(Photo: Mateus in front of a squatter shack on his property, Cf.)

Mateus Cabral is from Sâo Gabriel de Cachoeira, a town of almost 40,000 on the frontier with Venezuela and Colombia. It’s an isolated place that takes a boat ride of four or five days upriver from Manaus to reach. The area around Sâo Gabriel is home to the Kótiria tribe and an army contingent of about 5,000. I met Mateus in Manaus, and from there he guided me on a three-day trip south of the city, into the Amazon,  and we ended up spending more time together afterward.

His niece owns a parcel of land outside Manaus, inland from the Rio Negro, amidst what is still mostly primary forest. Together they are acquiring funding from the state government to develop the plot into a self-reliant community for other Kótiria who have migrated to Manaus but are unhappy in the city. (I’ll go into this further in another post.)

Meteus spoke pretty good English—a result of having lived in the U.S. for six years. As he explained it to me, he was brought first to New Mexico, to work with an anthropologist who was studying the Kótiria’s language. When he arrived he spoke no English. He eventually moved to Denver and returned to Brazil in 2005. This is how he met his fiancé…

Near the end of my time in the U.S., I was staying with a friend in Washington. I would call my girlfriend back in Manaus at the public phone in her building but she was never there. Instead, there was this other woman who would always answer, and after calling a few times and getting her instead, she started keeping me on the phone. She wanted to talk to me. I didn’t really want to talk to her, you know, I want to talk to my girlfriend! But I don’t want to be rude. So I stay on the phone. This happens many times. And she gets me talking for longer and longer. She says one day, I like talking with you: you sound so different from everyone else. You say funny things. “Why are you like that,” she asks. Maybe because I’ve been living in America, I tell her.

She would always laugh when I call. Finally, she says I want to meet you. I think, okay, we can do that. So when I move back to Manaus we go to a party together. It was nice. When I met her I liked the way she was. Because we had talked on the phone so much she didn’t seem strange to me… But I only wanted to be in Manaus a few days. I had to go to my hometown, Sâo Gabriel, and visit my family. She insisted on coming with me because she said liked to travel and wanted to see what Sâo Gabriel is like. We had just met but I said okay. She’d never been any place like that. It’s very far for her. She’s a mestizo from Santarém. It takes four or five days by boat from Manaus.

We went and she liked it there. And she liked my family. I had it in my mind if she likes me and wants to stay with me—that’s good. But if ever she don’t like me she can go. We stayed together. That was almost five years ago now. I’m forty and she’s twenty-seven. Our daughter is three. That’s why I don’t blame people who meet on the Internet. Modern world, you know.