the planet is small and fragile; we’re on the verge of damaging it irretrievably.”
“Those are just words,” he said, waving away the air in front of his nose as if an insect were buzzing there, “and that’s just because the apocalypse has such cachet. If we don’t talk about the end of the world, nobody listens to us. They also said the sun revolved around Earth and condemned Galileo, and today they say there’s no other life in the universe but us—can you imagine that? Or they claim God doesn’t exist because science made him obsolete. Do you believe them? Scientists are the quacks of the twenty-first century. That’s a fact, miss.”
“And yet you use machines invented by those scientists,” I persisted, needling him. “And you understand the order of the layers of Earth’s crust because of the knowledge they’ve granted.”
Fabinho stared off at the end of the street, which I found unsettling. Was there a new danger? Nothing was there.
“What I know doesn’t come from speculations I’ve read,” he said, “but from knowledge of these jungles and God’s work. I inherited it from having been born close to the soil, smelling firewood burning in the stove or the clay pot. The indigenous people didn’t study at Harvard, nor do they need to, to know what a plant has inside it.
“It’s knowledge accumulated over generations; indigenous children don’t start over from scratch. Just like our science, it gets stored. There’s a pedagogy.
“Intimate familiarity with the earth is more important, I’m telling you. Believe me. You’re good with words—it’s your job. For me, I know the things I know. In my bones. If I can’t explain them any better, it’s not because the ideas are weak, but because my powers of expression are limited.”
I nodded in agreement, but thought, This guy is totally nuts; he’s even more tangled-up and mystical than Fritz. They must know each other. They’re exactly the same.
“We’re living through the days before the Lord’s coming,” Fabinho continued. “And it’s not me saying that—it’s the Bible. That’s why we need to be in harmony with nature and the Creator’s work. People who keep throwing their lives away will not be able to receive grace. That’s why I created a church in the jungle, and that’s why I work here. Is there anything in the world closer to God’s work than the jungle?”
He was wearing a heavy gold chain with a medallion that he suddenly stroked. It was the hand of Jesus with the phrase “We are healed.”
“Are mining gold and building Pentecostal churches part of the same concept?” I asked.
He smiled, pleased by the question. “Of course, it’s all part of divine love. I told you that already. The end is coming, and it’s better to be close to the Lord’s work. That’s why I use the gold I mine to establish churches. It isn’t for my own personal enrichment.”
I was tempted to really get into that, but I held back. “Do you have any relationship with Colombian mining?”
He looked me in the eye, and I felt a sudden pang in my belly.
“I worked in your country for a while, near the border. But the people’s hearts were shattered, and I didn’t stay. I did what anyone would have done: work and keep my mouth shut. That jungle still dwells in my heart, one of the toughest places I’ve been. The trees block out the sky. The loneliness of the world is more intense, like the parking lot of an abandoned shopping mall, or a ghost town where all the people have fled or died of the plague; a universe without any life but one’s own is the most terrifying notion a person can conceive, and it is precisely there that the figure of Christ comes down and penetrates your heart and leads you by the hand to a boat or shepherds you into a drone for humans and lifts you above the world, close to the only source of heat that can console the spirit, which is God himself, he who is about to arrive. I am waiting for him—are you not?”
I was startled by the question. I told him I wasn’t a believer, that I didn’t have a religious background. My spirituality followed a different course.
“And what course is that?” he asked.
“Art, music, books,” I replied awkwardly.
“Oh, of course,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “but those, too, are manifestations of God, so in the end we agree. Receive my blessing. Everything is part of divine love.” He looked at me cheerfully and said, “Would you like to see the mine where I’m working now?”
I said I would.
He said he’d send someone to pick me up tomorrow at six A.M. Then he got up and, with a comical bow, we said goodbye. He turned to one of the waiters and made a circle in the air with his finger. I understood that he was saying, Put it all on my tab. He went down to the street, accompanied by two men, and as he turned right along the park the people at four other tables got up and hurried out. More security.
Sunday
At 6:11, as I was having breakfast, someone asked for me at reception. An Afro-Guianese woman, no older than thirty, with natural hair. She said her name was Thérèse Denticat and I remembered her emails. Fabinho’s secretary at Ouro Amazónico. I finished my (delicious) coffee, went upstairs to brush my teeth, and came back down.
“Mr. Henriquez is waiting for you at the mine,” she told me.
A fancy Peugeot 4x4 was waiting outside, its air conditioning hardly noticeable. Wonderful.
“How long is the drive?” I asked.
“Five hours,” Thérèse said. “The first three hours are on a good road; you’ll be able to rest and relax.”
Rest and relax? As soon as we left Cayenne, Thérèse turned onto a very rudimentary road (not even two lanes, let alone a proper highway) and immediately sped up to 160 kilometers an hour, which sent me into an unbearable panic. I was consumed by thoughts of imminent death. Why were we going so fast? I didn’t dare ask her to slow down, but if a dog ran into the road or we hit a pothole—and I saw several—we’d go flying. We’d crash into the trees in the jungle. Every so often the chassis of an abandoned car appeared.
Palms, towering trees, lush vegetation, and sometimes, when we got nearer the ocean, mangrove swamps. The same landscape I saw on my way from Suriname.
I almost wept when we turned off onto a smaller road that cut through the trees. We were slowing down! Containing my fear had given my abs a workout equivalent to an hour at the gym. As if that weren’t enough, every so often the idiot would ask me if I wanted to listen to anything in particular and would let go of the steering wheel to dig for a CD in the driver’s side door. I almost screamed.
Now that I’m writing it all down, my stomach’s hurting again. The road is striking. The treetops cover the sky. Sunlight doesn’t enter directly, and there’s a greenish light, like those low-wattage bulbs. The road becomes a track, and the dirt is the color of clay. There are prehistoric plants. I don’t know the names—they look like ferns or bromeliads. If a dinosaur lumbered out from behind them, I wouldn’t be surprised. Moisture drips off the leaves, as if they were sweating; a carpet of crushed branches covers the ground.
The Peugeot had amazing suspension, which my kidneys appreciated, since the ineffable Thérèse stepped on it again. Finally we reached a hill, and to the right a wooden tower appeared. Thérèse just honked, and the guards waved and signaled for her to drive through. At the third tower, tents appeared along with a wooden hut with a corrugated metal roof.
There, wearing rubber boots and with a pistol at his waist, Fabinho was waiting for me.
“Welcome to Ouro Amazónico,” he said. “First I should note that for security reasons, we don’t allow photos. If you need some for your article, there’s an archive of recent and stock images that guarantee us protection and maximum security.”
The men in the towers had machine guns and, it looked like, assault rifles.
“I see it’s a dangerous job,” I said.
“I’d love not to have these armed guards, which make the operation look . . . I can’t think of the word . . .”
“Illegal?”
He looked at me, amused. “Well, no . . . You have quite a sense of humor. The company is completely legal; it’s fully registered and . . . what is it they say? Compliant, that’s it. As you know. But since it’s in the jungle and has guards, it looks like a guerrilla camp. There’s nothing we can do about that. Come this way. Shall I show you around?”
We went to the gold deposits. The light was different there. The sun poured in through the hole left by felled trees. A machine similar to the ones used for oil drilling was punching into the earth to break the crust and access the deeper layers. Fabinho explained that those drills, with their steel heads, crushed fifteen tons of rock every twelve hours and extracted them with suction tubes into an enormous bucket, where the stone was washed and smashed. There were about fifteen grams of gold in each ton.
“Ever since I was very young, I’ve worked in underground mines, and it was there that I started to get to know the seam. We looked for what’s known as the vein, which technically is an inclined mass of exquisite auric chloride, mixed with quartz. It seems incomprehensible, right? Gold is in something known as ferruginous pyrites, impregnated with arsenic. There are other minerals too: white, needle-like crystals and impure aluminum sulfate, embedded in the walls.”
He waved his hand in the air, as if to erase what he’d said, and added, “These words seem like gibberish to you, but they are a miner’s psalms. Each occupation has its own language. I was born hearing them, and through them I came to know the world. God made language for that purpose. A dog or a chimpanzee can express rage or fear, but they can’t wonder about the meaning of life, right? And because they can’t, they don’t think about it. What came first? I’m a creationist, so I believe the Bible when it says that the first thing was the Word. Everything is explained by that. Look around—you won’t see anything but foliage and bushes. And do you know why? Because you don’t know the name of each plant. Whereas the indigenous people go into the jungle and read. To you it’s just landscape.”
Next to the water wheels and barracks was a lean-to sheltering something that looked like a catafalque. We walked over. I saw a painting with the image of Christ, a tree trunk made into a cross, and a carving of a hand with tendrils of vines and insects.
“This is our chapel,” he said. “We have services here with the workers twice a day.”
“Including the guards?”
“Sadly, no,” he said. “Since we’ve been here, bandits have attacked us four times. Satan is with them.”
“Thieves?”
“Yes, people looking to take advantage of other people’s labor.”
“What do the police say?”
“The officers come, make their report, take names, and leave. Nothing ever happens.”
“They don’t protect you?”
“Our contract says it’s our company’s responsibility. Anyway, we don’t want to make too much of a fuss because, you know, plenty of people don’t want us around. If we become a problem, they’ll end up shutting us down, and only the bandits will win, the people engaged in illegal mining.”
We went back to a wooden bungalow where an office was set up. He offered me coffee. We sat in director’s chairs.
“Tell me about your work as a pastor.”
“Miss, the most important thing to me is to communicate Jesus’s word to many people. To reach as many souls as possible. That’s my aim.”
I looked him in the eye. “Why?”
He was a little taken aback. “Why? Well, because . . . it’s the right thing to do. It’s what must be done to glorify God’s word and his work on Earth.”
He sat in silence and, for the first time, looked down.
“I understand that, but why do you do it?” I persisted.
“Because . . . Like I said, because it’s the right thing to do . . .”
From outside, jungle sounds drifted in: birds taking flight, animals running, branches rubbing in the wind, amphibians croaking somewhere. And above it all a deafening noise: the crash of the drills striking the subsoil and the steady rhythm of the water wheels, like the sound of the sea on rocks.
“Maybe I should tell you a little more about my life. Sometimes I get theoretical and forget that the substance that people are made of is memory. If you would, please join me in an exercise in memory.”
With that, he closed his eyes and lifted his arms for a few seconds, as if invoking some jungle spirit. It was moving and a little ridiculous. Then he looked at me and began to speak.
What I transcribe here, again without corrections or cuts, is his direct narrative:
First of all, you should know that I’m your typical socially embittered person. Why hide it? It’s part of me. I walk down the street and see other people, I watch the way most of them laugh and talk, busily coming and going. For them life is a piece of warm toast that they load up with delicious things: butter and then a bit of ham, cheese, gherkins, slices of tomato. Other people spread dulce de leche or jam for a sweet flavor, and from there they start taking bites of it, if you get what I’m saying. Nibble, nibble, nibble.
That gives their life meaning and makes it something to savor, because the task of living is to endure, even to thrive in this long span of time that was granted to us for our existence. It can be sad and bitter, or it can be sweet. That’s why those who triumph smile.
Seeing those people, I used to feel sadness. That’s what my life was like for many years.
I had pain in my stomach, a burning sensation akin to an ulcer that ruined my digestion. The symptomology of resentment. Other people’s smiles were a dagger in my belly. Why?
Throughout my life I’ve experienced lack of love, humiliation, fear, loneliness; I have been pushed out for no reason from places where I was comfortable and happy; I have endured the indifference of people I loved; I have felt jealousy and pain when I saw others receiving the love I craved, the attention I needed; I begged a thousand times, but always in vain.
Nobody listened to me.
I’ve been lucky to experience all those things, which now have converted into an enormous fortune. Time is a stream of water. It gradually heals everything, washes everything. The cruelest and most painful things fade away. Memory is there to prevent complete healing. That’s why some addicts flee from memory, a well-honed knife that reminds you: this is how it was, this is how you felt, it was there and now it’s gone, you lost it for ever, you loved something and it went away, you used to be so happy, they died because of you, they left without a word, you were a kid, they humiliated you, you want to go back and it’s not possible, the door is closed, you want a smile, just one, they’re gone, left for good, they’re buried, mother, friend, brother, father, I’m alone, I’m scared.
Fabinho wiped away a couple of tears and looked up at the heavens again, as if expecting to be refreshed by a nonexistent drizzle.
He pulled himself back together and kept talking.
I scream and scream, Where are you? And sometimes that scream is the scream of someone calling down the tunnel of a mine, toward the darkest, deepest center—can you imagine? C’est dure. The only reply is its own echo. When a person screams into the darkness, what reply is possible? None. When a person screams into soil that has been partially pried open, who replies? Nobody. When a person is at the seashore and is dragged off by a tsunami and gnawed by salt, who listens to him? The sea? The wind?
