5
THE DRAMA OF THE FROST
—by—
Monteiro Lobato.
Translated by Joseph Eugene Agan.
June. A frosty morning. The vegetation shrunken
mold. On all the leaves the embroidery of diamonds
with which the dew adorns them.
Shivering ‘‘colonos’’ tramp along toward the farm with a curl of smoke about their mouths.
Cold. The cold of frost, the kind that kills the little birds and ices our bones.
We had come out early to see the coffee trees and come to a halt on the Peak, the highest point on the "fazenda”. The major turned toward the sea of coffee rolling before our eyes and exclaimed with a sweeping gesture:
“All my work, look!”
I looked. I looked and understood his pride, feeling proud also of such a countryman. That pioneer was a atrative force, one of those that ennoble the human race.
“When I bought this land, it was all virgin forest, every single inch of it. I cleared, I burned, I made roads, levelled knolls, I put up fences, I constructed bridges, I built houses, I provided pastures, | planted coffee—I did everything. I worked like a negro slave for four long years. But I won. The ‘fazenda’ is perfect, look!”
I looked. I saw a sea of coffee rolling over the breast
of the land and standing firm in long, straight files. Not
a single defect. It was an army on the eve of a battle
but yet untried. It would only go into action the next
year. Up to that time the first fruits had been little more
than skirmishes of harvests. And the major, the supreme
chief of the green army by him cultivated, disciplined,
drilled for the decisive battle of the first large harvest
which frees the planter from the burdens assumed dur-
ing the years of preparation, had that look of pride which
shines in the face ot a fathér whose sons do not shame their
birth.
The Paulista farmer is something worth while in
the world. His energy creates. Each plantation is a
victory over the stubborn ferocity of the elements united
in the defense of aggrieved virginity. The effort of this
plant was never sung by poets but there is many an epic
that is not so fine as that of these heroes of silent labor.
To make a plantation out of nothing is a formidable
fear. To alter the order of nature, to conquer her, to
impose one’s will upon her, to canal her forces in accord
with a preconceived plan, to defeat the enraged forest,
to discipline the workers, to break the strength of pests—
a battle without truce, without end, and without a mo-
ment of repose, and what is worse, without the full cer-
tainty of victory. He often falls in the clutches of his
creditor, the usurer who advanced him a few dear loans
and remained safe in the city with his arms crossed on
his mortgage and awaiting the opportune moment to
swoop down on his prey like a hawk.
“Really, major, this overcomes me. It is before such spectacles as this that I see the pettiness of those back there who live like parasites on the farmer's labor.”
“You are right. I did everything, but the greatest
gain is not mine. I have a voracious partner who sucks
from me one forth of the production: the government.
Then the railroads bleed me, but I do not complain about
these for they give me something in return. I will not
say the same. for the sharks of commerce, that swarm
of middlemen that begins in Santos, the drone, and fol-
lows in a chain to the American roaster. It makes no
difference to me. The coffee supports everyone, even
the beastly producer....." he concluded joking.
We spurred the animals to a trot and rode on with our eyes fixed on the intervening coffee trees. Without a defect in formation the parallels of green swept on and on accompanying the roll of the land, until they were confounded in a single mass in the distance. It was a veritable work of art in which man, placing himself above nature, gave it the rythm of symetry.
“Nevertheless,” continued the major, "the battle
is not won. I contracted debts; the plantation is mort-
gaged to French Jews. If the harvest I count on does not
come, I will be one more man conquered by the fatality
of things. Nature, once subjugated, is a mother; but the
creditor is always an executioner.”
Here and there, lost in the green wave, surviving peroba trees thrust up their twisted trunks as though galvanized by fire in a horrible convulsion of pain. Poor trees! What a sad fate to be themselves deprived of the comrades of their old life and cut off in the creeping green of the coffee, like captive queens dragged at the chariot of the conqueror on his day of triumph. Orphans of the native forest, how you must weep for the comradeship of days gone by. See them. They haven’t the grace, the brilliant green tops of those that are born in the open fields. Their branches, fashioned for the close growth of the forest, now seem ridiculous and their height, in such disproportion to their foliage, provokes a laugh. They are like women undressed in public, pale with shame, and not knowing what part of the body to hide. The excessive amount of air stupefies them and the excess of light martyrizes them—accustomed as they are to a small shade and the somnolent shadows of a millinear habitat.
