“Guaraci?” Inácio called out, just above a whisper.
Aruanã studied the boy thoughtfully. “Escort him to Porto Seguro,” he said. “Then return — to your people.”
Guaraci showed Aruanã an expression of enormous gratitude. “I will, my father,” he said fervently.
Guaraci accompanied the four warriors who carried Inácio back to the coast. There was a ship in the bay, bound for the north.
The padre made repeated requests to Guaraci to return with him to the Bahia. And always Guaraci refused, telling him he could not leave his family, the Tupiniquin.
“But you are of the family of Jesus,” Padre Inácio reminded him.
“No. I am Tupiniquin,” he said.
IX
June 1559 - September 1583
“Behold! He comes! The Protector! Guardian of our lives and safety — he comes!”
“Give thanks to the Lord!”
“Praise be Jesus Christ!”
A throng of white-robed children — Tupinambá and Caeté — lined the processional route along which the governor-general of Brazil, Dom Mem de Sá, was entering the mission village of St. Peter and St. Paul, six miles beyond São Salvador. It was June 29, 1559, the feast day of the two Saints.
Dom Mem de Sá, one of Portugal’s most respected judges, had been chosen governor-general by King João III to replace the ineffectual Dom Duarte da Costa, Tomé de Sousa’s successor. Dom Duarte da Costa’s tenure had been marked by conflict between the governor and the church over differing views on how the natives could be pacified and the governor’s indulgent attitude toward the lax morals of many colonists.
Governor Mem de Sá clearly enjoyed the full approval of the Jesuit missioners and their charges: As the procession entered the aldeia, some children held palm fronds to form an archway above His Excellency and his party; others tossed handfuls of petals at Mem de Sá. The governor acknowledged this homage by nodding his head gravely, with something approaching a smile on his severe face.
Medium in height, slightly plump and stiff-limbed, Mem de Sá was not given to great displays of emotion. Months before, when he learned that the savages had slaughtered his son, Fernão, twenty years old, he’d reacted by withdrawing to his quarters to pray for the child he’d personally ordered into battle. At the time he was named governor in 1556, he was already fifty-nine years old, a widower, a member of the king’s council, and chief justice of the court of appeals. João III had given him dictatorial powers and made him answerable to no one but his king. But then João III had died before the new governor left to take up his post, and was succeeded by Dom Sebastião, then only an infant of two. The child’s grandmother, however, the regent Catarina, had upheld João’s decision.
Even before landing at the Bahia, Mem de Sá had been shown a portent of how demanding his association with Terra do Brasil would be. His fleet was becalmed off the Guinea coast, where forty-two of the 336 aboard died of heat and starvation, and it took an incredible eight months to reach São Salvador. When at last he arrived, three days after Christmas 1557, he found Brazil everything he’d been led to expect: hot, vice-ridden, and offering every possible offense to a great lawgiver.
Upon taking office, Mem de Sá had immediately gone into retreat to perform the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. Through those eight days of preparation, he had sought the opinions of Manoel da Nóbrega and his fellow Jesuits on every aspect of life in Brazil, and there’d been little to please him in what they had to report.
Now, eighteen months later, he could begin to see progress, and it was with special pleasure that he had come to visit his Jesuit friends at this aldeia, which the fathers had planned in every detail with his support and encouragement. Four smaller missions had been amalgamated here, bringing together some eight hundred natives of all ages. At the head of this enterprise, Nóbrega had placed Padre Inácio Cavalcanti, whom Mem de Sá knew to have suffered a terrible defeat with his first attempt to convert the savages at Porto Seguro. Padre Inácio had repeatedly asked the governor to prosecute a slaver most responsible for the destruction of the Tupiniquin village, Marcos da Silva, but da Silva had fled the captaincies, west beyond the Tordesilhas Line to the provinces of the vast Spanish viceroyalty of Peru.
Behind the lines of children stood their parents, and they were a joy to the fathers: Not one was naked, not one adorned with ornaments of superstition, not one streaked with dyes.
Of all present, Padre Inácio Cavalcanti was perhaps most deeply moved by the events of this day. He stood at the doorway to the church. Near him were Padre Nóbrega and five other Jesuits, watching quietly as the governor’s party progressed toward them. The children were to be baptized this morning, and the governor was to be a godfather — protector of their faith.
Much had been achieved here with the inspiration of Padre Nóbrega and the force of Governor de Sá: this fine church at the top of the plaza; dormitories for boys and girls; a colégio, where the children were instructed; and rows of neat houses built around a rectangle, each corner of which was marked by a Cross — to keep those brought down from the forest ever mindful of His presence in this aldeia.
Inácio looked beyond the cluster of white-robed children and upward, to where a flock of storks was parading against the open sky above the mission fields. Peripherally, he saw Padre Nóbrega looking at him.
When Padre Nóbrega, Provincial of all Santa Cruz, first learned of Inácio’s failure with the Tupiniquin, he had wept with his friend and then insisted upon washing his feet, as a gesture of tender care. Inácio, following his return from Porto Seguro, had stayed two years at the colégio in São Salvador, performing whatever duty was asked of him; then he’d been sent to one of the four missions now joined here at the aldeia of St. Peter and St. Paul. It was difficult now for Inácio to recall the years of Dom Duarte da Costa — dark, dangerous years in which all had so nearly been lost. Da Costa, aloof, unmoved by the holy call to lead the natives to Christ, and ever ready to listen to those crying for more slaves. The wealthiest planters maintained private armies ready to march into the backlands in search of rebellious natives. If along the way they stumbled upon innocent malocas and enslaved their inhabitants, who was there to raise a cry? The Jesuit fathers would protest, but they were few and hard pressed to protect their own settlements against interference from these planters’ militia and roving bands of pagans.
Dom da Costa felt a strong antipathy toward priests in his territory, as a result of his hatred of Bishop Pedro Fernandes Sardinha, first prelate of Brazil.
Bishop Sardinha had been grieved by the transgressions rampant among the colonists, and nothing vexed him so much as their sexual depravity. The chief offenders in his eyes were Dom Alvaro da Costa and a following of young men who, when not slaughtering and subjugating the natives, spent their nights whoring and drinking and gambling.
“A libertine!” Bishop Sardinha had stormed from the pulpit. “Dom Alvaro da Costa, the son of our governor, outranks all in this colony with his lewdness and licentiousness.”
Dom da Costa had reacted to this slander against his son by drumming up charges of sedition against colonists close to the bishop. The prelate threatened the da Costas with excommunication. Finally, King João himself had been forced to intervene: “Dear Bishop, come home,” he said. “We must discuss these problems.”
Bishop Sardinha had sailed for Lisbon, vowing to rid Brazil of Dom da Costa and his libertines. Between the Bahia and Pernambuco, the ship was wrecked, but the bishop and one hundred of the passengers and crew managed to reach the shore, where the Caeté were waiting. The prelate’s fellow survivors begged the savages not to eat this great man of God, but that had only increased the appetite of the Caeté; they slew all but three of the shipwrecked, who escaped to report that the first bishop of Brazil had been devoured by the pagans.
Dom Duarte da Costa was remorseful. He decreed that the Caeté be seized and enslaved for life. The planters’ militia raged up the coast, wiping out
village after village and driving the Caeté to the plantations and slave markets. And converts from this tribe were removed from the Jesuits’ care.
What darkness had come to Santa Cruz, Inácio thought, remembering those days. Anarchy reigned among the colonists and natives around the Bahia and far beyond. And without fear of eviction, heretics had flocked to these shores: Frenchmen, who had audaciously returned to Santa Cruz not as squatters stealing brazilwood but as settlers. A colony that existed to this day had been planted upon an island in Guanabara Bay. A strong force of heretics manned the fortifications of this Huguenot redoubt, which was flanked by granite buttresses that rolled up behind the shoreline and projected between great woods. The French made alliances with any natives who could be incited against the Portuguese. They’d had considerable success, for a group of degredados who’d been there long before — calling the place Rio de Janeiro, after the river they’d mistakenly believed must flow into so vast a bay, and the month they’d arrived — had so mistreated the natives that, prompted by the French, the savages had rebelled and slaughtered most of their tormentors.
Inácio focused his gaze on the governor. What a wondrous working of the Lord, when all seemed abandoned in His vineyard, to send Mem de Sá, with the wisdom of a Solomon and the arm of a Joshua! In so vast a territory, there were many places where Mem de Sá’s authority could not reach, but where it did, he’d begun rigorously to apply the law. Among the colonists, his officers and soldiers had rounded up the gamblers, the vagabonds, the sellers of harlots, the degredados who’d failed to reform themselves, and put them in chains; they enforced the laws prohibiting illicit enslavement and cruelty toward the natives. Word was sent to the clans themselves: Break the peace, disturb the industry of the planters, and we shall bring you by force to the Jesuit villages and teach you how to distinguish between good and evil.
“Compel them to come in!” the Gospel of St. Luke urged, and it had become the rallying cry of the Jesuits.
Compel them . . . Inácio glanced at José de Anchieta, a young brother standing with the group. Brother José was eager to comply with this shibboleth. Anchieta was often sickly. But his zeal was militant and inspiring, and his craving for the harvest of souls insatiable. Inácio was convinced he’d been wrong in hoping to convert the Tupiniquin at their malocas. Nóbrega and Anchieta, who had contemplated an aldeia such as this, had had the true vision. And how they’d clung to it through those dark years with Dom Duarte da Costa!
Yet Inácio realized today that da Costa’s very lack of support had in a way promoted the cause of the Jesuits. At the Bahia, both temporal and secular authority had been against them; and Nóbrega had realized that in the north, too, as long as the family of Dom Duarte Coelho Pereira dominated Pernambuco, there would be scant enthusiasm for the Company and its servants because they supported the removal of the donatário’s powers. This had spurred Padre Nóbrega’s interest in developing a great Jesuit establishment in the south of the colony.
After leaving Inácio at Porto Seguro to work with the Tupiniquin, Padre Nóbrega had gone on to tour the captaincy of São Vicente, the most southerly settlement. Thirty miles beyond São Vicente’s small port of Santos, above precipitous heights sweeping up more than two thousand feet, Nóbrega came upon a great plain the local natives called Piratininga, which he saw as a gateway into the heartland of Santa Cruz. There’d been a settlement there, Santo André, headed by a João Ramalho, another castaway who’d made himself king by taking as wife the daughter of a local clan leader — many daughters, in fact, for the progeny of old Ramalho were as numerous as those of a biblical patriarch. Ramalho’s bastards and the other half-breeds living beyond those mighty crags were known as mamelucos.
Nóbrega had returned to Tomé de Sousa, seeking permission to open those lands to Christ’s mission. Governor Tomé had denied his request: There were too few Jesuits for so far-flung a venture; worse, the opening of those lands could draw the colonists away from the coast, and if the few thousand Portuguese in Brazil were dispersed into the interior, that vast terra incognita, they could be lost as effectively as if they’d been swept into the sea.
In the time of Governor da Costa, Padre Nóbrega, Anchieta, and others had gone back to Piratininga. Nine miles from the mameluco settlement, on January 25, 1554, they had established the aldeia of São Paulo de Piratininga. And Nóbrega had immediately looked even farther south, toward the Spanish settlement of Asunción, in the province of Paraguay. Between that town and São Paulo were great numbers of natives related to the Tupi tribes of the littoral. Two fathers had been designated to contact them, and had set out — only to be slain by savages roused against them by a disgruntled Spaniard upset by their insistence that he marry the concubine with whom he lived.
“Inácio.”
“Oh!” he cried, jolted away from his thoughts.
José Anchieta was smiling up at him. “The governor,” the little hunchback said quietly.
Mem de Sá had been greeted by Padre Nóbrega and was moving with him toward the other Jesuits. The governor’s fine apparel was sober, in keeping with his temperament; the only extravagant touch was the heavily jeweled hilt of his long sword, a weapon he was known to use with greater enthusiasm than might be expected of a judge of final appeal.
“Padre Inácio, what wonderful work you’ve done here,” he said, after greeting Anchieta and Inácio.
“It is only what the Lord seeks to accomplish,” Inácio said.
“Most surely, but . . . His servants help.”
“So, too, our governor,” Inácio said.
“Your uncle’s son — young Tomás — is in São Salvador, with men from Pernambuco,” Mem de Sá said. “We may need you, Padre Inácio. For the Tupiniquin.” He began to turn away, joining Padre Nóbrega once again. “We will talk later,” he said.
The governor and his party entered the church, and Inácio and Anchieta stayed outside to supervise the children, who were beginning to press forward eagerly.
“The trouble at Ilheus and Porto Seguro,” Anchieta said, attempting to explain Mem da Sá’s words.
“Yes, I’ve heard — two settlers murdered.”
“Our old general will not wait for more.”
“I fear he won’t.”
“They should fear — the Tupiniquin. If they but knew the lessons taught the Tupinambá in these lands.”
The lessons Anchieta spoke of had been raids led by Mem de Sá against the Bahia Tupinambá, not successfully pacified since the day of Tomé de Sousa, when they had eaten the degredados. One especially arrogant elder, Bloated Toad, had mocked the new governor as the creature of a king who was a baby: He, Bloated Toad, was a man and would do as he’d always done, and to prove it, he’d sent his warriors to seize a plump enemy, who was slain by him and eaten in the middle of his clearing. “Come and judge me!” Bloated Toad dared Mem de Sá. “Judge me or sit with the cowards at Sáo Salvador.” Mem de Sá had attacked at night, burning down the malocas and taking the most prized captive of all: Bloated Toad.
Bloated Toad’s defiance had, however, encouraged the murder of three Christian natives by men from another clan, and this crime had launched Mem de Sá on a campaign that had not ended until more than one hundred malocas had been destroyed, their occupants killed, dispersed into the forest, or driven to this and two similar aldeias. Engaged in subjugating these Tupinambá, the governor had received an appeal for help from Espirito Santo, a captaincy threatened by savages, south of Porto Seguro. He’d sent his son, Fernão, with a force that had conquered the rebellious clans, but Fernão had been killed.
Inácio pitied any tribe that provoked the wrath of Mem de Sá, but he did not disapprove of the governor’s actions. The governor protected the natives who’d accepted Christianity, but those who persistently refused his kind advances he put down with a sword of fire.
When Mem de Sá, his officers, and São Salvador’s councilmen and clerks had taken their places in the church, a simple, high-walled, whitewa
shed building, Inácio and Anchieta shepherded the boys and girls inside. Then, as many parents and friends as the church could hold were allowed to enter. The dignitaries sat on benches to the left of the altar; the children to the right, by the font.
The solemnity began with brother Anchieta’s reciting of the Forty-second Psalm, which he rendered beautifully in the Tupi language.
“Praise Him! Praise Him!” several children called out.
Padre Nóbrega then proceeded with the Mass and the baptism of these converts, assisted by Inácio and another ordained Jesuit. The first child to receive the Sacrament was led forward by Anchieta; a boy of nine, he’d been carried to the aldeia after the defeat of Bloated Toad. Nothing was known about his parents.
Governor Mem de Sá was at the font, to be with his godchild “Peter,” as the boy would be called. “Come child, to be born again,” he said quietly, trying to comfort the nervous Tupinambá. “This lovely holy water will wash away the sin of First Father.”
The boy’s eyes moved to the hilt of Governor de Sá’s sword.
Then Padre Nóbrega began talking, slowly and calmly, his speech impediment unnoticeable: “Child, what dost thou ask of the Church of God?”
The boy was hesitant, shifting his big brown eyes to gaze at Padre Inácio, who had been his instructor.
“Faith,” the boy said.
“And how will faith reward you, child?”
“I will live forever,” the boy said, in a small voice.
“If you are born again without the sin of First Father, will you keep the Commmandments and love the Lord Jesus with all your heart and soul and thoughts .. . and treat your enemies as your friends?”
The boy nodded, and clasped his hands together. When Padre Nóbrega offered him the salt he’d been taught was symbolic of wisdom and of protection from evil, he thrust out his tongue eagerly to taste it. He repeated the vows Padre Inácio had taught him, renouncing the devil Jurupari and all his spirits, and he listened as the governor, most powerful man among the Portuguese, pledged to make a Christian hero out of him. Finally, a lighted candle was placed in his hand: His faith must burn as brightly and steadily as its flame. He smiled happily as Brother Anchieta led him back to the other children.
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