Reluctantly we move into the last day of the Chinese New Year holidays- doors slamming, wind howling, 'huff puff I will blow your house down' Sunday. Over Margot & the Nuclear So & Sos (Thanks Mary - I dig them! ) I make a vain attempt to finish up all the leftover CNY goodies for breakfast. Assignments are piling up, time to pull up my socks, February is here. My handphone sounds and it's Davidof reminding me that my library books are due today. Senor Vivo and The Coca Lord, I didn't think it was as good as the first book in De Berniere's south american trilogy, The War of Don Emmanuel Nether Parts but a delightful read nonetheless.

Lazaro passed in his canoe through a shanty town where the destitute migrant workers , the dispossessed , the greedy optimists were mining for gold. In this tropical inferno, there were no trees.

Lazaro missed the trees. He walked with his hideousness in a landscape made hideous by excavation and denudation. In the great pits men were working like termites, carrying their pails of mud up the sliding, glistening faces of these arbitrary holes in the earth. They were burrowing amid the heaps of spoil, slaving by the river, poisoning both it and themselves with the mercury of the separation process.

Downstream, the indians were dying from eating fish poisoned with the metal, and the fish themselves were dying of it also. The once black waters were turning light brown, and the rains were washing the deforested banks into the riverbed. Nowadays the cablocos further downstream found that when the floods receded they were left not with virgin forest floor but with an ocean of sucking clay that set hard and then cracked.

In the town at night the skeletal and rachitic workforce took their recreation amongst the corrugated iron and the middens. Indian girls with drooping breasts and malnourished stomachs , with dead eyes and the assurance of an early grave, gave away their favours to drunks in return for home-made rum and a few centavos. As they died of syphilis and influenza, their babies abandoned by the river to what wild animals were left, and new girls arrived who had been rounded up by armed canoes or bribed with promises of beads and powerful husbands wearing cloaks made out of pelts of pure black jaguars. After many rapes and beatings the girls would learn that they could suffer the present and forget the past with a bottle to their lips and a man with glassy eyes and a tubercular cough heaving between their thighs.