CHAPTER 8
Remarkable Stories: Where Their Roads Led
Truth and lies are faced alike; their port, taste, and proceedings are the same, and we look upon them with the same eye.
—Montaigne, Essais (book 3, chap. 11, “Of Cripples”)
Historians are more interested in testimonies than in witnesses from witchcraft trials, and they thus deprive themselves of one of the phenomenon’s social dimensions.
—Robert Muchembled, “Sorcières du Cambrésis”
Maria Barbosa, Manuel João, Luzia da Silva Soares, Luzia Pinta, Salvador Carvalho Serra, and Adrião Pereira de Faria would never be remembered at the dawn of this third millennium had they escaped the clutches of the Inquisition. The first woman was poor and of ill repute, while the other two were black slaves; one of the men was a barber, another a carpenter, and the third—a bit more fortunate—a militia sergeant in Vila da Vigia. Their relations with the powers-that-be were defined by submission: it would appear that Maria Barbosa performed sexual favors for governor Diogo de Menezes, and Luzia da Silva Soares was slave to a man who owned tracts of land rich in gold. No matter how poorly he may have governed, Diogo de Menezes—like his enemy Dom Constantino Barradas, bishop of Brazil—would have gone down in history, if only as a name on a long roster of colonial administrators. But what record might have been left of Maria Barbosa?
Even when society’s subaltern classes are not ignored by historians, they seem condemned to silence. Yet there are times when sources allow us to reconstruct “not only indistinct masses but also individual personalities”; when—to borrow Carlo Ginzburg’s formulation—it becomes possible to make out faces in the crowd, to “extend the historical concept of ‘individual’ in the direction of the lower classes.” This is indeed an innovative approach: lending identity to the anonymous and affording them the same treatment granted only to members of the ruling classes until a very short while ago.
Such an exercise, however, must be wary of the risks of becoming paternalistic or anecdotal. The “history of the vanquished”—to use an expression very much in fashion—is not justified merely by the qualifier but rather by the noun: it is history, and for this reason deserving of our attention. Correspondingly, a given individual biography is placed in the limelight not to survey facts but to probe within them for the microcosm that reveals an entire social stratum. That these are nearly anonymous biographies, at first glance merely average and unimportant, is precisely what makes them so representative.1
The remarkable stories of these obscure colonists reveal the relationship between metropolis and colony, power apparatuses and individuals, elite culture and popular culture, the real and the imaginary. Knowing their stories helps us better understand what the colony’s social formation was all about. It also helps us remember that beneath the single face of Clio lies a hidden mosaic of individual adventures, which may be recovered. Finally, this knowledge is paramount to maintaining our ability to feel dismayed and outraged in the face of iniquity.
Maria Barbosa
Maria Barbosa was a parda from Évora, where she had married the goldsmith João da Cruz.2 According to the witnesses who accused her, in her native land she had been condemned as a sorceress and encarochada. Her sentence must have been banishment to Angola, where she met another parda, Marta Fernandes. While in Africa, “in an earthen basin [she] showed the wife of the governor [illegible] da Silveira Pereira tilling with a plow, sewing dressed in green.” Back then she used to wear the bone of a hanged man about her neck. In other words, she had not given up her habits, and she was publicly flogged as a sorceress and procuress. She then went to Pernambuco, where again “they were about to make her wear a witch’s hat, but out of respect for her husband, they did not.” “She traveled about many parts of the world since they sent her away from every place that she went, from Pernambuco as well as from Rio Grande, and from the island of Fernão de Noronha, and from Angola, and from the town of Évora.” “Never was she in a land where she did not follow the wicked path,” always resuming her sorcery. In 1610 she had been in Bahia for some time. That year Bishop Dom Constantino Barradas led a Visit to the city and forwarded his findings to the Kingdom.3 Among those accused was Maria Barbosa.
Numerous witnesses had denounced her. “Maria Barbosa leads a most wicked life, and is a poor example, harmful to other people, debauched, and in the habit of cursing many serious curses, . . . much more than any other woman,” stated the local authorities, intent on cleansing the social body of the pernicious fellowship of the sorceress and on punishing this lost sheep. “She does not attend mass, nor listen to preaching; nor is she willing to abjure her sins,” but works on Sundays and on saints’ days. They emphasized that she was a troublesome citizen and poor Christian and then went on to a detailed list of her offenses, which were simultaneously cause and consequence of her marginalized social position. “Being married, she is mistress to many men” (which was tantamount to saying she was a prostitute); “she is a sorceress and procuress, and for so being she has already been encarochada and banished to the island of Fernão de Noronha and other parts.”
In the stereotype, sorceress and prostitute were inseparable. At the same time that the defendant’s acts of sorcery were described, her acts of indecency were enumerated: she turned her home into a bawdyhouse; procured women for men; spent the whole night with them, eating, drinking, and offending God. She dishonored her husband, “calling him a cuckold, and making him stay at the foot of the cot, and sleeping with men in front of him,” saying that “she wants to sleep with whomever she so desires.” “With her fingers she makes horn-like gestures on his head,” threatening to strangle him to death. She kicked her spouse out so she could live “more at her will” and surrender herself to a series of romantic adventures. “Most of the time, the said Maria Barbosa was someone’s paramour, and destroyed many men.” Apparently resigned to his situation, her husband lived under her yoke: although he was “[f]ormerly a goldsmith, now his wife has made him a fish buyer, and sends him to Tapagipe, where he stays the entire week, and from there he sends her fish.” He occasionally would complain to his neighbors that “his wife [did] not want to join him in bed.” Sometimes he went about “as if witless,” while Maria Barbosa paid him little heed and called him a “royal parrot.” According to one of the witnesses, “she pays him no more mind than if he were her Negro.”
Prostitute and sorceress, Maria Barbosa posed a threat to the community by her mere existence and also by the example she set. People believed that women like her worked to win over followers. She sometimes put up other women in her house, as she once did with an ugly, cross-eyed woman that “they also say is a sorceress.” But the disciple whose name appeared most often in the accusations was Isabel Roiz, a “fine-looking young woman.” Like the colonial Celestina, Isabel preferred to live by herself and had already been initiated into the secrets of Eros. After being widowed, she and her elderly mother came from Cape Verde and went straight to live in the procuress’s house.
As soon as it became public knowledge that Isabel was living at Maria Barbosa’s, the keepers of the faith and guardians of good morals made it their job to rescue the new arrival from the clutches of the veteran sorceress. Francisco Pereira and Francisco Soares, both brothers of the Casa de Misericórdia (Almshouse), went to Barbosa’s to get the novice, “for they said that it was dangerous in her house.” But Barbosa also demonstrated ascendancy over her female disciple. She called her aside “and he, the Witness, does not know what she said, but he knows because he was present that the young woman disappeared behind some straw mats after the said Barbosa spoke to her, and now at present it is rumored that she keeps her at her house and that she gives her out.”
Isabel’s mentor often took her to the homes of male clients. Her elderly mother was scandalized: “She saw some things that seemed very wicked, as when the said Maria Barbosa adorned her daughter with tails in her hair, something she never wore, and put paint on her cheeks.” Her protests were useless, for “the said Barbosa would respond that she had to adorn her.” Isabel would receive gold earrings from the men who sought her favors. Her mentor would applaud and tell her that “the men of Brazil gave much.” Fearful that her daughter would catch a venereal disease, Isabel’s disconsolate mother would protest, claiming that Barbosa “would cover her daughter with lesions.”
The Visitation of the bishop ruled that Maria Barbosa should pay public penance and be banished for two years to Brazil’s southern captaincies. She was accused of being “notoriously the most harmful and scandalous woman to be found in these parts, where there are many wicked ones.” But Barbosa had famous friends. One who protected her was Governor Dom Diogo de Menezes; he spoke “with her publicly at the window” and kept her in hiding for a while. Furious, the archbishop of Brazil excommunicated her, resorted to his prerogatives as a Visitor for the Holy Office, and only calmed down when he had managed to get Barbosa thrown in jail and have her offenses sent to the Inquisition in Lisbon. It was 1611.
Maria Barbosa gained renown among the other prisoners for her spells using herbal powders, which she used to bind the heart of one of her lovers (Diogo Castanho). She bragged that she knew many spells and magical prayers, one of which invoked a curious “sea devil.” She had ties with an African sorcerer who would go to the jail in person with the herbs Maria needed for her sorcery. She handed out recipes for spells, was debauched in her speech, did not hide her knowledge of witchcraft, and boasted that she was powerful enough to “bring the devil into jail to remove her from it.” In their description of Barbosa’s behavior, her cellmates reinforced the image of sorceress, procuress, and prostitute that the community had already constructed around her. This collective construction is evident in her trial records, which constantly highlight one or another of the three inseparable facets. One series of witnesses stresses her whorish traits, while the next group lists her characteristics of a procuress who leads young girls astray, and yet another recounts behavior that reminds us of a loathsome, menacing witch.
In 1613 the trial records referred to Barbosa as a “defendant imprisoned by the Holy Office.” Archbishop Dom Constantino’s fury had found echoes in the inquisitorial “zeal,” and the reexamination of witnesses commenced. This time around, they were unanimous in emphasizing her traits as a sorceress, and her spells and witcheries began weighing more heavily than the practice of prostitution. But in order to judge her a sorceress, it had first been necessary to blaze the incriminating trail that made Maria Barbosa into an “easy woman.”
Barbosa’s journey to Lisbon was one of many adventures. Her ship fell into the hands of pirates at the latitude of the Cape of Espichel, and the unlucky woman was first taken captive and then abandoned in Gibraltar. She reached Lisbon on her own and along the way was aided by the Casa de Misericórdia, curiously enough the same institution up in arms against her in Bahia some years earlier. Half-naked, she asked the inquisitors to “favor her with a cloak with which to cover herself, inasmuch as she was an honest woman.” Finally, in 1614, in accordance with an elliptical verdict that emphasized solely that she had been excommunicated for a long time and had not lived as a good Christian, she was ordered to appear in person at a public auto-da-fé “with a lighted candle in her hand” and to abjure de levi. The ruling also prohibited her from returning to Bahia, thus guarding against the “scandal” she caused in the community, based on her three-pronged guilt as sorceress, procuress, and prostitute.
Manuel João
When he left his native Maranhão and journeyed to Belém, the young Manuel João was just learning the barber trade.4 He went to the new city in the company of two retired ensigns and his uncle, a Mercedarian friar by the name of Manuel. He stayed a while with one of his traveling companions and then left for the farm of his grandfather, Manuel Fernandes Soródio. This was the first time that Soródio had heard of his grandson, introduced to him by his son the friar. Even much later, Manuel Soródio did not want to accept Manuel João as his descendant. Despite the cleric’s confirmation, the grandfather “did not recognize him as such” but did agree to take “him into his house with this title.”
Right from the start, Manuel João was an outsider in the family circle. His father, Francisco João, was a blacksmith from Loures, Portugal; his mother, a Luso-Brazilian born in São Luís, was the daughter of Manuel Soródio. Considering the grandfather’s reservations, it would appear that Manuel João had been born out of wedlock. Manuel Soródio did not know the boy and perhaps knew nothing of his own daughter’s whereabouts, her relationship with any man, and most certainly nothing of the fruit of this union. The young barber was then just sixteen, and the year 1668 was dawning. He had been in Belém only three months, and already there were signs he had brought strife and conflict with him. He made friends with his aunt Guiomar Serodia (a year younger than he was), who was irked over a quarrel with her father. She taught Manuel João a recipe for living in constant harmony with Soródio: to sit across from him at meals and send him figas [gestures to ward off the evil eye] under the table. Despite their bond of friendship, years later the aunt would testify against her nephew, likewise expressing doubt about their alleged family ties: he “called her aunt, but she did not know if he was [her nephew].”
About six months after arriving in Pará, Manuel João saw his reputation besmirched by the people of Belém. More than thirty witnesses testified against him before the ouvidor, accusing him of being a superstitious sorcerer who invoked the devil with words that “greatly offended Christian ears.” They were unanimous in blaming him for the specters that had vexed the residents in his grandfather’s house ever since his arrival. In an attempt to put an end to the disorder reigning in his home, the grandfather sent his grandson and other relatives and dependents to Nossa Senhora das Mercês Convent, hopeful that the church could settle the problem through exorcism. But “much as the said clergy investigated, they could not discover anything, nor cure the evils that they suffered.” Still, suspicions of a demonic pact hung in the air. Bringing pressure to bear on the lad, the priest discovered a written paper containing strange paintings and the names of what were supposedly two devils: Sorro and Oroto.
In May 1668 the ouvidor had the boy arrested. They described him then as “a beardless young man, with sparse hair, said to be 17 years of age, and dressed in black cotton breeches and a black gaberdine, with clogs.” The bailiff seized a mandinga pouch that Manuel wore about his neck, containing the usual: a paper with prayers on it, strange drawings, twigs of rue, broken bits of an Agnus Dei, a bone that appeared to be from a fresh corpse. When questioned, the young barber began to recount his version of the events at his grandfather’s house.
While he did not deny the truth of a number of extraordinary facts, Manuel João believed that many of the testimonies against him were based on hatred sown by his uncle Gaspar Baleeiro. He said that shortly after his arrival, he had taken a liking to an Indian woman named Isabel, a slave in his grandfather’s house. The romance infuriated his uncle, perhaps because he too was fond of the young woman and therefore jealous. With the backing of Manuel Soródio, the uncle broke Manuel João’s arm, cut off his hair, humiliated him. A deposition by the retired captain Mateus de Carvalho confirmed the boy’s mistreatment, even justifying the subsequent sorceries and saying that Manuel had resorted to them, “offended by the blows his uncle Gaspar Baleeiro had given him.”
The first of a series of amazing events had involved a fishing expedition. “A Negro by the name of Carlos had gone fishing, and had thrown his spear at a manatee, and had not pierced it, and the manatee had escaped from his sight without his being able to reach it.” When they had told another black man, Dionísio, what had happened, he “had jeered at this and had gone fishing another day, and at the river he said he was going to swim underwater to the other bank, and after he dived under, . . . some unknown thing had taken hold of his feet on the river bottom; and with chills and trembling he had returned home, where he had remained some days in a fright.”
The second extraordinary fact occurred after the burning of some haunted houses where “black shadows” were tormenting people. Gaspar Baleeiro had ordered his nephew and a black man to raze the structures, and he went along with them. On the way back home, Manuel João started to feel that “someone was striking blows against his legs, without seeing who was doing it,” and he fell on the ground. That night a huge beetle appeared to him, passing over his head and going into “a corner from whence it told him that he should order them immediately to cover the rooftops they had burned, or otherwise it would not leave him alone.”
Following the manatee and then the beetle, the devil’s third appearance was “in the form and figure of St. Michael the Angel” but with very black feet in shackles. He ordered the barber to pray three chaplets and fast two Fridays and two Saturdays. He also taught him some inverted Hail Marys, where instead of “children of God” he should say “we are” and instead of “children of Eve” he should say “we shall be.” Finally, “Amen, Jesus” should be omitted from the prayer. The young man taught this to his aunts, who also fasted and followed the angel’s orders. The vision appeared quite often and said they should give him a something written with their blood if they wanted to know what those prayers were for. Manuel João refused, but he “then understood that the vision was the devil.” The figure next began appearing to other people in Manuel Soródio’s house, teaching ballads and practices. This is when Manuel João’s alarmed grandfather decided to ask the Mercedarians to perform exorcisms.
Despite his confession, the barber was taken away to the fort of Belém and kept prisoner there while a good share of the community testified against him before the ouvidor. Some witnesses made clear that they felt a mixture of repugnance and attraction to the young man. One Dona Inácia told how she had met him at the home of Dona Maria Medina, a relative of Manuel Soródio’s, with whom Manuel João had stayed during the exorcisms. The friend had told Dona Inácia about these specters and Manuel João’s purported powers, which she termed “talents.” Half-terrified, half-fascinated, Dona Inácia asked to meet him. She was surprised “to see him so young and with the reputation of having such abilities.” Responding to the women’s curiosity, the lad gave wings to his imagination, telling how he had been initiated into the secrets of sorcery by the “Pernambucana do Maranhão” [a nonsensical nickname: “the Pernambucan woman from Maranhão”] and how he had learned to harden water, move basins through the air, divine things. Introjecting the inquisitorial perspective, a scandalized Dona Inácia said that “it was not possible to do such things without superstitious words and diabolic art.”
Other witnesses provided details on the specters and the barber’s participation in them. They told how he prided himself on knowing how to conjure up demons with words, although he did not know how to make them go away. The deponents stated that “the said Manuel João was the reason the people in his house were haunted by specters, for [he is] a sorcerer and knows words that invoke the devil.” “He had the gall to fill that house with devils, but not to put them out, for he did not know how to do the opposite.” Those testifying also told how the young man would sometimes show up with hair ties around his feet, which he claimed to be the work of the Pernambucana do Maranhão, who had the ability to appear before him in the company of some Tapanhunos. On one occasion he had buried a howler monkey, saying it would be reborn. At other times, he ran about the house like an enraged madman and scaled to high places, on top of cupboards, “where he could not climb in so short time without the help or order of the devil, and seated there he laughed and threw a pillow at them.” Taunting them, he said the devil had given him the pillow.
Witnesses were heard throughout the months of May, June, and July. Meanwhile, Manuel João remained a prisoner in the fort, where he frightened the soldiers with his divinations and dubious behavior: he would go up and down stairs despite the shackles on his feet; he would dance with them on, as if free and unchained; he would unleash high winds and heavy rains. He eventually managed to escape and, according to his own deposition, “spent two or three years sleeping about in forests and villages.” He reached Maranhão with the help of the Jesuits, but he was arrested again at the order of the local ouvidor and held prisoner for another year.
In early 1672 João Álvares Correia, ouvidor and auditor-geral of the state, sent the prisoner to Lisbon, along with the Devassas listing his offenses. Although his crimes had been recorded in civil court, they were then transferred to the jurisdiction of the Holy Office. Manuel João was handed over to the boatswain of a brigantine, who ended up leaving him at the port of Angra on the Azorean island of Terceira, where he had no way of proceeding on his journey. The barber was once more put into prison, where he awaited the arrival of another brigantine to transport him to the capital of the Kingdom. On June 11, 1672, he was finally delivered to the jailer of the inquisitorial prisons, who found on him 210 réis, which were turned over to the treasurer of the Holy Office. It had been four years since his first arrest, and he no longer looked the same: “nineteen years, thereabouts, hair on his head all cut and dark brown in color, pale face, small eyes, no beard, hair on his upper lip, with the mark of a knife cut in the corner of his forehead and another knife mark on his face, both on the right half.”
Manuel João reached Lisbon already bearing the stigma of being a sorcerer. He himself admitted this: when his questioning started all over—this time by the Inquisition—“he said that while he was on his grandfather’s farm and in the town of Pará, he was taken to be a sorcerer.” The Holy Office ordered that a new inquiry be held in Belém, this time to be headed by the Ecclesiastical Court. It commenced in March 1673. Given the amount of time that had elapsed, many witnesses no longer remembered what they had declared, others had passed away, and some had gone to live in the sertão and were too far away to be interrogated. By July, from all indications, the new Devassa had reached Lisbon. Based on it and on the previous one, the Inquisition summarized the defendant’s offenses, called for his detention in its prisons, and charged him with a presumed pact, “for that which had occurred in the house [illegible] of his grandfather and uncle was not a natural thing, and it is very likely that the same demon intervened . . . in virtue of said pact, principally because he had confessed that he was the cause of it all.”5
In November 1673 the long arm of the Inquisition discovered among the residents of Lisbon two of the former witnesses who had helped build the case of sorcery against the defendant. They had been living in Belém at the time of the specters and remembered everything, attesting to how important this episode had been in the city’s everyday life. The authorities who had investigated the case and arrested the accused, as well as the deponents and participants in the events themselves, certainly constituted a significant portion of Belém do Pará’s population. By word of mouth, the story of these astonishing events went round—the visions, the aunts’ and slaves’ fainting spells, the barber’s feats, the uncle’s and the grandfather’s wrath.
When interrogated by the Holy Office, the defendant narrated in greater detail what he had felt during the appearance of the specters. “His eyes were closed and he saw nothing, however he very well heard the people who were present speak, and by their speech he knew them quite well, and he was as if outside himself, unable to rise up.” The visions came to him in shadows and “they were shapeless.” Right from the angel’s first appearance, to Manuel João he seemed “to be an evil angel, and the demon, for he was not worthy or deserving that the angel St. Michael should appear before him.”6
As always, the inquisitors endeavored to confound the defendant, hurling at him the dreadful logic of argumentation used in Holy Office interrogations. They first tried to unearth a pact, insistently asking if he had given the devil something so that he would appear, since the demon was not in the habit of doing so before Catholic people, nor was he given to harassing them with no profit in exchange. The inquisitors moved next to intimidation, asking “[i]f he knows or has heard tell that hell is the dwelling place of the demons, and that there they are suffering eternal penances to which they were condemned for their offenses?”
In November 1673 the Bill of Indictment ruled that there was presumptive evidence of a pact and underscored the defendant’s unwillingness to confess to his true offenses: “The Defendant, using poor counsel, did not wish to do so, but instead, being blind and stubborn, he denies and deceitfully conceals [his offenses], as he is a sorcerer and has a pact, dealings, and communication with the demon.” It also stressed the barber’s lack of repentance—he did not regret his friendship with the devil—and insisted that the full force of justice be brought against him.
Manuel João was assigned an attorney, which meant practically nothing within the peculiar functioning of inquisitorial trials. His lawyer’s arguments were extremely timid; he said that the defendant had always been a God-fearing man and had observed the church’s precepts. His client was aware that “the devil is a condemned thorn” and had always fled from communication with him. The lawyer vacillated: “The Defendant has provided a complete and truthful declaration of the temptations that the devil offered him, to which he did not consent; by no means did he do any one thing to which the devil persuaded him. And therefore it should not be held against him that he has declared in the same confession that he had said he gave a writing to the devil, for he said this when importuned by the one who had asked him.”
Manuel João raised doubts about some of the witnesses and called others to testify, including “Manuel Biquimão, sugar planter living in the town of Maranhão,” and “Tomás Biquimão, his brother.” On April 25, 1675, witnesses underwent a new round of questioning in the Carmo Convent, in São Luís. Manuel Beckman (the original spelling of “Biquimão”) did not show up to testify, but his brother did. He stated that he was married, a resident of São Luís, the son of Tomás Biquimão and of Leonarda das Neves. He was thirty-one years old and had met the barber when they were in prison together. It seemed to him that the lad was a fine, God-fearing person. When commenting on the reasons behind his former prison mate’s arrest, Tomás revealed the bias of a rich man who identified with the metropolitan mentality on many points: “It appeared to him that if [Manuel João] had committed some offense in the said crime, he had done so out of ignorance, for being born in the State of Maranhão and not having the experience that the children of other countries have, to know good and turn away from evil.”7 Tomás’s stay in prison was not yet related to the rebellion against the Jesuits that was to take place nine years later, when the rich fazendeiro would be arrested in Portugal (where he had gone as Representative of the People of Maranhão) and sent back to São Luís—exactly the opposite of what happened to the simple barber one decade earlier.
On October 27, 1676, a decision was made to send Manuel João to torture. It is not clear whether he was subjected to it then or six years later. The description that follows in fact applies to the torments he suffered on April 3, 1682. They ordered him to finish confessing in the house of torture, with the instruments readied before him. “He said that he had never been a sorcerer, that he had committed no offenses.” The physicians decided he would not be able to withstand the pulley, perhaps because he had been debilitated by ten years in captivity—“at which the gentlemen ordered him put on the rack.” The defendant called out “continually in the name of Jesus, saying that he had not been a sorcerer.” The torture lasted a quarter of an hour.
On May 10, 1682, before the prince, the inquisitors, and all the nobility, Manuel João appeared in a public auto-da-fé in the Terreiro do Paço. He held a candle in his hand, and they flogged him until the blood flowed profusely. He abjured de vehementi and heard the public reading of his verdict before the curious, pitying, irritated eyes of the crowd. Ten days later, he signed the Termo de ida e penitência, a document stating where he would be sent and what his penance would be. He was obliged to go to confession on the Assumption of Our Lady, Christmas, and Easter; say a chaplet to the Virgin every week; and on Fridays say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys, for the five wounds of Christ. His sentence was five years in His Majesty’s galleys, “where he shall work the oars, without pay, at the discretion of the Inquisition.” In punishing the sorcerer, church and state worked together.
Here all trace is lost of Manuel João, son of the blacksmith Francisco João and of a daughter of Manuel Soródio. Fourteen years had passed, and the beardless young boy had become a mature, 30-year-old man.
Luzia da Silva Soares
Manuel Freire Batalha was a Commissary of the Holy Office and had headed lengthy Inquiries throughout the interior of Minas Gerais before the first bishopric had been established in that captaincy, in 1745. In April 1742 he wrote to the Inquisition in Lisbon to report on his accomplishments as a keeper of the faith and also on suspicions that one of Domingos de Carvalho’s female slaves had made a pact with the devil. The woman in question was Luzia da Silva Soares, a 40-year-old black woman who resided in the arraial known as Antonio Pereira, in the parish of Nossa Senhora da Conceição.8 Years before, when he had started the Devassa, the Visitor had issued an official opinion stating that the slave should be detained in the town jail in Ribeirão do Carmo (today the city of Mariana), located in the same district. Following her arrest, around 1739, she had been taken to the prison in Rio de Janeiro, where she awaited both ratification of the witnesses who had testified against her and a decision on her voyage to Lisbon. She ended up going, and on December 18, 1742, she reached the capital.
Luzia was born near Olinda, “where they call it the village of São Bento,” on the sugar plantation of one João Soares, where his mother lived as well. But the master had gambled away all his slaves, and Luzia was sold to Maria Gomes, in whose house she lived until the age of six. From then on she changed masters several times. She eventually came to belong to Manuel da Silva Preto, who lived in the parish of Antonio Dias das Minas Gerais. He died shortly thereafter, and the slave was left to his brother, José da Silva. Although she had a series of masters, Luzia enjoyed moments of freedom and adventure too and had even wandered about the woods with calhambolas [fugitive slaves, also known as quilombolas]. At the time of her capture, she was married to a Benguela slave by the name of Bartolomeu.
Luzia had always been treated well, “with much love, in the houses she had been in before becoming slave to the said sergeant-major José da Silva, so much so that the said Maria Gomes laid her down to sleep in her bed and she slept with her the whole time she was in her house, as if she were her daughter.” Even in the home of Domingos de Carvalho, José da Silva’s son-in-law, Luzia had been treated with great consideration—until they began to think she was a sorceress.
The first accusations against Luzia date to 1738. On that occasion her mistress had gone to the slave quarters to punish the young woman but could not get the door open, as she was overcome by a sudden sharp pain in her arm. A series of amazing events took place from that point on, each one involving Luzia. Whenever her mistress saw Luzia, she would be struck by an excruciating headache. After exploring the matter, it was discovered the headaches were triggered by pots of boiling water prepared by the slave; when the water boiled, her mistress’s mouth would burn in terrible pain. If she tried to punish Luzia in despair, by striking her with the soles of her slippers, her arm would ache and go limp. Once, acting on her suspicions, she took a knife and cut some embroidery flosses wound about the young girl’s neck. Her pain went away.
To verify Luzia’s offenses, her masters bound and tortured her. Under this vicious torment, the slave began to superimpose her masters’ beliefs on her own and to include the transgressions attributed to her in her confessions. Later, in Lisbon, she reported that “if she had denied doing these maleficia,they would soon punish her, so that she had seen herself forced, to escape punishment, to confess that she had done them, this not being the truth.” To save herself from torture “and the pain and affliction that it caused her,” she said that “she had done that which she never had.”
When Luzia confessed to an initiation that perhaps never really took place, she fell back on a deep-seated African belief, common to European populations as well. She said that she had been initiated into demoniacal society by a black man named Mateus, who had persuaded her to talk to the devil at a crossroads. On that occasion, she had smelled “a stench like a goat” and heard someone snorting. A voice asked who she was. She replied that her name was Luzia, to which the devil retorted: “You are mine.” Henceforth, the slave called him “her king Barbado.” Mateus had hexed a child and carried its withered remains about in a leather bag that also contained gold dust and some papers, along “with other powders made of different feathers.” During one of her torture sessions, Luzia confessed to having used some of these powders to make her mistress, Josefa Maria, fall ill.
Another significant stage of Luzia’s confessions under torture was her admission to a pact. She said she had made a compact with the devil and had promised to be his. She had given him her blood, taking it from her ribs, belly, legs, and feet. By means of this contract as well as superstitious words, she caused maladies and also removed them when so desired. Years later, in Lisbon, she made clear that she had confessed to the pact in terror of the “mighty punishment that they gave her so that she would thus confess, and not because she had in truth done anything.” Slave-masters also acted as hounds on the trail of diabolic pacts.
Luzia further confessed to having put many roots and white powders all around the house, provoking different kinds of pain, colds, and lack of appetite. She had buried pots containing roots, powders, frogs, animals, human nail parings, and hair from the white people in the house, all with the intent of causing harm. It was later necessary to dig more than one hundred holes to disinter these maleficia. But when her masters ordered the sorcery pots burned, everyone in the house again caught a cold.
The accusations listed in Manuel Freire Batalha’s Devassa also blamed Luzia for the deaths of little children. She had killed her masters’ daughter by sucking on the baby, “for she was a witch.” The infant had been born weak and was baptized at home. Four or five days later, the child began to suffer very acute pain, and within twenty days she was dead. Her father noticed that there was a sort of bite next to her mouth and nose. It was there—as Luzia would later confess—that the slave had sucked out the baby’s blood, entering the bedroom “through a hole in a window, in the figure or form of a butterfly, like the witch that she was.” Family members interred the infant, but Luzia dug it up and used its arms, legs, and innards to concoct sorceries. She buried its arms and legs in the slave quarters’ oven. She placed its innards in a jar and used them to make a porridge that would be administered to the mother’s child, Josefa Maria. She burned the afterbirth and buried it under the doorsill. Filled with hatred, according to her masters’ accusations, Luzia wanted to make her mistress even more miserable; she wanted her masters’ marriage to go badly and to this end buried three handfuls of rooster tail next to the cot where her mistress slept. Like European sorceresses, so too was Luzia able to provoke sexual impotence.9
The accusations charged Luzia with casting spells in all directions. To do harm to her mistress’s father, she had buried a rag doll with a needle stuck “into its heart.” Along pathways and at crossroads she would bury powders, frogs, and various creatures that would cause the plantation slaves’ feet to swell and also give them stomachaches and headaches. Two black slaves had died as a result of these maleficia. Luzia targeted the labor force as well, annihilating it.
These confessions and accusations attest to the existence of conflict. Luzia claimed that her mistress did not like her because the woman suspected her husband was sleeping with the slave. The black man Francisco, famed for his ability to see inside people, had denounced Luzia to their masters because he could not talk her into having sex. Tensions and conflicts were also apparent in her masters’ fear of this simple slave woman’s extraordinary powers. The denunciation lodged by her boss, the contractor Domingos Rodrigues de Carvalho, provides a fine example of how the master stratum lived in constant paranoia in the slave-based colony. According to Domingos, Luzia’s motivation for performing “the said spell was to kill him, his father-in-law, and his wife, and become mistress of the fazenda where they lived.” Until she achieved this goal, the slave would cast spells so the mines would yield no gold. Although the slave system formed the backdrop of this story, the fear of Luzia’s maleficia harked back to the European roots of the witch stereotype; in Europe people likewise believed in these individuals’ inordinate power to influence the means of subsistence and instruments of work.10
In Lisbon, Luzia’s confessions took on a new light. The slave reported that Josefa Maria had once fallen ill and nothing could improve her condition, stirring the suspicion that the sickness was the result of maleficia. The masters had then summoned the black man Francisco Ferreira, the one who wanted to sleep with Luzia. He was quick to say that the author of the maleficia was Luzia, and this meant that only she could undo them. Her mistress ordered her to do so, under the threat of punishment. Luzia denied the accusations, insisting that they were all lies and that she had never cast spells and did not even know what they were.
Infuriated, Josefa Maria reported this to her father and husband. Together, the three decided to punish Luzia so that she would confess to her wrongdoings. They bound and tortured her with unprecedented brutality. Over a heap of fiery embers they heated “a large pair of blacksmith’s tongs, which, after they were red hot,” were pressed against the poor wretch’s naked body, leaving it covered with open sores and raw flesh. Out of her senses, and in an attempt to escape further torture, Luzia confessed her responsibility for the maleficia. But since the mistress’s health did not improve, her owners resumed the torments. They pinched her tongue and stuck a needle with four threads through it. They tied her to a ladder and set a fire next to it. Singed all over and passing out time and again, Luzia confessed to everything her masters wanted to hear: that she had made a pact with the demon and on the occasion had been surrounded by lights, circling about her; that she had hexed the child and killed it.
Irrespective of her admission to a pact, the torture continued, since Dona Josefa Maria failed to recover her good health. They used a slender cord to squeeze Luzia’s head tightly; they punched her; they threw dippers of cold water at her; they stuck the tips of her toes on the firing pin of a shotgun and snapped the hammer shut, “most painfully breaking her bones when it struck.” They dripped hot sealing-wax on her genital region; they put her in the stocks, leaving her irreparably disjointed—since that time, “she never again had good health, nor the strength to work, nor to do that which was necessary for her.” With a sharp stick they pierced around her left eye; it came out of its socket and she lost sight in it. They beat her with an unsheathed sword until they broke her right shoulder bone. In despair, “many times she wanted to kill herself with a clasp-knife, from which God Our Lord saw fit to save her.” But the worst torture she suffered was being flogged by black slaves with bunches of switches, leaving her covered in blood. They then left her tied out under the sun, where the flies bit her and creatures gnawed her flesh down to the bone. She would have died if other slaves had not taken pity and come to her rescue, washing her wounds.11
After this torture, her masters handed Luzia over to the law so that she could be further punished; they denounced her “without malice or slander, but in the service of God Our Lord.”12 At the plantation manor, her confessions had all been recorded by the priest José de Andrade, uncle to her mistress, Josefa Maria.
After all she had been through, Luzia was paraded in chains about the arraial for everyone to see. Years later, people still commented that she had been sent “imprisoned to Portugal by the Holy Office.”
Luzia’s confession to the Inquisition in Lisbon left a deep impression on the inquisitors. They ordered the reexamination of the witnesses called by the defendant, those whom she identified as having knowledge of the inflicted cruelties; this was done in 1744. Many confirmed the slave’s claims, that is, that her masters had ordered her flogged solely to obtain her confession to a pact and that they had meted out “most serious treatment” and “most harsh lashings.”
Luzia da Silva Soares did not end up in the secret prisons. The inquisitors were convinced that her offenses were minor and did not trust either her masters’ accusations or the records of Father José de Andrade.
It appeared by all votes that she should not be imprisoned, nor tried for the offenses for which she had been ordered into the custody of the penitential prisons to be examined, as she indeed had been; not only because of what these same examinations state, but also because the witnesses of the summary proceeding are very close kin, and people from the same home, and of whom the Defendant was a slave, and because they testified without any other grounds for believing that she used maleficia and had made a pact with the demon other than the fact that she had so confessed, which she did solely to escape the most harsh punishments that the same witnesses gave her, as stated in the summary proceeding that was later ordered at the instruction of this board, to better investigate the matter; where it is further stated that in the act of judicial questioning of the Defendant, carried out by the vicar Manuel Freire Batalha, present at all times was the priest José de Andrade de Morais, relative of the same witnesses, and the same person who had brought her in under arrest and handed her over to the said vicar, and for this reason she had not wished to deny that which she had already confessed, dreading and fearing that she would again be handed over to her masters, and that the latter would again punish her with the same severity and excess with which they had done so already, so many times. And therefore she should be set free, and sent in peace to wherever it be well for her.13
This remarkable document is dated May 20, 1745. The Holy Office was calling into question its own usual methods, namely, the practice of hunting down pacts and judging them based on the defendant’s confessions and on depositions by witnesses who were not always reputable or unbiased. This apparently was progress. But after Luzia’s trial came others, where those accused of sorcery were dealt with most harshly. More than complaisance on the part of the Holy Office, what this story may reveal is that the tribunal felt a certain irritation toward a power that had preempted it. After all, these torments at the masters’ hands occurred before the beginning of the episcopal Inquiries, which, as seen in the last chapter, did not employ torture. Moreover, this other power, wielded by the master stratum, had vested itself with authority that should belong solely to the Holy Office. In essence, the Inquisition did not disapprove of the procedure that Luzia’s masters had adopted on their plantation. But finding itself caught in the uncomfortable position of acting as its own judge, the tribunal felt compelled to take a more lenient stand with a view to reaffirming the full scope of its powers, which a given social stratum could not be allowed to usurp—otherwise, how could it justify its own existence?
It was possible to free Luzia and deem her innocent because she had already been sufficiently cleansed of her superstitious practices. On May 31, 1745, a judicial instruction closed the books on her case. The Inquisition defiantly set a captive free.
Luzia’s trial had lasted seven years, and during its course multiple concepts were woven together. Luzia’s beliefs (her apprenticeship with the slave Mateus, the practice of typically African maleficia, the knowledge of medicinal herbs used for such specific purposes as ceasing menstruation or causing bellies to swell) were interwoven with her masters’ beliefs, more typically European and revolving around the stereotype of the witch: brewer of potions made of cadaver parts, someone capable of penetrating cracks in doors and windows, causing sexual impotence, destroying the source of daily sustenance, and, finally, entering into pacts with the devil. When Luzia was detained in the Inquisition’s prisons in Portugal, a third discourse became intertwined with the first two: the inquisitorial. During her interrogations, she was asked whether she had ever used an altar stone or similar objects “for illicit ends.” Luzia had never heard of such things.
Luzia Pinta
Luzia Pinta or Luiza Pinta—the two forms appear interchangeably throughout her trial—was an unmarried black freedwoman from Angola who lived in Vila de Sabará, Minas Gerais.14 She had been brought from Africa sometime around the early 1720s. She was arrested on March 16, 1742, under Manuel Freire Batalha’s Devassas. From all indications, when the Visitor reached Minas, denunciations had already been lodged against the woman in the Bishopric of Rio de Janeiro, under whose jurisdiction the gold-mining region fell. These denunciations were followed by the interrogation of witnesses, pursuant to the norms laid out by the Inquisition in Lisbon. According to standard practice, denunciations and the depositions of witnesses formed the body of accusations against the defendant and constituted the legal matter underlying the inquisitorial interrogations.
On December 18, 1742, eight months after her arrest by the Devassa, Luzia/Luiza reached Lisbon, where the Inquisition began interrogating her. Her first confession came on March 18 of the following year, when she was still in the public prison. One month later she was transferred to the private or “secret” prison, due to the gravity of her offenses. The inquisitors considered Luiza/Luzia recalcitrant, and on July 10 the prosecutor’s Bill of Indictment was entered; on August 12 they began torturing her. Convicted of minor heresy, she appeared in the public auto-da-fé held on June 20, 1744, where she heard the verdict announced and abjured de levi. On August 4, 1744, Luzia/Luiza reached the couto of Castro Marim, in Algarve, to which she was banished for four years. The scribe typified her as a woman of “fifty years of age, thereabouts, preta baça [pale black], tall and stout, with a mark quite close to her forehead and one on each cheek [marks that suggest ritual wounds].”
Compared to other trials, Luzia Pinta’s progressed rapidly. But this did not mean it was not traumatic. The mighty tribunal took Luzia/Luiza—already torn from her native land by the slave trade—and cast her to the outskirts of the very metropolis that had made her a captive in its most important colony. She watched as the African rites to which she had remained faithful were metamorphosed into an inadmissible, condemnable breach of the law. This simple story consequently bears the marks of Africa, Brazil, and Portugal, the triangle of lands that buttressed the colonial system and that the humble Luzia had trodden in great suffering.
Of what had Luzia/Luiza Pinta been accused? What grave error had led to her arrest, depriving her of her hard-won freedom?
Luzia was publicly known as a calundureira. People living in her arraial would ask her to perform divinations, shed light on the whereabouts of stolen oitavas-de-ouro, and heal the sick.
Whenever Luzia intervened in these minor problems of daily life, it was through a nocturnal ceremony: the calundu. She would dress up in peculiar costumes—“inventions,” as the trial records state—and her head would be covered with garlands or a turban. She danced to the sound of African musical instruments, like the atabaque drum; she went into a trance—“great tremblings”—and provided the desired answers to questions. She was assisted by other black men and women, who danced and sang along with her. After drinking some wine, the “winds of divination would come.” Sometimes she carried a rapier in her hand and would prescribe wild leaves for her patients. She sat in a tall chair, like a throne, and would leap over people lying face down on the floor, who had come in hopes of finding a cure. Some witnesses said Luzia would bray like a donkey and that at a given point she would untie a belt from round her waist and make strange gestures with it. She would sniff people’s heads to tell whether they had been bewitched and would give them potions to make them vomit. According to others, there were rattlesnakes wrapped around her legs and arms, and she claimed that the winds of divination blew into her ears.
One of the witnesses, Manuel Pereira da Costa, said he knew Luzia to be a calundureira “because it was public knowledge.” He emphasized, however, that “it was not known if she [was] a sorceress.” This was precisely the doubt the Inquisition sought to silence, endeavoring instead to link one activity to the other and setting out on a foreordained hunt for confirmation of the infamous “diabolic compact”—the certificate of witch-hood, according to demonological manuals and treatises.
Most likely having been advised how the Holy Office operated, Luzia omitted any reference to the figure of the demon in her confession of March 18, 1743. She admitted to relying on mushes made from herbs and roots for healing purposes but denied the use of divinations and said that she had never entered into a pact with the devil. When questioned about her background, she declared that she was a baptized, confirmed Christian who observed religious precepts, confessed and went to mass regularly, and knew how to recite her prayers satisfactorily.
As the pressure of the interrogations intensified, Luzia broadened her confessions. On June 7, 1743, she stated that during the calundu ceremonies described earlier she would lose her senses. She began speaking of the medicines administered and how to go about it, all of which she did “by the destiny that God gave her.” On July 3, still under pressure, Luzia went even further. She defined the calundu as a “contagious disease”—“it passes from one person to another”—that she had suddenly caught one day and said that the only way to deal with it was as she had described, through those ceremonies, playing instruments. She told how at times she would go places while her body would stay where it was, remaining behind as if abandoned, dead—an experience Luzia attributed to God. It was also by heavenly intervention that the words rose to her mouth, involuntarily, she knew not how, while divining and healing.
Her omission of a pact did Luzia no good. She was found guilty in an auto-da-fé held in the São Domingos Convent. The large crowd in attendance included Dom João V, the future Dom José I, and the inquisitors. Behind the story of a humble black colonist, ex-inhabitant of African lands, ex-slave, transformed into an accomplice of the devil by the will and grace of the Holy Office, lies a case study of the archaeology of African religions in Brazil. Acceding to the needs of assimilation, African colonists, or colonists of African descent, found a way to preserve their cultural universe in the form of the calundu. The clothes Luzia wore resembled those used by today’s Baianas [Afro-Brazilian women who wear traditional white turbans, peasant style blouses, and long, layered skirts edged with lace] and most probably have Muslim roots—the “diverse inventions in the Turkish style” alluded to in Luzia’s trial. The rattlesnakes wound about her arms and legs are found in many religious expressions common to African civilizations. Bastide offers an in-depth discussion of these serpents’ role in the rites and suggests possible kinships, for example, with the Dahomans and Congolese. He settles on a broader interpretation of the serpent complex, where he perceives two different groups of magic: that of the black snake charmer, probably of Muslim or Arabic origin, and that of the black healer of snakebites, a specific case within a vaster realm of curative magic.15 The regurgitations induced by the calundureira from Sabará were not unique to the African cultural universe; the indigenous peoples likewise believed they could rid a bewitched body of spells, along the lines emphasized by Evans-Pritchard—that witchcraft was a physically detectable organic evil.
From a land of the Bantu language—Portuguese Angola—Luzia, calundureira, was the cultural predecessor of contemporary Brazil’s mães-de-santo [priestesses of Afro-Brazilian religions]. Like them, she believed that fate had granted her preordained talents, that predestination exists and it is up to each person to develop her or his gifts, such as receiving spirits. Appearing before the Holy Office, Luzia made it a point to accentuate a syncretism that was indeed there: she cited the Virgin Mary as patroness of her healing and God as responsible for her ability to divine; her successful cures had earned her two oitavas-de-ouro, which she had spent on masses for St. Anthony and St. Gonzalo, the ones truly responsible for her achievements. It is hard to tell whether this was more a device to dupe the enemy than a manifestation of full-fledged syncretism. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in response to inquisitorial pressures, expressions of Catholicism rose to the surface and encroached upon African religious traditions, moving into the voids left open when the material bases of the African slaves’ universe had collapsed and elements of their own religion had been lost. These expressions could lie dormant as long as the calundu had free rein in the distant corners of Minas. But under the pressure of the tribunal, they emerged and assumed the role of defense mechanisms.
Clinging desperately to these markers of Catholicism, Luzia intuitively knew that she should keep her distance from any activity suggestive of a diabolic pact. “Asked if she at any time had believed in the demon and had worshipped him as she worshipped God, thinking that he be worthy of adoration and veneration, and powerful enough to save souls,” she responded in the negative. She likewise denied having at any time relinquished “God Our Lord as lord of all goods, both spiritual and temporal” or having been involved with the devil or spoken with him. Finally, they asked her “if she, the Deponent, had made a pact with the demon by herself, or through an intermediary person, in what form she had made it, which words they had used, and what they had promised each other.” “She said that she had never made a pact with the demon.” In response to her denial, the Inquisition tried to demonize her work as a healer, claiming that it was ridiculous to rely on one single medicine to cure a variety of sicknesses. “Asked if she used the said medicine believing that in it there be a tacit, or express, pact with the devil, by means of which it would be possible to improve the health of the people on whom it was used, . . . she said that she never believed that in this medicine there was a pact or any intervention by the demon.”
The inquisitor then tried to rout the devil from the calundu ceremony, asking Luzia if she perceived it as natural or supernatural. In reply the tribunal heard that “she, the Deponent, believes that the said sickness is supernatural, because when it comes, she remains still, her eyes turned toward the heavens for some length of time, at the end of which she bows her head and looks at once at the ill and then knows which are to live and have a cure for their ailment, and also those which have none, which for this reason she does not accept as her patients, but has them taken away by the people who brought them.” This was just what the inquisitor had been waiting for: “What reason does she have for believing that all such extraordinary feats are born of the virtue God hath granted her, and not of diabolic influx, which must more naturally apply?”
The inquisitor struck another blow when Luzia confessed that sometimes her body would be passed out on the ground, and yet she would go other places: such feats could only be possible through diabolic intervention, and therefore she must have entered into a pact. Luzia replied in the negative and repeated that she had nothing to do with the devil, “nor did she rely on him for the said feats, and she instead believes that all is the work and destiny of God, who hath wanted to grant this to her.” Her adversary was annoyed: “If she knows full well that these are customarily wrought through the intervention of the devil, how does she therefore intend falsely to attribute them to destiny and to her own virtue, the said facts being wholly opposed and offensive to this virtue, with which she intends to excuse herself?” Cold and calculating, the inquisitor insisted it was impossible to reconcile her virtue—the ability to cure—with her “extraordinary inventions,” to wit, the extravagant clothes she wore when healing. “She said that she cannot do the healing without wearing the said inventions, and that only God Our Lord understands the reason, because she, as a sinner, does not know how to understand it.”16 The inquisitor was exasperated: “Why does she attempt to excuse herself with frivolous, indecisive replies, if, from her same confession, it is known with all evidence that she achieved the aforesaid by means of a pact made with the demon, and not by destiny or her own virtue, to which she in pretense and falseness attempts to attribute it?” Luzia answered in kind: “She knows full well that she has no pact with the demon, and that God Our Lord knows how she has stated the whole truth before this board.” The inquisitor tried in turn to demonize the winds of divination, the words Luzia uttered during the ceremony, and her method of healing. In the end, he charged her with the infamous pact, based on presumptive evidence.
Luzia’s recourse to the Catholic substratum of her religious universe was ultimately defeated by the Inquisition’s unbending logic, and she was convicted. Her efforts could not even save her from the rigors of torture: “Being bound perfectly at all eight points, she was given all the torment to which she was judged, and during it she cried out for St. Anthony, and a quarter hour was spent on it, all of which in truth came to pass.”
Salvador Carvalho Serra
In December 1757 the fleet from Rio de Janeiro arrived in Lisbon, carrying the saddler Salvador Carvalho Serra.17 He was a poor mulato, born to a man from Minas and the black slave he had freed, and grandson to Congolese slaves. He had left Minas Gerais and his native colony because he had fallen into the clutches of the metropolitan Inquisition. Salvador had always lived in the gold-mining arraiais, and the only thing he knew of Rio de Janeiro was the jail where he had been temporarily detained. Baptized and confirmed, he could recite the prayers and commandments of the Holy Mother Church. He could also read and write—in all probability quite poorly—and even though he was not married, he had two small children by a parda woman, who was also single.
His great misfortune had begun some five years earlier, when he had traveled to the arraial of Nossa Senhora da Conceição de Mato Dentro to serve as godfather at the baptism of his nephew, born to his brother Antonio, a shoemaker by trade. Recounting what happened back then, Salvador tells two different stories. Inscribed between the two is the violent pressure that inquisitorial mechanisms exerted on their accused.
Salvador’s first confession is dated September 22, 1758. In it he states that at the time of the baptism he and his brother had received a paper containing fragments of communion wafer from a Congo slave owned by the painter Antonio Correia. The two brothers talked it over, wondering whether or not the hosts were consecrated. Deciding they were indeed, the two men gathered them all in one piece of paper, and Salvador put them away in a pocket. Not long after, he took the pieces out—there must have been about seven—and ate them. Some six weeks went by, and then one day the parish priest from the arraial of Conceição came to his house in the company of the sexton, the painter’s slave, and two more black men. The cleric set about searching both Salvador and his belongings, examining even the scapulars and pouches of relics that he and his brother Antonio wore about their necks. This done, the priest left without offering any explanation. But Salvador remembered the hosts he had eaten and figured that they were the cause of the unexpected search. Tortured by his conscience, he began asking if anyone had noticed hosts missing from the sacristy. He felt somewhat relieved when he learned that the parish priest had conducted the search after receiving a written denunciation against Antonio Carvalho Serra, who had allegedly received consecrated hosts from the hands of the painter’s slave. Salvador’s peace of mind was, however, short-lived. He, his brother, and the painter’s slave were arrested and imprisoned for nearly three years, after which Salvador was sent to the Inquisition in Lisbon.
The second narrative differs from the first on some points and adds several new bits of information. Salvador says that he was at his brother’s house when the painter’s slave appeared, wanting to talk to Antonio Serra. Since he was not at home, the black man gave Salvador a small paper bundle, “saying that he had brought some relics for his said brother” and that he was giving these to him. Opening the packet, Salvador saw that it contained a “whole host,” lying in a wad of cotton; according to what the black man had told him, it had been consecrated. While the painter’s slave went off to look for his brother, Salvador put the paper away in a pocket. Antonio got home later with a similar packet, but he did not want to keep it “because those were things of Negroes.” He gave it to Salvador, who quickly placed it in his pocket with the other one.
Three or four days later, when the two brothers had already forgotten the incident, they went off to Paraúna, from there continuing on to Tapanhuacanga, where Salvador lived. Upon their arrival, the saddler found his home occupied by capitães-do-mato. Instead of going into his house, Salvador went with his brother to take refuge at the home of Gonçalo de Viveiros. Gonçalo informed them that the capitães-do-mato were looking for Antonio Carvalho Serra, who quickly headed back to his home in Conceição. Salvador stayed on at Gonçalo de Viveiros’s, once in a while going out to some fields of his, always most cautiously. But then came a “day of precept and believing that the said capitães-do-mato were gone, he decided to go to mass in the arraial; and as he entered it on horseback, a man he did not know called to him from the house of Francisco da Silva Leal, saying he wanted a word with him; and, dismounting, he, the Confessor, went into the house where the said man was, who was a capitão-do-mato by the name of João Gaia, who straight away seized him, aided by three caboclo soldiers that he had brought with him.” Salvador was taken inside, where they searched him and discovered a knife on his person. Since it was necessary to record this finding, the capitão-do-mato asked him for some paper to write on. The terrified Salvador then remembered that he had the wrapped hosts on him. He took out a blank sheet of paper, handed it to his jailer, and asked to go into the other room, where “he ate the said hosts so that they would not be found.” He managed to convince the capitão-do-mato to let him escape for the price of twelve oitavas-de-ouro. It was after this that he had been arrested, in the circumstances described in his first narrative.
What the Inquisition demanded of Salvador Carvalho Serra was that he carry all his offenses with him in his memory “to make a complete and truthful confession of them,” stating “the pure truth” so that his soul might be saved. Following the tribunal’s standard practice, at each confession they reiterated that he should better examine his conscience, probe it deeply, and unveil his most hidden intentions.
From the viewpoint of the Holy Office, Salvador had attacked the Catholic faith—and more specifically the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist—and had failed in his due observance of the “irrefutable doctrine” of the church. Christ had instituted the sacraments to heal and save souls, and for this reason no one should show them “any contempt, nor even the slightest irreverence.” But the defendant, “forgetting his obligation and the utmost respect that he should pay to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, without any fear of God, nor of Justice, to the bane of his conscience and harm of his soul,” had carried two consecrated hosts in his pocket.
As penalty and penance for his offenses, Salvador was ordered to appear in a public auto-da-fé, hear the verdict read, and abjure de levi. This occurred on September 20, 1761, in the cloisters of the São Domingos Convent. Before being sent to the couto of Castro Marim, in Algarve, where he was to remain banished for two years, he would be “instructed in the mysteries of our Holy Catholic Faith necessary for the salvation of his soul” and would also fulfill all other penalties and penances and pay the costs of the court trial, which came to 2:961 réis.
Salvador spent almost four years in the Inquisition’s jails in Lisbon and, according to his confessions, spent another three imprisoned in the colony—a total of seven years of incarceration for eating two communion wafers. The long arm of the Holy Office had snatched him from his native arraial in the heart of eighteenth-century Minas, thrown him into a dungeon in Lisbon, and ultimately exiled him to Castro Marim, where he meekly presented himself to the authorities on October 23, 1761.
Together with this shift in geography came another, greater one—one that had disturbed his beliefs, religiosity, and worldview. In signing the form stating that he abjured de levi (in the eighteenth century, the Inquisition printed these forms to attach to the trial records), Salvador had converted himself into a Christian stereotype, anathematizing and divorcing himself from all heresy that might be committed against the Holy Catholic Faith and promising henceforth to serve as a true soldier of Christ, persecutor and discoverer of heretics, denouncer to the inquisitors and church prelates of any deviant practice.
Left behind was another religiosity, the living religiosity that was part of people’s daily lives in Minas. The bond between this living religion and everyday life pulsates in Salvador’s story: his references to the parish priest, to the Familiars of the Holy Office, to hosts, and to baptism accompany references to everyday events like field chores, a trip to the tavern, journeys around the gold-rich arraiais, incidents involving capitães-do-mato, mention of various artisans living in the mining region, expressions of ties of solidarity and friendship (reliance on Gonçalo de Viveiros’s hospitality, for instance), along with manifestations of prejudice and a sentiment of caste (carrying about hosts is something “Negroes” do, says Antonio Carvalho Serra, who, as Salvador’s brother, was quite likely a mulato as well).
In the first narrative, Salvador ate the hosts for no particular reason. He states quite simply that he did not know whether they were consecrated or not and speculates that they might have been just scraps of wafers. And even if they were consecrated, what was wrong with that? He got the urge to eat them, and that is what he did.
In the second narrative, Salvador travels with his brother after swallowing the hosts; life goes on as normal, and neither of them talks about the episode, which they in fact forget. It is imprisonment that revives Salvador’s memory: the violence of the capitães-do-mato occupying his house and pursuing his brother (why?), characteristic signs of the violence that raged actively or bubbled below the surface in Brazil’s eighteenth-century mining zones. Here the host was not eaten by happenstance; rather, it was an act of self-defense meant to elude the clutches of ecclesiastical justice into which the capitães-do-mato would hand him. Or might the act have been a nonconfessed impulse to resort to the host as an amulet that would seal his body and defend Salvador from physical danger, considering its virtues as the Body of Christ? In any case, to him it seemed normal to carry a communion wafer all that time. After all, he wore relics and scapulars around his neck, and the church endorsed and approved such practices; they belonged to the universe of permissible religiosity. Nothing indicates that Salvador thought it out of the ordinary to carry hosts in his pocket, although his brother viewed these as “things of Negroes”—and with this discourse pointed up the syncretism more common among slaves.18
Something else in this second narrative is interesting: it is the action of repressive forces (in this case, led by capitães-do-mato, a secular rather than ecclesiastical power) that displaces an acceptable act to the universe of wrongdoing. Salvador is afraid of being denounced to other agents of repression—this time ecclesiastical—and he eats the hosts. But he remembers them only because he is seized, and only when frightened does he associate the act of carrying hosts in his pocket with wrongdoing. In other words, even when temporal, this repression has the effect of uprooting a practice common to his everyday universe and casting it into the universe of wrongdoing, dominated by the church’s elite discourse.
From this path there would be no return. Once in jail, Salvador, Antonio, and the painter’s slave “agreed among themselves, already knowing that they were ordered to come before the Holy Office, that they would state in this Tribunal that the said Antonio Carvalho Serra had asked the said Negro Antonio Correia for some scraps of host to seal letters, and the latter had given him some and they had remained in the hands of him, the Confessor, thus concealing that what the Negro had brought were whole wafers, since being scraps it could not be presumed that they were consecrated.” Their imprisonment did away once and for all with any idea that possessing communion wafers was something routine, and together the three men constructed a third narrative, a false one intended to cover up what had really happened. Even before they were interrogated, they thus armed themselves for their confrontation with the tribunal, for by that time it was clear to them what the Holy Office signified and what it meant to stand accused before it.
The longer their stay in the inquisitorial prisons, the hazier the story gets; its sense grows muddled, its meaning changes, and hence room is open for multiple narratives, mirroring the fragmentation suffered by Salvador’s original religiosity. If it was impossible to explain why the consecrated hosts had been eaten, it was useless to tell the story. The only way out was to abjure, embracing the strict religion of the metropolitan’s inquisitors.
Adrião Pereira de Faria
It was April of 1754 when Adrião Pereira de Faria momentarily had to leave Vila da Vigia, in Grão-Pará, on the heels of some runaway slaves.19 He was the administrator of his stepfather’s sugarcane aguardente distillery but was undertaking this pursuit in his capacity as militia sergeant. Adrião was about nineteen and had been abandoned by his wife, who had run off to Maranhão with a fellow by the name of Anacleto de Sousa Magalhães. To make haste in the matter of the fugitive slaves, Adrião left some trousers at the home of a friend, Manuel Pacheco Bitancur, a 52-year-old man who was part of the town’s public administration. Adrião’s Calvary commenced when Manuel Pacheco picked up the trousers, and out fell a paper with some strange signs and drawings on it. Looking closer, he saw that the words were “contrary to our Holy Catholic Faith” and decided to hand the paper over to the town’s juiz ordinário [justice of the peace], not really knowing quite what to do with it. The judge, Bernardino de Carvalho, noticed that the words “seemed to have a pact with the devil” and that the drawings represented swords and knives etched in black ink. The two decided to make sure the writing on the paper was really Adrião’s, so they sought the help of Marcos Gonçalves Correia, the town’s notary public. He recognized the signature as indeed belonging to the young man.
As soon as he got back, Adrião picked up his trousers and noticed that the paper was missing. He panicked. Anticipating disaster and already sensing the long arm of the Holy Office upon him, he went out, saying he had lost a very important document about a large amount of money owed him; he said that “the missing paper would be cause for him to move to a new land.” He hurried to tell the blacksmith Crescêncio Escobar what had happened, because he was the one who had transcribed the paper for Adrião and advised him to carry it at all times so that he would be lucky in love and fare well in fights. Crescêncio also saw trouble ahead; he got mad at his friend and told him “he did not know how to keep anything.” On the afternoon of that same day, Adrião was arrested on the order of the local vicar and was detained in Vigia’s jail. He would later travel to Belém, where he stayed in the guard unit on the bishop’s order.
The accusation hanging over his head was that he had signed a pact with the devil. The piece of paper stood as hard evidence and was difficult to refute. Nonetheless, Adrião tried to convince the Commissaries who interrogated him that he had signed the paper ignorant of its contents, for Crescêncio had not read it to him and he himself was unable to. But even when he had been back in the town jail, the community had already begun discriminating against him, treating him as a marginal man. One day he was playing with the jail-keeper’s sword, when the Eucharist was carried down the street in the form of a viaticum for someone on their deathbed. Adrião joined those around him in kneeling down, but the sword remained in his hand. This was enough for him to be accused of disrespect. Once he arrived in Belém, his reputation as a sorcerer grew. There he relied on the services of a mulata named Maria Barata “for that which he needed.” She would often go up to the jail bars to talk to him. But a man steered her away from Adrião, saying that the prisoner was a “great sorcerer” accustomed to going in and out between the bars—just as witches in Europe were said to do.
After a year in prison, Adrião managed to arrange a meeting with the bishop, who acceded to the accused man’s pleas and released him for a time. During his period of freedom, Adrião ran into an old girlfriend and nourished dreams of a new marriage, hopeful that his wife had died in Maranhão. While he endeavored to verify her death, he appeased his new lover’s guilt feelings by promising to give her land in the town if he was unable to marry her. He even went to the church, where he arranged for the banns and asked the bishop for advice. But he was arrested yet again, this time by the Familiars of the Holy Office—it had been decided his offenses fell within the jurisdiction of that tribunal.
In November his brother wrote to the vicar of Vigia, entreating him to have mercy on Adrião, who was in prison for offenses against the Holy Office, while Crescêncio, the true culprit, remained free—all in vain. By this time, things were already in place for Adrião’s voyage to Lisbon. On November 21 the Familiars Joaquim Resende Leitão and Lázaro Fernandes Borges explained that he should have a “bed, and all else for his use, as well as 60,000 réis for his support, to which he replied that he was a poor man, and that he had nothing of his own.” The Commissary Caetano Eleutério Bastos sought information on the defendant’s true financial situation and was informed by the superior at Vigia’s monastery that indeed “that which he had inherited from his parents he had consumed and that he had no goods.” Three days later, they handed him over to the captain of the Senhora Santa Ana, who was on his way to the metropolis. In early July of the following year, the Holy Office began to interrogate Adrião.
While Adrião had been imprisoned and while he had nurtured dreams of wedding Eugênia Maria da Costa during his fleeting period of liberty, the local Commissaries of the Holy Office and the metropolitan authorities had exchanged extensive information about him by letter, tracing the lines of the unfortunate man’s fate. In August 1755 the Commissary Lourenço Álvares Roxo (who died shortly thereafter and was replaced by the aforementioned Caetano Eleutério) had forwarded a list of his offenses and the written pact to the Inquisition in Lisbon. Seven months later, the Commissary received instructions from the Inquisition to requestion the witnesses who had testified in civil court, this time pursuant to the norms of the Holy Office. But these efforts were hampered by a smallpox epidemic that raged through Belém, leaving inhabitants in nearby towns terrified of catching the disease. The epidemic was followed by other obstacles: one of the witnesses was unavailable because she herself was facing charges in secular court; another, confined to her small farm, could be contacted in a few days but was so poor that she might not be able to come “as quickly as the case required”; Bernardino de Carvalho offered this justification for not testifying: he was old, infirm, and “had a chronic urine ailment.” Finally, when epidemics no longer blocked the entry of ships into the port of Belém, the great distances to be traveled created another set of problems. Canoe trips could take days: “I can only tell Your Honor that it took the bailiff three days with four Indians and a canoe on his first endeavor; and another journey took a little over one-half day, with two Indians.”
When the Inquisition commenced its interrogations in Lisbon, it was already convinced of Adrião’s guilt. In October it decided to place him in the secret prisons and prosecute him. Functionaries of the Holy Office had classified him as a “poor, lustful man” hungry to “have and take advantage of the female sex,” to which end he sought the devil’s aid. Adrião gradually realized he would need to adhere to inquisitorial concepts and admit his guilt. He began by “remembering” that he had known from the outset what was on the paper. He then went on to admit that “he knew very well that it was sinful and diabolical” and that he had accepted and used it “in hopes of benefiting from its good results.” He attributed his behavior to having been “blinded by his appetite” at the time but stressed that he had been motivated by “libidinous spirit only” and not by any “heretical” purpose.
Adrião displayed an acute intelligence during the interrogations, through his concepts illustrating the struggle between good and evil, heaven and hell—the obsessions of the mentality of the era. He did not expect the devil to protect him from injuries, for this was a thing of God, who gave life. But in his sinful stubbornness to win over a given woman, he could rely only on the demon. “He solely desired from him to vanquish the will of the woman that he intended so he could gratify his lasciviousness, and it seemed to him, since the end was sinful, that the devil could and would contribute to satisfying his desires.” He recognized that he had sinned but saw the sin as within the realm of Christian offense: “His weakness and lasciviousness had caused him to fall into this error, and he had always hoped to redeem himself through the sacrament of penance, as a true Catholic, although a sinner.”20 Having relations “with the women of others, stealing, killing, and not going to confession in disobedience of Lent” were sinful acts, but it was up to each and every individual to decide what path to follow: “He always knew in part when he did good or evil.”
Adrião longed for a God who would be less unforgiving and more benevolant toward human faults and errors and for a more democratic religion, more open to popular participation, less marked by rites and ceremonies. He judged that “to be a Christian, it was enough to be baptized, make the sign of the cross, and know the substance of confession.” His mother had forced him to follow the religion of mass and obligations, at a time when his concerns lay elsewhere: “He went to mass when his mother ordered, because at that time he, the Defendant, thought only about playing and passing time, but he believed that he was a Christian, although it seemed to him that to be a saint and just, it was necessary to be of more noble birth, concurring that he could not be so because of his lowly birth.” “He was not totally unaware that the lowly and humble who labored under the law of God could go to Heaven, and that it only seemed to him that to be a bishop, pontiff, and saint venerated by the Church, it was necessary to be of lofty birth, but he was not unaware that all good men could be saved.”
From the very beginning of his interrogations, Adrião is thus heard making statements that echo the singular popular religiosity explored by Ginzburg in his study of Menocchio’s trial. God and the devil were not wholly indivisible: “He well knew that the devil was God’s enemy, but he was unawares that to follow one, it was necessary to abandon the other.” He believed that it would at least be licit to make recourse to the demon for dark motives—for example, to sleep with women. Adrião gradually began to embrace the inquisitorial perspective, wherein God and the devil lived at war, eternally engaged in endless battle with each other. During the days when he had taken up his belief in the devil, the defendant had quit going to mass and prayed only to him, placing his hands beneath his arms. He would go up to the church door but would not enter. Sometimes he would have his doubts. Then he would invoke the devil, who would rail at him for vacillating: “How dost thou wish that I succor thee, if thou still hast love of another thing? Cast it out of thyself, believe in me, and thou shalt enjoy all that thou ask of me, and shalt find that I succor thee.” The devil wanted Adrião to stop wearing the beads around his neck, and he quickly obeyed. He began to revere the devil as he had formerly revered God and Jesus.
The inquisitorial discourse ultimately displaced many of Adrião’s statements to a context where God and the devil appear to be irreconcilable. Referring to the time when he believed in the demon—“the time of his errors”—the Holy Office declared that Adrião “did not believe in the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, nor in Christ Our Lord, since he held only the demon as his God, to whom he directed and made his petitions.” The Sessão de Crença [session during which the Inquisition interrogated the accused about his or her religious beliefs], held on May 31, 1758, provides a fine illustration of how the inquisitors skillfully set about “demonizing” the defendant’s discourse.21 They asked him whether he knew that the soul was eternal and that once the body had passed away, the soul “remains forever and that it receives its punishment or reward according to the evil or good works” carried out during one’s lifetime. Adrião replied that he had believed at that time that “the soul ended together with the body, and that death occurred because medicine had no cure, for he was a stupid man who had no education whatsoever.” They then asked him what he thought heaven, hell, and purgatory were. “He believed Heaven was glory, where God was, and there would the just go, and Hell the place where the devils are and there would the damned go,” that is, “those who offended God.” The relentless inquisitorial logic began browbeating him: if he said the damned would go to hell, this was because he knew there was a soul; when he had denied this earlier, he had been fooling the Inquisition and had tacitly concealed that he had given his own soul to the devil. Adrião tried to get himself off the hook by blaming it on the coercion of interrogation, which led him to confuse things and fail to express himself properly, causing him to stumble into contradictions. His affirmation that the soul perished along with the body “was a lapse born of the disturbed state in which he found himself before this Board.”
Unyielding, the Inquisition wanted his confession to a pact. They sent him off to torture, employing the standard practice of first intimidating him with the sight of the instruments to be used. “By the house in which he was, and the instruments he saw therein, he could easily understand how severe would be the zeal that would be used on him, which he could avoid if he wished to finish confessing to his offenses and his true intent of committing them, affirming the pact that, according to the law, it is presumed he has made with the demon.”22 They tied him to the rack, warned him that if he died it was solely his own fault, and began to tighten it, giving it a half-turn. Adrião interrupted his torment by asking for a hearing and then confessed he had signed the paper and “had purposefully agreed to deliver his soul to the demon, wanting and intending to be his slave till he had taken advantage of a certain woman he intended, and that with this perverse spirit he had carried the paper on his person, believing and hoping that this same demon would assist him in his endeavor, the which he invoked several times with the said writing, desiring that he aid him, and he believed in him till the time when he was arrested by the juiz ordinário in the city of Pará.” He had not made a full confession earlier for fear they would kill him.
On July 5, 1758, the Holy Office decided that from all this “resulted presumptive evidence that he, the Defendant, had made an express pact with the devil.” The verdict to be read in public underscored the defendant’s humble roots, in a pejorative tone: “As a rustic overwrought by the burning passion of his inordinate appetite,” he had found himself grappling with violent instincts “out of his ignorance and stupidity.”23 His “poverty and weakness” had led him to persuade himself that “the demon would help him in his appetite.” Adrião’s poverty, irrationality (“inordinate appetite”), and subjugation to his sexual instincts are thus linked to another characteristic, just as negative but somehow hidden in the text: Adrião’s colonial condition.
At the end of August, the colonist from Pará—son of a Bahian man who “made his living by going into the sertão to hunt down Indians” and of an indigenous woman named Florência Gomes—appeared in an auto-da-fé held at the São Domingos Convent. Humiliated by the terms of the verdict, he was also made to don a witch’s hat bearing the label “sorcerer.” He abjured in forma and was sentenced to imprisonment and to wear a sanbenito at all times. Finally, he was forced to spend five years in banishment, serving in His Majesty’s galleys.
The sly Adrião did not give up easily. While still in Pará, when the bishop had decided to release him following his first arrest, he had changed his name from Faria to Simões. In justifying this act, he said that he had been prompted by his “disdain and hatred” for “the evil he had done”—that is, walking about with a paper wherein he had made a compact with the devil. But everything suggests that he was really attempting to escape the clutches of the Holy Office. Just one month after he began serving his sentence in the galleys, he decided to lodge a petition with the board, asking that his sentence be changed so that he could serve out his banishment “where he could live with his wife, alleging that she was destitute in his absence and wretched imprisonment, and in danger without his company.” The inquisitors were not taken in and remembered that the defendant himself had confessed that his wife did not live with him but in Maranhão, where she had run away in the company of another man. They also remembered that he “had been taking measures to be wed a second time,” to Eugênia Maria, and that his allegations were therefore groundless. Finally, they brought up his need to be cleansed, something that could not yet be established, “only one month having passed since he commenced the banishment that he is now serving, after committing the terrible crime of idolatry, so that as an example he must be well punished.”
Apparently resigned, Adrião fulfilled his Christian obligations, going to confession and mass on the four holy feasts, as the curate from the São Julião parish, in Lisbon, attested one year later. But he was back at it in 1760, again asking that his sentence be altered, this time because he was ill and could not recuperate in prison. His request was accompanied by a physician’s statement that emphasized the offender’s grievous condition: “He is in a miserable state, afflicted by many illnesses, for throughout most of his imprisonment he has been in the infirmary, his body all leprous, which has left him lame in one leg, which is almost immobile and incurable owing to the incommodiousness of the place, as he the petitioner was raised in America, and according to his repeated complaints, near to losing his life in the most underground prison where he is.”24 The Holy Office’s doctor certified that Adrião suffered from universal dropsy, “a most grave and chronic ailment” and hard to cure, especially in the place where he was, which was highly favorable to this infirmity.
Everything suggests that the tribunal decided Adrião had adequately purged his errors. The trial closes with the information that he left Évora in 1765, embarking on a ship back to Pará, where the next year found him serving as a soldier.25
Adrião’s is the most complete story of which I have knowledge and the only one that provides information on the offender’s return to the colony. After all that had transpired, after the many years he had lost in the inquisitorial prisons, it appears that Adrião had the energy to make a new life for himself and find a place in society again. But cases like this must not have been common. In a way, Adrião embodies all that has been said throughout this book: he lived torn between the idea of good and evil, of heaven and hell, struggling with his own concepts of religion and seeking to make it closer and more accessible to him. He resorted to magical practices and gave himself to the devil under a pact so that he might solve problems in his daily life, like brawls and love troubles. Finally, under the pressure of interrogation and torture, he refashioned his former concepts and ultimately internalized the demonization forced upon him. Even if atypical, his return to his homeland has a symbolic significance: persecuted, mortified, broken, reduced to subhuman conditions, the colonists oftentimes persevered in their own beliefs and dreamed of returning to that land in America where they had been born. The contours of these beliefs were gaining clearer form and proving not to be reducible to the metropolitan mold.