Mad Maria     by Márcio de Souza, Translated by Thomas Colchie Original title: Mad Maria Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Avon Pub. Date: October 1985 Format: Paperback, 390 pages ISBN: 0380898713 List Price: $4.95, £4.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £4.95 Published by Avon Pub. Date: 1986 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback Not available for ordering

Márcio Souza’s action-packed novel revolves around the true events surrounding the construction of the infamous Madeira-Mamoré railroad on the Bolivian/Brazilian border in the early years of the twentieth century. Much of the international labour force brought to the remote Amazonian region to work on the railway perished from the effects of disease and the appalling conditions in which they were forced to work. With tragic irony, when the railroad was finally constructed it almost immediately became obsolete due to the collapse of the Brazilian rubber market.

Souza’s narrative takes the reader back and forth between the construction of the railroad in the jungle, and the political and economic manoeuvrings in Rio de Janeiro which are behind the project. The novel features several historical figures involved in the affair, such as the Brazilian statesman Ruy Barbosa, and the North American industrialist Percival Farquhar, and gives the reader a vivid picture of the scramble by European and North American capitalists to exploit the potentially huge profits to be made in Brazil at the time.

Much of the novel centres on the savage infighting between the railway construction workers, many of whom have been hired under false pretences, and the cynical efforts of their exploitative employers to drive the project on. Excessive heat, torrential rain, and a multitude of ferocious insects all combine in a ‘green hell’ to reduce the railway’s construction to a snail’s pace. Yet as Souza demonstrates, the imported foreign workers are not the only victims of this venture, for local indigenous people are also savagely swept away, mere obstacles in the path of the locomotive, (the ‘Mad Maria’ of the title) which symbolizes ‘progress’. Their plight is epitomised by one native Indian who, despite being horribly mutilated by railroad workers, throws in his lot with the Europeans, only to be subsequently reduced to the role of a circus attraction. Published in 1980, Mad Maria represents a heartfelt indictment of the author’s concern over the destruction of the Amazonian environment and the human greed which allows it to take place.

The civilized were a difficult tribe to understand. From the top of a tall tree, invisible among the web of vines, he had seen everything and was frightened — not by the rifle shots but by the furious outbursts of hatred that the whites spewed forth echoing through the jungle. It also troubled him that, even though the light of life seemed to be extinguished so often among the civilized, they possessed no ceremony with which to treat their dead. It was as if only the very act of bringing death to themselves constituted a ceremony, and this he found difficult to accept. The civilized were powerful, nonetheless: they could build great constructions and they always had food, though they did no planting or hunting. Yet every day he felt obliged to withdraw in terror, because the intensity of hatred issuing from the whites was so painful to behold. He watched the civilized who had wrestled in the mud now get up and walk off in bitter silence. An older one of them, who was apparently their chief, came walking beneath him together with another, as the two were lost in conversation. What they were saying to each other was not difficult for him to understand; he had already managed to learn to speak many of their words. This, despite the fact that the civilized used a number of different languages; for he had observed that some among them did not even understand the language of their chief. 28-9