editor
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Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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 Posted: Tue Dec 14, 2004 3:40 pm Post subject: Brazil |
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WELCOME!
Brazil:
The Walrus
Magazine Subscription
Rough Justice
Illegal diamonds are the prize. But death in the Amazon rainforest is the price, as Indians, Brazilian miners, and a mysterious third party fight over the richest deposit in South America.
By Shawn Blore
November, 2004
| Quote: | Night falls early in the Amazon. Through the darkness, the headlights of my little white rental car trace the outline of elaborate marble tombs. Close in front of me, the beams illuminate a solitary row of wooden crosses, the names stencilled in black. Fifteen of the graves have only numbers.
This is the last earthly resting place of twenty-nine diamond miners, killed on Arpil 7, 2004, by warriors of the Cinta Larga Indian tribe. Nearby, I see a wooden plaque on which someone has inscribed a miner's epitaph:
In the game of life we all place wagers.
Of all that I had, I bet the most
important -- life -- and lost...
I won the most valuable of all rewards --
the kingdom of God.
(-- p. 62 |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=1742#1742
Last edited by editor on Tue Mar 10, 2009 8:53 am; edited 5 times in total |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 9:02 am Post subject: |
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Brazil
Paperback
By John Updike
Based on the tragic romance of Tristan and Iseult
| Quote: | | Uncle Donaciano rooted his ebony-and-ivory cigarette holder - empty, since he was trying to stop smoking, and used the holder to pacify his habit - deeper in the side of his mouth, giving his lips a sage and sinister twist. His lips were thin but ruddy, as if freshly scrubbed. "The hands of the many would tear everything up," he explained. "Even so, the Rio of my youth has been turned into one big slum. So beautiful it was, so amusing - the tram along the Botanical Garden, the cable car to Santa Teresa, the Casino where Bing Crosby would come and sing. So quaint and charming, like an exotic piece of Venetian glass, unique. Now, in the shell of its beauty, it has gone rotten. There is no air, there is no silence. All the time, traffic noise and music, the music of the brainless samba; everywhere, the stink of human secretians. Everywhere, bodum." (From iii. Uncle Donaciano, p. 23) |
| Quote: | | The couple held hands stickily in the growing heat, dozing alternately. Tristao had spent the night stretched on a bench in the bus terminal, fearful of being robbed, his arms entwined with his knapsack straps, his bundle of cruzeiros tucked against his lower belly, behind the pocket of his bathing shorts where the razor blade waited to be unsheathed. The terminal lights were bright and a small local group seemed to use it as a gaming club, slapping down domino tiles and shrieking as they rolled the dice, playing bozo. He had slept for ten minutes at a time and kept waking as the straps cut off circulation in his arms. Isabel had lain awake in her bleak room at the end of the gently curved hall, listening to the tall thin manservant and his fat wife slowly settle to sleep. She stared at the angles of the room she had adorned with a college student's posters and records and books, books whose broad spines stared back at her in the moonlight, reproaching her with desertion. At five she rose and stealthily packed two blue suitcases, made her way down the hall, and trusted that the security man in the lobby would be stretched out behind his desk asleep. With her heavy two suitcases on the streets she looked like one more hopeful immigrant to the capital, come to find government work, rather than a fleeing child of privilege. She took a taxi to the bus terminal, where whe shared with Tristao a cheap breakfast of coffee and pupunha and bread and cheese. This time as a couple, they promised each other, they would be more economical than in Sao Paulo. (From XV. Goias, at pgs. 111-112) |
| Quote: | | For some hours they shared the rocking vehicle, its hard floor softened by a strewing of old sugar canes, with three other passengers, mestizo garimpeiros or parasites upon the gamimpeiros, who marvelled at Isabel's bright white hair and her two blue suitcases, as weighty with clothes as if loaded with stones. They assumed she was going to work on the mountain as a prostitute and that Tristao was a curious cross between her slave and her protector. They joked about her price, speculating that the arrival of such luxuries betokened an upturn in the luck of Serra do Buraco. There advances became sufficiently physical - a dark hand reaching to caress the shimmering faint fur on her forearm - that Tristao seized the nearest of the three and struck him a blow in the face, as calmly as if tightening a bolt on a fusca engine support. The man mumblingly called him nigger and cur but slumped back among his two companions, caressing the bloody gum above a tooth the blow had loosened. He had lost several front teeth already, to combat or decay. "We are going to test our luck with the gods of gold," Tristao explained, as if to apologize. She showed them the folded papers of the claim. (From XVI. The Mine, at pgs. 123-124) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2803#2803
Last edited by editor on Tue Mar 10, 2009 10:44 am; edited 6 times in total |
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