Little Animal of God | The companions of Capybara and the real estate sector

It is San Juan night, about a hundred years ago. From the ravine that borders the river, in a corner of the Paraguayan jungle, a German woman watches how the camalotes sway downstream protecting a heart of fire that tradition lights up to celebrate the saint. Through the bonfires that seem to walk on the water, the vagabonds of the river sail in silence – says Augusto Roa Bastos – the gypsies of the water, in their towers hollowed out along the trunk of a drunken stick. They want the San Juan fire to bring them luck on their hunting trip.

I do not know if Roa Bastos was the first to curdle these nomadic carpenters in his figure of copper and terracotta, descending from a summer moon, and wrote them in high literature; but to me they were a novelty, mysterious and disturbing, when I read them years ago, in the last century. For the Germans who watched them from the slope, they were free men and women who roamed, without master, the liquid roads, rowing long tacuaras, nourishing their lives with their own decisions, capybara meat and dividends. of the skins they were selling. . They were the envy of the sugar factory workers, slaves attached to their place and their work, exploited alongside their machines, their dialectical opposition. The German’s way of denying her European whiteness, the faded blue of her eyes and the war of pain and hunger she left across the Atlantic, was to simply grab the dark hand. and wrinkled of the elder carpincheros and walk with them to follow the course that the moon has marked in the water.

I couldn’t remember until a cousin, not because of a less wealthy and less capricious beloved, gave me a pair of exquisite capybara leather gloves, back when it was elegant for us to style the gloved hand with such finesse, because in the twentieth century lifestyle did not suit sable fur muffs. I myself must have given friends from foreign countries the exquisite softness of two slippers, or a wallet or a small bag attached to the waist – belt bag is such a crass word – made with leather exotic capybara. Although they are described as small diurnal animals, I finally saw them from afar, for the first time, under their alias capybara, one night I was going down the Madre de Dios river in the Amazon of southern Peru. The accompanying jungle baqueano came as close as possible to the steep shore of the coast and aimed his flashlight on them so that they would look at us or at least lift their noses from the growing weeds.

Some good ladies and gentlemen, who have chosen to mesh the future of their life in a closed redoubt, may wear capybara skin boots when winter arrives. Protected, virgin of vulgarity, of a mixture of commoners and envious observers, the closed district allows to enjoy the wealth without reprimand, its own ramp, the private dock, such a green space and such bluish lagoons with outlines. distinctly irregular pluriforms It almost looks like a natural habitat, more swimming pool, less swimming pool. Nested in this eco-real estate environment, harassed by jet skis and freed from predators and nocturnal hunters, the capybara capybaras, claiming their pre-existing condition, return, empowered as messianic Jews, to reconquer the marshes of their ancestors. They relax their stomachs in the water, like any former president in a deckchair, barely showing their hairy muzzle and ears and, blissfully ignorant of their fellows who, in an exportable wallet square, are displayed in a shop window on Santa Fe Avenue, they watch in amazement at neurotic poodles peeing on the lawn at set hours.

The fact does not refer to an exclusive rampage in the Paraná Delta. I myself saw, on the Baltic Neringa Peninsula, north of Kaliningrad, how wild boars would burst into gardens at night looking for their truffles and wake up full of holes and tangled clods while my parents Lithuanian peasants shivered through the double-glazed window when the wolves – who perhaps a thousand years ago stalked Little Red Riding Hood in the forest and now see that the limits of its forest and the quality of its prey are shrinking – enter his farm, agitated by the sound of their bowels starving to such an extent that the European Union has had to give a subsidy to farmers to compensate them for the cows and sheep that crush them.

At the risk of repeating myself – this is my melody in a few last notes – I mention the name of the Holocene with which the geological era has been called until now that our planet, with humanity in tow, passes over the earth’s crust. Dutchman Paul Crutzen, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry in 1995, suggested that the changes brought about by our human presence, perhaps due to the industrial revolution, global warming and the depletion of natural resources, justify considering a new stage at what he calls Anthropocene. The ambition of consumption, the denial, the selfishness of our ontological nature would make all human beings guilty of these transformations that should be reversed. But ecohistorian Jason Moore, professor at Binghamton University in New York, by analyzing and unfolding before our eyes the long journey in the history of modernity, which has transformed the fabric of life in the various aspects of life. global ecosystem, in As for the role that the Big Capital elite assumed as an extractivist sketch in the constant search for profit maximization, he ignores the gross credulity that could lead us to accept the idea of ‘Anthropocene. Instead, Moore offers the boldest and most enlightening concept of Capitalocene, the borderline era where global financial angst puts the planet in a state of soponcio. Grassroots social and political movements are called upon – says Jason Moore – to confront Capital to reshape what it calls the complex and encompassing fabric of life, not one society and one nature but one single ecological world: peasants and indigenous peoples, proletarians and semi-proletarians, migrants, expelled, discriminated against and capybaras.

Framed in its hairy aesthetic of brown hues, its almost amphibious technology, its phlegmatic morality, its vegan gastronomy, its wetland traditions and its complex history interwoven by the river, the constant danger of its tribe being hunted down by hunters, the value of ‘use of their lean meat, the exchange value of their precious skin, the ordeal of cross-border migration and their current return to reclaim their ancestral territory, the capybara companions, with their membranous feet, tread land and water one of the doors of Capital, the real estate company.