Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters

by Maria José Silveira

  Tomé de Sousa, the first governor-general named by the Portuguese king Dom João III, had arrived in Brazil, bringing with him the first great wave of soldiers, artisans, servants of the Crown, priests, exiles, women, and children to settle the country. Dom João III’s orders were clear: it was time to secure the new territory for Portugal. This included gaining control over the natives and transforming them into a source of manpower to build the future country. The demand for indigenous slaves increased.

  The Castilian would have no difficulties selling a shipload of captives, but before arriving at his final destination of Bahia de Todos os Santos, he made his customary stop to visit a friend, owner of a farm on the Bahia coast. His friend was a Portuguese man who had family in Spain and a knack for good conversation. He was on very good terms with the Castilian, who, besides bringing him reliable slaves, also knew how to appreciate, as few did, his cured wild-game meat.

  On this particular visit, after spending hours on good food, drink, and friendly jests, and feeling a bit disappointed because the cured meats had long since come to an end, the Castilian was about to depart when he had an idea. He walked to the brigantine, pulled Sahy from among the throng of natives, and delivered her to the Portuguese man: “I give you this native as your slave so that she might learn to make enough of your cured meats so I might take some with me.” His friend took a liking to the idea and agreed.

  It was no mistake that Vicente Arcón chose to leave Sahy behind. He did so because one night a few weeks prior, when the Castilian’s boats pulled up along a bank and his men went off to hunt, the warm, humid night of the tropics led the Castilian to grab the first native he laid hands on among the hordes piled atop the brigantine deck. It was Sahy.

  He took her to dry land, but, before throwing her to the ground, he felt her head touch his chest in the exact spot where his wife’s head had before, against the same black, pea-shaped birthmark just below his left nipple. A sudden chill ran down his entire body: Sahy was the same height as his dead wife. She was also of a similar weight and shape, she had the same sized breasts, the same girth, the same passive manner of someone whose spirit appears to be far away, which provoked a powerful and peculiar arousal. Without warning, all of this caught the Castilian off guard and awoke in him the wild and terrible sensation that he once again possessed the body of his dead wife.

  After this episode, he wanted to be rid of Sahy, and, at the same time, have her at hand when he found himself in one of those hellish moments when, on account of a similar pang of madness, he desired to possess once again the wife he had pierced through with his sword, but whose absence he nonetheless mourned.

  For this reason, it was Sahy he chose to leave at the farm belonging to his Portuguese friend.

  From that point forward, every time the Castilian passed through the region, a bounty of cured meats awaited him, and at nights in front of a bonfire, he would grab hold of Sahy, take her to his tent, and once again feel the touch of his dead wife against the same black, pea-shaped birthmark just beneath his left nipple.

  For Sahy, the Castilian became someone to whom she would always be irreparably connected. She felt neither horror nor pleasure at this. She felt nothing at all. Ever since she’d dedicated herself to leading an interior life, always seeking reflection, it was as if everything that happened to her was happening to someone else, as though she merely saw and contemplated those events.

  Each time the Castilian sought her out, Sahy would close her eyes and see the gently flowing brook that passed by her tribe’s village, and listen to its soft murmur. Or else, she saw herself, as though she were lying on the jungle floor, staring up into the humid air trapped beneath the dense forest canopy, the leaves falling one by one, without a sound and without allowing the slightest passage of light amid the darkness. Sahy let the Castilian take her without drama, without a fuss, the same way she ate, breathed, drank, and relieved herself.

  In her dreams she had seen that with each visit from the Castilian she would give birth to a son, all of whom would die as soon as they were born. She knew it was meant to be that way; she would wrap the dead infants in the mats she wove specially for this purpose, and bury them at the edge of the brook, along the left bank since all had been boys.

  Something curious had happened to Sahy, and perhaps the only explanation for this was her existence as a marauna, a dream decipherer. She, who had dreamed of being a jaguar at the height of her freedom and power, had suddenly stumbled upon—at the exact moment that she herself was trapped in a net—the most tragic of traits common to all animals: their openness to vulnerability, the perverse potential to become prey, to be subdued by another. At that exact moment, so that she might know and feel in some way that she was more than a mere animal, she moved past the anger that she sensed would do no good and the sorrow that she knew to be useless, and soon reached a stage in which she always reached beyond, the stage where she could accept and contemplate the world as a passive observer of the infinite human capacity to inflict suffering.

  Only after her daughter was born did Sahy step out of this state of mind, but not so much, not entirely, and only during those moments she sat Filipa on her lap to teach her daughter the things she knew.

  Life on the Portuguese man’s farm was quite hard for the other captives, but not for Sahy, who stayed in the kitchen and enjoyed an almost special status for her connection to the Castilian. She would slaughter the animals the men brought back from the hunt and, when she’d finished preparing the meats for curing, she would sit at the foot of a majestic cashew tree, solitary and still.

  There she would close her eyes and see. She saw back to the beginning of her people, how they had come to that land where later the white men, too, would arrive. She could see what that land had looked like before and what her people’s life was like there. She saw her brothers who were now working in the fields, planting seeds as the women of the tribe had done before, and she saw the hate swelling in their chests, or, worse than hate, their grief and their bitterness. Only in the act of clearing the forest in that way of theirs, separating out an area and setting fire to it, crouching down to observe the voracity of the flames devouring the forest, did they still seem to have some inner glow. The natives who watched over the cows and the steer, bizarre animals who had crossed the sea from distant lands and whose milk was much whiter and heaver than that made from cassava, these men led lives that were more in accord with their nature, free to roam the fields, but they were few in number. And even among them, anyone who sought to disobey the white man’s orders, pausing when their body asked for rest, were whipped and bound and had their food taken away.

  One night, there appeared a white man who was different than all the others. He was wearing a black cloak and his nose, the largest Sahy had ever seen, recalled the enormous beak of some bird. The boney angles of his deathly thin body exacerbated his resemblance to a smooth-billed ani. The way he looked at the natives was also different, like that of someone who had suffered a great personal trauma and who harbored a desire to see beyond the surface, to peer deep within them.

  On Sunday nights, this man would come to talk with the slaves around the bonfire. He said that there was but one Tupã, the lord father of all, and that He had died on a cross like the one the man wore around his neck—just like the cross of Sahy’s white father, the one her mother used as though it were a lucky charm. Now she understood that it was Tupã. The man told them that God was good and loved them all, and he would often stay for hours on end talking about the things that pleased this different Tupã.

  He spoke softly and always in the same low, husky voice, often sounding as though he were repeating the same word. Sahy would close her eyes and see the freshwater brook, hear its soft murmur as it ran through her village; she saw her mother and her aunts and her sisters, she saw them all seated on the ground, weak, fainting like the jaguar in her dreams, and she observed them as she sat listening to the hypnotic voices of the priest and the water.
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br />   The priest would poke at her until she returned to herself and began to listen again, and his eyes bored into hers as though trying to see straight through her.

  The priest did not like Sahy.

  The poor Jesuit, who despite his oath to love all of God’s children and the fact that he was there for this exact reason, to love the natives, greatly disliked Sahy. He found her to be sly, with those lifeless eyes that he found impossible to decipher. He thought she was indolent because she slept around the fire rather than listening to his words. He considered her wicked because she welcomed men to her mat without recognizing that a child of God should not do so.

  He had the farmer’s permission to catechize the natives on Sunday nights. He would gather next to them around the fire and begin speaking in his soft voice. That was when Sahy would close her eyes and have a vision of the priest, tied to the cross, as though he himself were the Tupã he was always talking about. The cross was carried away by the waters, but this time she didn’t hear the sweet, soft ripple of the crystal-clear brook of her village, but the deafening noise of rough, violent waters, the piranha-infested waters of a rushing river that slowly turned red, then rosy, then red again with the blood of the priest tied to the cross-shaped raft as it was swept down the furious river.

  When the priest would prod her yet again to listen to the words of his god, Sahy would open her eyes, but it was as if she hadn’t opened them at all, because she continued to see the bird-like priest tied to the cross, rushing down the river, the water red, then rosy, then red again.

  Only when the time for psalms arrived did the priest stop worrying whether Sahy had closed her eyes. As he felt his tenor’s voice carry through the endless night, he forgot himself and Sahy and imagined himself in the kingdom of the Lord with all his flock. But it was then Sahy would open her eyes of her own accord because she wished to see the powerful sounds as they left the priest’s mouth. She needed to see the movements that molded the air into sonorous waves so that she might learn and, together with the other natives, open her mouth, too, and let forth that sound that filled the night, giving it the palpable weight of the presence of great and impenetrable spirits.

  Some days, the priest carried what appeared to Sahy to be a piece of some unknown type of corn husk where he drew some shapes with a tiny stick. He would ask the natives to repeat certain words over and over, and then he’d make a few more scribbles.

  One day, Sahy asked him what those scribbles meant. He explained to her that he was drawing out words from their language, the savages’, to remind him later of their meaning and show them to the others. Sahy then told him that he ought to write mañuçawa, the savages’ word for death, for this was the best word to show the others.

  It was for reasons like this that the Jesuit priest disliked Sahy.

  Or perhaps, too, because he thought it within her power to avoid Vicente Arcón, the Castilian, forgetting that she was merely a slave and that such things were completely beyond her reach.

  Each time Vicente Arcón passed through, it provoked an argument that became increasingly heated between the hot-tempered slave trader and the Jesuit who wished to protect the Tupinambá. A Spaniard himself, the priest began to harbor doubts about Vicente’s supposed origins. In a loud voice, he promised to ask for an investigation, he would not permit the slave trader to treat the natives like animals. So contagious was the Castilian’s fury that it left even the Jesuit defenseless, rendering him nearly unrecognizable as he raged in a way entirely unbefitting a soldier of Christ.

  On the Castilian’s final visit to the farm, he slept with Sahy, who knew that a daughter had been planted in her womb that night, and that this time the child would survive.

  Early in the morning, she saw the Castilian and his men heading for the priest’s simple chapel. The previous afternoon, she had looked on as these same men, at the Castilian’s orders, hammered two large pieces of cedarwood into a cross the size of a man. When she closed her eyes afterword, she saw the red- and rose-colored waters of the river thick with piranhas.

  Neither the priest nor the Castilian was ever seen there again.

  Among the baptized and unbaptized savages, there was mention that bits of the priest’s black cassock had been found farther downstream. There was weeping, cursing, and vows of revenge against the Castilian and his men. Their liturgical songs filled the damp night with a despondency that seemed to freeze the sound in the air.

  Sahy continued canning meats for some time, though she knew the Castilian would never return for them.

  When her daughter was born, Sahy’s owner, the Portuguese farmer, had the new priest baptize the child with the Christian name Filipa, in honor of the Spanish king he so admired, and who would soon also be king of Portugal.

  The first ten years of Filipa’s life were spent on the farm, with neither great tragedies nor great cause for joy. At night, after finishing her work in the kitchen, Sahy would sit her daughter on her lap around the bonfire, close her eyes, and tell the girl in a dreamy voice everything she could see. She recounted what her people had been like in the beginning of the beginning. Where they had come from, and how they had lived. She spoke of the forest, its herbs, and its secrets. She told of the arrival of the white man who swore friendship yet offered anything but, of the cross that hung around the neck of the man the young girl’s grandmother had eaten, and who had bequeathed her lighter skin than the others. She spoke of her tribe’s decimation and the jaguar and all the other beasts that she knew so well. She spoke of the black bird-priest and the river full of piranhas and the strange god the man proclaimed was the one true god; she spoke of the slave trader who was Filipa’s father and who had given her almond-shaped eyes and the scent of cured meats.

  And so those first ten years went by, with mother telling daughter the story of her people and their suffering.

  Until one night Sahy dreamed once again that she was a jaguar. But she was neither a young nor a powerful jaguar—she was old and decrepit, collapsed by the enormous trunk of a Brazilwood tree, where there soon appeared a blackbird who nailed her to an enormous cedarwood cross; this cross was not the size of a man, but of a woman.

  On account of it being an old jaguar, Sahy committed her second major error as a dream interpreter, believing that the evil to come would touch only her. But even had she understood that the evil headed her way would also reach Filipa, what could she have done?

  She woke early the next morning and went to the kitchen to help prepare a breakfast of tapioca pancakes with coconut, and the morning resembled all others in every way, it was neither less sunny nor quieter. But it was on this particular morning, identical in every way to the others, that everything would change, because on that morning, neither less sunny nor quieter than all the rest, Filipa was to be sold to the mameluco charged with buying slaves for a sugar plantation farther north, in Recife.

  The buyer arrived at the crack of dawn and selected the youngest and strongest Indians, who, if they were still pagans, were immediately baptized by the priest at his side. When Sahy threw herself to the ground, offering herself to be taken along with her daughter, the mameluco looked into her nearly toothless mouth and declared that she wouldn’t do.

  That night, without her Filipa, Sahy sat at the edge of the fire one final time, closed her eyes, and saw the forest’s darkness close in on the jaguar.

  She never opened her eyes again.

  It was said later that her death that night was the first of the great chickenpox epidemic that would kill more than fifty thousand Indians in Bahia.

  FILIPA

  (1552-1584)

  Filipa shared her mother’s privileged position at the farm belonging to the Portuguese man of the cured meats, and assisted only with the work in the kitchen.

  The Portuguese farmer wasn’t certain who the girl’s father was, but because it was in his cautious nature to account for all possibilities, he decided to give her a Christian name—a Spanish one at that—just in case, and to tre
at her as he had Sahy. Except that the Castilian had not appeared once in the last ten years, and the Portuguese farmer soon began to ask what, when it all shook out, sort of obligation did he have to a murderer of priests? It’s quite true that, beyond the good conversation and the praise heaped on his cured meats, deep down, just like everyone else, he harbored a terrible fear of the infamous Castilian. But ten years is a long time to harbor anything, even the most secret of fears, which, if they are not carefully cultivated, fade over time like everything else.

  The only bit of news that reached him every now and then was that the Castilian was keeping a distance from the region to avoid any awkward situations, and so the Portuguese farmer thought it wise to consent when a slave trader said he would like to take the plump little daughter of an Indian and a white man. By all means, as money was one of the most welcome things as far as he was concerned. He could take Sahy too, if he wanted, and, if he didn’t want her, he wasn’t the one to blame for separating mother and daughter—and when it came right down to it, what was wrong with separating mother and daughter if they were both Indians? The savages, while he wouldn’t say they had no feelings, for even he could attest they did, were like cattle: their suffering was of a lighter nature and would soon pass.

  The fact is that Filipa, accustomed to canning meat and spending hours on her mother’s lap by the bonfire, wasn’t prepared in the least for what she was to find at the mill in Recife.

  Things got off to a bad start on the journey north. Bound to the other natives, Filipa, who was unaccustomed to walking long distances, was practically dragged along by the others, her feet soon full of open sores, her legs cramping and pangs shooting up her legs, hunger—which she had never before known—piercing her stomach, and the thirst causing her throat to close up. This hell lasted for days, and she only survived because the slave trader, worried about losing a slave so quickly at the beginning of the journey, sat her on the back of a donkey carrying a load of salt.