Palmares

by Gayl Jones

  “Didn’t I chase the devil away?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “And didn’t I touch Goncalo’s forehead and cure him of his craziness?”

  I looked at her. She smiled.

  “You want me to cure my own? Ha. Ha. Shall I cure yours?”

  I shook my head and smiled and kicked my feet in the grass. I shook the palm leaves in my apron and stared at the distant hills, the dark and green land, one of the ridges jutting out like the head of a green cobra.

  “Here we’ve got the best fruit in the state.”

  The master and a stranger passed. The master glanced at my grandmother, the stranger at me. I smiled. Or perhaps it was not at us they were looking, but merely in our direction.

  “You dry the leaves first, and then you tear them apart, like this,” my grandmother said. “And when you’re out in the field, you chew on a cane stalk and it’ll give you energy . . . and kill the hunger.” The last thing she said softly so the master wouldn’t hear.

  “Have you found out who’s been setting the fires?” asked the stranger.

  “Quem e aquele desconhecido?” I whispered.

  Grandmother shook her head, but she cocked her ear to listen.

  “No, not yet,” replied the master, “but mulher or homem . . .”

  He said something so softly that he couldn’t be heard.

  The two men left the palm grove. I saw the stranger turn to look at me, again. Yes, it was at me he looked.

  “I’ll show you how to make bowls out of palm nut shells,” said my grandmother in an ordinary voice, then she closed her eyes and leaned against a palm tree. “I see a black man sitting on a horse.”

  “Pretos can’t ride horses. It’s against the law. I know that.”

  “Hush. All black men and women will gain liberty here. Between the rocks I see abandoned plantations, but there’s a white man lying on a hammock. Oh, there’s a white man lying on a hammock, eating a mandacaru.”

  I knew that only brancos rode horses, but anyone could lie in a hammock and eat a mandacaru but pretos couldn’t do it just anytime they wanted. Abandoned plantations? Freedom? Was that why they called her a crazy woman, to speak always of such things? I stared at the hill that stuck out like the head of a green cobra. A tapir peeked out at me from under a low branch.

  “I see people dancing in the streets of Bahia. Pretos and brancos dancing. But there’s one old crazy woman going around saying, ‘Is it true I’m a free woman? Is it true I’m free?’ And an old crazy man comes up to her and says, ‘As long as you’re with me.’ Then they dance the batuque. And there’s a white man lying in a hammock eating a mandacaru. There’s a white man eating a mandacaru.” She sang the lines, then she said, “But me? I’ll tell you what I’ll remember. A slow whisper without any tenderness and the penitents of St. Sebastian slashing themselves with pieces of broken glass.”

  “Will you be there on the day of our freedom?”

  “We’ll all be there,” she answered. Then she laughed. “‘Is it true I’m a free woman?’ Oh, I’ll be out in the street with everyone dancing the batuque to the sound of African drums.”

  I laughed at her. I rubbed the large soft leaves of the palm tree and stared at the hill.

  “There’re a variety of snakes,” she said, as if she’d seen my mind. “I’ll show you the magic that can be done with a magical one.”

  I looked at her and frowned. I looked again at the strange place she’d brought me to, waiting, holding onto the palm leaves in my apron.

  “That man behind you,” she whispered suddenly, pointing, and leaning into my ear. “He’s the one I brought you here to tell you about. His name’s Rugendas. I wanted to tell you about me and Senhor Rugendas.”

  I looked behind me, but there was no one standing there. I looked back at her. She was still leaning into my ear and staring back over my shoulder at him. I looked behind me again, but I still saw no one.

  “His name’s Senhor Rugendas,” she said, still looking behind my shoulder, but leaning forward now. “Your mother would remember him. It took me a long time to make any kind of peace with his world or his spirit. But still it’s no kind of peace. I did my duties, but I did them without any feeling. You hear me laugh, don’t you? But I’m without laughter. I’m an old woman without any laughter. But I have laughed. I have held laughter and fear in the same fist.” She picked up one of the palm leaves from her apron and held it in her fist. She shoved her fist out in the direction where Senhor Rugendas was, then drew it back. But still I saw no Senhor Rugendas. “Haven’t I, Rugendas?” she asked the man who wasn’t there, or whom I didn’t see.

  She waited though as if he would answer, then she looked back at me. Then she turned her eyes on Senhor Rugendas again. Her eyes threw daggers at him, then she looked back at me.

  “Yes, he’s seen me hold laughter and terror in the same fist. Rugendas came here feeling that it was a land of promise and wasn’t it that for you, mapmaker? But me, I wanted nothing from this place. I’m an old woman without any laughter, but I can still bite blood from an onion, can’t I, Rugendas? Yes, he knows I can. See how he loves me and fears me too? He’s looking at my breasts now. They’re not so high as they once were, Senhor.” She moved the upper part of her body; her breasts shook gently. “‘You’re a strange one,’ he told me. ‘You’re a strange one,’ he said. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m like any other woman.’ But to him, he couldn’t see me as the men in my own country would have. He saw a strange, exotic creature.

  “No, he didn’t see me as a full and human woman. ‘Pick one and I’ll bring her to you. See how quiet she is. She’s yours. You hear that? Come to the land of gold and women. They’re always open, these women. Do you hear that? Everything comes from God.”

  She shook the palm leaves again and her breasts gently. The nipples on them jutted out and looked like fruit. “He asked me if I felt like I was a new woman here. A new land, a new woman. No I didn’t. Not my land of promise, I told him. I walked with the other women. They let him see me plainly. Didn’t you see me plainly, Rugendas? Couldn’t you draw a map of me?” She pinched her nipples and they jutted out more. “But it was me you chose. I kept all my feelings away from you. I hid them. A new world for you, Rugendas. A new brave world for you. And this one wants me to tell her about tomorrow. Do you want me to tell her I’m not tomorrow’s woman? But I’ll be dancing with all the others. I was afraid to be a woman, then, afraid of my breasts and belly. Afraid of the touch inside my hand. I see you laughing. They’d open your mouth so they could look inside. They’d open your mouth and pinch your nipples.”

  I started to pinch my own nipples, but she struck my hand away. “In those days too I was afraid to look at myself, afraid of my own eyes.” She looked at me. I encircled my apron with my hands.

  “I’d travel with him. He went around drawing maps and I’d travel with him into the interior of the country. I’d ride behind him on horseback, holding onto his back. Only in the interior of the country. He liked my silence and detachment. I was silent and detached. That was me and he liked that, as he went about his work, his drawings, his calculations. He’d look at me and say all the time, ‘The woman isn’t talking. Why does the woman not talk?’ But he liked it. And me, didn’t I stare into the face of the monster. Oh, I don’t mean him. By their standards, he’s a handsome man. Aren’t you, Senhor? I mean the monster of time. Yes, and tomorrow . . . Rugendas is displeased when I speak of the future. He only wants me to speak of the past. Isn’t that so, Senhor?”

  She looked at him. I tried to see him but could not. I twisted and turned on the rock, but he was perfectly invisible to me.

  “The final act is always an act of mutilation and blood. No? Of recognition and tenderness, he wants me to say. Ha. He knows it’s not so. What do I want from you, Senhor? Nothing. What does a woman like me want from a man like you? Nothing, Senhor. I would travel with you, wouldn’t I? Lean over your shoulder and study the new maps. You don’t want me to
leave you? I’m yours anyway, aren’t I?”

  She leaned over my shoulder as if to listen.

  “He says that we’re close now, spiritually close. Ha. Do you hear that? That now he acknowledges the spirituality in this creature of God like any other woman. Ha. Hear that? But now he doesn’t want me to tell you about the future, and he claims the past too.”

  She straightened her shoulders and looked at him. Her nipples no longer jutted out. They were rounded. But her breasts were no longer hanging. They were round and firm. Was it magic?

  “He doesn’t want me to speak of the future and he claims the past too,” she repeated. “Do you believe, Rugendas, that a man and woman can be made perfect?” She cupped her hand to her ear and listened. “He wants me to tell him I love him. No, I don’t say such things with ease and I won’t say them, not to the likes of you, Senhor.”

  She wrinkled her forehead and stood up. Really, she was not an old woman. She was only thirty years older than me, thirty-seven then, but she called herself an old woman, and my age made me agree with her.

  “I’ve introduced you to Senhor Rugendas,” she said, as we left the palm grove and entered the road leading toward the senzala. “Ha. Ha. He feels that we’re spiritually close. Spiritually close, did you hear that?

  “Those are his words. He acknowledges my soul. When we entered the palm grove, he said, ‘The beautiful woman has come.’ Did you hear him? I know charms. I carry charms in my hair. He thinks I’m the same dark stranger I was then. But I’m not the same menina I was when the mapmaker bought me and tried to make me say sim sim sim sim. Did you hear that? Listen. He said he’d be pleased if the old woman would stop talking. That’s what he liked in those days, my silence. But I talk now, don’t I, Rugendas? Don’t I, Senhor? Spiritually close. Ha. Ha. That’s for you.”

  She touched my hair.

  “This is my gift to you, Almeydita,” she said, as we stood in the road.

  She touched my hair and my forehead. “And tomorrow Joaquim, Pao Joaquim will give you a blessing.” I looked up at her and smiled. “Rugendas. Ha. Ha,” she said, nodding her head and staring in front of her. We continued walking. “He’s displeased when I talk of the future. But I’ve stood in the face of the monster of time. I’ve stood in his face, Rugendas.”

  I wanted to look back to see if he was following us, to see if I could see him more easily on the road, but I was afraid to. I feared to see him and I feared that again I wouldn’t see him.

  “Is he a spirit?” I whispered.

  “Is who a spirit?”

  “Rugendas.”

  “Rugendas a spirit? Ha. He feels we are spiritually close. Ha. Ha. That’s what he feels, that’s what he says he feels.”

  I laughed too, stroking the large soft leaves.

  “Rugendas a spirit,” she kept repeating and laughing. “What maps have you drawn on your new world of the spirit?” she inquired. “Well, perhaps we’re closer now in spirit,” she added with a chuckle.

  Pao Joaquim

  IN THE HUT OF PAO JOAQUIM I’m silent. I stare across at him and he stares at me with his strange eyes. I hold my hands in my lap staring at him, then he motions for me to rise and I do. He is wearing a mask. He stares out from it with his strange eyes. As I go out, my grandmother lowers her head and enters. When she returns, she touches my shoulder. “Come and go for a walk with me,” she says.

  In the road a black man comes riding by on a horse. He sits very tall and straight in the saddle. I’ve never seen a black man on a horse before, because here it’s against the law. So why is he sitting up there? I’ve never seen a black man sit on a horse before, and I’ve never seen any man sitting on a horse like he does. He’s wearing a white muslin shirt and ordinary cotton pants, cotton they call Sea Island cotton, cotton they call Egyptian cotton. His skin is dark and smooth and he has a beard, a beard like the one on the mask of Pao Joaquim. When he gets to us he stops and holds his hand down. My grandmother takes it and he tries to pull her up on the horse. “No, it’s not the time,” she whispers.

  He sits tall with his shoulders back and says nothing. I think he’s looking at me, but can’t tell. He jerks the stirrups and rides on. I start to look back at him, but my grandmother holds my head forward and we keep walking. We walk on a flat wide road.

  “He always wore a wide hat and he gave me a smaller narrower hat,” my grandmother said.

  She picked up two small stones from the road to jingle them in her hands as we walked. “I’d hold onto his waist and ride with him that way all the way into the interior. We didn’t travel into the city, because then there’d be evil stories, and he thought he could shield me. But no man has such power. In the interior, in the solitude of forest and jungle, that was my place. I was his woman, but I was my own too. He knew I was my own with my own power, different from his compasses and mathematical reckonings.”

  “Who? That man?” I asked. I wanted to look back, but stared ahead.

  “Rugendas, I meant.”

  “And that one?”

  She ignored my question. “One day we were riding and I was holding his waist, Rugendas, and the horse was prancing. And we came to this enclosure, like a huge stable, and there was a black man inside sitting on a donkey. He was wearing a vest and no shirt and a wide straw hat and leaning forward with his back hunched. The donkey’s ears were pricked up like he was listening for something. Then when the black man saw us—we were well upon him before he saw us—but then when he saw us, he turned his back to us. Rugendas tried to lead the horse into the enclosure. Was it a slave pen? I don’t know what it was. A barn or a slave pen out in the middle of the forest. Every time Rugendas tried to lead the horse in, the horse wouldn’t move. Smart horse. He stood with his leg up, with his knee pointed, as if he’d go inside, but didn’t. I held Rugendas tighter around the waist. I felt as if there was something inside the enclosure I couldn’t see.

  “Something beside the man on the donkey. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, the man with his back to us. Now he was sitting straight and tall as an arrow.

  “Then the black man began to turn his horse around—yes, in the time we were looking and not seeing, the donkey had turned into a horse.

  “There was a woman with dark eyes sitting in front of the fire looking up at the man on the horse, a white man was lying in a hammock, a black man was leaning against a bale of hay putting the finishing touches on a saddle that he’d made. The white man in the hammock saw us and started rising to greet Rugendas. And the black man turned around slowly, but before he got completely around, Rugendas’s horse took fright and galloped away.”

  We were walking in the wide road between the casa grande and the palm grove, but we didn’t enter the place of the palmeira trees where she had taken me before, where there was the man that only she saw. We walked back and forth on the long road, and she didn’t speak for a long time, and then as we neared the banana grove where the black men were working, I was sure she was saying things not meant for me. I watched the men bare to the waist and wearing only their cotton trousers. Some worked on the ground while others climbed into the banana trees.

  “Then we went everywhere. I could never learn that tongue though. He called me something that meant black girl. Was it the same? Nigger. And it could be said to anyone, not just me in particular, but he came looking for me that time, not just anyone. Mr. Rugendas they called him in his country, not Senhor. Have you seen her?”

  “Seen who?” I asked. I imagined myself climbing to the tip top of one of the banana trees.

  “I left her with the woman who owns the place. No. I have her papers. What’s been done with her? Not just any woman.”

  She was talking that talk now. I listened, looking from her to the men in the trees, but I could understand nothing. It was all nonsense to me. A peacock strutted near us with its bright feathers.

  “No, not just any woman.”

  “Pavao,” I mumbled to the bright bird.

  “What place did you brin
g her from? It doesn’t matter. We have a woman here. But Mrs. Dumpling has taken her into town with her. Mrs. Dumpling, the English woman, she told me about all her husbands, all along the way, what this one was like and what that one, but still she was a free woman and always would be, as free as a duckweed. She liked this new country, she said, it was just like her. Is that your man, the one that left you with me? She asked. We saw him, waiting. As we got nearer she kept saying what a free woman she was, rubbing it in, you know, because I wasn’t. Rub the lice from her hair. Rub rub rub rub. Do you want me to buy you from him? I was thinking I’d like to. You’re a good companion.

  “But no, he wouldn’t sell me because I was the one he was waiting for all that time. And she told him too the country was just like her. And they ate together, while I stood in the kitchen. I watched them from the kitchen. I kept watching them. She was a handsome woman in a green silk dress and wearing a hat with feathers and red shoes. I’d never seen a woman dress like that, except the whores in Rio, but she wasn’t a whore, she was a free woman. She’d look solemn at some moments and burst into laughter at others. She had a space between her teeth, but it didn’t distract from her handsomeness, it added to it. Handsome I’ll call her, because she was no beauty, not even by their rules. I could tell he found the woman interesting. Oh, yes. And there was wine on the table, which they drank freely. The solemn expression, and then the laughter. She swore something by St. Thomas, but I couldn’t hear exactly what it was.”

  “St. Thomas?”

  “Santo Tomas.”

  “‘I ain’t always such a reveler,’ I heard her say, again solemn. He asked her why’d she come to that country. She was silent, then she talked about all her men, how all of them enchanted her.”

  “Enchanted Mooress.”

  “Then Mrs. Dumpling said, ‘I don’t dally, I give myself whole, but not to any every man.’ He was silent and she looked solemn for some moments, then she burst out laughing again. She could see me in the doorway, I knew it. ‘See how jolly I am,’ she said loud where I could hear. ‘And I sing like a nightingale.’ She sang him a ballad, a romance, about the English countrysides and lovers and mystical creatures that appeared and disappeared. When she finished she said she wished God would bless his soul. I thought he’d stay with her.”