"In reality Brazil does not exist," Peppe, the village obeahman, said to me. "We cannot be found anywhere on the map."

I did in fact find Brazil on a map of Trinidad and Tobago, but no one seemed to know when the village was established, why it was named Brazil or by whom. Even Michael Anthony, who wrote a book on towns and villages in Trinidad and Tobago, and got as close to Brazil as San Raphael, conceded apologetically, "I do not know anything about Brazil."

The village of Brazil is about an hour and two taxis away from Port-of-Spain, south of Arima and north of Talparo. You know you're almost there (if you approach from Arima) when you get to a junction of four roads, presided over by both the San Raphael Roman Catholic Church and a statue of St. Raphael (the healer) himself.

The road east leads to Arena, site of the historic Arena Massacre of 1699 in which many Amerindians were killed after a revolt during which they clubbed Spanish priests to death, throwing their bodies into the foundation of the church the Amerindians were being forced to build. Caroni is to the west.

My first trip to Brazil left me thinking that the history of the place was lost for sure. But then I returned, determined to find someone who knew something of its past. I stopped at what appeared to be one of the oldest houses in the district, built from wood and decorated with traditional latticework and jalousies. The garden path led me to Mary Lee Muraldo, a descendant of Manoel Luces who owned the biggest estate in San Raphael in 1892, the San Raphael estate.

Muraldo, who was born there in 1904, took me on a journey of reminiscing.

"The whole district was cocoa," says Muraldo. "We had a cocoa estate, which belonged to my mother, where we spent our holidays."

The bare sprawling countryside and an old cocoa house are testaments of the time.

"Do you know the origin of the name Brazil?" I asked desperately.

"Of course I do," she chuckled. "My grandfather cut the road."

The road was built a few years after Muraldo's birth, to give access to other cocoa estates in Talparo and Tamana, and was cut right in front of her childhood home. "The place was mainly populated by Caribs and Spaniards," says Muraldo, but she explains that many other people came in from Grenada, Barbados and even St. Lucia to work on the cocoa estates or in some kind of agriculture. "The whole place was agriculture," Muraldo explains. Finding the multicultural aspect of the community to be much like that of the country of Brazil, the people living on the new road decided to call the area Brazil.

Continuing to sketch the history of a place about which nothing appears to have been written, Muraldo notes that, "Bread came from Arima by mule and cart. I remember the cart was driven by a Barbadian."

Muraldo, who worked in the Registrar General's office at the Red House from 1928 to 1960, went to the Roman Catholic school in San Raphael and to St. Joseph's Convent in Port of Spain. While at the convent, she stayed on Richmond Street, Port of Spain. Going to town meant catching the horse and carriage or walking to Guanapo (on the road to Arima) to catch the train.

By the time Jhankie Sinanan was born in 1942, the mule and cart had been replaced by a jeep, the horse and carriage by buses. "We used to plant rice, peas, oranges…we had an acre of cocoa." Sinanan too remembers a time when farming was the mainstay of the village, "but the land has been abandoned," she says. "Fields of oranges have been razed to build houses. Lots of people stop planting, they buy their food crops now."

Many of the original inhabitants of Brazil left and were replaced by people from other parts of Trinidad, either going to more industrialized areas in the country or out of the country entirely. Of those who remain, many work outside the area in careers unrelated to agriculture. Part of a family of 24 siblings, of whom 13 are still alive, Sinanan is one of six who live in Brazil. She is the only one who works here, behind the counter of One Love Restaurant and Bar, a village shop over 67 years old.

Sinanan remembers going to the village well to draw water at 4 a.m. with a flambeau and milk can, carrying a hook stick for dipping, then washing clothes at the river at 6 a.m., and finally getting ready to attend the Anglican school at 8 a.m.

Augustus Etienne is tending to his cows, which are grazing on a plot of land that once bore a wealth of citrus and other food crops. He is one of the last surviving farmers in Brazil. Etienne rears both cows and pigs, and grows patchoi, lettuce, plantain, figs and pawpaw. He sells milk to about eight village households, filling 12 empty rum bottles daily at $6 a bottle.

"The soil around here real nice for agriculture," says Etienne, "but I cannot support everybody on farming alone." Etienne has 11 children, seven of whom still live with him, and has been forced to take up landscaping of village gardens as an extra source of income. He believes that it would not have come to this if he had some help. "I was hoping that my children would take over where I left off," he explains, "but they are not interested." He holds out hope: "By the time I am 45 I want to be living entirely off the land."

Beat upon by the sun, worn out by the terrain, I never found the rice field that Etienne sent me to look for. Lost in the forested area near the river for two hours, I scanned the water and bushes for the cocoa snakes, rat snakes and caymans I was told live here. But in the absence of cocoa, and of the rice, which the rats eat before they are then eaten by rat snakes, it seemed that even the caymans have packed up, searching for greener horizons.

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