Juvêncio declined when invited by Bento to stay. Having fulfilled his promise to Maria Taiaôba, he was determined to roam across the mining region, where it was said many people had discovered precious metals. He promised to pass through whenever possible.
Of Guilhermina and Bento’s two children, the first to go out into the world was Jerônimo. He left to accompany a band of cowboys who had stopped on their way to Sergipe, farther south. For more than two years, he had nurtured hopes of going after the so-called herbs of the backlands, various plants and roots utilized in cooking and medicine. Once he had arrived in Sergipe, his idea was to continue on to Sítio do Uma in the state of Pará, from there to São José do Rio Negro. He carried a hand-drawn map by a priest from one of the religious missions in the Amazon; his plan was to continue on to the destination marked on that map, which was a present he’d been given from a dying man two years earlier.
The twin boys had been little older than twelve when a reinol who had become lost arrived at the farm, dehydrated, malnourished, on death’s doorstep. He had wandered about the jungle for months; the other fifteen men from his expedition had expired along the way. They had set out from the port at Espírito Santo for Caminho dos Currais da Bahia, a land passage stretching through the backlands up to Salvador, but their guide gave so many orders to take wrong turns, they only learned later that, in order to avoid the attacks of the Tapuia, they had set off in the opposite direction from their destination. The original plan had been to follow the Rio São Francisco to Pernambuco, where it was said precious metals were to be found. Along the way, however, they had encountered a lone traveler, a priest who said he was part of the religious missions along the Rio Negro. The priest told them of riches, more guaranteed than gold, in a place much farther north where he had been and for which he had a map. These riches were the aforementioned “herbs of the backlands,” discovered with the help of the tribes of the North, and included several types of plants such as cacao and clove, and other sources of oils and balms. The Europeans thought that these could substitute Eastern spices, whether in medicine or food, and they were paying a fortune for them. The priest could not stop talking about how he would grow rich with this map leading to the herbs worth more than gold or silver, and which were easily sold, how he had already planned the whole thing out. He spoke so much and with such swagger that he began to fill the heads of that group with ideas, and some began to think it wasn’t right for a man of God to have this type of ambition. In the end, one of them arrived at a dispute with the priest and killed him. The map, as the group soon discovered, truly was in his bag, drawn entirely by hand and drawn well, though few of them there knew how to read it. By punishment or by coincidence, the first to die on the expedition was the man who had killed the priest, and one by one they all began to die until only the wandering Portuguese man remained. Sensing his own death approaching, he wanted to perform the benevolent act of giving the map to someone who, having gained possession of it by gift rather than theft, might use it without any guilt or fear of revenge.
That’s how, before dying, he gave the map to the two brothers. But the man’s story had left an impression on only Jerônimo. Romualdo, not so much. Jerônimo had the dreamy, romantic temperament of all adventure-seekers, but Romualdo had inherited his priestly grandfather’s mystic side, and though his father had given him little education, his calling seemed to be religion. For some time, he had been gathering information from this or that priest who passed through, and his future plans included the Jesuit college at Piratininga. Soon after Jerônimo set off with his map, Romualdo decided it was time he too left, and off he went.
Each of the brothers took with him a portion of their great-grandmother’s coins.
Their parents never heard from either of them again.
The twins also never met their sister, Ana de Pádua, who was born a few months later, after another complicated pregnancy for their mother. As with the twins, Guilhermina’s daughter was a mystery to her; a child was something whose sense, meaning, or purpose she was unable to grasp. As she had also done with the twins, she left her daughter in the hands of a house slave, the same woman who had accompanied her pregnancies since she and Bento fled Salvador.
Now that his chapel was complete, Bento was able to focus his attentions on his daughter. He taught her to read and write, as he had the boys, and taught her the rudiments of religion.
The girl didn’t like cattle and never accompanied her mother on her chores. She would stay with her father, helping him with his sculptures—but she worshiped Guilhermina.
When her mother arrived home at the end of the afternoon, covered in burrs and dust, she would wash up in a nearby stream. This was Ana’s favorite part of the day, when, fascinated, she helped Guilhermina wash her long fire-like hair. Guilhermina always wore her hair up as she did her chores, wrapping the long strands around her head several times and securing them beneath a leather hat. Later, she calmly unfurled them before Ana, as though they had all the time in the world, slowly and carefully massaged her mother’s hair with oil from coconuts, which she rubbed between the palms of her hands before sliding them along her mother’s voluminous tendrils of hair. She felt the softness of the curled waves and their beauty as they shimmered beneath the golden, late afternoon sun. She would comb it until each strand shone, and watched as the color transformed beneath the setting sun. In such moments, her mother would let out her voice and fill the clearing with the fullness of her powerful singing, and there the two women would remain until the first stars or the light of the moon could be seen.
Then, upon waking one morning, that fire-like hair of Guilhermina’s, which she had never cut and which, when untamed, reached her feet, was white. It happened without any warning or explanation.
Ana’s and Bento’s jaws dropped and Guilhermina also marveled at herself, but no one grew sad because her long white hair was as beautiful and extraordinary as it had been before.
Immediately, Bento began to add a new characteristic to his statues of female saints: though he lacked the proper pigments, he found a way to scrape the soapstone until it resembled Guilhermina’s white hair, and he also began to let this hair fall until it reached the saint’s feet.
It’s a pity that so little remains of the work of Bento Vasco. With his growing technical skill, the frivolous levity of his earlier work gave way to figures that were more world-weary, and the long white hair of the women saints gave his sculptures a particularly seductive aspect.
As a strong storm set in one late afternoon, a cowhand came to tell Guilhermina that her favorite breeding cow had escaped the corral. The two immediately set out on horseback in search of the runaway. A jaguar had been seen prowling the region and killing livestock, and Guilhermina didn’t want to lose the pregnant cow. Armed beneath the violent storm, the two heard the growling of a jaguar and desperate moaning as they approached a familiar hollow in the forest. They drew closer to see the terrified cow lying on the ground, giving birth, the jaguar directly next to her.
Perhaps under the effect of the lightning and thunder that reinforced the violence and cowardice of the jaguar’s attack on the defenseless cow, or for God knows what reason, the bloody scene seemed to have driven Guilhermina mad with rage and, in the blind fury of an irrational attack like none she had ever experienced since that scene in front of the church door in Salvador, she instantly jumped from her horse and advanced unarmed on the jaguar.
Woman and beast leapt at one another in a scene of pure horror, and as strong as Guilhermina was in her uncontrollable fury, the jaguar—by its very nature a hundred times stronger—had in no time clawed open her jugular.
The cowhand who had accompanied her would repeat, for the rest of his life, that he never understood why his boss had done that. Paralyzed with fear, he only managed to shoot the jaguar milliseconds after it had already killed Guilhermina.
Woman and beast died side by side beneath the electric storm that illuminated the birth of the calf,
which survived together with its mother.
That night, Guilhermina’s body lay across the long wooden table in the main room of house. Ana carefully cleaned the blood from her mother’s body, unfurled her long white hair and arranged it, lock by lock, curl by curl, until it covered her entire body down to her toes.
The next morning, they buried her behind the tiny chapel.
IMPROBABLE SPLENDOR
ANA DE PÁDUA
(1683-1730)
Unlike her mother, Ana had inherited more of her father’s complexion and had a tiny, thin frame and brown skin. Fragile only in appearance, she was bold and courageous, not as much as her mother, but enough to be considered a strong woman. Her name had been chosen by her father, who had also chosen those of the twins. Ana’s had resulted from a promise made to Our Lady of Pádua, the saint of Bento’s devotion, at the hour of his daughter’s difficult delivery.
When the cowhand recounted how her mother had died, Ana was the only person to say that she did, in fact, understand why her mother attacked the jaguar with her bare hands, for if she had been there herself, she would have done the same. Despite her tender age, it was she who arranged Guilhermina’s body atop the long wood table, and wrapped her in her hammock when the time came to take her to the prepared grave on the hillside.
Bento found himself adrift following the death of his wife, the force around which he had constructed his life at the farm. A man without larger ambitions, an artist who lived for his saints and for Guilhermina, he felt empty and alone now that she had died.
It was Guilhermina who had overseen not only the livestock and the crops, but also the slaves. Not knowing what to do with them, Bento decided to grant them their freedom, an action whose perhaps unexpected consequence was of great worth to him later in easing the solitude of advanced age; the freed slaves did not depart, but rather built mud huts with thatched roofs on the surrounding land and continued to work for him in exchange for calves as payment, as other farmhands did. Little by little, a tiny village began to develop, at its center the tiny chapel constructed by Bento on the hill next to his house. Bento became a sort of patriarch for the outpost, which he named Pouso da Capela.
News began to trickle in that gold had been discovered, the information received more trustworthy and euphoric with each report. It was said that a mulatto had dipped his trough into a stream to gather water when he noticed tiny grains the color of steel; everyone thought this unusual, because no one knew what sort of metal it was. But they did know that the mulatto ended up selling these grains to a trader who had no idea what he was buying, and who sent them to Rio de Janeiro for examination only to receive news that they were the finest gold. They said that in the mining region there were plenty of streams just like that one, and all you needed to do was dip a trough into the water and pull it back out to find it full of gold.
The number of travelers passing by grew as they continued toward the Rio das Velhas and the Rio das Minas dos Gataguás. They passed through quickly, often not stopping for more time than necessary for a quick rest.
At her father’s side, Ana watched as the number of travelers increased, and she took a liking to it all.
She was always the first to bring water to the outsiders and to strike up a conversation. Unlike her mother and father, she enjoyed others’ company and was eager for news.
One of the many who passed by on his way back from the region near the Rio das Velhas was Juvêncio, Maria Taiaôba’s former companion. At his side was Baltazar, who’d recently arrived from Portugal, impelled by his fever for gold. Somewhere around forty-five years old, Baltazar took a liking to Ana de Pádua’s youthfulness, her dark-skinned beauty, and silky black hair, and asked Bento for the young girl’s hand, that Bento might let her go with him to Sabará so they could be married by the first priest they could find.
Bento saw no reason to refuse. His daughter was reaching a marriageable age and it wouldn’t be easy to hunt up a husband in those parts, unless it were in a similar situation with a traveler passing through. And the Portuguese man had accompanied Juvêncio, who was at least something akin to family. When he finally saw that Ana seemed to like the idea of setting a new course for her life, Bento gave his blessing.
For Ana, it was as though things had been pre-ordained and were merely following their natural course, in the same way a river did, or the weather, or time. There was no rhyme or reason to think the issue over: if Baltazar had stopped there, was in need of a woman to help him settle in the country, and he wanted it to be her, what was there to argue? It was only natural for Ana to go with him. The only obstacle that could have gotten in the way was if she had been too attached to her father or the farm, or if she had been too shy. But no—Ana wasn’t shy at all, and though she loved her father, what she most wanted was to leave that place, to know others, to see the world. Whether it was at Baltazar’s side or someone else’s, the girl of fifteen asked no questions. Her restlessness and youthful curiosity were much greater than any fear.
Had it not been for Juvêncio and his Indian slaves, the journey to Sabará would have been a disaster. The heavy woods and roads nearly did Baltazar in, since he understood nothing about the tropical land where he’d arrived with the intent of becoming rich. Baltazar arrived at his destination with a fever, feeble and weak, and Ana de Pádua spent her first few months of marriage tending to her husband’s illness.
After he’d recovered, Baltazar, a merchant by origin, showed little enthusiasm for the hard work of mining, but soon saw an alternative path to instant wealth. Gold was the only truly abundant thing in the region, and since no one eats gold, drinks gold, or sleeps with gold, the enormous scarcity of basic necessities in the region would affect the camps that, with the hordes of people arriving daily, were rapidly transforming into villages. Everyone wanted to dedicate themselves to the extraction of gold and no one thought to lose time planting crops or guaranteeing the essentials for survival. In this gap between ambition and necessity, Baltazar’s offerings found great demand in the greedy hands full of gold, gold which ultimately ended up in his hands, but without his having to wear down his body in the rivers next to those swaggering, brute men whose skill in this area—this point he was not foolish enough to ignore—was much greater than his.
He opened a lodge with a home in back, and with a few coins and some of the jewels that had belonged to Ana’s grandmother, purchased slaves for planting cassava, corn, and sugarcane; he organized a network of cattle-drivers and livestock sellers, and sold literally everything for its weight in gold: food, drink, tobacco, clothing, anything at all.
For Ana, the lodge was a dream, with all its people coming and going and stirring about. The toughest labor was performed entirely by slaves, and her husband, in the beginning, showed her great tenderness and never made unreasonable demands. Hers was a bustling, energetic life that fit like a glove.
But in a region infested with men without women and where having a woman was a prize, especially a young woman who was more white than black, Baltazar began to suffer from that deadly illness called jealousy. As in every mining region, the majority of the adventurers preferred to leave their wives, if they had them, in their cities of origin. And so, disputes over a skirt-tail—a black woman’s, an Indian’s, or whatever combination—were a natural part of the raucous gold-mining nights. Given their rarity, white women, or those who appeared to be, were coveted like jewels of unparalleled purity.
This was no place for jealous men. And after Ana’s first pregnancy resulted in a stillborn son, Baltazar’s disposition only made matters worse.
That’s when restrictions were placed on Ana’s activities: she was not allowed to go to the lodge during the busier hours; she couldn’t leave the house unless it was with her husband; and when she left, she had to cover herself with a long black shawl that concealed her from head to foot.
But Ana was young, cheerful, extroverted, and Baltazar was soon of the opinion that his restrictions weren’t strict enoug
h. He turned to physical aggression. He would whip Ana with an enormous leather belt that left her back red and swollen. It no longer mattered after some time whether or not she had given Baltazar reason to be jealous, since a life of an aching back and broad leather belts inevitably sent Ana looking for an escape.
She found it in a man who had come from São Paulo—one younger, better looking, and richer than Baltazar.
THE PAULISTA JOSÉ GARCIA
José Garcia e Silva came from a family of explorers who had set out from São Paulo. His father, Manuel Garcia e Silva, had participated since a young age in the expeditions that preyed on Indians to be found in the Jesuit missions of southern Brazil. Such expeditions were highly attractive to the Paulistas, who could find hundreds of natives at a time, settled in villages, already pacified and adapted to white society, practically ready and waiting, so to speak, to be kidnapped and sold as slaves. There were other Paulistas who preferred to take it upon themselves to enter the service of His Majesty, via contracts to pacify and settle contested regions of the colony, receiving as payment a portion of the prisoners they took and land, positions, pensions, and commendations. Manuel Garcia e Silva was different. He liked to work independently and keep his distance from the men of the Crown.
For Manuel, the backlands spelled mystery and adventure. It was the force of the rivers and the beauty of the mountains, the constant battle against nature. In the backlands, there was the possibility of gold and precious gems, the certainty of finding native slaves, the adventurous lifestyle of rugged men.
Twenty-two times Manuel Garcia e Silva set off into the backlands, on trips that sometimes took up to two years each, in search of Indian slaves for plantations, the chattel whose work the Paulistas considered “the best remedy against poverty.” Manuel’s life was a constant coming-and-going, seeking, capturing, and selling slaves. But the backlands also meant insidious fevers, delirium, infection. Territory rife with jaguars and other wild beasts. Savages and the unknown. The backlands could be the death of you and, on his final trip there, Manual Garcia was killed, victim to poison-tipped arrows. He was sixty-nine.
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