Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  Inácio walked to the farthest maloca, where Tomás, a group of soldiers, and some Tupinambá were still meeting resistance. Wherever he looked was evidence of slaughter: warriors beheaded and mutilated, pinned to the ground with lances; others battered and broken by the clubs of many Tupinambá.

  Tomás, sword in hand, his clothes splattered with blood, greeted his cousin jubilantly: “Let us thank the Lord — all the Saints, Inácio — for this great victory.”

  Inácio’s face was deathly pale. “Tomás, so many have been killed,” he said. “Their treachery is not to be denied, but so many put to the sword?”

  “I warned you that this is not your battle. You wanted to convert them with love, Padre, and you failed. See them now, lambs who stand meekly, broken by the hammer of war.”

  “These people welcomed your father to Santa Cruz; they were there, Tomás, on the beach when Nicolau Cavalcanti came ashore.”

  “I know this,” he said, and his expression hardened. “Today, cousin, I feel only joy in this clearing of my father’s whore. Don’t look so stricken, Padre: You know it’s true that the bitch he took came from these people.”

  “But this was the sin of your father.”

  “And this sweet and bloody scourging is mine, Padre, for all the sorrow and sufferings borne by my sainted mother, Helena, whom you yourself have wept for — Helena, holy Christian, mocked by the forest harlot and her bastards, my half-brothers!”

  At that moment an arquebus was fired into the side of the opposite maloca, from which volleys of arrows were being discharged at any who tried to approach.

  After the blast from the arquebus, two more gunners stood ready with their weapons, but they held their fire when a short, stooped Tupiniquin stepped into the daylight.

  Inácio gave a cry of recognition. “Pium,” he said. “It is their sorcerer, Pium.”

  Pium appeared much older, his smooth skin lined now, his light frame bonier. He called out in a strident voice, “You returned, black robe; you came back to destroy us. Many Great Rains you waited, and now you come with soldiers and Tupinambá.”

  “No, Pium. This war you brought upon yourselves. You denied the love and peace of Jesus Christ.”

  The pagé looked at Inácio grimly, his small eyes narrowing. “Peace? Where we hunted, there are trails of our warrior’s blood. Where our people rejoiced with the ancestors, the urubu waits to sing. In every field of the Tupiniquin, there is peace — for those who lie with eyes upon Land of the Grandfather.”

  “Where are the elders?”

  Pium gestured toward the maloca. “One waits there.”

  “Aruanã?” Inácio asked hopefully.

  Pium nodded. “Aruanã remembers you. He remembers that day you carried the Cross through our clearing. ‘Let them behold,’ Aruanã says, ‘these sorrows of the Tupiniquin — how much greater they are than those the Son of Long Hair’s God suffered.’ ”

  There was a flash of steel as Tomás Cavalcanti lunged forward. “Blasphemer!” he howled, and drove his sword into Pium’s side.

  As Tomás stood over the pagé, Inácio started forward in the direction of the maloca.

  “Padre!” a soldier cried. “Padre, stop!”

  Tomás looked away from Pium’s body and saw the cassocked figure hastening toward the longhouse. “For love of God, Inácio, come back!” he shouted. Then he ordered the two arquebusiers to fire into the maloca.

  The shot from one of the guns went wide, hitting Inácio in the shoulder and knocking him down. Tomás dashed to his side and dragged him back as arrows launched from the maloca fell around them. He pushed Inácio roughly toward the line of his men. “Get him to safety before he endangers others!”

  When two soldiers had taken Inácio away, Tomás called for Tupinambá bowmen and ordered them to shoot flaming arrows into the palm fronds of the maloca. “Stand ready,” he warned. “They’ll not endure the heat for long.”

  The Tupinambá warriors agreed, stamping their feet impatiently. “Come! Come, Tupiniquin! We wait for our enemy!”

  Fanned by a breeze, the blaze tore through the dry fronds and raced down the maloca’s gently curved sides. A few ran out of the low entrance but were shot down as they cleared the opening, and others did not follow.

  Suddenly, Inácio returned, breaking through the front rank of those who stood watching the fire. He raised his good arm, gesturing for those behind the fire to escape.

  One Tupiniquin did break through the burning wall, the flames engulfing him as he staggered and collapsed six feet away from Inácio.

  Tomás was at his cousin’s side. “The fires of hell,” he declared, “come to earth to consume this pagan.”

  Inácio remained silent, gazing upon that face so hideously disfigured and yet recognizable to him. He could hear the roar of the blazing maloca but no longer the howling of those trapped within.

  Inácio reached down toward the figure on the ground and snapped off the charred cord the man had worn around his neck. Attached to the cord was a green stone.

  He turned toward Tomás. “Here,” he said, thrusting the stone at him. “Take this. It was his treasure — the only spoil you’ll find this day.”

  Inácio walked away slowly, leaving Tomás to admire the jade amulet taken from the body of Aruanã, the Tupiniquin.

  By 1562, three years after the conquest of the Tupiniquin clans of Porto Seguro and Ilheus, the results of Governor Mem de Sá’s great harvest of souls — and of slaves — were everywhere in evidence. The colonists at the Bahia had acquired more than ten thousand natives ordered into bondage for taking up arms against the governor’s militia.

  Except for Pernambuco, where the family of Dom Duarte Coelho still ruled, the donatários of the other captaincies were no longer lord proprietors of their territories. But their families still held their hereditary allotments extending over hundreds of square miles. By 1562, a harvest of two thousand tons a year was reaching the merchants of Lisbon and the refineries of the Dutch, the sugar masters of Europe. What made this output all the more remarkable was the small number of colonists responsible for it. From Pernambuco, in the northeast, to the farthest outposts at Santos, in the south, and São Paulo, on the plateau beyond, there were less than three thousand settlers, mainly Portuguese, though Spaniards, Genoese, and other foreign adherents of the faith were also permitted entry to the colony. Most plantations and engenhos were found near the Bahia and Olinda; the far north, above Pernambuco, remained unconquered, and the granite massifs rising behind the ocean all along the southern littoral provided a barrier to the hinterland.

  Governor Mem de Sá was scrupulous in observing the laws regarding belligerent natives, taking great care that his officials enslave only those who’d rebelled against the authority of the future king of Portugal, Sebastião, now eight years old. Thousands of natives had accepted Mem de Sá’s peace, and since they represented a triumph of persuasion and diplomacy, he treated them with utmost consideration.

  The aldeia of St. Peter and St. Paul was still led by Padre Inácio, and by 1562 was home to more than two thousand natives. But this was only one aldeia, and in the region of the Bahia alone, there were now eleven Jesuit settlements with a total population of thirty thousand.

  What joy, then, to find that this compulsion had worked to move the most reluctant heathens. At the aldeia of St. Peter and St. Paul, with its imposing church, college, and dormitories — here, at last, was a victory in the great battle for souls to which Inácio had been rallied as a young man.

  Another Jesuit, Padre Agostinho Correia, two lay brothers, and a council of native elders assisted him. Among the elders was the convert Paulo — Arm of Iron, Mem de Sá’s “bailiff” — who remained most dedicated to every discipline of the fathers.

  Nine hundred at the aldeia had already been converted, and such progress had led Inácio to believe that in a year or two every soul in the village would be given the hope of salvation. This advancement had not come without the greatest exertion by Padr
e Inácio, Padre Agostinho, and a group of converts, whom they appointed as teachers.

  Lapses among his flock were saddening to Inácio: There were bouts of drinking that led to fights and murders; adulteries exposed by women who’d formerly have given no thought to the sin of their spouses.

  Always, Inácio returned to the children, with whom there was full hope of salvation. He was never so happy as at the end of day, when the boys and girls walked in white-robed procession through the streets of the aldeia reciting their Aves.

  And then, toward the end of 1562, there occurred an event that was to have a profound effect on the aldeia of St. Peter and St. Paul: the departure from Lisbon of a one-hundred-ton caravel bound for Brazil.

  São Felipe made a good passage of forty-seven days, with a cargo of supplies for the captaincy of Ilheus, which had begun to prosper since Mem de Sá’s annihilation of the savages. In the first week of December, São Felipe rode off that same shore where the twelve hundred Tupiniquin had perished.

  When São Felipe had been safely anchored, her captain and officers went ashore to arrange for the landing of her cargo. The settlers, who were always delighted to see a ship from Portugal bringing comforts and necessities denied them in the colony, gave them a rousing welcome.

  On this voyage, São Felipe carried something else, too, brought across the Atlantic by her marinheiros to these lands of Ilheus and soon to reach the Bahia and far beyond: the plague.

  Padre Inácio was alone in the aldeia church, his dark shape just distinguishable in the moonlight that shone weakly through the windows high upon the wall behind the altar, and he did not hear Paulo enter. Inácio had been praying at length, though he would have been unable to say with any certainty how long he’d knelt here; he’d lost the proper sense of time through days and nights and weeks of witnessing the suffering of the natives of the aldeia.

  Paulo moved so that he stood just behind the priest, off to the right. In the years since his appointment as bailiff, Paulo had filled his position with dignity and respect. While other men, most of them older than he, had been named elders by the Jesuits, and met regularly with the fathers and brothers, at such gatherings it was usually Paulo who had most to say about the welfare of the aldeia’s natives in those areas that did not concern their faith.

  Paulo went down on his knees; he did not pray but asked aloud, “Padre Inácio, why does the Lord God persecute us?”

  Without turning, Inácio asked gently, “Paulo, why are you not at rest?”

  “I am afraid, Father. Could it happen, I ask myself, that tomorrow Arm of Iron must wake to begin his dying?”

  Inácio kept his eyes upon the outline of the altar. “Your faith is strong, Paulo.”

  “So many who believed are dead.”

  “But the souls of those who truly gave themselves to Him are unharmed and perfect.”

  “Even the smallest child freshly anointed?”

  “Oh, Paulo, see them at His feet.”

  The children had been the first to come down with the sickness that brought chills and fever and delirium, attacked the intestines, the liver and lungs, and brought a bloody froth of spittle to the lips. For the worst afflicted, death came in two or three days. Nothing that had been tried, neither bloodletting nor infusions of the juice of limes and oranges, had helped. Week after week the epidemic raged, claiming first one hundred, then two hundred. Ultimately, so many were anointed for burial and carried to the great holes dug in the fields beyond the aldeia that Inácio lost track of the number. And after a month, just when it had seemed that the worst of the epidemic was over, there came a second pestilence, more horrible than the first.

  A virulent pox attacked the bodies of the children, corrupting the flesh with a rash that started on their face and forearms and spread to the rest of the body. By the third day, blisters began to form and then enlarged to putrescent sores.

  What had happened with the children was repeated with their parents, until almost the entire aldeia had been stricken with the deadly infection. Little could be done for the victims except scrape off the contaminated flesh and bathe them, but for the majority these ministrations only delayed the end.

  “We never knew these illnesses before. When we lived at our malocas, our people did not suffer this way.”

  Remaining on his knees, Inácio twisted around to face Paulo. “It is true that the sickness was brought by the Portuguese, but it is God’s will whether it attacks a man or not.”

  Inácio weighed his words carefully, for the epidemic was provoking the most awful doubt among the natives. Why did so many die immediately after they were anointed? they asked. Wherever the cross was and many natives were gathered, the sickness raged: Were the fathers of Jesus in league with the other Portuguese to kill all the clans?

  Paulo had been a strong support through these terrible months, but lately even he had begun to show fear for his health and had begun to express doubts and ask probing questions.

  “For every Portuguese, Padre, a hundred of our people are taken. Is there so much wickedness with us? Even among those who follow Jesus?”

  Inácio shook his head. “So many questions, Paulo. What can be more important than to ask His mercy for all — His forgiveness for our sins?”

  “I will pray, Father,” Paulo said.

  Inácio rose and left quietly. He slept restlessly till after dawn, and awoke unrefreshed. After morning mass, Inácio took leave of Padre Agostinho and set out for São Salvador, where he was expected at a meeting of fathers from the aldeias.

  His old comrade Padre Manoel da Nóbrega was away in the south, working with José de Anchieta at São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Governor Mem de Sá had attacked the French Huguenot settlement at Guanabara Bay, driving the inhabitants from their island redoubt, forcing the survivors to the mainland, and then launching a campaign to expel them from Brazil.

  At São Paulo, Nóbrega and Anchieta had welcomed this initiative, for the natives befriended by the French interlopers disturbed the peace in the lands between Guanabara Bay and the plains of Piratininga and were delaying an advance into the wilds beyond the São Paulo aldeia. This Jesuit village had been attacked the previous year by natives in league with the half-breed mamelucos, the tribe of the castaway João Ramalho, who had grown resentful of the Jesuits’ repeated calls for order and civilization at Piratininga. But the Jesuits, led by the fierce hunchback Anchieta, had beaten off the assault with the help of their converts.

  Padre Nóbrega had stepped down as Provincial to free himself for this mission in the south, and though Inácio was acquainted with the new Provincial, Luis de Gra, from his days at Coimbra, they did not enjoy the friendship Inácio and Nóbrega had shared.

  Inácio was a lonely figure at the Jesuit colégio, a handsome two-story building raised on a vantage point overlooking the bay. His very appearance evoked sympathy from the scholarly and cultured fathers who devoted themselves to the teaching of the colonists’ children and the spiritual welfare of the capital. They saw a tall, haggard man of indeterminate age. There were moments when Inácio seemed much older than his forty-four years; his expression was anguished and worn, and his back and shoulders sloped in a manner that suggested great weariness. When he arrived, his cassock was tattered and patched with dyed strips of canvas and his feet were bare. Such poverty moved several fathers at the colégio to offer him a new robe and sandals, which he accepted graciously.

  At the colégio, he learned that in three months the epidemic had taken hold from Porto Seguro and Ilheus to the Bahia, and outbreaks were reported far beyond these regions, at Olinda and in the interior of Pernambuco. The extent of the calamity could be gauged from what was happening around the Bahia: Two-thirds of all the aldeia natives were dead, and among the ten thousand survivors, it was feared that the same percentage would yet succumb.

  The same fatalities were to be found among the enslaved natives and the blacks, among whom the toll was so great that the cane fields, and their owners, faced ruin.
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  The desolation did not end there: From the reports of two fathers who had journeyed inland, the horrors of plague and pox were raging at the malocas of natives not yet contacted by the Portuguese. Many were fleeing toward the colony’s settlements; crushed as they were by the diseases, they had faced yet another torment — famine.

  “If you could see the poor things,” said a father reporting on the condition of these refugees, “seeking a bowl of manioc. They arrive at a plantation begging the owner to take their children as slaves in exchange for a single meal. If they have no children, then they offer themselves, weak as they may be, and if they are refused, they do not give up but remove the shackles from slaves who have died and bind themselves with these, thinking to impress the master with this show of willing bondage.”

  These new forms of slavery, with men surrendering their liberty for a bowl of manioc, disgusted the fathers, and it was resolved that to fight this evil the fathers at São Salvador would seek the support of Governor de Sá. Inácio and the others, now apprised of the full threat to their missions, were to return to their aldeias.

  One morning six weeks after his return from São Salvador, Inácio was conducting a burial service for nine natives who’d died during the night, when he noticed a young girl among those standing at the graveside. At the conclusion of the services, the girl hurried to his side.

  “What is it, child?”

  She stood with her eyes downcast. “Father, I must confess.”

  Seeing the urgent appeal in her eyes, he nodded and gestured for her to follow him to the church.

  “No, Father, I have not sinned. There are men who speak words I fear, and my father is with them and I fear for him, for surely the anger of the Lord will not spare

  “And what is their sin?”