And the senhor dispatched two trusted men to find the couple, with this message: “Tell my son he’ll be forgiven if he rides back immediately with the vaqueiro’s daughter.”
The men returned three days later, with Bartolomeu Rodrigues’s youngest son, Geraldo, who now permanently resided in the Cavalcantis’ house at Olinda.
“I thought the girl was a servant, but Graciliano brought the caboclo into our salon,” Geraldo told his father. “He laughed at me when I objected. Oh, Father, so help me, I begged him to realize the offense this would give the senhor, but Graciliano ignored me.”
Bartolomeu Rodrigues made another attempt to solve the crisis peacefully. “Go to Graciliano, Padre Eugênio. He’s headstrong, but surely he won’t ignore an appeal from you. Tell him of the shame he brings to my house. And tell him of his mother’s sorrow.”
At Olinda, Eugênio Viana met only stubborn resistance from Graciliano. “My brother Paulo and Luciana Costa Santos fill the senhor with pride — the heir of Santo Tomás and his princess! Always I’m reminded of the honor Paulo brings to the name ‘Cavalcanti.’ I’m not a child, Padre. Yes, I may later beg my father’s mercy, but I will not give up this girl now.”
Viana asked to see Januária. A slave woman who served at the Olinda house had been sent to buy a dress for her; pale green with red trimmings, it was tight-fitting and emphasized her full bosom. She had been given shoes, too, but they pinched her broad feet and she had discarded them. She stood in front of Graciliano and the padre, one hand over her mouth, the other fiddling with the trimming on the side of her dress.
“Ribeiro Adorno is waiting at the engenho,” Viana said. “He will not return to the fazenda without his daughter.”
Januária took her hand away from her mouth and dropped it to her side; her brow creased deeply. She shook her head.
“You belong there, Januária,” the padre said.
“Senhor Graciliano has told me that I must stay, Padre.” She bared her large white teeth in a smile and raised her dark eyes to look up at Graciliano. “I won’t go back.”
When Padre Viana returned alone to the engenho, Bartolomeu Rodrigues listened calmly to his report, and thanked Viana for trying to reason with his son. But within six hours of dismissing the padre, Cavalcanti was on his way to Olinda, with Ribeiro Adorno and six men from the engenho. The senhor rode up front, straight-backed in his saddle, his narrow shoulders erect, his expression impassive. Paulo and Geraldo had asked to go with Bartolomeu Rodrigues but been refused. “I don’t want you there,” he told them brusquely. “I go to perform a father’s duty, as sad as it may be.”
The ground floor of the Olinda town house, a former silversmith’s works, was now a storeroom. A narrow staircase gave access to the living quarters on the second floor. The senhor told Ribeiro Adorno and the others to wait below, and quietly ascended the stairs to the salon.
Graciliano and Januária were on a sofa, with their backs to the stairwell, and they did not hear Bartolomeu Rodrigues approach.
“Graciliano!”
The young Cavalcanti leapt to his feet.
His father jerked his head in Januária’s direction. “Leave the room, girl.”
She looked nervously at Graciliano.
“Go to the kitchen.” Graciliano grabbed her arm as she stood up and pushed her toward a passage that led to the rear of the house.
“For the love of God, Graciliano Cavalcanti, what possessed you?”
“I intended no disrespect toward the senhor,” Graciliano said weakly.
“No disrespect? At Santo Tomás, they’re laughing behind my back — ‘Senhor Bartolomeu Rodrigues’s son and the vaqueiro’s caboclo fled to their love nest at Olinda!’ Here, Graciliano, in my own house, with this bitch of the sertão. Why, my son? Why?”
Graciliano frowned. “I don’t understand, senhor . . .”
“What? What’s difficult to comprehend?”
“Many others have their slave women and their brown mistresses.”
“And leave behind mulattoes, mamelucos, caboclos to inherit the conquests won with the noble blood of Portugal!”
“Father, they helped with the conquest. Eugênio Viana reminds us of this, does he not? The peças and caboclos who fought alongside Fernão Cavalcanti and others?”
“God rest our hero’s soul!” Bartolomeu Rodrigues said fervently. “Dom Fernão will cry out in heaven this day at the sight of this caboclo and you.” His voice rose. “The girl goes back with Ribeiro Adorno, Graciliano. Now! ”
Graciliano shook his head slowly.
The senhor swung toward the stairwell. “Ribeiro Adorno!” he called. “Your daughter waits for you!”
Graciliano glared at him contemptuously. “Show us, Ribeiro Adorno, the ring the old man Fructuoso gave you!”
Ribeiro Adorno looked puzzled. “Senhor?”
“In exchange for Januária,” Graciliano said coldly.
A flush suffused the vaqueiro’s face. “Fructuoso was a good man.”
“And I’m not?”
“This is not the fazenda, Senhor Graciliano.”
“Take the girl away from my house, Ribeiro Adorno,” Bartolomeu Rodrigues said gruffly.
As the vaqueiro stepped nervously past him, Graciliano said, “Ask your daughter if she wants to return to the sertão. Ask her, vaqueiro, if she prefers to stay with her lover, Graciliano Cavalcanti!”
“Mother of God! ” Bartolomeu Rodrigues cried. “O, Jesus, forgive this insolence!”
But the devil was with Graciliano now, and he burst into laughter.
Trembling, Bartolomeu Rodrigues moved to the railing of the stairs and, in a quavering voice, shouted a command that brought four of the men from the engenho storming up the stairs.
Graciliano gaped disbelievingly at his father. “Father, what —”
Before Graciliano could resist, the men dragged him down the steps and pushed him into the open storage area, where two others waited. For twenty minutes they thrashed Graciliano, until he lay senseless at their feet. Earlier, the senhor de engenho had warned them that this punishment might be necessary to remind a son to honor and obey his father.
They carried Graciliano back to Santo Tomás that night, with Bartolomeu Rodrigues riding up front on the cart bearing his son. For two weeks, Graciliano stayed in bed in the Casa Grande, rejecting the sympathy of Eugênio Viana, Paulo, and others who visited him. Early in the third week, he disappeared with two horses and a mule, making for the Fazenda da Jurema, to which Ribeiro Adorno and his daughter had returned.
Senhor Bartolomeu Rodrigues’s first reaction was to go to the chapel to pray for guidance. He considered leading a troop of men to bring Graciliano home again, but as he knelt before the Santo Tomás, he changed his mind. “No blood,” he promised the saint. “Let my son’s exile in that wilderness be a punishment, until a day he looks the bitch of the sertão in the eye and realizes his terrible mistake.”
Graciliano did not return. When Jacinto Ribeiro Adorno, driving cattle to the coast, called at Santo Tomás in May 1759, sixteen months later, the vaqueiro’s son spoke enthusiastically about Graciliano Cavalcanti’s ability to ride, work cattle, and hunt. Graciliano’s forays at night through the streets of Recife had been replaced by a more dangerous pursuit: With the vaqueiro’s guiada, which he had adapted for close combat with the ferocious animals, he went into the caatinga to hunt jaguars. On one night alone he had single-handedly slain three of the beasts, said Jacinto, who did not conceal his admiration for Graciliano.
Jacinto had been warned by his father to say nothing about Januária, but another vaqueiro had told Senhor Bartolomeu Rodrigues that Graciliano and the caboclo had been blessed with a son in October 1758. The senhor’s acute disappointment was alleviated by his joy at the birth of Paulo and Luciana’s first child, a daughter, born two months before Graciliano’s bastard.
The senhor de engenho had increasingly given Paulo control of the plantation, and his heir’s ability impressed him, though oc
casionally when he listened to Paulo and Eugênio Viana philosophizing about the rights and duties all men shared, he felt that Paulo was overly concerned with these impractical debates. But he kept silent about his misgivings, for he was confident that when the time came, Paulo would be a strong and just master of Santo Tomás.
During the first half of 1759, Bartolomeu Rodrigues heard many conversations between Paulo and Viana on a topic of deep concern to them and one he himself found perplexing: the problems of the Jesuits. Bartolomeu Rodrigues had long been a friend of the black robes, not only the padres at the aldeia of Nossa Senhora do Rosário, but also those at the colégios in Olinda and Recife. Ever since the uprising of the Guarani in the south, however, the charges against the Jesuits had mounted, until the black robes stood accused of complicity in crimes so heinous that Bartolomeu Rodrigues feared there must be some truth to the reports that this holy brigade had mutinied against God.
In Lisbon, the king’s chief minister, Sebastião Jose Carvalho e Melo, had provoked the king, Dom José I, into throwing the Jesuit confessors and tutors to the royal family out of his court. The minister had convinced Dom José that the Jesuits had been responsible for the Guarani uprising, and he had supplied the king with reports from his brother, Mendonça Furtado, who had described the exploitation of the king’s native subjects in Maranhão and Grão Pará.
In April 1758, Carvalho e Melo’s ambassadors at the Vatican had persuaded Benedict XIV to grant a brief appointing the patriarch of Lisbon to investigate the affairs of the Jesuits. The patriarch, Francisco Saldanha, was an ally of Carvalho e Melo’s, and within two weeks he had forbidden all commerce of the black robes in Portugal. Two months later, the patriarch had removed the Jesuits’ right to hear confessions or to preach to the citizens of Lisbon.
Then, in Lisbon, on the night of September 3, 1758, at 11:30 under a new moon, masked assassins had ambushed Dom José and a companion, Pedro Teixeira, on their way back to the palace at Belém. The musket shots had blasted through the thin panels of the chaise, striking the king in the shoulder and arm. Teixeira was unhurt.
Carvalho e Melo had urged that the attempted regicide be kept secret. The first official notice of the attempt on Dom José’s life had been given to his subjects three months later. Among the plotters incarcerated were members of two of Portugal’s most illustrious families: The marchioness of Távora, a favorite at the court of Dom João V, and the duke of Aveiro, hereditary grand marshal of the royal household, were incriminated by letters they had written to relatives in which they revealed the attempted assassination and made further threats against the king.
But Carvalho e Melo’s satisfaction over the arrest of these fidalgos was as nothing compared with his sense of triumph at the capture of Gabriel Malagrida and twelve other Jesuits. Malagrida’s zeal for prophecy had been his undoing: A letter had been found in which he warned of dark days ahead for José I if His Majesty failed to halt the persecutions of the Society of Jesus.
“Saúva! Saúva! Saúva!” Padre Leandro Taques cried out at Nossa Senhora do Rosário on a day in September 1759. His cassock swung wildly as he raised one foot high and then slammed it down on the earth.
Paulo Cavalcanti observed Padre Leandro’s agitation as the black robe moved in small circles between rows of manioc plants, his head bent toward the ground.
“Saúva! O rei do Pernambuco!” Padre Leandro’s furious movements as he stamped the soil, belied his seventy years. “Saúva! O rei do Pernambuco,” he shouted.
Saúva, the leaf-cutter ant: truly the king of Brazil! Columns of these insects had invaded this clearing near the mission church, but it was not the destruction of the manioc plants that infuriated Padre Leandro: The manioc was there to provide shade for four rows of small coffee trees that he had planted in this field a few months ago, the first attempt to grow the crop in Pernambuco.
At Belém do Pará coffee had been introduced from the French colony of Cayenne, where the governor had been under strict orders not to permit a single seed to be taken out of the colony, which bordered the northern territory of Maranhao and Grão Pará. In 1727 a Portuguese officer, Francisco Palheta, had been sent to Cayenne to negotiate a border delimitation; the story told at Belém do Pará was that the handsome Palheta had so charmed Madame Claude d’Orvilliers, the governor’s wife, in parting she dropped a handful of seeds into Palheta’s pocket.
Within seven years back at Belém do Pará, Palheta had grown more than a thousand coffee trees and was appealing to Lisbon for permission to obtain slaves for his enterprise. By the time Leandro Taques had sent for his seeds, coffee-growing at Pará was a promising venture that saw tons of coffee exported to Lisbon annually.
Padre Leandro stopped his assault on the ants and walked over to Paulo. “My poor little trees. Every foot of bushes ravaged!” Three or four coffee seedlings were planted in one hole, this cluster called a pé, a foot of bushes, which formed the base of the tree. “In one year, blossoms; in three, they should be tall and carrying the first berries. Picked and dried in the sun. Shelled and sorted. Coffee!” Padre Leandro shook his head. “Now what can I hope for?”
“They may recover.”
“Perhaps.” The right side of Padre Leandro’s pockmarked face twitched. “Perhaps I concern myself unnecessarily, Paulo, and I will be gone from Rosário long before the first blossoms.”
Paulo, walking silently beside Taques, frowned.
“I pray I can continue my work here, but I don’t know. Some days I stand on the steps of the church and look toward the road from Recife, expecting to see a messenger come riding in with the order that Salvador de Meireles and I abandon Rosário.”
An hour after Paulo and Leandro Taques had examined the damage to the coffee trees, they were sitting with Salvador de Meireles in the front room of the padres’ house. Paulo was at Rosário to arrange for the processing of hides from Fazenda da Jurema at the aldeia’s leatherworks, but most of the conversation this day concerned the difficulties facing the Society of Jesus.
There were compelling reasons for Padre Leandro’s fear that he might soon be ordered to leave Rosário. By this time, September 1759, the Jesuit province of Maranhão and Grão Pará, where Padre Leandro had labored among the Tapajós for more than thirty years, was all but extinguished. The voluminous propaganda of Mendonça Furtado had resulted in the expulsion of the Jesuits from the aldeias along the Rio das Amazonas and its tributaries, and in the confiscation of their cattle ranches on the Isle of Marajó at the mouth of the great river.
The regulations removing the black robes’ temporal power over their converts in the aldeias along the Rio das Amazonas, and providing for the appointment of civilian directors at the missions, had been extended to Brazil in May 1758. But Rosário and many other aldeias remained in the control of the Jesuits, because the governors of the captaincies were having difficulty finding directors with the integrity and virtues needed to carry out Minister Carvalho e Melo’s plan to integrate the natives into Portuguese society.
“When did the fathers of the Society have anything less in mind?” Padre Leandro asked. “Of course, it will be wrong for us to deny the charge that we exercised temporal control over the aldeias in a manner far exceeding our priestly roles. To save the savage! God knows how many more would have been slain or enslaved if we had failed to isolate and protect them at the aldeias!”
He rubbed the side of his face. “Our critics omit nothing from their litany: We foster a rude and savage condition; we teach the Tupi-Guarani lingua geral to keep our converts ignorant; we confine them to our aldeias to deprive them of civilization. Even the gowns that cover their nakedness are cited as an example of Jesuit mistreatment in supplying only the meanest raiment. But what else is there to give them, when our king forbids the making of any cloth but the coarsest weave for the loins of slaves?”
Paulo nodded in agreement. The laws banning manufactories in Brazil were explicit, and the king’s officials vigilant against illegal products injurious
to Portugal’s exports to the colony or to the monopolies exercised by contract with the king.
“There have been bitter controversies before,” Paulo said, “but they’ve been resolved.”
Salvador de Meireles nodded energetically. “At São Paulo and Santos, the Jesuits were banished. Your own province in the north, Leandro, has twice before been threatened with extinction. In the Lord’s good time, the agitators were calmed.”
“My Tapajós stood on the banks of the Rio das Amazonas and wept when I left,” Padre Leandro said. “‘Courage, my children, courage! Padre Leandro will return!’ I called to them.” He shook his head. “Never.” The others did not speak. “Oh, God, how I fear the same will happen here at Rosário.”
Leandro Taques’s pessimism was fully justified.
At this moment, a ship from Lisbon was at sea with orders for the viceroy and the governors of the captaincies of Brazil. On September 3, 1759, the anniversary of the attempt on his life, His Most Faithful Majesty Dom José I had issued a royal edict against the Society of Jesus:
These religious being corrupt and deplorably remiss in their holy
institute, and incapable of any reform, must be properly and effectually banished,
denaturalized, proscribed and expelled from all His Majesty’s domains as
notorious rebels, traitors, adversaries and aggressors of His Royal person and
realm, as well as for the peace and common good of his subjects.
Padre Leandro stood outside the house near the church, watching impassively as Salvador de Meireles supervised a group of natives carrying their belongings to a cart. From time to time, Padre Salvador glanced anxiously in his direction, but Padre Leandro did not respond.
It was December 23, 1759. A week ago, a messenger from the superior at Recife had brought the order that the two priests leave Rosário in compliance with the royal edict. Forbidden to say Mass or to instruct the children at the aldeias and colégios, the 629 Jesuits of Portuguese America were to be confined in the colégios until ships were found to carry them away from the captaincies, first to Lisbon and then to exile in the Papal States.
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