Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters

by Maria José Silveira

  This constant commotion drew attention in the end. Aware that someone was stealing up to the plantation in the dead of night, Jacira ordered her men to prepare an ambush and shoot any intruders on sight, since whoever was sneaking around like that could only be a thief or troublemaker.

  No one can say for sure whether Jacira suspected the intruder was Jacinto. And nobody could question her order, since anyone who sneaks onto another person’s property, no matter who he is, is probably doing so without the best of intentions. And perhaps, just perhaps, had Jacinto not been wearing a hood, or fled like a thief when given the order to stop, Jacira’s men would have recognized him and his fate would have been different.

  But fate is never different.

  The order had been given, he was wearing a hood, no one recognized him, and they had truly thought he was a thief. And there he died, beneath the blue window, a bullet to the heart.

  Maria Bárbara’s heart also suffered a fatal blow that night.

  Not even the birth seven months later of the child she was expecting brought the least bit of color or happiness to her face.

  She died of pneumonia less than a year later, without having forgiven her mother or having spoken to her ever again.

  During endless days of mourning and regret, Jacira would sit on the porch for hours and hours, looking out over her lands, whose emptiness once again seemed immense. She tried with all her might to revive the happiness she felt after the birth of Maria Bárbara and Mariano, her handsome twins, and the euphoria that struck Dagoberto, who considered twins a sign of abundance and who finally had himself a little girl. On his first trip to Rio after their birth, he bought a piano for his daughter, a tiny, well-tuned piano that would also hold up well along the way, ideal for beginners, as the owner of the store had told him. He wanted her to learn to play as soon as she grew a bit more and her tiny fingers could master eighty-eight keys of ivory and ebony.

  Dagoberto loved music. He’d had a baritone’s voice and was fond of repeating that music was a gift his mother had passed on to all her children. Jacira didn’t know it, since when it came to family she couldn’t remember anything beyond her father’s and mother’s first names, but she also had a talent for music in her veins. It came as no surprise, however, that at least three of her children had a gift for music, especially the eldest, Antonio, and Maria Bárbara, both of whom had perfect pitch.

  Antonio was a baritone like his father: his voice, however, had a deeper and more melodious timbre, as well as an acute and fatal sadness. During his adolescent years, a kick in the head from an angry horse had nearly killed him, knocking him unconscious for several days and leaving him entirely deaf in his right ear. On account of this injury, or perhaps on account of his submissive temperament, Antonio never stepped out of the shadow of his parents. If prior to the accident his voice could often be heard in a duet with his father, after the incident he practically went silent. Later, he took the most pleasure in sitting with his left ear turned toward his sister at the piano. In such moments, his face lit up with a rare, tender expression and Antonio would close his eyes as if dreaming sweet, easy dreams.

  It was Antonio who saw to the instrument’s maintenance, and after some time studying its workings, he was a consummate tuner and connoisseur. When Dagoberto died, no one even considered the idea that his eldest child might assume command over the plantation. His roles had always been secondary and changed frequently; his lack of initiative left him no place of his own in the running of the plantation. At the age of thirty, Antonio married Maria Ambrosia, a young woman who had come to live with the family and who was as timid as he was. They went to live in a house that Jacira ordered built for the couple on a plot of the plantation’s land near the grazing fields. There, after the death of Maria Bárbara, Antonio began to build instruments similar to his sister’s piano. Without the right materials, though, he managed to create instruments that emitted unknown sounds, some of them pleasing to the ear, others disturbing. Several of these instruments can be found today in the Museum of Image and Sound at the Institute of History and Geography of Goiás.

  Maria Bárbara was a self-taught piano player. Sometimes, travelers who passed through the plantation would know how to play and taught her a thing or two. Her dream was to go one day to Vila Boa de Goiás, or to the capital of what was now the Viceroyalty of Brazil, to study piano more seriously. Their brother Feliciano, who had been living in Rio de Janeiro since the age of sixteen, dedicating himself to business affairs, would write to her with encouragement, telling her of the many good family girls who played well, but none of whom, in his opinion, could match her. Her plan with Jacinto was to flee to Rio, where her brother would no doubt help them.

  Her twin brother Mariano, a close friend to both her and Jacinto, had promised to help them as he could. After their deaths, unable to forgive his mother, whose guilt he considered clear and unredeemable, Mariano abandoned the plantation and went to live with Feliciano in Rio.

  Back at the plantation, Jacira had only her youngest son Justino left, born two years before Dagoberto’s death.

  Jacira made an effort to evoke the plantation of years past, when Maria Bárbara played her piano, Antonio, his eyes closed, would dream at her side, and Mariano, leaning against the instrument, also drank in the melody. Above the piano hung a portrait by a young painter who Dagoberto had brought from Rio expressly for that portrait: Jacira sitting down, wrapped in her blue silk mantilla with her gold chain and cameo necklace, holding the twins on her lap; Dagoberto behind her, cutting an elegant figure in his dark suit, hair parted down the middle, his arm resting on the chair-back, the other on Antonio’s shoulder as Feliciano kneeled at his side, the two boys in festive attire. Justino had yet to be born. The colors of the portrait, once so vivid, now appeared to have a mist hanging over them, permanently depriving its subjects of their splendor and sharpness.

  Jacira remembered the boys’ cries of joy when they were little and the happiness in her daughter’s eyes, eyes that never again looked her in the face after that terrible day, the memory of which cut her anew like an eternal wound. The day her daughter told her with eyes full of tears: “I hate you, and I will never forgive you for what you’ve done.” She remembered her daughter’s blue bedroom window, which opened up onto a trellis of jasmine whose sweet, piercing perfume would wash over the room. It was next to that window that Jacinto had fallen. Some days later, no longer able to stand the smell of the jasmine she herself had planted, Maria Bárbara walked over to the trellis as the sun set, at the exact moment when the flowers exhale their heaviest scent, and tore the plants up by the roots, one by one. It was that very same night—or perhaps not, Jacira couldn’t remember anymore—that her daughter ran to the imposing jatoba tree where the Captain had decided they would settle down so many years ago and tried to unearth it, too, her nails digging into the hard bark with such fervent and unnerving despair that Jacira wished she could die in Jacinto’s place rather than see her daughter suffer. Maria Bárbara had to be torn away from the spot, her hands covered in blood and wounds so deep they would never heal fully, or didn’t have the time to do so.

  Jacira would also think back to Mariano, who from a young age could always be found at his twin sister’s side, as if the two were one. Her son Mariano who, on the same day his sister was buried, mounted his horse and, looking back on his mother standing there like a silent statue on the porch, rode up alongside her and, rather than offer the consoling words of goodbye Jacira had hoped for, had looked straight at her and spit.

  Afterward, the bulk of Jacira’s days were spent with these memories. They were wounds she knew she would carry with her until she was in her casket and covered with earth. They were indelible moments she could never erase but which—this much was in her power—she could keep from ever happening again. Keep them from happening with Damiana, the precious creature who had remained from Jacinto and Maria Bárbara’s union, the union she had so stupidly tried to thwart.

 
; Her granddaughter was what gave purpose to Jacira each day, surpassing even her efforts to preserve Dagoberto’s memory.

  Albeit with some delay, news of what was happening throughout the country always arrived at the plantation. Travelers passing through brought news of events in the other provinces. The cattlemen who went to Rio and Bahia were also important sources of information, and they also brought the books she requested. Later, her son Feliciano’s long letters gave her a direct connection to the capital and its unsettling developments.

  That’s how Jacira had learned about certain decrees, like the one prohibiting the installation of mills and factories in the colony, or another that ordered the immediate collection of all unpaid taxes. She was quickly informed when, in Minas Gerais, talk of a rebellion spread everywhere—in the streets, throughout the taverns, out to the roadside farms. Later, she learned how all of it ended, the sedition of Minas, the hanging of one of the rebellion’s leaders, the ensign Tiradentes, and the jailing of all the rest. In a long letter, her son Feliciano, a man with modern ideas who closely followed the debate over independence, described the flag that the conspirators had already designed and which circulated in several places throughout the country, and which bore phrases in Latin.

  Feliciano wrote her about what had happened in France in 1789, and how in Rio people were saying that equality, fraternity, and liberty were the basic rights of everyone, “including us, mother, including the Brazilians.” Many people even declared openly, he told her, that the French had done well to kill the king and Marie Antoinette.

  Jacira read these reports attentively, but thought it all had little to do with her. Faraway from everything, isolated from the rest of the country, dedicating her life to her lands and the goods they produced, such great issues were quite vague in her mind. Her relationship with her farmhands was one of hierarchy, built on economic power and tradition, not violence. As far as the slaves went, she felt that their dependence on her was greater than her dependence on them. How would they survive without someone like her to put clothes on their backs and the food on their plates?

  Strictly speaking, she saw herself as a sort of mother figure to them all, a mother who provided the basic means for survival and who, when forced to punish them, punished them like a mother would, a just punishment she administered for their own good. On the plantation she, like Captain Dagoberto before her, never permitted violence against the slaves like that at other plantations. When a neighboring farmer warned against the danger of runaway slaves, she would respond that if a slave truly did not want to work for her any longer, he wouldn’t be missed much were he to flee.

  Nearly ten years later, news arrived of insurrection in Bahia—the Tailor Revolution, an uprising caused by a shortage of food in the city. People told of how a mob had attacked slaves carrying enormous quantities of meat on Holy Saturday, destined for the commanding general in Salvador. For the first time, Jacira heard talk not only of independence from Portugal, but the proclamation of a Brazilian republic, the end of slavery, and free trade.

  When Prince Regent João VI of Portugal, and his mother, Queen Maria the Mad, fled Napoleon and disembarked in Rio, Feliciano’s letters conveyed the sense of euphoria that had taken hold of the city despite the chaos provoked by the rapid increase in its population, which swelled quickly on account of the fifteen thousand Portuguese who followed the royal delegation. As far as Feliciano, who traded in foodstuffs and other odds and ends, was concerned, the arrival of the Portuguese was a blessed and promising gift from the heavens. He described in great detail the stupendous public works the king had ordered and how life for everyone was about to change for the better, as though a tornado of miracles had swept the city.

  There was only one thing Feliciano’s long letters never spoke of: Mariano. As soon as his brother arrived in Rio, Feliciano wrote Jacira telling her that Mariano had arrived and had accepted his offer to live with him under one condition: Feliciano was never to give her any news of him since he considered her, like Maria Bárbara, dead to him. Feliciano had given his word and, as a result, this would be the first and last time he would ever send news of his brother, a promise he kept to the very end.

  As the years dragged on, the production on the plantation began to change naturally, despite Jacira’s speech about how everything would remain the same, despite her Captain’s name being always on her lips. However, without her realizing it, it was as though this name she repeated constantly had become a rare sort of sweet candy on her tongue. A candy that didn’t melt from outside to inside, but from the inside out, slowly devoured from the core by the most powerful and invincible being of all—time, the force that both carries everything and takes it away, never to return, and which had left in its place a thin, empty shell with the name of Dagoberto. Without her realizing it, Jacira began to set her own wishes aside, and the winds of change slowly swept across her land.

  Since she seemed to have a greater inclination and skill for looking after the cattle, the cattle began to take over, soon assuming priority over the sugar mill, the cotton fields, and the crops, all of which continued to grow, of course, but on a smaller scale with fewer slaves and fewer workers. Those on the inside perhaps failed to notice these changes, but beyond her lands, Dona Jacira became better known for raising cattle—the biggest in the region—than for her crops or her sugarcane. From her porch at the end of the afternoon, she’d look out upon her river of white horns crowding into the enormous corral with a satisfaction that could not be put into words.

  THE RE-ENCOUNTER WITH ALENCAR AMBRÓSIO

  On that distant morning lost to memory, when Diogo Ambrósio killed his wife and left Jacira on Corporal Jesuíno’s doorstep, his son Alencar, then nine years old, had recently set off for the Jesuit School of Rio de Janeiro at his paternal grandfather’s urging. Visiting him later, his father told him merely that his mother had died and that he ought to forget his sister because he would never again see her. At that moment, the young boy was unable to question his father or demand any sort of explanation. But he always had an intuition that his sister was still living and he knew that, when he was able to, there would be some way of finding her.

  With his mother’s inheritance and his father’s money, and his paternal grandfather’s contacts, Alencar Ambrósio, little older than twenty, entered the slave trade. The notable increase in demand for slave labor in the gold mines transformed the trafficking of black chattel into the era’s multimillion-dollar business.

  The rich men with business in the ports of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia had created an extraordinarily lucrative system of commerce: ships would carry tobacco, sugarcane liquor, and other products produced in Brazil to Africa, and return with slaves. Without the permission of the Portuguese or protection from a naval fleet, these ships were easy prey for ships belonging to pirates or to other countries. But the profits from the sea crossing were so great that they gave birth to the greatest Brazilian fortunes, greater even than those earned in the gold mines. And so the Ambrósio family would quickly become one of the richest of Rio, and Alencar a venerable old patriarch.

  After 1808, when England began to apply pressure to end the Atlantic slave trade, and up until 1850, when the traffic of slaves was effectively outlawed and put to a definitive end, several decades passed during which Brazil’s slave-trading elite mounted startling fortunes. Alencar Ambrósio’s sons and grandsons would later transform their grandfather’s ships into true warships, capable of fending off attacks from pirates or the English Navy. They would also continue, as their grandfather had done, to diversify the family business, becoming coffee farmers, bankers, and ship owners.

  All the same, the old patriarch Alencar Ambrósio never forgot his sister.

  He didn’t wish to reopen his father’s wound while he was still alive, but after the old man’s death he began his long search for her. He dispatched one of his men to discover what had happened to Jacira Antonia, but no one at his father’s old plantation knew where Diogo Ambró
sio had gone when he set off at a gallop on that terrible morning, his daughter of three on his horse with him. No one, not even the slave women, had heard Clara Joaquina’s fateful lie just before she died; nearly all of them believed that Jacira’s father, acceding to madness and jealousy, had killed his daughter as well and buried her in the woods.

  And so Alencar had sent one of his men to continue the search together with his maternal grandfather’s family, with whom his father had broken entirely. The descendants of Paulista explorer José Garcia, however, had never heard anything of the whereabouts of Ana de Pádua’s daughter, much less her granddaughter.

  The man returned without making inroads. Many years would pass until Alencar decided to adopt another approach: he ordered his man to cross all the towns and villages within a day’s reach from the old plantation. The search was slow, full of false leads, but in the end they discovered where Jacira had spent her childhood and whom she had married.

  After that, it was merely a question of time.

  One afternoon, at eighty years old but strong as the giant trees of the backlands, Alencar announced himself, together with one of his sons, at his sister’s plantation.

  The likewise old and powerful woman received her visitors from her hammock on the porch. She was seventy-four. At her side was her youngest son, Justino, and her granddaughter Damiana, already twenty-two.

  Jacira could not hide her trembling as she listened to the words of the imposing old man with hair and a beard that were completely white. She didn’t know what to make of that patriarchal figure with his city manners, so different from her own. In her memory, she had preserved the sound of her father galloping away and the names Diogo Ambrósio and Clara Joaquina. A dark room, filled with mist. Nothing more.

  No brother. No tenderness or memory of affections once traded, no remembrances good or bad. Nothing.