Unauá withdrew her hand from his. “I understand,” she said quietly. She moved to the doorway, and looked back at him. “But I am sorry,” she said, and hastened away.
The next day, when Padre Inácio returned to his shabby hut from classes with the children, there was a single mauve orchid on the table, a perfect bloom taken from the heart of the forest.
Padre Inácio remembered that orchid two months later, in October 1553, when he was far away from the malocas, in the forest, where he had gone to perform the Spiritual Exercises devised by the Jesuit Father-General Ignatius Loyola for the self-examination and grace of his followers. Guaraci and two converts accompanied him, but, at his request, they kept to themselves and did not disturb his solitude. The place where they rested was four days’ journey from the malocas, and to reach it, they had passed the villages of clans who greeted them with friendship, for the reputation of the Long Hair who bled for the Tupiniquin had spread.
Inácio had purposely come this way, almost within reach of Ilheus, the captaincy north of Porto Seguro, to explore the extent of his mission. He planned to appeal to Nóbrega again for assistance, but until someone came, he hoped to be able to travel from clan to clan, sharing his ministry with them. Just how demanding this would be was shown in the number of villages encountered along their route: nine
Tupiniquin settlements with sixty-four malocas, more than three thousand souls by Inácio’s estimate. Had they chosen another direction, his escorts said, they might have found the same, up to the forests held by the enemy Tupinambá.
After passing the ninth group of malocas, Inácio had begun to look for a suitable site for contemplation. They were in hilly country, the forest less humid than at the coast, the vegetation thinning out in places. Still, there was a wild luxuriance, especially along the rivers that scored the land. They had crossed a small stream and were progressing along the side of a hill when, higher up, Inácio discerned a burst of mauve. He halted his escort and walked up to admire the orchids; they were clustered along the branches of a tree that in itself took Inácio’s attention, for it was no ordinary denizen of the forest.
All day Inácio would stay on the hill, leaving the others before dawn and usually not returning until dark. He meditated upon the heinousness of sin, upon death, judgment. In the last days of his solitude, he walked around that orchid-bedecked tree, conversing in a whisper with Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, the Saints, sharing all the gladness of Resurrection. He felt refreshed and renewed, with a deepened consciousness of his mission and enormous spirit to pursue it.
On the march back to the malocas, they spent the last night of their journey with a clan whose village was the first beyond the Tupiniquin settlement near Porto Seguro. The elders received Padre Inácio with courtesy; they had a temporary shelter built for him to occupy that night. The women who erected it in the clearing joked about its being similar in detail to the sanctuary given a prisoner for his last sleep before meeting Yware-pemme.
Despite their hospitality, Inácio sensed an aloofness among his hosts. The elders showed little interest in his journey, and moved off by themselves as soon as they judged it proper. He sought out Guaraci, but the young man could offer no explanation. And then, in the morning, when they were ready to leave, they discovered that the two Tupiniquin converts were gone.
“What have you done with them?” Padre Inácio asked.
“Nothing, Father,” an elder said. “They left by themselves.”
“But we travel together.”
The elder looked unconcerned. “Perhaps they move faster,” he suggested.
“Come,” Inácio said to Guaraci, who stood next to him, “we will go after them.” He thanked the clan’s leaders. “I promise to return soon,” he said. “I wish nothing more, friends, than to share the great joy being discovered by the Tupiniquin at the maloca of Aruanã and the other longhouses. Every day more people come to know Jesus and His love.”
At first baffled over the disappearance of the warriors, Inácio decided that the Tupiniquin, who’d been away from their wives and families for a month, had simply been impatient to get back to them. The two were among his staunchest converts, accepting baptism and marriage, too.
As they marched through the woods, Inácio would occasionally burst into a hymn, and if Guaraci knew the words, he’d join in, sharing a delight at being so close to home. The young man contrasted this happy pilgrimage with the terrors of his own journey from the Bahia to Porto Seguro: The God he had found was indeed a mighty power.
They were moving through a part of the forest where the canopy was thin, when Inácio abruptly stopped singing and called to Guaraci to halt.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Inácio said. He glanced deep into a grove of tall palms. “Something . . .”
Guaraci followed his gaze. “I see nothing.”
“Wait.” Inácio walked a few paces off the trail, continuing to search between the palms. It was odd for so many trees of a similar species to be grouped together. He moved his head slowly, scanning the palm grove from one end to the other. Suddenly, he gave a cry. “There!”
Guaraci had dropped a bundle of supplies and was holding his bow ready.
“A woman,” Inácio said. “A little old woman hopping between those palms.” He squinted against the sunlight. “No! Two women,” he announced. “Poor souls — have they lost their way?”
One old woman, seen clearly now by both Inácio and Guaraci as she dashed from palm to palm, began to wail loudly, her lament immediately taken up by the second woman, and then by a third, whose cry changed to a maniacal shrieking, a string of unintelligible howlings. The closer the men approached, the farther back the trio sped.
“Stay!” Inácio shouted. “We’ll not harm you!” He was running, out of breath. “What’s wrong?” he gasped. “Why do they flee?”
“Cariri?” Guaraci said.
Inácio did not answer but kept pursuing the women. Their cries suddenly ceased.
“Cariri,” Guaraci said again, “leading us into a trap?”
Inácio continued forward but at a slower pace.
“Please, Padre, go no farther,” Guaraci appealed. “If these are Tupiniquin from our malocas, why would they run from Padre Inácio, whom they know to be their friend?” Inácio laughed. “Guaraci, since when are the mothers, who feast at the devil’s banquet, the friends of Padre Inácio?”
“But why would they flee?”
Inácio stood for some minutes, staring into the forest ahead. If they advanced, they might still flush the old women out of their hiding place. But perhaps Guaraci was correct, and this was a trap to lure them into a band of murderous Cariri. “Let us go,” he said.
Two hours later, at the malocas, Padre Inácio discovered that the old mothers had not gone to the palm grove to seek the devil but to escape the hounds of hell.
Inácio was standing in the clearing of Aruanã’s village, upon the spot where the Tupiniquin had once slaughtered their prisoners. He clasped the iron crucifix at the end of his rosary with such desperation that his knuckles were white.
The double stockade had been torn down at several places and all eight malocas had been destroyed by fire. Not a building had been spared. The clearing was strewn with smashed pots, rattles, scattered rainbows of feathers, discarded bows and clubs, and piles of food, which were now being raided by vultures.
Inácio began to walk leadenly toward the malocas. Guaraci kept near him, and as Inácio entered the heart of this desolation, the youth heard him begin to moan quietly, before he cried out “Guaraci! Where are they? Where are all our dear souls?”
Without replying, Guaraci cautiously stepped into the ruin of the first maloca they reached, climbing between the fallen beams, kicking up clouds of ashy dust as he trod where once he, Salpina, and Unauá had hung their hammocks.
“Unauá . . . the children . . . the Lord’s children . . . where?” Inácio asked again, as in a daze.
They cont
inued walking from the ruins of one maloca to the next, until they’d completed a circuit of the clearing. They stopped at the devastated hut of the sacred rattles, which reeked pungently of Pium’s herbs and brews. Bones, too, both human and animal, were scattered among the ashes.
Beside his ruined chapel and school, Inácio wept convulsively.
A wild, frantic energy seized him then; he hurled himself into the ruin, tearing at gray fronds of palm, and forcing a passage to the altar. The Cross, blessed by Nóbrega himself, had been thrown to the ground, torn from the top of its humble base. He grabbed it out of the cinders and tenderly pressed his wet cheek against it.
Stumbling out of the ruin, he screamed across the clearing to Guaraci: “Who has done this dreadful thing? The Cariri, beasts of Satan?”
“Not the Cariri.”
“Who, then?”
“They did it, Padre,” Guaraci said, pointing to something on the ground not far from the ruined chapel. “Long Hairs who carry that.”
Still holding the altar Cross, Inácio moved across to the object and picked it up: an iron shackle. “Christians! Children of God!” Inácio wept aloud. “They cannot be taken. Unauá . . . the others . . . No! No! They cannot take His little ones! O God, hear me!”
Then he was quiet for a long time, standing there with the Cross in one hand, the shackle in the other, his eyes sweeping over every detail of the village. And he realized that there was nothing for him to do here, amid the scavenger birds and debris of a proud Tupiniquin community.
Driven by great sorrow and anger, Padre Inácio plunged back into the forest with Guaraci, and by early morning, his eyes bloodshot, his gaunt frame trembling with fatigue, he stood before the justice of the peace of Porto Seguro, Vasco Barbosa, and flung on the table before him the iron shackle found at the malocas.
“There, Barbosa, is all the evidence you need of a ghastly crime against the Tupiniquin. The malocas are destroyed, the people. God’s own little house is ruined, defiled. Nothing remains, Barbosa — nothing!”
Barbosa leaned forward, his great belly pressed against the side of the table, his eyes on a cut the shackle had gouged in the wood.
“Padre Inácio, I know —”
“You know? You knew of this outrage?”
“After it was done,” Barbosa said. With a fingernail, he investigated the scratch on the table. “Slavers, Padre — they came ashore south of here and attacked and carried off the Tupiniquin two weeks ago.”
“Why here?” Inácio fairly shouted. “Here, where so many were coming to accept our Lord?”
“They came from the south,” Barbosa repeated. “Two ships, it is believed, with close to a hundred men, well armed, well prepared. It happens all the time, Padre — you know this, all along the coast — but in this case it was at the invitation of Marcos da Silva that the slavers raided the malocas. They took the Tupiniquin before dawn, when they were still in their hammocks, asleep. Da Silva left Porto Seguro with the slavers.”
“Every soul swept away,” Inácio murmured, more to himself. “The smallest children among them.”
“No, not all.”
Inácio started. “There are survivors?”
“A hundred slavers, Padre, cannot herd seven times their number,” he said, as if he was discussing the theft of cattle.
Inácio leaned across the table. “Where, Barbosa — where?”
Barbosa drew back. “The forest,” he replied. “You’d go after them? You’d search for them?”
“It is my mission.”
“I beg you to leave this ruin, Padre. Go back to the Bahia, to Manoel da Nóbrega. There’s nothing here but suffering and failure.” He rose from his chair and moved around the table to Inácio’s side. “My failure.”
“I do not understand.”
The justice of the peace now looked worried, his big, round face miserable. “I only did what I believed to be just, Padre.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“Your Christians — those who fled into the forest. A group caught four of the slavers and brought them to me. ‘These attacked our malocas,’ they said to me. ‘Punish them, Portuguese!’
“Dear Lord, I did what I thought was just, Padre. The men they’d caught were savages, like themselves, not Tupiniquin but some other tribe consorting with the raiders.”
“What did you do?” Inácio asked sharply.
“I asked these Tupiniquin if they were Christians, and they said they’d been taught by Padre Inácio. ‘There is the law of the king with the Portuguese.’ Oh, such obedient subjects, coming out of the forest to me. I was dealing with a matter between savages, as I saw it. I told them to punish their captives themselves.”
“You gave them the captives?” Inácio was aghast.
Barbosa’s big chest heaved. “We had a report about the punishment,” he said.
“Senhor, tell it to me.”
“Yes, yes. There, in the forest, your converts met others hiding in the trees. Together they crushed the skulls and roasted the flesh.”
Inácio returned to the forest with Guaraci to search for the survivors of his mission. They traveled back to the ruins of the malocas and on to the palm grove where they had seen the old women; then to the village where the two Tupiniquin warriors had left them. They remained in that village for five days; it became obvious that the clan knew of the slavers’ attack but were either unwilling or unable to offer more than a suggestion that the survivors had gone “toward the lands where the sun sleeps.”
Inácio realized there was nothing left but to return to Porto Seguro — in such a way, however, that would carry them to the west. Their progress became slower, Inácio growing more fatigued each day. Occasionally Guaraci had to take the padre by the hand and lead him on, for he seemed almost to be blind.
Inácio’s condition frightened the young man. Often the priest was delirious. He spoke of whips and shackles; he raved against every kind of sin, and then fell to repeating the Commandments, over and over, in a frenzied voice. Sometimes he would stand very still and silent, staring with a wild, fixed gaze into the darkness between the trees, and this Guaraci would find most disturbing, for there was nothing to see.
Then, one morning, Guaraci could not wake Inácio, and for that day and the next he sat with him. Inácio lay drenched with sweat and shivering; he slept for hours, until the tremors that shook his body began to subside. On the third morning, Guaraci was roused from his own sleep by Inácio’s voice: “Thank you, Lord. Thank you.”
Guaraci took him some water.
“The fever has left me. It is not time, Guaraci,” Inácio said weakly as he took the gourd.
At that precise moment the Tupiniquin came out of the trees, about twenty of them, with clubs and bows, their bodies streaked with urucu and genipapo. Inácio tried to rise but was too weak.
Guaraci recognized several of the men. “Oh, my brothers, we have sought you through many sunrises.”
The warriors did not respond; they stood in a half-circle, most of them with sullen expressions. One who’d been in the rear of the group pressed to the front and went to stand near Inácio, holding his club in his right hand, resting its head against his left palm.
“João,” Inácio called him. “João.”
The man, a convert Padre Inácio had baptized, said nothing.
Guaraci stepped closer to the warriors. “You see me — Guaraci, brother of Unauá; why do you not speak?”
Still no one answered.
Guaraci glanced back at Inácio, and the convert standing above him. “Padre — you speak to them.”
“Oh, my Tupiniquin, I have come back,” Inácio said. “I will share this terrible time with you. Help me, Guaraci!” he cried out, and the young man went to him. Inácio stood with his arm around Guaraci’s shoulder. “Oh, friends, Tupiniquin, I feel your sorrow. I want to help you.”
The half-circle of warriors opened up to make a passage for the elder Aruanã, stooping slightly, his tooth neckla
ce swinging free of his chest. “Let him stand alone,” he said to Guaraci, who obeyed his command.
Inácio tottered for a moment, but he remained on his feet.
“These men ask that the black robe’s skull be broken,” Aruanã said.
“So be it!” Inácio responded vehemently.
“You are not afraid?”
“No, Aruanã. I die happily for our Lord.”
The warriors uttered cries of pleasure in praise of the prisoner who mocked his enemies.
“No!” It was Guaraci. “He is not the enemy. This is Padre Inácio, who has always loved you.”
“Yes, Guaraci, he loves us, as his Jesus loves us,” Aruanã said. Looking up at Inácio, he said, “We will not kill him.”
The warriors had not ceased their acclamation of Inácio’s willingness to die; now they began to mutter against Aruanã’s decision.
He silenced them, very calmly. “You must live, Padre Inácio, for that is what Pium advises. ‘Let him live,’ says Pium, ‘and he’ll not see Land of the Grandfather but will fight Jurupari until his last breath.’ ”
“Merciful God,” Inácio moaned. “They understand! Take me back, Aruanã — to your people. Please take me back.”
“No, Padre. There is no wish to anger Voice of the Spirits as we did in our clearing. Pium warned us against your Jesus and he was right.” Aruanã looked at him sadly. “Even this boy’s sister, Unauá, your Jesus did not save. The Long Hair who cut your face took her.”
Inácio collapsed then, crumpling to the ground.
Aruanã bent toward him. “Where is the power?” he asked.
Inácio could not speak.
The old warrior stepped back. “Take him to his people,” he ordered Guaraci. Guaraci looked from Inácio to Aruanã. “My father, I cannot do this. My place is here — with the Tupiniquin.”
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