Maria Cafuza was not, in fact, a cafuza, as she was not the daughter of an African man with an Indian woman, but with a mameluca. But who cared about these details? Certainly not Filipa or Mb’ta. For them, their daughter was always Maria Mb’ta, and so it was until the day they fell into the hands of João Tibiritê, the same day that Maria was called cafuza for the first time.
If you’re still hoping to find a good-looking member of the family, look no further. This girl, it’s true, had a rare beauty, a combination of the best that could be found in all of the races that pulsed inside her. How can I describe her to make you realize just how beautiful she was? She was tall, with long legs, and golden-brown skin unlike any other. Silky hair the color of a blackbird fell in gentle curls over her shoulders. Lips that were ever so full, iridescent, almond-shaped eyes that alternated between green and violet depending on how the light struck them. A square chin and a silhouette so shapely that whoever saw her felt the desire to stop and admire her. And Maria’s smile was certainly the most beautiful smile you’ve ever seen.
But after she became Maria Cafuza, she never smiled again.
And why should she? With the life she led, there wasn’t the slightest reason for a smile, and nothing could uncloud the fierce drama concealed behind her perfect features.
All this is very sad, I know, but as I said in the beginning, I have no intention of glossing over the less savory aspects in this story.
Maria watched her parents die, tortured at the hands of João Tibiritê. She watched as João tore out her father’s fingernails, rammed an enormous stick up his ass, gouged his eyes, and left him there bleeding on the ground. She watched as this same João turned to Filipa and began slowly cutting into her skin with an enormous, fine-edge knife, until her striped body was a stream of red flooding the piles of leaves that covered the ancient, pristine forest floor.
Maria Cafuza watched it all. She was five at the time. Later, João Tibiritê took her with him.
THE MAMELUCO FROM SÃO PAULO
The story of João Tibiritê could have been different, and his character might have been, too. But who can tell the exact moment when a gene is corrupted, creating a monster? Let’s leave João for a moment and turn to his band of mameluco slave hunters, which included Manu Taiaôba, the son of a Portuguese settler and one of his three Indian wives.
Some of Manu’s childhood was spent with relatives in his mother’s village, some on his father’s tiny farm, here and there, together with other little spitfires just like him. Then the Jesuits took him to their mission, baptized him, and tried to ensure he studied at their college and became a “good Christian,” fearful of the one true God and capable of the repetitive work crucial to the economic order of the newfound colony. But the call of the forest, of adventure, and especially his blood was much stronger, and, a mere twelve years old, he ran away to join João Tibiritê’s much-feared band.
The Paulistas, as they were called, were known as ruthless hunters of runaway native slaves, and would venture deeper and deeper into the untamed backlands in search of their prey. The João Tibiritê posse was one such group. They made incursions that would last for months on end and return with hundreds of natives they’d captured in battles and ambushes. They would set out for their mission armed and ready; no one knew the landscape like they did, they were adept at hunting, fishing, and identifying edible plants, they could speak and understand any of the indigenous languages and Língua Geral, they had no difficulty facing the sun, rain, storms, thunder and lightning, they were hunters in search of jaguars and snakes, trained for war and adventure. A brand of men prepared for the circumstances they’d been born into and who lived to do exactly what they did: push further and further into the backlands and tame the land.
Manu Taiaôba, swift with his bare feet, his fine ear, and innate hunting ability, loved that life. It was as though he was born for it, and he spent hours dreaming and thinking of nothing else. He was soon devising battle strategies and logistics, and in a short couple years he became João Tibiritê’s right-hand man, responsible for devising new, innovative tactics for catching slaves.
In that summer of 1583, João Tibiritê had captured a good number of slaves to take to Pernambuco, where he found a job as a runaway slave hunter.
An epidemic of runaways seemed to have hit the area, and he was the right man to put an end to it. Not everyone in his posse liked the line of work, but João thought it better to stay awhile to earn some easy money as he prepared to make the long journey back to the parts known as São Vicente.
As a result, Manu Taiaôba was present when João killed Maria’s parents. Although he was part of João’s posse, a group of adventurers accustomed to killing and who considered bloody victories their only reason for living, the strange and senseless violence of torture still caused Manu to turn away so as not to see the dismantled bodies of the black man and the mameluca woman. He had never felt this way before: a strange sort of pity filled his heart as he looked to their daughter, a skinny girl who looked as if she would fall apart when the captain snatched her up.
Ever since that day, Manu was present for each moment of Maria’s life.
There were no women in João’s posse, except for an old Indian witch-doctor who had begun to follow them one day and never left. When they arrived at camp the day Maria joined them, Manu called the old woman to her and told her to look after the girl.
Thanks to the old woman and the protection of Manu, Maria Cafuza survived. When she entered the camp, the young girl had already erased from her mind everything she had seen up until then, even how to speak. The only thing left in her heart was the crushing, oppressive, convulsive impulse to hate João Tibiritê. From that moment on, her only purpose in life was to be consumed by this hate.
She grew up in the midst of that posse, without speaking and as though she understood nothing, like a wild animal. She accompanied them on their journeys, witnessed their battles, all the while turning over in her head the only thought she ever had—her obsession, her fuel, her water, and means of breathing—to kill João. Crouching down, sneakily trailing behind and hiding amid leaves and branches, Maria Cafuza observed each and every move her private demon made.
What’s curious is that João Tibiritê, experienced and observant as he was, never noticed Maria’s stare as it fixed on him; he never suspected that the hand that held his destiny was but a few steps away. It never occurred to him that the mute child he had taken with him on a whim, whom he had raised among his posse, could one day represent some sort of threat. He had practically forgotten about her, the withdrawn creature who lived concealed in the forest bushes, more beast than girl.
And so he was completely surprised when, after a night spent drinking in celebration of the capture of an entire Carijó tribe, Maria, all of fourteen, stealthy as a rattlesnake, slipped into his tent and prodded him with the tip of her dagger until he opened his eyes to see his approaching death and assassin. Then she plunged the dagger straight into his Adam’s apple, then again into his heart, and one last time through his liver, exhibiting the ability and anatomical knowledge of someone who had trained for years without rest for no other purpose but this.
João Tibiritê’s eyes flashed and he flailed about, but he was unable to cry out in horror and fear.
Manu was the only one who had seen Maria enter João’s tent, had seen her leave, but he didn’t interfere.
The following day, he assumed João’s place at the head of the posse.
Just as Maria had obsessively watched João’s every move, Manu Taiaôba watched Maria. The older the girl grew, the more bewitched Manu became.
Something interesting was happening there: the young slave hunter couldn’t make out why he had begun to dream about Maria instead of battles, as he’d done before. The young man, brought up in the harsh reality of the wilderness, the rush of adrenaline in the midst of war, and in the sole company of other brutes like himself, knew nothing about feminine beauty. There was no beauty at all in that universe of crude men who wouldn’t recognize a beautiful woman if they saw one. A person can only notice and understand what he has been taught to notice and understand. If he lacks the fundamental knowledge, some basic instrument to tell him what is and isn’t beautiful, how can he take notice?
This was exactly what happened in the case of Maria’s splendorous beauty: there was no one in the posse capable of taking notice. Only the old woman and Manu, without realizing exactly why, would spend hours on end staring at the young woman, and each time they looked, they felt something inexplicable and better inside themselves. And so it was the girl, rather than combat, who began to inhabit Manu’s dreams.
Manu asked the old witch to find him an herb to calm his mind, which was on fire, consumed with nothing but thoughts of Maria.
Each time Manu tried to draw closer, Maria would drive him away as she drove away the others. No one would ever touch her. All attempts to rape her—and there were many for the simple fact that Maria was a woman in such an environment—were thwarted by a vigilant Manu, who little by little made sure everyone in his posse understood that they were to leave Maria in peace, or they’d have to deal with him.
After the death of João Tibiritê, Maria felt something like disappointment that he could not come back to life so that, now that she had learned how, she could kill him over and over, until she, too, died, together with the hate she carried inside her.
Nonetheless, in some way something changed inside her—not by much, but enough that one night under a full moon, at the edge of a river, she let Manu approach her. He drew closer with such desire and such fear that it was nothing short of a miracle that anything happened there at all. But it did. Maria howled like a wild animal, but stopped when she finally understood that she wasn’t howling out of hate or terror, but for some other reason she couldn’t quite make out, but which she knew was not bad.
Her life, despite everything, did not change. Her uncontrollable hate for João Tibiritê, even after his death, left no room for any other emotion to occupy her mind and heart. She continued to lead her life in the same feral manner as before, at the side of the old Indian woman, trailing the posse wherever it went. On nights with a full moon—and only on such nights—she would go to the edge of some river and allow Manu to touch her.
Manu’s devotion to her was almost religious. He always set up his tent next to that of the old woman and the young girl, and did everything in his power to ensure they wanted for nothing.
The leadership of the tactical, adventure-seeking Paulista took little time to assert itself, and soon his reputation for success replaced even that of João Tibiritê, as did his aversion to unnecessary violence. Manu Taiaôba was no delicate flower, but he had no sympathy for violence for the sake of violence: he was of the opinion that honorable death in combat was the safest way to resolve matters and that, while the capture of savages was a necessity, he could not say the same for violent forms of punishment, which only served to delay their forward progress.
In the ten years that passed, his posse marched many times from the backlands of southern Brazil to the sugar-producing region in Pernambuco, in the north. Maria became pregnant twice, and twice, with the help of the old woman, she aborted. She was unable to tolerate even the thought of putting a child into this world. Never that.
That was when a plan began to take shape in Manu Taiaôba’s mind: to take Maria to the sugar plantation where she’d been born. Would she remember the time there when she could still speak? Would she recall memories of her parents that would rid her of the hate consuming her? His devotion to Maria caused his thoughts to wander in the hopes of finding something, anything, that would make life less of a burden to her.
They did, in the end, return to the old plantation. The Portuguese farmer who had hired João Tibiritê had already died, as had his wife. One of his sons had since taken over the mill, which continued to be a wildly prosperous enterprise. Under the pretext of talking over the idea of buying some land in the area, Manu requested permission to camp with his posse near the plantation.
They stayed for a while and Maria walked the land without any sign of recognition. She had merely become more given to contemplation: she would sit down somewhere and stay there for hours, looking out toward some unrecognizable point beyond the horizon.
Until one cold and cloudy morning, she got up and she set off like a zombie toward the margin of the nearby creek; she began to walk faster and faster, as though following a clear path she could see in her mind.
Manu followed her.
Maria walked a good distance before stopping beneath a leafy jatoba tree, where she crouched down and began to dig furiously until she lifted out a small package bundled in an old and dirty handkerchief.
Shaking, she untied the tiny bundle of Filipa’s treasures.
And then, her body no longer had the strength to hold back all the devastating, pent-up pain that she had carried all those years. As she fell to ground in convulsions, a terrified Manu felt he had committed an irreparable mistake.
But just look how life is full of surprises.
Maria Cafuza, this time without suspecting a thing, was pregnant. She’d barely gained any weight, her belly had hardly grown at all, and though she had a slight suspicion, she still lacked the certainty to take the necessary precautions. Perhaps her own arrival at the plantation of her childhood had lifted her thoughts to somewhere other than her body, and nature continued on its course without her or the old woman noticing a thing. But that day, there beneath the jatoba tree, everything happened at once: Maria writhed with painful contractions, without realizing that, as she died, taking that incurable pain with her, she gave birth to a daughter.
Had she known better, she would have killed her.