In 1992, two years after torrential rains washed away the tillable earth in one southern region of the Amazon Basin, Mané da Costa Pena discovered the feather. In the years after his discovery, the soil over his small farm and for miles in every direction was scrubbed away. It had begun with the fires, the chain saws, and the government bulldozers. Before that, Mané Pena had wandered the forest like the others—fishing, tapping rubber, and collecting Brazil nuts. One day, in the usually dark forest, he wandered through a strange tunnel of light in which the damp forest humidity seemed to churn in changing colors. At the end of the tunnel, he found himself in this clearing where one of his rubber trees used to be, and this goverment sort hands him some papers and says, “We’ve done the clearing for you, sir. Now it’s all yours, from that tree yonder to that stick yonder.”
“Got nothing on it,” observed Mané.
“Couple of weeks, we’ll send an agronomist ’round. Get you started; show you how to plant. Whole new way of life, Seu Mané. Meantime, if I were you, I’d get some barbed wire, fence it properly. Congratulations. Just sign here.”
The agronomist never did come, but the rains did and the wind and the harsh uncompromising tropical sun. Even Mané’s mud-and-thatch house was eventually washed away. What was uncovered was neither rock nor desert, as some had predicted, but an enormous impenetrable field of some unknown solid substance stretching for millions of acres in all directions. Scientists, supernaturalists, and ET enthusiasts, sporting the old Spielberg rubber masks, flooded in from every corner of the world to walk upon and tap at the smooth, hard surface formerly hidden beneath the primeval forest.
That the primeval forest was not primeval was hardly news to old Mané. He and others had been telling tales of the impossibility of tapping underground water sources for as long as he could remember. Years ago they had even told this to TV reporters when the national network had come over to tape sections of a documentary about the Amazon. The reporters visited Mané’s poor farm—the paltry stubble of manioc in an unweeded and eroding garden—and put him and his family (his second wife and all her children and the younger ones of his previous marriage) on national television. Mané complained awkwardly to the cameras about the underground matacão, or solid plate of rock that always blocked well-diggers. Mané’s old cronies and even Mané himself laughed at the sight of his wrinkled face, eyes dancing about and peering suspiciously into the camera lens. That Mané had said all that in a regional tongue, consonants lost between a toothless grin they could all understand, on real TV seemed to settle the complaint in everyone’s minds, and the reporters, who were used to interviewing illiterate, backward, and superstitious people, filed the videotape under fantástico and let it collect dust until the late 1990s.
There were odd theories about the Matacão, as it became known—that it was the earth’s mantle rising to the surface or the injection of a cement layer by a powerful multinational. It was indeed strange that the Matacão was made of some sort of impenetrable material; had a slick, shiny surface; and seemed to glow in the dark on moonlit nights.
Mané, having discovered the feather, was more fortunate than others who farmed the area and who subsequently lost everything. He had put it this way: “We thought when we came here that we’d farm virgin soil, but her tubes had been tied long ago.”
Mané and others did not have much choice. He and his family accepted the government’s offer to live in low-cost, riverside condominiums built on the edges of the Matacão, but the government condemned those buildings just five years after they were built, and a private real estate company came in and bulldozed them under, replacing them with American franchises wedged between and under exclusive penthouses with heliports and hotels. Tourists stomped over the Matacão, billed as one of the wonders of the world, and it was considered chic to get a tan on the field.
That was when Mané’s feather started to take hold. By now, Mané, his wife and all those children were living in a shack built of construction residue and making a living working on the bulldozing and construction sites along the Matacão. His wife did hand-laundering for hotel guests, while the older children slipped off one by one to odd jobs nearby and as far away as Manaus and Rio de Janeiro.
In the evenings, Mané would wash up and lounge around the street bars, sitting at a table in one of the sidewalk cafes, stroking his ear with his feather and cracking jokes with the other old-timers. The others teased him, calling him “Mané feather,” but the feather, he claimed, was better than smoking or drinking. Of course, it was not as good as sex, but what feather could compete with that? It had worked wonders on his sleepless children and was completely natural. It was like those copper bracelets everyone used for rheumatoid arthritis: if it didn’t help, it sure didn’t hurt.
The second time the national network people came by, having pulled out their decade-old tapes on the same geographical area for a historic foothold of some purposeful and continuing saga, old Mané was again a poor, barefoot regional type on national television with another uncredited statement, this time about the feather, which again would change his life forever. To have one’s life changed forever, three times, amounted in Mané’s mind to being like one of those actors on TV who slipped from soap opera to soap opera and channel to channel, being reincarnated into some new character each time. One story had nothing to do with the other except that the actor was the same. The disjunction of each stage in Mané’s life seemed as divisible as the Matacão and as incomprehensible as the magic of the feather. Still, the feather, Mané concluded, was the only tangible evidence of coherence. Like the remote control and the buttons on his new TV, it made things happen.