Juvenal Suárez was the youngest of five brothers, and he had watched all four of his siblings fall prey to the fevers of measles. ‘Mu unteva,’ he’d heard his last brother say, and watched him dissipate just like that, the way flowers or clouds fade away. At that time there were fewer than fifteen members of the Nataibo tribe and only Juvenal seemed to understand that the words held a sad prophecy. A few weeks earlier, an expedition of garimpeiros in search of gold had stumbled upon their Amazon village, and from that moment on the Native population had fallen ill at an alarming rate. ‘Mu unteva,’ his brother had said, proud that none of the garimpeiros could understand what his words meant. They were words that Juvenal Suárez would translate two years later for Von Mühlfeld as ‘this is as far as we come’, speaking a brittle Spanish he had learned years before from the rubber tappers whose arrival had marked the beginning of the end for the Nataibo people. He’d been only twelve or thirteen years old then, and he had never seen a white man. He couldn’t know, then, what the older people remembered: that those men were demons, thirsty for rubber and blood, capable of unspeakable atrocities. Much less could he know that during those years, on a distant continent, the world was laying its bets in a war that would destroy all but the heavens. Even the Nataibo, who had pursued isolation and privacy with such zeal, were not safe from that vile war. It was 1942 or 1943, and, when the Japanese captured the Southeast Asian rubber plantations, the Allied forces had been obliged to return to the route that a century before had led thousands of men into the nightmare of an unprecedented hell. Hope and a lust for victory were returning then, and the Amazon’s waters were witness to the return of a monster everyone thought had been defeated. That was when a lost expedition of rubber tappers came into contact with the tribe, and Juvenal Suárez first saw the pale and pinkish skin of white men. In those days his name was not Juvenal Suárez, and if not for the old folks’ memories he wouldn’t even have known that they were men. In the following months he would learn it the hard way, on those rubber plantations where slavery came wrapped in the whisper of a strange language. That would be where he first heard the Spanish language that later, over the course of his life, he would learn and then renounce.

All that would remain of those years was a handful of words and the memory of the great wave of malaria that washed over them a few weeks after the rubber tappers’ arrival. That first epidemic, furtive and deadly, would take both his parents and one brother. Even more important, it took away the illusion of solitude and isolation that had insulated the tribe up to then. So when the white men exhausted all the rubber in the region and finally set them free, the Nataibo decided to set off upriver in search of the peace that had now become synonymous with survival. After four days, they found a spot at a bend in the Tigre River that seemed remote enough, and they decided that was where they would seek the tranquility the rubber tappers had stolen. And they found it, or at least they thought so.