The Fever That Dwells in Men

Have you heard of a madness that does not burn with fire but seeps like a disease, making bones feverish and bending the mind to its will? It does not speak, it does not sing, it does not threaten, but it sparkles, bewitching with its unique bile, with the flickering of something elusive, something that demands to be strived for. Gold. A word like a whisper in the dark, like a secret known before birth, as though it were not a thing of the earth but of the blood itself. It is older than empire, older than hunger, older even than the gods to whom men once prayed before they learned to kneel before metal.

The conquistadors carried it in their marrow. Not gold itself, but the need for it—the unnameable craving that turned otherwise rational men into wraiths, gnawing at the world as though only gold could still their hunger. To call it greed is to simplify it. Greed is a thing of the hands, a vice of the individual. This was something else. This was a malady, an inherited plague passed from father to son, a sickness in the soul of an entire civilization. It had no face, no origin. It simply was.

Cinema, in all its illusions, has tried to capture this madness, has tried to pin it down like a specimen, to contain it within frames, to name it. And yet, even there, it refuses to be caged. Two films stand before me, both looking upon this affliction with horror, both grasping at its heart, both failing to find its source.

Carlos Saura’s El Dorado (1988) and Agustín Díaz Yanes’s Gold (2017)—two visions of the same sickness, two journeys into the fevered minds of men who believed the jungle would bow before them. The former, a slow, methodical unraveling of an expedition doomed from the start, the latter a sharper blade, a more frantic nightmare, but both tracing the same inevitable arc—men setting forth on rivers of their own madness, paddling toward ruin.

They came with crosses, with banners, with the steel of empire. They came with the names of kings on their lips, with maps that turned air into possession, with the conviction that the land would yield because it must, because it had been ordained, because God himself had whispered into the ears of Castilian men and told them that gold belonged in their hands. They did not come as beggars, nor as wanderers, but as claimants of something already stolen.

And the land did not answer them. The jungle does not speak in human tongues, does not kneel, does not barter. The jungle only waits.

In El Dorado, the waiting is slow, agonizing. Lope de Aguirre and Pedro de Ursúa, the doomed commanders of the expedition, do not rush to their end—they sink into it, inch by inch, swallowed not by violence, but by inertia. The jungle does not need to strike; it simply exists, and in its existence, it grinds men to dust. The river carries them forward, but there is no destination, no city of gold, only the unbroken sameness of trees and water, the vast, indifferent green that cares nothing for their hunger. One turns away from the other, just like people do when they feel nobody is taking any notice of them. Flourishing paranoia spreads through the body like a rapid disease, whispers become sharp as daggers, and the once radiant dream of El Dorado ceases to be a shining beacon and becomes a millstone around the neck.

Gold is swifter in its destruction. The jungle does not have the patience to watch these men rot slowly; it strips them of their illusions faster, more brutally. This is not a journey—it is a sentence. The men who march through the green shadows, hacking at vines, wiping sweat from their brows, are already dead. They do not know it yet, but they are. They are ghosts chasing a ghost city, figments hunting figments. The myth of Tezutlan dangles before them, just out of reach, just believable enough to keep them moving, to keep them killing, to keep them dying. The madness takes them quickly, like fire racing through dry grass.

And what was it all for? What sickness was this, that turned men into shadows of themselves, that sent them across oceans, across mountains, into jungles that did not want them, toward deaths they could not comprehend? What was gold, to make them suffer so?

It was never about wealth.

Wealth is a human thing, a thing of numbers and ledgers, a thing of contracts and possession. But gold was never a thing of reason. It was a hunger that could not be named, a wound that could not be healed. The sight of it, the promise of it, was enough to unmake men, to unmoor them from all sense, to turn them into something lesser. It was not greed. It was worship.

Somewhere in the veins of empire, in the marrow of those who left their homes never to return, there was a whisper that gold was not a thing to be spent, not a thing to be counted—it was a thing that was, a thing that needed no explanation. It was the flesh of gods, the echo of something greater. The men who chased it did not love it. They feared it, in the way that men fear the unknowable, in the way that men fear their own limitations.

And what of those who lived upon the land before the fever came? What of those whose hands had shaped gold into masks, into offerings, into reflections of the world’s quiet truths? They did not hoard it. They did not burn for it. It dawned on them that gold is ungovernable. That it was not meant to be locked away, that claiming ownership over it would be utterly futile.

And so they perished.

Decapitated, enslaved, erased. Echoes of them dissolved in silence of the Amazon, their names faded, their cities buried under the canopy of green, their world consumed by a plague that had not come from them. Cinema cannot capture this loss. It can show the men who came, the madness in their eyes, the cities that crumbled. But it cannot touch the absence. It cannot show what it meant for an entire way of being to be undone. The gold remains, scattered in museums, buried beneath the earth, melted into the trappings of European wealth. But the hands that once held it without hunger are gone.

And the sickness?

It has not left us.

The conquistadors are no longer here, but their hunger lingers. The fever of gold has found new forms—no longer in rivers of the New World, but in markets, in banks, in the endless pursuit of wealth without meaning, in the quiet terror that whispers to men that they are nothing if they do not own, if they do not possess, if they do not hoard.

The jungles have not forgotten. The rivers still carry their ghosts. And somewhere, beneath the canopy of green, beneath the soil where the bones of the nameless rest, there is still gold. Silent. Waiting. A god that has outlived its worshippers.