by Ian McDonald
‘I cannot receive Mass from you, Father Gonçalves.’
Again, the coy dip of the head that Quinn understood now concealed fury.
‘Does not your soul crave the solace of the Sacrament?’
‘It surely does, and yet I cannot.’
‘Is it because of the Lady, or because of the hand that gives it?’
‘Father Gonçalves, did you attack and raze a Carmelite mission and take its people into slavery?’
‘Yes.’ Quinn had expected no worming denial from Father Diego, yet the flatness of the acknowledgment shocked Quinn as if a pistol had suddenly been discharged.
‘You did this contrary to the act of 1570 prohibiting enslavement of the indigenous peoples and the rule and example of our Order ?’
‘Come, Father, each to his role; you the admonitory, I the examiner. You are aware what that means?’
‘You are empowered to judge and declare Just War against those who scorn the salvation of Christ’s Church. I saw the house of God burned to the waterline, our brothers and sisters in Christ put to the sword. I spoke with a postulant, a survivor, dreadfully burned. Before she died she told me she had seen angels walking on the treetops, the angels that adorn the masts of this self-consecrated basilica.’
Gonçalves shook his head sorrowfully, as at a woodenly obtuse schoolboy.
‘You speak of enslavement; I see liberation. When you have seen what I have worked for Christ in this place, then presume to judge me.’
Quinn strode from the choir. Day was a plane of blinding white beyond the door.
‘I shall call upon you this evening to begin the examination of your soul.’
But Father Gonçalves’ words, thrown after him, hung in Luis Quinn’s memory.
‘They were animals, Father. They had no souls, and I gave them mine.’
A flicker of lightning momentarily lit the receiving room. By its brief illumination Quinn saw Father Gonçalves’ face as he took apart the Governing Engine; the delight and energy, the pride and intelligence. It had not been the soul of Diego Gonçalves that had been examined in this hot, high airless room; it was his own, and it had been found light. I am of so little consequence that you prefer to study a machine. Now came the thunder. The cloud line was almost upon them; Luis Quinn felt warm wind buffet his face. Hands ran to the rigging, reefing sails. A tap at the door; a lay brother in a white shift.
‘Fathers, we have raised the City of God.’
Gonçalves looked up from his study, face bright and beaming.
‘Now this you must see, Father Quinn. I said you could not presume to judge me until you had seen my work; there is no better introduction.’
As admonitory and pai climbed by ladders to the balcony above the portico the basilica was simultaneously lit by lightning and beaten by thunder, a rolling constant roar that defeated very word or thought. Luis Quinn emerged into deluge; the threatened storm had broken. Such was the weight of the rain Quinn could hardly see the shore through wet gray, but it was evident that Nossa Senhora da Varzea was preparing for landfall. The greater body of the canoe fleet had fallen back, and now only two remained, big dugouts, thirty men apiece, each hauling a thigh-thick rope from its bowser beneath the narthex. Combing otter-wet hair out of his eyes, Quinn could now discern piers running far into the river; mooring posts, each the entire trunk of some forest titan sunk hip-deep in mud rapidly reverting to its proper elemental state. A cross, three times the height of a man, stood at the highest point of the bank.
The double doors opened, men and women in feather and genipapo bearing drums, rattles, maracas, reed instruments, and clay ocarinas. They stood impassive on the steps, the teeming rain running from their bodies. Father Gonçalves raised a hand. Bells pealed from the tower, an insane thunder audible even over the punishing rain. In the same instant, the assembly burst into song. Lightning backlit the monstrous cross; when his eyes had recovered their acuity Quinn saw two streams of people pouring over the top of the bank, slipping and sliding on the mud and rain-wash, summoned by the beating bells. Again Gonçalves lifted his hand. Nossa Senhora da Varzea shook from narthex to sanctuary as she shipped oars. Now the shore folk stood waist deep in the water, fighting to seize hold of the mooring lines. More joined every moment, men and women, children alike, jamming together on the jetties. The ropes were handed up to them; the men pulled themselves out of the blood-warm water to join the effort. Hand over hand, arm by arm, Nossa Senhora da Varzea was hauled in to dock.
‘Come come,’ Father Diego commanded, darting lightly down the perilous rain-slick companionway. Quinn could refuse neither his childlike delight nor his galvanic authority. Gonçalves raised a hand in blessing. The jetties, the piers and canoes, the haulers in the water and all across the hillside, went down on their knees in the hammering rain and crossed themselves. Then Gonçalves threw up his arms, and choir, tolling bells, thunder, and rain were drowned out by the roar of the assembled people. The choir fell in behind him, a crucifix on a pole at their head, a dripping, feather-work banner of Our Lady of the Varzea at the rear. Quinn hung on Gonçalves’ shoulder as they slogged across the slopping red mud, canoes running up onto the bank on every side. Bodies were still pouring over the hill; the steep bank was solid with people.
‘Citizens of heaven, subjects of Christ the King,’ Gonçalves shouted to Quinn. ‘They come to me as animals, deceptions in the shape of men. I offer them the choice Christ offers all: Accept his standard and have life in all its fullness, become men, become souls. Or choose the second standard and accept the inevitable lot of the animal, to be yoked and bound to a wheel.’
Quinn wiped away the streaming water from his face. He stood with Gonçalves on a rise at the lip of the bank; before him palm-thatched longhouses ranged in concentric circles across a bare plain to the distant, rain-smudged tree-line. Remnant palms, cajus, and casuarinas gave shade, otherwise the city - no mere aldeia this- was as stark as a sleeping army. At the vacant center rose a statue of Christ risen, arms outstretched to show the stigmata of his passion, ten times the height of a man. The smoke of ten thousand fires rose from the plain. And still people came, mothers with infants slung from brow straps, children, the old women with drooping flat breasts, pouring from the malocas into the muddy lanes between, their feet and shins spattered red. Striped peccaries rooted in the foot-puddled morass; dogs skipped and quarreled. Parrots bobbed on bamboo perches.
‘There must be forty thousand souls here,’ Quinn said.
The leaping rain was easing, following the storm front into the north, set to flight by bells. To the south, beyond the masts and crowning angels of the floating basilica, shafts of yellow light broke through curdling clouds and moved across the white water.
‘Souls, yes. Guabirú, Capueni, Surara nations - all one in the Cidade de Deus.’
Luis Quinn grimaced at the bitter liquor. The Guabirú boy who had offered him the gourd cringed away. The storm had passed entirely, and sun rays piercing as psalms swept the plantation. Leaves dripped and steamed; a bug kicked on its back in the puddle, spasming, dying. What Luis Quinn had thought from the purview of the bank was the edge of the great and intractable forest was the gateway to a series of orchards and plantations so extensive that Quinn could see no end to them. Manioc, cane, palm and caju, cotton and tobacco and these shady trees that Gonçalves had been so insistent he see: Jesuit’s Bark, he called them.
‘The key that unlocks the Amazon.’
‘I assume from its bitterness it is a most effective simple against some affliction.’
‘Against the ague, yes, yes; very good, Father. What is it holds us back from taking full stewardship of this land, as Our Lord grants us? Not the vile snakes or the heat, not even the animosity of the índios, though many of them display a childlike enthusiasm for violence. Sickness, disease, and especially the ague of the bad air, the shivering ague. A simple preparation from the bark of this tree affords complete cure and immunity, if taken as a regular draft. Can you imagine
such a boon to the development and exploitation of this God-granted land? A thousand cities like my City of God; the Amazon shall be the cornucopia of the Americas. The Spanish have souls only for gold and so dismissed it as desert, wilderness; they could not see the riches that grew on every branch and leaf, under their very steel boots! As well as my Jesuit’s Bark there are simples against many of the sicknesses that afflict us; I have potent analgesics against all aches and pains, herbal preparations that can treat the sepsis and even the gangrene if caught early enough; I can even cure disorders of the mind and spirit. We need not cast out with superstitious exorcism when a tincture, carefully administered, can take away the melancholy or the rage and quiet the demons.’
Luis Quinn could still taste the bitter desiccation of the almost-luminous juice on his tongue and lips. A chew of cane would cleanse it; a good cigar better. He had smelled the curing leaf from the drying barns, and his heart had beat sharp in want. Now he felt a fresh cool on his still-wet back; glancing round he saw the sun halo the giant Christ, its shadow long over him. The mass bell of Nossa Senhora da Varzea intoned the Angelus; in maloca, field, and orchard the people went to their knees.
As they returned along the foot-hardened walkways, the field workers bowing in deference to their Father, Quinn let himself slip down the march to fall in with Zemba. The swift night was running down the sky; the shifting layers of air around the river pressed the smoke of the cook-fires to the ground, dense as fog.
‘So friend, is this the City of God you have been looking for?’ Quinn spoke in Imbangala. In the weeks chasing legends up to the confluence of the Rio Branco, Luis had been fascinated by, and learned a conversational facility with, Zemba’s language. Learn the tongue, learn the man. Zemba was not so much a name as a title, a quasi-military rank, a minor princeling betrayed to Portuguese slavers by a rival royal faction of the N’gola. His letters of manumission, sealed by the royal judge of São Luis, were forgeries; Zemba was an escapee from a small lavrador de cana in Pernambuco who had lived five years in a quilombo before it was destroyed, as all the colonies of escaped slaves were destroyed, and ever since had searched for the true City of God, the city of liberty, the quilombo that would never be overthrown.
‘The City of God is paved with gold and needs neither sun nor moon, for Christ is her light,’ Zemba said. ‘Nor soldiers, for the Lord himself is her spear and shield.’
The two-man patrols were ubiquitous; skins patterned in what Quinn now recognized as the tribal identity of the Guabirú and armed with skillfully fashioned wooden crossbows, cunningly hinged in the middle with a magazine atop the action. Quinn recognized the Chinese repeating crossbow he had encountered in his researches into that greatest of empires, when he had thought his wished-for task most difficult might lead him there, rather than to this private empire on the Rio Branco. Quinn did not doubt that the light wooden bolts derived much of their lethality from poisons. He murmured phrases in Irish.
‘Your pardon, Father?’
‘A poem in my own language, the Irish.
To go to Rome,
Great the effort, little the gain,
You will not find there the king you seek
Unless you bring him with you.’
‘There is truth in that.’ Zemba moved close to Luis Quinn. ‘I took my own diversion while the Spanish father showed you the fields. I looked into one of the huts. You should do that, Father. And the church, look in the church; down below.’
‘Father!’ Gonçalves called brightly. ‘Confidence in Our Lord is surely the mark of a Christian; having seen what I have shown you, are you with me? Will you help me in my great work?’
Zemba dropped his head and stepped back, but Luis Quinn had caught the final flash of his eyes.
‘What is your work, Father?’
Gonçalves halted, smiling at the ignorance of a lumbering adult, his hands held out in unconscious mimicry of the great Christ-idol that dominated his city.
‘I take beasts of the field and I give souls to those that will receive them; what other work is there?’
You seek me to provoke me, Luis Quinn thought. You desire me to react to what I see as arrogance and self-aggrandizement. Luis Quinn folded his hands into the still-damp sleeves of his habit.
‘I am nearing a judgment, Father Gonçalves. Soon, very soon, I promise you.’
That night he came to the maloca that Diego Gonçalves kept as his private quarters. Pacas fled from Luis Quinn’s feet; Father Diego knelt at a writing desk, penning by the yellow, odorous glow of a palm-oil lamp in a book of rag-paper. Luis Quinn watched the concentration cross Gonçalves’ face as his pen creaked over the writing surface. Ruled lines, ticks and copperplate, an account of some kind. Quinn’s approach was unseen, unheard; he had always been quiet, furtive even, for a man of his size.
‘Father Diego.’
The man did not even start. Had he been aware all the time? Gonçalves set down the nubbin of quill.
‘A judgment by night?’
The prie-dieu was the only solid furniture in this long, palm-fragrant building. Quinn settled his large frame to kneel on elaborately appliquéd cushions.
‘Father Diego, who are those men and women beneath the deck of the ship?’
‘They are the damned, Father. The ones who have rejected Christ and His City and so condemn themselves to animal slavery. In time they will all be sold.’
‘Men and women; children, Father Diego.’
‘They have brought it on themselves; do not pity them, they neither deserve nor understand it.’
‘And the sick, Father Diego?’
Gonçalves’ boyish face was bland innocence.
‘I am not quite certain what you mean.’
‘I looked into one of the malocas. I could not believe what I saw, so I looked into another, and then another and another. This is not the City of God; this is the City of Death.’
‘Overtheatrical, Father.’
‘I see no play, no amusement in whole households dead from disease. The smallpox and the measles rend entire malocas and leave not one alive. Your ledger there, so neatly ruled and inscribed- have you records there for the numbers who have died since being liberated into your City of God ?’
Gonçalves sighed.
‘The índio is a race under discipline. They have been given over to us by God to be tried, tested, and, yes, admonished, Father. Through discipline, through exercise, comes spiritual perfection. God requires no less than the best of us as men and as a nation sacred to Him. These diseases are the refiner’s fire. God has a great plan for this land; with His grace, I will build a people worthy of it.’
‘Silence.’ Luis Quinn’s accent cut like a spade. ‘I have seen all you have wrought here, but I take none of that into account into my judgment, which is, that you are guilty of preaching false doctrine: namely, that the people to whom you have been sent to minister are born without souls and that it has been granted you the power to bestow them. That is a deadly error, and with it, I find you also guilty of the sin of hubris, which is the fatal sin of our Enemy himself. In the name of Christ and for the love you bear Him, I require you to place yourself under my authority and return with me to São José Tarumás, and then to Salvador.’