The Green Brain

Начало книги

HE LOOKED pretty much like the bastard offspring of a Guarani Indio and some backwoods farmer’s daughter, some sertanista who’d tried to forget her enslavement to the encomendero system by “eating the iron”—which is what they call lovemaking through the grill of a consul gate.

The type-look was almost perfect except when he forgot himself while passing through one of the deeper jungle glades.

His skin tended to shade down to green then, fading him into the background of leaves and vines, giving a ghostly disembodiment to the mud-gray shirt and ragged trousers, the inevitable frayed straw hat and rawhide sandals soled with pieces cut from worn tires.

Such lapses grew less and less frequent the farther he emerged from the Parana headwaters, the sertao hinterland of Goyaz where men with his bang-cut black hair and glittering dark eyes were common.

By the time he reached bandeirantes country, he had achieved almost perfect control over the chameleon effect.

Читать дальше →