by John Keene
Long hours spent in the study of any text will reveal inner, unseen contours, an abstract architecture. This is as true of sacred books as of those poems written in the pursuit of courtly or earthly love, or even of language itself. The ancient Mosaic law had accommodated this insight to the disadvantage of the surface layer, of images, while the Roman Church, akin to the preliterate cultural forms from which it in part arose, allows for the existence of a mystical understanding and experience of these abstractions. The careful scholar cannot but help but become aware of the conflict: when one speaks of the word, or Word, what is one truly speaking of? Who is the architect, man, and—or—a—God? Attempts to apprehend this new reality, these tensions, went initially by the names of philosophy, theology, science. What is it to know, know deeply? Is knowledge not always a form of power that, taken too far, cannot be turned against itself? The texts continually opened these doors and subsequent ones for D’Azevedo, who conveyed them, using ciphers, to some of his distant correspondents.
Several months into the new provost’s tenure, after a brief campaign that, he believed, had successfully changed perceptions of the monastery in the town’s eyes, he began weekly tutorials for a small cohort of boys he selected from the upper ranks of the town’s citizenry. Though each of these boys had their own personal tutors at home, D’Azevedo suggested to their parents that in the event they did not receive training at another college, and to ensure adequate preparation for further study in law, medicine, the classics, or the priesthood, especially should they seek to serve at the Royal Court or in the administrative center in Bahia, he might provide them with supplementary training. As a result, each Tuesday through Thursday, amidst his other duties, D’Azevedo guided the sons of the Espinozas, the Palmerias, the Cardozos, the Alonso Lopeses, the Figueirases, and the Pimentels, in the study of the Old Testament; Latin and Greek; the natural sciences, especially botany, and mathematics; in disputation and philosophy; and Hebrew.
The boys rode out to the monastery or arrived by coach, bunked in a room furnished only with cots, stools, a wash basin, and woven baskets for their personal effects, that D’Azevedo had set aside especially for that purpose, with one of the child slaves their only attendant. Early Friday morning they rode back to resume their own usual routines at home. In this way he was planting the seeds of a school, and, it seemed, doing the very work you had tasked him to. He alone taught the boys, and maintained an atmosphere of utmost rectitude. It has often been subsequently said that this small cohort, once spread across the Empire and beyond, never lost sight of the ethos he nurtured there.
One Wednesday evening, weeks into his courses, shortly after the turn of the new year and the feast of Our Lady, once he had concluded Vespers and tucked in for the night, D’Azevedo awoke to what he thought he perceived as the regular beating of a drumhead, though so low it was almost below the level of audibility. He rose, slipped his doublet over his nightshirt and stepped into his sandals, then made his way through the tunnel of dark, for the monastery was kept lightless until 4, the hour of morning prayers, to where he thought the sound emanated. Perhaps, he considered, the boys had snuck in a jug of any of the many types of liquors that were the fruits of the abundant sugar crops, and were continuing Christmas celebrations, frowned on though they were; but he would only chide them, gently, and remind them of the House’s rules, for though they were guests and youths, they were expected to carry themselves in the manner expected of any who lived between these walls, let alone boys of their station. Tracing his way to them, he opened the door, as quietly as possible, and entered the room. All were soundly asleep. Soft snores rose from their slumbering forms. In the slender ribbon of light the moon cast through the half-closed shutters, the Figueiras boy, curled beneath his sheet, was murmuring the gibberish of dreams. D’Azevedo closed the door, waited for several minutes, then went back in. Not a body had shifted.
As he closed the door he could again hear the drumming, faint but now accompanied, he perceived, by a low wail, like an animal caught in the crevice of a deep shaft, or wire upon wire. He left the boys and tracked his way back, ever so carefully through the blackness, until he reached the main entry hall. The noise was coming, he thought, from the cloister. He passed through the large wooden door, now so familiar to him, out into the cool air, to find not a single soul or sound but those of the summer night, the light of the moon and the stars, the soil and grasses and flowers and stones. Everything lay in its usual place. He stood still and listened but the sound was gone. He strolled the open space, checking in corners, scanning the back wall, examining the wings, with bedrooms, including his own, that extended from the long, low main building. He saw and heard nothing. He sat on the ground and kept vigil for a while, until he grew sleepy and felt his head nodding. It was as he was opening the door to go back indoors that he again heard drumbeats and, out of the corner of his eye, he spied a shape, a shadow, moving along the rear wall, and he turned to spot something, someone, its hair fanning over its shoulders, gliding over the stone barrier. D’Azevedo ran to the wall and leapt up, seizing its top to wrench himself high enough to peer over it, but there was nothing, neither drum nor cry, only the nearby barns and stables, the slave cabins, the fields, the vast forest with its peculiar soundscape, and enveloping it all, the dense, impermeable silence of the night.
D’Azevedo crept back to bed, but could not sleep. Despite no sounds beyond the usual ones of the house, his entire body, like a sentinel, kept vigil. He went early to the chapel, before the bell, and as soon as he had mouthed the last syllable of the Latin imprecations, he turned to his fellow monks and told them that he would like to meet with them straightaway in his office. They walked there together in silence, and it was not until he closed the door that D’Azevedo noticed the slave João Baptista sweeping his office. He promptly ushered him out. The provost opened the gathering by noting its irregular nature, and apologized for calling his brethren from their appointed duties. He recounted the strange incidents of the prior night, and made clear that he had not merely dreamt them. He had heard drumming, and had observed someone vaulting over the wall. With barely suppressed shock he noted it might even have been a woman, given that none of the monks—and he surveyed them as he spoke—nor the slaves, had long hair.
Had any of them heard anything? Seen any odd characters traipsing about the monastery’s buildings or grounds? All said no, they had heard nothing last night, seen no one. Padre Pero noted that sometimes the blacks consorted with women in the town, without permission, but that in any case, this would occur in their quarters and never within the cloister or main building. He promised to conduct an inquiry and severely punish anyone found to be violating the rules. Padre Barbosa Pires asked whether D’Azevedo was certain it was none of the students he had brought into the house; there were forces at work in the town that the Holy Office might well need to address. D’Azevedo dismissed this comment, noting that the students’ behavior had been unimpeachable, and awaited Dom Gaspar’s thoughts, but he expressed none. With that, D’Azevedo thanked them all and sent them on their way. He wrote out a letter asking you for guidance, and prepared it for posting, though, he noted to himself, he had not heard from you or anyone in or around Olinda for some time. Finished, he felt lightheaded. Before he could call for assistance, João Baptista knocked to enter his office, with an urn of fresh coconut water, and a bowl of cashews, which are said to be good for the nerves, and the remedy set him right for the rest of the day.
Things proceeded without account, until, several weeks later, after a private meeting and dinner at the monastery with several members of the powerful
Pimentel family, local plantation owners and brewers who were considering becoming patrons of the future school they hoped their younger sons might someday attend, at which alcoholic spirits from a newly gifted cask had flowed, though the abstemious provost had not drunk more than a cup, D’Azevedo invited Dom Gaspar into his office to record the leader’s thoughts on the event. Once Dom Gaspar had done so, and drafted a letter of thanks to the Pimentels, which D’Azevedo signed, the provost, calmed by the sweet and potent liquor, the fellowship, and the knowledge that they had roughly a half hour or so before evening prayers and bedtime, asked his charge to remained seated, and said, “My dear brother, I am so grateful for your assistance here. I do not know how I would have gotten this house into the shape it is in without you by my side.”
The brother, his lips and mind also loosened by wine, unbuttoned the top of his doublet and replied, “And I am so thankful to you, my Lord, for the changes you have wrought here. How different it was before you arrived! In the absence of a firm tribune of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost this House was approaching the precipice. There was not just a laxity of practice but of the Faith, of spirit. That wickedness, either preached by the devil’s handservant Luther or by Satan and his agents themselves, when they are not one and the same, was rising like a fever through these walls. I shall not call out any names, but I must testify to you, as I have not yet dared even in Holy Confession, that I did not always appear for prayers and on Sundays I did not always rise from my bed before midday. I hoarded food and ate eggs raw rather than let them be cooked. I raised my voice to the Negroes and even once took the Lord’s name in vain. I—”
“My dear brother,” D’Azevedo started, his face crimsoning at Dom Gaspar’s torrent of words, but the charge continued:
“I tell you, my Lord, the slaves themselves often forgot their places; they refused to work, they talked back, some vanished for days on end and cavorted with the Indians, they even dared to order the monks around. The one called Damásio, who was sold off shortly after I was sent here, threatened to murder Padre Pero in his sleep, I heard him say it with these two ears. Padre Pero beat him, then had him bound and sold at the market at the port, and sold off another that same day who planned to murder us all as well and have the other slaves rise up in revolt.”
“My dear brother Gaspar,” D’Azevedo said again, “perhaps some queer things may have transpired here in the past—”
“And, I, I am sure I glimpsed—for if not, let my eyes be struck blind by the Lord God Himself . . .” Here he broke off, momentarily gathering himself, his face flushing and his tongue in tremor. “My Lord, by the Blessed Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and by the force of the Holy Office of the Inquisition itself, for I only heard and now dare to repeat it, O Lord Christ strike my tongue dumb, but Padre Barbosa Pires told me that he saw a Negro woman, and one of the slaves, he could not make out which one it was, ordering Padre Travassos around, the elderly priest on his hands and knees in the center of the cloister at twilight not but a week, I believe it was, before he died, and he wore not a doublet, not a robe, not a single stitch, and the Negro man was riding him like an ass, and driving him with a crop, and around the white man’s neck he held reins tight, for in his mouth was a bit, and the white man was not uttering a single sound, only making the sounds of a beast, that much he glimpsed—”
“Mercy, Brother Gaspar,” D’Azevedo said.
“—and that is not all, my Lord, for not only did the slaves come and go but the house had received a steady stream of visitors, they were coming before I arrived and some came after, few of them fellow monks or anchoresses or even priests from near or distant dioceses, nor pilgrims in search of spiritual salve, nor lay mendicants, not faithful from the nearby towns, nor even the savages that populated the forests or runaway slaves, but men and women who brought vile thoughts and vicious deeds in their wake, including sometimes persons whose kind one could not discern, man or woman or some other creature, and they usually appeared just at the fall of night, and Padres Travassos and Pero did entertain them, Padre Barbosa Pires told me, and then I saw him enter the room and entertain them himself, and the Negroes took part in the revelries too, the three priests did entertain them, as was said did the former founder Padre Duran Carneiro, before his flight, for why do you think those two boys here are mulattos—”
“Mercy of the Lord—” D’Azevedo said.
“—inviting them in, your Grace, and transforming the solemn holidays into scenes of lasciviousness, with rituals so diabolical it would cause even the Lord Jesus Christ to turn his face away in horror, and there was said to be witchcraft and sorcery of a kind so powerful in this house and outside it, such that creatures worse than those that issue forth from Mephistopheles’ bowels were roaming this estate, and I heard tell that a beast with multiple heads and another beast that could both swim and fly, and another beast that bred with every other animal including humans, including humans living here—”
“Brother, stop,” D’Azevedo said, “I think the spirits—”
“—and so great was that evil and so present that sometimes even though we have all walked arm-in-arm with our Father since you, my Lord, crossed the threshold I can still sometimes feel it, if only you knew of the rituals, in which they defiled the chapel altar and the Host, and daily that Negro woman gave sooth, and one told me in confession that it was one of them, our blacks, parading around in women’s garments, and that the priests sometimes did the same, sometimes even going out as women to meet their lovers in the town, just as there were men and boys from the town who came here during these monstrous frolics, and Padre Travassos took eager part in them, and Padre Duran Carneiro too, I have heard said, before he fled, driven out by that slavewoman, and Padre Pero—”
“Gaspar, please, no more of this, I command—”
“And it was only a year ago, around the time weeks from now when the Lord’s Son will rise from the dead and redeem the World, that some of the townspeople, who are said to be of those accursed faiths, the Jews and the Muslims and the followers of that German monk, Padre Barbosa Pires having denounced some of them even in his childhood, and people believing in dangerous spirits and having no beliefs at all, including the Negroes, and aboriginals who were enticed from their forests, arrived here to participate in the most abominable revelries, and I had begun to barricade myself in my cell, but a female visitor appeared very late one night at the threshold of this very house, I could hear her knocking, and she was so heavily cloaked despite the heat that I could not see her face, and out of Christian duty and hospitality I let her in, and lo I quickly found myself thus at the threshold of the door of the room where she was lodging, as if at her beckoning, which had not required a single word nor even a gesture, as if by sorcery, and only at that moment I fell to my knees, my Lord, and implored our Father for the requisite strength to still these desires and mortify this flesh, and return me to the sanctity of my vows, though as I did so I could hear the drums and the moans and the most extreme and exquisite pleasures occurring only steps from me, just beyond every surrounding wall, and that creature opened the door, though I did not go in, and lifted her skirts, and made me promise not to utter a single word or I would be struck dumb and deaf and blind—”
With this Dom Gaspar fell silent, his whole body shaking like the string of a berimbau, and D’Azevedo shook too, unsure of what to say, until they both heard the ringing of the bell, and realized it was time to go pray.
“My dear Brother,” D’Azevedo said, barely able to summon words, “we must hurry to prayers. But we shall not speak of this again, until I have had time to invest
igate it further, and seek counsel from Olinda. Do you understand? Do you?”
The brother assented, and as he began to say something there was a knock on the door, and with D’Azevedo’s permission he opened it, and the slave João Baptista was there, lamp in hand, to guide them to the chapel. D’Azevedo looked at Dom Gaspar, who had calmed down, and then toward the slave, whom he could not see because of the lamp’s glow, except for the flash of his large, expressive eyes.
Throughout the prayers, D’Azevedo could not shake Dom Gaspar’s tale from his head, and kept getting lost in the words, the Latin sounding more like mere rhythms than sense. Only when they were nearly done did he calm down. What he told himself was that the cane liquor itself bore terrible spirits, so powerful he could still smell its aroma, and these had gotten to Dom Gaspar’s already nervous mind and caused the terrible flight of fantasy, the nightmare that had overtaken his waking thoughts. He nevertheless intended to put this too in a letter to you, hoping that you or someone in Olinda might advise him. He wavered between the final words of the prayer, Dom Gaspar’s account and thoughts of his tutorial with the boys tomorrow. Once the Vespers had finished he hurried to his bedroom without saying a further word to Dom Gaspar, who also went straight to his room, or to either of his fellow priests, who too duly vanished.