“With Sousa?” To Nicolau, who knew nothing of the Jesuits, “His Company” had simply meant the company of colonists.
“Yes, and hundreds more sent by His Majesty to plant afresh his New World colony.”
Nicolau’s face hardened for a moment. Then he said, “Son of my brother, come; you’ve had a long journey. There’s meat and manioc and beans — let us feed you!”
Nicolau indicated that they should enter the great block of a house, but before they could move, Helena reached out and placed a hand on Inácio’s arm:
“My child — what of my Henriques?”
“Henriques is in good health, working with my father in the countinghouse. He is married.” He stopped. “This you must know?”
But her expression told otherwise, and then Nicolau spoke:
“The last we heard of that coward, my son,” he said, “was years ago. He ran away; he had no stomach for this conquest. So, he’s married, is he? Good. Maybe there’s man enough in him to satisfy one woman!”
“He is happy, Uncle, to be back in Portugal.” And then Inácio remembered. “Dear Pedro,” he said, “I pray for him.”
“Yes, nephew, pray for my Pedro’s rest — and all damnation for his blackhearted killers.”
He swung away then and entered the house, the other two following him.
The interior consisted of one huge room, as filthy as the open ground of the stockade, low-ceilinged with a rough-hewn ladder that led to similar quarters above. Inácio was introduced to Pedro’s widow, Maria, and was told that her child and Tomás, Nicolau’s thirteen-year-old son, were out playing. Several other women and children were about, and grew silent at Inácio’s entrance, but now they ignored him and resumed their conversations. Nicolau made no attempt to explain who they were or what function they served in his establishment. Several little half-breed children rubbed up against Inácio’s cassock and tugged at the rosary that hung from his belt. Nicolau shouted at them in the language of the natives and they leapt away.
Nicolau led Inácio to a thick-beamed table and benches that occupied one section of the room. Here, too, were hammocks, where Nicolau, Helena, and Tomás slept, and again, Inácio was distressed to observe that everyone in the house lived openly and shamelessly without privacy.
A chaotic assortment of items cluttered the room: weapons and powder, heaps of manioc and beans, jars of wine and water, broken and rusted implements, lengths of chain to bind slaves; and from the uneven rafters hung strips of drying meat and bundles of roots and herbs. Chickens nested atop piles of goods and pecked their way across the hard mud floor. Pet birds flew beneath the rafters, where two small monkeys dangled, screeching and baring their teeth at Inácio. Flies, slower and fatter than those outside, swarmed everywhere. And permeating the atmosphere was the stench of rotting meat and sweat.
Bowls of powdery manioc, chunks of stringy, burnt meat, and beans swirling in fat were brought by two of the women occupants. Nicolau attacked his food voraciously, between mouthfuls telling Inácio of the early years at Iguarassu. At one point, when Inácio expressed joy at being able to teach the Gospel in these glorious woodlands, this “garden of the Lord,” Nicolau gave his own vision of the forest — a hostile giant that had to be razed with fire and ax relentlessly to make this country fit for Christian. “They must either destroy it or be destroyed by it!” he said.
Inácio was even more disheartened by his uncle’s attitude toward the savages:
Nicolau recalled the massacre of Pedro, recounting every horrid detail of the butchery. “A thousand times since then,” he said, “I’ve closed my eyes and beheld my ravaged son. A thousand times I’ve vowed revenge against those who slew him.” His countenance became remarkably placid. “My dear nephew, such sweet revenge I’ve had.”
“Uncle Nicolau, vengeance is God’s alone,” Inácio said quietly,
“Is it, Padre Inácio?” Nicolau retorted. “Then, God gave me these hands — this will — to act on His behalf. Pagans came to murder Pedro and destroy the labor of our first year. They sought to destroy every settlement of Christians in Nova Lusitania. But we drove them away from Iguarassu and Olinda and out of our lands, and we pursued them and their allies and slew what we caught. But they’re still out there, living like animals in the forest, for they breed like vermin.”
He took some wine, and added in a calmer tone, “We capture them if there’s opportunity, and bring them to hunt and fish for us and to work in our fields. They’re without human reason, cruel, vindictive, dishonest; they have strength for their barbarous pastimes, but here in our fields they’re as weak as fish out of water.”
“Perhaps we need to be patient with them. They are still wild children, not men with understanding.”
“Yes,” he said. “We do the savages a priceless service by dragging them out of the forest. We teach them to till, to sow, to reap, and to work for their upkeep — things unknown to them before the Portuguese arrived.”
Nicolau rose from the table. “Get some rest, nephew,” he said. “In a land of pagans, the weary Christian, Padre, needs his rest. This you will learn.” He went over to the woman in the white robe, who laughed and swung out of the hammock to follow Nicolau into the sunlight.
“O Lord, take note of him,” Inácio prayed quietly for his uncle. “Remove the thorns that bind his heart, and free his spirit in this lovely land.”
The woman in the white robe was Jandaia, Affonso Ribeiro’s daughter. By this her forty-first year, she had a mature, graceful appeal that made her as attractive as ever to Nicolau. That childish pout was gone, but the slight aloofness remained. The constancy of Nicolau’s affection for her made Jandaia self-confident. Nicolau slept with others in the big room, but these were women he used without tenderness, and no one held the place of Jandaia.
When she’d followed him out of the house, he led her to the cane field near the stockade. They’d been here before, lying between the rows of sugarcane, and he would make love with a furious, demanding passion.
But this time she found him quiet, almost hesitant. When she cast off her robe, he did not immediately unclothe himself but stood there, his eyes upon her body, a withdrawn, distant expression on his face. She went down on her knees before him, and he loosened the rope at his waist, so that his breeches fell about his ankles. She caressed him, and he ran his hands through her hair, but he did not respond to her soft kisses. She looked up at his face and saw that he’d closed his eyes, as he often did when she touched him. But the troubled look had not disappeared.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
He shook his head, and resting a hand on her shoulder, he lowered himself to the ground, gently pushing her down next to him. She welcomed this, pulling him toward her. Kicking off the breeches at his ankles, he began to make love to her with sharp, hurried motions, pressing her fiercely to the earth, his rough leather jerkin scratching and chafing her skin. He uttered none of his usual impassioned appeals but breathed loud and hard, his rasps and grunts mounting until he had his release. Then he rolled away, rustling and snapping dry leaves and stalks, and lay on his back.
“What is troubling you?” she now asked him again. She had no sooner put the question than she realized what it must be. Before he could reply, she said, “The one that flew in like the urubu, so scrawny and black, the padre — you do not like him?”
Nicolau was amused by her description of Inácio.
“Yes, Jandaia — such a bird, indeed. Black and hungry for the souls of men.”
“So, Padre Urubu is hungry.” She laughed gaily. “Then let him be fed — at my father’s malocas. Let him find Affonso Ribeiro and he’ll not want for devils.”
“Inácio is honest — too honest for Terra do Brasil. But don’t think him a fool.”
She was hurt by his rebuke and looked at him apologetically. She did not forget that after the Caeté and their allies who’d besieged Iguarassu and Olinda were driven off, and the full facts of what had happened at Ribeiro’
s maloca became known, Dom Duarte had demanded that her father and all his tribe, every person related to him, be banished from Pernambuco. It had been Jandaia who had begged him to intercede on her father’s behalf, pleading that she, too, would be exiled. And Nicolau had heard her and gone to Dom Duarte, saying that he, personally, would take responsibility for Affonso Ribeiro. He wanted none of the riffraff and drunken friends, but the immediate family could move to Engenho Santo Tomás. They were still here.
“I fear for this little padre,” Nicolau said afterward. “Men like Affonso Ribeiro and Nicolau Cavalcanti — are going to break his innocent heart.”
Inácio lay in a hammock Helena had ordered her house slaves to hang for him in a storeroom next to the big room.
Inácio could not sleep. He was deeply troubled by what he’d seen and heard at Engenho Santo Tomás.
This afternoon Nicolau had got back to the stockade, alone, at the same time his slaves began returning from the clearings. Inácio was watching them file through the entrance, and Nicolau approached him:
“Observe my peças — strong, healthy black sons of the soil — and then observe, nephew, those they drive ahead of them — soft, rheumy-eyed lambs! How, I ask you, are we to conquer this land with such servants?”
There were, Inácio saw when all had entered, ten Africans and some fifty natives, who did indeed appear miserable, walking dispiritedly, showing neither exhaustion at the end of a day’s toil nor relief that rest was soon to come. Small men mostly — some almost womanish in the delicacy of their frames when compared with the more robust blacks — they displayed a marked resignation and docility.
“Where do the natives come from?” Inácio had asked.
“These are Caeté, Potiguara, a few unfriendly Tobajara. Some I took myself, in the wars after they rose up against us. Some I paid for: A cask of the cheapest wine, a rusty pike, a piece of cloth, and a savage will deliver his brother. Some were with the cord.” He saw Inácio’s frown. “That one there,” he said, indicating a man at the back of the group, “he has me to thank that he enjoys this day. He was bound with the white cord of his enemy, being led to their place of slaughter, when I rescued him. You’d think that such a man would show gratitude, wouldn’t you?
“The creature wails at me and calls me a thief. I stole from him the prospect of a glorious death, he tells the others. With such, nephew Inácio, your task is going to be hard.”
While he’d been talking, a pack of young boys moved boisterously to where the two men stood, offering noisy greetings in both Portuguese and Tupi.
Nicolau calmed them. “Tomás,” he said, and one had stepped forward. “Tomás —this is your uncle Felipe’s son.”
“He’s a padre?” the boy said bluntly.
“Yes, little savage,” Nicolau said, “ and he’ll be wanting your respect.”
The boy looked into the pale, anxious face above him and, in an uncertain tone, bade Inácio a proper welcome. When they’d exchanged greetings, Tomás asked his father, “The padre is from Olinda?”
“No,” Nicolau said, “from Portugal and the Bahia.”
“Oh, yes?” the boy said, and then darted away to join his friends.
“He’s been a great solace to Helena,” Nicolau said quietly, “and, since Pedro’s death, to me. A late child, Padre, given us by the Lord in this wilderness. Tomás knows nothing of Lisbon, nor of any land but this. He knows nothing of counting houses and fancy fidalgos, and this is the way I wish it to remain. Let him grow up to be a little wild, a little like these savages, and he’ll know better than any how to conquer Brazil.”
“But surely the boy should be sent to Portugal for an education?”
“What will it profit him, here in this forest?”
During the early part of the evening, Inácio had sat with Nicolau and Helena and had more opportunity to observe their son. He’d found him ill-mannered, ill-educated, and every bit as wild as his father was hoping he’d become. He spoke Tupi, the language of his playmates, more fluently than Portuguese, and the only Latin he could recite was in the few prayers he knew. His scantily clad body had been burnt so dark and coppery by the sun that he appeared as a brother to the half-breeds with whom he played. Nicolau indulged the child, protesting neither his invasions of the big room nor his interruptions of their conversation, and Inácio unhappily saw that the child was in many ways, from his eating habits to his quick temper, a small replica of the lord of this valley.
Nicolau had sat talking until it became dark, giving Inácio a rambling account of his experiences since settling at Pernambuco with Dom Duarte Coelho.
“We’ve had peace — sometimes almost a year between troubles,” he said, “but then the savages perform some treachery against a Christian and they have to be punished. Engenho Santo Tomás lies farthest from Olinda; none can safely venture beyond my valley, for the backlands are infested with these pagans. We’re so few, they of limitless number. My wild Tomás will be an old man and still we’ll not have cleared this barbarous race from the forests!”
It was this grim prophecy of Nicolau’s that had kept Inácio awake in his hammock.
He’d begun to doze when he heard a dull, repetitive thudding that seemed to keep pace with the beat of his heart. Now, as he listened, he recognized the sounds as the rhythms of drums, and there was also the melodious note from a stringed instrument.
He climbed out of his hammock. The music was coming from the slave quarters across the stockade, a low and haunting refrain of the men of Africa, echoing in this valley of Santa Cruz.
As he stood listening, Inácio pondered his acceptance of the bondage of these peças. Since the days of Prince Henry, blacks had been shipped to Portugal to labor for Christian men. They were rescued from their ignorance and their brute natural laws and offered Christ’s priceless redemption. What greater reward, even with their bondage, could these men expect?
Inácio returned to his hammock. He was awakened before dawn by the cry of a man in terrible pain.
He hurried out into the clearing before the big house. The slaves were assembled in front of an upright triangle formed by three stout posts. A native was bound to this contraption, his arms and legs spread-eagled.
Standing to one side was Nicolau, with Tomás and the gang of young boys. Sebastião, the overseer of the slaves, was in charge of the flogging, and directed two other Africans, who wielded thick tapir-hide whips.
Their victim was a young Caeté, no more than a boy, who howled and begged for mercy.
Inácio hurried over to his uncle. “For mercy’s sake, Nicolau Cavalcanti, put an end to this savagery!”
“This little Caeté tried to run away last night, nephew Inácio. What savagery is there in teaching him to know his place among Christians?”
“You will teach him nothing.”
Before Inácio arrived on the scene, the Caeté had already been given eighty lashes, and when these last twenty had been administered, Sebastião ordered a halt. He stepped forward with a bowl of salt mixed with the juice of limes. Then, as Sebastião poured the bitter, burning mixture over the Caéte’s raw flesh, the native screamed once, a long, withering cry, and then was silent.
The two Africans untied and unshackled the Caeté, and Inácio rushed over to him. It was obvious that the boy was dying.
Kneeling beneath that ghastly triangle, Padre Inácio Cavalcanti gave the young heathen his first and final anointing, and claimed his first pagan soul for Christ in Santa Cruz.
Two days later, Inácio called his guides from the malocas and prepared to leave Engenho Santo Tomás. He said he would return to the valley before departing Pernambuco, but was now eager to undertake the circuit of the colony which Padre Nóbrega had requested.
Nicolau welcomed Inácio’s departure. “Visit others, and come and tell me whether you find it so different with them,” he said.
During his travels to the plantations between Nicolau’s valley and Olinda, and up to the settlement of Iguarassu, Inácio m
et with kindness and generosity from his hosts. They greeted his arrival with open delight, grew devout and prayerful in his presence, and surprised him with their gentility. The prosperity of these landowners was still meager by Lisbon standards, but several had taken him to a vantage point above their estates, and indicating the cane fields reaching into the great valleys below, they declared that the culture and opulence of Pernambuco would yet rival anything known in Portugal. And he believed them.
But these kind and openhearted men were, like Nicolau, stained with immorality, and cheerfully revealed their numerous transgressions with the pagan girls. They did not understand that the young man who heard their loud boasting was not like the lascivious priests of Olinda, who kept concubines, but was deeply shocked by their sin and dismayed at the sight of the bastard progeny paraded before him.
It was Olinda, the capital, however, that truly scandalized Inácio. Those seven lovely hills were infested with a breed of godless, vice-ridden men. Inácio walked the narrow, stony lanes that wound along the hillsides and became aware of a great number of foreigners in the town — Italians, Galacians, Canary Islanders. Foulmouthed drunkards and riffraff with no respect for his cassock offered him the most depraved suggestions. He trembled at the sight of half-naked women, both native and half-breed, lewdly disporting themselves in public.
And he found priests who, to his sorrow, had been swept into the devil’s embrace.
Angry and fearful at what he’d beheld, he called upon the donatário himself, Dom Duarte Coelho Pereira, in the white limestone bastion he’d erected upon one of Olinda’s hills.
“Oh, Padre Inácio,” Dom Duarte had welcomed him warmly, “How wonderful to have a true servant of God with us.”
To Inácio’s great surprise, the man who stood at the head of this cesspool of iniquity was a devout Christian. And even more so was his wife, Dona Brites, who, after the introductions, said directly, “Padre Inácio, are you come with your Jesuit brothers to save the souls of these wicked people?”
Brazil Page 19