Read Online The Violent Land by Jorge Amado - Free Book Online Page A

sleep. Over it passed the days and the nights. The summer sun shone above it, the winter rains fell upon it. Its trees were centuries old, an unending green overrunning the mountain, invading the plain, lost in the infinite. It was like a sea that had never been explored, locked in its own mystery. It was like a virgin whose flesh had never known the call of passion. Like a virgin, it was lovely, radiant, young, despite those century-old trunks. Mysterious as the body of a woman that has not as yet been possessed, it, too, was now ardently desired.
    From the forest came the trill of birds on sunny mornings. Summer swallows flew over its tree-tops, and troops of monkeys ran up and down the trees and leaped crazily from bough to bough. Owls hooted by the yellow light of the moon on nights of calm. Their cries were not forebodings of evil, for men had not yet come to the giant wood. Innumerable species of snakes glided noiselessly among the dried leaves, and jaguars yowled frightfully those nights when they were in rut.
    The forest with its age-old trees lay sleeping, and its interlacing lianas, its mire, and its prickly thorns stood guard over it as it slumbered.
    Out of the forest, out of its mystery, fear came to the hearts of men. As they arrived of an afternoon, after having made their way through mud and stream to open a trail, as they stood there face to face with this virginal growth, they were paralyzed with fright. Night came, bringing with it black clouds, heavy with June rains, and for the first time the owl’s hoot was an augury of woe. The weird cry resounded through the forest, awakening the animals; snakes hissed, jaguars howled in their hidden lairs, swallows dropped dead from the bough, and the monkeys took flight. As the tempest fell, ghostly forms awoke. The truth is, they had come with the men, in their wake, along with the axes and the scythes—or can it be that they had dwelt in the forest since the very beginning of time? On this night they awoke: the werewolf and the goblin, the padre’s she-mule, and the fire-breathing ox, the
boi tátá
.
    The men huddled together in fright, for the forest inspired a religious awe. There was no trail here; here were only animals and ghosts. And so they came to a halt, fear in their hearts.
    The tempest broke, lightning rent the skies, thunder crashed as though the deities of the wood were gritting their teeth at the threat that man brought with him. The lightning’s rays illumined the forest from moment to moment, but all that the men could see was the dark green of the trunks as they listened intently to the sounds that reached their ears: the hiss of the fleeing snakes, the yowl of the terror-stricken jaguars, the terrifying voices of those shadowy shapes let loose in the wilderness. That fire which ran along the tops of the tallest boughs, that came without a doubt from the nostrils of the
boi tátá
. And that sound of hoofs which they heard, what was it if not the padre’s she-mule scurrying through the undergrowth, once a beautiful maiden, who, in an access of love, had given herself to the sacrilegious embraces of a priest? They were no longer conscious of the howling of the jaguar. Now it was the ugly cry of the werewolf, a creature half wolf, half man, with enormous claws, and crazed by a mother’s curse. The sinister goblin dance of the
caapora
on its one leg, with its one arm, as it laughed from a face that was cloven in two. There was fear in the hearts of men.
    And the rain fell, in torrents, as though it were the beginning of another Deluge. Here everything was reminiscent of the beginning of the world. Impenetrable and mysterious, ancient as time itself and young as spring, the forest appeared to the eyes of men as the most formidable of ghostly habitations, home and refuge of the werewolf and the goblin. For them an unfathomable immensity. How small they were, there at its feet: frightened little animals! From its depths