Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  “If the old goat dies before I get him to the engenho, Padre Salvador, so be it. You have no right to keep him.”

  “Senhor Bartolomeu Rodrigues has always been our good friend. He knows that we will do nothing to harm his interests.”

  “Certainly! And our Padre Viana, as well. But, then, how often do they go to Recife? There’s not a ship from the south without news of the rebellion by Jesuit militia such as these: the regiments of Guarani who challenge the armies of Portugal and Spain.”

  Thus far, Leandro Taques had been silent during the confrontation. Now he spoke: “Do not comment on matters you do not understand.”

  “You’re new here, Padre?”

  “Yes.” Leandro Taques was a tall, slim man, sixty-eight years old. His features were ravaged by the pox, and the pitted flesh beside his right eye twitched spasmodically. “But I have met Senhor Bartolomeu Rodrigues. I respect the senhor and his power. I know of nothing that compels me to accept his son’s insolence. Move Onias and you will surely kill him. But you will not do so, Graciliano Cavalcanti. Not while I stand here.”

  “So help me God, if you didn’t wear that black robe —”

  “Please!” It was Padre Salvador. “I promise, my solemn word: If Onias lives, the day he can be moved, I will personally take him to Santo Tomás.”

  Graciliano glared at Taques. “It’s a mistake to make an enemy of the Cavalcantis.”

  Padre Leandro spoke calmly: “Go to your father. Tell him that if the slave lives, he will be returned. The senhor will accept this.”

  Padre Salvador was desperately anxious to divert Graciliano’s attention from Taques. And he hit upon the perfect solution. He was aware of a tragedy that had afflicted the thirty thousand Guarani of the seven missions across the Rio Uruguay. A decisive battle had taken place in Paraguay nine months ago, in February 1756. Eighteen hundred Guarani from the seven missions, most of them mounted and with cannon made from leather-bound wooden logs, had gone up against the same number of Portuguese and Spanish with cavalry squadrons, an artillery battery, and a detachment of grenadiers. The Guarani commander had been killed in an early artillery barrage, and his force had retreated into deep gullies, where musketeers shot them down. Fourteen hundred Guarani died, compared with three men from the allied units. By the end of May, the six remaining missions had been invaded.

  But Padre Salvador pretended ignorance of this battle, and asked Graciliano what he had heard of events in Paraguay. To the padre’s immense relief, Graciliano was eager to share these dismal tidings, and though he continued to give Padre Leandro angry glances as he spoke, the tension between them eased.

  Padre Salvador had been at Rosário for fourteen years. He was sallow-faced, with a perpetually harried expression. He did his best to alleviate the poverty of his community, but one year the crops failed, the next there was sickness and apathy among the natives — always something to frustrate Meireles’s hopes.

  Padre Leandro was twenty years Salvador’s senior. Before coming to Rosário a year ago, he had served among the Tapajós at the Rio das Amazonas for thirty-five years. He had left Grão Pará after earning the enmity of Carvalho e Melo’s brother, Governor Mendonça Furtado, by refusing to supply men for the canoes of the northern border commission. “The governor accused me of hiding my Tapajós in the forest,” Leandro had told Padre Salvador, “but what were they to think at the approach of twenty-eight canoes? Slavers! To a man, they fled into the trees.”

  Mendonça Furtado had sent a report to the Jesuit vice-principal at Belém do Pará and to Lisbon. The vice-principal had considered it politic to move Taques from his aldeia, and another Jesuit had taken his place. But in January of this year, 1756, the Tapajós mission had become one of the first where temporal power was removed from the Jesuits and given to a civilian director, who was to transform the savage converts into loyal, hard-working Portuguese citizens.

  Now, as Graciliano Cavalcanti spoke of the invasion of the seven missions in the south, Padre Salvador commented sadly, “Ever since the Treaty of Madrid was signed, the padres did all they could to get the Guarani to move peacefully.”

  “And who will believe this today,” Taques interjected, “when it is so fashionable to denounce us in every quarter?”

  “But, Padre,” Graciliano said, “surely you can’t expect people to believe that tens of thousands of Guarani — those docile converts of your society — will rebel without strong encouragement?”

  “They were ordered to abandon churches, homes, plantations. What further encouragement was needed?”

  Graciliano glanced again at the group watching them. “But isn’t the savage a wanderer at heart?” he asked. “Why should a nomad who drifts from valley to valley object to a just relocation?”

  “The Guarani were settled there for a century,” Padre Leandro reminded Graciliano. “Their relocation was as unfair as . . . as if a Cavalcanti were told to abandon Santo Tomás.”

  Graciliano laughed loudly. “Never, Padre!” He gazed across the square. “I ask once more: Deliver my father’s property to me.”

  Padre Salvador appeared to waver.

  “Leave — now,” Padre Leandro said firmly. “Tell Senhor Bartolomeu Rodrigues that we will do all in our power to save the slave.”

  “You defy me?” Graciliano said, very softly.

  “No, Graciliano Cavalcanti, I defy inhumanity.”

  Graciliano turned abruptly and strode to where a slave waited with his horse. When he had mounted, he shook a finger at Taques. “I’ll remember this meeting!”

  “I have no doubt you will.” Padre Leandro’s face began to twitch convulsively.

  “Bastards!” Graciliano dug his silver spurs into his mount’s flanks and started toward the natives. All but one man scattered. “Son of a bitch!” Graciliano raised his horsewhip to strike this man but the African stepped smartly out of his way. Graciliano stormed off, rending the air with his curses against all at Nossa Senhora do Rosário.

  The man who stood defiantly as Graciliano Cavalcanti charged the group was Pedro Préto, “Black Peter.” He was forty years old, lean and dignified in appearance, with a long, narrow face. From the age of fifteen until his twenty-eighth year, he had been a slave in the house of Artemas Cabral de Albuquerque, a resident of Recife.

  Senhor Artemas, a bachelor, had owned two slaves, Black Peter and Samuel, and he had treated them like sons. They slept under his roof and ate the same food.

  Senhor Artemas was a beggar. Three times a week, his slaves carried him through the streets in a hammock suspended from a long pole, their leisurely progress marked by their master’s appeals for alms. Nothing ailed Senhor Artemas but an acute case of laziness!

  After years of glorious indolence, Artemas had died peacefully, granting Black Peter and Samuel their freedom.

  Artemas’s house and four thousand gold cruzados that he had accumulated over the years he bequeathed to the Jesuits. A padre sent to inspect the property had offered Black Peter and Samuel work at the colégio. Trained as a carpenter’s helper, Black Peter had been sent to Rosário twelve years ago, and he now lived at the aldeia with a wife and four children.

  Black Peter was a great-grandson of Santiago Préto, who had been known among those he commanded as Nhungaza, captain of the royal regiment serving Nganga Dzimba we Bahwe. From his own father, Black Peter had learned about the stronghold of the runaway slaves that had survived for sixty-five years in the Serra do Barriga. Eighteen times troops sent from Recife had marched against Palmares, as the Portuguese called the settlements of the runaways, but not until 1694 did they reach the capital, Shoko, and its twin city, ’Ngola Jango.

  “They sent a butcher, Domingos Jorge the Elder, with his Paulistas and hundreds of Carijó. They came with two hundred muskets and six cannon, and still it took them twenty-two days to smash our defenses,” Black Peter’s father had told him. “Had the great Nganga been alive, and your great-grandfather Nhungaza with him, we would not have been defeated. We wer
e twenty thousand strong, but we failed because our leaders were weak.”

  Domingos Jorge the Elder had campaigned at Palmares for a year, slaughtering blacks who resisted, capturing others to be returned to slavery, and destroying every vestige of this African kingdom in the Americas.

  Of all the stories Black Peter’s father had told him about Palmares, the one that had had the deepest effect on him concerned the Place of Stones, which had been built by the Nganga Dzimba we Bahwe in the hills behind the capital.

  When Domingos Jorge the Elder had overrun Shoko, and resistance became hopeless, 150 men of the royal regiment made their way to the sacred hill. They climbed to the Place of Stones, where the bones of Ganga Zumba lay. One by one, they flung themselves over the wall of the enclosure into the abyss below.

  Four weeks after the confrontation between Graciliano and the Jesuits, Padre Salvador and Black Peter arrived at the engenho with Onias.

  Graciliano had come back from Rosário demanding that the district militia his father commanded be sent to fetch the fugitive. The senhor was well aware of Graciliano’s hotheadedness and had sent Padre Viana to the aldeia instead. Viana returned with a full account of what had happened, and Bartolomeu Rodrigues had been so incensed, Graciliano was forced to flee Santo Tomás. He had gone to the Cavalcanti town house at Olinda, where the third brother, Geraldo, was in residence. (The unambitious Geraldo possessed a talent for penmanship, and his father had secured him a post with the câmara at Olinda.) Two days before the arrival of Padre Salvador, Graciliano had gone back to Santo Tomás and asked his father’s forgiveness, which had been granted, with the warning that he was not to go near Rosário.

  Graciliano was with Bartolomeu Rodrigues and Paulo when Padre Salvador rode up to the Casa Grande. Graciliano’s greeting to the Jesuit was cold and formal but not overtly hostile.

  Senhor Bartolomeu Rodrigues thanked the priest for delivering Onias, then said to the old runaway: “I won’t have you whipped or branded, but you’ll spend your days and nights in the stocks. When you’ve served your punishment, you’ll work like a young ox to fill the place of the slave who died because of you.”

  “I understand, my Master.” Onias’s white-haired head was bowed, his eyes fixed on Bartolomeu Rodrigues’s boots.

  Onias lay in the stocks for two weeks. When he was released, he was put in charge of a high-wheeled cart and four oxen that lumbered back and forth between the cane fields and the mill. It was December, the fourth month of the cutting season, and for ten days Onias led the oxen along the rutted track between the rows of cane from dawn until dark. On the tenth evening, Onias failed to appear at the slave muster.

  Bartolomeu Rodrigues considered the old slave’s behavior an unforgivable provocation. Graciliano reminded his father that he had warned him that the old goat was stubborn and troublesome. The senhor was now very sympathetic toward Graciliano, and told him to pursue Onias a second time and trap him before he reached Rosário or another sanctuary.

  Before the slave hunters could set out, however, Onias and the missing cart were found in a cane field of Santo Tomás.

  After ten days, Onias had lost heart. He had led the oxen into a thick stand of cane, where he had unhitched the beasts and left them to browse among the lush leaves. Then he had sought to end his life in a way known to the ’Ngola of Africa: Sinking to his knees, he had consumed great mouthfuls of rich red soil. A young slave couple seeking privacy for a love tryst had found him unconscious but still alive.

  Graciliano took charge of the treatment of Onias, who was forcibly administered a powerful emetic concocted from a Tupi recipe. After three days he recovered.

  Onias was led to the blacksmith. Here Onias was fitted with a contraption to prevent him from eating dirt: an iron mask that had apertures for his eyes and nose but not his mouth.

  When Onias was locked into the mask, Graciliano ordered him to proceed to the mill to work at clearing the cane trash. “Show us you can be trusted not to harm yourself and the mask will be removed,” Graciliano said.

  During the first week of January 1756, Bartolomeu Rodrigues received a message from Joaquim Costa Santos, one of three independent cane growers in the second valley controlled by the Cavalcantis.

  “Senhor Costa Santos asks that we prepare for thirty tarefas. Go and inspect his fields, Paulo. See if his canes stand as high as his hopes for riches.” A tarefa was the quantity of cane milled at the engenho in a day.

  If Bartolomeu Rodrigues was the equivalent of a lord of the manor, then Joaquim Costa Santos was a squire: He owned eighty acres of land purchased from the Cavalcantis, twenty-four slaves, forty oxen, eight carts, and a seven-room house. Joaquim Costa Santos’s cane was, in theory, “free” — he was under no obligation to send his carts to Santo Tomás — but the Cavalcanti engenho was the only mill serving these two valleys, and fifty percent of the sugar produced from the Costa Santos harvest went to the senhor de engenho.

  At Santo Tomás, since the days of its founder, Nicolau Cavalcanti, senhores de engenho had regarded the cane growers, the lavradores de cana, as retainers who owed not only sugarcane but also allegiance. Today, except for the three independent growers, the lavradores were all tenants or sharecroppers.

  At one time, however, there had been nine independent growers in these two valleys, an enterprising middle class between the senhor de engenho and his tenants. The drop in the price paid for Pernambucan sugar after the plantations in the Antilles began to prosper had thinned the ranks of the independent growers. But an even worse calamity for them, and for all who lived in the settled areas of Brazil, had been the discovery of gold.

  Until men like Olímpio Ramalho da Silva found the treasures of Minas Gerais, the settlement of Brazil had been slow but orderly, and concentrated around the capital, Salvador, at the Bahia, and at towns like Recife and Rio de Janeiro. The bandeirantes of São Paulo, the vaqueiros, and the missionaries had moved into the sertão, but most settlers had remained in the districts along the littoral.

  But, in 1693, when gold was seen glittering in the streams of Minas Gerais, many colonists were swept up in the rush to the diggings, a chaotic dispersal over the massifs of the Serra do Mar and south through the sertão.

  At Santo Tomás, of nine independent lavradores de cana before the turn of the century, six had lost their lands — three abandoning them to go to the mines; three bankrupted by the low sugar prices and the exorbitant cost of slaves. These lands had been bought back by the Cavalcantis.

  Joaquim Costa Santos was the third generation of his family to supply cane to the Cavalcanti engenho. He was forty-one, a small, energetic man with shiny black hair and a thin face divided by a long, sloping nose. Joaquim had married a senhor de engenho’s daughter, Isabel Teixeira, a dark-eyed and attractive woman from a plantation north of Olinda. There were five children, three sons and two daughters.

  Joaquim had not expected the senhor de engenho’s son himself to come in response to his request for a schedule for grinding his cane, and when Paulo Cavalcanti rode to the Costa Santos lands that January day in 1756, Joaquim and his sons were away.

  His wife and a daughter, Ana, were ill from eating unripe fruit. The older girl, Luciana, did not like wild figs, and she was there to greet Paulo.

  “My father will be back in the morning,” she said. Already early afternoon, it was a four-hour ride back to the engenho. “Senhor, will you stay the night?” She kept her hands clasped together tightly, at arm’s length in front of her. She wore a plain dress, light blue and dainty, with a wide frilled neckline, small white shoes, and white ribbons in her hair.

  “Yes,” Paulo said. “I’ll stay.”

  Luciana Costa Santos was fifteen, of medium height, her figure not yet fully formed. Her face was gentle, with soft, rosy cheeks and a small, well-defined mouth. Her eyes were brown and calm, and there was a reddish tinge to her dark hair, which was pulled back from her forehead.

  Isabel Costa Santos called out then, from a bedroom behind th
e reception area. Luciana excused herself and went to her mother. She was back within a few minutes, offering her mother’s apologies for not receiving their guest. “I have food prepared,” she said. “May I serve you, senhor?”

  As the two household slaves among the twenty-four the Costa Santoses owned were also ill from eating the unripe figs, Luciana brought a plate of food, and Paulo sat down at the trestled table. Luciana was shy and embarrassed in his presence. He tried to engage her in conversation, but she responded very little and stood a few feet away from the table, her hands again clasped together in front of her. After a few minutes, she excused herself and fled to the kitchen. After he finished eating and got up to go to the cane fields, she appeared in the doorway.

  He praised the food, and then remarked, “Padre Eugênio comes here every week?”

  “Yes, senhor. He’s a wonderful teacher!”

  “Your brothers like him, then?”

  “And me, too, senhor,” She looked down at the table. “The neighbors laughed at my father when he let me take lessons from the padre. They say a girl needs to know no more than what she can learn from her mother.” She looked up then and their eyes met, but, embarrassed, she quickly looked away.

  Paulo laughed softly. “Oh, Luciana Costa Santos, I don’t think Padre Eugênio’s efforts will be wasted on you.”

  The blood rushed to her cheeks. “Thank you, senhor,” she said. And she backed off into the kitchen.

  Paulo found Costa Santos’s foreman and went to the fields with him. The lavrador had not exaggerated: His harvest was likely to exceed the thirty tarefas he had estimated. Each tarefa crushed at the water-driven Cavalcanti mill corresponded to forty carts of cane.

  As Paulo rode or walked beside the foreman, a tall, loquacious man from the Azores, his thoughts drifted to Luciana Costa Santos. He saw her face, her eyes, her inviting mouth. He recalled the shyness, daintiness, the awkwardness of the girl. The foreman spoke of the merits of different species of cane, and Paulo responded appropriately, but he kept thinking of Luciana.