Damiana had begun to catch on to her husband’s duplicity, his miserly arriviste character disguised beneath the mask of charm and flattery he used to please whoever served his interests. She had noted how he barely contained his disdain for Mariano and his intellectual friends, how he treated her with irritation and impatience. In fact, Inácio had resolved to let his true feelings be known. He recriminated Damiana for leading a life unfit for a family woman and accused Mariano and his group of being a bunch of good-for-nothing leeches. He didn’t agree with the ideas circulating through the house; he found them much too revolutionary, too independent, a country of mestizos, after all, ought to proceed with caution, ought to look to the example of countries in possession of a more elevated culture. He could no longer stand Damiana’s interest in literature, which he considered the fancy of a rich heiress. If in the beginning he had pretended to read his wife’s poetry and other writings, heaping praise upon them, by now, whenever he read them it was only to make them the subject of his mockery.
Only the fear of the lowly merchant in the face of the symbolic weight of the lands belonging to his wife’s family managed to curb more aggressive behaviors. With time, however, to the extent he began to increase his own circle of important relations, he gained confidence, as though he had finally managed to perform a psychological transplant on himself of the prestige he so coveted; with each day that passed, he began to consider himself the true owner of the family lands, since, if Damiana was his wife, he—by law and by fact—was the true property holder, the owner, the principal.
His objective was to obtain the title of baron, the coronation of his influence and power. Doors had begun to open to him thanks to his wealth and status as an owner of great tracts of land. He formed friendships with influential nobleman, and performed favors that began to attract the attention of the king.
The proof of his importance came with an invitation to the coronation of King João VI after the death of his mother, Queen Maria the Mad. Inácio felt as if nothing could hold him back. His participation in the sumptuous court procession that followed the king from the majestic Mass to the Arch of Triumph, erected expressly for the occasion in the palace square, was a milepost in the psychological life of Inácio Belchior: from then on he felt more powerful than his wife, capable of doing to her whatever he pleased.
His audacity had no end. Damiana was soon being called frivolous, a mere society lady. Her friends, a bunch of shameless louts. Her poetry, the work of a child. Her habits, licentious.
Damiana, however, did not lower her head. She didn’t know how to, she hadn’t been brought up for that. She had always been free and did as she pleased, and she would continue to do so. Her initial surprise with the changes in her husband soon morphed into a determination to leave, to live only with her daughter, to divorce. She decided to write Mariano, who was traveling, for there was no one better than her uncle to help her with how to proceed.
Meanwhile, as often happens in such cases, things quickly got out of hand. One night, when he arrived at home to find friends visiting his wife, Inácio practically kicked them out of the house and, in a burst of rage, waited for Damiana in the bedroom and struck her across the face. Damiana, her eyes full of tears but sure of herself, announced her decision to immediately ask for a divorce.
This was her tragic error: to make her intentions clear to her husband.
Don’t be surprised: divorce was possible in Brazil. It was, in fact, almost always a result of the wife’s request. Though Catholic doctrine considered marriage an indissoluble bond, the ecclesiastic tribunals of each diocese had the freedom to rule over separations and annulments, and the civil tribunals would then oversee the division of goods among the separated parties. The problem was when the husband did not accept the divorce out of what he considered humiliation, or because he did not want to divide the couple’s assets. Which was exactly the case with Belchior.
For him, the divorce would mean the worst of his fears: the loss of part of his goods and a risk to his obtaining the title of baron. It had never occurred to him that his wife could think of such a thing. It was a threat and a humiliation that he would never allow, and which brought out all his demons and eradicated whatever remaining scruples he still possessed.
After a sleepless night, he decided to act quickly. It was essential he take advantage of the fact that Mariano was not in the city. He sought out the intendant-general of the Rio police, a personal friend, and filed a complaint accusing Damiana of being a libertine, an atheist, licentious and a spendthrift, unfit for society. He, an honorable subject of the Crown, a merchant belonging to the Order of Christ, and owner of land in the province of Goiás, no longer knew what to do to preserve the honor of his house and his daughter. He accused Damiana of being dangerous, of threatening his life and seeking divorce, which would amount to dishonor and ruin for him and his young daughter. He did not want to create a public scandal, but wished to punish the adulteress who organized republican meetings in his house, in his own house, the house of a loyal and honorable subject of the king.
He also sought out the archbishop and other important friends to denounce her and bring his plans to fruition. The friends of his wife and Mariano were mostly artists, without great political or religious authority, and Inácio took advantage of this fact in the execution of his plan. He could also count on his own friendships and money to convince everyone of his wife’s dishonor and his own despair, and the need to take all precautions, and quickly, before the situation deteriorated further. With neither difficulty nor delay, he obtained false witnesses to attest to his wife’s calamitous state. The intendant-general, the archbishop, and the prelate found it advantageous to agree; it was imperative that something be done, and fast.
Damiana, ignorant to her husband’s machinations, was caught by surprise. The same night of the argument in which she had naively announced her decision to her husband, her daughter became sick with a bout of fever, and so she spent the following days and nights by the crib, having neither time nor the mindset to tend to her own concerns, much less speak to her friends. She wasn’t the least bit prepared for what was about to happen to her. She wasn’t at all alert enough to realize the trap her husband was setting when he asked her to go with him to the convent to speak with the Mother Superior. Inácio insisted, practically imploring her, he swore it was the last chance for them to arrive at an understanding, that she owed him that chance. He said that a slave woman would watch over the girl, that she was already better, she no longer had a fever.
Damiana, exhausted after many nights of keeping vigil and without the will to continue arguing, decided she would lose nothing by going to the convent.
When she arrived at the convent she was led through several dark hallways, then was asked to enter in a tiny cell; after they closed the door behind her and locked the door, she began to grow perplexed. At first, she had no idea what was happening. She spent the next few moments thinking about the strange behavior of the Mother Superior when welcoming visitors to the convent.
Then, a chill ran down her spine.
But she did not give in to fear, for what did she have to fear? She came to visit the convent at her husband’s request; the whole thing was strange, true, but such things are always strange, the Mother Superior was bound to provide some explanation.
She began to understand the situation little by little. At first, as a small insinuation that she quickly discarded, chiding herself: “You’re stupid, stupid, how can you think something so stupid? Inácio and the Mother Superior will arrive any moment.” But as more time passed and the niggling idea lingered, and once she decided that she had effectively passed an unusual amount of time there, she began to scream. Her terrifying cries echoed down the long, hollow corridor. She received no response.
Just silence.
Damiana had no idea how long she had stood there screaming, how much time she spent there committed to the terror to end all terrors, that of not knowing what awaited her. T
he clear light entering through the tiny window near the ceiling began to change tone, to turn yellow, then a dark orange, when she heard the sound of an iron door opening and, filled with hope, she screamed louder: “Help! Who’s there?” But there was no response. Only the faint sound of footsteps along the corridor with its towering ceiling and the small slot in the solid wood door that opened to pass through a tray with a cup full of water, a piece of bread, and a bowl of soup.
Damiana’s screams had no end.
Her voice seemed a constant font of despair, terror, and a search for answers.
Still later, when darkness began to take over her tiny cell, she again heard the noise of an iron door opening at the end of the hall, and again the sound of footsteps approaching. The small window in the door opened again, and through it the cavernous mouth of the archbishop himself appeared to explain the situation. At her husband’s request and by unanimous decision by the relevant religious and civil authorities, she was there to repent for her dissolute lifestyle and her licentious and corrupting habits. The length of her reclusion would depend on, above all else, her repentance and good behavior. He hoped to grant his blessing for her to return to a peaceful life at the side of her family, as soon as she accepted her role and destiny as a wife and mother in accord with the laws of the Church and society.
When she would accept her situation, cease screaming, and calmly commit herself to that period of rest and reflection in the convent, which is what everyone expected of her and with the greatest speed, she could be transferred to a larger cell in the company of other cloistered women.
Damiana, however, never accepted the situation and never stopped screaming. As she grew increasingly weak, her screams became briefer, her voice hoarse, but she could still be heard down the long corridors. She did not accept or resign herself at any point, not even for a fraction of a second, to the convent life; no matter how futile, she never lost an opportunity to try to flee, however small.
Ah, Damiana!
Why?
When people face such unexpected blows and intolerable losses, they try to relive over and over the moments that led up to the tragedy, the actions that brought them to that point, in a desperate attempt to understand that which cannot be understood. They don’t do it out of the irrational hope that they might still change things, or out of the longing to torture themselves, or to make themselves pay for something they did or didn’t do, as though they were ultimately as responsible for their predicament as their tormenters. No, that isn’t what drives them to do this, but rather the absolute human need to understand what happens and why it happens, where they are and how they got there. It is the all-consuming need to uncover some thread of logic, no matter how tenuous, on which to stand and rise above the incomprehensible, the unacceptable, the madness. Because if such a thread does not exist, then only one thing remains: unadulterated terror.
Damiana relived her final days at home over and over in her head. She saw the abominable image of Inácio Belchior invade her mind, repeating the same words, making the same gestures. She saw herself also repeating the same gestures and words. Time and time again. She tirelessly sought the thread of logic that could help her rise above it all and save her from her fate.
After a time she was transferred to a cell that was slightly larger; at least the window was larger and offered a wider view. But the convent’s walls were tall, its doors thick, its locks impenetrable. Her attempts to escape were rather amateur, fruitless, and only led to tighter vigilance that made the limits of her confinement even more unbearable.
Many times the thick, humid air became difficult to breath and caused her to faint. When she woke up she would begin again to scream, to cry, to hurl threats. She would spend days without eating. She grew thinner until she was nothing but bones, she grew weaker, suffered hallucinations.
She demanded they give her pencil and paper to write. She wrote to her uncle, to friends, but soon realized that her letters were never sent. The only option that occurred to her was to throw her letters, her poetry, and her denunciations through the convent window. She would write, write, and throw the pages to the wind. Sometimes with a certain destination in mind, sometimes folded, but generally without an address, pages released to the wind, that it might take them wherever it would.
She did not know this, for she could never climb high enough to see, but her tiny window did not face the street, but a thicket. It was there that everything she wrote fell and became lost amid the leaves fallen from the trees, one more leaf of paper among so many others, a leaf different and whiter than the others, the pencil marks its veins, leaves that were more desolate and awful than any other, but as abandoned as the others, without a single hand to find them. They gathered there one by one, day after day, until they formed a mountain of unimaginable loneliness, stuck in the mud that came with each rain shower.
She wrote at length to her daughter Açucena. These letters were hopelessly sad, a bit illogical, a pale reflection of the absurdity of her situation. Sometimes, when she was lucky, she was able to dip into the past and write her daughter with memories of her former life: the never-ending plantation, the cattle, the jatoba tree, the great big porch where Grandma Jacira had sat for her ritual footbaths. When she could, she also dipped into the age when she arrived in Rio and held the illusion that the city could be hers, and she would write about them. When her captors wished to punish her for bad behavior, however, they would transfer her to another cell, the worst in the convent, a horrific cell whose tiny window opened not to the forest, but onto the tiny cemetery where they buried the homeless and slaves.
It was a hell to end all hells.
The dead were still buried at the church at that time, something that would only change after Brazil’s independence, when modern modes of hygiene gained sufficient influence, resulting in laws that determined that cemeteries would be constructed on the edge of the city, obeying basic notions of public health. But at that time, burials took place in the same churches belonging to the parishes that the deceased had frequented while living and where, while they were still alive, they had tread over other graves. Dona Maria, the Mad Queen, was herself buried there, in the very same Convento da Ajuda.
But those dead who did not belong to a parish, the slaves abandoned by their owners in alleys, those from Africa who had died in quarantine before they could disembark from the slave ships, or indigent mestizos—these were buried without a proper funeral, without any thought, in any old place that could be found, such as the woods behind the convent. These corpses, without caskets or even burial shrouds, were thrown into the shallowest of graves and covered with only a bit of dirt. If some limb or other remained exposed, it was beaten down with heavy wooden clubs, forced back down beneath the dirt.
In these shallow graves, the decomposition of the bodies produced noxious gases that posed a health risk, carrying disease through the tiny convent windows. One’s sense of smell eventually adjusted and no longer noticed these pestilent aromas swirling all around, miasmas that hung like dense clouds in the cells, causing nausea, headaches, and nightmares.
The dark of night was worse. Damiana would summon all her strength and determination so that her thoughts, at least, could flee that place. It was then, if she was lucky and managed to allow her mind to abandon the suffocating darkness of her cell, that she could see the city entirely light up, the candles and the street lamps burning on every street, and in even the poorest houses, a light in each open window and every door. She saw the streets bursting with flowers, the stones carpeted with sweet-smelling herbs, rosemary, chamomile, basil. The princess approaching from the port, the princess was arriving in Brazil, daughter to the Austrian emperor, the princess who was a lover of the arts and natural sciences, the new wife of Dom Pedro, Carolina Josepha Leopoldina Von Habsburg. The princess treading over the herbs that were placed there so that she might tread over them, and tread she did and wave and smile from beneath a golden canopy, the princess was completely taken with
Brazil, she saw right away that it was a magnificent country with sufficient greatness to warrant independence, and she tread over the herbs with her ankle boots with heels and a sweet, tantalizing smell began to rise from beneath her soles, a pungent, sweet, and asphyxiating smell, a smell that began to suffocate her, the princess was about to faint, she was about to faint in the tropical heat beneath the resounding bells, the salvos of cannons and fireworks, and from among the fireworks a louder sound rises then wells, and Damiana, overcome with horror, soon recognizes it, the thudding of the clubs beating the corpses back down into their graves, and then she watches as the half-buried bodies rise up from the earth, and the living dead torment her through the walls to the beat of the deafening thuds of the wooden clubs.
She opened her eyes, unable to breathe, once again overcome with terror.
It was one more night she would spend without sleeping and given over to complete despair.
Don’t think that Damiana was the first or the only woman to be imprisoned in a convent. This method of getting rid of one’s wife was often used at the time, when a husband did not want a divorce to divide up their property, but lacked the courage to kill her outright, or merely wished to teach her a lesson, so to speak.
At first, no one knew where Damiana was.
Only Belchior made sporadic visits to the convent, but she refused to speak to him. She allowed his visits in the hopes that he would bring their daughter, too, and she barely listened to what he said. During the two years she was confined, he brought Açucena to see her mother on two occasions, and this to not displease the Mother Superior, who insisted it would help Damiana to mend her ways.
Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters Page 20