Two Graves

55

THE NATURALIST WAITED IN THE SHADE, RESTING ON HIS pack, for Senhor Michael Jackson Mendonça to arrive. The man eventually made his appearance, with fanfare: a big, broad, brown, relatively young man with a gigantic smile, long curly hair tied with a bandanna, wearing a sleeveless shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. He bulled his way through the crowd, his loud, friendly voice urging one and all to make way. He extended his hand twenty yards before he even reached the naturalist, striding up and pumping the limp arm vigorously.

“Michael Jackson Mendonça!” he said. “At your service!”

The naturalist retrieved his much-shaken hand as quickly as he could. “I am Percival Fawcett,” he said, somewhat stiffly. At least Mendonça’s English was near perfect.

“Percival! May I call you Percy?”

This was permitted with another stiff nod.

“Good, good! I myself am from New York. Queens! Twenty years in your great country of America. So… I hear you want to go to Nova Godói?”

“Yes. Although it seems that it may be difficult.”

“No, not at all!” cried Mendonça. “It’s a long journey, yes. And Nova Godói isn’t a real town, a public town, that is. It’s way up there in the forest. Off limits to outsiders. They’re not friendly. Not friendly.”

“I’m not in need of friends,” said the naturalist. “I won’t bother anyone. If there are problems, I can pay. You see, I’m on the trail of the Queen Beatrice. Are you familiar with it?”

Mendonça scrunched his face up in puzzlement. “No.”

“No? It’s the rarest butterfly in the world. Only one specimen was ever collected—it’s now in the British Museum, specimen number 75935A1901.” His voice took on a reverent tone as he recited the number. “Everyone assumes it’s extinct… but I have reason to believe it’s not. You see—” he was now waxing eloquent on his subject—“from what my research tells me, the Nova Godói crater is a unique ecosystem, with special conditions all its own. The butterfly lived there and nowhere else. And that crater hasn’t seen a professional lepidopterist since the Second World War! So what do you expect? Of course no more have been sighted—because no entomologist has been there to see one! But now there is: me.”

He fumbled in his pack and extracted a laminated photograph, showing a small brown butterfly pinned to a white card, with writing below it.

Mendonça peered at the image. “That is the Queen Beatrice?”

“Isn’t it magnificent?”

“Esplêndido. Now we must talk about expense.”

“That’s the specimen in the British Museum. You can see it’s sadly faded. The original is said to have a rich mahogany color.”

“About the expense,” continued Mendonça.

“Yes, yes. How much?”

“Three thousand reals,” said Mendonça, trying to keep his voice nonchalant. “That includes four days. Plus cost of food and supplies.”

“On top of the boat rental? Hmm. Well, if that’s what it costs, that’s what it costs.”

“All up front,” he added quickly.

A pause. “Half and half.”

“Two thousand up front, a thousand when we arrive.”

“Well, all right.”

“When do we leave?” Mendonça asked.

The naturalist looked surprised. “Right now, of course.” He began counting out the money.

The naturalist sat in the bow with his backpack, reading a book by Vladimir Nabokov, while Mendonça loaded the boat with a cooler of food, along with dry foodstuffs, a tent, sleeping bags, and his own modest kit bag containing a change of clothes.

In no time they were heading upstream, Mendonça at the tiller, the skiff cutting a creamy wake through the brown water. It was already late morning and Mendonça was thinking that they could reach the last town before the forest by nightfall. While there was no lodging there, they could at least get dinner and—especially—cold beer at a local fornecimento. They could camp in a field by the river. And there, he hoped to God, he could find out from someone how to get up the final leg of the Rio Itajaí do Sul to Nova Godói, a place that in truth he had never been to, although he had heard plenty of rumors about it.

As the boat moved up the river, passing various fishermen and river travelers, a nice breeze came over the water, cooling them and keeping away the mosquitoes. They passed the last few houses of Alsdorf, green fields coming into view, some planted with crops, others pastures for cattle. Everything was very neat and tended; that was how things were in southern Brazil. Not like chaotic, criminal-ridden Rio de Janeiro.

The naturalist put down his book. “Have you been to Nova Godói?” he asked pleasantly.

“Well, not exactly,” said Mendonça. “But I know how to get there, of course.”

“What do you know about the place?”

Mendonça gave a little laugh, to cover up his nervousness. He’d been afraid the man might start asking questions like this. While he didn’t believe half the rumors he’d heard, he didn’t want to frighten a customer off.

“I’ve heard some things.” Mendonça shook his head, steering the boat past a group of fishermen hauling in a net.

“How many people live there?”

“I don’t know. It’s not a real town, like I said. It’s on an old tobacco plantation, private property, closed to the public. It’s a German colony of the kind that used to exist all around here, only much more remote.”

“And it used to be a tobacco plantation?”

“Yes. Tobacco is one of our biggest agricultural products,” said Mendonça proudly. To underscore this he removed a pair of cigars from his pocket, offering one to the naturalist.

“No, thank you. I don’t smoke coffin nails.”

“Ha, ha,” said Mendonça, lighting his up. “You are funny.” He puffed. “Tobacco. The plantation was abandoned in the 1930s. After the war, Germans arrived and a small settlement sprang up. They live up there and hardly ever come to town. The Germans down here don’t like them, say they’re Nazis.” Mendonça laughed heartily.

“But you don’t believe it.”

“Here in Brazil, people think they see Nazis everywhere. It’s a national pastime. If there are five old Germans in a town, everyone says, They must be Nazis. No—the people of Nova Godói just keep to themselves, that’s all. They are like a… what is the word?… like a cult. Outsiders not welcome. Not welcome at all.”

Another big puff of cigar smoke, then another, leaving two clouds drifting behind the boat.

“Some people seem to think the murders in Alsdorf originate from Nova Godói,” the naturalist said, offhandedly.

“Murders? Oh, you speak of the rumors going around town. People here are so provincial. You ask around in any town in Brazil, and they’ll tell you the next town is all bad people. I lived in Queens, so I don’t fall for that talk.” He laughed again, making light of the rumors. He was surprised the naturalist had picked up as much as he had. No point in spooking the man until he had collected his final thousand.

“How about the other rumor? You know—that everyone up there in Nova Godói are twins?”

At this, Mendonça froze. He had heard that rumor, but it was a deep one, only whispered about. How in the world had the naturalist heard of it?

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

“Surely you do. They say the town is freakishly populated with twins, mostly identical. They say there have been experiments, genetic experiments. Horrible genetic experiments.”

“Where did you hear this?”

“In a beer hall.”

That seemed improbable. Mendonça felt a small chill. This naturalist was beginning to give him the creeps. “No, I don’t know anything about that. It’s not true.” He cast about, hoping to change the subject. “There’s an old ruin up there, though. A fort. Do you know the history of that?”

“No.”

“It was built by the Portuguese in the late seventeenth century.” Among many of his other jobs, Mendonça drove a tour bus in Blumenau; he knew almost everything. “A group of Franciscan missionaries built a monastery on an island in the middle of the Godói crater lake and converted the Aweikoma Indians. Or at least they thought they did!” He gave a belly laugh. “One day the Indians rose up. They were tired of taking care of the monks’ gardens. Killed them all. So the Portuguese military moved in, turned the monastery into a fortress, killed off or drove away the Indians. And when there were no more Indians, the soldiers left. Later, it was turned into a plantation.”

“Why are there so many Germans in this region?” the naturalist asked.

“In 1850, the Brazilian government started a program of German colonization. You know about that? Germany was overcrowded and nobody had any land, and Brazil had land that needed settling. So Brazil offered any Germans who wanted to come free land in remote areas of the country. That’s how Blumenau was settled, along with Alsdorf, Joinville, and several other cities in Santa Catarina. Thirty, maybe forty percent of our citizens here are of German descent.”

“That is most interesting.”

“Yes. The colonies were so isolated that they developed completely along German lines, with German language, architecture, culture—everything. That all changed completely in 1942, of course.”

“What happened?”

“That is when Brazil declared war on Germany.”

“I never knew that.”

“Very few do. We joined with the Americans in World War Two. Brazil made it a law that these German colonists had to learn Portuguese and become Brazilian. Most of them did, but some in the remote areas did not. And a lot of Germans left Brazil to go back to Germany and fight for the Nazis. And then some came running back again, to hide from the Nuremberg courts. Or so people say. But that was a long time ago. They are all gone now. As we say in Portuguese, água debaixo da ponte: water under the bridge.”

“No Nazis in Nova Godói?” The naturalist almost sounded disappointed.

Mendonça shook his head vigorously. “No, no! That’s all a myth!” He underscored that with another series of vigorous puffs before jettisoning the chewed cigar stump overboard. Of course, the rumors about Nova Godói never seemed to end, all sorts of ridiculous, superstitious nonsense. But Mendonça had lived twenty years in Queens. He had seen the world. He knew the difference between rumor and fact.

The boat continued on at a steady pace, the fields now disappearing completely, the araucaria forest closing in, casting a pall of darkness over the brown river. And despite having lived in Queens, Mendonça felt a distinct chill of fear creep down his spine.