by Ian McDonald
Now by contrast I consider São José Tarumás do Rio Negro. A fort, manned by a handful of officers half-mad from malaria and a company of native musketeers; the landings; a government custom office; a court; the trading houses of spice factors; the taverns and their attached caiçara; the huddled rows of whitewashed taipa huts of the settled índios, the praça, the College; the church over all. The Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição is a gaudy of mannerist fancies and frenetic painted decoration that seemed to rise sheer from the dark water as we drew in to the wharf. It proclaims itself so because it is the last: beyond São José lie the scattered aldeias and far-between reduciones of the Rio Negro and Rio Branco. This sense of the frontier, of the immense psychic pressure of the wilderness beyond, gives São José its peculiar energy. The docks are thronged with canoes and larger river craft; rafts of pau de brasil logs lie marshalled in the river. The market is loud and bright, the traders eager for my business. All is build and bustle; along the river frontage new warehouses are being knocked together, and on the higher ground walled houses, the bright new homes of the merchants, want only for roofs. In every citizen from priest to slave I see an eagerness to get down to business. It would, I believe, make a good and strong regional capital.
Father Luis Quinn’s reputation precedes him. The Carmelites welcomed the visiting Jesuit admonitory with a musical progress. Trombas, tambourines, even a portative organ on a litter, and a veritable host of índios in white - men, women, children - sporting headdresses woven from palm fronds, waving same and singing together a glorious cantata that combined European melodies and counterpoints with native rhythms and exuberances. As I dogged along behind Quinn with my baggage train I found my pace adjusting to the rhythm. Quinn, being a man much moved by music, was delighted, but I wonder how much of his pleasure masked annoyance at being forestalled. Despite the opulence of the friar’s welcome, I sensed unease.
Father Quinn received the sacraments; I reconciled myself to Mammon by presenting my travel permits to Capitan de Araujo of the fort and a subsequent prolonged questioning neither unfriendly nor inquisitorial in tone, rather born out of long isolation and a lack of any true novelty. Here I received the first setback to my plans: I was informed that Acunha would be unable to take me onwards up the Rio Negro: new orders from Salvador forbade any armed vessel from proceeding beyond São José for fear of the Dutch pirates, who were once again active in the area and could easily seize such a ship and turn it against this garrison of the Barra. I did not like to comment that the wood, sand, and adobe revetments looked well capable of laughing off Fé em Deus’ pop guns, but if I have learned one thing in Brazil, it is never to antagonize local potentates on whose goodwill you depend. The capitan concluded by commenting that he had heard that I enjoyed a reputation as a swordsman, and, if time permitted, would welcome a chance to try his skill on the strand before the fort, the traditional dueling ground. I think I shall decline him. He is an amiable enough dunderhead; his denial a frustration, nothing more. There are canoes by the score beneath the pontoon houses in the floating harbor. I shall begin my bargaining tomorrow.
(Addendum)
I am troubled by a scene I glimpsed from my window in the College. Raised voices and a hellish bellowing made me glance out; by the light of torches, a fat ox had been manhandled into the praça before the church, a rope to each hoof, horn, and nostril and men hauling on them, yet scarcely able to controlling the bellowing, terrified beast. A man stepped forth with a poleaxe, set himself before the creature, and brought his weapon down between the ox’s ears. Seven blows it took before the maddened animal fell and was still. I turned away when the men started to dismember the ox in the praça, but I am certain that it was stricken with the plague, the madness. It has reached São José Tarumás, the last place in the world, it would seem, or is it from here that it originates?
I trust the bloody barbarism does not upset my appetite for the friar’s hospitality.
The men fell on them at the landing. Faces hidden behind kerchiefs, the three attackers stepped out from the cover of the pontoon houses on either side of the bobbing gangplank. Flight, evasion, was impossible in so narrow a pass. Quinn had no time to react before the big broad carpenter’s mallet swung out of the twilight shadows of the river town and caught him full in the chest. He went down and in the same instant the assailant swung his weapon to bring it down finally on the father’s head. Falcon’s foot was there to meet the attacker’s wrist. Bone cracked; the man gave a shrill, shrieking cry as the weight of the mallet snapped his hand over, broken, useless, agonized. The assailants had miscalculated their attack; the stricture of the plank walks compelled them to attack one man at a time. As Quinn fought to regain presence, the second assailant thrust his wounded colleague out of the way and pulled a pistol. With a cry and a delicate kick, Falcon sent it spinning down the planking. He retrieved it as it skidded toward the water and extinction, drew the muzzle on the second masked man as the assailant raised his foot to stamp down on Quinn’s bowed neck.
‘Hold off or you die this instant,’ he commanded. The man glowered at him, shook his head and pressed forward. Falcon flickered his thumb over the wheel lock. Now the third assassin elbowed his colleague out of the road. He held a naked knife, faced Falcon at breath distance, hands held out in the knifefighter’s pose seeming half-supplication.
‘I hardly think—’
The man struck. Falcon saw the top finger-length of the pistol fall to the wood. Worked hardwood, steel, and brass had been cut through as cleanly as silk. The man grinned, wove a pass with his knife. Falcon thought he saw blue fire burn in its trace. Falcon threw his hand up to protect his face and, heedless, pulled the trigger. The explosion was like a cannon blast in the strait labyrinth of wooden verandahs and gangways. The ball careered wide, sky-shot, lost. Falcon had never intended it to hit. In the daze and confusion, he struck the knife-man with two short, stabbing punches; Lyon harbor-blows. The blade fell from the assailant’s grip, struck the wood, and continued into it as if it were water until the hilt brought a halt. Now Quinn entered the fight, windful and hale. He snatched up the dropped blade. It cut through the planks; the boardwalk cracked and settled beneath him. Quinn drew himself to his full height; his bulk filled the coffin-narrow alley. The wounded mallet-man and the pistoleiro had already fled. The knife-man too scrambled away but in his panic tripped on a board-end and went sprawling on his back. With a bestial roar, Quinn was on top of him; knife slung underhand, a gutting blow, no Christian stroke.
‘Luis. Luis Quinn.’
A voice, through the brilliant, lordly rage. For an instant Luis Quinn considered turning and using this blade, this divine, hellish edge on the tiny, whining voice that dared to deny him, imagined it cutting and cutting until there was nothing left but a stain. Then he saw the houses and the doors and windows close around him, felt the thatch stroking his shoulders, the man beneath his blade, the helpless, ridiculous man and the glorious fear in his eyes above the masking kerchief. In the last instant before you face eternity you still maintain your disguise, he thought.
‘Fly!’ Luis Quinn thundered. ‘Fly!’
The assailant crabbed away, found his feet, fled.
Quinn pushed past the pale, shaken Falcon and descended to the jetty where moments - it seemed an age in the gelid time of fighting he knew so well from the dueling days - before they had been dickering with the canoe feitores. A marveling look at the blade - no shop in Brazil had ever made such a thing - and he flung it with all might out over the heads of the canoe-men into the river. His ribs ached from the effort: had the angelic knife left an arc of blue in its wake, a wound in the air? Now Falcon was at his side.
‘My friend, I seem to have outstayed my welcome.’
The church was death-dark, lit only by the votives at the feet of the patrons and the red heart of the sanctuary lamp, but Falcon was easily able to find Quinn by following the trail of cigar smoke.
‘In France it would be considered a si
n most heinous to smoke in a church.’
‘I see no vice in it.’ Quinn stood leaning against the pulpit; a vertiginous affair clinging high to the chancel wall like the nest of some forest bird, dizzy with painted putti and allegorical figures. ‘We honor the cross with our hearts and minds, not our inhalations and exhalations. And do we not drink wine in the most holy of places?’
The stew of the Rio Negro day seemed to roost in the church. Falcon was hot, oppressed, afraid. Twice now he had seen the rage of Luis Quinn.
‘Your absence was noted at supper.’
‘I have a set of exercises to complete before I continue my task.’
‘I told them as much.’
‘And did they note the attack at the landing today?’
‘They did not.’
‘Strange that in so contained a town as São José the friar has nothing to say about a deadly assault on a visiting admonitory.’ Quinn examined the dying coal of his cigar and neatly ground it to extinction on the tiled floor. ‘There is wrong here so deep, so strongly rooted, that I fear it is beyond my power to destroy it.’
‘“Destroy,” that is a peculiarly martial word for a man of faith.’
‘Mine is a martial order. Do you know why I was chosen as admonitory in Coimbra?’
‘Because of your facility with languages. And because, forgive me, you have killed a man.’
Quinn snapped out a bark of a laugh, flattened and ugly in his uncommon accent.
‘I suppose that is not so difficult a surmise. Can you also surmise how I killed that man?’
‘The obvious deduction would be in the heat and passion of a satisfaction.’
‘That would be the obvious deduction. No, I killed him with a pewter drinking tankard. I struck him on the side of the head, and in his helplessness I set upon him and with the same vessel beat the life from his body, and beyond that, until not even his master could recognize him. Do you know who this man was?’
Falcon felt his scalp itch beneath his wig in the stifling heat of the church.
‘From your words, a servant. One of your own household?’
‘No, a slave in a tavern in Porto. A Brazilian slave, in truth, an índio; recalling now his speech, I would guess a Tupiniquín. The owner had made his fortune in the colony and retired with his household and slaves to the Kingdom. He did not say much to me, only that he had been instructed to refuse me any further drink. So before all my friends, my good drinking and fighting friends, I took up the empty tankard and struck him down. Now, can you guess why I gave myself to the Society of Jesus?’
‘Remorse and penance of course, not merely for the murder - let us not bandy words, it was nothing less - but because you were of that exalted class that can murder with impunity.’
‘All that, yes, but you have missed the heart of it. I said that mine was a martial order: the discipline, friend, the discipline. Because when I murdered that slave - I do not choose to bandy words either - do you know what I felt? Joy. Joy such as I have never known before or since. Those moments when I have taken or administered the Sacrament, when I pray alone and I know I am caught up by the Spirit of Christ, even when the music stirs me to tears: these are not even the faintest echoes of what I felt when I took that life in my hands and tore it out. Nothing, Falcon, nothing compares to it. When I went out, in my fighting days, I merely touched the hem of it. It was a terrible, beautiful joy, Falcon, and so so hard to give up.’
‘I have seen it,’ Falcon said weakly. The heat - he could not breathe, the sweat was trickling down the nape of his neck. He removed his wig, clutched it nervously, like a suitor a nosegay.
‘You have seen nothing,’ Quinn said. ‘You understand nothing. You never can. I asked for a task most difficult; God has granted me my desire, but it is greater and harder than Father James, than anyone in Coimbra, ever imagined. Father Diego Gonçalves of my Society came to this river twelve years ago. His works the apostles themselves might envy; whole nations won for Christ and pacified, the cross for two hundred leagues up the Rio Branco, aldeias and reduciones that were shining beacons of what could be achieved in this bestial land. Peace, plenty, learning, the right knowledge of God and of his Church - every soul could sing, every soul could read and write. Episcopal visitors wrote of the beauty and splendor of these settlements: glorious churches, skilled people who gave their labor freely, not through coercion or slavery. I have read his letters on the ship from Salvador to Belém. Father Diego applied to the provincial for permission to set up a printing press: he was a visionary man, a true prophet. In his petition he included sketches of a place of learning, high on the Rio Branco, a new city - a new Jerusalem, he called it, a university in the forest. I have seen the sketches in the College library at Salvador; it is sinfully ambitious, maniacal in its scale: an entire city in the Amazon. He was refused of course.’
‘Portugal’s colonial policy is very clear; Brazil is a commercial adjunct, nothing more. Continue, pray.’
‘After that, nothing. Father Diego Gonçalves sailed from this fort seven years ago into the high lands beyond the Rio Branco. Entradas and survivors of lost bandeiras told of monstrous constructions, entire populations enslaved and put to work. An empire within an empire, hacked out of deep forest. Death and blood. When three successive visitors sent from Salvador to ascertain the truth of these rumors failed to return, the Society applied for an admonitory.’
‘Your mission is to find Father Diego Gonçalves.’
‘And return him to the discipline of the Order, by any means.’
‘I fear that I understand your meaning too well, Father.’
‘I may murder him if necessary. That is your word, isn’t it? By rumor alone he has become a liability to the Society. Our presence in Brazil is ever precarious.’
‘Kill a brother priest.’
‘My own Society has made me a hypocrite, yet I obey, as any soldier obeys, as any soldier must.’
Falcon wiped sweat from his neck with his blouse sleeve. The smell of stale incense was intolerably cloying. His eyes itched.
‘Those men who attacked us: do you believe they were Father Diego’s men?’
‘No; I believe they were in the hire of that same father with whom you dined so well so recently. He is too greasy and well fed to be much of a plotter, our Friar Braga. I questioned him after the Mass; he lies well and habitually. The wealth of the Carmelites has always been founded on the red gold; I suspect their presence is only tolerated here because they descend a steady supply of slaves to the engenhos.’
‘Do you believe he could be responsible for the destruction of the boat-town?’
‘Not even the Carmelites are so compromised. But I am not safe here; you, my friend, enjoy some measure of protection through your crown mission. I am merely a priest, and in this latitude priests have always been dispensable. We leave in the morning, but I will not return to the Colégio, not this night.’
‘Then I shall watch and wait with you,’ Falcon declared.
‘I would caution against spending too much time in my company. But at the least leave me your sword.’
‘Gladly,’ Falcon said as he removed his weapon belt and handed it, buckles ringing, to Quinn. ‘I could wish that you had not thrown that uncommon knife into the river.’
‘I had to,’ Quinn said, lifting the sheath into the sanctuary light to work out its character and feel. ‘It was a wrong thing. It scared me. Go now; you have been here too long. I shall watch and pray. I so desire prayer: my spirit feels sullied, stained by compromise.’
Light on the black water; a million dapple-shards brilliant in the eastering sun that sent a blade of gold along the river. The far bank was limned in light, the shore sand bright yellow; though over a league distant, every detail was pin sharp, every tree in the forest canopy so distinct Falcon could distinguish the very leaves and branches. The pandemoniac bellowing of red howler monkeys came clear and full to his ears. Falcon stood a time at the top of the river steps blinking in the lig
ht, shading his eyes with his hand against the vast glare; not even his green eyeglasses could defeat so triumphant a sun. The heat was rising with the morning, the insects few and torpid; he hoped to be out in the deep stream by the time both became intolerable. But this moment was fresh and clean and new-minted, so present that all the terrors and whisperings of the night seemed phantoms, and Falcon wanted to stretch it to its last note.
Quinn was already in his canoe. The Jesuit, a smallpox-scarred índio in mission whites, and an immense, broad black were its entire crew. The remainder of the pirogue was filled with Quinn’s manioc and beans. Falcon’s much larger fleet rocked on the dazzling ripples: a canoe with awning for the geographer, three for his staff, five for his baggage, a further three for their supplies, all well manned with São José Manao slaves.
‘A great grand morning, thanks be to God !’ Quinn called out in French. ‘I cannot wait for the off.’
‘You travel light,’ Falcon remarked as he descended the steps. The river had fallen farther in the night; planks had been hastily laid across the already-cracking mud, but there were still a few oozing, sinking footsteps through the mud to the canoe. ‘Is this the best the fabled Jesuit gold can purchase?’
