But the gap made by the water rapidly widened between the trees until reaching a vague grayish line that marked the beginning of the sea. Without saying a word, D’Arrast walked toward the slope, where the various flood levels had left marks that were still fresh.
A muddy path climbed toward the huts. In front of them, Negroes stood silently staring at the newcomers. Several couples were holding hands, and on the edge of the mound, in front of the adults, a row of black children with bulging bellies and spindly legs were gaping with round eyes.
When he arrived in front of the huts, D’Arrast beckoned to the Harbor Captain. He was a fat, laughing Negro wearing a white uniform. D’Arrast asked him in Spanish if it were possible to visit a hut. The Captain was sure it was, he even thought it a good idea, and the noble engineer would see very interesting things. He harangued the Negroes at length, pointing to D’Arrast and to the river. They listened without saying a word. When the Captain had finished, no one stirred.
He spoke again, in an impatient voice. Then he called upon one of the men, who shook his head. Whereupon the Captain said a few brief words in a tone of command. The man stepped forth from the group, faced D’Arrast, and with a gesture showed him the way. But his look was hostile. He was an elderly man with short, graying hair and a thin, wizened face; yet his body was still young, with hard wiry shoulders and muscles visible through his cotton pants and torn shirt.
They went ahead, followed by the Captain and the crowd of Negroes, and climbed a new, steeper embankment where the huts made of clay, tin, and reeds clung to the ground with such difficulty that they had to be strengthened at the base with heavy stones. They met a woman going down the path, sometimes slipping in her bare feet, who was carrying on her head an iron drum full of water. Then they reached a small irregular square bordered by three huts. The man walked toward one of them and pushed open a bamboo door on hinges made of tropical liana. He stood aside without saying a word, staring at the engineer with the same impassive look.
In the hut, D’Arrast saw nothing at first but a dying fire built right on the ground in the exact center of the room. Then in a back corner he made out a brass bed with a bare, broken mattress, a table in the other corner covered with earthenware dishes, and, between the two, a sort of stand supporting a color print representing Saint George. Nothing else but a pile of rags to the right of the entrance and, hanging from the ceiling, a few loincloths of various colors drying over the fire.
Standing still, D’Arrast breathed in the smell of smoke and poverty that rose from the ground and choked him. Behind him, the Captain clapped his hands. The engineer turned around and, against the light, saw the graceful silhouette of a black girl approach and hold out something to him. He took a glass and drank the thick sugar-cane alcohol. The girl held out her tray to receive the empty glass and went out with such a supple motion that D’Arrast suddenly wanted to hold her back.
But on following her out he didn’t recognize her in the crowd of Negroes and leading citizens gathered around the hut. He thanked the old man, who bowed without a word. Then he left. The Captain, behind him, resumed his explanations and asked when the French company from Rio could begin work and whether or not the jetty could be built before the rainy season. D’Arrast didn’t know; to tell the truth, he wasn’t thinking of that.
He went down toward the cool river under the fine mist. He was still listening to that great pervasive sound he had been hearing continually since his arrival, which might have been made by the rustling of either the water or the trees, he could not tell. Having reached the bank, he looked out in the distance at the vague line of the sea, the thousands of kilometers of solitary waters leading to Africa and, beyond, his native Europe.
“Captain,” he asked, “what do these people we have just seen live on?”
“They work when they’re needed,” the Captain said. “We are poor.”
“Are they the poorest?”
“They are the poorest.”
The Judge, who arrived at that moment, slipping somewhat in his best shoes, said they already loved the noble engineer who was going to give them work.
“And, you know, they dance and sing every day.”
Then, without transition, he asked D’Arrast if he had thought of the punishment.
“What punishment?”
“Why, our Chief of Police.”
“Let him go.” The Judge said that this was not possible; there had to be a punishment. D’Arrast was already walking toward Iguape.
In the little Garden of the Fountain, mysterious and pleasant under the fine rain, clusters of exotic flowers hung down along the lianas among the banana trees and pandanus. Piles of wet stones marked the intersection of paths on which a motley crowd was strolling. Half-breeds, mulattoes, a few gauchos were chatting in low voices or sauntering along the bamboo paths to the point where groves and bush became thicker and more impenetrable. There, the forest began abruptly.
D’Arrast was looking for Socrates in the crowd when Socrates suddenly bumped him from behind.
“It’s holiday,” he said, laughing, and clung to D’Arrast’s tall shoulders to jump up and down.
“What holiday?”
“Why, you not know?” Socrates said in surprise as he faced D’Arrast. “The feast of good Jesus. Each year they all come to the grotto with a hammer.”
Socrates pointed out, not a grotto, but a group that seemed to be waiting in a corner of the garden.
“You see? One day the good statue of Jesus, it came upstream from the sea. Some fishermen found it. How beautiful! How beautiful! Then they washed it here in the grotto. And now a stone grew up in the grotto. Every year it’s the feast. With the hammer you break, you break off pieces for blessed happiness. And then it keeps growing and you keep breaking. It’s the miracle!”
They had reached the grotto and could see its low entrance beyond the waiting men. Inside, in the darkness studded with the flickering flames of candles, a squatting figure was pounding with a hammer. The man, a thin gaucho with a long mustache, got up and came out holding in his open palm, so that all might see, a small piece of moist schist, over which he soon closed his hand carefully before going away. Another man then stooped down and entered the grotto.
D’Arrast turned around. On all sides pilgrims were waiting, without looking at him, impassive under the water dripping from the trees in thin sheets. He too was waiting in front of the grotto under the same film of water, and he didn’t know for what.
He had been waiting constantly, to tell the truth, for a month since he had arrived in this country. He had been waiting—in the red heat of humid days, under the little stars of night, despite the tasks to be accomplished, the jetties to be built, the roads to be cut through—as if the work he had come to do here were merely a pretext for a surprise or for an encounter he did not even imagine but which had been waiting patiently for him at the end of the world.
He shook himself, walked away without anyone in the little group paying attention to him, and went toward the exit. He had to go back to the river and go to work.
But Socrates was waiting for him at the gate, lost in voluble conversation with a short, fat, strapping man whose skin was yellow rather than black. His head, completely shaved, gave even more sweep to a considerable forehead. On the other hand, his broad, smooth face was adorned with a very black beard, trimmed square.
“He’s champion!” Socrates said by way of introduction. “Tomorrow he’s in the procession.”
The man, wearing a sailor’s outfit of heavy serge, a blue-and-white jersey under the pea jacket, was examining D’Arrast attentively with his calm black eyes. At the same time he was smiling, showing all his very white teeth between his full, shiny lips.
“He speaks Spanish,” Socrates said and, turning toward the stranger, added: “Tell Mr. D’Arrast.” Then he danced off toward another group. The man ceased to smile and looked at D’Arrast with outright curiosity.
“You are interested, Captain?”
“I’m not a captain,” D’Arrast said.
“That doesn’t matter. But you’re a noble. Socrates told me.”
“Not I. But my grandfather was. His father too and all those before his father. Now there is no more nobility in our country.”
“Ah!” the Negro said, laughing. “I understand; everybody is a noble.”
“No, that’s not it. There are neither noblemen nor common people.”
The fellow reflected; then he made up his mind.
“No one works? No one suffers?”
“Yes, millions of men.”
“Then that’s the common people.”
“In that way, yes, there is a common people. But the masters are policemen or merchants.”
The mulatto’s kindly face closed in a frown. Then he grumbled: “Humph! Buying and selling, eh! What filth! And with the police, dogs command.”
Suddenly, he burst out laughing.
“You, you don’t sell?”
“Hardly at all. I make bridges, roads.”
“That’s good. Me, I’m a ship’s cook. If you wish, I’ll make you our dish of black beans.”
“All right.”
The cook came closer to D’Arrast and took his
