In which we hear of the unexpected conversion of Queen Christina
THAT SAME YEAR the most incredible news reached the Vatican by devious routes: the daughter of that Gustavus Adolphus who had vowed to exterminate all the papists & Jesuits in creation, the enlightened but libertine sovereign of a kingdom that was a stronghold of the Reformation, Queen Christina of Sweden secretly wanted to convert!
There were important matters at stake: it was a unique opportunity for the Church of Rome to demonstrate its power & its ability to bring one of the most striking figures of the Reformation back to the fold. It was a matter, therefore, of carefully selecting those who would be charged with accelerating proceedings. Kircher’s services were once more called upon and he gave his superiors the benefit of his wise advice; two Jesuits from his immediate entourage were dispatched to Sweden at once, disguised as simple gentlemen.
The indoctrination of Christina of Sweden began right away, though not without difficulty as the Queen, intelligent & more conversant with theological matters than one would have thought, opposed argument after argument from her two instructors. Having said that, the stumbling block to her conversion was purely temporal: if she became Catholic, Christina could not remain head of a Protestant kingdom.
For the next two years my master hardly left his study at all, entirely taken up with the compilation of his Mundus Subterraneus, which grew a little larger with every day, & with the revisions and adjustments essential for the publication of his Egyptian Oedipus. To his delight, on May 2, 1652, the day of his fiftieth birthday, he finally held the first volume of this major work in his hands, the one to which he had devoted every moment of his life, from the time when the hieroglyphs had, as it were, appeared to him. Twenty years of uninterrupted research, more than three hundred authors of antiquity quoted in support of his thesis, two thousand pages divided into four volumes to be published over three years! A very large number of engravings, executed to his orders by such talented painters as Bloemaert & Rosello, provided marvelous illustrations to a text for which my master had many new characters cast. It was a huge enterprise & enjoyed corresponding success.
The Œdipus Ægyptiacus thus created a great stir throughout Europe & from 1652 to 1654 Kircher had to put up with the inconveniences caused by his contemporaries’ enthusiasm. Scholars, sent by the greatest scientific academies in the world, flocked to Rome to meet him. People came from all sides to see the man who had managed to decipher the language of the pharaohs, the hieroglyphs that had remained such a mystery to ordinary mortals for twenty-four hundred years … It was such a success that the books were sold out even before they came off the printer’s presses. The name of Kircher was on everyone’s lips & during those three years we had to reply to more than a thousand laudatory letters.
Meanwhile in Stockholm the Pope’s envoys suddenly saw their efforts rewarded: on February 11, 1654 Queen Christina of Sweden announced to the senate her decision to abdicate in favor of her cousin, Charles. All the protestations of the senators were futile &, in a coincidence to which destiny alone holds the key, it was on May 2, 1654, Kircher’s birthday, that she renounced the throne before all the representatives of the estates. After that, the ceremony of abdication was a mere formality & on June 16, having returned the crown jewels and taken off her crown herself, Christina of Sweden held sway over no one but herself here below.
Scarcely twenty-eight years old, though having reigned for longer than many a king who had gone white in the exercise of power, she immediately set off, anxious to leave as quickly as possible a kingdom from which she had banished herself in an act of great self-denial. Accompanied by a few servants & faithful courtiers, she had her hair cut, dressed like a man so as not to be recognized & left with no regret the country that had shown her such little love.
She headed for Innsbruck, where she was to abjure her heresy officially. One can well imagine how anxiously the ecclesiastical authorities followed her progress step by step. Her abdication, important though it was, meant nothing in itself; at any moment Christina could have renounced the sacrifice of her faith, which was so important for the Church. And my master was not the only person to follow the Queen on her journey by means of the letters the Vatican’s spies sent to the Quirinal.
On December 23, she arrived in Willebroek, where Archduke Leopold, governor of the Netherlands, had gone to meet her. After a sumptuous dinner, they embarked on a frigate that took them along the canal as far as the bridge at Laeken, on the outskirts of Brussels. During the short voyage the Archduke & Christina played chess, while the sky above was constantly lit up by fireworks. The next evening, Christmas Eve, they gathered with some nobles in Leopold’s palace, in the very place where, a hundred years earlier, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth had abdicated to devote the rest of his life to the contemplation of the works of Our Lord.
That was the night when, under the direction of the Dominican, Father Guemes, she abjured Protestantism before God.
Kircher admitted to me that there had been great relief in certain quarters on hearing that news. However, the repeated reports following this memorable event were still disturbing: far from showing the humility appropriate to a new convert, Christina of Sweden was said to be leading a very hectic life in Brussels. One feast, one reception followed upon the other & Christina’s activities were on everyone’s lips. She played billiards, at which she exceled, exclusively with men, took part in wild sleigh races across the countryside or even through the city streets & went so far as to play unsuitable roles in the sung plays the Church condemned. But the most difficult part was over & there was certainly much exaggeration in the reports of her wild behavior. No one had been informed of Christina’s conversion, so all she did was give the world material to criticize the usual excesses of the reformed religion.
In June 1655 Christina of Sweden finally reached Innsbruck. It was in the cathedral of that city, on November 3, that the Queen recanted, now in full view of the whole world, at the same time taking communion & receiving absolution for her sins. On this occasion she displayed perfect reverence & a humility, which boded well for the future.
Christina of Sweden a Catholic! The event, ceaselessly trumpeted abroad by the Church, was devastating for all the Protestant states. Sweden, above all, was thrown off balance by the coup. More than the Peace of Westphalia, this victory brought the Thirty Years’ War to an end, crowning the triumph of the Apostolic Church of Rome. Alexander VII was jubilant; never had our religion been in such a healthy state as under his rule. And when, only a few days after the ceremony in Innsbruck, Christina of Sweden expressed the desire to come to Rome & settle there, the Pope lost no time in granting her permission. After having convoked the Congregation of Rites, in the presence of all the cardinals, the General of the Jesuits & Kircher, he decided on the ceremonial to be observed in celebration of the entry of the eminent convert into the Eternal City. Any animosity toward my master had long since been forgotten & he was personally charged with organizing the preparations for her welcome to give them due pomp & solemnity.
Christina of Sweden had set off for Rome on November 6, after having been advised to make as slow progress as possible in order to give the Vatican time to make proper preparation for her arrival. Nevertheless there was no time to lose. As my master had been given carte blanche, he secured the collaboration of Bernini. They worked together night & day to devise & realize all kinds of magnificent projects.
While this feverish activity was going on, Christina was making her leisurely way. The Duke of Mantua received her with the respect due to a sovereign: reclining in a palanquin, she crossed the Piave by the light of thousands of torches brandished by the soldiers of the Duke of Mantua, who had gone to meet her.
Dressed like a stage amazon & adorned with jewels, Christina made triumphal entries to Bologna, Rimini then Ancona. Like a river getting fuller & fuller as it flows down from its source, her retinue had taken on alarming proportions. Noblemen of all nations, but also foul courtesans lured by her excessive extravagance or soldiers of fortune whose only wealth was in their fine looks, came to accompany Christina on her journey to Rome. And it was at Pesaro, while dancing the Canaria, the new dance that had come from the Islands, that she met Counts Monaldeschi & Santinelli, those unsavory individuals who, a few years later, were to involve her in a scandal that everyone still remembers. For the moment, dazzled by the two adventurers, she admitted them to her entourage & continued on her way.
At Loretto, at the gates of Rome, Christina insisted on depositing, in a symbolic gesture, her crown & scepter on the altar of the Virgin Mary. It was on the night of December 19 of that same year that she finally entered the city, shielded from all eyes by the closed windows of her carriage, & immediately went to the Vatican, where the Pope had placed some apartments at her disposal.
During these two months Kircher & Bernini had made tremendous efforts. Drawing without restriction on the resources of Alexander VII, they had prepared the most majestic of receptions. Christina’s official entry was not to take place until three days later, to give her time to recover from the fatigue of the journey. And even though the preparations had been completed a week ago, the setting up of the vast mechanism still had to be supervised. The College was in the grip of panic. Cloistered in his study, Kircher was constantly on his acoustic tube: ordering, shouting, checking a thousand things, spurring on his troops like a general on the eve of a decisive battle. In obedience to his commands, all the actors in this performance kept on rehearsing their roles & I had never rushed round so many of the streets of Rome as in those days.
On the morning of Thursday, December 23, Christina secretly left the city to go to the villa of Pope Julius, from which she was to set out in the early afternoon to make her solemn entry. Alas, a north wind had started to blow, gathering heavy clouds full of rain over the Campagna Romana. Seeing this from his window in the College, Kircher was on tenterhooks, so concerned was he that the ceremony should proceed correctly & praying that no ill fortune should deprive him of the fruits of his efforts. Immediately after lunch, which Christina took with the Pope’s emissaries, the storm burst with unheard-of violence. Flashes of lightning & peals of thunder followed at ever-decreasing intervals, as if to show disapproval of the pomp put on for a mere mortal.
In the courtyard of the villa, over which canvas sheets were hastily hung, Monsignore Girolamo Farnese, the Supreme Pontiff’s majordomo, showed Christina the presents His Holiness was giving her: a six-horse carriage designed by Bernini, which was adorned with admirable unicorns covered in gold leaf; a palanquin and a sedan chair, both of delicate workmanship; and an immaculate Anglo-Arab steed whose gold & vermilion harness made it worthy of an emperor. Since the rain did not stop, the majordomo proposed that Christina should cancel the ‘Ceremonial Cavalcade’ & enter Rome in a carriage, but the former sovereign, with all the confidence of her twenty-eight years, refused point-blank. Thus it was that the long procession set off on the Flaminian Way in the driving rain.
There was nothing so beautiful as her route through the town. In every street swathes of silk were flapping at the windows, the drums beat a steady rhythm & from all sides a multitude of glittering carriages came to join the solemn procession. Inside these vehicles the noblest ladies of the city displayed unashamedly costly dresses and jewels. As for their husbands, no less decked out, they rode along beside them in a deafening tumult of hooves and neighing.
When they reached Saint Peter’s Square, the rain redoubled its assault, but Christina, who only had eyes for the cathedral, seemed unaffected by it. And the whole procession followed her example; the wind blew away hats, the downpour spoiled the precious fabrics without anyone appearing to regret or even notice it.
On leaving Saint Peter’s she went, still under escort, to the Palazzo Farnese, which the Duke of Parma had put at her disposal for the whole of her stay in Rome. As was the custom to honor the great ones of this world, the entire front was concealed behind a fake façade. Designed by Kircher, it was impressive both for its splendor and for its unusual purpose. For the architecture he had taken his inspiration from the Temple of Music imagined by Robert Fludd & for the content from the famous “theater of memory” of Giulio Camillo, with the result that the façade represented the sum total of human knowledge. Driven by clockwork mechanisms, large wooden wheels, artistically decorated by the best artists of Rome, slowly turned, reproducing the courses of the planets, the sun & the stars. Seven other wheels, equally delightfully decorated with emblems & allegorical figures, were superimposed, but set off from each other: as they turned, Prometheus appeared, then Mercury, Pasiphae, the Gorgons, Plato’s cave, the banquet the Ocean gave for the gods, the Sefiroth &, within those classes, a large number of symbols drawn from mythology, which allowed all branches of knowledge to be gradually encompassed.
When Queen Christina, fascinated by this spectacle, enquired about its maker, Cardinal Barberini sang Kircher’s praises, telling her she would soon have the opportunity of meeting him, since a visit to the Roman College had long been planned for the next day. He added in passing, as if to make fun of the common people who kept commenting on these figures, that this plaster & wood encyclopedia had cost more than five hundred crowns. The paintings were by were Claude Gelée, known as Claude Lorraine, & Poussin; as for the practical details, they had taken sixty-six hundred large nails, & four boilers had been in operation uninterruptedly for two weeks to produce the 130 gallons of glue needed to assemble the various parts of the ephemeral facade.
Christina’s admiration knew no bounds & she immediately sent for Kircher to give him a precious medallion that she gracefully detached from her bracelet.
Waking next to Aynoré’s body, ensconced in the hammock he rented in the lean- to at Dona Zefa’s, Moéma spared a thought for Thaïs. Scraps from her fling with Aynoré, as precise and embarrassing as pornographic pictures, exploded over an image of a sad, accusatory smile. Her forehead felt as if it were being squeezed by a ring of iron, her moist skin gave off a smell of sour wine and her mouth tasted of sawdust—all signs that her remorse was the product of last night’s binge. She just needed to put up with it for a couple of hours and she would be cleansed of this nebulous feeling of shame, which is nothing more than the postbooze horrors.
Aynoré was sleeping like a log, a Gulliver trapped in the fine net of his tattoos. His naked, suntanned body inspired not so much a feeling of tenderness as of respect, a sort of esteem bordering on veneration. All she retained of the things he had said the previous evening was an impression of efflorescence, something like the slow-motion take-off of a parrot, the red and gold traces of a lost paradise.
She suddenly heard a voice above her: “So you couldn’t resist him either?” Marlene’s pale face had an expression of slightly contemptuous surprise. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep silent as the grave. I just hope you haven’t switched over, that’s all.”
“Drop it, will you,” Moéma replied stretching out, totally unconcerned about the fact that she was naked. “And you can tell who you want what you want, I’m past the age of secrets.” She pulled her tousled hair aside, like opening the curtains. “Is it late?”
“Eleven o’clock, time to get up for a joint. They way you look, poor thing! The whole gang of us are off to the beach, are you coming?”
“We’ll be there,” Aynoré said without opening his eyes.
Seeing the quiver that voice sent across Moéma’s skin, Marlene raised his eyebrows in a jokey expression, “Well, well, old girl,” he muttered as he went off, “you haven’t seen the last of your troubles yet. Você vai espumar como siri na lata …”
During the few moments Moéma stayed in the hammock, running her fingers over her lover’s hairless skin, Marlene’s innuendo had time to get its hooks into her. It was no use her telling herself the drag queen’s insinuations were only dictated by jealousy, she couldn’t recover the happiness she’d felt during the night. Added to the feeling of having betrayed Thaïs—it was already clear to her that giving herself to the Indian was not a passing fancy but a commitment with no way back, a deliberate and definitive farewell that she ought to sort out with her friend—were the doubts aroused by Marlene’s acid comments. His “either” had struck home. Given his appeal, Aynoré was bound to attract girls like flies … So what? The feelings that had thrown them into each other’s arms were unique and no one had the right, except out of spite, to say differently. Aynoré had promised to initiate her into all the things in us that modern society was doing its utmost to obliterate and she trusted him to keep his word. You couldn’t tame a wolf, nor was she attempting to do that, she would become a she-wolf herself, worthy of his way of being in the world, of the savageness he put into it.
It sometimes happens that one feels the need to be all the more determined in justifying a dream when it begins to fade; Moéma clung onto this one, trying to secure it by a founding act, a sacrifice that would testify to its legitimacy. As she pondered this vague plan, an image came to mind that brought a victorious smile to her lips. She shook herself, suddenly released from her fears, and climbed carefully out of the hammock.
When, a few minutes later, she gave Aynoré the comb and scissors she’d borrowed from Dona Zefa, the Indian made no difficulty about going along with her request. With the haughty aloofness that astounded Moéma, he started to cut her long hair in the fashion of the women of his tribe: having cut a horizontal fringe, which came down to her eyebrows, he continued along that line at the sides, leaving the full length of her hair over the back of her neck alone. He shaved her temples, to remove all trace of the former growth, and finished by clipping one of the blue-and-red feather earrings he sold in the streets to the lobe of each ear.
“You’re lucky I’m not a Yanomami,” he said as he held a piece of broken mirror in front of her, “you’d have been seeing yourself shaved from your forehead right back to the middle of your skull.”
Moéma didn’t try to recognize herself in the strange reflection he held in his fingers: with the sacrifice of her hair, her dream had finally emerged from limbo, she felt herself put right, inwardly modified after what she saw as an initiation ritual. Strengthened by this rebirth, she started to imitate Aynoré in his haughty bearing. Silent, with economy of movement—like a priestess of the olden days, she thought—she rolled a joint with a mysterious smile. And what she smoked that morning was not maconha but the sacred Caapi, the intercessor between the world of men and that of the gods …
As they went down to the beach, in the dazzling midday brightness, Moéma felt beautiful and in a warlike mood, a killer of men, an eater of flesh, an Amazon. They stopped at Seu Juju’s hut to eat crabs.
Thaïs had gone away toward the sea as soon as she saw their silhouettes appear over the top of the dunes.
WHEN THEY REACHED Marlene’s little group, far along the beach, beyond the promontory shielding the nudists from prying eyes, Moéma would have been happy to continue, but Aynoré took off his shorts and sat down among them without even consulting her.
“Deus do céu!” said Marlene, putting his hand over his mouth, “what have you done to your hair?”
“If you don’t like it,” Moéma said, getting undressed unselfconsciously, “you’ve only to look the other way.” She looked daggers at one of the boys who was giggling unrestrainedly. “It’s my business, not yours, OK?”
“Hey, stay cool,” Marlene said in conciliatory tones, “I was surprised, that’s all. You can shave your head, for all I care. But all the same … Turn around.”
Moéma hesitated for a moment, then turned round, glowering.
“It looks great! It suits you, it really does.”
Aynoré had stretched out on the beach. He was lying there, eyes closed, unmoving. Slightly embarrassed, Moéma noticed the size of his penis: in a soft curve against his thigh, it was longer than those of Marlene and his pals. Proud to have established this, she lay down beside the Indian, fully aware that all the others were eyeing them. It was good to be consciously naked as the focus of all these looks. Stretched out like this beside each other, they must look like the primordial pair, and she wished she could split herself in two to be able to enjoy the sight. With a mental flick of the hand she brushed aside the image of her father that suddenly appeared above her, drawing on his cigarette as he shook his head with a woebegone expression. Her mother would perhaps have understood, perhaps not, but she would certainly not have simply watched them with that hangdog expression … Moéma moved her arm until it touched Aynoré’s and when his hand closed over hers, she felt happy, at peace with the world and herself.
The sun was burning her skin in a way that was pleasant. By association of ideas, she remembered the story of the fires and the flood, the three founding catastrophes of the Mururucu myth, that Aynoré had told her before going to sleep, though her memory of the details was somewhat confused.
Even the air was burning … That was how the few survivors of Hiroshima had put it, in those very words, without anyone learning the ultimate lesson of human folly from them; all at once she felt too hot to stay on the sand one second longer. She got up, announcing that she was going for a swim, shook off her dizziness and ran to the sea.
After having played in the waves for a while, she lay down on her front at the edge of the sea. Facing the beach, her hands under her chin, she concentrated on the bubbles of foam sizzling on the back of her neck at regular intervals. Thirty yards away from her, Aynoré had joined the others at keeping the ball in the air with shouts and acrobatic dives. Far beyond them the short cliff bordering this part of the shore—a cliff of solidified sand, the sand that was put in layers in little bottles for the tourists—was like a rampart veined with gradations of pink.
Roetgen … Moéma realized she hadn’t given a single thought to him since the moment, already distant, when she’d left the forro da Zefa. He must be somewhere out on the open sea and she couldn’t wait for him to get back to tell him how her life had been turned upside down in his absence. She resolved to be there to meet him when the jangadas came back the next day. Perhaps she could do a thesis on the mythology of the Mururucu or gather sufficient material before going to Amazonia. She definitely wouldn’t tell anyone of her decision, not even her parents. Later, perhaps, when she had children, a swarm of little half castes playing along the riverside … She saw herself in the pose of Iracema, motionless beside the river, her bow aimed at the shadow of an invisible fish, or prophesying beside a fire, her eyes haunted by visions. The female condition of Indian women? The evidence that proved a thousand times over that they were kept on the sidelines because of their “impurity.” The practise of “couvade,” the tragicomedy in which the Indian men, in their masculine pretension, went so far as to act out the sufferings of childbirth and, moaning in their hammocks, receive the congratulations of the whole tribe while the new mother, still unsteady on her feet, was tiring herself out cooking cakes for the guests. All these distortions, which usually modified her enthusiasm for the Indian tribes, had vanished into thin air, rather as if all her critical faculties had been disconnected. Her love—for the first time she gave that name to the euphoria she felt at the mere thought of Aynoré—would transcend all these obstacles; and, if necessary, they would bend the tradition a bit …
At the roar of an engine she turned her head toward the promontory: driven at full speed along the very edge of the shore, a gold-colored beach buggy was visibly growing bigger as it sent huge sprays of water shooting up.
WITH A GOOD wind behind it, the jangada had been bowling along toward the shore for two hours, comfortably riding the heavy ocean swell. Cutting up a huge turtle, which they had caught right at the end of their fishing, had delayed them, so that now the sun looked like a globule of red sitting straight ahead of them on the dark line of the coast. João gave his orders for landing: “You come beside me,” he said to Roetgen, without looking at him, “and don’t get off till I tell you. One false move and we’ll capsize.”
Roetgen had understood the point of these orders; standing and symmetrically placed on either side of the trestle, which they were clinging onto, the four men had to concentrate right to the end on keeping the jangada balanced as it headed for the beach. A hundred yards from the shore, where the waves started to break in long, translucent rollers, João tensed as he clutched the steering oar. Features taut and eyes ceaselessly moving to check the trim of the boat and the hollow of the waves threatening to swamp the stern, he corrected its course with swift, precise touches on the helm. If it should get athwart the waves, or lose a little of its speed, the waves would roll them like any old log. Every time a breaker seemed about to catch them, João maneuvered so as to maintain the surf and the jangada would accelerate sufficiently to escape once more. Swept away uncontrollably by the final combers carrying it toward the shore, the vessel suddenly bumped the bottom, its headway carrying it, scrunching, up the beach. At João’s command, the four immediately leapt out and held the jangada against the pull of the ebb while other fishermen running to meet them placed log rollers under the prow and helped them push it out of reach of the waves.
The two-wheeled collection cart, pulled by a mule, came to meet them. While João was arguing over the catch with Bolinha, the driver, Roetgen took a minute to catch his breath. He was exhausted, but with that mellow weariness that comes from the completion of a task that everything had suggested would be beyond his ability. His sailor’s pride was now joined by the sweeter sense of having been accepted by the fishermen as one of them, of belonging as of right to their brotherhood. It was at that moment that he saw Moéma … The first thing that outraged him was her new hair style, so ridiculously loaded with meaning, the second to see the Indian kiss her on the neck as they came toward him. That smug complacency of a pregnant woman, Thaïs nowhere to be seen … Moéma hadn’t even spoken to him and already Roetgen was ruminating on the sour secretions of his self-esteem.
Without being insulting, he replied curtly to her questions with the slightly disdainful distance of someone who doesn’t really have the time to talk to idlers. Then, apologizing to her, he helped João and the others to carry the fish to the cart. When the time came to distribute their shares, he told Bolinha to take the one due to him to the fisherman he’d replaced and to see that he was credited with his usual amount with the cooperative.
With a weary smile, João slapped him on the shoulder: they were going to drink a cachaça or two together, perhaps even three, assuming they didn’t collapse first. With a little wave to Moéma, the two men picked up their things and left, staggering with fatigue, against the light in the red of twilight.
For a few seconds Moéma watched them go as they climbed the dune. Roetgen’s looks had made her feel ugly and she had to hold back the tears.
If I’ve become addicted to drink,
… the violeiro said, sitting on a beer crate, his voice husky, his guitar cracked. The mug of a Haitian sorcerer … the guy was falling apart at the seams …
The reason’s just the despair I’m in.
… José Costa Leite, the real one, with his little piggy eyes and his baseball cap stiff with grease.
No need to tell me what you think,
… me neither, thought Roetgen, nor João, nor anyone else either. Fill that up, will you?
Drinking isn’t such a sin.
… definitely not, eh João? Anything you want, but not a sin. A duty, a moral law, even. A categorical imperative!
No job, no dough, I’m on the street,
Nothing in my bag to eat …
… my God, the poor guys! To be listening to that while millions of others are getting all worked up over the Montignac diet or liposuction …
Why not make your home the inn?
Drinking isn’t such a sin.
… a medieval minstrel’s voice, a Sardinian voice, an Andalusian voice, a lonesome voice on the Blues railroad …
Alcohol soaks up the sadness,
Drown your memories in gin,
That’ll shut out all the badness —
Drinking isn’t such a sin …
… mass for the downtrodden, and educational! Verses poured forth at top speed and without taking a breath, the last line descending to the quavering line of the refrain. “Hell!” João suddenly says, his eyes glassy, his face ashen, “Come on, cantador, what about hell?”
Sozzled kidneys or a stroke?
Drunk or sober, you’ll still croak.
’s my own choice, this hell I’m in —
Drinking isn’t such a sin …
… an African song, the song of a visionary praise singer. The lament without joy of the man without hope. “Freedom!” Roetgen says, and he says it again because he feels as if he’s got a hot potato in his mouth, and he’s annoyed with himself because all at once the word seems as strange, as devoid of meaning as methoxypsoralen or retinol mononitrate … Two chords and the improvisation starts up again:
Freedom to which a donkey’s bred?
Endless traipsing ’round its shed.
… José Costa Leita looks at the wall, his singing gets hoarse, akin to a cry, finds new paths …
The rich man’s lapdog gets to guzzle,
The poor Brazilian gets a muzzle—
Your heart is free to pound and race
When the cops take up the chase …
So I maintain, through thick and thin:
Drinking isn’t such a sin …
… whistles round the bar, appreciation expressed in grunts and spitting … “Que bom! Where does he find these things?” the barman says. “A cachaça for the poet, and well filled!” Then suddenly there are two angels, two apparitions suffused with light against the darkness of the doorway. My word, it’s enough to make you believe in God! Prince-Valiant-style hair, sides and crown glittering with gold powder, long satin robes, pink for one, azure for the other, two young angels, wide-eyed, hands clasped high on their chests in a gesture of prayer. They’ve stopped to have a glance at hell, just as two real little girls might have done, letting their curiosity get the better of them on the way to church. Roetgen, however, didn’t think the angels had that grave look, the look of an entomologist intrigued by the sudden, inexplicable turmoil in an anthill. He waved them in—and they were gone: it was as if a stultifying wind had blown its peace over the bar. Costa Leite picked up his guitar again …
The factory bosses, in the main,
Have got a nice, poetic vein;
The workers veins are varicose
And they shit worms, to add to their woes.
I’ll sell my soul to the devil too,
If it’ll save some pretty girl’s
Let God save all the filthy curs
Since he has nothing better to do.
My only friend’s the pot I piss in—
Drinking isn’t such a sin.
… another cachaça, and another, to the very confines of this night. “You mustn’t hold it against her,” João says, his eyes fixed on a packet of Omo, “it’s not her fault. A mulher e capaz de quase tudo, o homem de resto …” Ready to drop from drunkenness and fatigue, they cling to each other, shoulders together, arms groping the bar, each holding the other up on the edge of the abyss.
When Thaïs found him, late in the evening, Roetgen was asleep on the billiard table, a nasty gash on his forehead, dried blood over his face. The barman told her he’d had to smash a bottle over his head, he was a decent guy and there was no real harm done, neither to his skull—just a bit of a cut on his scalp, nothing serious—nor in the damage he’d caused. João had been forcibly taken home a little earlier, griping about his wife at the top of his voice.
Nelson had been filing down his iron bar for hours. His mind released by the repetitive nature of the work, he was once more reliving the death of Lampião. There was something that bothered him about the way it had happened, his end was too prosaic, at odds with the qualities of cunning and intelligence attributed to his hero. Angicos, 1938 … The tragic end of the famous cangaceiro was well known: proud of their deed, the men of the flying squad commanded by Lieutenant João Bezerra had reported every last detail.
When the pale light of dawn rose over that part of Brazil on July 28, 1938, the police were so close to the cangaceiros that they could hear them talking or watch those already stretching in the doorway of their shack. Dressed in the only uniform the caatinga allowed, the men on both sides looked disconcertingly similar: a leather jerkin held tight over the chest by the crossed cartridge belts, gaiters, leggings jointed at the knees, a wide cocked hat in fawn leather, stuck with stars and gilded rosettes—a bit like the hats of the dandies of the Directoire period but with a headband and chin strap. Designed to resist the thorny vegetation, this bronze armor united hunters and hunted like knights and their reflection. Dull sounds emerged from time to time beneath the patter of the driving rain: the clatter of mess tins, a horse snorting, a dry cough … They were only to open fire on Bezerra’s command, but the lieutenant’s jaws were welded so tightly together by fear that his pulse was visible on his cheek; far from being ready to pounce, he was trying to disappear into the puddle where he was crouching. The sudden rattle of a sewing machine sent the coward’s face plunging into the mud … A sudden movement in the scrub? The metallic glint of a carbine? An unusually deep silence round the encampment? Without anyone being able to say why, one of the cangaceiros gave the alarm. A second later Maria Bonita thought she saw her sewing machine spitting bullets.
Rushing out when his companion called, Lampião was one of the first to fall under the hail of machine-gun fire. While a good number of the cangaceiros scattered into the hills, Maria Bonita, Luís Pedro and the most faithful of the outlaws entrenched themselves in the huts. The attack only lasted about twenty minutes, but long after the last rifle facing them had fallen silent, the machine guns continued to pepper the shelters of canvas and branches.
Thus the battle was turned into a pigeon shoot. The machine guns had given the cangaceiros no chance at all. And how could such a rout be justified? Why should Bezerra, the well-known coward, have prevailed over intelligence and bravery on that morning rather than any other? Lampião and his faithful followers had died without fighting. They had simply been executed.
Moved by the scene he was visualizing, Nelson had increased the speed of his file over the iron bar. No, he thought, Lampião would never have allowed himself to get caught so easily on a field of battle, even if he’d been taken by surprise. The story just didn’t stand up. The other version, though, the one that had been rumored abroad almost immediately after the tragedy of Angicos, was much more convincing: fuelled by the revelations of Father José Kehrle and confirmed by the brothers João and David Jurubeba, it declared that Lampião and the ten cangaceiros who had been martyred along with him had been poisoned.