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Afuá stopped off with supplies to keep him going. Viega took out timber now and again, and the guard tapped rubber and grew bananas. But the Old Man was just letting Guariba tick over. His real interest at the time was in the next river, the Rio Preto, purchased in the same deal, where he had a rice plantation employing 140 wageworkers.
    It was only when the project on the Rio Preto faltered that Viega turned his attention to Igarapé Guariba. He harvested just one crop of rice and then had his workers plant pasture for cattle. His men cut narrow trails through the forest and savanna and drove the animals to pasture, close to what was then the creek at Guariba. Then he began recruiting fregueses from his land on Afuá.
    It was 1958 when the Viegas finally arrived in Guariba. They built a tile-roofed house on a low bluff at the mouth of the river, and theybrought in their son Chico, a man of imposing bulk, to uphold their law. They built a warehouse to receive forest and agricultural products, a store which, as somebody in this roadless world joked, sold “everything except cars,” and they assembled the single-blade sawmill. Their boats began stopping off with manufactured goods bought on credit from one of the Viegas’ own patrões in the city of Belém, up to seven days by sail across the bay. And after stocking the store, the boats would head off with the contents of the warehouse, making a circuit of the couple’s properties and trading in Macapá on their way back across the estuary.
    Four families moved at first from Viega’s properties on Afuá to Igarapé Guariba. They included Benedito and Nazaré Macedo and their eight children. They built a house near the store and cleared a garden. They planted their first year of bananas and watermelons. They mapped out new rubber trails, and they worked in the forest, hunting, collecting oilseeds, and cutting timber. It was not that different from Afuá. Igarapé Guariba, though, Benedito Macedo remembers, was farto , a land of plenty. There was more timber, as much fish and meat as you could want, and the soil was fertile. The Macedos settled once more into the type of clientelist arrangement that had spread through the Amazon during the nineteenth-century rubber boom and that is still a widespread form of social organization. As their fregueses arrived, the Viegas advanced them materials to build, hunt, and farm. In return, they would sell all the products of their labor only through the Viegas and their agents. Anything these clients needed to purchase, they could find in the store, available on terms of exchange that were monopolistic but not unusually punitive.
    Longtime residents describe the Rio Guariba of the early 1960s as a besteira , a joke, a silly little thing. It was a short and narrow river, probably about 50 to 75 yards wide at its mouth, where it met the Amazon, and shallow and safe enough for children to wade or swim across at low tide. It ended in a waterfall—a feature usually described in the diminutive, a quedazinha , a cachoeirazinha . Hunters would haul their canoes over or around the rocks to arrive in the midst of an open grassy landscape of flooded savanna. Such areas are often dominated by the papyrus-like pirí , from which people in poorer families in Guariba make mats that sell in bundles of ten for R $1 (then U.S. $1) to the Macedos and other local boat owners. Above the waterfall, the pirí formed a dense barrier, a pirizal , in association with aninga , a woodyaroid that can easily stand 6 or 7 feet high. The pirizal was near-stationary, shallow, and entirely dried out in summer, yet residents called it a lake, the lago . 16
    Within a few years of the families’ arriving and the sawmill starting up, it became clear that the valuable resources at the mouth of the river—animal skins and timber particularly—would soon be exhausted. Moreover, the difficulty of communicating among