Genesis
Page 29
1692: Guápulo
Nationalization of Colonial Art
In the sanctuary of Guápulo, a village overlooking Quito, Miguel de Santiago begins to show his canvases.
In homage to the local Virgin, who is a great miracle worker, Miguel de Santiago offers these mountains and plains, this cordillera and this sky, landscapes that would have little life if the people who move in them did not light them up: local people moving through local settings in procession or alone. The artist no longer copies works from Madrid or Rome about the life of St. Augustine. Now he paints the luminous city of Quito surrounded by volcanos, the towers of these churches, the Indians of Pujilí and Machángara Canyon, Bellavista Hill and the Valley of Guápulo; and the suns behind the mountains, the rising bonfire-smoke clouds, and the misty rivers that never stop singing all belong here.
Nor is it only Miguel de Santiago. The anonymous hands of indigenous or mestizo artisans sneak contraband llamas into their Christmas paintings instead of camels, and pineapples and palms and corncobs and avocados into church-façade greenery carvings; and even head-banded suns up close to the altars. On all sides there are pregnant Virgins, and Christs that grieve like men, like men of these parts, for the sadness of this world.
(215)
1693: Mexico City
Juana at Forty-Two
Lifelong tears, springing from time and pain, soak her face. She sees the world as profoundly and sadly clouded. Defeated, she bids it farewell.
For days she has been confessing the sins of her whole existence to the implacable Father Antonio Núñez de Miranda, and the rest is all penitence. With her own blood as ink she writes a letter to the Divine Tribunal, asking forgiveness.
Her light sails and heavy keels will no longer sail the seas of poetry. Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz abandons her human studies and renounces literature. She asks God for the gift of forgetfulness and chooses silence, or accepts it, and so America loses its best poet.
Her body will not survive long this suicide of the soul. Let life be ashamed of lasting so long for me …
(16, 49, and 58)
1693: Santa Fe, New Mexico
Thirteen Years of Independence
Thirteen years have passed since the bells of Santa Fe went mad celebrating the death of the God of the Christians and of Mary, his mother.
Thirteen years the Spaniards have taken to reconquer these wild lands of the North. While that truce of independence lasted, the Indians recovered their liberty and their names, their religion and their customs, but they also introduced into their communities the plow and the wheel and other instruments that the Spaniards brought.
For the colonial troops, the reconquest has not been easy. Each pueblo of New Mexico is a huge, tightly shut fortress, with board walls of stone and adobe several stories high. In the Rio Grande Valley live men not accustomed to obedience or servile labor.
(88)
Song of the New Mexican Indians to the Portrait That Escapes from the Sand
So I might cure myself,
the wizard painted,
in the desert, your portrait:
your eyes are of golden sand,
of red sand now your mouth,
of blue sand your hair
and my tears are of white sand.
All day he painted.
You grew like a goddess
on the immensity of the yellow canvas.
The wind of the night will scatter your shadow
and the colors of your shadow.
By ancient law nothing will remain for me.
Nothing, except the rest of my tears,
the silver sands.
(63)
1694: Macacos
The Last Expedition Against Palmares
The great Indian-hunter, killer of Indians over many leagues, was born of an Indian mother. He speaks Guaraní, very little Portuguese. Domingos Jorge Velho is captain of the mamelukes of Sao Paulo, mestizos who have sown terror over half of Brazil in the name of their colonial lords and in ferocious exorcism of one half of their blood.
In the past six years, Captain Domingos has hired out his services to the Portuguese Crown against the Janduim Indians, rebelling in the hinterlands of Pernambuco and in Rio Grande do Norte. After a long campaign of carnage he arrives victorious at Recife, and there is contracted to demolish Palmares. They offer him fat booty in lands and blacks to sell in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires and also promise him infinite amnesties, four religious orders’ habits, and thirty military grades to distribute among his men.
With telescope slung over his naked chest, his greasy jacket open, Captain Domingos parades on horseback through the streets of Recife at the head of his mestizo officers and his rank-and-file Indian cutters of Indian throats. They ride amid clouds of dust and whiffs of gunpowder and rum, to applause and the fluttering of white handkerchiefs: this Messiah will save us from the rebellious blacks, the people believe or hope, convinced that the runaways are to blame for the lack of hands in the sugarmills as well as for the diseases and droughts that are devastating the Northeast, since God will not send health or rain while the Palmares scandal endures.
And the great crusade is organized. From all directions come volunteers, impelled by hunger, seeking sure rations. The prisons empty out, as even the jailbirds join the biggest army yet mobilized in Brazil.
The Indian scouts march ahead and the black porters bring up the rear. Nine thousand men cross the jungle, reach the mountains, and climb toward the summit, where the Macacos fortifications stand. This time they bring cannons.
The siege lasts several days. The cannons wreck the triple bulwark of wood and stone. They fight man to man on the edge of the abyss. There are so many dead that there is no place left to fall down, and the slaughter continues in the scrub. Many blacks try to flee, and slip down the precipice into the void; many choose the precipice and throw themselves off it.
Flames devour the capital of Palmares. From the distant city of Porto Calvo, the huge bonfire can be seen burning throughout the night. Burn even the memory of it. Hunting horns unceasingly proclaim the victory.
Chief Zumbí, wounded, has managed to escape. From the lofty peaks he reaches the jungle. He wanders through green tunnels, seeking his people in the thickets.
(38, 43, and 69)
Lament of the Azande People
The child is dead;
let us cover our faces
with white earth.
Four sons I have borne
in the hut of my husband.
Only the fourth lives.
I want to weep,
but in this village
sadness is forbidden.
(134)
1695: Serra Dois Irmāos
Zumbí
Jungle landscape, jungle of the soul. Zumbí smokes his pipe, his eyes locked on the high red rocks and caves open like wounds, and does not see that day is breaking with an enemy light, nor that the birds are flocking off in terrified flight.
He does not see the traitor approaching. He sees his comrade Antonio Soares and rises to embrace him. Antonio Soares buries a dagger several times in his back.
The soldiers fix the head on a lance point and take it to Recife, to putrefy in the plaza and teach the slaves that Zumbí was not immortal.
Palmares no longer breathes. This broad space of liberty opened up in colonial America has lasted for a century and resisted more than forty invasions. The wind has blown away the ashes of the black bastions of Macacos and Subupira, Dambrabanga and Obenga, Tabocas and Arotirene. For the conquerors, the Palmares century whittles down to the instant when the dagger polished off Zumbí. Night will fall and nothing will remain beneath the cold stars. Yet what does the wakeful know compared with what the dreamer knows?
The vanquished dream about Zumbí; and the dream knows that while one man remains owner of another man in these lands, his ghost will walk. He will walk with a limp, because Zumbí had been lamed by a bullet; he will walk up and down time and, limping, will fight in
these jungles of palms and in all the lands of Brazil. The chiefs of all the unceasing black rebellions will be called Zumbí.
(69)
1695: Sāo Salvador de Bahia
The Capital of Brazil
In this radiant city, there is a church for every day of the year, and every day a saint’s day. A glow of towers and bells and tall palms, of bodies and of air sticky with dendê oil: today a saint is celebrated, tomorrow a lover, in the Bahia of All Saints and of the not-so-saintly. São Salvador de Bahia, seat of the viceroy and the archbishop, is the most populated of all Portuguese cities after Lisbon, and it envies Lisbon its monumental monasteries and golden churches, its incendiary women and its fiestas and masquerades and processions. Here strut mulatto prostitutes decked out like queens, and slaves parade their masters on litters down leafy avenues amid palaces of delirious grandeur. Gregorio de Matos, born in Bahia, thus portrays the noble gentry of the sugar plantations:
In Brazil the gentlefolk
are not all that gentle;
their good manners, not all that good:
So where do they belong?
In a pile of money.
Black slaves are the brick and mortar of these castles. From the cathedral pulpit Father Antonio Vieira insists on gratitude toward Angola, because without Angola there would be no Brazil, and without Brazil there would be no Portugal, so that it could be very justly said that Brazil has its body in America and its soul in Africa: Angola, which sells Bantu slaves and elephants tusks; Angola, as the father’s sermon proclaims, with whose unhappy blood and black but happy souls Brazil is nourished, animated, sustained, served, and preserved.
At almost ninety this Jesuit priest remains the worst enemy of the Inquisition, advocate of enslaved Indians and Jews, and most persistent accuser of the colonial lords, who believe that work is for animals and spit on the hand that feeds them.
(33 and 226)
1696: Regla
Black Virgin, Black Goddess
To the docks of Regla, poor relation of Havana, comes the Virgin, and she comes to stay. The cedar carving has come from Madrid, wrapped in a sack, in the arms of her devotee Pedro Aranda. Today, September 8, is fiesta day in this little town of artisans and sailors, always redolent of shellfish and tar; the people eat meat and corn and beans and manioc, Cuban dishes, and African dishes, ecó, olelé, ecrú, quimbombó, fufú, while rivers of rum and earthquakes of drums welcome the black Virgin, the little black one, patron protector of Havana Bay.
The sea is littered with coconut husks and boughs of sweet basil, and a breeze of voices sings as night falls:
Opa ule, opa ule,
opa é, opa é,
opa opa, Yemayá.
The black Virgin of Regla is also the African Yemayá, silvered goddess of the seas, mother of the fish and mother and lover of Shangó, the womanizing and quarrel-picking warrior god.
(68 and 82)
1697: Cap Français
Ducasse
Gold escudos in hard cash, doubloons, double doubloons, big-shot gold and little-shot gold, gold jewelry and dishes, gold from chalices and crowns of virgins and saints: Filled with gold are the arriving galleons of Jean-Baptiste Ducasse, governor of Haiti and chief of the French freebooters in the Antilles. Ducasse has humbled Cartagena with his gun salvos; he has reduced to dust the cliff ramparts of the fortress, colossal lions of rock that rear up from the sea, and has left the church without a bell and the governor without rings. To France goes the gold of the sacked Spanish colony. From Versailles, Ducasse receives the title of admiral and a bushy wig of snow-white rolls worthy of the king.
Before becoming governor of Haiti and admiral of the royal fleet, Ducasse operated on his own, stealing blacks from Dutch slave ships and treasure from galleons of the Spanish fleet. Since 1691, he has been working for Louis XIV.
(11 and 61)
1699: Madrid
Bewitched
Although the herald has not blown his trumpet to announce it, the news flies through the streets of Madrid. The inquisitors have discovered who bewitched King Charles. The witch Isabel will be burned at the stake in the main plaza.
All Spain has been praying for Charles II. On waking, the monarch has been taking his posset of powdered snake, infallible for giving strength, but in vain: The penis has continued in a state of stupefaction, unable to make children, and from the royal mouth froth and foul breath have continued to emerge, and not one word worth hearing.
The curse did not come from a certain cup of chocolate with gallows bird’s testicles, as some witches of Cangas had claimed; nor from the talisman that the king wore round his neck, as the exorcist Fray Mauro believed. Someone suggested that the king had been bewitched by his mother with tobacco from America or benzoin pills; and it was even rumored that the palace maître d’hôtel, the duke of Castellflorit, had served the royal table a ham larded with the fingernails of a Moorish or Jewish woman burned by the Inquisition.
The inquisitors have at last found the mess of pins, hairpins, cherrystones, and His Majesty’s blond hairs that the witch Isabel had hidden near the royal bedroom.
The nose hangs down, the lip hangs down, the chin hangs down; but now that the king has been debewitched, his eyes seem to have lit up somewhat. A dwarf raises the candle to look at the portrait Carreño did of him years ago.
Meanwhile, outside the palace there is no bread or meat, fish or wine, as if Madrid were a besieged city.
(64 and 201)
1699: Macouba
A Practical Demonstration
To put some gusto into his slaves’ work in this land of sluggishness and drowsiness, Father Jean-Baptiste Labat tells them he was black before coming to Martinique and that God whitened him as a reward for the fervor and submission with which he served his masters in France.
The black carpenter of the church is trying to make a difficult dovetailing of a beam and cannot get the angle right. Father Labat draws some lines with a ruler and compass, and he orders: “Cut it here.”
The angle is right.
“Now I believe you,” says the slave, looking him in the eyes. “No white man could do that.”
(101)
1700: Ouro Prêto
All Brazil to the South
In the old days, the map showed Bahia close to the newly discovered mines of Potosí, and the governor general reported to Lisbon that this land of Brazil and Peru are all one. To turn the Paranapiacaba Mountains into the Andes cordillera, the Portuguese brought two hundred llamas to São Paulo and sat down to wait for the silver and gold to appear.
A century and a half later, the gold has turned up. The riverbeds and streams on the slopes of the Espinhaço Mountains are full of shiny stones. The Sāo Paulo mamelukes found the gold when they were out hunting Cataguaz Indians.
The wind spread the news all through Brazil, and a multitude responded. To get gold in the Minas Gerais region, all you had to do was gather a handful of sand or pull up a tuft of grass and shake it.
With gold has come hunger. The price of a cat or a dog in the camps is 115 grams of gold, which is what a slave gets for two days’ work.
(33 and 38)
1700: St. Thomas Island
The Man Who Makes Things Talk
Lugubrious bells and melancholy drums are sounding in this Danish island of the Antilles, a center for contraband and piracy. A slave walks up to the execution stake. Vanbel, the big boss, has condemned him because this black fellow turns on rain when he feels like it, kneeling before three oranges, and because he has a clay idol that answers all his questions and clears him of all doubts.
Smiling from ear to ear and with his eyes fixed on the stake surrounded by firewood, the condemned man approaches.
Vanbel intercepts him: “So you won’t be chatting with your doll anymore, you black sorcerer!”
Without looking at him, the slave answers softly: “I can make that cane of yours talk.”
“Stop!” Vanbel cries to the guards. “Unbind him!”
“Do it,” he says.
The slave kneels. With his hands, he fans the cane stuck in the ground, makes a few turns around it, kneels again, and strokes it.
“I want to know,” says the master, “whether the galleon that’s due here has sailed yet. When it will arrive, who is aboard, what has happened …”
The slave takes a few steps backward.
“Come closer, sir,” he suggests. “It will tell you.”
His ear close to the cane, Vanbel hears that the ship sailed some time ago from Helsingør, in Denmark, but that on reaching the tropics a storm broke its small topsail and carried off the mizzensail. Vanbel’s neck quivers like a frog’s belly. The onlookers see him turn white.
“I don’t hear anything,” says Vanbel as the cane proceeds to tell him the names of the captain and the sailors.
“Nothing!” he screams.
The cane whispers to him: The ship will arrive in three days. Its cargo will make you happy, and Vanbel explodes, tears off his wig, shouts: “Burn that Negro!”
He roars: “Burn him!”
He howls: “Burn that sorcerer!”
(101)
Bantu People’s Song of the Fire
Fire that men watch in the night,
in the deep night.
Fire that blazest without burning, that shinest
without blazing.
Fire that fliest without a body.
Fire without heart, that knowest not
home nor hast a hut.
Transparent fire of palm leaves:
a man invokes thee without fear.
Fire of the sorcerers, thy father, where is he?
Thy mother, where is she?
Who has fed thee?
Thou art thy father, thou art thy mother,
Thou passest and leavest no trace.
Dry wood does not engender thee,