Poor and feeble, Corporal Jesuíno’s only stroke of luck was the day he killed a rattlesnake that had nested in his commander’s kepi, saving the man from certain death. In return Jesuíno had received a runaway slave girl whose owner had resolved to sell her at all costs after breaking her pelvis and rendering her practically useless.
Not that killing a venomous snake deserved a second thought in that era. In everyone else’s eyes, the corporal had only been doing his duty, and the fact that he killed a rattlesnake—a common occurrence, after all, since there were more snakes than anything else in that village, which itself was nothing more than a clearing in the middle of the woods at the end of the world—wouldn’t have caught anyone’s attention were it not for the commander’s dream the night before. In the dream, a rattlesnake slithered through one ear and, before crawling out the other, rattled around every last corner of his terrified brain, which was swollen like a big old ball. When he woke up in agony from his dream with his head pulsing with pain, the commander woke his wife, well-versed in prophecies and witchcraft, who without batting an eye ordered him to do two things early that morning: the first was to slather his scalp with a special concoction she had immediately begun to prepare that morning with ingredients from her personal pharmacopeia; the second was to find a way to perform two good deeds in one, in the name of Saint Benedict. They couldn’t be two separate good deeds. They had to occur simultaneously.
Late that morning, at the small border post around which the tiny village had sprung up, the commander, driven insane by the tortuous pain attacking his brain and by his inability to hit upon a way to fulfill his double mission, decided to go out for some fresh air. That’s when it happened: the commander reached for the kepi, the rattler readied its attack, and by some miracle the poor cabo—who was generally oblivious to what went on around him—looked and saw, and still more miraculously grabbed his blunderbuss and pulled the trigger. Not only did he pull the trigger, but he shot the snake right in the head. A truly inexplicable and authentic miracle. The comandante’s hand remained suspended in mid-air, paralyzed.
It was at that moment, too, that the owner of the crippled runaway slave girl showed up, offering her for a pittance to whoever wanted to do him the favor of taking the useless creature, or else he would have to beat her to death as she deserved.
At that moment, the commander saw a clear signal from the heavens to perform his double-good deed, one for the corporal who had so spectacularly saved his life, and the other for the slave owner, from whose shoulder he was lifting a burden. What’s more, he secured the man’s goodwill should he need his help one day. So he paid a pittance for the black slave woman and gave her as a present to the corporal.
Then, feeling quite satisfied with himself and considering his day won, he headed home to finally rest now that the swelling in his head had begun to recede, leaving the startled corporal the owner of a black girl who could barely walk.
Seeing no other alternative, the new slave owner took the hobbling woman to his hut and there, walking with the crutch he made for her out of some wood from a mango tree, she lived long enough to bear him five children and serve as an adoptive mother to Jacira Antônia.
Ever since Jacira had arrived on the back of her father’s horse on that morning lost to time, she had always been a serious girl who rarely smiled. The world, as she saw it, ought to be confronted with seriousness, if not distrust, and that is what she did with her big dark eyes.
At the edge of her parents’ bedroom door, on that fateful day, she had been spared from seeing the bloody wounds on her mother’s body. From where she stood, she saw only her father’s back. But she no doubt noticed that something very wrong was happening there, and when her father pulled her up violently and hoisted her up onto his horse—her father, who had always looked upon her with affection and treated her so kindly—she felt that whatever this thing was that was wrong, was also wrong with her.
She never figured out what had happened or what to think of it all. Meanwhile, the trust the girl of three had placed in her father caused her, unconsciously and without even understanding why, to accept her new life in some way. In the beginning, she was certain her father would arrive at any moment and once again set her upon his horse and gallop away. As time passed, she made a conscious effort to abandon this hope, but in the depths of her soul and until the day she died, that hope was to continue, a tiny flame that burned with the same unbearable desire to hear the hooves of a galloping horse, returned to take her back home.
At fourteen, Jacira was spindly and boasted few attractive features. Yet when one Captain Dagoberto made the settlement his last stop before setting off on an expedition into the country to find lands that would bring him wealth and importance, it was the corporal’s adopted daughter whom he thought to take with him to start a family. It’s true that the captain’s options were limited, but it’s also true that he could have soldiered on alone. But again, don’t romanticize a simple calculation made by a pragmatic man. What he saw in Jacira—and he was right to see in her—was an inner strength, an energy that was not easy to find in others. The girl had a confident stride, a reflective gaze in her big dark eyes, a sure sign of intelligence and learning, and she was always busy: sweeping the house and the porch, fetching water from the river, stirring the coals in the oven, washing clothes in a stream, feeding the chickens and the pig, shucking corn, preparing food—food that was simple but abundant, thanks to the initiative of that very same girl, who had substituted her crippled mother in practically everything. Dagoberto sensed she would be a good acquisition for his ends and went to communicate his decision to the corporal, who evidently responded positively, as expected, and simply said: “I’m very honored, dear captain.”
As for Jacira, marrying the captain or any other man was all the same, since at that time and place these things were considered commonplace, as they had been in her mother’s and her grandmother’s time, much as one accepts a rainy or a sunny day, or the arrival of night or day. But setting off on an expedition—that indeed was an unexpected bit of news and it left her slightly agitated and feeling something she had ever felt before—an inner restlessness that she couldn’t put her finger on and which, for the first time in a long time, kept her body from sleep that night, her eyes wide open in the dark of her corner of her family’s hut. It wasn’t a bad feeling, on the contrary. It was good to feel the subtle itch of curiosity, that unfamiliar agitation breaking into a slight smile that she found silly, but which stubbornly loomed on her lips, expectation opening tiny wings inside her chest.
CAPTAIN DAGOBERTO
Dagoberto da Mata had come from the far away Captaincy of Ceará in the Northeast, where his father had settled along the Rio São Francisco, becoming a rich cattle rancher. The fifth child from a large family, Dagoberto decided to strike out on his own and left for Rio de Janeiro, where he thought of enlisting to tame the backlands in service of the king. His passion for gambling, however, led him to give up on a military career, taking nothing with him but the nickname “Captain.”
He was a just man, clear-headed, magnanimous, with an impressive ability to read people’s faces to decipher their character and emotions, a talent that was evidently at the root of his formidable skill in gambling and which also brought him to choose Jacira as his wife.
Despite his love for gambling, it was not his only or his greatest passion: the young man from Ceará had always aspired to conquer new lands. The exploration and conquest of the unknown territories were his sirens’ songs. In the beginning he had thought to do this exploring in the name of the king, but during the conversations he had over the months of travel between Ceará and Rio, he became convinced that he could do everything he wanted for himself.
His gambling in Rio served to multiply the banknotes his father had given him as an advance on his inheritance and to build the necessary capital to buy slaves, animals, arms, and supplies. Preparations lasted nearly a year, and only came to an end in the village where he was making his final arrangements—where he met Jacira, and asked Corporal Jesuíno for her hand.
On the exact day he turned twenty-five, Captain Dagoberto da Mata set out to conquer his dream of venturing into the rugged backlands to put down roots.
That same day, in the chill of a foggy morning, Jacira left with her husband the Captain, each of them on their own horse, accompanied by twenty mules carrying provisions, supplies, and munitions, four mulatto foremen, and thirty slaves (twenty-five men, five women, all of them black). They were heavily armed, and full of enthusiasm as they headed toward the Captaincy of Goiás, a place that was still little-explored, and where it was said there was much gold and plenty of good land.
After more than eight months of traveling, they came to a field near a river with lead-colored waters, lush trees, and fertile soils of humus. They had arrived in the deep backlands of Goiás; an imposing jatoba tree lifted its branches skyward in its stubborn desire to touch the bright blue cloudlessness. They had been camping in that spot for a few days when the Captain told her that it would be the spot where they would build their house and sow their crops. Whether there was gold close was anyone’s guess, but the soil was good for farming, and that was the Captain’s priority. There weren’t any Indians for miles and the local tribe wasn’t violent, and didn’t seem to pose a threat. The Captain and Jacira would settle down here. The next day they would begin to clear a plot for the house and the crops.
Jacira was filled with peace as she listened to the news. She had also liked that spot. A short distance from there, the river broke off into a separate branch until it reached a pool of water that, it seemed to her, would be very useful. The land was indeed good and their crops were sure to grow. She would plant rice, beans, cassava, and corn. Lots of corn. Dagoberto had been advised by Paulistas he’d come across in his travels to bring corn, whose kernels were easier to carry on long journeys than cassava cuttings. They would raise cattle. Jacira knew the Captain also had plans to grow sugarcane. They would irrigate the land with water from the nearby river. They would build a gristmill. There she would have their children; her belly had already begun to show signs of the first. Yes, that would be her land, her home. She was at peace.
The time passed quickly, and within four years the house, with its five bedrooms and a beaten-earth floor, was at the center of a small plantation. The sugarcane was profitable. The gold the slaves had found in nearby riverbeds—it wasn’t much, but it also wasn’t a pittance—was dried in cow leather and stored in tiny leather bags that Jacira had sewn, which the Captain stored in a location known only to the two of them.
Jacira had become her husband’s right hand. He respected her and treated her with great consideration, admiring her tirelessness and the authority she wielded calmly but without hesitation. On cold country nights, they would sit around the copper pot where the Captain leisurely tossed corncobs that slowly transformed into burning embers, consumed in the fierce and corrosive red flames. It was at such hours that the Captain would tell her of his plans in slow, thoughtful sentences and wait for her opinion, which, without his fully realizing it, he had come to consider essential. Her eyes fixed on the embers, where it seemed she saw beyond the crimson incandescence, Jacira would deliberate as long as she needed. She would only offer her opinion when she thought she had something important to add, otherwise she merely assented: “Good thinking, my Captain.”
When the Indians, who until then had been friendly, began to adopt more hostile attitudes, neither of them considered it grave. Since they had first settled there, the natives had been a constant presence, sometimes looking at them from a distance for days on end, sometimes disappearing for months at a time, other times one or two would sneak up close to nab a piece of clothing from the line, a round of ammunition or something of the kind, either out of curiosity or for fun, Jacira imagined, since they always did this in broad daylight, darting joyfully about, drawing attention to themselves.
Nearly all the other farmers who had recently established themselves in the area around the same time or a little after Jacira and the Captain were violent with the Indians, trying to drive them far from lands the farmers now considered theirs. The Captain was one of the few who had given orders to his slaves and hired hands to leave the tribe alone. Not because he was especially virtuous, for, like everyone else, he too thought there was little difference between an Indian and any other beast, but rather as a question of style; the Captain was more accustomed to dominance through the force of one’s character than with violence and disorder. As for Jacira, she also thought it only natural that Indians were considered more closely related to beasts than to people. Her generation of Brazilians, after fewer than two centuries had passed, had forgotten entirely who their ancestors were. Besides not being considered fellow human beings, the Indians incited fear and—worse yet—disdain. Were you to tell Jacira that she had Indian blood running in her veins, were you to tell her about Inaiá, Tebereté, and Sahy, her deep dark eyes would light up in shock.
At that time, everyone thought that was the ways things were: the white man in command, the slaves doing the work, the Indians and animals in the forest. Jacira never thought to question this as she sat around the burning embers on chilly nights. It wasn’t worth thinking about. But just as she didn’t mistreat animals, she also thought it wrong to mistreat the savages. Besides, much was said about their vengeful spirit, and this, yes, was often the topic of conversation when sitting around their copper pot: tales of revenge, cruelty, and savagery that served as warnings against the foolishness of provoking them.
The danger gradually became noticeable. First, the episodes even seemed like nothing more than horsing around, the deeds of snot-nosed little kids. In the middle of the night, they would wake up to the panicked whinnies of the horses or the terrified grunting of the pigs, who had been tied in groups of two by their tails and chased around by the Indians. Or it was the large mortar found full of manure the next morning, the irrigation ditch gone dry, the river’s course altered upriver, the gristmill jammed, small animals missing.
Soon men brought news to Captain Dagoberto that the farm of Senhor Jahudehir had been attacked, some fifteen leagues away. His head and that of his wife, two foreman, and five black slaves had been mounted on the pointed fence-tops protecting the fields. When her husband returned home that night, Jacira was mute as she listened to the news.
Jahudehir had never been easy to get along with. He was well known for the violence he inflicted on the Indians, the way he burned their villages and their crops in his zeal to chase them to the ends of the earth. The local tribes, which weren’t violent, saw themselves forced to respond to the attacks of Jahudehir and his men, but this business of attacking a farm and killing families was something new entirely. In addition, the latest news they’d had of their avaricious neighbor was that he had emptied rat poison into the natural well where the Indians got their drinking water.
Captain Dagoberto announced that, early the next morning, he would set out with five men to gather more information with the other neighbors and stock up on ammunition. Jacira was to be careful and keep the slaves close to home. No one was to wander far and they ought to always walk in pairs, guns in hand, even if it was just to retrieve water from the well or the nearby channel.
He would return as soon as possible.
Morning greeted them with a tense and threatening silence. There was an unfamiliar and palpable weight in the air, a warm mass condensing around a nucleus of cruelty and danger that hovered heavily, quietly above them. The animals, also much quieter than usual, stood at attention, their senses sharp and alert.
Jacira ordered a group of slaves to reinforce the doors and windows with wooden crossbars. She sent another group to make sure the animals stayed close together. A third group she sent to bring back every stick, rock, and whatever else might be employed as a weapon. The black women were to continue their work in the kitchen.
It was early afternoon when the group in charge of protecting the animals came to sound the alarm. They had seen Indians armed with arrows stirring in the bamboo trees. Jacira ordered them to immediately sound the bell warning everyone to come inside the house. Within minutes, the slaves came running from every corner of the yard and arrows skidded onto the veranda, as though the two movements were part of some strange choreography. The doors and windows were quickly bolted. Jacira gave the order for them to fire from the two rifle holes in the front and back doors, warning them to aim carefully because they couldn’t afford to waste the little ammunition they had.
She was certain of one thing: the Indians lacked numbers. She knew that there were more women and children to be found in their villages than men. There was no doubt the women would not be on the front lines. Sitting there locked inside her house, Jacira couldn’t be sure of how many were outside. But judging by the howling and the quick glance she took before closing the last window just before the tribe attacked, she was certain they were no more than two-dozen men. At her side, meanwhile, were twenty male slaves and five women who were also capable of mounting a defense. She would send some of them to stay with the children in the large, windowless middle bedroom, and the rest would stay to help as necessary. The Captain would be back soon, she only needed to hold out until he arrived with more men and more weapons.
The savages’ strident howling, the sound of their clubs beating against the doors and windows, the desperate panic in the slaves’ eyes were only interrupted by the gunshots coming from the holes in the doors, shots that, in reality, had not been much more effective other than to frighten the Indians. As the attackers had already reached the building, they were outside the line of fire except for when they passed directly in front of the holes in the doors where the bullets escaped.
Jacira’s composure was admirable, but she knew they would not last long that way. That’s when her eyes fell over the stove; a simple idea came to her when she saw the large copper pan forgotten in the hearth.
“Light a fire to boil the animal fat,” she immediately ordered her two quickest slave women, and within minutes the crackling flames were spitting forth scalding bubbles that began to burst from the pan like the fiery mouth of a tiny erupting volcano.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Fill the ladles carefully and throw them on the Indians through the openings in the doors and windows. And you two”—she turned to a pair of male slaves—“pay attention, and when you see they’re close, open the wickets quickly and throw the pans right in their faces.”
Immediately grabbing spoons and frying pans, the slave women began to pour out the boiling slime on any Indian who came near the gaps in the doors and windows, following Jacira’s orders: “Get them in the eyes and hands. Don’t waste time on other parts of the body.”
The cries of pain and surprise multiplying outside filled the house with joy. They soon realized that the unorthodox tactic had rebuffed the Indians’ attack until the Captain returned.
With her extraordinary composure and a triumphant smile on her lips, Jacira sat in her chair in the middle of the living room and savored her bizarre victory.
After that day, once she had felt enormous satisfaction at discovering her own strength, something inside Jacira changed. Something subtle, deep down, something that not even Captain Dagoberto, an astute reader of others, realized at first. Something that might have been translated as an almost natural passion for power and the conviction that to obtain it, she would find the right path, by stealth or by force.
Thanks to the energy of Dagoberto and Jacira, the plantation grew into a source of enormous prosperity. The number of slaves and cowhands, who were paid in money, products, or livestock, also grew, and day-to-day operations entailed a great hustle and bustle. The livestock soon stretched further into the backlands, and the fields of corn, sugarcane, and cotton also expanded—the land was endless and open, and Captain Dagoberto’s property continued to spread through the uninhabited expanse. In his travels to Rio de Janeiro, he had managed to double the size of the allotment he had originally asked of the Crown. And there was barely any more talk of Indians.
Jacira oversaw the production of cassava and tapioca flour of an unrivaled whiteness, and of marmalades and guava pastes prepared with enormous quantities of fruit and sugar, which the slave women stirred without rest and for hours at the stove, in large copper pans that were black as coal on the outside and shiny like gold on the inside. At the foot of the giant clay ovens in the covered sheds behind the house, more black women stirred the mixture until it began to thicken and slowly erupt in viscous and noisy, plopping bubbles. Packaged in tiny wooden boxes before they could cool, they soon made their way to fill customer orders in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia. The sweets produced at the Jatoba Plantation had become famous.
Jacira also ordered a shed constructed for housing looms and increased the quantity of cotton planted, sending the slaves to spin the cotton into thread and stitch white clothing for everyone on the plantation.
When the storehouse became full, Dagoberto would send one of his foremen out with a barren of mules to the stores of Rio de Janeiro.
Over time, the couple also began expanding and repairing the old mud house with its beaten-earth floors, whose furniture consisted of the hammocks, boxes, and trunks they’d brought with them, and a single long table and two matching wood benches they’d made soon after they had arrived.
Dagoberto brought a bricklayer and a carpenter from the regional capital, Vila Boa de Goiás, and constructed a large house made with bricks and roof tiles, a house with many bedrooms and an enormous veranda, with ceilings more than twelve feet high to ensure the house stayed cool. They no longer had a beaten-earth floor but one of long wooden boards. Later, he sent for two beds with ornamental headboards from Rio de Janeiro, lace curtains for the living room, and a blue taffeta curtain with red and yellow tassels for the bedroom. He also bought silverware for special occasions.
Captain Dagoberto was a man of refined tastes and ideas that were ahead of his time.
In the trunk full of things they had brought with them, there were two packs of cards, a backgammon board, and silver chalice monogrammed with an interlacing D and M. In his first trip to Rio, Dagoberto brought Jacira a wrought-silver snuffbox and two silver cups with a new monogram, now with a J between the D and the M, a monogram that from that moment on Dagoberto would have printed on the leather trunks and everything else on the plantation. On other trips, he brought her a four-foot-long gold chain, an ivory cameo, a silver basin, and a blue-silk mantilla she never let out of her sight and which she took to the grave, wrapped around her head.
From the beginning, Jacira learned a great deal from her husband. Dagoberto introduced her to life’s three great pleasures: the bedroom, the snuffbox, and the foot-bath. All of them had come as a surprise. He also taught her more useful things. Dagoberto passed on all of his knowledge, his ideas, his enterprises, and his aspirations to Jacira, both through his daily conduct on the plantation and the easy conversations they had around the fire in the copper pot, a custom they maintained even in the new house. When night fell, a slave woman would bring the copper pot and a basket full of corncobs, which she placed at the side of Dagoberto’s high-backed chair on the raised veranda built above the cellar. It was there they would sit and admire the sun setting across their lands, which stretched on and on, and lay out plans and dreams. Jacira would discreetly wonder at the whiteness of Dagoberto’s feet beneath the clear water of the foot-bath.
Dagoberto also taught Jacira to read and write. This, however, hadn’t been intentional. It hadn’t occurred to him that this ability could be useful to his wife, but rather to his children, whom he made sure knew how to do both. Jacira was always close by during these lessons and easily learned to read and write as she looked on. When he discovered that his wife already knew how to read, Dagoberto nodded approvingly: “Well, well!” he exclaimed and began to make lists of books his foreman was to bring back from Rio.
Neither Dagoberto nor Jacira had been brought up in the Church. They considered themselves Catholics, however, and over time their religiosity began to grow. Colonial society breathed Catholicism in a rather unorganized yet effective manner. Traveling priests often passed by the plantation to do a bit of proselytizing, and many of the slaves and hired hands were baptized. Slowly, with the increasingly frequent visits from the priest of the nearest village, visits which sometimes carried on for days, the couple ended up constructing a “room of the saints,” where they placed a few statuettes, among them two tiny female saints of blue-green soapstone with wavy white hair flowing to their feet. For some unknown reason, Jacira had been overcome by an unfamiliar emotion when she saw the saints for sale by a cattleman who had passed by the plantation, and she immediately bought them. From that day on, she had considered them the most beautiful pieces on her tiny altar, these almost miniature saints, made, the cattle driver had told her, by an old man, who was by now deceased, in a tiny town the people called Pouso da Capela. At the feet of the two saints, she laid a branch of a blessed palm from Palm Sunday that the priest always brought for protection against thunderbolts, lightning, and storms.
It was a happy marriage, Jacira and Dagoberto’s. Without great displays of affection, as the era demanded, but nonetheless with great attention and care for each other and the tranquil pleasure of being together. They had nine children, of which only five survived: four boys and a girl.
Their surviving daughter was named Maria Bárbara, and was born when her mother was thirty-two. But can we really call someone a survivor if she doesn’t make it to the age of eighteen?
Maria Bárbara was a slender girl, almost frail, like her mother, but she had a sweet and lively temperament. The slave women who helped raise her called her Birdie on account of her voice and persistent cheerfulness. Her story, however, is quite sad, though perhaps a bit banal for her time and circumstances.
As an adolescent, she fell in love with Jacinto, Captain Dagoberto’s foreman. In reality, he was Dona Jacira’s foreman, since at that time twelve years had passed since the death of Jacira’s husband, though she made a point—as she had done when he was still alive—of referring to him in everything, as though the Captain were still alive. Jacira had been widowed at thirty-six, leaving a hole nothing could fill until one chilly dawn when, after yet another endless night spent opening the bedroom windows and passing the hours peering, hypnotized, into the dark, she decided to dedicate the rest of her life to making her husband’s name the most important in the region. She hadn’t left the bedroom ever since the morning Dagoberto had suddenly fallen dead, practically at her feet, as they were making the rounds of the sugarcane fields four weeks earlier. That is, until the morning she made her decision, when, to everyone’s surprise, she emerged from behind the bedroom door with her customary serenity, her hair done up in a bun, wearing the black mourning clothes she would wear the rest of her life.
That morning, she had summoned all the men and women on the plantation, those who had been welcomed into the family, the hired help, and slaves, and gathered them in the large yard. Looking down upon them from the veranda, as Dagoberto had always done, she spoke: “All of you know that the Captain is dead. This is a fact that I would give my life to deny, but I cannot. But here on this plantation, which he built and which belongs to him, he is not dead and never will die, not as long I’m still here. Everything will continue on exactly as when he was with us. No one will change anything, not so much as a blade of hay. You will all continue to belong to the estate of Captain Dagoberto, and be the men and women of Captain Dagoberto, until the day I die.”
And so it was. The plantation still belonged to Captain Dagoberto, the cattle were still his cattle, the sugar mill, the cotton fields, the goods, and the hired hands, all his. The place at the head of the table, where Jacira never allowed anyone else to sit, was his, the chair on the veranda next to the copper pot, the left side of the bed, all of these places were left empty and would never be filled by anyone else; they would always belong to him, her Captain.
Jacira was careful to ensure everything ran as it should. She replicated her husband’s gestures and his approach; she more than simply replicated them, in fact, she adopted them as her own. She would set out early in the morning, as the Captain had done before her, to make the rounds of the plantation and the innumerable tasks its maintenance required. She did everything as she had learned to do by watching her husband day after day. She used the same hat as her husband, which she had managed with particular deftness to make sit firmly on her smaller head, and off she would go in her widow’s attire, made of lightweight fabric to make riding easier, spending entire days surrounded by the Captain’s men.
Are you surprised that a woman could exercise such power and authority in that era? Well, you shouldn’t be. In every era, everywhere, there have always been women whose power rivaled that of men. They’ve always existed, and they are anything but rare. By this point, you’ve no doubt noticed that the women who peopled this land during the first two or three hundred years, the ones who traveled to the most remote backlands to live on the frontier, in a country that was just getting its start, couldn’t afford to be weak and submissive the way some people would like to portray them. They had to take care of themselves; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t survive the inhospitable conditions in which they lived, often passing months without their husbands at home, forced to fend for themselves in many cases, and see to the conditions that would guarantee their survival. Of course, there have always been all kinds of men and women, weak and strong, craven and gullible, intelligent and limited, good and bad, powerful and impotent. But you all can be certain of one thing: the women who lived in the vast, unforgiving, magnificent backlands in the early centuries of this country’s history could be many things—but silly and fragile they were not.
It fell to Jacira then, with her team of foremen, to wait for visitors at the edge of the property to guide them up to the plantation house, per the standards of courtesy and hospitality that Dagoberto had always made a point of observing. If the visitors were important, the meals they were served, as during the time of the Captain, were comparable to real banquets. When it came time for visitors to depart, it was she who once again led the convoy, accompanying them to the edge of the property. When it was neighbors who visited, she would receive them, as Dagoberto had done, taking snuff in her hammock on the porch, where she administered the courtesies her husband often had and gave her opinion on the subject matter at hand.
She soon found herself busier and busier. In a few years, she became the most powerful plantation owner in the area. What couldn’t be obtained through persuasion she obtained by cunning or force—that was her secret motto, the motto that lent a victorious little smile when, as night neared, she would sit in her chair on the porch, her feet soaking in the warm water of the foot bath a slave woman regularly refreshed. There, next to the empty seat of her late but eternally present Captain, she would toss corncobs into the copper pot and tell him, without uttering a word, about all she had achieved in his name.
Dona Jacira’s manner and imposing attitude were well known and were a topic of conversation miles away, together with the wealth of Captain Dagoberto’s plantation. Even in the regional capital, Vila Boa de Goiás.
Everyone knew of the absolute loyalty Dona Jacira demanded of her employees, but they also knew that she didn’t hesitate to do her own part whenever necessary. The story of what happened with one of her cowhands, Manuel Damasceno, who killed a man over a gambling dispute and was immediately arrested by an officer of the civil guard, quickly became a legend. As soon as she learned about what had happened, Jacira set off at a gallop, trailed by her troops to the village of São Francisco. São Francisco was the closest village to her lands, and though it was small, it boasted a church and a jail.
They entered the village kicking up dust and causing a commotion with their combination of horses, spurs, whips, dogs, and men. Within seconds, they filled the small open field that served as the town square, and Jacira ordered one of her men to dismount from his horse to call the officer to the jailhouse door. A good man, the officer had a peaceful and calm manner.
“Good afternoon, Officer,” Jacira said.
“Good afternoon, Dona Jacira,” he responded.
“I’ve been informed, Officer, that Your Honor mistakenly arrested one of Captain Dagoberto’s men.”
“You’ve been informed correctly, Dona Jacira, but there was no mistake about it. I had every intention of arresting him.”
“Oh, is that so, Officer? May I know your reasons?”
“Manuel Damasceno killed a man over a card game, Dona Jacira, and this I cannot permit in my village.”
“If he killed him, the other man is already dead, Officer. It’s not by arresting one man that one brings another back to life.”
“I may not bring him back, Dona Jacira. But I will bring him justice.”
“Justice is for God to decide, Officer. And when it comes to my men and my things, that’s up to me and my husband. But, to make this brief, Your Honor must know I’ve come to fetch Manuel, since he is one of Captain Dagoberto’s men and is sorely missed.”
“That I cannot permit, Dona Jacira. The lady will forgive me, but with all those arriving here in the village, how much can a single man be missed?”
“A great deal, Officer. And all these people you see here with me came for no other reason than to bring him back with us.”
“Only if you kill me first, Dona Jacira.”
“My dear man, why this stubbornness?”
“It’s not stubbornness, Dona Jacira. It’s authority. I’m here to arrest anyone who disturbs the order and send him to trial in the capital. And that’s what I’m doing.”
“I see, Officer, that the gentleman is a man of authority. But the greatest authority in this region is Captain Dagoberto. Perhaps Your Honor hasn’t yet heard.”
“This comes as news to me, Dona Jacira.”
“Well, that’s no fault of ours, Officer. If you’re in need of a lesson, we’re only too happy to provide it. You need only wait.”
Maintaining her elegance, Jacira circled her horse around and ordered her men to retreat, but the officer knew his fate was sealed. Distressed, he thought over his next move. From the very beginning of his conversation with Dona Jacira, he had seen he’d reached a dead end. He stood still, his thoughts fading away and leaving a void in their place. For a moment, he had the sensation that he had left his body and was looking down from a distance on some rooftop at his solitary figure standing at the jailhouse door, watching as the widow and her men departed, kicking up so much dust it seemed a twister had blown through town.
The officer was unmarried and had no children. He had arrived there a little more than two years earlier, sent by the Civil Guard’s provincial command to oversee the region along with five soldiers. Just think about it: five soldiers against the Captain’s band of rough- and-tumble men.
What a mess he’d gotten himself into! A cold sweat ran down his face as the adrenaline remaining from his confrontation with the Captain’s widow began to fade.
When he slowly regained his thoughts, he became convinced that he had no other option than to release Manuel Damasceno. His decision made, he walked back to the cell, unlocked the door, and muttered: “Get out of here already, you miserable wretch, and I don’t ever want to see you here again. I’m warning you.”
Later that day, Jacira was surprised to see Manuel Damasceno walking toward the plantation, kneeling at her feet and kissing her hand, thanking her and invoking all the saints that they might protect her. But Jacira was not satisfied.
That very night, a group of ten men, each of them carrying in his saddlebags a large bundle of dry sugarcane, entered the town, this time without kicking up dust or making any noise as you’d expect from a group of their size, or even from a single man—they were trained for this after all, and could slip undetected through the cool night air as they carried out their orders. They circled the jail with the dried sugarcane, kicked down the door to check whether anyone was in the cell. There was no one, and since there was no one in the cells, even the soldier who acted as night watchman had gone home to sleep. Lucky him! The Captain’s men threw more of the dried sugarcane inside the cells, lit them on fire, and left as quietly as they’d arrived.
The first people in the village to wake with the crackling fire and the smell of smoke could do nothing but keep the fire from spreading to other homes. The jail was already consumed by the furious flames, their rage redoubled at being called to work on such a peaceful, easy night.
Many miles from there, from her chair on the porch, Jacira finally allowed a tiny victorious smile to form on her lips.
“That officer has likely learned that you’re the one in charge here, Dagoberto.”
This was Dona Jacira’s life after her husband’s death: to command, to plot, to emerge victorious. Which, nevertheless, did not diminish the attention and love she lavished on her children. She wanted to raise them, the boys, in the image of the Captain. And Maria Bárbara, in that of a little queen.
It was not, therefore, out of cruelty that I’m about to tell you what happened. Rather, it was an error so common to so many mothers who think they know what’s best for their children, better even than the children themselves do. Hers was a tragic error that she would bitterly regret for the rest of her life.
JACINTO, THE FOREMAN
Strong, good-looking, and intelligent, Jacinto was also what one called a “pardo” at the time, a mulatto who was born free. On account of his skills and the affection the Captain’s family had for him, he earned the post of deputy foreman when he was still a young man. The son of a cattle driver from Bahia, a man who was neither rich nor poor, Jacinto’s family had settled down along the road to Goiás. From a young age, he liked to linger at the Jatoba Plantation each time he and his father would pass by, and many times his father left him there to pick him up on his way back. Jacinto became best friends with the Captain’s sons and the love of Maria Bárbara’s life.
Ever since they were young, the couple would go off on long walks, or on horseback, their eyes bright, their faces tanned by the sun, their bodies exuding vitality with each step.
But Jacira had other plans for her daughter. She wanted to marry her to someone as kind and as important as Dagoberto. Let’s be fair: it wasn’t out of pure material interests that she intended to choose her daughter’s husband for her; it was because she wanted to see her daughter as happy as she had been. Love had come to her in a way so natural and so sure that she thought it ought to be the same for everyone, especially for her Maria. Which would no doubt happen were she to find a husband worthy of her, like Dagoberto. A clear thinker, learned, kind—qualities that for some reason, whether for his lack of education or his poverty, or perhaps even the color of his skin, she thought Jacinto seemed to lack.
As soon as she noticed the friendship between the two transform into something more, she did not hesitate to transfer the foreman. First, she sent him to oversee the most distant pastures, which meant he was rarely present on the plantation. When she noticed that the distance only left her daughter more excited and happy each time she saw him, she called him aside and informed him she would no longer be needing his services. Since he had been welcomed to the plantation with Dagoberto’s blessing, she told him she would accord him the respect of speaking frankly: he was to leave the plantation, once and for all, and forget Maria Bárbara.
Jacinto obeyed the first of her orders, but the second and third he ignored. It wasn’t difficult for him to find work at a neighboring plantation, and since he would be caught by day, he began to secretly visit Maria Bárbara at night. The young woman could barely wait to hear his soft tapping on her blue bedroom window, asking her to open it and let him in for the night.
This constant commotion drew attention in the end. Aware that someone was stealing up to the plantation in the dead of night, Jacira ordered her men to prepare an ambush and shoot any intruders on sight, since whoever was sneaking around like that could only be a thief or troublemaker.
No one can say for sure whether Jacira suspected the intruder was Jacinto. And nobody could question her order, since anyone who sneaks onto another person’s property, no matter who he is, is probably doing so without the best of intentions. And perhaps, just perhaps, had Jacinto not been wearing a hood, or fled like a thief when given the order to stop, Jacira’s men would have recognized him and his fate would have been different.
But fate is never different.
The order had been given, he was wearing a hood, no one recognized him, and they had truly thought he was a thief. And there he died, beneath the blue window, a bullet to the heart.
Maria Bárbara’s heart also suffered a fatal blow that night.
Not even the birth seven months later of the child she was expecting brought the least bit of color or happiness to her face.
She died of pneumonia less than a year later, without having forgiven her mother or having spoken to her ever again.
During endless days of mourning and regret, Jacira would sit on the porch for hours and hours, looking out over her lands, whose emptiness once again seemed immense. She tried with all her might to revive the happiness she felt after the birth of Maria Bárbara and Mariano, her handsome twins, and the euphoria that struck Dagoberto, who considered twins a sign of abundance and who finally had himself a little girl. On his first trip to Rio after their birth, he bought a piano for his daughter, a tiny, well-tuned piano that would also hold up well along the way, ideal for beginners, as the owner of the store had told him. He wanted her to learn to play as soon as she grew a bit more and her tiny fingers could master eighty-eight keys of ivory and ebony.
Dagoberto loved music. He’d had a baritone’s voice and was fond of repeating that music was a gift his mother had passed on to all her children. Jacira didn’t know it, since when it came to family she couldn’t remember anything beyond her father’s and mother’s first names, but she also had a talent for music in her veins. It came as no surprise, however, that at least three of her children had a gift for music, especially the eldest, Antonio, and Maria Bárbara, both of whom had perfect pitch.
Antonio was a baritone like his father: his voice, however, had a deeper and more melodious timbre, as well as an acute and fatal sadness. During his adolescent years, a kick in the head from an angry horse had nearly killed him, knocking him unconscious for several days and leaving him entirely deaf in his right ear. On account of this injury, or perhaps on account of his submissive temperament, Antonio never stepped out of the shadow of his parents. If prior to the accident his voice could often be heard in a duet with his father, after the incident he practically went silent. Later, he took the most pleasure in sitting with his left ear turned toward his sister at the piano. In such moments, his face lit up with a rare, tender expression and Antonio would close his eyes as if dreaming sweet, easy dreams.
It was Antonio who saw to the instrument’s maintenance, and after some time studying its workings, he was a consummate tuner and connoisseur. When Dagoberto died, no one even considered the idea that his eldest child might assume command over the plantation. His roles had always been secondary and changed frequently; his lack of initiative left him no place of his own in the running of the plantation. At the age of thirty, Antonio married Maria Ambrosia, a young woman who had come to live with the family and who was as timid as he was. They went to live in a house that Jacira ordered built for the couple on a plot of the plantation’s land near the grazing fields. There, after the death of Maria Bárbara, Antonio began to build instruments similar to his sister’s piano. Without the right materials, though, he managed to create instruments that emitted unknown sounds, some of them pleasing to the ear, others disturbing. Several of these instruments can be found today in the Museum of Image and Sound at the Institute of History and Geography of Goiás.
Maria Bárbara was a self-taught piano player. Sometimes, travelers who passed through the plantation would know how to play and taught her a thing or two. Her dream was to go one day to Vila Boa de Goiás, or to the capital of what was now the Viceroyalty of Brazil, to study piano more seriously. Their brother Feliciano, who had been living in Rio de Janeiro since the age of sixteen, dedicating himself to business affairs, would write to her with encouragement, telling her of the many good family girls who played well, but none of whom, in his opinion, could match her. Her plan with Jacinto was to flee to Rio, where her brother would no doubt help them.
Her twin brother Mariano, a close friend to both her and Jacinto, had promised to help them as he could. After their deaths, unable to forgive his mother, whose guilt he considered clear and unredeemable, Mariano abandoned the plantation and went to live with Feliciano in Rio.
Back at the plantation, Jacira had only her youngest son Justino left, born two years before Dagoberto’s death.
Jacira made an effort to evoke the plantation of years past, when Maria Bárbara played her piano, Antonio, his eyes closed, would dream at her side, and Mariano, leaning against the instrument, also drank in the melody. Above the piano hung a portrait by a young painter who Dagoberto had brought from Rio expressly for that portrait: Jacira sitting down, wrapped in her blue silk mantilla with her gold chain and cameo necklace, holding the twins on her lap; Dagoberto behind her, cutting an elegant figure in his dark suit, hair parted down the middle, his arm resting on the chair-back, the other on Antonio’s shoulder as Feliciano kneeled at his side, the two boys in festive attire. Justino had yet to be born. The colors of the portrait, once so vivid, now appeared to have a mist hanging over them, permanently depriving its subjects of their splendor and sharpness.
Jacira remembered the boys’ cries of joy when they were little and the happiness in her daughter’s eyes, eyes that never again looked her in the face after that terrible day, the memory of which cut her anew like an eternal wound. The day her daughter told her with eyes full of tears: “I hate you, and I will never forgive you for what you’ve done.” She remembered her daughter’s blue bedroom window, which opened up onto a trellis of jasmine whose sweet, piercing perfume would wash over the room. It was next to that window that Jacinto had fallen. Some days later, no longer able to stand the smell of the jasmine she herself had planted, Maria Bárbara walked over to the trellis as the sun set, at the exact moment when the flowers exhale their heaviest scent, and tore the plants up by the roots, one by one. It was that very same night—or perhaps not, Jacira couldn’t remember anymore—that her daughter ran to the imposing jatoba tree where the Captain had decided they would settle down so many years ago and tried to unearth it, too, her nails digging into the hard bark with such fervent and unnerving despair that Jacira wished she could die in Jacinto’s place rather than see her daughter suffer. Maria Bárbara had to be torn away from the spot, her hands covered in blood and wounds so deep they would never heal fully, or didn’t have the time to do so.
Jacira would also think back to Mariano, who from a young age could always be found at his twin sister’s side, as if the two were one. Her son Mariano who, on the same day his sister was buried, mounted his horse and, looking back on his mother standing there like a silent statue on the porch, rode up alongside her and, rather than offer the consoling words of goodbye Jacira had hoped for, had looked straight at her and spit.
Afterward, the bulk of Jacira’s days were spent with these memories. They were wounds she knew she would carry with her until she was in her casket and covered with earth. They were indelible moments she could never erase but which—this much was in her power—she could keep from ever happening again. Keep them from happening with Damiana, the precious creature who had remained from Jacinto and Maria Bárbara’s union, the union she had so stupidly tried to thwart.
Her granddaughter was what gave purpose to Jacira each day, surpassing even her efforts to preserve Dagoberto’s memory.
Albeit with some delay, news of what was happening throughout the country always arrived at the plantation. Travelers passing through brought news of events in the other provinces. The cattlemen who went to Rio and Bahia were also important sources of information, and they also brought the books she requested. Later, her son Feliciano’s long letters gave her a direct connection to the capital and its unsettling developments.
That’s how Jacira had learned about certain decrees, like the one prohibiting the installation of mills and factories in the colony, or another that ordered the immediate collection of all unpaid taxes. She was quickly informed when, in Minas Gerais, talk of a rebellion spread everywhere—in the streets, throughout the taverns, out to the roadside farms. Later, she learned how all of it ended, the sedition of Minas, the hanging of one of the rebellion’s leaders, the ensign Tiradentes, and the jailing of all the rest. In a long letter, her son Feliciano, a man with modern ideas who closely followed the debate over independence, described the flag that the conspirators had already designed and which circulated in several places throughout the country, and which bore phrases in Latin.
Feliciano wrote her about what had happened in France in 1789, and how in Rio people were saying that equality, fraternity, and liberty were the basic rights of everyone, “including us, mother, including the Brazilians.” Many people even declared openly, he told her, that the French had done well to kill the king and Marie Antoinette.
Jacira read these reports attentively, but thought it all had little to do with her. Faraway from everything, isolated from the rest of the country, dedicating her life to her lands and the goods they produced, such great issues were quite vague in her mind. Her relationship with her farmhands was one of hierarchy, built on economic power and tradition, not violence. As far as the slaves went, she felt that their dependence on her was greater than her dependence on them. How would they survive without someone like her to put clothes on their backs and the food on their plates?
Strictly speaking, she saw herself as a sort of mother figure to them all, a mother who provided the basic means for survival and who, when forced to punish them, punished them like a mother would, a just punishment she administered for their own good. On the plantation she, like Captain Dagoberto before her, never permitted violence against the slaves like that at other plantations. When a neighboring farmer warned against the danger of runaway slaves, she would respond that if a slave truly did not want to work for her any longer, he wouldn’t be missed much were he to flee.
Nearly ten years later, news arrived of insurrection in Bahia—the Tailor Revolution, an uprising caused by a shortage of food in the city. People told of how a mob had attacked slaves carrying enormous quantities of meat on Holy Saturday, destined for the commanding general in Salvador. For the first time, Jacira heard talk not only of independence from Portugal, but the proclamation of a Brazilian republic, the end of slavery, and free trade.
When Prince Regent João VI of Portugal, and his mother, Queen Maria the Mad, fled Napoleon and disembarked in Rio, Feliciano’s letters conveyed the sense of euphoria that had taken hold of the city despite the chaos provoked by the rapid increase in its population, which swelled quickly on account of the fifteen thousand Portuguese who followed the royal delegation. As far as Feliciano, who traded in foodstuffs and other odds and ends, was concerned, the arrival of the Portuguese was a blessed and promising gift from the heavens. He described in great detail the stupendous public works the king had ordered and how life for everyone was about to change for the better, as though a tornado of miracles had swept the city.
There was only one thing Feliciano’s long letters never spoke of: Mariano. As soon as his brother arrived in Rio, Feliciano wrote Jacira telling her that Mariano had arrived and had accepted his offer to live with him under one condition: Feliciano was never to give her any news of him since he considered her, like Maria Bárbara, dead to him. Feliciano had given his word and, as a result, this would be the first and last time he would ever send news of his brother, a promise he kept to the very end.
As the years dragged on, the production on the plantation began to change naturally, despite Jacira’s speech about how everything would remain the same, despite her Captain’s name being always on her lips. However, without her realizing it, it was as though this name she repeated constantly had become a rare sort of sweet candy on her tongue. A candy that didn’t melt from outside to inside, but from the inside out, slowly devoured from the core by the most powerful and invincible being of all—time, the force that both carries everything and takes it away, never to return, and which had left in its place a thin, empty shell with the name of Dagoberto. Without her realizing it, Jacira began to set her own wishes aside, and the winds of change slowly swept across her land.
Since she seemed to have a greater inclination and skill for looking after the cattle, the cattle began to take over, soon assuming priority over the sugar mill, the cotton fields, and the crops, all of which continued to grow, of course, but on a smaller scale with fewer slaves and fewer workers. Those on the inside perhaps failed to notice these changes, but beyond her lands, Dona Jacira became better known for raising cattle—the biggest in the region—than for her crops or her sugarcane. From her porch at the end of the afternoon, she’d look out upon her river of white horns crowding into the enormous corral with a satisfaction that could not be put into words.
THE RE-ENCOUNTER WITH ALENCAR AMBRÓSIO
On that distant morning lost to memory, when Diogo Ambrósio killed his wife and left Jacira on Corporal Jesuíno’s doorstep, his son Alencar, then nine years old, had recently set off for the Jesuit School of Rio de Janeiro at his paternal grandfather’s urging. Visiting him later, his father told him merely that his mother had died and that he ought to forget his sister because he would never again see her. At that moment, the young boy was unable to question his father or demand any sort of explanation. But he always had an intuition that his sister was still living and he knew that, when he was able to, there would be some way of finding her.
With his mother’s inheritance and his father’s money, and his paternal grandfather’s contacts, Alencar Ambrósio, little older than twenty, entered the slave trade. The notable increase in demand for slave labor in the gold mines transformed the trafficking of black chattel into the era’s multimillion-dollar business.
The rich men with business in the ports of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia had created an extraordinarily lucrative system of commerce: ships would carry tobacco, sugarcane liquor, and other products produced in Brazil to Africa, and return with slaves. Without the permission of the Portuguese or protection from a naval fleet, these ships were easy prey for ships belonging to pirates or to other countries. But the profits from the sea crossing were so great that they gave birth to the greatest Brazilian fortunes, greater even than those earned in the gold mines. And so the Ambrósio family would quickly become one of the richest of Rio, and Alencar a venerable old patriarch.
After 1808, when England began to apply pressure to end the Atlantic slave trade, and up until 1850, when the traffic of slaves was effectively outlawed and put to a definitive end, several decades passed during which Brazil’s slave-trading elite mounted startling fortunes. Alencar Ambrósio’s sons and grandsons would later transform their grandfather’s ships into true warships, capable of fending off attacks from pirates or the English Navy. They would also continue, as their grandfather had done, to diversify the family business, becoming coffee farmers, bankers, and ship owners.
All the same, the old patriarch Alencar Ambrósio never forgot his sister.
He didn’t wish to reopen his father’s wound while he was still alive, but after the old man’s death he began his long search for her. He dispatched one of his men to discover what had happened to Jacira Antonia, but no one at his father’s old plantation knew where Diogo Ambrósio had gone when he set off at a gallop on that terrible morning, his daughter of three on his horse with him. No one, not even the slave women, had heard Clara Joaquina’s fateful lie just before she died; nearly all of them believed that Jacira’s father, acceding to madness and jealousy, had killed his daughter as well and buried her in the woods.
And so Alencar had sent one of his men to continue the search together with his maternal grandfather’s family, with whom his father had broken entirely. The descendants of Paulista explorer José Garcia, however, had never heard anything of the whereabouts of Ana de Pádua’s daughter, much less her granddaughter.
The man returned without making inroads. Many years would pass until Alencar decided to adopt another approach: he ordered his man to cross all the towns and villages within a day’s reach from the old plantation. The search was slow, full of false leads, but in the end they discovered where Jacira had spent her childhood and whom she had married.
After that, it was merely a question of time.
One afternoon, at eighty years old but strong as the giant trees of the backlands, Alencar announced himself, together with one of his sons, at his sister’s plantation.
The likewise old and powerful woman received her visitors from her hammock on the porch. She was seventy-four. At her side was her youngest son, Justino, and her granddaughter Damiana, already twenty-two.
Jacira could not hide her trembling as she listened to the words of the imposing old man with hair and a beard that were completely white. She didn’t know what to make of that patriarchal figure with his city manners, so different from her own. In her memory, she had preserved the sound of her father galloping away and the names Diogo Ambrósio and Clara Joaquina. A dark room, filled with mist. Nothing more.
No brother. No tenderness or memory of affections once traded, no remembrances good or bad. Nothing.
But there on the porch of her own house, her great big dark eyes became even rounder as she attempted to rescue some resonance from inside herself that could explain the attention and the emotions being directed her way.
Alencar told her who their parents had been and how, from a young age, he had sworn to find her some day. But he couldn’t provide what might have been the only motivation and interest on Jacira’s part to return to the mysteries of the past: the motive for her tragic abandonment, what reasons her father had for leaving her, so small and fragile, to the care of complete strangers. Alencar did not have an answer for this. Alencar wasn’t even sure how their mother had died: his father had told him it was of natural causes; with time, however, he heard vague, foggy rumors of a revenge killing. But he had made no attempt to verify this; he had no interest in stirring up that mystery. What was done was done, he thought, and there was no way to change history now.
Unfortunately, what he did not know is that there is never a way to change history, whether in its entirety or in part.
The story had already been lived. It was over, completed. More impossible to change than the most immovable of mountains since, if there is something that is absolutely unalterable in this world, it’s the past.
Suddenly feeling as helpless as when her father had left her on Corporal Jesuíno’s doorstep, and even more so than when her husband had died thirty-four years earlier, Jacira closed her eyes and asked herself, as she hadn’t done for nearly a lifetime: “Dagoberto, what should I do? What does this man want of me?”
No, Jacira had not liked learning this part of her first three years of life, years that had been closed off in a heavy and unbreachable darkness.
She did not like knowing that, along with her father, her mother, and her former life, she had lost a brother, too. She wanted that old man with his white hair and imposing figure to leave her in peace. Seventy years is an irrecoverable mountain of time. She did not wish to relive what had never been, she had no desire to nurture memories of an impossibility.
The sooner that man went away the better it would be for everyone.
Justino and Damiana understood perfectly their mother and grandmother’s desire to avoid rummaging through the past. What’s more, they were young people who, due to the influence of Feliciano and Mariano, detested the slave-trading vessels, ships whose fame for unthinkable horrors had already spread across the country. Especially Damiana, who maintained a frequent correspondence with her uncle Mariano and considered herself widow to one José Batista, a young teacher whom she would later meet through her uncle and who had died two years earlier. The three of them were enthusiastic abolitionists who, together, would do what they could to bring slavery to an end.
They didn’t like this relative standing here before them, nor his air as though he owned the world.
Alencar and his son gave them a card with their address and left the plantation, disappointed with the cold reception, frustrated at the chilly façade they encountered, and the impossibility of reinventing the past. But since Alencar was not a man to give up on his plans, much less this one, which he had obsessed over his entire life, he left convinced that with time it would be possible to overcome the indifference of his sister and her children and reaffirm the family ties he had always valued so much.
In Jacira’s case, meanwhile, this encounter did irreparable harm, reopening a wound she thought she had put behind her.
The overwhelming effort to remember her past, provoked by her brother’s visit, seemed to have drained her of her strength. Worse yet, it was as if she had been abandoned all over again, on that doorstep where the terror and panic induced by the episode were once again visited upon her after so many years, after an entire lifetime.
“My god, seventy years later and I’ve still not erased these things from my memory?”
Her brother’s visit brought back the tramping of the hooves galloping away, a single deafening sound in her head, sweeping across the dark night, rousing her from sleep, leaving her weak, panicked, entirely alone.
Jacira’s strength slowly seeped away through those terror-filled nights when she was transformed once again into the trembling little girl left on a dark doorstep, watching her father gallop away.
Panicked and entirely alone.
Until the inevitable morning not long thereafter when a slave woman found her cold and stiff in her twin bed, the muscles of her mouth slack in death’s hollow silence, her body on its side facing the left half of the bed, the place belonging to Captain Dagoberto, empty for so long.