Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  Cavalcanti could think of nothing else on the passage back.

  When they returned to Olinda, Dom Duarte listened to Nicolau’s report but agreed with Affonso Ribeiro that it was dangerous to move so far from the main settlements.

  “But Tabira’s people stand between us and the Potiguara and Caeté,” Cavalcanti argued.

  “Settle your valley later, Nicolau,” Dom Duarte counseled. “For now, stay with the others, along the rivers near Olinda. Here is fine land for everyone.”

  “I do not want a roça senhor,” Cavalcanti said, referring to small grants used mostly for food crops. “I came for the same reason you did: to grow cane, and cane needs endless land.”

  “Certainly, Nicolau, and you’ll have all you need, but if you strand yourself in the wilderness, will you survive to grow anything at all?”

  Cavalcanti was persistent in the weeks that followed, and finally persuaded Dom Duarte to accept his petition for the valley and to record it in the colony’s land register. Accordingly, Cavalcanti received, at no cost but the taxes that would become due to the king, an estate of some twelve square leagues, almost 75,000 acres — to a man from Portugal, a kingdom in itself. The deed stipulated that Cavalcanti must inhabit and cultivate his lands within eight years. Nearer Olinda, a shorter time limit was given, but Dom Duarte did not believe that Cavalcanti would soon move so far into the hinterland.

  Cavalcanti continued to work his lands at Iguarassu, and quietly prepared for the conquest, as he thought of it, of his valley.

  Many times he would describe the high ridges, the tumbling stream and crystal lake, and the broad, forested valley. And always Helena would listen attentively but without his enthusiasm: This untamed land remained as distant and fearsome as when she had first heard Nicolau tell of his wish to move here.

  She spent her days in the stockaded village, in the clay-and-stone hut Nicolau had built, as rude a place as those inhabited by the peasants at her father’s vineyards in Portugal. It contained one large room with a corner partitioned off for the adults. Their sons’ hammocks were in the open section, which served the family as living quarters. With low, uneven rafters crawling with insects, and small holes for windows, it remained dark and depressing no matter how hard she worked at making it a home. When it rained, the clay floor loosened and became damp, until one side of the room was as muddy as the open ground.

  Helena did not complain to Nicolau, but often she had to fight her tears when she sat with the other women. There was one thing, however, that did lift their spirits: the unflagging faith of Dona Brites, wife of Dom Duarte. She never failed to show concern toward the women who had joined her husband’s colony.

  One subject alone Helena would not discuss with Dona Brites or anyone else: her husband’s relationship with the woman Jandaia.

  Helena knew that Nicolau was making love to Ribeiro’s daughter: When he came to their bed after he had been with Jandaia, it was with a passion Helena had not felt in him before. She was not jealous of the girl: He could make love with as many forest women as he desired, but he would never forsake his Portuguese wife, the mother of his heirs — of this Helena was as confident as were other women whose men did the same.

  She wasn’t jealous; still, it gave her pleasure to tell him on his return from the Iguarassu fields one evening, “We’re to have a child.”

  He was overjoyed. Pedro, their youngest, was now sixteen; since his birth, there had been two other babies, but both had died. The infant who would come so late was a blessing in their new land, he told Helena, embracing her affectionately. Soon it would be no secret, he thought as he felt her against him, that not only his wife but also his wild mistress, Jandaia, was expecting his child.

  A few days later, the settlement witnessed a furious activity at the Cavalcanti house.

  It began when Nicolau paced out a square of ground adjoining his habitation. He then drove his Potiguara slaves to prepare the small patch for the floor of a room. Then he directed the raising of walls that would abut against the existing dwelling.

  He explained the purpose of this new room to his wife thus: “It’s wrong for you to work so hard,” he said, quite genuinely. “With a child

  . . .”

  Helena sat in her dark clothes, her small hands folded in her lap.

  “The daughter of Ribeiro is a strong woman,” he went on. “She’ll be at your side, and will help you. This girl will refuse nothing you ask, my Dona Cavalcanti!”

  Helena smiled, and taking it as a sign of her gratitude, Cavalcanti clapped his hands together.

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll fetch her.” And he hurried away, filled with the joy of having the two women in his life so close to him.

  Not a single colonist objected to Cavalcanti’s domestic arrangements. It was rare to find a Nova Lusitania man, married or single, who did not take at least one native mistress.

  The priests did object weakly, and some of the colonists responded by presenting their concubines: “We lead them,” they said, “not to temptation but to the faith.” They were sincere in their affirmation. “Teach them, Father,” they urged, “to be good Christians.”

  To fetch Jandaia, Cavalcanti had only to walk a short distance beyond the stockade to the clearing where Affonso Ribeiro had built his maloca.

  Ribeiro had got his pardon from the king and been given lands near Iguarassu. For a time he’d had his sons work in the fields, but these were eventually abandoned: The Ribeiro clan now grew patches of manioc and other foods cultivated by their women and girls.

  The day Cavalcanti came to fetch Jandaia, Ribeiro was sprawled as usual in the shade of a brazilwood tree. Around him were his sons, several men who worked with the loggers, and two degredados recently banished to Pernambuco.

  These exiles, Rodrigues Bueno and Paulo da Costa, both from Coimbra, hadn’t met until they boarded the ship transporting them to Brazil. Bueno was a large, scar-faced tough, who had been exiled for common theft. Da Costa was only twenty-two, a slight man with a pronounced stoop. He had come from a decent family but was a gambler, and to meet his losses, he had debased the king’s coinage by rasping silver specie and accumulating the filings. Thrown together on the voyage out, the pair had become firm friends dedicated to profiting from their punishment.

  Ribeiro knew about Cavalcanti’s arrangement with his daughter and noisily welcomed it: He saw good prospects in having a tie with a man who dreamt of great valleys of cane.

  “Oh, Master, what a fine house I’ve seen you build,” he said with mock earnestness. “Nothing like this straw palace of mine.”

  Those on the ground laughed.

  “Where is she?” Cavalcanti asked directly.

  “Why, Master, are you always in such a hurry? You Portuguese,” he said, as if he were not the same, “you seek a fast and rich conquest as you had in India. This is the land of Brazil. Brazil, Master, makes its own time.” He swung away and grabbed a jar of liquor.

  Cavalcanti remained silent.

  “You want your valley, Master? In time you’ll have it, with all the sugarcane you can grow!”

  “If I ever find men to work it,” Cavalcanti said.

  Ribeiro looked at one of his sons, Mathias, reputedly the laziest creature at the settlement, his young face already showing the signs of excessive drinking. “Miserable dog!” he growled at the boy. “Will you work for Senhor Cavalcanti?”

  The young man groaned loudly, and appeared to crawl deeper into the dirt.

  “My Tupiniquin!” Ribeiro said, and laughed at him. “Same as the others, he won’t work, because what need is there for work? You Portuguese know nothing!” he said, and now he grew serious. “These people would rather die than work in your fields. It’s for women to turn the soil, not men. Men are warriors.”

  “It will change,” Cavalcanti said, with quiet conviction.

  “Never.”

  “I’ll work that valley, Ribeiro,” Cavalcanti persisted, in the same level tone of voice. “If it takes
ten of these to do the work of one honest man, then there’ll be ten, and as many times ten as I need.”

  “It may have to be,” Ribeiro said.

  Strangely, it was Mathias who showed interest in Cavalcanti’s remarks. Lazy as he was, Ribeiro’s son was coming to the unhappy conclusion that to live with his father’s people, he needed an income, and Bueno and da Costa had suggested a means of gaining one: They must go north along the coast to collect Potiguara slaves for men like Cavalcanti. It was dangerous and the reward was not great — a Potiguara now had the same value as a sheep from Portugal — but it was better than hauling logs or toiling in a field from dawn to dark.

  Ribeiro’s women came drifting in from the fields, Jandaia in front with the youngest of Ribeiro’s wives, Salpina. These two began to speak animatedly when they saw Cavalcanti.

  Cavalcanti had by now a good knowledge of Tupi, but not adequate enough to follow this rapid exchange.

  “The children,” Ribeiro explained. “This one” — he indicated Salpina — “seeks to know who will care for them.”

  Cavalcanti showed indifference: The warrior’s boy and girl were not his concern.

  Ribeiro spoke harshly to his wife, then turned to Cavalcanti. “They’ll stay here, Master. What difference one or two at my maloca?”

  Season followed season, and for six years the fertile lands in Cavalcanti’s valley lay untouched.

  Cavalcanti had passed into his fifties and it required tremendous faith to keep alive the hopes he had for this valley, but whenever he doubted they’d be realized, he had only to look at his youngest child, Tomás, and his spirits would soar.

  Tomás was now a vivacious, intelligent five-year-old, with his father’s green eyes and dark complexion. He was much like his brothers at this age, yet there was something of untamed Brazil in him, something difficult to define, a sense of belonging to this land that set him apart. His brother Pedro had come to accept Brazil as his home, but Nicolau’s older son, Henriques, had returned to Portugal with others who had no vision of wide and prosperous valleys. It was difficult to condemn their faintheartedness: Iguarassu remained a small, depressing outpost with the same cluster of squalid buildings, a mill that crushed a still-profitless harvest of cane, and an ever-widening tract of graves in the woods.

  The presence of Tomás had made Henriques’s departure less painful for his parents — and, for Nicolau, there were also two sons Jandaia bore him. This wild, boisterous trio of little boys filled his house and noisily compensated for the disappointment he felt in a Nova Lusitania that was failing to live up to its glorious name.

  Helena had always treated Jandaia with kindness, more like a zealous younger sister than a slave. Once the two had been able to converse, Helena led Jandaia to the church and instructed her husband’s mistress in the manners of a good Christian. There was little dissension between them, and then only when Affonso Ribeiro was involved: Helena forbade him near her house.

  Nicolau, too, had come to regret bringing Ribeiro’s wild and unruly family to the colony. Most often when there was trouble, it started at Ribeiro’s maloca.

  Dom Duarte sent appeal after appeal to the king, begging him to stop shipping criminals to Pernambuco. “If God and nature cannot reform these men, how can I, my lord?”

  But the degredados kept coming. The big Bueno and stooped da Costa who’d consorted with Mathias Ribeiro were typical specimens, and what they finally did threatened to bring all Dom Duarte’s efforts to ruin.

  Mathias and the two criminals attacked Potiguara villages and brought back scores of men and boys. Dom Duarte approved, because they were campaigning beyond the settlement. A recent raid had gone badly. The rigors of their march had been terrible, and they had been fortunate to escape with their own lives. But soon they were headed out on another expedition, and returned after only three weeks with more captives than ever before.

  That next morning, the settlers in both towns awoke to find that all Tabira’s people had gone, except for a few drunks and the women who had taken up with the Portuguese. Not one who wandered freely in and out of the towns or worked at the fields appeared that day.

  Only at the end of a week was contact made with a local chief, through his daughter, Green Bow, whom Dom Duarte’s brother-in-law had taken as wife. She was sent to her father’s village and returned with a report for Dom Duarte:

  “They ask why you enslave their people.”

  “It’s a lie!” the donatário said. “We’ve never troubled the villages of our friends.”

  “Then, why do people from the malocas of Tabira’s uncle sit in the pens at Iguarassu?”

  Dom Duarte acted swiftly, knowing what the enmity of Tabira’s people could mean to his settlements. Behind the colony lay a wall of hostile Potiguara and Caeté; if the alliance with Tabira was broken, the Portuguese could be swept into the sea.

  Dom Duarte ordered the arrest of Mathias Ribeiro, Bueno, and da Costa, released their captives, and invited the local chiefs to witness his justice.

  The inquiry was rapid but proper, with evidence being given by some of the former prisoners. The sentence of Dom Duarte and his magistrates was without appeal: “Hang them!”

  When it was Mathias’s turn for the hanging hook, he had to be dragged across the clearing. Crying for mercy, he ignored the priests who begged that he claim this last chance for forgiveness, though he did try to cling to their robes at the foot of the gibbet.

  Tabira’s people had been set free, but the time they spent in the pens with the Potiguara taught them that what they had feared for years was true: Slavery could afflict their own just as it had taken their enemies.

  Dom Duarte had hoped that his swift justice would reassure Tabira’s people about his honest intentions, but in fact it accomplished the opposite, and those who had worked for the Portuguese drifted away.

  “I didn’t come to found a colony of poor peasants,” Dom Duarte told his leading settlers. “We try, God alone knows . . . we try to work with these people to make something of this place. How hopeless it is! Give them an ax or a knife or a piece of cloth and they stop laboring. They care nothing for possessions.”

  “Slaves,” a colonist said. “Only as such do they learn the value of honest work.”

  “These natives will never do the work we expect of them,” said Cavalcanti. Today he had fifteen slaves but had become convinced that what Affonso Ribeiro once said was correct: Take the savages away from their trees and they wilted like weak plants.

  “We must persist with them,” he added, “but surely we must also look elsewhere.”

  “Must my sons work the soil?” a planter asked. “No. Nor will mine,” Cavalcanti said. “Then, who?”

  “The slaves of Africa.”

  There were negative murmurs from the group. Bringing blacks to Brazil had been discussed many times but dismissed as too costly. A Potiguara could still be had for the value of a sheep; a black slave might demand a small flock, so expensive would it be to transport him across the Atlantic.

  But Cavalcanti raised arguments in favor of importing the blacks: “One will be worth ten Potiguara,” he said. “Remember the fields of Portugal and Madeira — of any place where slaves toil . . .. I’ve traveled in the kingdom of the ManiKongo. I’ve seen an infinite supply of peças, and men who know how to prepare them for the journey.”

  Cavalcanti won his argument and Dom Duarte wrote to King João asking for slaves, and a little over two years later, in February 1545, a caravel from Mpinda, at the mouth of the river Zaire, rode in to shelter behind the long reef opposite Olinda.

  Cavalcanti stood in front of the group of planters on the shore anxiously watching the ship’s boat draw in to the beach. Suddenly the young man in the prow called out to him:

  “Cavalcanti! Oh, Master Cavalcanti!”

  The man leapt from the boat and splashed through the surf toward Cavalcanti.

  “Brito!” Cavalcanti cried. “Brito Correia!”

  “The same!” came th
e response, and the little hero from the São Gabriel stood smartly before his former commander, broader in the chest, perhaps a foot taller, but unmistakably the same Brito Correia who’d hurled himself at Le Tigre with a knife.

  For a moment they hesitated, and then embraced, the rank that had once separated them now forgotten.

  Lourenço Velloso was dead and the orphan from Santarém had inherited all he’d owned, which was substantial. Brito had prospered: the sixty slaves in the ship, the king’s fifth already paid, were his property.

  Cavalcanti bought six: Three were grown men and three older boys. The most imposing, tall and muscular, bore a Christian name: Sebastião. Correia suggested that he should be head slave.

  Cavalcanti addressed his slave, but the man made no response.

  “Sebastião! Sebastião!” Brito chided him. “Where is your Portuguese — your lovely Portuguese?”

  Still the man refused to speak, and was led off by Pedro Cavalcanti.

  “They fear nothing but the whip,” Correia advised.

  But Cavalcanti wasn’t listening. There was joy in his heart at the sight of that file of slaves moving along the beach. Now God in His mercy would allow him to move to the valley.

  On March 12, 1546, a year after the arrival of the slaves, Nicolau Cavalcanti gave thanks for that blessing. He knelt in a stockade they had built upon the rise overlooking the small lake, with twenty-four souls around him as he prayed. Eight he considered his immediate family: Helena and Tomás, and Pedro, now married to Maria, a settler’s daughter, and their son; Jandaia, too, with Nicolau’s two bastards.

  Sebastião and the five other Bakongo knelt near the ten native slaves, half of whom were Potiguara. The two groups had little friendship for each other; it had been inevitable that the Bakongo would become overseers of the Potiguara, whom they found primitive and simple, with no heart for plantation work.

  Engenho Santo Tomás, Cavalcanti called his lands. Fields had been planted with cane behind the rise with the stockade. The mill was being built alongside the stream that tumbled through the gorge.