Into Darkness: Chapter 2, Section(s): 2

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   I never realized what I’d had in that raw village until I was already gone. As a child growing up I had an urge to leave and explore the world around me that would not be calmed by the fear I had in my heart of having to walk into the rainforest one day very soon. That desire in my body split me in two, on one end of the spectrum I was a boy filled with excitement, a boy who was ready to see what else the world had to offer him but on the other end I was fragile and weak, I could imagine great things but when it came time for the moment to fulfill those dreams I would falter like the statue of Ozymandias. It’s one of those unseen things we chase in life. We seem to get the itch every so often. Even when things go right, some of us can’t stand still. We see the wind and we want to take flight, never to look back on the life we had, hoping to create a better future which surely won’t come. Even when we know just moving won’t solve our problems, we venture on because maybe there will be something in that new mysterious place where we find the seeds of our potential happiness for it to grow into a beautiful figure that could make the whole world burst into tears when seen.

   Since my diagnosis I’ve done a lot of reflection on my time in Qurituba. It’s made me think and think and think and think about certain things that happened. I can recall the look in my mother’s eyes when she came back from the public execution of her brother for stealing food. When they burned my back with the tips of their steel prods in order to get me to tell them what the elders were planning and who were behind the attacks on them. I can remember when they castrated my youngest brother, Edinson, for trying to court one of the men’s visiting daughters. I can also remember when my permanently drunk father shot Mr. Forde in the back of the shoulder instead of the head during a failed assassination attempt one night.

   I don’t like to replay these moments and grizzly images in my head but I can’t stop myself. When my eyes close my mentality breaks and my mind opens up the door that I had kept closed all day. There’s just something inside me that needs me to convince myself that I could have done something and that it’s my fault. I can’t live with the fact that I was never at fault for any of these instances in life because even if that were true I still feel like I could have done something to change the outcome of many lives. I was present for all of those moments. I saw them and I stood silent. I saw Forde react to the gun shot that grazed his body with a brutal stab into my father’s throat. I watched him slowly turn that rusty knife as if he were fine-tuning his pocket watch. They stared at each other for a moment and my father fell. Forde just snickered and walked away. I was outside looking in horror as my father tried to get up but the blood loss was just too much. He managed to force himself upwards onto the seat Mr. Forde had been sitting in only to look outside the window, at me, and then slump his head down for one final time.

   To this day, I’ll always remember the look in Forde’s eyes as he twisted that knife slowly, like the rotation of the earth around the sun, in my father’s body. The moment couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds but for me, it is still happening.

   Just like I feared my passage into the jungle alone, I feared these czar’s like the plague. While I kept doors open for them and bowed when crossing them in the village my brother’s would orchestrate foolish plans of insurrection. They tried to get me to join them, to fight for a cause that actually meant something but I just couldn’t find that little piece of bravery they were all born with inside of me. The invaders must leave and we must prosper, the invaders must die and we must dance on their ashes. They sang, they roared this phrase during meetings while I stood in the back of the crowds, mumbling the rhythm while my brothers turned into immortal leaders. 

   Maybe that’s why I had my itch. I knew that I wasn’t good enough to call myself a member of this tribe, a member of my family, but my brothers would try so hard to dig up that piece of me hidden from myself and express it to the world. At best, I would end up a loser like my father. A symbol for everything that I detested in human beings he was. I wasn’t afraid of not finding what I wanted from life but I was afraid of becoming what I was likely to become if I stayed there. For some of us, that’s why we travel in search of unseen and unknown dreams and goals that fade just as quickly as the morning fog in the Fall. It’s not a new adventure we’re hoping to find; instead we search for a sense of belonging, hoping to cultivate it in a new land.

   I had that feeling from the first day I learned to think for myself. Not in the best interests of the tribe but for myself. I suffered as a result of this new way of thinking. My father protested any inkling of my wanting to leave with beatings that could make the evilest of men repent their sins. I knew I wanted to leave but I didn’t know how. All I had ever known in my life was rainforest and mountains to the west, rainforest to the north, nothing to the south and more rainforest and ocean as far as the all Seeing Eye can see to the west. I was trapped and besides, what was I going to do if I did leave? I was afraid to venture into the rainforest for a fortnight. There was no way I was going to be able to get past that and all of its unknown obstacles and end up somewhere else. Even by some sort of miracle, I would still be lost and without any way to communicate with other people. It was always a distant dream. Something I said I would love to do but would never actually follow through with. That was until I had seen the destruction Qurituba would go through in 10 years. I realized that if I didn’t leave then I would end up being one with the soil and eventually turn into a tree.  

   From what I can recall it has been some 50 years since I left Qurituba. If I do recall correctly the Friends of Charleston had come soon after the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914. I’ve been able to piece together certain historical moments from my time in this new country through reading and research and I’ve logically concluded certain things occurred at certain times but then again, I could be forcing an obsolete jigsaw piece into an incomplete puzzle that makes no sense. We knew they were a small American company. What we didn’t know was the extent of how much of South America they wanted to control with their winding railroads and ecological destruction. They weren’t just focused on creating better trade routes, but rather, they were focused on making their company and America a predominant force in Latin America and abroad. If the Friends of Charleston were a small American company than they certainly exemplified the ideals of America at the time and now with their thirst for more power thinly veiled behind rhetoric of atonement and security.

   There’s one thing that you should never do when it comes to dealing with native peoples, though: Destroy their land. It’s something the company failed to recognize quickly enough when they came to our village and it’s what caused us to hold out so long. Even though they had more weapons and stronger men, the land that we lived on for thousands of years was an extension of every single one of our people’s bodies. The situation in Vietnam reminds of the struggle we trudged through in Qurituba. The combatants are similar and the odds are heavily stacked against the southern Vietnamese people yet they still have found ways to be the pebble in the shoe of America. Try as they might, the pebble eludes escape when banged against the ground as we did when hunting enemies in the jungles. We work with what we have in the jungle whereas modernity has caused humans to conquer it rather than finding ways of integrating it into their lives. For us and many other indigenous people across the world we viewed, and still do, the land as divine providence. We get our food from it, our shelter from it, our spirituality from it, everything in our lives revolves around what the land bears for us and what the sky decides for us. The complete opposite of what happens here in the United States where we applaud bigger and grander infrastructures that take away from the true beauty this world has breathed upon us. The differences between my people and the people of today in America are plenty and so vast that even Moses couldn’t split it further apart. You see, the way I view it, we are here to serve our God’s and our land. That’s something the Friends of Charleston never understood and maybe that’s why it took them 10 years to actually get a sense of “we might actually be defeating these guys,” even though they were much more prepared to fight a long bloody battle than we ever could have been.

   After spending the last 30 years in America I’ve come to certain conclusions about them, and about this country, that played a role ideologically on that company. I don’t quite know if they are feasible or even make any sense but it’s what I truly believe in my heart and my mind. I’ve thought these theories over in my mind sober and drunk and they’ve all made sense to me. This wasn’t about creating a super-powered railroad network that potentially make the United States stronger economically and therefore stronger in every other international arena but this was a belief and decision made by the Friends of Charleston because it had been ingrained in them that this was what was supposed to happen. I can conclude that this was just destiny, a destiny that only a handful of people in the world knew then and maybe only I do now. I’ve never tried to bring up Qurituba to anyone until now because I’ve always felt that it wasn’t right and that I wouldn’t be believed—mostly because I wouldn’t be believed and I had no evidence to back this up. The funny thing about all of this is when I had recently fled the village I tried to go back but I couldn’t find my way through that hellish jungle. I tried for years, strategizing with acquaintances in the bars of Calí, on the streets of Quito and on the banks of Iquitos. Never, though, was I able to penetrate the rainforest like my ancestors had so long before and the elders had whenever they needed to travel from village to village using only the ground as their map and the sky as their seeing eye. It’s yet another reminder that I wasn’t really a native to that village or the jungle but rather I was implanted their as some sort of experiment from the God’s. I was a failed test subject and my reward for failing to provide enough service to my community, to my family and to my village is a never-ending exile that has barred me from even coming near the place I used to call home. In my heart I believe that I deserve this fate because of my inability to assimilate to the ideals of my society at the time and I can’t change that because I’ve never been able to find Qurituba ever since I fled. I can’t help but think that the same people who scathed us with false dreams of prosperity through railroad expansion befell to the same fate after I left. Mr. Forde will always remain a symbol in my mind rather than a real living breathing person who walked this earth and Qurituba will always remain a memory that may have been falsely constructed from my manic mind. If that were so, though, then I’d have to find other explanations for all those memories that seem so real and all the scars that litter my body. It was a dream civilization we created in Qurituba and maybe that’s why they struggled so hard to take it from us. Maybe, just maybe, Qurituba was heaven on earth.     

   It was something else they were searching for and they thought they could have found it in our village. We were isolated so no one really knew much about us. The closest village to us was 30 miles to the south and we only occasionally had the chance of being acquainted with them through trading or drought seasons which forced us to pool resources together in order to survive. Second, I think they thought they were really looking for railroad routes. From my studying of your history books I’ve come to realize that the Portuguese and Spanish had controlled much of the area near my home. To the west was the Portuguese presence in Brasil that still lingers there to this day and the rest of the continent was Spanish territory. The only problem with that was that we had never met any Conquistadors. Ever. I think they were startled to even stumble upon this tiny little village in the remote Amazon of Ecuador. Maybe they saw this as their chance to get something from literally nothing. It was prime land in all honesty and when I fled it took me about six months to find my way out of that jungle. I nearly died on numerous occasions and I can understand how no one, up until their arrival, had ever met us. Lastly, I have never found any documents pertaining to the Friends of Charleston or my village of Qurituba. I’ve been looking for decades and I’ve only found vague terms that sounded like Charleston only to find out it was a small rubber company. A few years back I thought I’d found something on Qurituba only to find out it was about a city in Brasil spelled Curitiba. I’ve come so close to finding out what happened there after I left yet I’ve never found any reference to the 10 years’ war we fought. I’ve never mentioned it to anyone except for you now. I find it hard to believe but I’ve steadily come to the conclusion that everyone died there or that it was a dream. It’s almost impossible to believe that not one single person ever took any notes on what happened. It’s almost as if when they came our village suddenly became encapsulated in an invisible bubble that ensured what happened inside of it would never leak out to the world. And that’s why I’m telling you my story and our history.

    I don’t believe the Friends of Charleston were here to build railroads. Or at least that wasn’t their main ambition when they first started journeying through the then mysterious jungle. They were taking a huge looking for something they had no idea existed or not. They risking certain death but somehow they survived and they found us. I’ve been led to believe that the risk itself, walking into a jungle that even natives were afraid to venture into, helps prove that they weren’t after railroad land but something more ideological. They wanted to find something that couldn’t be touched or seen but rather, felt and imagined because for all of us, those two emotions can create a new world that we had never imagined existed. That itself leaves the world open to revolution and change that can alter history. Were they after that exactly? I’ll never know. I can only guess.    

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