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by Errol Lincoln Uys


  “In the evenings, they . . . they pray with Paulo. They talk of the sickness when they are together at his house, and ask for protection against it. They burn pepper and roots of the forest, and there is talk of evil.”

  Exercising great control, Inácio calmly told the girl to keep silent about this and sent her on her way.

  He waited till night, with Padre Agostinho and the two lay brothers. When most in the aldeia slept, they crept toward the house of Paulo, Inácio walking ahead of the others with a thick staff of wood as hard as iron.

  When they were close enough to hear the proceedings from within the house, they paused: The sounds that reached them were not the chants and rattles they’d expected but a murmur of prayer and the low, faithfully voiced appeal of hymns, not to a pagan deity, but to the Lord Himself.

  Inácio motioned his trio of companions to remain where they were; then he pressed forward, bending low as he made for a window. Apparently the girl had been confused, misinterpreting a fervent appeal by these converts, who perhaps believed that the pungent smoke of pepper warded off infection.

  “O Lord Jesus, Son of God,” he heard Paulo intone, “hear their cries in these sorrowful days. Lord Jesus, my friend, guide them through this long darkness.”

  ‘Jesus, Jesus,” others cried.

  “Holy Spirit,” said one, “may he lead us to what has been lost.”

  “Where is Paulo, Arm of Iron, whom all in the aldeia followed?”

  This question puzzled Inácio, for Paulo himself had asked it.

  “There is the body but not the soul,” a man said.

  “Paulo rests. Paulo rests” another chanted.

  Inácio hastily drew himself up to look through the window. In the light from several lamps, he saw the convert Paulo, wearing a long green robe in the style of a cassock and upon his head a red cap. A woman, whom Inácio recognized as Paulo’s wife, stood near him, supporting a Cross.

  “Holy Spirit who rules, Father, Son, Holy Mother,” Paulo was saying, “your servant from heaven . . .”

  “Saint! Saint!” several cried. “Saint of Heaven! Holy traveler without rest!”

  “God alone will save our people,” Paulo continued, “with His Son who died so that all may live. As the dawn rises, so did He, and His light is everywhere in the forest. O Tupinambá, where the fields are neglected and dying, where the boots of our persecutors tramp, the fruits of the earth will grow again. An abundance wherever our wives take their digging sticks. There will be happiness, for the Lord promises all these fruits for the sick and the slain, who will be born again. They will rise, wherever they were killed by the Portuguese, and in all the places where they have been afflicted by the plague of the Portuguese.”

  “Tell us, saint of Heaven,” a native said, “what He has said about our enemies.”

  “When it is time, they will be turned into beasts, with eyes for nothing but the forest . . . and fear for the Tupinambá who hunt them.”

  “This has been promised, Santo António?”

  “This is how it was revealed to me.”

  Inácio could bear no more. He burst through the entrance, pushing those in his way aside with his staff, and stormed toward Paulo. “Blasphemy!” he cried. “False witness! Satan!”

  “I speak only the truth, as it was revealed to António, Saint of Heaven.”

  Inácio raised the staff threateningly.

  “No!” several in the room cried. “No!”

  But Inácio struck out, enraged, wielding the staff with both hands. “Satan! You damn every soul in Santa Cruz with your lies! Your pestilence has stained these shores, this forest, ever since you were cast from His heavenly temple!” His raving ended when several in the room seized him and dragged him down.

  “O Santo António,” one asked, “what must we do with him?”

  Paulo stood looking down at the crumpled figure of Inácio and shaking his head. “Forgive him,” he said finally.

  For Paulo, who so impressed the Jesuits when they found him before the altar after Mem de Sá’s forces had driven him to the aldeia, there had been another glorious encounter with God. How often he’d listened to Padre Inácio tell of St. Anthony, who had gone into the wilderness to do battle with the hosts of evil. When Paulo had witnessed so many dying at the aldeia, he’d gone alone to the forest to perform a retreat, and there he’d had a vision in which it was revealed to him that he was Santo António; and his wife, Mother of God. His mission on earth was to lead the Tupinambá away from this aldeia to lands where the past could be reborn. There they would wait for a day when every Long Hair was transformed into a lowly beast.

  Padre Agostinho and the lay brothers had rushed up at the sound of Inácio’s shouts, but they had been denied entrance to the house. They now saw the green-robed Paulo leave with his wife and twelve men, some of whom they recognized as their most devout converts.

  In July 1583 the office of the Jesuit Provincial at São Salvador sent Rafael Arroyo, a lay brother attached to the colégio, to assist Padre Inácio Cavalcanti at St. Peter and St. Paul’s aldeia. Arroyo was only slightly over five feet tall, with a long nose, tiny dark eyes, olive skin, and oily black hair. The son of a sword maker in Toledo, he had recently arrived at the Bahia. He himself was an armorer by trade, and when he was twenty-five he had gone to Lisbon, where he’d worked in the royal armory alongside other craftsmen invited from Italy and Germany. The armorers had been welcomed by King Sebastião, then a flaxen-haired, large-limbed twenty-year-old filled with a sense of grand destiny, his spirit moved by fanatic fervor for the glories of the past.

  In 1578, Dom Sebastião assembled sixteen thousand men and set out to conquer Morocco. At Alcacer-Quibir, south of Tangiers, the force was destroyed and Dom Sebastião himself slain. Less than fifty escaped, among them Rafael Arroyo, who had sworn that if God allowed him to live, never again would he put his hand to the creation of weapons of war.

  The rout at Alcacer-Quibir had not ended in the sands of North Africa. Dom Sebastião had died a bachelor, and the heir to the Portuguese throne was his aged great-uncle, Cardinal Henriques. Eighteen months after his succession, Henriques died. This marked the end of the Aviz dynasty, so triumphant in the days of Manoel the Fortunate. Manoel’s daughter Isabel had married Charles V, father of Philip II of Spain, who now claimed and won the throne of Portugal.

  Not only had the Portuguese lost the independence of their homeland and empire; they had gained new enemies — the English and the Dutch — with whom their new king, Philip II, had long quarreled.

  Thus it was that Rafael Arroyo, the Toledo armorer who’d become a servant of peace, found himself among the Portuguese at the Bahia, since the possessions of Spain and Portugal were now united under Philip’s crown.

  When Brother Rafael was told to move to the aldeia beyond São Salvador, he was not entirely pleased, for he’d been employed in the decoration of the church of the Ajuda. Brother Rafael had turned his talent for embossing and enameling breastplates and gauntlets to the patterning of gold and silver leaf and had found it greatly rewarding — and comforting — to work alone at the altar in the church. But he obediently accepted the orders of the fathers at the colégio, and left at once for the aldeia of St. Peter and St. Paul.

  Upon his arrival, he was distressed by the disorder he encountered. The church was in need of repair, its limed walls crumbling in many places. Although the great square was open and clean, the huts that flanked it were as shabby as the church.

  The natives of the aldeia greeted him cheerfully enough, especially the children who ran to meet him, but they seemed to lack an enthusiasm he expected to find in a community of new converts. The children kept him company as he walked across the square, and directed him toward the house of Padre Inácio.

  Brother Rafael was almost at the door of the small abode when its occupant came out to greet him, walking slowly with a staff in his hand. The black robe hung loosely about the father.

  “Welcome. Welcome, dear friend, to our
village.”

  “I am grateful to serve here, Padre Inácio.”

  “Wonderful, my son,” he said. “There is so much to do for Him, always — and so little time for the work. How long have you been in Santa Cruz?”

  “Seven months, Padre.”

  “Seven months,” Inácio said, wistfully. “Manoel da Nóbrega was setting the stones for our church at the Bahia in the first seven months, after we came with Governor Tomé.”

  They toured the aldeia then, and Padre Inácio kept referring to a time before the plague when the village held not the 170 natives of today but two thousand souls — and Jesus seemed assured the triumph that should make this His land of promise. Suddenly he grew tearful and, seizing Brother Rafael’s arm, cried, “Oh, Brother Rafael, I beg of you, serve Him as a true soldier! Serve Him without the weakness and unworthiness I have shown in His cause!”

  In the days that followed, Brother Rafael would often find Padre Inácio’s conversation straying to thoughts of the past. He would talk of Nóbrega, who had died in 1570, and of other fathers he’d known at this aldeia and elsewhere. He told of his uncle Nicolau, who had lived to the grand age of eighty-four, twenty years more than he himself had seen, and of Tomás Cavalcanti, whom he had accompanied on a campaign against the Tupiniquin and whom he now called “one of the butchers.” He had not seen Tomás in all this time, but he knew him to be married to the orphan Theresa Dias and to have fathered a large family, who were prospering at Engenho Santo Tomás. Most of all, Padre Inácio spoke of the natives, with whom he’d labored so hard.

  Brother Rafael was deeply moved by Padre Inácio’s unquenchable faith. Inácio told him of the many expeditions into the forest and beyond to search for natives —a cycle repeated again and again, for often the plague had returned and the converts had died in great numbers, or they had drifted away, lured to the plantations as slaves, or simply wandered back to their malocas. Yet, true apostle that this lonely man was, he had not given up hope but had continued to reach out to find new corn for God’s mill.

  One afternoon two months after his arrival, when Rafael was at work in the aldeia’s smithy, Padre Inácio came to him in a state of excitement. “Prepare yourself to travel, Brother,” he said. “There are souls waiting for us to rescue. Ten days’ journey and we’ll find the malocas of a clan who seek to be led to this aldeia.”

  They departed the next morning, heading toward the northwest, journeying with eight of the aldeia converts. Inácio had found a tremendous energy, striding forward vigorously with his staff and constantly urging the others to hurry their pace, as if he feared that the malocas they sought might be snatched from them.

  On the seventh day of their journey, their route took them out of the forest into open country, where the luxuriant vegetation quickly began to give way to an arid cover of spiky bushes and stunted plants. The humid forest floor was replaced by a way strewn with stones and crossed by the dusty beds of streams. Clumps of bush, stick-dry and dead; spiny cactus bent into grotesque shapes; gnarled branches of stripped trees — caatinga, “the white forest,” the natives called this ash-gray landscape.

  For two days they traveled through this region in the backlands of the Bahia captaincy before they decided they were lost. They decided to split into two groups, one with Padre Inácio to head north, the other west with Rafael Arroyo. If they did not find the malocas in two days, they were to return to this place, recognizable from a trio of rounded granite hills. If one of the parties did locate the missing clan, it was to send back a messenger.

  Brother Rafael and his group found two small villages, but neither was the one they were seeking. They returned to the rendezvous, and so too, late the next day, did a native who’d been with Inácio. Rafael was jubilant as he saw the man approach from the north, for his lone arrival suggested that the malocas had been found.

  But the Tupinambá cried out in fear: “Come quickly. He is ill!”

  They broke camp immediately and marched through the night, but it was past noon two days later before they reached him.

  It was ferociously hot. Inácio lay in the shade of a tree, on a bed of leaves and twigs. He was burning with fever. There’d been three natives to watch over him, but he was alone now.

  “Padre Inácio, it is I — Rafael.”

  Inácio trembled with chills. He first moved his lips silently and tried to make a gesture with his head. Then his eyes, bright and watery, seemed to widen in recognition of the figure above him and he smiled. “Oh, Rafael . . . a wonder of wonders: In this stony desert where I am stricken — such a glorious vision — my tired eyes opened and my worthless spirit was brought to rejoice in the presence of our Mother of God and her favored Saint. The sweetest reward — to behold Santo António and the Holy Mother.” And then, his face radiant with a final and tremendous joy for the marvelous vision of Our Lady and her Saint, Padre Inácio Cavalcanti died.

  The three men who’d been with Inácio now came crawling out of the bushes.

  “We were frightened they would harm us,” one said.

  Brother Rafael frowned. “Who?”

  The Tupinambá who’d spoken was a convert who’d been at the aldeia since childhood and was one of the few who survived the plague of 1563. His name was Peter, and he still recalled the day when Governor Mem de Sá had welcomed him at the font.

  “They left an hour ago,” Peter said. “We hid in the bushes for fear they would kill us,” he repeated.

  “Who were these people?” Brother Rafael asked again.

  Peter’s voice filled with alarm. “The devil came out of this stony earth to torment our beloved father.” And then he explained: “Twenty years ago, at the time of the plague, a convert, Paulo, fled the aldeia. He called himself Santo António, and his wife, Mother of God.” He stopped and began to sob.

  “Go on, Peter,” Rafael said gently.

  “Santo António and others who roam the caatinga found us here. He saw that the padre was dying and he spoke to him. ‘I am Santo António,’ he said. His wife stood with him. ‘This is Mother of God.’ ” Peter stopped again, gazing at Inácio.

  “What happened then?”

  “Oh, Brother Rafael! Santo António took the padre’s hands in his own and told him that God had led him to this place — to summon Padre Inácio. The padre believed him. Paulo prayed with Padre Inácio and then told his followers that they must leave, for God wanted to be alone with Padre Inácio.”

  A scowl returned to Brother Rafael’s face. Then he looked at Inácio’s expression. “But, dear Lord, how happy he looks.”

  THE ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO BRAZIL - THE JESUIT

  BOOK THREE: The Bandeirantes

  X

  August 1628 - August 1639

  “Ishmael Pinheiro, you’re a fat, lazy fool, but not half as foolish as I, Amador Flôres da Silva, who put my trust in you. ‘Sleep soundly, Amador,’ I told myself, ‘for the bold Pinheiro will watch over you. The devils of the forest themselves will dance away from Ishmael Pinheiro.’ What stupidity!”

  Pinheiro was sitting on the ground, his legs stretched out in front of him. He said nothing but raised a balled fist to wipe his tears with his broad knuckles.

  It was August 17, 1628, deep in a forest some 150 miles southwest of São Paulo de Piratininga, in the direction of the Spanish colony of Paraguay. Close by sat six men, a rearguard patrol with an army in which the boys’ fathers served. Left behind at São Paulo, Amador and Ishmael had run away to join the force: Ishmael had fallen asleep on guard the night before and awoken to find the soldiers in their midst. The patrol leader had shown them no sympathy: “You want to be heroes?” he’d jeered. “Good. Be heroes. Show us how brave you are, when you face your fathers!”

  Amador Flôres da Silva was a grandson of the renegade slaver Marcos da Silva and Unauá, the girl from the Tupiniquin. After the slavers had destroyed the malocas of Aruanã at Porto Seguro and the hopes of Padre Inácio, Unauá, had been taken captive. Seduced by Marcos da Silva, she had come
to bear his children and to be a devoted wife to this man who had brutalized her people.

  Amador was short and thickset. He had a large head, with raven-black, coarse hair and the beginnings of a beard; a small, fleshy mouth; hard brown eyes, alert and dark; and a face scarred by the pox, which he’d survived two years before, when one of the recurring epidemics had struck the São Paulo region. He wore a short coat, shirt, knee-length breeches, and a kerchief of green Manchester cotton angled across his brow and knotted at the back of his head. And he carried a bow and arrows and a long knife.

  Indicating the patrol with a gesture of his head, Amador asked, “What if these had been Carijó, Ishmael?” He did not wait for a response. “Such a royal banquet you’d have made for them — down to the last morsel of your tiny brain.”

  “Please, Amador, please,” he blubbered. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ll be sorrier, my friend, when you stand before your father,” Amador said.

  Now Ishmael smiled weakly. “At least it’s not Bernardo da Silva to whom I must answer.”

  It was Amador’s turn to look miserable. His father, Bernardo, was a wrathful man, with a heavy beard, a lined and ravaged countenance, and the same hard, secretive eyes as Amador’s.

  “Mother of mercy,” Amador moaned, “when old Bernardo da Silva sees me carried out of the forest like a savage for ransom, what will he say? When I begged him to let me come on this war, he laughed. ‘War is for men, Amador Flôres,’ he said, and sent me back to the cows.”

  “Oh, Amador, you are a man.” Ishmael looked up with open admiration for his friend. “You’ve led us through the forest, never losing your way.”

  Amador and Ishmael had left São Paulo ten days before, quickly picking up the trail of the army and following it through lands that lay southwest of the Piratininga heights. From the people of his grandmother, Amador had developed a bold and acute sense of the wilds.

  Of course he was a man, Amador thought, and his father knew it, too. This very month he had turned fourteen. But Bernardo da Silva had deferred to the wishes of his third wife, Rosa Flôres, who insisted that her son stay home to tend the cows and pigs.

 

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