The Abyss

by Lara Blunte

  When the waters became calm again, the passengers already looked as though they had been through a war, or worse; they had been at sea for only a week.

  The food, prepared in haste for their departure, was far from enough and was immediately rationed. The water became rotten after two weeks and was thrown overboard. Everyone swayed on their feet or lay in corners, complaining of hunger.

  There were biscuits, lentils, olive oil, sour cabbage and salted meat or codfish to eat. The salt increased the terrible thirst of passengers and crew even more. They only had bad wine or beer given by the British to drink, and the little fruit that had been brought was long gone.

  When they were in the mid Atlantic Clara felt she could not stay in the cabin, and went instead to the deck, where she thought she saw a scene out of the Inferno. People she knew were lying in their own waste, and she tried not to cover her nose at the stench; she realized that she must not smell good herself, and though they were all almost beyond caring about their dignity, they had not yet reached that point. The children, thin as ghosts, were a pitiful spectacle, and brought tears to Clara's eyes.

  There had been rats and the fear of plague since the beginning, but the increasing heat brought swarms of cockroaches and lice. The lice almost seemed like the worst thing, as a thousand people shrieked in anger and frustration, scratching their heads till they bled. The men shaved their hair, and the women were so desperate that they followed their example.

  Clara was half insane from the itching on her scalp, running her head against the edge of doors and wooden beams to get some relief once her nails broke, but Juliana would not allow her to cut off her hair.

  "I have to, I have to!" the girl screamed in agony.

  Juliana had already shaved her own head, but she could not let Clara do it.

  "What does it matter?" Clara shrieked. "Look where we are!"

  But Juliana was, for once, so tired and ill that Clara didn't have the heart to rebel. She sat between her mother's legs as Juliana opened her hair in different places and rubbed whale oil meant for the lamps on it. Clara felt a measure of relief, though she reflected wryly that she might go up in flames at any time because of vanity, and that she smelled so bad no one wanted to be around her.

  Finally, as they neared the equator, the cold gave way to infernal heat. No one could now bear the cabins during the night, everyone wanted to be outside; but when the sun climbed up, it was so fiery that those who could still move sought the shade, and dragged the others to it. The captain and the sailors had to constantly beg the passengers not to move without being told where to go, as they were throwing the ship off balance.

  Clara's parents were very weak, and they hardly stood up anymore. It was terrible for her to see Juliana so wan, and Pedro unable to speak or comfort her. She walked around in a soiled dress, her petticoat heavy with the gold her mother had sown into it, getting them food and forcing them to eat. Some people, after seven weeks, had developed scurvy, and lay burning in painful fever. Others lost many of their teeth for lack of vitamin; Pedro lost three of his.

  As Clara held her mother's head, Juliana managed the strength to put her hand up and touch her cheek. "Still beautiful..." she said weakly.

  The girl said nothing. It felt as if they would be on this ship forever, suffering like animals, and she herself had begun to fade, her dress hanging loosely, her face and arms burnt, her lips peeling, when the cry came from another passenger.

  "Terra! Terra!"

  Land! Clara stood up weakly and moved to the railing. "I can't see anything!" she heard a woman next to her cry out. The passenger who had seen it was still pointing and shouting.

  Clara looked, her eyes narrowed against the sun, "Please, please, please..." she begged under her breath.

  After a few moments which seemed cruelly long her hand shot out, her finger pointing, "Terra!"

  The bedraggled, exhausted, filthy passengers embraced each other, wept and shouted in joy at the same time. They had seen land. They had arrived in Brazil!

  They found out that they had deviated from the ships carrying the royal family, which went north to Salvador first. The Margarida was about to dock in the capital, Rio de Janeiro, instead.

  It was only then that they remembered that, while they suffered, the year had changed. It was the 17th of January, 1808.

  Ten. Rio de Janeiro

  Clara saw baskets pass by the window and in a few seconds she had run out the door, clutching coins in one hand and a jug in the other.

  "There she goes again!" she heard her mother say.

  She followed the slaves, who were carrying water containers or fruit in flat baskets on their heads as they went down the stairs.

  "Água! Fruta!" Clara called.

  The slaves always stopped and waited when they were called by the things they were carrying. They smiled at her as she eagerly leapt down the stairs in her simple cotton dress. Some still had African tribal marks on their faces; one had a baby hanging from her neck.

  "Bom dia!" they greeted her, showing their white teeth.

  They were all women, allowed by their masters to go out and sell things. They got the water from creeks or public fountains, and the fruit from trees. The male slaves had days in which they could offer to do odd jobs all over the city, and also sold whatever they could make. They all paid a fee to their owners and kept the rest of the money. In time they might make enough to buy their freedom and even start some sort of small business. Not all masters were generous with their slaves' time, but many were.

  These women had been a great boon to Clara. When she, her mother and her father had arrived bedraggled, emaciated and thirsty, they had taken their first drinks of water from them, given for free because they had looked so ill.

  The slaves had felt sorry for her family, and yet they always arrived in even worse conditions, almost a third of them dying on the way. Perhaps they knew, or their parents or grandparents had told them, what it was like to be so hungry and thirsty, but it was a miracle that they should feel any generosity toward the white people who had imprisoned them.

  They always smiled and chattered in their strange Portuguese, filled with words and expressions from different African languages, some of which the Brazilians had adopted. Clara loved to run after them and buy whatever they had. Now she bought a jug of water and a great amount of tropical fruit that still bore native Indian names: caju, goiaba, pitanga, jabuticaba.

  When she returned to their simple whitewashed house, she set the fruit before her mother, who was lying on a hammock, and sat on a weaved mat on the floor to eat.

  "You will make yourself sick from eating so much fruit," Juliana said, though she was already biting a banana.

  Clara paid no attention to her mother. Juliana was always predicting some sort of disaster, even when there was no possibility of anything bad happening. After the privation they had undergone at sea, Clara always closed her eyes in bliss as she ate fruit or drank fresh water. There was so much in Brazil: water so plentiful, and fruit so sweet.

  She was happy now, sleeping on the mat on the floor because there were no beds in the house. Her parents slept in the hammocks which were hung inside, Juliana's bald head and gnarled feet sticking out at night. Clara was trying to procure a bed and mattresses, but such articles had not been plentiful to start with, and had disappeared when thousands of people had disembarked in a small, unprepared city.

  Rio had been like a picture of Eden when the Margarida sailed into one of the biggest and most splendid enclaves that anyone could imagine, the Bay of Guanabara. There was golden sand everywhere, for miles up and down the coast, and behind the beaches there were hills, and rows of majestic mountains. There were forests too, in endless shades of green, as if this were still the beginning of time. Palm trees rose near the sea, and great ancient trees provided generous shade father inland.

  There were rows of simple white houses rising over the hills from the beach, and they lived in one of them now, quickly procured w
ith their gold as the Portuguese court disembarked and rushed to claim whatever was available.

  From the house they could hear the Atlantic crashing on the shore below, and the breeze coming from the ocean was a great relief from the excessive heat and humidity of summer in the tropics.

  Juliana hated every inch of Rio, every hot and humid breath she took there, every person she saw. She criticized the way the Brazilians dressed, "without elegance", she said, the women in gowns that were too short, the men in shirt sleeves and vests instead of jackets, all of them wearing sandals. She lay in the hammock, still weak from the voyage, and wailed for Lisbon. When they had to eat with their hands, she cried for her cutlery, when they drank from clay cups or ate from coarse plates she wept for her china and crystal, when the heat started to rise after seven o'clock in the morning she begged for winter. She wanted her house, her bed, her servants, her things, her country.

  Clara could not hate it. Perhaps she had a strange wandering spirit in her, but after the shock of arrival, the necessity of finding quarters, the realization that they would not have the comfort they had known, she had grown to like her new life.

  For one, she was enjoying a freedom such as she had never known in Lisbon. Both her parents were still weak from the voyage, and she had naturally taken the lead in their daily life. Her father tried not to complain, and every time the good man smiled without three of his teeth, his daughter felt overwhelming tenderness, and kissed his cheek and hands. Juliana had regained some of her old manner, but not all of her strength, and her feebleness allowed Clara to do most of what she wanted.

  She had negotiated the price for some of the gold they had brought, though Juliana had found fault with what she had managed to get, saying it could have been double as much. Clara had paid no heed, and had embarked on finding things they needed to be more comfortable. In this she had been aided by a mulatto boy who was about twelve years old, Gaspar. He was always walking around the houses and asking if anyone needed anything.

  He became her cicerone in the city, taking her to do anything she wanted. He would pass by almost every day and whistle, and Clara would grab money and shoot out of the house to meet him outside.

  She would tell him what they needed and he would point, "That way!"

  They had bought the soft mats, the hammocks, pillows, plates and cups. He had taken her to old freed slaves who made chairs, and she had ordered some. Clara had told Gaspar to be on the lookout for beds and mattresses.

  He also took her to the best places for fresh meat, eggs, milk and fish. The markets smelled of blood and fish, were full of flies and of people jostling each other and negotiating, but she could not resist going to them. She would get a great amount of good food there, and then she would cook the things she bought in clay pots, helped by freed women she paid, who knew how to make delicious dishes that bore the influence of three continents.

  "Vamos?" Gaspar would ask when she appeared at the window as he whistled.

  The boy became her everyday companion, and she loved his easygoing manner, his humor, his joy. She felt at once a mother to her parents, who needed her, and a child with Gaspar as they ran around the city, climbed on carts to get a ride when they ventured father off or ran in the beaches.

  He cooled himself off in the sea, though she only dared to wet her feet in the foam and stick her tongue out at the spray. Then they went to the edge of the forest, where she saw tiny monkeys with old men's faces, and parrots that screeched.

  On Sundays, after Clara went to mass with her parents, she and Gaspar sat drinking sugar cane juice in town as they watched families parade their finery. White men loved to exhibit how many slaves they had, as it denoted their importance. They would walk at the head of a long line, in a jacket fit for the European winter and wearing a bicorn hat and sashes, followed by a wife, sons, daughters and then female and male slaves. Gaspar, barefoot in his tattered clothes, would join the end of the line putting on a face of importance, and when the man at the head noticed that he was being mocked, he would chase the boy and afford even greater mirth to everyone, including Clara.

  Perhaps it was the mixture with the Africans, a people who loved to laugh, that made the Brazilians, whether they were pure white or half black, smile and make fun of everything all the time. They sat outside houses that were built close together, teased each other, gave nicknames to everyone, or lay in their hammocks telling stories through the open window. Their slaves would also join with a remark here and there, and the whole street would erupt in laughter.

  But there was the terrible underside to this as well. The Market of Valongo, not far from where their ship had first docked, was where the miserable Africans who had been taken as slaves arrived and were exhibited for sale. Clara had passed the market with Gaspar, when she had gone to the docks. There was not much of interest for her to buy at the port, as it was closed except to commerce with Portugal; things mostly went out of the country rather than came in.

  She saw then what Brazil’s greatest import was: human beings chained to each other, in a state of emaciation and despair such as Clara had never seen, even on the ship that had brought her. There were children among them, weeping. She stood with her mouth open and a flood of tears in her eyes, so horrified that Gaspar took her by the hand and said, "Não fique assim!"

  Don't get so upset.

  She felt the tears drop from her eyes and turned her back on the scene for a moment, only to find a sleeve being offered to her, "You can blow your nose here," Gaspar said, his face serious with concern for her.

  Clara gave a small laugh, "Ladies don't blow their noses," she said softly.

  The boy raised his eyebrows, "Then they must swallow a lot of snot!"

  She couldn't help holding him to her for one second, in thanks for being such a good little friend, and for not being bitter or hating her, when he had reason to be very angry.

  There were so many people falling through the cracks, she thought as they made their way back in a rickety cart. Slaves were freed or freed themselves, and tried to make a living by selling things and doing any odd jobs, but some joined a life of crime, especially if they had escaped their masters. Rio was full of fugitive slaves, as it was easier for them to blend with the third of the population that was black in the city.

  Juliana was adamant about locking the doors and windows at night, though Clara saw that the white Brazilians in the other houses took everything more casually. They would not close the windows and stifle, and sometimes one or another talked of having been robbed, even at the end of a knife.

  Things began to change when Prince John and the bulk of the court finally reached Rio after a two-month sojourn in Salvador. He had ordered the opening of Brazil's ports and the British, who had been pushing him to do it, had already begun to send the products of their new industries across the ocean. The arrival of ice skates and heavy woolen cloaks was deeply puzzling to the locals.

  Pedro, feeling much stronger now, rejoined the prince at the Quinta da Boa Vista, in the north of the city, where the regent settled after an uncomfortable initial period. A wealthy slaver had offered him his house, which was one of the grandest in Rio, and John had taken it.

  The prince ordered that much better lodgings close to him be found for Pedro and his family. The best houses in Rio were being requisitioned for the nobles, and there were not many. The owners either accepted their fate, hoping for reward, or left grumbling.

  By April they were in their new home, a good house of ten rooms near the prince and the affairs of the exiled court. It was also very far from the sea, from the women selling things and from Gaspar. Clara's freedom was once more curtailed, especially now that Juliana had regained her strength, and she could not help missing the little house by the sea.

  However, there was another terrible battle left for the two women to fight. Juliana insisted on having slaves, like any Brazilian family of note or any European who lived there, for that matter. It would save them money if they bought three o
r four people to do all the work. She hinted to Pedro that he might get one or two as a present from some Brazilian person grateful to him for pushing his requests forward to the prince.

  Clara stood up from the breakfast table where the issue was being discussed and announced with a pale face that if they even considered owning people she would leave and they would never see her again.

  A screaming match ensued between her and Juliana, with Pedro going "Ai, ai, ai!" and covering his ears. Juliana pointed out that everyone did it, and there was no reason to mistreat the slaves, they would have food and a place to sleep.

  "Or do you want to do all the housework?" Juliana shouted. "Do you want us to spend all the money we brought, after what you have seen?"

  "I carried that gold for two months in my clothes," Clara said passionately. "There is more than enough to pay for free servants. If you ever try to bring a slave to this house I will set fire to it!"

  "You criminal!" her mother screamed. "Going around with people in the street, this is what you have become! Did you hear what she said, Pedro? She would burn her parents too!"

  But Pedro this time would not stay quiet. He stood up and slammed his fist on the table, a gesture that was so unprecedented that his wife and daughter fell silent and stared at him wide-eyed.

  "I have had enough!" he cried. He pointed at Juliana. "I am the one who asks you, after what we have been through, do you not know what it is to be wrenched from your country and to suffer torture like an animal for months, to arrive in a new place with nothing? There will be no slaves in my home!"

  Juliana stood looking pale and trying to gather her thoughts for a reply, but Clara rushed into her father's arms and began to cry and kiss his cheeks. e patted her head, saying "There, there, my love."

  The mother felt rebuked by their kindness. In spite of appearances, Juliana was not completely devoid of soul; it would have been cheaper to have slaves, and everyone had them, but she stood there knowing that Clara was a much better person than she was. At that moment she felt a deep shame, even if her face wore its usual indomitable look. She told herself privately to try and be kinder, while still resenting her husband and daughter for siding with each other and against her.