“After spending so much time locked in a cell, seeing only the dark, damp stone walls, I think everything is a wonder,” he continued. “I even liked being on the ship, with all the movement of the waves. I thank God for putting good people in our path to help us. Now I’m working to give something in return and help this land produce riches for the king. Quim Carapina asked me to make a few benches, and here I am struggling with woods that I’ve never seen. But I haven’t seen the famous brazilwood yet.”
The carpenter heard the end of the exchange as he approached.
“Brazilwood isn’t used in carpentry, but in dyeing,” he explained. And today it’s no longer as important as it was over a hundred years ago, when our countrymen first came here. Anyway, it wouldn’t show up here. The trade has become the monopoly of the crown.”
“Today the wealth is elsewhere, young man,” the priest added. “White sugar is a lot more valuable now than the red brazilwood. It’s sugar that fills the holds of vessels going to Portugal.”
“Maybe in a few days you’ll see how sugar is made,” said Quim Carapina. “I may send you to Don Vasco’s sugar mill. He wants to place an order and we need to take measurements. I have a lot of work and can’t leave Amparo at the moment.”
“But doesn’t Don Vasco have his own carpenters?” the priest asked, surprised.
“Of course he does — good carpenters, at that. They make the mill wheels, the grinding equipment, the troughs and yokes, the wooden trays, the roof beams, the window frames, the wheels of bullock carts — all the working pieces, as well as the furniture. But it seems that Don Vasco wants a small wooden shrine for Dona Barbara, and he needs a craftsman capable of doing something more elegant.”
And so it was that a few weeks later, Bento was sent to the sugar mill to work out the details of the order. As he walked the three leagues that separated the village from the mill, he thought about the recent changes in his life.
At this point, the two siblings were feeling quite at home in the new land. They were getting used to the heat, the food, the intensity of light in the tropics. They were even getting used to the presence of slaves everywhere, doing all kinds of heavy work. The slaves were like the poorest of the poor in Lisbon — people with no choice but to live in poverty and hunger, to depend on the charity of others or on pilfering. If fortune smiled and brought them some work, it was always a heavy and exhausting load, poorly paid, ruining the body — the difficult jobs that nobody wanted to do but that everybody needed to have done. Not much different from what the two siblings had experienced and seen around them their whole lives.
But Bento and Manuela also noticed some clear differences in the colony. Although the slaves in Brazil may have had fewer material needs than the poor in Portugal, they suffered much more. They had somewhere to sleep and something to eat every day, because if they were too weak and frail, their work would be less productive. But they couldn’t go where they wanted, they were forcibly separated from their families, and they were subject to mistreatment by their owners. That was the biggest difference — they had owners. They could be bought and sold as if they were not people, but things — merchandise. They were brought from far away, from Africa. And they all were black.
In the widow’s house, Manuela helped the other two girls, Beatriz and Felipa, with the household chores. They were close in age, one a little older than Manuela, the other slightly younger. Both were daughters of an Indian woman and Dona Catarina’s late husband. Dona Catarina had no children of her own and had taken the girls into her home and brought them up.
All of them worked, and there was plenty to do. The colony was far from Portugal, and almost everything had to be done at home — salting meat and fish so that it wouldn’t spoil quickly, grinding corn to make cornmeal, making cassava flour, preserving vegetables and fruits. There was always work to be done on a spinning wheel or a loom to make the household fabrics. They had to make seed oil for the lamps, ash and lard soap, brooms of brushwood sticks and palm fiber, and weave nets, and mats for sleeping.
The household slaves took care of most of the work, but not all of it. Two men tended the garden of corn, cassava, beans and squash. Two women were charged with work in the kitchen, the heavy cleaning and washing clothes in the river.
There was also a boy slightly older than Manuela who chopped wood, carried water from the fountain and helped with all the household chores. His name was Didi — at least that’s what everyone called him. But when he referred to himself as Didi, he put the accent on the first syllable.
Manuela liked him immediately, with his intelligent expression and friendly smile. But they could not talk much, because of a lack of time and because of language difficulties. As the weeks passed, however, and both he and she learned more words in Avanheém, they were able to share information about their lives and see that they had some things in common. She still had Bento, but had lost her parents and two other siblings to the plague. He had arrived from Africa a little more than a year before, had been separated from his family by captivity and had not had news about any of them.
Manuela told Bento all this on the eve of his departure for the mill. She was almost in tears. The boy was surprised because she had always been brave and had never shed tears needlessly. Why did she come to the workshop asking him not to travel to Don Vasco’s mill?
“But it’s a short way, hardly even a trip,” Quim Carapina explained, smiling. “Why are you worried? It’s just a three-league walk. He’ll only be gone a few days.”
She could not explain why she was so upset. But ever since her brother had been released from prison and they had managed to stay together, she was afraid of losing him again. She was fearful that something would happen to them if they weren’t within reach of each other. And when she understood that Didi was in a situation much worse than hers, she became distraught. She was afraid of what might happen to them in a place where everyone accepted so naturally that families could be separated forever.
She tried to respond to the carpenter.
“I’ll miss my brother terribly.”
Then she asked Bento, “How long will you be gone?”
“The time that is necessary,” was the almost harsh answer from the boy who couldn’t give in to childish pleading. “And don’t talk about it anymore.”
Now, walking along the road under the warming sun, Bento remembered the tone he’d used with his sister and regretted not being more caring. Manuela didn’t deserve it. It was true that she had been very sensitive lately, and was irritated or cried unexpectedly for no reason. She hadn’t been like that before. Maybe it was the delayed effect of everything that had happened to them, and which the girl had had to keep locked inside. Or maybe it was that she was no longer a child, that she was becoming a woman. And he really didn’t understand women very well.
But he knew for certain that if it were not for Manu, he’d still be in that horrible, damp stone cell in Lisbon, or suffering a lonely exile. He had already lost hope when she rescued him and brought him here. He shouldn’t have been so harsh with her.
While he was thinking about all this, he disappeared into the sugar cane, the wind rippling the field as if it were a sea of intense green. It was a sight more beautiful than he’d ever seen. Under the hot sun, step by step, he completed the journey. Reaching the top of a hill, he spotted the buildings of the mill on the floodplain below. It was just as Quim Carapina said — the large two-story house with a small windowed turret, the mill with a tiled roof and its wheel turned by oxen, the chapel, the long slave quarters and a scattered group of houses. It was a small village set in a sea of green sugar cane.
The road curved, passing by some tall trees with a stream of clear water running through them. It began as little more than a trickle percolating among the rocks, then gradually swelled. Bento followed the riverbank, descending the slope of the small hill. When he reached the flat plain at the bott
om, he saw a widening of the riverbed into a sort of pool surrounded by large stones, before the water continued its course a little farther on. At the pool, a group of young slave women were washing clothes and scouring copper pots with sand in a huge wooden trough. Some of the girls were very beautiful.
The boy stopped to look at them. But in an instant they saw him and were startled. One squealed, another chuckled, and they all began to talk among themselves. As he wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, the oldest-looking one asked him who he was and what he was doing there in Don Vasco’s mill.
“My name is Bento. I’ve come from Amparo at the request of Quim Carapina to take measurements for a wooden shrine.”
“Dona Barbara has been waiting for this for a long time,” one of the women replied.
The women stopped working to talk with him briefly, grateful to have an excuse to take a little rest. Only the one who was at the far end of the pool continued what she was doing. She was the most beautiful. She was rubbing sand into the bottom of a copper pot that had been blackened by sitting for hours on the wood stove. The others were doing laundry — soaping, scrubbing, bleaching in the sun, rinsing, wringing and then spreading the huge amount of clothing on the grass. It would be loaded into basins later, still damp and heavy.
“Just yesterday Senhora Barbara complained that it seemed as if the carpenter would never come. Isn’t that right, Tonia?”
“I didn’t hear any complaint from anyone. You’re always hearing something, Carmo.”
“Stop scolding me. Everyone heard, didn’t they, Rosa?”
She agreed. And so, with the talk going back and forth, Bento quickly learned all the women’s names. Except for the one who was cleaning the copper pot. He had to ask.
“Ah, that is Rosa.”
“But aren’t you Rosa?” said the boy, who had paid attention to all the names.
“I am just Rosa. I was born and raised here. She arrived last year, straight from Africa. She could only speak her own language, but she had to learn the housework quickly. And Senhora Barbara was convinced she had to call her Rosa — why, I don’t know …”
“Because she arrived on the birthday of Senhora Barbara’s sister, Senhora Rosa, who died.”
“Yes, but she came along with her mother whose name is Chica, so she became Rosa Chica.”
Hearing her name, the girl looked up from what she was doing and stared at Bento with a haughty, almost challenging air, as if she wanted to say something. But everything stopped there. They heard the sound of horses’ hooves.
“The foreman!” cried one of the slaves.
In a second, the conversation ceased and they were all working again.
Bento watched as the rider approached. He had a straw hat, and a whip in his hand. Bento thought it best to talk to him immediately, before being questioned. He explained who he was and said he had just stopped to make sure that this was the Amarante mill.
The man ordered the carpenter to accompany him and steered his horse toward the big house.
There was no other option. The boy had to follow him immediately. But he still managed to look back and smile at Rosa Chica. This time she returned it, half-mockingly.
That look and that smile made Bento stay at Don Vasco’s mill much longer than necessary. He even offered to build the shrine on the spot, something that Quim Carapina hadn’t considered. But it was a good excuse to be able to see the pretty girl who worked in the kitchen and cleaned the house, and talk to her from time to time. And they all welcomed him, especially Senhora Palmira, Senhora Barbara’s mother and his countrywoman. When she heard the Portuguese boy’s accent, she was delighted.
“Oh, how I miss my dear homeland!”
Senhora Palmira was constantly coming to the open shed where Bento worked to ask for news. She wanted to know things that Bento couldn’t answer — about the current fashions in Europe or some new music that was being played at parties. But he could describe in detail the procession he had seen just after arriving in Lisbon, giving thanks for the end of the plague — the quilts hanging from the balconies, the chants, the branches decorating the window grills, the flickering candles carried by the faithful, who wound their way through the hills of the Bairro Alto toward the center of the city.
Senhora Palmira listened and sighed.
“Oh, how beautiful! I guess I’ll never see anything like that again. Now my life is here. I came as a girl with my father, and I never returned. But it makes me very happy to hear you talk. It takes me back to Lisbon.”
One time, Don Vasco heard her and joked, “It takes you back in thought but without your stomach churning with the rolling waves, isn’t that so, Mother? You always say that you were nauseated the whole trip over.”
“I thought I was going to die. I vomited so much my guts almost came out.”
“So be happy now that the words of Bento the carpenter can take you from Amarante back to Lisbon.”
Everyone laughed. And Bento continued telling them his memories of the inn, the street market, the fight he’d been in. Then he added, “I didn’t have a chance to see much. I had some problems at work. But my bro … my sister can tell you more sometime. In fact she lived with a nobleman’s family for a while.”
Everyone was interested, asking how it had happened. Bento enjoyed being the center of attention. He told them about life in his village, the banter of his siblings, his father’s craft, his mother’s work, the garden with cabbages right outside the house with the blue and yellow glazed tiles. He recalled how neighbors gathered to tread the grapes in the winepress to make wine. He remembered the olive oil, the long winter nights, the soup by the fire. He didn’t talk about his arrest or his exile, although he already realized that in this new land no one cared. There were other exiles, or former prisoners. The past didn’t matter. If a person worked hard and was friendly, all would be well.
On Bento’s first night at the mill, the other carpenters asked him to sit with them around the campfire in front of the slaves’ quarters. They were all slaves. It was his turn to listen. They had sad stories of a terrible journey in a crowded ship’s hold, maltreatment, other owners, other places, family separations. They were homesick for their native lands, very different from the one he and Senhora Palmira came from.
But the conversation didn’t last long. Everyone had to go to sleep early, because more work was waiting for them when the sun rose.
The next day, as he was taking a bench he had repaired back to the kitchen, Bento found Rosa Chica by herself.
Unexpectedly, she asked, “Brother or sister?”
At first, Bento didn’t understand. The girl explained. She had noticed his hesitation the evening before and was wondering if, after all, he had a brother or a sister. He wanted to tell her the truth, and that’s what he did. He quickly mentioned his two dead brothers, and the young sister who had fled from the plague with him, who had dressed as a boy and saved him from prison.
“I had a little brother who died when they captured us, and a sister who died on the ship,” Rosa Chica said. “My mother was bought by Don Vasco along with me and works here, too. But I have another brother who I’ve never seen again. And I don’t know what happened to my father. Some of the other women saw them on the ship, so they may not be very far away.”
“No use talking about it, my daughter,” Chica broke in. She was bringing in a basket of sweet potatoes to peel. “It only makes us feel bad. What can’t be remedied must be endured. It can stay with you forever, like these scars we bring from our land. But since there is nothing you can do, it is best forgotten.”
Rosa saw her mother’s sad look. She gazed at her beloved face, with the tribal scars from the other side of the sea, and was silent. She had tears in her eyes when she looked at Bento.
The boy smiled and reaching out, gently squeezed her hand. Then he was silent.
&n
bsp; But later they found a way to talk some more. Bento listened attentively to what Rosa Chica wanted to tell him — her memories of her father and brother, her sense of longing and her determination to find some clue about where they were. Bento wanted to help. He asked for more details, and promised he would do everything possible to try to get news of her family when he returned to Amparo. It was a bigger place. Maybe someone there knew something.
12
—
Queen Jinga
Bento returned from the mill full of news. At first, Quim Carapina was annoyed that the boy had stayed in Amarante for so long. But then he realized that the time had been worthwhile. For one thing, the order for the wooden shrine was settled. Not only had Bento taken measurements, but he would soon begin to make it. It had already been paid for and was now one less thing to worry about. Furthermore, the new helper’s work had been highly praised by the women in the house. And Don Vasco had taken the opportunity to order another piece of furniture — a canopy bed, something that had never existed in those parts. Senhora Palmira remembered seeing one in Lisbon when she was a girl, in a noble house where she had gone with her mother, an embroiderer, to deliver some sheets. It would pay good money.
Manuela was happy that her brother was back. She had really missed him. She also had lots of her own news to tell. She was doing well at the Jesuit school, learning a lot. And, happily, she was really improving in her work at the pottery.
Better yet, in the opinion of Bento, the girl was feeling less lonely. She was good friends with Beatriz and Felipa. The three spent the day talking as they worked — an endless, soft-spoken patter, like the twittering of the sparrows that gathered in the late afternoon in the branches of the huge sibipuruna tree in the church square.
Through all her conversations with the two girls, Manuela had mastered the common language and could express herself much more easily than when she arrived. She was able to follow the lessons at school and chat with her friends. She was so talkative that Father Vicente had called her attention to it more than once. The teacher decided to take advantage of the girl’s aptitude for talking and teach her how to read. Then she could read the prayer book aloud to everyone during meals or while the others worked.
Until the Day Arrives Page 6