The Tarantula Stone. Philip Caveney

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СКАЧАТЬ silence. He tipped his hat back on his head a little and reached for his cigarettes.

      He had come to Rio to become a garimpeiro and now he had the money to enable him to do it; but he didn’t like the set-up one bit. Caine had been too confident of himself to be making idle threats. There was little doubt that those who had tried to cheat the patron really were out in the graveyard he had mentioned. Martin was going to have to keep his nose clean from now on.

      That afternoon, he purchased the equipment he required – a pick and shovel, several round pans with wire mesh bases for sifting rubble, a good pistol and some spare ammunition, a knife and as many packs of cigarettes as he could conveniently carry. All these things could be purchased up at the garimpo, the storeholders told him, but would cost very much more. The following morning, before dawn, he took a train through the jungle to Garimpo Máculo. It was a three-hour ride through dank, humid forest and the interior of the train was like a Turkish bath. It was packed with hopeful prospectors of every nationality, each, like Martin, sent out by a patron. For the most part they were a tough, hard-bitten bunch of men, most of them running away from something – the police, the war, or just their own poverty. There was no friendliness between any of them. They began the journey as they meant to continue, as rivals.

      One thick-set bearded Englishman asked loudly if anybody could tell him what maculo meant. A Portuguese on the other side of the compartment shouted back in slow, heavily accented tones that maculo was the Portuguese word for the diarrhoea caused by dysentery and that the camp was named after it because the disease was rife there. But this was the only conversation of the journey. Martin was relieved when the train finally came to a stop and the passengers spilled out onto a muddy deserted halt in the middle of the jungle. From here, it was only a short trek across open scrubland to the garimpo.

      Martin’s expectations of the place had never been very high and yet he was unprepared for what he saw; a great ugly gash in the surface of a wide stretch of red rock which not so long before had been covered with dense jungle; and, within the gash, countless numbers of man-made pits, each with a single occupant grubbing his way frantically deeper with pick and shovel. There were hundreds of men working here, tough, scowling, sunburnt men dressed in rags who greeted the arrival of the newcomers with nothing more than a sidelong sneer. Round the edges of the garimpo were the living quarters, a description that was little more than a bad joke when applied to the tumble-down, ramshackle collection of squalid huts, lean-tos and canvas shelters that the garimpeiros called home. As Martin and his companions disembarked from the train, a little weasel-faced man in a filthy suit and a shapeless panama hat moved amongst them, announcing that he was the fazendeiro on whose land the garimpo was situated. If anybody wanted to dig here, they would have to pay him, Senhor Mirales, ten per cent of anything they found. The man was an irritating little insect and would normally have been swatted aside like a troublesome mosquito; but, predictably, he was backed up by three venomous-looking pistoleiros and the newcomers were too dazed and numbed from their journey to make much trouble. They milled about in confusion while specially appointed men moved amongst them, offering accommodation for hire. The prices demanded were exorbitant but nobody was in any position to refuse. Martin was billeted in a filthy little wooden shack with no windows, no door, no toilet, not even any running water. There was simply a rough bed made out of boards with a single filthy blanket lying on it. Water could be obtained from a hand-pump on the other side of the clearing or, failing that, from the stretch of muddy river that ran alongside the perimeter of the garimpo. Food could be purchased from the nearby barraca at about four times the going rate elsewhere and would have to be cooked on open fires outside the shelter. Also from the barraca would come any equipment that needed replacing and the cachaça with which a weary miner might drink away the misery of a long fruitless day’s work. For those with a little more money to spend, there was a brothel situated next to the store, haunted by a collection of dead-eyed, gaunt and miserable-looking Indian girls. They were plain and, for the most part, rife with venereal disease but, after a few months of unrelenting toil, it was surprising how attractive they could look.

      Martin threw himself into the work with silent dedication, rising every morning at first light to go and hack away the ground in the place which had been allocated to him. The first few weeks were terrible. His skin blistered in the sun, he was bitten half to death by a multitude of insects, he suffered a dose of malaria that turned his skin grey and racked him with uncontrollable bouts of shivering. His hands blistered and scarred against the hard wooden shaft of the pick and at night he staggered back to the stinking little shack to sleep only to find it crawling with rats and cockroaches. And, worst of all, in all this time he found nothing, not the smallest trace of a stone. Others found diamonds. Every few hours a wild shout would go up from some corner of the garimpo and there would be a sudden rush of men, anxious to see what had been discovered. A few moments later, the same men would trudge grimly back to their own claim and continue to hack at the hard, indifferent, unyielding soil. Men went down with the maculo, the debilitating diarrhoea that left them little more than weak skeletons. Others contracted typhoid. The sick who had any money left took the train back to Rio, the others simply died and were buried in shallow graves out in the scrub jungle by men who were well schooled in the art of digging and had no time for prayers.

      When a man did grub a diamond from the earth, the word spread like wildfire through the camp; and a short time later, a buyer – a comprador – would appear, a professional man usually employed by the patron or the fazendeiro. He would examine the stone with his eyepiece while the finder looked hopefully on; and then he would make his offer with calm, well-practised disdain. ‘It is not much of a stone; a good size, I grant you, but badly flawed. I could not offer you anything more than ten thousand cruzeiros for it.’ The price offered was always a fraction of the stone’s true value, but the presence of the ever-watchful pistoleiros in the background prevented any possibility of argument. The ‘lucky’ finder would take his share of the money and promptly go on a binge, getting blind drunk, spending a couple of nights fulfilling his tawdry fantasies in the brothel, brawling with his fellow garimpeiros; and a few days later he would be back at his accustomed place, hacking savagely into the soil, fuelled by the conviction that what had happened once could happen again. Sometimes really large diamonds were discovered, so big that even the comprador’s lousy offer would amount to a sizeable sum. Then all kinds of madness would break loose. Martin came to hate the garimpeiros and their stupid macho philosophy which dictated that it was a great loss of face not to squander any money that they had earned in the shortest possible time. One man who had found a good diamond went to the lengths of having a Cadillac shipped in from the United States, piece by piece, so that it could be brought in to the garimpo by train. Once everything had arrived, he had it put together and delighted for a few days in driving the expensive vehicle round and round the perimeter at breakneck speed, its interior packed with yelling drunken men who normally would not have bothered to talk to him. This went on until the car ran out of petrol and the owner was running short of money. Soon he was back at work and the rusting, dilapidated hulk of the car still stood at the edge of the jungle, an incongruous intruder in this remote corner of the world. Other diamond finders had more unfortunate ends. Sometimes a man was knifed in the back at the height of some drunken brawl and the remainder of his money appropriated by the killer. Others simply drank too much cachaça, went berserk and plunged yelling and shrieking into the jungle. Either the Indians got them or wild animals; they were never seen again.

      Eventually, Martin found a diamond; not a particularly big one, but a diamond nonetheless; and though he had sneered in the past at the brutish excesses of his workmates, he found himself acting in just the same way. Long months of loneliness and frustration spilled out of him and there was nothing he could do to stop himself. He drank himself insensible at the barraca, he beat up some man who was too slow to get out of his way and, that night, in one of the grubby beds of the brothel, he rutted with an Indian girl who barely acknowledged his presence. The next morning, sick at heart, ashamed of his stupidity and suffering from the worst headache in all of creation, he was back at work, ignoring the jeers of men working alongside him.

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