Robert Francois St.Honore Falcon: Expedition Log

A wonder a day and I do not doubt we should all live forever! I am comforttably domiciled in the College adjoining the Carmelite Church of Nossa Sennhora da Conceição, shaved, in clean linen, and anticipating my first decent dinner in weeks, but my mind rerurns to the phenomenon I witnessed today at the meeting of the waters.

Captain Acunha, desiring to show a proud Frenchman a marvel of his land, called me to the prow to observe the extraordinary sight of two rivers, one black, one milky white, flowing side by side in the same channel; the black current of the Rio Negro, its confluence still two leagues distant, runnning parallel to the silty flow of the Solimoes. We steered along the line of division — I filled page after page with my sketchings and I saw that, closely observed, the black and the white waters curled around each other like intricate silhouette work; curls within curls within curls of ever-diminishing scale, as I have seen in the pattern of ferns and the leaves of certain trees. I wonder, does it decrease in its self-similarity ad infinitum? Am I prejudiced to the macroscopic? Is there an implicit geometry, a mathematical energy in the very small, that cascades up into the greater, an automotive force of selfordering? I do think that there is a law here, in river flow and in fern and leaf.

Now by contrast I consider São José Tarumás do Rio Negro. A fort, manned by a handful of officers half-mad from malaria and a company of native musketeers; the landings; a government custom office; a court; the trading houses of spice factors; the taverns and their attached caiçara; the hudddled rows of whitewashed taipa huts of the settled indios, the praça, the College; the church over all. The Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição is a gaudy of mannerist fancies and frenetic painted decoration that seemed to rise sheer from the dark water as we drew in to the wharf. It proclaims itself so because it is the last: beyond São José lie the scattered aldeias and far-between reduciones of the Rio Negro and Rio Branco. This sense of the frontier, of the immense psychic pressure of the wilderness beyond, gives São José its peculiar energy. The docks are thronged with canoes and larger river craft; rafts of pau de brasil logs lie marshalled in the river. The market is loud and bright, the traders eager for my business. All is build and bustle; along the river frontage new warehouses are being knocked together, and on the higher ground walled houses, the bright new homes of the merchants, want only for roofs. In every citizen from priest to slave I see an eagerness to get down to business. It would, I believe, make a good and strong regional capital.

Father Luis Quinn’s reputation precedes him. The Carmelites welcomed the visiting Jesuit admonitory with a musical progress. Trombas, tammbourines, even a portative organ on a litter, and a veritable host of indios in white — men, women, children — sparring headdresses woven from palm fronds, waving same and singing together a glorious cantata that combined European melodies and counterpoints with native rhythms and exuberances. As I dogged along behind Quinn with my baggage train, I found my pace adjusting to the rhythm. Quinn, being a man much moved by music, was delighted, but I wonder how much of his pleasure masked annoyance at being forestalled. Despite the opulence of the friar’s welcome, I sensed unease.

Father Quinn received the sacraments; I reconciled myself to Mammon by presenting my travel permits to Capitan de Araujo of the fort and a subbsequent prolonged questioning neither unfriendly nor inquisitorial in tone, rather born out of long isolation and a lack of any true novelty. Here I received the first setback to my plans: I was informed that Acunha would be unable to take me onwards up the Rio Negro: new orders from Salvador forbade any armed vessel from proceeding beyond São José for fear of the Dutch pirates, who were once again active in the area and could easily seize such a ship and turn it against this garrison of the Barra. I did not like to comment that the wood, sand, and adobe revetments looked well capable of laughing off Fé em Deus’s pop guns, but if I have learned one thing in Brazil, it is never to antagonize local potentates on whose goodwill you depend. The captain concluded by commenting that he had heard that I enjoyed a reputation as a swordsman, and, if time permitted, would welcome a chance to try his skill on the strand before the fort, the traditional dueling ground. I think I shall decline him. He is an amiable enough dunderhead; his denial a frustration, nothing more. There are canoes by the score beneath the pontoon houses in the floating harbor. I shall begin my bargaining tomorrow.

(Addendum)

I am troubled by a scene I glimpsed from my window in the College.

Raised voices and a hellish bellowing made me glance out; by the light of torches, a fat ox had been manhandled into the pracça before the church, a rope to each hoof, horn, and nostril and men hauling on them, yet scarcely able to control the bellowing, terrified beast. A man stepped forth with a poleax, set himself before the creature, and brought his weapon down between the ox’s ears. Seven blows it took before the maddened animal fell and was still. I turned away when the men started to dismember the ox in the praça, but I am certain that it was stricken with the plague, the madness. It has reached São José Tarumás, the last place in the world, it would seem, or is it from here that it originates?

I trust the bloody barbarism does not upset my appetite for the friar’s hospitality.

The men fell on them at the landing. Faces hidden behind kerchiefs, the three attackers stepped out from the cover of the pontoon houses on either side of the bobbing gangplank. Flight, evasion, was impossible in so narrow a pass. Quinn had no time to react before the big broad carpenter’s mallet swung out of the twilight shadows of the river town and caught him full in the chest. He went down and in the same instant the assailant swung his weapon to bring it down finally on the father’s head. Falcon’s foot was there to meet the attacker’s wrist. Bone cracked; the man gave a shrill, shrieking cry as the weight of the mallet snapped his hand over, broken, useless, agonized. The assailants had miscalculated their attack; the stricture of the plank walks compelled them to attack one man at a time. As Quinn fought to regain presence, the second assailant thrust his wounded colleague out of the way and pulled a pistol. With a cry and a delicate kick, Falcon sent it spinning down the planking. He retrieved it as it skidded toward the water and extinction, drew the muzzle on the second masked man as the assailant raised his foot to stamp down on Quinn’s bowed neck.

“Hold off or you die this instant,” he commanded. The man glowered at him, shook his head, and pressed forward. Falcon flickered his thumb over the wheel lock. Now the third assassin elbowed his colleague out of the road. He held a naked knife, faced Falcon at breath distance, hands held out in the knife-fighters pose seeming half-supplication.

“I hardly think — ”

The man struck. Falcon saw the top finger-length of the pistol fall to the wood. Worked hardwood, steel, and brass had been cut through as cleanly as silk. The man grinned, wove a pass with his knife. Falcon thought he saw blue fire burn in its trace. Falcon threw his hand up to protect his face and, heedless, pulled the trigger. The explosion was like a cannon blast in the strait labyrinth of wooden verandahs and gangways. The ball careered wide, sky-shot, lost. Falcon had never intended it to hit. In the daze and confusion, he struck the knife-man with two short, stabbing punches; Lyon harborblows. The blade fell from the assailant’s grip, struck the wood, and continued into it as if it were water until the hilt brought a halt. Now Quinn entered the fight, windful and hale. He snatched up the dropped blade. It cut through the planks; the boardwalk cracked and settled beneath him. Quinn drew himself to his full height; his bulk filled the coffin-narrow alley. The wounded mallet-man and the pistoleiro had already fled. The knife-man too scrambled away but in his panic tripped on a board-end and went sprawling on his back. With a bestial roar, Quinn was on top of him; knife slung underhand, a gutting blow, no Christian stroke.