“You come late to this battle, Amador Flôres. There are many to tell us what we should do, and who accuse us of favoring the heretics. We fought the Hollanders for five years after they took Olinda and Recife — long, bloody campaigns, with all our captaincy contested.
“At São Paulo, senhor, we’ve heard about the shameful retreats of Bagnuoli.”
“You’ve heard that he was a coward, whose purpose was to hasten the Dutch conquest?”
“This and more has been said, senhor.”
“Dear God — was ever a man so slandered.”
“Our own expedition was deserted by him!”
“Was he a coward because he asked the Hollanders for fair conditions of war? And got an agreement to end the slaughter of prisoners? And pleaded that women and children be spared? A coward because he refused to waste men’s lives in campaigns he saw they couldn’t win? Bagnuoli has dined in my house, Amador Flôres. He is a great soldier, who did as much for the Portuguese and Pernambuco as any man who fought here.”
“But the Dutch conquered the captaincy.”
Cavalcanti’s boots squeaked as he shifted position irritably. “Was Bagnuoli to stop them with the miserable relief sent from Spain and Portugal? When a thousand Dutch guns blockaded the coast, and no supplies could be landed?”
Amador had no answer. While Fernão Cavalcanti had been defending Bagnuoli, Amador found himself wondering about the senhor’s role during the backlands war. From that ridge overlooking Engenho Santo Tomás, he’d seen no evidence of war in the valley; not the slightest devastation. And here Cavalcanti stood, so fashionable and prosperous. But he wasn’t about to pursue this potentially sensitive point. In this grand house, he was a common soldier given refuge by the lord of the plantation. Even this bed he rested in — four carved posts, brocaded canopy — made him acutely conscious of his inferior position.
Cavalcanti said no more about Bagnuoli but remarked: “There are Portuguese who would follow an endless holy war in Pernambuco.”
“I understand them, senhor. Who but the Infidel would have dealt so barbarously with my patrol — the Infidel and the Hollander?”
“Only a few Hollanders are as brutal as Jan Vlok, captain of the men who attacked your patrol.”
“You know the devil?”
“Vlok has a reputation. Even the governor, Count Maurits, despises the man for his cruelties. We’re weary of Vlok and others who make a sport of suffering. These men have brought years of sorrow to the colony.” Cavalcanti saw that Amador wanted to speak, but he gestured for silence. “Jan Vlok and his company still hunt the stragglers of your column, but you needn’t worry. When you’re well enough, I’ll arrange a passage to the Bahia.”
Cavalcanti stepped toward the door.
“Senhor Cavalcanti . . .”
“Yes?”
“Do you accept the Dutch in this valley — in all Pernambuco — forever?”
Cavalcanti moved back to the bed. “You speak very freely, da Silva.”
“No offense, senhor. God knows, I owe you my life.”
“I visited that beach, Amador Flôres. I saw what Jan Vlok did. I understand your anger. But in this valley, working with Count Maurits is the only way I know to save what the Cavalcantis have held for a hundred years. I make no bargains with Vlok and his butchers, but I will listen to reasonable men. If they are Dutch, as it happens Maurits is, so be it.” He turned away then, and without another word, walked out of the room.
Amador lay thinking about what Cavalcanti had said: Sweet Jesus, was the blood of my comrades shed so that the senhores of these valleys may prosper with the Hollanders? He would have risen there and then and left Fernão Cavalcanti’s house, but he was overcome with exhaustion and soon fell asleep.
And then, the next morning, Amador abandoned any notion of leaving Engenho Santo Tomás.
He heard someone approaching the room and expected the slave Celestina, bringing a bowl of food. When the door opened, it was an angel who had appeared at his bedside as he lay racked with fever.
“So, Amador Flôres, you’re better — recovered enough at least to anger my father?”
“Senhorita Joana?”
“My father doesn’t like it to be thought that he favors Dutch rule over that of Lisbon.” She held out a bowl of food to him. “Here,” she said. “Old Celestina is sick — perplexed, says Padre Bonifácio, by the wizards of ‘Ngola, who dance in her mind.”
As he took the bowl, Amador looked into Joana’s face and was awed by its strength, beauty, and sweetness. Her skin was ivory; her eyes soft and dark and intelligent beneath dark eyebrows; her lips full and red. Her black hair fell in loose ringlets on either side of her face and, at the back, was plaited into a knot worn high on the crown.
Her gown was less sumptuous than her father’s clothing, black with silver thread, tight at the waist and accenting her shapely figure. And now there was a lively sparkle in her eyes.
“Tell me . . .”
“Yes?”
“My father says the men of São Paulo are Gypsies, wanderers — Moors of the sertão, he also calls them. Are you such a man, Amador Flôres?”
“If the senhor says so.”
“Before the Cavalcantis came to this valley, it was wild, my father says — as it must still be at São Paulo, I imagine?”
“It is, senhorita, with many, many Carijó,” he said. “All my life, I’ve marched with the bandeiras of Captain-Major Raposo Tavares. Oh, Senhorita Joana, if Raposo Tavares had led our column in Pernambuco, the Hollanders wouldn’t have driven off our army.”
“But they always have,” she said. “Since I was a girl, the age of my sister Beatriz, the Hollanders have beaten our soldiers. My father fought at Recife and in the south, but it did no good. When the Hollanders were ready, they marched across the land.
“Ask the others if Joana was ready — with musket and powder. Our dear Padre Bonifácio trembled at the sight. But I was ready, if ever they attacked Santo Tomás.”
“You, Senhorita Joana, with a musket?”
“You don’t know Joana Cavalcanti!” With a toss of her head, she danced out of the room, laughing as she went.
“Senhorita Joana,” he whispered aloud.
A senhor de engenho’s daughter was supposed to be untouchable, a captive of the big house, until the senhor de engenho found a man he was willing to accept as her husband. The donzela must do nothing but squat upon cushions and carpets, in the Moorish fashion, with the little dona’s slaves cooing and gossiping around her, feeding her sweet confections and titillating tales from which she’d learn all she needed to know to satisfy the husband chosen by her father.
But Senhorita Joana was altogether different. Her coming alone to the bedside of a strange man was in itself revealing. What lovely, defiant talk. A girl with powder and a musket! Laughing at the Hollanders!
Amador lay listening to sounds from the rooms beyond, imagining that Senhorita Joana made them. But, after a time, his thoughts grew more realistic: A “Gypsy” of the sertão: what place was there for such a man with Senhorita Joana?
Joana Cavalcanti was a rebel. Her sister Beatriz followed the customs of the big house, as had Fernão Cavalcanti’s other daughters before their marriages, but not Joana. She was now nineteen, but even as a child she had revealed her free spirit.
While the other Cavalcanti girls played behind screens and shutters, Joana crept out of the house to the stables, swearing the slaves there to secrecy as she taught herself to ride, discovering on horseback the beauty of the valley of Santo Tomás, which had so delighted Nicolau Cavalcanti when he’d first seen it. Her sisters grew plump and obedient, with no ambition beyond a comfortable marriage, but not Joana.
“I won’t marry without love,” Joana had said to Fernão Cavalcanti, after rejecting several well-born Portuguese who’d had his permission to visit the house. “I won’t be the plaything of a man who needs no more than a lazy queen with a brood of children.”
Her father had e
xpressed shock at such talk, and, sympathizing with Dona Domitila’s concerns for this “heavensent flower of virginity,” vowed to persist with his search for a husband for Joana, but secretly Fernão admired his unusual daughter.
When he saw Joana tearing across the engenho on one of her Arabian horses, her black hair streaming behind; when he heard her conversing on topics of no concern to women — the harvest, the mill, the sharp dealings of the sugar merchants at Recife; when he saw her as defiant as a man toward the Dutch — then Cavalcanti became open-minded, and realized that the Lord had given him a rare and exceptional daughter.
It came as no surprise to Senhor Cavalcanti that his daughter should befriend the mameluco. When Amador was able to get out of bed — two months after he’d been carried to the engenho from the river — they moved him out of the big house to the quarters of the Portuguese mill workers. Although his wounds were healing, he remained weak; a ball that had struck his leg left him with a permanent limp.
On many days, Cavalcanti had seen Amador resting in the shade of trees near the chapel: Sometimes Padre Bonifácio was with him; sometimes, Joana.
A senhor de engenho’s daughter in the company of such a common man! Many fathers would order the overseer of the engenho to apply his thickest tapir-hide whip to the fellow. But Fernão Cavalcanti knew that such a response would be futile where Joana was concerned; and he would never question the innocence of her interest in da Silva, though he had to wonder what she saw in him. He soon found out.
At dinner one evening Dona Domitila, sorely vexed by her daughter’s friendship toward the “half-breed savage,” openly objected to the association.
“Mother, Amador Flôres is a fine teacher,” Joana said. “No one knows the sertão as he does. He’s made so many journeys, not a secret in the forest is hidden from him.” Responding to Fernão Cavalcanti’s contentious look, she added, “The Paulistas, Father, are different from the Pernambucans.”
“How so, my child?”
“We’re bound to our houses and plantations,” she said. “We have no interest in what lies in the next valley — unless it’s to be opened for more cane fields. Amador tells of the bandeiras that set out in every direction from São Paulo. They’re as bold and brave as the settlers who came from Lisbon with nothing. The mamelucos, Father, are like Nicolau Cavalcanti and Grandfather Tomás: They still seek a country.”
Fernão Cavalcanti noticed that Dona Domitila, who had initiated this conversation, was concerning herself now with Beatriz, who was biting her nails. Dona Domitila took Joana’s words seriously only when her daughter referred to Dona Brites, widow of the first donatário, Dom Duarte Coelho. Dona Brites had led the colony after Dom Duarte’s death, and Joana loved the idea that a lady governor had ruled Pernambuco for five years.
After a pause, Fernão responded to his daughter: “They search the sertão, but they find nothing except Carijó, who they take from the Jesuits, and a handful of gold. And they’ll do nothing for Portugal and her captaincies.”
Joana looked down at the dinner table. “For the smallest reward, Father, Amador Flôres and other Paulistas left their homes to fight for us. By the river, his friends . . .”
“Your nails, Beatriz,” Dona Domitila said. “If you don’t stop eating them, they’ll lodge in your lungs, child; you’ll get a canker that may kill you . . .”
The attack at the river had taken place at the beginning of March 1640. It was now July, and Amador’s wounds had healed enough for him to begin the journey back to São Paulo. But he had made no effort to leave, nor had he pressed Senhor Cavalcanti to arrange for his departure.
Joana Cavalcanti was the source of his inertia . . . Oh, sweet Jesus, to find favor in the eyes of this lady. Paulistas were reviled as “mongrels,” “outlaws,” “slavers” by the Pernambucans, who also feared them, but Senhorita Joana understood how hard life was above those wild crags at Piratininga and with the long wanderings of the bandeiras.
Sweet Jesus, what torment! The image of Maria was constantly before him. If he saw the senhorita in his dreams, the big one would appear, too, demanding his return. And what of the two savage girls at São Paulo who were so ready to leap on their backs for him? In their pagan way, they were the most faithful of lovers.
Amador found himself plagued by other questions, too, which he had never considered before. Marcos da Silva, Tenente Bernardo, and now himself — what had they achieved with the great whore of the wilderness? After a lifetime in the sertão, what did they have that could match this grand engenho?
When he’d been able to walk with a stick, he’d investigated Fernão Cavalcanti’s property, with its two hundred black slaves. Cavalcanti’s slaves worked great tracts of cane, but other plantings were managed by families not unlike his own mamelucos, half-breeds with the blood of the natives.
He discovered that many families were related, claiming a common ancestor, Affonso Ribeiro, who had come to the valley of Santo Tomás with the first senhor de engenho, Nicolau Cavalcanti. There was at this time another Ribeiro with the name Affonso, a lumbering, potbellied braggart whose breath was always burning with cachaça and who occupied a group of dilapidated, mud-walled houses with three women and a multitude of children. By the tenants’ standards, Ribeiro was prosperous, for he owned eight black slaves to tend his canes for the engenho.
This Affonso Ribeiro had been greatly taken with the “Tenente Paulista,” as he called Amador, and had gathered his relatives at a celebration for him. Late at night, drunk and swaying on his feet, his breeches sagging, Affonso Ribeiro had made a speech about the “war,” in which he associated himself with heroes, Tenente Paulista included, who sought to expel the Dutch.
Ribeiro told Amador that during the guerrilla war, he had served with two units, the first commanded by Felipe Camarão, a Potiguara chief, and the other by Henrique Dias, a free black. Loyal to the Portuguese, these commanders had accepted recruits such as Ribeiro, but the bulk of their forces were their own people, natives and blacks, and they had troubled the Dutch more than had the armies of General Bagnuoli.
“I was there, Tenente Paulista, when Henrique Dias lost his hand,” Ribeiro said. “Oh, the brave man — with a sword in the hand that remained, howling like a wild black dog, for the Hollanders to come to him. And Dom Camarão — he deserves to be made a fidalgo for his services — Dom Camarão saw Affonso Ribeiro chop up three Hollanders, one after the other, with my machete.”
“Will we ever get rid of the Dutch?” Amador had asked.
“Oh, yes, amigo,” Ribeiro had said drunkenly. “They must go. Even Count Maurits, who seeks to be our friend.”
“The senhor de engenho doesn’t feel strongly about this?” Amador had queried.
“Why should he? What has he lost?”
“Nothing,” Amador had responded.
After that night, when Ribeiro came to the mill he would seek out Amador, inviting him to return to his house, but Amador always had an excuse — his wounds, his fatigue.
Ribeiro had been sympathetic: “Ah, Tenente Paulista, may your strength return. The senhor says we have to work with the Hollanders, but you — you, Tenente Paulista — know better than this.”
But this morning, as he sat in the shade of the trees by the church, Amador was preparing to meet a Dutchman, at the specific request of Joana Cavalcanti.
“But, Senhorita Joana, you know how I hate them,” he’d said when she asked this of him the day before.
“My Dutchman is different. Secundus Proot isn’t interested in war and killing, Amador. He’s an artist — a painter.”
He’d not heard the name clearly. “‘Segge?’” he said.
“‘Secundus Proot,’” she said. “He’s been to the engenho before, Amador — to draw pictures of the house, the mill, the slaves.”
“What do I want with this man?” he’d asked. “Other Hollanders come to see your father. I watch them, senhorita. I see the sergeant and my patrol. ‘Damn the souls of the Dutch,’ I say. ‘Cur
se them!’”
“I know how you feel, Amador,” she’d said. “You’ll realize that he’s not like those butchers. Secundus Proot would never kill a man. He’s kind and gentle, Amador, and he loves the sertão.”
Amador found himself powerless to refuse Senhorita Joana. And he also believed that his antagonism toward the Hollanders was lessening.
He had come to believe Senhor Fernão’s statement that he worked with the Dutch not because he supported these heretics but primarily to save Engenho Santo Tomás. Months at the engenho had shown Amador that Cavalcanti and his family remained first and foremost Portuguese — in fact, more Portuguese than those from the old country itself. Not one of them had been to Lisbon, but it was their city, and Portugal their country, and their melancholy at being so far from the homeland was profound. “Better a beggar with the shield of the king than the richest planter in Brazil,” the nobles of Pernambuco believed.
Amador was pondering this obsession with nobility when Joana Cavalcanti emerged from the house with her Dutch painter. Amador rose and started toward them, dragging his left leg.
Secundus Proot was one of the strangest-looking men Amador had ever seen. Proot’s oval face was a bright pink and dominated by a wide red nose. His straw-colored hair was shoulder length. He had an upturned mustache, a yellow beard, and his eyes beneath his thin brows were a soft blue. He was a foot taller than Amador, with a heavy but muscular physique. His hands were freckled.
Amador had borrowed a red-velvet jacket from a mill worker to appear dignified in front of the Hollander. He need not have bothered, for “Segge’s” attire was plain: buff leather jacket, square linen collar with only a touch of lace, black breeches, and shabby boots. The one elaborate touch was a large pearl in the lobe of Proot’s right ear.
After Joana’s introductions, the Hollander described in Tupi-Guarani his delight in this valley of Santo Tomás, hoping to lessen Amador’s blatant hostility toward him. Amador was surprised at Segge’s ability with the dialect, and interrupted Proot to ask how he’d come to learn it.
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