On one of these visits, Maria, then seventeen, told him she was to be married.
Her suitor was Bento Diogo de Sá, born in the city of Bahia, the son of a Portuguese father, who had arrived in Brazil in 1550 to open a general store selling odds and ends and foodstuffs, and a Portuguese mother raised in the Orphans’ Convent in Lisbon and sent to Brazil by Queen Dona Catarina along with other orphans to help populate the new land. A healthy and submissive young girl, Bento Diogo’s mother served her one purpose: she fulfilled the mission given to her by the queen—in other words, she gave birth. Bento Diogo was the twelfth of fourteen children.
His father’s small business established itself as one of the busiest stores in the city, a place that, most importantly, sold wine from Portugal and wine from Spain. While most of his brothers and sisters each had their own destinies to pursue, he remained at home, with the pretext of helping his father with the business. A handsome young man who was popular with the ladies, he, too, made a healthy contribution to peopling the colony, siring several children with mamelucas and Indians, all bastards, all raised without any assistance from him at all.
Lazy, but ambitious and lacking scruples, Bento Diogo had great plans for himself. Among them, that of becoming the king of the honey-wine made in the new country—cachaça. He maintained that anyone who didn’t like cachaça was a fool. Cachaça was a wonderful alcoholic beverage that would bring Brazil recognition worldwide, it was the cheapest and the most accessible, the least susceptible to the unpredictable variations of sea and ship. This honey-wine, a true product of the new land, was extremely simple to produce and store, and easier still to drink. He would sow the widest sugarcane fields that had ever been seen and wouldn’t use a single cane, not a single one, no matter how small, to make sugar, only cachaça, cachaça, cachaça, and he would fill an unseen number of barrels.
That’s how he spent hours and hours, months and months, years and years, drinking with friends and planning out his grandiose empire, tied to the marvelous future of the Portuguese colony, the greatest and richest of all of them, as he never tired of saying.
After the death of his parents, Bento Diogo continued on for some years chipping away at the patience of his two brothers who spent hours working at the general store, telling anyone who asked that he was in the business of importing spirits. Until one day, pressed by his brothers who could no longer put up with his gambling debts, drinking binges, and boasting, he found himself practically thrown out of the house, forced to take some action and to try to survive on his own dime.
It was then that, already nearing the age of forty, but maintaining his fine figure and silver tongue, Bento Diogo set off in search of his empire.
He found it in Maria Taiaôba, in Olinda.
Watching her pass by, and asking around after her, the man from Bahia was quite impressed by this only child’s coy grace and with her father’s vast sugarcane fields. Losing no time, he put all his skill and experience into courting her.
Maria, for her part, who wasn’t a silly girl in the least but who had felt, since birth, an enormous curiosity about everything, had for some time been hoping to find out what it would be like to have a husband. She wanted to know about the things the women of Olinda were always taking so much about, but up until that point, frankly, she had found her suitors rather dim-witted. She saw in Bento Diogo a boldness and a charm that she’d never seen before—and so she decided to say yes.
When Manu Taiaôba met his future son-in-law, he barely uttered a word or two in way of a greeting. Just as with everything else related to his daughter, he asked the old woman if she thought the whole idea was all right, and the old woman told him yes, everything was all right, that he shouldn’t worry, that the man would have no opportunity to bring the girl any harm.
And so it went. After the wedding, Bento Diogo moved to the plantation and spent his days talking about his plans to make sure that all that sugarcane no longer went to the Engenho Santo Antônio, but rather to a factory. He already had it all figured out. “You’ll see, Mariazinha,” he’d tell Maria, “we’re going to build an empire here in Pernambuco and you’ll be the Cachaça Queen of Brazil. We’ll go to Portugal and sell our honey-wine in Lisbon, and then move on the Spain. Did you know that those Portuguese colonists, those reinols, when they get off the ship here in Brazil, the first thing they do is drink our wine? And do you know why? Do you know the best thing about this wine of ours? It’s that you only need a little bit, Mariazinha, and it will already whisk you off to heaven with all the angels and archangels. Are you sure you don’t want to try some?”
Maria thanked him, but declined.
She didn’t like cachaça, and though she did like something about her charming and loquacious husband’s tirades, she was beginning to find it a bit exhausting to have a husband who did nothing but ramble on and on. She’d satisfied her curiosity as far as the bedroom was concerned, and even found it quite interesting, but she couldn’t stay in bed all day and she had begun to note that her husband was of little use beyond the bedroom.
But Maria never came to truly worry about this because, in fewer than six months, right in the middle of one of his long diatribes about the great changes he would bring about at the plantation, Bento Diogo’s heart gave out and Maria Taiaôba found herself a widow.
At the time there were some in the village of Olinda who remarked among themselves that the old woman had something to do with the unexpected passing of a man at the peak of his productivity. But the old woman need not have interfered. Blessed as she was with her premonitory gifts, the truth is that the she had merely assumed that things would unfold this way, and there was nothing to do but let time run its course, and she didn’t need to lift a finger to prevent Maria from traveling further in the charming and unscrupulous opportunist’s leaky canoe.
THE NEW CHRISTIAN REINOL
Duarte Antônio de Oliveira arrived in Olinda in 1628, at the age of twenty-three. From a family of New Christians, his parents had decided to send him, the middle child, to try his luck in that newly-forming country and where—if the good Lord so desired—he would be free from the harshness and austerity of the Inquisition. His father gave him enough money so that, arriving in Brazil, Duarte could construct a sugar plantation on par with the ones that were making so many people rich. The idea was for him to establish an alternative home for the family if the situation in Portugal grew worse. The father also placed family heirlooms and jewels in his son’s luggage, which would be safer in Brazil than in Lisbon, where their confiscation was an increasingly frightening possibility.
The young Portuguese man was cultured, well read, a devotee of Camões—his copy of The Lusiads was always at hand and he could recite long passages from memory with ardor and passion. He felt as though he were living a hero’s fate, taming the young continent and conquering a better life for his family. He exuded enthusiasm and dynamism when he arrived in Olinda and immediately fell in love with the exuberance of the tropics, their light, their colors, their smell, their lush vegetation, the flora, the sensual flavor of their fruits.
One day, following a guide on a visit to the sugar mills and sugarcane plantations in the region, he met Maria Taiaôba and the old woman along the road. Unconcerned with customs that had never been her own, Maria was not dressed in mourning clothes, and Duarte Antônio, seeing her with colored flowers in her hair and a basket full of yellow and red cashew fruits she had picked to make desserts, was fascinated at the sight, thinking he had come upon a Brazilian forest nymph.
That image of Maria Taiaôba must truly have been one of great beauty and power, for she would later fascinate a Dutch artist, as well, who would paint her exactly in this way, gathering flowers and fruits at the edge of a wood.
Maria began to serve as Duarte’s guide, and few outings were necessary for her to likewise become charmed with the cultured and educated man from Portugal, as young as she was, as wonderstruck with life as she was, as in love with the country as she w
as.
Not long thereafter, the two of them were married.
The money Duarte brought from Portugal transformed the Taiaôba family’s sugarcane fields into a powerful sugar-producing plantation. He succeeded in this with the unrestricted support of the old woman and under the supervision of Manu Taiaôba, who, little by little, for the first time in his life, would spend nights out on the veranda talking with an educated person such as Duarte. His son-in-law told him about life on the other side of the sea, the habits of the Portuguese, the royal court, what the kings of Portugal and the king of Spain were like, about business, what people wore, the importance of education, religion, the cruelty of the Inquisition. Manu would tell him about Brazil, the different kinds of forest, the friendly and unfriendly beasts that inhabited them, what to do when one came upon a river, what the natives were like, the differences between them, their way of life, their beliefs, and their arts.
When he had first arrived in Brazil, Duarte had worked as a scrivener at the Municipal Chamber of Olinda. He continued to exercise this public post during the first year he was building his sugar mill, which was an enormous investment not only due to the purchase and installation of the machinery, but also because of the necessity to buy more slaves. They required significant manpower to run the sugar plantation, and Manu Taiaôba’s native slaves, though good for planting the sugarcane, were not suitable for the disciplined and difficult work demanded to manufacture the sugar itself—they needed to buy slaves who had come from Guinea, who were much more expensive.
In the year 1630, things were going well and Duarte had already abandoned his government post to spend his time exclusively overseeing the plantation, which was at full production when the Dutch invaded Pernambuco, sparking a war that would last sixteen long years.
Belmira, the first and only child born to Duarte and Maria, was born on the night of the Great Olinda Fire. No one slept that night in what was by then the enormous plantation house. They watched from a distance as the smoke and tongues of flames climbed higher and higher above the city. Even Maria, the baby in her arms, stood up to watch the voracious mouth of the fire as it swallowed the damp nighttime air hovering above the trees. The newborn Belmira cried uncontrollably the entire night, as though she could see the misfortunes that awaited a girl born and raised in the midst of war.
Throughout that entire day, they had given food, water, and shelter to those fleeing the city. People they knew came to the plantation, fearful and defeated, weeping over the bitter fate that forced them to abandon their homes, their furniture, cupboards stocked with food, and provisions of olive oil, flour, and barrels of wine. Tears, curses, hate, lives undone: this was the painful path that opened up before them and that would last for years of bloody suffering.
It was also there, watching the fire singe Olinda, that Manu Taiaôba decided to enlist in the war against the Flemish. It wasn’t that he harbored any special preference for Portuguese dominance since he led a lawless life; it made no difference to him—as far as he was concerned, the land belonged to those who had been born there, the Brazilians, and not the Europeans, no matter where they came from. But watching the fire devastate the city that even if he didn’t love, he respected, Manu began to think the war did have something to do with him. However, more than patriotism or devotion to some cause, what inflamed his chest was his hunger for combat, and this time, combat on a much larger scale than any he had known before. A youthful enthusiasm swept over him. His son-in-law, who estimated his father-in-law was around seventy years old, even tried to warn him about the risk at his age, urging him to reconsider participating in something that would likely not differ much from any of his other experiences. The old mameluco flashed one of his rare smiles and replied that, if it was his fate to die that way, his daughter and his son-in-law could be sure that it would be great consolation to the old man to hear calls-to-arms and the sound of gunshots at the hour of his departure.
Old Manu Taiaôba was a minor military genius. But he had never had formal instruction, and knew neither how to write nor read; he had lived his entire life in the jungle, scarcely knew city life, and had trouble imagining what another country might be like. A talent for strategy and combat tactics flowed through his veins, the innate capacity to set battlepieces in motion, his gift for the art refined by years of experience. At that moment, he felt that his slave-hunter’s body, sculpted along the intense journeys and the challenges of a life led beneath the stars, was still as agile and limber as a young man’s. His passionate, rejuvenated mind once again dreamed of battles and hard-fought victories.
Early the next morning Manu and the most courageous of his posse, composed of mamelucos and Indians, joined the resisting army.
It wasn’t long, however, before he became disenchanted with the white men’s style of war, the war of the Europeans that he could already see was lost, and his enthusiasm and his dreams began to wane. From the outset, a disagreement had broken out within the Luso-Brazilian army over two very different strategies, and the rift only worsened over time.
One was the position of the native-born captains, men like Manu, familiar with the landscape and the climate, who defended the adoption of a Brazilianized combat-strategy, a war fought in the jungle, setting up an ambush precisely in those stretches of landscape unfamiliar to the enemy. They thought it was possible to undermine Dutch resistance by taking advantage of that which belonged only to those who lived on the land: a mastery of the climate and the geography, the stealth of the natives, agility and cunning on the battlefield.
The other camp was composed of the European officials who had arrived to lead the Luso-Brazilian army and who advocated for the only war tactics they knew: a battle over positions, great field battles, adhering to the precepts established by the European art of war. They expressed disdain at the military experience of those who lived in Pernambuco and considered war not only an art, but a science that had its own rules and principles, and which depended on discipline and order.
Except many of these rules of order had nothing to do with Brazil—that’s what Manu Taiaôba said to his daughter and son-in-law each time he was given leave for a quick visit to the plantation. How, for example, are we going to use the cavalry and artillery the way they want? Here we have good horses, strong and resilient, but where are they going to run? How will they cover the dense forests, the sugarcane fields with their sharp stalks, the mangroves and the mud that can swallow an entire army? How are we to carry their heavy artillery along roads that don’t exist? And the infantry, how will they cross the rivers, most of them without bridges or even passages, how, with their socks and shoes, dressed in uniforms made of miles of fine cloth? They don’t even know how to tell an angry alligator from a complacent one and nearly suffocate in the heat, and what’s more, their sweet blood attracts swarms of hungry mosquitoes like bees to honey.
Things deteriorated to a point that Manu lost his patience—so unlike him—as he recounted the folly of the Luso-Brazilian commanders. But the gleam returned to his eyes as he recounted his own unfailing tactic to lure the Dutch to the cane fields, where the thickness and uniformity of the sugarcane plants threw off their sense of direction; they soon looked like dizzied cockroaches and were stuck full of holes by the piercing stalks, they lost sight of each other and became easy prey for the surprise attack launched by Manu’s men.
Disturbed with what he was seeing, Taiaôba decided to request a meeting with one of the commanding officials. After a long wait, he finally managed an audience with the mestre de campo, a veteran of the War of Flanders and other European conflicts. It’s unclear which of the two men left that meeting more appalled and disgusted with the other.
To the eyes of the elegant European commander, the uncouth figure of the Indian hunter was frightening and an affront to decency. Though Manu had shed his beard, which he shaved before battle in order to apply war paint to camouflage himself in the forest, his light uniform of raw cotton was indecent in the eyes of the nobl
eman, his enormous bare feet a monstrous sight, and his voice, more often silent than engaged in speech, resembled an animalesque grunt. Everything about him was appalling to the official, who only managed to hide his repulsion because he understood very little of what Taiaôba tried to tell him. Taiaôba spoke in Língua Geral smattered with a few words of Portuguese, but the official didn’t so much as bother to summon an interpreter because he had no interest in understanding what the old man was saying. According to his military code, based largely on his feudal nobleman’s mentality, the ambush-style warfare advocated by the savage before him represented the total negation of all the ideals he had been taught to hold in high regard. The official regarded individual courage and loyalty as irreconcilably contrary to the cunning and shrewdness of this monkey warfare the natives wished to wage. The tactic of an ambush was for cowards and thieves, and the monstrous individual before him seemed only to validate his convictions. No matter how much he learned about the near-legendary battle victories of Manu Taiaôba, he was a man he would never allow to march behind him and whom he would never invite to sit at the same table, not even for a light meal of field rations.
Taiaôba, for his part, was also unable to conceal his aversion to the idiotic man before him. The peculiar European’s insistence on following military orthodoxy in that unforgiving landscape, his inability to grasp what was so plainly visible to everyone else, this stubbornness that to some even appeared to be collaboration with the enemy more than stupidity, had begun to appear unacceptable in his eyes. Seeing the official’s well-manicured hands, his nails as clean as if he had just scrubbed them, his mustache and hair so well groomed and waxed that it looked like a helmet, the old jungle fighter understood that any resistance would be futile. This fop—who was more worried with the presentability of his uniform and boots, and whose hands were in constant agitation, waving a spotless handkerchief near his face to fan himself and wipe away the sweat that poured in endless currents down his face—convinced Taiaôba that the war was ridiculous. At that moment, he decided it was better to return and watch over his cattle than to stand by as defeat closed in day after day.
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