by John Keene
Meanwhile, Fonte da Ré’s replacement, Nogueira, had reassigned most of Londônia’s men to Viana’s regiment, now reconstituted as part of a larger military unit which was to take up a position north of Olinda, close to the Dutch fort at Itamaracá. Capturing the fort would, Nogueira’s superiors thought, prove decisive. Though Viana hoped that the tribunal would rule swiftly on what was by now an oft-mentioned punch line of his infamous humiliation (“tied up by that crazy nigger Figueiras, no less!”), there was a war to wage. The men shipped out on a navy vessel from the deep harbor at Salvador on the day the trial began; the winds were in their favor and only a short while later they had anchored off the coast of Pernambuco, as the general in charge deliberated on their plans.
Viana’s lawyer, seeking to have him testify, learned that he had been mustered out. An order must be issued not to send him into battle; his case was underway. His commander, Nogueira, for his part, had not received word of the trial, though it was taking place on the other side of the garrison. The lawyer requested a stay, until he might present further testimony. The tribunal, however, wanted to conclude the trial as soon as possible, as it was, by any measure, a distraction—the officers were needed for the ongoing campaign, and there were pressures from other quarters, in any case. Several of Londônia’s men—Dos Santos, Pereira—testified: they were rough-hewn characters, not entirely reliable, the members of the tribune conceded, but their tales of their commander’s determination and valor would have persuaded the devil. Viana’s lawyer elicited no counter claims; he returned to studying his written commentary. Again, he requested an appeal to be delivered to Nogueira, then rested his case.
Londônia sat to testify. The panel found his narration of heroism during the earlier Bahian conflict, followed by his campaign in the wilderness, enthralling. There was so much to hear, those Figueirases have a way with the word. Despite the seriousness of the affair, a current of easy familiarity passed among the men. Several laughed at Londônia’s account of the circular march through the jungle; his route, he suggested to them, would eventually make a fine cow path. There were those Indians, of course, and other hardships, which need not be elaborated upon. He was no Jesuit, mind you. All he had to show for his exertions, however, was the unmistakable burnt-cork tan from wandering in the sun and forest for so long, and an amulet, which his councilor requested be entered into the record. Londônia even mentioned that he would have brought them back his pet monkey to exonerate him, only he’d forgotten it in his parents’ home in Sergipe. When the session concluded, several of them thought he ought to be promoted on the spot, until they were reminded of the full slate of charges against him.
Back in Pernambuco the order came: Viana and his men boarded and launched small craft to reach the shore. The Dutch, surprised at the gross lack of subtlety, began their fusillade. The cannons at the fort let loose, while sharpshooters took aim, supplemented by a team of archers. Whatever men were not drowned and made it to shore fell quickly to the sands—Viana, who had never set foot on Pernambucan soil, was at least able to register this new achievement momentarily before closing his eyes for the final time.
Back in Bahia, the military lawyer waited; still no Viana. Nor did any other witnesses come forward. The head of the tribunal was losing patience; was this Viana unaware that the Dutch held territory as far north as Rio Grande do Norte? Things proceeded, arguments. . . . The councilor gave his final plea on behalf of the hero, which stirred nearly all present. Then the military lawyer spoke, so rapidly one had to strain to hear him. Arguments ended, the panel ruled. Londônia had grounds, there was the necessity of following his orders and the insult, so he would keep his commission, but he would be assigned, at least for a while, in a training capacity to a garrison near the city of Rio de Janeiro. Until such time, he should relax and reacquaint himself with civilization. All shook hands, the Colonel was released. Several slaves carried his numerous effects to his sister and brother-in-law’s home, in the upper city above the Church of the Bonfim, where he would lodge until he set sail for Rio. Friends of the family paid visits; in his honor Mrs. Figueiras Henriques threw a sought-after farewell dinner, which concluded in dawn revels.
The journey to Rio was an unpleasant one, though Londônia had his comforts. From the ship, he could see that this second city, on the Guanabara Bay, was, despite its mythical mountains and bristling flora, markedly more rustic than the capital. But he had grown up on a sugar estate, far from the poles of civilization, and could adapt. As Londônia walked through the port area to hire a horse to reach the garrison, he found himself in the midst of a public scene. There was shouting, shrieks; a shoeless mulatto, his face and shirt and breeches clad in blood, scampered past him, followed by a large slave woman sporting a bell of petticoats, screaming. What on earth was this? Then another man, short, emaciated, with the sun-burnt face of a recently arrived Portuguese, emerged from the wall of bodies, his right hand thrusting forward a long dagger. Londônia tried to slip out of the way and brandish his sword in defense, but his reflexes, dulled after the protracted incarceration, failed him.
As soon as word reached the military officials in Bahia, he received several raises in rank; his body was brought back to Sergipe d’El Rei for a proper funeral. An auxiliary bishop officiated at the burial. It was only several months later that his wife, who had given birth and returned to her parents’ home, learned of her husband’s misfortune. She was now a wealthy woman. Their son, whom she originally named Augusto, was henceforth known as Augusto Inocêncio. She soon remarried, producing several more sons and daughters, and resettled with her new husband, a soldier who was related on his maternal side to the Figueiras family, near the distant and isolated village of São Paulo.
On Dénouement
In 1966, the model Francesca Josefina Schweisser Figueiras, daughter of army chief General Adolfo Schweisser and the socialite Mariana Augusta “Gugu” Figueiras Figueiras, married Albertino Maluuf, the playboy son of the industrialist Hakim Alberto Maluuf, in a lavish ceremony in the resort town of Campos do Jordão. The event, conducted by His Eminence, the cardinal, in the Igreja Matriz de Santa Terezinha, with a reception on the grounds of the newly inaugurated Tudor-style Palácio Boa Vista, was covered in society pages across the Americas and Europe. They were divorced shortly after the country’s return to democracy two decades later, in 1987.
Their youngest son, Sergio Albertino, was known as “Inocêncio,” a family nickname given, for as far back as anyone could recall, to at least one of the Figueiras boys in each generation. Sergio Albertino’s marked simplicity of expression and introverted manner confirmed the aptness of this name, by which he quickly and widely became known. Yet from childhood this same Inocêncio—“emerald eyes, skin white as moonstone, a swan’s neck”—also periodically exhibited willful, sometimes reckless behavior, engaging in fights with other children, committing acts of vandalism, setting fire to a coach house on the family’s estate that housed the cleaning staff. He met with numerous and repeated difficulties in his educational progress. No tutor his mother enlisted lasted longer than a few months. Bouncing between boarding schools in the United States, Switzerland, Argentina, and Brazil, he developed a serious addiction to heroin and other illicit substances. An encounter with angel dust at a party thrown by friends in Iguatemí led him to drive a brand-new Mercedes coupe off an overpass, but he was so intoxicated that he suffered only minor injuries. After a short involvement with a local neo-Nazi group and repeated stays in rehabilitation centers, he dropped out of Mackenzie Presbyterian University, in São Paulo, where he had enrolled to study business, a profession wh
ich his family had long dominated. An arrest for possession of ten grams of cocaine, a tin of marijuana and three Ecstasy tabs led to a suspended sentence. His community service included working with less fortunate fellow addicts in other parts of the city. Quickly befriending several of these individuals—friends of his parents remarked in the most restrained manner possible that from childhood the boy had possessed uncouth predilections and tastes—he increasingly spent time in city neighborhoods in which most people of his background, under no circumstance, would dare set foot. The bodyguards his parents hired gave up trying to keep track of him. One evening in midsummer, he left the flophouse—where he was staying with a woman he’d met on a binge—to score a hit. . . .
“Oh, this terrible ancient pain
we feel down to our bones
that fills the contours of our dreams
whenever we’re alone—”
On Brazil
São Paulo, once a small settlement on the periphery of the Portuguese state, is now a vast labyrinth of neighborhoods upon neighborhoods, a congested super-metropolis of more than fourteen million people, the economic engine of Latin America. As Dr. Arturo Figueiras Wernitzky has noted in his magisterial study of the region, millions of poor Brazilians, many of them from the northeastern region of the country, including the states of Bahia, Sergipe and Pernambuco, have migrated over the last four decades to this great city, its districts and environs, suburbs and exurbs, primarily in search of work and economic opportunities.
Among these nordestino migrants, many of them of African ancestry, were members of the Londônia family from the towns of the same name in the states of Bahia, Sergipe, and Pernambuco, who constructed and established unauthorized settlements, or favelas, across the city of São Paulo, lacking sewage and electricity, and marked by the highest per capita crime rates outside of Rio de Janeiro—murders, assaults, drug-dealing, and larceny, as well as well-documented police violence.
Among the most notorious favelas is one of the newest, as yet unnamed, only marked on maps by municipal authorities by the letter—N.—perhaps for “(Favela) Novísima” (Newest Favela), or “(Mais) Notório” (Most Notorious), or “Nada Lugar” (No Place), though it is also known, according to journalists and university researchers like Figueiras Wernitzky, who are examining its residents as part of a larger study of demographic changes in the region, among those who live in it, as “Quilombo Cesarão.”
AN OUTTAKE FROM THE
IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Origins
In January 1754, Mary, a young Negro servant to Isaac Wantone, wealthy farmer and patriot of the town of Roxbury, Massachusetts, gave birth in her master’s stables to a male child. An older Negro servant, named Lacy, also belonging to Wantone’s retinue, attended Mary in her prolonged and exacting labor, during which the slave girl developed an intense fever. For an half-hour after Mary delivered the child, a tempest raged within her as she lay screaming in a strange tongue, which was in part her native Akan. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she expired. Lacy uttered a benediction in that same language, and thereafter presented the infant to her master, Mr. Wantone, as was the custom in those parts. When he saw the copper-skinned newborn, eyes blazing, upon whom the darkness of Africa had not completely left its indelible stamp, the master, adequately versed in the Scriptures, promptly named him Zion, which in Hebrew means “sun.”
Knowing his servant not to have been married or even betrothed at the time of the child’s birth, Wantone rightly feared the sanctions laid down by Puritan and colonial law, which in the case of illegitimate paternity included whippings, fines rendered against the mother of the child, its father, and quite probably the master, be he same or otherwise. Wantone also might have to put in an appearance before the General Court. Though not a gentleman by birth (he was of yeoman stock and self-read in the classics), Wantone had fought admirably among his fellows in King George’s War and had by dint of many years’ toil built up an excellent estate. Moreover, he subscribed unwaveringly to the Congregational Church. And, on all these accounts, he declined to have his reputation or standing in the slightest besmirched by such a scandal. He had therefore conspired to conceal Mary’s condition for the full length of her term by keeping her indoors as much as possible and forbidding her to venture out near the local roads, where she might be spied by neighbors or passersby. He also forbade his servants and children to speak of the matter, lest their gossip betray him. Toward neither plan did he meet with rebellion; so it is said that one’s sense of the law, like one’s concept of morality, originates in the home. The child’s father, whose name the taciturn girl had refused to speak, Wantone identified as Zephyr, a sly black-Abenaki horsebreaker in the service of his neighbor, Josiah Shapely. Among the members of his own household, however, he himself was not entirely above suspicion, especially given the child’s complexion. In any case, Zion would, according to plan, officially be deemed a foundling.
Wantone’s wife, née Comfort and descended from an unbroken line of Berkshire Puritans who had arrived in the Bay Colony not long after the Mayflower, had for several years been growing ever more austere in her faith, and to the achievement of a glacial purity of relations. As a result she abhorred all spiritual and fleshly transgressions, especially bastardy, in which the two were so visibly commingled. Upon learning of the infant’s imminent entry into the sphere of her family’s existence, she ordered that it be kept out of her sight altogether.
Music
When Lacy had first passed the infant Zion to her master for inspection, the child began to cry uncontrollably. Wantone order him to be placed in a small wooden crib on the second floor of the house above the buttery: thereby he might learn peace. This weeping, which soon became a kind of keening, persisted for several weeks without relent. Meanwhile Wantone ordered his slaves Jubal, a native-born Negro who tended his livestock, and Axum, a young mulatto of New Hampshire origin who served as his handyman, to bury the deceased slave girl Mary near the edge of his south grazing fields. At her interment, the master recited over the grave a few lines from the Old Testament, and wept.
Lacy was nearing middle age, yet this chain of events soon bound her into assuming the role of the child’s mother. Otherwise she was engaged in innumerable chores about the house or attending to her mistress, Mrs. Wantone, who did not like ever to be kept waiting. Lacy had not seen her own child since shortly after his sixth birthday nearly fifteen years before, because her previous master, then ill with cancer and disposing of his Boston estate, had sold the boy north to a merchant in Newbury, and her south to Wantone. Taking frequent quick breaks, she nursed the infant Zion from a suckling bottle, on warm goat’s milk sweetened with honey and dashes of rum, of which there was no shortage in the cellar. She also sang to him the lively songs she remembered from her childhood along the lower Volta, in the Gold Coast, as well as Christian hymns when any member of the family, especially her mistress, was in earshot. Eventually the child calmed down appreciably, and Wantone allowed him to be carried about the entire house and grounds when the mistress was away.
Though these were years of increasing privation for many in the Colony as the noose of the mother country tightened, Wantone prospered. Not long after this time he purchased a likely young Negro woman, named Mary, for £11 from the Boston trader Nicholas Marshall, to replace the deceased Mary, who had attended primarily to the four Wantone children, Nathanael, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Hepzibah. New Mary was also expected to afford Lacy more time for Mrs. Wantone by also watching Zion. This became the only task to which sh
e took with even a passing enthusiasm. She had been born in the region of the Gambia, where all were free, and quickly chafed under the weight of her new status. She ignored orders; she talked back. Moreover she was given to spreading rumors and painting her face and fingers gaily with Roxbury clay and indigo on the Sabbath, while declining to recite the Lord’s prayers, as well as to other acts of idleness, gossip, lewdness, and truculence. For these offenses, to which the boy was a constant witness, she was routinely whipped by her mistress, who took a firm and iron hand at all times. Naturally, New Mary ran away, to Brookline, where she was captured by the local constabulary, and returned bound to the Wantones. She received ten lashes for her impertinence, another ten for her flight, still a third ten for cursing her mistress before the other slaves, and an interdiction not to leave the grounds of the estate under any circumstances. One can only temporarily keep a wild horse penned. For several years, as the child Zion was nearing the age of his autonomy (seven), New Mary endured these constraints, peaceably rearing the child with Lacy and the several Negro male servants, Jubal, Axum and Quabina. And then she ran away again, this time getting as far south as Stoughton, on the Neponsit River. Again she was returned, duly punished, ordered to comport herself with the dignity befitting the Wantone household. Repeated incidents of insolence and misbehavior followed, however, including acts of a lascivious nature with a local Indian, the destruction of several volumes of books, and an attempted fire. The Wantones sold New Mary to a Plymouth candlemaker for £4. Zion was, for nearly a year, inconsolable.