“From the Tobajara and other natives at Recife,” Proot said. “I made this my first task.”
“What need was there?”
“So that I could learn more about them and their customs. There’s so much to learn, from so many different people.”
“Secundus wants to paint portraits of everyone. You, too, Amador,” Joana said. “Me?”
She laughed merrily. “You would make a fine subject.”
How lovely she was today! She wore an emerald green gown, which perfectly complemented her ivory skin and black hair.
“A marvelous subject,” Proot said. “Man of the bandeira, in the sertão, with his armor.”
“Oh, Senhorita Joana, tell him about the mameluco, please — before the man makes a fool of himself.”
“Secundus Proot paints what he sees around him, Amador — the engenho, slaves, scenes of the forest. Why not a man of the bandeiras? Secundus is not a decorator of churches.”
“Oh, we know this, senhorita: The Dutch only tear down churches.”
“No, Amador, that wasn’t his doing.”
Proot brought the subject back to art: “I’d be grateful, Amador Flôres, for the opportunity to paint you here at the engenho. I don’t believe I’ll ever be allowed to visit you at São Paulo.”
“No, senhor, that you won’t — not in a thousand years.”
Proot remained unruffled and agreeable. “I’ve heard it said that twelve soldiers could block an entire army’s ascent up the Serra do Mar.”
“Exatamente! And I would be one of the twelve!”
Joana intervened: “If the two of you must have a war, fight it when the portrait is finished. I do want to see how a famous artist draws the man of the sertão.”
“You would truly wish to see it, senhorita?”
“Oh, yes, Amador, I want Secundus to make a very grand painting of you.”
“Then I’ll do it, senhorita.”
“Oh, I knew you would, Amador Flôres!” she said.
Amador turned to Proot, and was irritated to see him smiling at Joana. “Is this all you do? Paint?” he asked.
“It’s my work, yes.”
“Work? What work in painting?”
“When I draw you, Amador Flôres, you’ll understand.”
“Me understand what a Hollander does? It’s not possible.”
“Secundus knows about your patrol,” Joana interjected.
“What Hollander wouldn’t? Tell me, Segge — at Recife, did they celebrate the killings?”
“I don’t rejoice in death,” Proot said quietly.
Amador was silent.
“Please, both of you, you’re my friends. Let Secundus get on with his painting, Amador.”
It was arranged that Amador would meet Proot the next morning. He told no one about the portrait, and in the morning he waited until the sugar master and the other Portuguese had gone before creeping out furtively with his weapons and equipment rolled up in his jacket.
Joana Cavalcanti was waiting with Proot on the verandah of the big house. To Amador’s disappointment, she excused herself. “Secundus doesn’t want me glancing over his shoulder,” she said.
An hour later, Amador found himself seated on a bench outside Proot’s room, which had a door opening onto the verandah. He had wanted to keep this meeting secret, but here he was, on display for anyone who walked past the house. He held one of the senhor de engenho’s muskets, and Joana had also loaned him a wide-brimmed hat with a plume of ostrich feathers.
Proot was perched on a stool opposite him, making preliminary sketches with pen and ink.
“We don’t sit on benches,” Amador announced, after the artist had settled him down.
Proot did not respond but continued to draw furiously. Then, after a time: “What did you say?”
“With the bandeiras, we don’t carry benches; we march!”
“Yes,” Proot said, “you march.”
“It would be wrong to have me sitting this way — an old man on a bench.”
“Yes,” Proot said, “it would be.”
Damn Dutchman, Amador thought. If he wants to exhibit his foolishness, then let him. He watched Proot silently, following the rapid movements of his pen.
Finally, Proot said, “These are rough drawings. I’ll use them to plan the painting.”
“Yes?”
But Proot gave no further explanation, and Amador asked, “Why have you come here?”
“The Cavalcantis invited me.”
“No, not to this valley. To Pernambuco. You’re not a soldier, not a sugar merchant. Why do you come here to paint? Can’t you do this in Holland?”
“Here the Lord has planted a second Eden. That’s why Count Maurits has brought artists and scientists to this New World. Here in this second Eden, Amador, I, too, am given another chance.”
“To do what?”
Proot looked at him keenly. “To draw and paint in such a way . . . even Master van Rijn will acknowledge the work of Secundus Proot.”
“Master?”
“My teacher.”
“You went to school — for painting?”
“For seven years.”
“Seven years?”
“Rembrandt van Rijn did not think it enough,” he said.
“This master — he paints, too?”
“Rembrandt’s work is among the best in Holland. He’s young, ambitious; his paintings are marvelous.”
“And yours, Segge?”
“In time, others will see them,” Proot said vaguely, and returned to his sketching, a deeply pensive look on his face.
It was a month before Secundus Proot completed his Bandeirante, a name suggested by Fernão Cavalcanti. Amador had been called to pose many times. During those sessions, their conversations had grown friendlier, though a gulf still remained between them.
At last, Amador was invited to Proot’s quarters to view the finished painting.
Four feet by three, it depicted a stocky Amador in the middle ground, standing boldly in his padded jacket, festooned with weapons and crowned with the ostrich-plumed hat, and firing his musket. In the background, several Paulistas were discharging their weapons, others reloading. In the right-hand corner was a dying savage on the ground. In the trees, also to the right, was another native, taking aim with bow and arrow. The encounter was set deep in the forest, with Amador standing between two great tree trunks covered with vines and ferns.
“Oh, Segge!” Amador exclaimed. “What a fine painting we have painted!”
On a night in September 1640, planters from neighboring engenhos and a group of Dutchmen were gathered in the big house of Engenho Santo Tomás. Senhor Cavalcanti was holding a festa, and the senhor’s orchestra played the most pleasant tunes with viol and lute. Cavalcanti took pride in his musicians: eleven slave boys who had been taught their Italian madrigals and old pastorales of Portugal by Padre Gregório Bonifácio.
Those attending this night’s festa included no less a personage than the governor of New Holland, Johan Maurits, count of Nassau-Siegen. Maurits had arrived from Recife that morning with an escort of pikers and musketeers; during the day, Cavalcanti had taken him on a tour of the engenho, during which he expressed interest in almost everything he saw. And indeed, the governor’s curiosity, his stream of questions put by an interpreter to Cavalcanti and his sons, Felipe and Alvaro, was not an expression of mere politeness. Since its settlement more than a century before, Pernambuco had had no more enthusiastic leader. In his first letter to Amsterdam, after landing at Recife in January 1637, the governor described his post as “the most beautiful country on earth.”
The Heeren XIX had made a wise choice in appointing him governor. As a young man, Johan Maurits witnessed the first flowering of the Golden Age of the Netherlands. The nation brought together in the seven United Provinces, of which Holland was the richest, was beginning its climb toward dazzling brilliance in commerce.
By this year 1640, the directors of the East and West India compa
nies had advanced far toward their goal of establishing a trading empire around the world. Their activities extended from the Hudson River and this conquest in Pernambuco, in the Americas, to the Guinea coast of Africa, and from there to the great emporium of Batavia in Java, then on to Siam and Formosa, and to Japan, where Iyeyasu, first shogun of the Tokugawa regime, had given the Dutch a license to trade in 1605.
Maurits, a Calvanist and a hero of wars still raging in Germany between Protestant armies and the princes of the Catholic League, was a liberal and a humanist. When effective resistance by the Portuguese in Pernambuco had collapsed, his first moves were to offer loans to colonists to rebuild engenhos and buy slaves, and to promise no interference with Portuguese customs and religion.
The orthodox dominies from Holland complained about concessions to the “Romish Papists,” and also disapproved of the governor’s friendliness toward Jews. But Maurits had proceeded unwaveringly. “God has appointed us custodians of Canaan,” he said. “Dare we drag the old and bloody arguments of Europe to His fairest land?” He did make one exception: Since the Jesuits had a notorious reputation in Protestant Europe as militants and plotters, Maurits ordered their expulsion from Pernambuco and other areas of Dutch Brazil.
Opposite Recife, on an island formed by two rivers, the governor was building a new capital, Mauritsstad, a well-fortified town with broad avenues and two canals, as the Dutch had known in Amsterdam, with gabled homes and warehouses facing the water. A bridge two hundred paces long was planned to connect Recife with Mauritsstad.
Capable soldier and fine administrator, Maurits also showed himself to be a visionary. He assembled a group of forty-six scientists, scholars, writers, and artists from all over Europe and solemnly declared their assignment: “to reveal to the world the wonders of paradise.”
Fernão Cavalcanti and like-minded Portuguese could not deny that Johan Maurits’s artists and scientists, and his new capital, gave formidable proof of his love for Brazil.
Cavalcanti had fought with the regiments of Bagnuoli against Maurits, and had been influenced by the Italian’s pragmatic attitude toward defeat: Since the regular army had been beaten soundly by the Dutch, Cavalcanti considered it futile to think of expelling the Hollanders with bands of outlaws sniping at their patrols from the bush.
Cavalcanti served with a planters’ council organized by Maurits for consultations between the Portuguese and the Dutch. Still, he maintained a cautious, dignified attitude toward the Dutch. He would be a gracious, genial host to Governor Maurits, whose nobility and learning he greatly admired, but any suggestion that he was a traitor angered him. His first and main concern had been to save Engenho Santo Tomás. “Besides,” he told his detractors, “you cry for restoration to Portugal, after sixty years of Spanish captivity. What difference is there between the rule of Madrid and that of Amsterdam?” A huge difference, he knew: The Spaniards were hopeless merchants who knew nothing about marketing sugar. Before Portugal had been dragged into conflict with the Netherlands because of the union with Spain, the Hollanders had distributed Pernambucan sugar throughout Europe.
Cavalcanti considered his dealings with the Dutch mere expediency; his heart burned with secret longing for the restoration of Portugal, not only in Pernambuco but also at Lisbon. Reports reaching Recife told of a nationalist movement at Lisbon, with a strong pretender to the Portuguese throne in Dom João, duke of Bragança.
This day of the festa, while touring the engenho, Maurits had spoken of the Lisbon nationalists. “Think of it, Senhor Fernão: Holland and Portugal free and independent, with a truce between us. There would be a Golden Age for Pernambuco, without such hopeless Spanish adventures as the conde da Torre’s.”
“It may be so, Governor Maurits,” Cavalcanti had responded guardedly.
Had the conde da Torre’s armada succeeded, Cavalcanti and the men of his engenho would have marched to join it. But it had failed, and Cavalcanti had been thankful for concealing his intentions from the Dutch. Others had not been so prudent and had been imprisoned or expelled from the colony.
The threat of the armada had almost destroyed relations between Maurits and the planters, particularly when the column with which Amador had marched through the sertão, with its patrols breaking off to attack Dutch outposts. (Amazingly, most of the soldiers had survived the twelve-hundred-mile march.) As a reprisal, Maurits had sent a force by sea to the Bahia. In a surprise attack, twenty-seven mills had been destroyed. It had seemed as if a protracted war was inevitable.
However, Fernão Cavalcanti and planters who served on Maurits’s council, the vicar-general, and several Catholic priests had been summoned to a secret meeting with the governor.
“Friends,” he had called them, “when I came to Pernambuco nearly four years ago, it was a ruin. The next cane harvest will be the colony’s best. Will you help me save it?”
The vicar-general pointed out that this was a strange request from one who had ordered the destruction of twenty-seven mills at the Bahia.
“I did not send an armada, with eighty-six ships and with orders to give no quarter,” said Maurits. “‘Every Dutch man, woman, and child to be handed over to the cannibals,’” he quoted, from a captured dispatch.
Then Maurits had made a proposal: “We can save the harvest, and the lives of our people, if we negotiate a truce.”
Again the vicar-general reminded him of the twenty-seven ruined mills, saying that his countrymen at Salvador would not forgive that injury.
“That I understand,” the governor agreed, and had turned to Fernão Cavalcanti and the other planters: “It is you who must initiate this truce.”
“Impossible!” several objected, Cavalcanti included. “Already they condemn us as traitors for refusing to leave our lands.”
“It is possible,” Maurits had responded. “You, reverend padres, must petition me for an end to hostilities without quarter — for an end to the destruction of the engenhos. I will send your petition to the governor at the Bahia, suggesting that we negotiate on the basis of its contents.”
In celebration of Maurits’s visit, Senhor Fernão declared a holiday for all at the engenho, and the slaves, free laborers, and tenants had their own festa at the slave quarters.
But it was not a happy night for Amador. Early in the evening, he stood outside the big house with a group of mill workers and slaves, who had come for a glimpse of the senhor and his guests. They kept a respectful distance and remained quiet, not wanting to be denied the grand sight through the open doors and windows of the saloon.
The long table, with Governor Maurits at its head, was covered with a white linen cloth. The men at the table wore squares of the same material tied around their necks to protect their lace collars. On the table was a startling array of silver bowls and dishes, and gold and silver candle-holders ornamented with birds and fruit. There were silver spoons and knives for each guest, and new implements, forks, an Italian device of great interest to the group outside.
Joana Cavalcanti, radiant and beautiful in a rich mauve gown, sat next to the painter, talking with him and laughing vivaciously at his conversation.
Amador thought of the many times he’d seen that pair together in the three months since Senhorita Joana introduced him to Segge, as he’d continued to call Proot.
Amador had come to like the big blond Dutchman. Moody when there was a problem with his painting, Proot for the most part had a placid, amiable nature, and it was not difficult after a time to accept Senhorita Joana’s opinion that Segge was different from typical Dutchmen, who cut off the heads of their enemies.
Segge did not affect fancy airs. In the company of the Ribeiros, the artist had got as drunk as the rest. And Amador had been moved by Segge’s passion for Brazil. On a night with a full moon, when the two of them had been at the lake below the hill, drinking cane brandy and smoking tabak, Segge had grown rhapsodic: “Why should I return to that gray, foggy land when I have found paradise? Amador, how I envy you.”
&nbs
p; Of all they talked about, the sertão and the savages interested Segge most. He would listen to anything Amador said about the natives.”
When Amador spoke of the far-distant Carijó and Tupiniquin, Segge also began to understand the vastness of Brazil.
“We say that with New Holland we have an empire in the tropics. But it’s only a small margin of land along the coast.”
“You shouldn’t feel so bad, my friend,” Amador had said. “After a century and a half, we ourselves have yet to discover Brazil. We’ve been called crabs, clinging to the white sands, always looking to Europe.”
“But you were born here. You’re a son of São Paulo — of Brazil.”
“I’m Portuguese,” Amador said, adamantly.
“You’re no more Portuguese than I am.”
“You’re wrong,” Amador protested. “When we had a king at Lisbon, even the lowest-born mameluco was proud to be his subject. We will be free of Madrid one day. Free, and restored to Portugal, our mother.”
Amador had been reminded of his own delay at Engenho Santo Tomás. Six months had passed and both he and the senhor had continued to be vague about plans for his departure. Fernão Cavalcanti was preoccupied with truce arrangements with the Hollanders, and Amador had done no more than ask Padre Bonifácio to write to Amador’s family in São Paulo, telling them that he was alive.
Although Amador still limped, his wounds had healed, and he regularly went hunting in the valleys behind the engenho, accompanied by three natives of Fernão Cavalcanti’s, the remaining descendants of the clan whose malocas had once stood on the hill. Sometimes Fernão Cavalcanti himself would join them.
He had become friendly with Segge, he had hunted with Senhor Fernão, and he had a secret passion for Joana Cavalcanti, but for all this, he was still a mameluco.
Watching her now at the sumptuous banquet table, delighting in a world totally different from his own, he knew he would always stand outside — outside, with the slaves and the workers . . . and the dogs of Fernão Cavalcanti.
As the senhor’s orchestra began to play, Amador fled down the hill, and farther, until he heard another sound, music from the senzala — the slave quarters. “Yes!” he cried aloud. “Yes! Here is where you belong, mameluco!”
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