Iracema
Legacy Name: Iracema

Iracema's love was like the calm stream of water that leads to the farthest corners of the earth ─ it seemed to lead to the heart of an immense darkness.



Far beyond the shore, the ever wider riverbed of the Amazonas flowed through the immensity of wooded islands.

It was as easy to get lost in that river as it was in the desert. You could spend the whole day looking for the native village in the riverside, until you believe you have been forever separated from everything you have ever known.

The long stretches of river extended, lone, to the darkness of distances shrouded in shadows. A course of unbroken water, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. There was no joy in the sunlight.

Tribes of warriors lived in those woods, and the mere idea of the lethal confrontations used to wake the colonizers at night, as the sound of the wind in the trees was mistaken by arrows cutting the skies.

In the core of that forest was born Iracema, the daughter of the Pajé Araquém of the tabajara tribe in the Amazon. She was the first woman born after eight sons. The ancestral spirits of the tribe ordain the daughter of a pajé must be the human represented expression for cure and spirituality.

However, Iracema was born an exception. She was first and foremost a warrior. The agility with the archery, a strategist mind, the knowledge of the land, the mastery of rhetoric.

Naturally in short time she became the tabajaras leadership in the intertribal wars and in the colonization conflits that would come after.

By fascination or fear, her name and the name of her tribe would hover over the forest and its inhabitants as the herald of war and its persistence for years on end.



This was a silent and contemplative day that in no way remembered peace. The air was hot, heavy, inert. The tabajaras were bringing prisoners to the village, where they would stay without term. They were received to the sound of flutes made with the bones of other enemies, killed in the same way that the new prisoners will be.

Iracema marched the front line, bow and arrow on her back. She had tied to her belt a white man of no more than 30, whose comrades called Martin.

They were taken to an improvised hut in the core of the woods. Iracema would be in charge of watching the prisoners in the early mornings until the ritual.

During the first days Martin would try speaking to her ─ just as a desperate attempt to kill boredom. She remained in silence for so long he came to believe she didn't speak the common language.

But in the tenth day she put a dagger in his throat, merciless:

"White man quiet!"

Not intimidated by her combative posture, he handed her a small cyan colored stone, typical of Amazon ─ at that time the word "Turquoise" resounded in the air among the conquerors, underlying, reverenced, impenetrable.

Her eyes twinkled red behind her lively curiosity. He stared as immobile as the forest around him, afraid of the outcome of that decision, which he still debated intimately. But she accepted that gesture of conciliation, and the abyss that broke their hearts apart fade away for the first time.

She went to the huts many other times as the guardian of the prisioners. Her impetuous attitude made her contradict the principles of her tribe and relate to a white man, ignoring the tragic aspect of their future.

Many moons passed, the nights had became darker, the air hotter. The ritual would take place in the summer solstice.

Iracema walked amidst the torches that framed the path to the pajé's house. She was strangely unconnected to everything that night, her mind only cared for interceding for Martin's life.

With much formalism, in a serious voice, the pajé said: "the white men knows no god, so they see no honor in death. It's the place of gods to judge. What's to be done will be done."

Iracema was calm, as if for now she was done with all emotions. When she saw Martin in front of her in the forest, however, she came to herself; she saw fear in its true proportion.

As for him, he had conquered at least one soul in the world that was not tainted by the defense of self-interest. She had been his attachment to the earth while he had been in this unsubstantial state that is waiting for death. As unsubstantial as his quest for richness in Amazon this whole time, under distant orders from the continent, that ignored the savagery of living and dying in America.

There was no god below the equator line for the white man. That was so true as everything in his life ─ and death. Thus, in his last moments on earth, Martin prayed to Iracema's gods, so they would meet again in another life.

After all, they should have the same god, as they had the same heart.