Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  The thought of Alemtejo, with its ancient citadels wrested from Roman, Goth, and Moor, now lying within the realm of Spain galled Raposo Tavares, who loathed the authority of Castile. This was not his first incursion into Paraguay, but never had he come with such a force into the provinces of his enemy.

  At the fireside, Amador heard the captain-major and his father talking about the Spaniards, and one in particular: the new governor of Asunción, Don Luis de Céspedes, who’d passed through São Paulo some months before on his way to take up his post.

  “If only every highborn Hidalgo could be brought to marry a good woman of our land. Don Luis sits in Asunción, but his heart? Oh, how his heart longs for the beautiful Victoria . . . and for her sugar plantation.” He laughed, for it greatly amused the Paulistas that the impecunious Spaniard sent to protect their favorite raiding grounds had been smitten by the wealthy niece of the governor of Rio de Janeiro. Don Luis had been engaged to Victoria and had then set out for his new post, passing through São Paulo, where he’d found the Paulistas preparing for this great bandeira. He’d made a weak protest against the planned incursion into his colony, to which the Paulistas had replied that their only purpose would be to subdue savages who might destroy the peace Don Luis desired, now that life had so much to offer him.

  “Don Luis is as old a campaigner as the one you see before you,” Bernardo added, “and now that he has the love and lands and wealth of Victoria, he wants no more.”

  “Ah, but he does intend for his wife to be cared for with a share of the best captives from our expedition,” said Raposo Tavares.

  Bernardo grinned at this reminder. “It’s nothing,” he said, “a small token for a governor who’ll ignore our passage through the province of the Jesuits.”

  The captain-major was a frequent visitor to the da Silva lands beyond São Paulo. When this army had been raised, Bernardo da Silva had immediately volunteered to put his militia under Raposo Tavares’s command: “The man has the sertão in his heart,” he’d explained to his family. “He may come from the plains of Alemtejo, but it’s upon our sertão that he seeks his horizon.”

  This word — “sertão” — arose frequently in the conversation drifting back from the men at the fireside. “Backlands”; “wild country”; “the unknown forest”; “hill, valley, river hidden by the mist of Creation”; “place of thorn and desert”; “brutal land without end” — sertão was all these and more. It started not beyond the next rise or across the river ahead but deep within the soul.

  The men of São Paulo, with their fusion of races, were born to answer the call of the sertão. From the amalgam of Iberian and Moor, African and Tupi, there emerged a breed of men singularly equipped to challenge the sertão: bold and brutal, cheerful and ingenious, brave discoverers and shrewd traders, fearless and rapacious and visionary wanderers of river and desert and forest. Always they carried the hope of a mountain of emeralds reflected in the heavens, a summit piled with rocks of gold in the shape of the crown, the spear and the nails of Christ.

  Year after year the da Silvas and their countrymen had pressed deeper and deeper into the sertão; emerald mountains and lakes of gold still eluded them, but they remained believing and patient, and had not been entirely unrewarded, for there was the native horde pulled from their malocas in the sertão and driven to São Paulo.

  São Paulo: a squalid blot upon the highlands above the Serra do Mar, where the Jesuits had founded it seven decades ago. Its officials were weak and corrupt, and men such as Bernardo da Silva viewed the settlement with suspicion.

  The da Silvas kept mostly to their holding thirty miles away from São Paulo in hills rolling toward the Anhembi, or, as they called it, “The River,” to denote its uniqueness, for it flowed neither east nor south down the Serra do Mar to the sea but instead to the west, a great artery into the heart of the sertão.

  Several times a year, however, when there was a religious festival, the da Silvas dutifully tramped to São Paulo. The clan camped around Bernardo’s town property near the câmara, the meeting place of the judges and officials of the town.

  The colégio of the Jesuit fathers stood upon a good vantage point above the Piratininga plain. Here, too, were the Franciscans and Benedictines, their churches raised with care. But most of São Paulo was a slum of mud-and-wattle hovels planted along dirt-strewn streets, which were loose and stony in summer and thick with mud and filth in the rainy season.

  In all, 2,300 people lived in the town and the lands beyond it. The majority were mamelucos and natives, and all knew a sense of isolation engendered by the mist-covered crags of the Serra do Mar that had to be descended to reach the coast; but, more than that, they felt a gnawing loneliness in this remote settlement that fostered an independent and arrogant cast of mind and made them turn not back toward the coast but to the promise of the vast sertão.

  When Amador had finished eating, he remained seated where he was, keenly attentive to the words of the men near him.

  “You’re an old man, Bernardo, who has come this way many times,” Captain-Major Raposo Tavares was saying. “Small wars, Tenente, to what this bandeira can achieve. We have the men, the muskets, the power to seize more Carijó than any previous bandeira.”

  Amador heard his father make a noise of approval, and saw him gesture with his silver spoon toward the south: “The fathers of the Company of Jesus labor faithfully to reduce the savages to submission.”

  “And such success they’ve had! Twelve great villages filled,” Raposo Tavares said. “Think how glorious it will be to return with so vast a treasure snatched from the Spaniard — thousands of Carijó.”

  Amador was aware that the Paulista army was marching to the area of the reductions, but he had no idea of the number of slaves that might be taken from the black robes.

  “Ten thousand Carijó, Bernardo,” Raposo Tavares said. “More than you’ve seen in your long life.”

  Six weeks later, in mid-October 1628, Amador was able to prove to his father and Captain-Major Raposo Tavares that he was as good a campaigner as any man who marched with them.

  Penetrating deep into the Jesuit province, the four companies of the Paulista force had separated in order to cover as much ground as possible. The twelve Jesuit reductions lay between two great rivers, the Paranapanema, to the north, and the Iguazú, to the south, an area encompassing some 250 miles. The Paulistas concentrated on four southernmost settlements — Jesús Maria, San Miguel, Concepción, and San Antonio. Captain-Major Raposo Tavares and six hundred men were within a day’s march of the reduction of San Antonio, where the Jesuit fathers had assembled four thousand natives.

  Raposo Tavares and his company had been halted at a river, beyond which lay a small natural plain. The Paulistas (mainly the native warriors) raised a stockade around the camp, similar to those protecting the malocas, a great circle of tall poles implanted in the earth and lashed together with vines. Within the stockade, thatched palm-leaf shelters had been built: The natives and mamelucos had erected longhouses, where scores were able to hang their hammocks; the officers were quartered in smaller huts, the captain-major sharing his headquarters with five of his officers, Tenente da Silva included. Near Raposo Tavares’s hut was the bandeira’s chapel, in front of which a carefully hewn Cross had been planted.

  In the stockade, too, an area had been cordoned off with wooden stakes as tall and strong as those that formed the outer defense works. This was the pen for prisoners taken in the surrounding countryside. At this point, only seventy Carijó were herded together in the enclosure. Most were wild savages, though seventeen of them claimed to be Christians who had been traveling from one Jesuit village to another when captured by Paulistas.

  Patrols sent to spy out the San Antonio reduction had confirmed the presence of a vast congregation, but Captain-Major Raposo Tavares had not yet made a move against the Jesuit village: He was seeking that precise moment when he could be sure not one of the reduction’s natives would escape the bandeira.
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  Ishmael Pinheiro’s father, true to his word, had sent his son back to São Paulo. But Amador had quickly found new companions. Two boys, both with fathers attached to Bernardo da Silva’s militia, were often with him — the mameluco Valentim Ramalho, and Abeguar, son of a Tupiniquin slave.

  Valentim Ramalho’s family belonged to a great clan of mamelucos related to João Ramalho, the castaway who had settled the high plateau long before the Jesuits Nóbrega and Anchieta arrived to establish São Paulo de Piratininga, and who had married the daughter of the most influential Tupiniquin elder in the region. Valentim’s father had land of his own adjoining the da Silva holding, but he’d made no attempt to develop his property, electing instead to serve his neighbor Bernardo da Silva as captain of his militia.

  Valentim was seventeen, with black eyes, a flat nose, and sallow complexion, as beardless as the people of his native mother. But he was only three and a half feet tall. His diminutive stature, however, had not prevented him from gaining notoriety two years before, when he bedded first the widow of a Spanish Gypsy who’d been settled at São Paulo, then the Gypsy’s daughter, and then, to add injury to insult, a pair of Tupiniquin prostitutes who’d been bequeathed to the widow and happened to be her livelihood.

  Amador had known Valentim and his four brothers and two sisters since childhood. One sister, Maria, a full-chested, big-limbed fifteen-year-old, had alarmed Amador with the passion she showed for him. Whereas her brother Valentim was abnormally short, Maria was almost inhumanly ugly. Her small, dark eyes, one of which wandered to the left, were set close to the bridge of a flat nose with huge nostrils. Her thin lips contrasted dismally with the fatness of her cheeks, and she had big ears that stuck out from the sides of her head. On her chin grew two moles, from which sprouted spiky tufts of hair.

  A year after Valentim’s episode with the widow, Maria had managed to lead Amador to a place in the woods behind their house. A coarse young girl, Maria Ramalho knew enough, mainly from the slave girls of her house, to mock Amador with talk of what small, lusty boys of São Paulo did with sheep and goats and other beasts, and before he could finish denying this, she’d wrestled him to the ground and was readying herself for him.

  Knowing of Valentim’s reputation as a lover, Amador had been proud of losing his virginity to Ramalho’s sister, and there’d been other occasions since, when she’d stolen away from her house to make love to him.

  Amador, who dreamed of chivalrous knights and fair ladies, was perturbed by Maria’s grotesque homeliness, but he was also unable to resist her, and whenever there’d been an opportunity, he’d eagerly surrendered to her clammy embrace and the soft, inviting comfort of her enormous breasts.

  Amador’s second close companion, Abeguar, was the fourteen-year-old son of a Tupiniquin who, driven from his maloca sixty miles north of São Paulo fifteen years before, was undisputed leader of the native warriors — the slaves and the group from the malocas — on Bernardo da Silva’s lands. Abeguar was slightly taller than Amador, and carried his lean, athletic body proudly. He wore nothing above the waist. A small ivory crucifix and a feather ornament fashioned by his father hung from the ends of two leather thongs around his neck.

  One morning soon after work on the stockade and slave pen had ended, Amador, Valentim, and Abeguar left the camp. An unsuccessful raiding party returning the night before had reported a valley two hours to the east filled with game. With Bernardo da Silva’s permission, Amador was leading his two companions on a hunt.

  They each had bows, quivers made of soft bark and filled with iron-tipped arrows, and several knives, including a facão — the Spanish machete, the heavy eighteen-inch blade of which was excellent for hacking away undergrowth.

  It was an easy descent down a wooded hill to the valley floor, and they quickly saw the accuracy of the patrol’s report. The trio glimpsed deer, too far for a successful shot, and troubled a giant anteater probing for termites at the rotting base of a dead palm. Valentim grew excited and unsheathed his broad knife, clasping the weapon in both hands. The anteater rose up and made threatening gestures with its sickle-shaped claws, but when Valentim stepped closer and the others began to laugh at the sight of him ready to confront so forbidding an adversary, the anteater lifted its bushy tail and hurried away.

  “Fools! Why did you alarm it?” Valentim complained.

  “Oh, Valentim, such a creature wasn’t worthy of your attention,” Amador said, and, unstoppering a calabash flask of cachaça, a raw-sugarcane brandy, passed it to Valentim. “Drink.”

  Valentim grabbed the calabash, gulped the fiery cachaça, and, his eyes watering, gave a noisy burst of satisfaction. “One more!” he cried, but Amador demanded the flask back.

  To the adults of the bandeira, casks of cachaça transported on the backs of slaves from São Paulo were as important as barrels of gunpowder. To three young braves, it was yet another introduction to the coveted pleasures of their warrior elders.

  Amador sealed the calabash and they moved off. Abeguar took the lead, and they had not gone far when the Tupiniquin stopped in his tracks and urgently indicated that they should be quiet and remain where they were. He then took off alone, hurrying into the trees to his left, not making a sound as he darted away through the undergrowth.

  Abeguar was gone less than fifteen minutes. He returned from the opposite direction in which he’d left, having circled around the place to which his attention had been drawn. “Seven Carijó. Five young, the same as us, and two older hunters,” he reported.

  “I saw nothing ahead in the trees,” Amador said.

  “There was nothing to see,” the young Tupiniquin replied.

  “But, how then — ”

  “The tapir!” Valentim said, suddenly remembering a sound he’d heard just before Abeguar urged them to be silent.

  Abeguar nodded. “The killing was almost done. I heard the beast’s cry.” Valentim beamed, and rocked from side to side, so great was his pleasure at having recognized this sound.

  Amador studied him quietly, a serious look on his face. Then he said, “What would our fathers do if we were to bring them these animals?”

  Now Valentim’s delight reached such new heights that he began to tremble. “Oh, yes!” He shook his long knife. “Why don’t we hunt these Carijó?”

  “There are seven,” Abeguar reminded them.

  “We must have a plan,” Amador said.

  “They’ll be a long time with the tapir,” Abeguar said. “They’re using stones to butcher it.”

  “We may fail if we try to rush them, even if there’s surprise,” Amador said.

  Valentim had been eyeing the flask of cachaça Amador carried. “Wine!” he said suddenly. “Some wine for this problem.”

  Amador placed his hand on the calabash but did not pass it to Valentim. He merely nodded his head, as if agreeing with what Valentim had said. Then, quickly, he explained: “We’ll go to them as friends. We’ll offer to help with the butchering. Once among them, we can wait for the right moment to take away their weapons.”

  Abeguar agreed and so did Valentim, who repeated his demand for cachaça.

  “We must save it,” Amador said. “For the Carijó.”

  Immediately they set off toward their prey. The ground beneath their feet became loose and swampy, amid tall, straight trees that shot up from the valley floor. They hadn’t gone far before the trees thinned out, the high brush providing cover as they crept forward. They first saw the Carijó crowded around the tapir, which lay on its back, its great white belly exposed.

  The trio approached cautiously. When they were almost upon the savages, Amador whispered to Valentim, “Keep a distance behind us.”

  “What difference will that make?”

  “Better they first see only two of us.”

  Amador and Abeguar showed themselves, crying out words of friendship, and created immediate panic among the Carijó. Some waved their hand axes; others ran to take up their bows. But when they heard the strangers s
peak Tupi, a language intelligible to them, their fear was replaced by intense curiosity.

  “Friends!” Amador called out. “We are friends, come to hunt in this valley from the hills beyond.”

  Valentim, unable to contain his excitement, stepped into the open beside his friends. He was greeted with shrieks from the Carijó. Two leapt away to hide in the brush, but the rest remained, petrified with fear at the sight of Valentim.

  “Aieee!” Amador exclaimed. “A little demon! This is what the Carijó think you are — a tiny demon to bewitch the innocent!”

  Valentim was furious. He puffed out his chest, clenched his chubby hands into fists, and waved them angrily at the Carijó.

  “Calma! Calma, Valentim,” Amador exhorted him. “Do exactly as I say.”

  “Valentim is a man,” Ramalho retorted. “A man — not the imp of Infidels!”

  “The Gypsy widow and all at São Paulo know this,” Amador said. “But, my friend, listen to me, now.”

  Valentim quieted down.

  “Good. Now, sit . . . there, where you are. Good.” He turned to Abeguar. “I want you to tell them that we’ve ordered this demon to keep away from them.”

  Abeguar told the Carijó that the tiny creature was indeed a fierce denizen of the forest whom they’d found wandering, lost, through the trees, and they had succored him with a wonderful drink they carried, and this had so placated him that he’d put himself at their service.

  Valentim quickly began to realize the value of this deception and wholeheartedly entered into his role. Amador took the calabash of cachaça, sipped from it, and then offered it to the Carijó.

  One of the older warriors stepped closer and Amador passed him the drink, saying, “A brew so powerful it will pacify the fiends of the forest.”

  The man cried out with delight at the strength of the cachaça and then called the others to taste it. To those hiding in the brush, he shouted that it was safe to return, for the strangers were their friends and possessed a marvelous power against evil spirits.