EXCERPT While the skipper of the barge, threading the tiller through his hands, sent it to port and starboard to avoid the twists and turns of the current, Vicente Mucuin, leaning on the batelão’s bow, gazing sceptically at the unwinding coastline that spread out like a rosary of poetic spots surrounded by greenish patches of muri, Inga trees, embaúbas and taxis…. Since he could not find Gertrudes in Manacapuru, he would follow the beaten track to Maués—the fiefdom of Colonel Tito. It was his land, that dead little town, by the river, slack and vegetating like a frail araçaí tree in the middle of the igapó.…