Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  “I waited with you, Padre,” she said simply.

  The Tupiniquin began to emerge from their longhouses, and were greeted by an astonishing sight: The black robe who’d stolen the Cariri had come back.

  He was on his knees at the ashes of the boucan, weeping and chanting in Tupi.

  When word of the black robe’s return spread, more people tumbled from their hammocks to see this strange Long Hair with the mighty courage to return to the Place of Slaughter, where he had so offended their ancestors.

  For more than three hours the black robe kept at his vigil, with neither food nor water. The elders led by Aruanã, came out to observe, and sat in the same position they had assumed at the feast the previous afternoon. Pium, standing alone, watched impassively from the entrance to his hut.

  Over the next three months, a truce prevailed between Padre Inácio Cavalcanti and the Tupiniquin. They were curious enough to want to continue their observation of the priest who, as the days passed, demonstrated an unwavering friendship toward them; and Inácio, having witnessed the depths of their depravity, had the good sense to bide his time.

  As resident priest of a permanent mission, it was Inácio’s duty to keep the vice-provincial at the Bahia informed of his progress. This he did in regular letters written in fine Latin in the privacy of his small hut. He would send a Tupiniquin to Porto Seguro with each letter, not knowing when the next ship bound for São Salvador was due to arrive.

  “Oh, Padre Nóbrega, their hearts are stone,” he lamented in his first letter. “I see that I must first content myself with the smallest pebbles, a handful of which I may take at one time and grind with no effort, until they are as fine and pure as the white sands upon these beaches.”

  He was referring to the children, the boys who were not yet called to seek feathers of Macaw, and the girls who were too young to work in the fields with their mothers. Inácio made quick progress with these youngsters. A week after his arrival at the malocas, the supplies for his mission were brought up from Porto Seguro, among them a quantity of the best Pernambucan sugar. For the little ones who attended his classes on the ground in front of his hut, there was always a spoonful of sugar, which he poured into their hands. They would squirm and giggle with delight as the grains trickled into their palms, and hurry off to lick up the sweet reward.

  But it was not sugar alone that brought him his early converts. In the beginning, he had addressed his young charges in the gravest manner, almost in tears with his eagerness to fill them with the love of Jesus. But they were so easily distracted. And then Inácio had an inspiration: He considered the ways of the native pagé. . . .

  One morning, to the delight of his audience, Padre Inácio forsook his solemn approach. As he told the story of David and Goliath, he pretended first to be Goliath, nine feet tall and clad in bronze; then the little shepherd David protecting his father’s flocks against the lion and the bear, taking up his crook, five stones, and a catapult. He roared Goliath’s challenges and pounded the ground. The little Tupiniquin cheered him and begged to hear more.

  Gradually Inácio drew certain youngsters into the plays, giving them short parts to play, and sometimes he’d employ them all in grand, noisy marches around the clearing. Before the end of the third month, Padre Inácio was able to inform Nóbrega: “Sixty-two have been baptized. Dear friend, how I wish you could see the happiness of these little souls brought out of the desert!”

  The rest of the village accepted him with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion, but were not unfriendly. After Inácio’s return from the forest, Aruanã and the elders had agreed that he could stay at the malocas for an unspecified time. No one had mentioned the slain Cariri or the boucan. As for the pagé and the priest, Pium and Inácio maintained a cautious distance. Each considered the other a malevolent and forceful competitor, and neither was ready yet for a showdown that could result in a loss of face before the elders and the warriors.

  Inácio had built a ten-by-twelve-foot mud-and-thatch hut that served as habitation, study, chapel, and infirmary. It was often hot and airless by day, damp and crawling with insects at night. The furnishings were simple: a table and stool he’d made himself, two chests containing his supplies and few personal belongings; one small, unframed canvas of St. Paul, given to him by his father, Felipe, before he’d left Lisbon; a crucifix; and a statue of St. Stephen the martyr. Inácio could not adapt to sleeping in a hammock — his long, angular body hung at the most wretched angles — and he slept instead on a cot of thin branches layered with dry palm fronds.

  Later, adjoining the hut, he built a roomy open-sided shelter — his “church” — where he set up a simple altar of mud and stone, always draped with fine cloths when in use, and his “colégio,” where his converts gathered.

  His meals came from several sources. Often the women of one of the eight longhouses would send him a bowl of manioc or beans. If there’d been a hunt, he would be offered a cut of the meat. And, always, there was Unauá to see that his meals were prepared and that his hut and church were kept clean.

  Unauá lived with Salpina in Aruanã’s maloca, but there were many days and nights, too, when she was away from her hammock. Her absences had delighted the entire longhouse until someone espied her asleep one night just outside the door of Padre Inácio’s hut; they realized then that this black robe’s words about a marriage to the Church were true.

  For all his loving acceptance of the Jesuit vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Inácio was beset by periods of gnawing loneliness, in which he yearned for company different from these simple Tupiniquin. He was often invited to sit with the elders or to eat with the men of one maloca. But he’d come away from these meetings exhausted, for as the men sipped their beer and puffed their tabak, Inácio carefully weighed every word he offered, every song he delivered, for its effect in softening their hearts.

  It was different, though, when he was with Unauá. She had accepted Christ, and when he spoke with her, it was to further her knowledge of the mysteries of the faith. But there were also times when she’d want to know about his own, personal life, and she would listen just as attentively to all that he said.

  She knew how much he loved the forest and the things that grew there, and sometimes she would go alone beyond the malocas and return with a gift for him: a small bunch of fresh herbs or a pale mauve orchid, which she would secretly leave on the table in his room. When he entered, her gift would be waiting for him, and he would experience a deep contentment in knowing so faithful and loving a child.

  Toward the end of June 1552 the small group of settlers at Porto Seguro sent a messenger to invite Padre Inácio to their celebrations for the feast day of St. John the Baptist; their priest was away at the Bahia and they wished Padre Inácio to preside over the day’s pastoral observances. This he did, in a small whitewashed church on the hill overlooking the bay — a neat little building on the site where the Franciscans Diogo and Gaspar had established their illfated mission. The settlers crowded the Masses he held, and most were eager to make their confessions. There was to be feasting and dancing and a great bonfire and fireworks.

  It was an occasion when even the sternest plantation owner looked sympathetically upon his slaves and farm workers and ordered that they, too, celebrate the saint. The Africans were grateful for this rest, and showed thanks by bringing to the feast little dainties they’d made of sugar, cashew nuts, and manioc, and of corn and coconut, sweet combinations of what they remembered from Africa and what they found in the New World. The natives of Santa Cruz were less enthusiastic, puzzled especially by the appearance of their owners, many of whom, taken by the spirit of St. John’s asceticism and simplicity, donned their oldest clothes to appear as poorly as their bonded servants.

  The settler Cardim was often at Inácio’s side.

  “Oh, senhores, Daniel himself had no greater challenge in the lions’ den!” Cardim said in the presence of several planters, though directing his words at the justice of the peace,
Vasco Barbosa, corpulent and rumpled, who, with the dignity of his office in mind, had avoided donning rags but still appeared untidy. “Oh, senhores, it was a miracle!” Cardim continued. “To see how the padre stole the meat those barbarians were ready to devour.”

  “It is only what God — and our king — demands of us in Santa Cruz,” Inácio said. “That we wean these people from their abominable past.”

  Barbosa, his fingers sticky from one of the slave confections, said, “God be praised, Padre, for the faith and the courage of His servants!” He popped the delicacy into his mouth and continued: “But I see little hope — may He prove me wrong! — little chance for the enlightenment of these savages.”

  “Come to the malocas, Senhor Barbosa and see the progress made there over these past months. I tell you, senhor, the Tupiniquin are more eager than many of our own people to hear the word of the Lord.”

  “I’ve heard of your company of children,” Barbosa said. “A delight! There, Padre, you may have an answer. But what of their parents, always a threat to our settlements? Must we live in fear of the Tupiniquin, the Tupinambá, the Cariri, for a whole generation?”

  “A generation and more, if need be — until we bring these nations into His church.”

  “Children!” Barbosa said suddenly. “The way I see it, Padre, they are all children. They must be brought in from the forest and tamed on the lands of the colonists.” He looked for — and received — nods of approval from the group standing with him. “When they’re obedient and submissive, like good children,” he continued, “then, Padre, raise them as men, fit to be rewarded with Christianity!”

  “From what I’ve seen, Justice of the Peace,” Inácio said, using the title for the first time, “our laws themselves do not spare the natives long enough for them to collect that reward.”

  “We intend them no harm, Padre, but it’s difficult to make them understand our simplest demands.”

  “No harm, Barbosa, except to be whipped to death and blown to pieces at the mouths of our cannon?”

  A flush came to Barbosa’s face. “We rule in Africa and India, Padre,” he said, “because we permit no contempt for our laws and our way of life — or the Holy Cross. Why, then, should the knights of Portugal accept abuse from savages? The natives are ungrateful, cruel, and lazy. They abandon themselves to their vices — this you’ve witnessed.”

  “They are also,” Padre Inácio said sternly, “the children of God.”

  “You mustn’t think too harshly of us, Padre, for being more than a little troubled, especially after trying so honestly to work with them. As da Silva here knows, Padre, what wonderful liars these Tupiniquin make!”

  Domingos da Silva was the holder of lands southwest of the bay, in that area once occupied by the malocas of Aruanã and his people. From Setubal, south of Lisbon, famed for its salt pans, da Silva had first visited Porto Seguro twenty years before as a brazilwood logger, later returning to settle permanently in the captaincy. He was short and stocky with small, piggish eyes beneath coarse, bushy eyebrows, an almost toothless grin, and a foul temper matched only by those of his three sons, Marcos’s being the worst. Dubbed “The Silent,” Marcos had throttled to death and then personally quartered a savage who had tried to incite others to flee the da Silva plantation.

  “Yes! The greatest liars!” da Silva agreed with Barbosa. He had four remaining upper teeth, grouped together in front, and a habit of drawing his lip back and exposing them when he spoke. “I have a slave who claims to know the padre from Pernambuco, there in Dom Duarte Coelho’s lands.” He gave a small, wet laugh.

  “I have traveled through the captaincy.”

  “Most assuredly,” da Silva said, “but this one tells a fantastic story of being with the padre. . . .”

  “Da Silva, where did you get him?”

  The planter merely shrugged. “A vagabond,” he said. “Starving when my Marcos found him. We fed him; we nursed him with the milk of kindness, Padre, until he was well. And now? Now he wants nothing but to run from our lands.”

  “I do not think he lies to you.”

  Da Silva gave him an angry look and then frowned at the justice of the peace. These two were good friends: The law always supported the da Silvas, and was ready to oblige with permits for the detention and enslavement of any pestiferous natives. Such permits had become necessary with the administration of Governor Tomé de Sousa, who was eager to promote orderly dealings with the savages.

  “You have an explanation, Padre?” asked the justice of the peace.

  “His name?” Inácio asked. “What is his name?”

  Da Silva thought for a moment before replying: “Guaraci.”

  “I thought so.”

  “You know this savage, then?” da Silva asked.

  “Yes, I know him,” Inácio said, with restraint. “He is a grandson of the degredado Affonso Ribeiro.”

  Da Silva laughed, baring his teeth. “And so,” he said, chuckling, “and so it is with every little caboclo in Porto Seguro!”

  Inácio ignored da Silva’s use of the word for “copper-colored,” which denoted the crossbreed of white and native Brazilian. “I took Guaraci and his sister away from Olinda after Ribeiro died. I promised to return them to these Tupiniquin, from whose malocas their father had come.”

  “Then it can’t be him,” the justice of the peace said.

  “It is. I was a year at the Bahia. Longer. Guaraci could not wait, and set out to walk to Porto Seguro.”

  Da Silva seemed to find this highly amusing. “Go see this one who calls himself Guaraci now, Padre. He walks nowhere.”

  Inácio said, “I’ll fetch him in the morning.”

  The other men in the group were very quiet, looking from the priest to the planter, expecting da Silva to react angrily to the Jesuit’s words. Instead, da Silva laughed so hard that his sides shook and he had to clasp his belly.

  “Padre, it would be most unwise,” the settler Cardim cautioned later. “Da Silva respects nothing and no one.”

  Despite the warning, the next morning Inácio hastened to the da Silva lands, accompanied by three Tupiniquin who had acted as his guides to Porto Seguro. They traveled by canoe for three hours, making slow headway up a river that flowed into the bay. They found a landing Cardim had described to Inácio, and beached the canoe.

  Within an hour they were in sight of the da Silva stockade, similar to that of Nicolau Cavalcanti, positioned on the hill that sloped toward the place where the Tupiniquin malocas had stood when Aruanã was a boy.

  Inácio was half a mile from the da Silva stronghold when he saw Domingos da Silva and a younger man, later identified as Marcos, riding down the rise toward him, the son keeping just behind the father. They did not rein in their mounts until they were twenty yards from him.

  “So! You’ve come, Padre” — Domingos da Silva glanced at his son — “to fetch the little wanderer.”

  Marcos da Silva, darker and stockier than his father, reached for a whip hanging from the side of his saddle. Fourteen feet of finely plaited tapir hide, it was the kind used to drive the oxen hauling high-wheeled carts of cane, but Marcos preferred to save it for the backs of men who disobeyed him.

  “Let’s have no trouble, senhor,” Inácio said. “There has been a mistake. Guaraci was walking to reach his people and was lost and starving.”

  “Yes, Padre, Yes — and here he found rest and shelter,” the older da Silva said. “Now, Padre, isn’t it right that he pay for this hospitality?”

  Inácio fought to stay calm. “I am here — at the Tupiniquin malocas — for the cause of peace between them and our people,” he said. “I take His message of love and compassion. How, Senhor da Silva, am I to make the Tupiniquin accept this if they see that we show neither?”

  Marcos da Silva had uncoiled the whip as Inácio spoke and was flicking it with small movements.

  “The boy Guaraci is my charge,” Inácio said firmly. “Give him to me, senhor, or you’ll answer to the gover
nor himself.”

  “The governor?” Domingos da Silva grinned across at his son. “Why would His Excellency de Sousa vex himself with one little native when all Brazil is now his care?”

  Inácio suddenly tired of this fruitless exchange, and started to walk off in the direction of the stockade.

  Da Silva said in a hard voice, “God may save you from the jaws of the Tupiniquin, Cavalcanti — here, you’re on my lands.”

  Inácio continued walking.

  Then Marcos da Silva swore at him, and the whip cracked, snapping up dust in front of Inácio. “Priest! Go back!”

  Inácio kept moving forward.

  Marcos struck out again. The end of the whip, sharp and thin as a quill, slashed Inácio’s right cheek.

  Inácio’s head jerked back, and his broad hat fell off. The whip had drawn a long, thin line that had begun to bleed. Inácio’s eyes blazed; his mouth opened but he said nothing, and after the briefest of pauses, he started to walk again. But his eyes were on the whip.

  When Marcos started to raise it again, Inácio stamped on it with his sandaled foot and suddenly grabbed the tapir hide. As he pulled it, Marcos, whose feet were out of the stirrups, lost his balance and tumbled to the ground. He mouthed a string of oaths as he scrambled to his feet. Then he drew a short, curved dagger.

  The older da Silva drove his horse forward at his son. “Marcos! Get away!”

  The young man was forced to leap aside, but immediately he started to creep back toward Inácio.

  “He’s a priest!” Domingos da Silva screamed. “Go — before you’re eternally damned!” Using a section of the reins as a flail, he struck repeatedly at his son until finally Marcos ran off, dashing past the three Tupiniquin, who had watched the confrontation in absolute silence.

  Da Silva turned upon Inácio. “Take your precious Tupiniquin!” he said in a high-pitched, shaking voice. He gave a tight, nervous laugh. “Why should I cry over one young savage when the good Lord provides us so abundantly?”