In the year of the Amazon Synod, we wish to recover the memory and testimonial of Florentino Zabalza, Augustinian Recollect and Bishop of the Prelature of Lábrea (Amazon, Brazil) from 1971 to 1994, who left his memoirs that are now offered to all audiences, for the first time, through AgustinosRecoletos.org.
Flooding is an annual phenomenon in this region: the rivers grow and grow until they reach twelve or more meters; since their beds are not that deep anywhere, the time comes when they get out of hand, flooding kilometers and kilometers of jungle.
No one is taken by surprise; I would even go so far as to say that it is a desired phenomenon. In Spain we say: year of snow, year of goods. The same can be said here of the flood. The rising waters kill many plagues of mice, ants and other bugs, a scourge of the plantations, anguish and fear of farmers. When it returns to its normal course in summer, the river brings from the jungle a thousand kinds of vegetable matter that are the fertilizer for the beaches that will be used in the plantations.
Ferreira de Castro, a Portuguese novelist, in his novel La Selva, has magnificent paragraphs about the flood. Thus he says, with the poverty of my translation, in some of them:
The river began to rise. It was an annual deluge that came from Peru, from Bolivia, from the foothills of the Andes, veins that gushed out, blocks of ice that melted, sliding from the highlands, thundering in the falls and destroying, in its path, everything that was put in front of them.
It seemed as if the Pacific had jumped over the mountain range to come and expand here. It mined, it opened new roads, it twisted in the coves, it thickened with the rains and it was always, without rest, on the way to the low points. Upon reaching the esplanades it lost in violence what it gained in imposition. It was no longer a torrent running on the slopes and singing on the cliffs: it was a heavy volume of liquid, mud that marched in great scale, carrying with a smooth face, without murmurs or roars of the falls, all the damage it caused. It seemed to come from a world reduced to rubble. The rivers then rose, swallowing summer beaches, jumping over ravines and making sad and moored castaways out of the green islands.
(…)
They went higher, they always went up, spreading out below the Indian barracks. Then the land was flooded. The deluge, a descendant of the Biblical one, slowly, silently invaded the frightened jungle. Go up, up; a thousand languages that were divided here to unite later in a deaf persistence of extermination. Today a span, a meter tomorrow; a kilometer later, finally, leagues without count, the entire land as if the jungle were nothing more than an underwater forest brought, by magical arts, to the surface of an ocean never seen before.
(…)
The dead water of the ponds, imprisoned in the brush during the summer, rose to life, moved again, losing its color of black slime on contact with the other waters that came to join it to spread everywhere. The lakes ceased to possess outlines, they were no longer halos or glittering monocles through which the earth looked at the sky. It was all dirty water, calm sea, almost covering, for immense extensions, trees that acquired duplicity of amphibians. The swamps that had dried up in the summer and had been just rotting were now transformed into excursion grounds for fish that demanded a variety of scenery.
(…)
Only here and there did the eye of the tapir or the deer discover a narrow strip of land where the invader had not yet reached with its invincible dominance. Clean land that was visible, it was mud where the animals left their four paws deep and the men cracked their toes.
(…)
They lived above the water, which was seen through the cracks in the ground supported on stakes. And the caboclos that in the summer tied up their canoes 500 meters away, back there, on the river bank, now had it next to the door. And it rained and rained.
(…)
The flood lasts for months and, in the years of greatest volume, in the plains of the valley not a fold was left. Defying the deluge, cautious landowners immediately erected wide platforms where the cattle spent the winter. It was almost always useless work, because many times the flow followed them; oxen and cows, first with their feet, then with their bellies, sank into the enemy, ending up dying of starvation and being thrown into the water to the delight of piranhas and candirus.
(…)
The water climbed up to the green plantations, clearing all the land that strong arms had prepared for the work of creation. And the most unprepared saw it dragging itself, in the current, undone with damaging vigor, to the home they had built within reach of the intruder. It was desolation and it was poverty that came hidden in the folds of the impure sheet of water.
NEXT PAGE: C. Cassava
.
