by Lara Blunte
Heinrich had painted his watercolors and then disappeared; as he also had a passion for geology, he had become certain that diamonds could be found further north in the mountains of Bahia as well. He had sound reasons for thinking so, as he explained over a map not only to Gabriel, but to two other Portuguese men of good but ruined families, Thiago D'Ajuda and Roberto Dantas.
Heinrich was talking of wild, unclaimed land; there were no guards, private contractors, or slaves there. They might be eaten by Indians or by spotted jaguars, but there would be very few miners, if any.
There might not be any diamonds either, but Gabriel had taken a gamble and put what was left of his mother's inheritance into the adventure; the others had invested what they could, and the four of them had set off together to explore an inhospitable chain of mountains.
For a year they had camped in the wild as they moved along the river looking for diamonds. In spite of how hard their life was, unlike the others Gabriel fell in love with Brazil.
When he woke up before dawn and made a fire to warm their coffee, breathed the clean mountain air and saw the flight of colorful birds; when in that mountain they managed to find wild boar, plentiful fruit and plants to eat; when he drank the cold water of brooks and swam in the clear natural pools formed by waterfalls ─or when he came across an orchid perched on a tree trunk in its vibrant, fragile beauty, he thought he could live like this forever.
If only Clara had married him…
The four men moved for months, looking at the river, digging, sifting, until they finally struck lucky: a bed yielded the precious rocks in their rough form. Bearded, dirty, tired, wet, they danced for joy on the banks of the river.
Then they found a place they liked, leveled the earth and built four tiny houses of mud bricks across a courtyard of beaten dirt. They would live there until they had extracted enough diamonds to be rich.
"Tag!" Heinrich would say as he emerged from his house in the morning; he would always be the second person to wake up.
The two of them would sit around the embers drinking their coffee, and eating fruit and cakes they made with shaved cassava. It was good nourishment for the morning ahead, which they would spend mining.
The nearest village was half a day's ride away, and there was no time to go there, except when an instrument broke and they could not fix it themselves. In the few and widespread villages around, there were people all colors of the rainbow, from a few white Brazilians to the ebony black of the Yoruba or Sudanese, who were probably fugitive slaves. Then there were the many people of mixed race: the mulattos, the cablocos who were part white and part Indian, and the cafuzos who were black and Indian.
The miners stayed away from the villages, since no one ought to know that they had found diamonds in the bed of the river. Everything there was hard, everything was scarce, but it was the very isolation of the place which was going to make their fortune.
"Sometimes I think I will die of tedium," Dantas often said, lying in a hammock he had tied between two trees.
"I think I will die trying to fuck a tree!" D'Ajuda replied, shaking his hips. "Even the ass of that mule is beginning to look good!"
Heinrich blushed at this talk, which made the other two call him "altar boy". Gabriel was neither shocked nor interested, but after a while, his countrymen began to grate on him. It would have been better to stay with Heinrich, who was a sensitive man and an honest soul, and whom Gabriel very much liked.
Sometimes they had to go all the way to Salvador, the erstwhile capital of Brazil and one of its greatest cities. It was a ride that would take several days.
There they would sell a few diamonds to be able to afford things that they needed: blankets, hats, boots, horses, mules, hammers, shovels, pans. It was best to go into a big city and sell a very few tiny diamonds there, and then buy things in different places, as they would attract less attention. In a big city no one knew or cared where they were coming from: men arrived from different places and sometimes had gold powder, nuggets or diamonds. A lot of them were probably smugglers, buying houses and courting women in the city. The natives were too lazy to ask or find out anything about them ─ it was the people who were not from Salvador that Gabriel wanted to avoid, the ones who tended to ask questions.
In Salvador Dantas fell in love with a beautiful mulatto girl called Francisca, or Chica, while D'Ajuda made the rounds of the whorehouses. Heinrich and Gabriel would often stay behind in the camp, or go to Salvador together when the others were not going.
Gabriel met a cabloca, a girl of twenty whose name was Iaci. She had toasted skin, almond-shaped black eyes, and a heavy curtain of silky black hair that fell to her waist. She also had a one-year old daughter by a Dutch sailor who had promised her things, then left her behind.
He was not in love with Iaci, but he liked her company. She did not talk much, and had no romantic notions about life; she didn't expect him to love her, and was grateful that they gave each other pleasure, and that he took care of her.
"You're a good man," she would tell him in her serious way.
"Am I?” Gabriel would reply, his gaze roaming the sea in front of her house. He could not speak about another woman who still occupied his thoughts, and who lived on the other side of the ocean.
In the meantime he was falling in love with Iaci’s child, Iara, a baby with golden skin and green eyes. He liked to sit with her in the hammock as her mother cooked the fish they would eat. The child would lie against his chest and sleep as he moved the hammock back and forth with his foot on the ground. Sometimes he would softly sing some sad, slow song from Portugal to her, or even the air of an opera.
Gabriel and Heinrich would never stay too long in Salvador, unlike their partners. Heinrich planned to one day go back to Austria and become wealthy; he dreamt of supporting artists and explorers, and traveling with them.
There were different plans for Gabriel; he would never stay there, or in any city. He saw all the people squeezed together, as if there were not enough space in the enormous landmass that was Brazil, and he saw their vices: prostitutes exhibiting themselves at the doors of shacks, men drinking until they fell in the middle of the street, gamblers fighting each other in corners, men with knives stuck on their waistbands, looking to rob and kill someone.
He was glad that he had no real need of people. He was still the Grand Inquisitor, he thought with a mirthless smile, remembering his brother.
On Sunday morning the prostitutes, the thieves, the gamblers and the drunkards climbed endless steps under the hot sun to make it to a Baroque church perched on a hill. There were many such churches in Salvador, but he had no need of any. The sinners would go in, somehow feel better about themselves, and then come out to sin again.
At night, as he strolled enjoying the cool air, he would sometimes pass the terreiros, clandestine dirt yards where the Africans practiced candomblé, the religion they had brought with them. They danced to the rhythm of drums, in the worship of many gods, or orixás. The English and the Dutch had probably been more efficient at rooting out these parallel cults and evangelizing their slaves, Gabriel thought; the Portuguese had forbidden the pagan rites, but at the same time turned a blind eye to them. He had spoken to Brazilian whites who even believed some of the African superstitions.
One afternoon, as he drank coffee at the door of a small trade shop, an old slave woman stopped to stare intensely at him, until he raised his eyebrows at her. She approached slowly, supported by a cane and holding a smoking pipe with the other hand, from which fragrant tobacco smoke rose. She was dressed in dazzling white and had many necklaces made of shells; he wondered how she kept her clothes so clean.
Her eyes were clouded, but she still seemed to see out of them, as she said in a cracked voice, "Ogun is in you!" she said. "It can be a frightening thing, to look at Ogun, but I am not scared!"
She put the stem of the pipe back in her mouth and snapped her lips over it. Gabriel understood that the woman was speaking of an African god. He
thought wryly that if she had been speaking of the religion he knew he would have given her short shrift, but that her exotic beliefs might at least surprise him.
He asked her if she wanted a coffee. The slave, probably a free woman now, smiled and said, "I love coffee!" She took a deep breath and almost managed to straighten her back. "I feel strong when I drink it!"
She chose a table by the counter and he sat down with her, ordering the coffee. Her fingers were gnarled and bent as she picked up the clay cup with the steaming drink and sipped gingerly. Then she closed her eyes and took a drag from her pipe. It was amusing to see someone so old enjoy such simple things.
"They go well together," she said, indicating the coffee and the pipe. Her eyes seemed to sharpen as she nodded at him. "You are Ogun all over. The god of war. I can see it! Strong, stubborn, never turning away from a difficulty, always conquering! Are you like that?"
Gabriel thought that she would tell him a few general things, then ask for money, but he liked her, and he didn't mind. He only smiled. She smiled back, and then began to cackle as if something highly amusing had occurred to her.
"Women are scared of Ogun, but they love him most of all!" she told him, and leaned closer as she breathed smoke out of her nostrils to add, "Very potent, do you see what I mean, very skillful!"
He was glad that she hadn't asked if he were like that. In Brazil the greatest prudery lived side by side with a sort of amoral freedom in matters of sensuality. The woman leaned back and cackled more, and took more sips of her coffee. Gabriel was still smiling. There was always a god of war, he thought. How could there not be, when the human race thrived on strife?
Her smile died, though her toothless mouth stayed open. She was watching him. Gabriel watched her back quietly; she seemed to have gone almost into a trance. "You have beautiful eyes," she finally said. "They look like heaven, but there is hell in them. It's pride, isn't it? Terrible pride. Ogun doesn't like anyone to even look him in the face. Ogun hates lies more than anything. Ogun is very vengeful."
His gaze finally fell before her steady one and he frowned at the ground, but she wasn't done. "Ogun is with you, but there is also a slave, in the shape of a woman. It's a very beautiful woman, made for love. She is by your shoulder, all the time."
This time Gabriel scoffed; of course there would be a woman, and children, and happiness, if only he paid her. "I don't keep slaves, and I never would," he said flatly.
"No, you are a slave to her!" the woman cried. "She represents your spirit, in chains to a woman! She always follows you, she is always there! She is there now, by your shoulder!"
Gabriel made an impatient movement, as if to get up, but the woman cackled once more and drank the coffee, then said fixing him with clever, cloudy eyes, "Invest in land!"
"What?" he asked. He hadn't expected her to sound practical all of a sudden.
She finished her coffee, set it down with a smack of her lips, and began to lean on her staff to get up. "Invest in land," she repeated. "Food, animals. Ogun will help you, he watches over these things, and you are his creature! You will do very well! But you must leave him something under a tree, a big tree, not a weak one. He likes tobacco, and drink!"
She started moving away and he stood up, fishing for a coin in his pocket. She waved a hand, "I don't want your money. The coffee was enough!"
On his way home Gabriel thought that the old lady had not spoken only nonsense. Land was the future! Had not the explorer Pero Vaz de Caminha written to the king of Portugal in 1500, to tell him that anything that was planted would grow there? Águas são muitas, infinitas, he had written. There is infinite water...
The diamonds in the mountains would be discovered sooner or later, and he already had enough of them to be a very rich man. He would invest in land. The people in the provinces would need meat, tobacco, leather, coffee, sugar, vegetables. It was a good occupation for a lifetime, an occupation he would like.
"Land," he told himself.
On the way back he told Heinrich about what he was going to do, and his friend thought it was a good idea. "There are no bad natural disasters here," he said. "No earthquakes, no typhoons or hurricanes. There are storms, and there can be floods, or a river may rise. Stay away from rivers."
They talked about the different places where land would be good, where it would be best connected to reach the people willing to pay for produce.
Gabriel felt at once that there was a different atmosphere at the camp upon their return. Dantas and D'Ajuda, who were always lazier than them, now exhibited a complete unconcern for sharing tasks. They had stopped cleaning or even gathering wood and water. They had brought a good quantity of dried meat with them from their last trip and chewed it, instead of helping to hunt or find fruit. Sometimes they looked at each other with a secret smile.
"Hide your diamonds," Gabriel told Heinrich after checking that his were intact. He hid his bag inside a hollow mud brick in the wall.
"But why?" Heinrich asked. "No one comes here!"
"There are people here already," Gabriel said grimly.
"Oh, you have a very bad opinion of men!" Heinrich said. “They would never steal our diamonds. We are all friends."
Friends. Gabriel sometimes wanted to smash the heads of those two idiots together, and he probably would, if he had not been so near his objective. He insisted that Heinrich should listen to him, and left pebbles in the sack where he normally kept his diamonds. He waited until everyone was asleep to put the real diamonds away in a hiding place in the woods.
Something was brewing, and he would not be a victim to it. If one mistrusted people, they could only turn out better than one thought. Those two countrymen of his could be thinking of scampering with his diamonds, and they would be sorry if they tried.
However, things gradually went back to normal, with Dantas and D'Ajuda becoming more helpful again, and complaining less.
"We are almost there, eh?" D'Ajuda would say. "We are almost very, very, very rich!"
They left for Salvador and came back with bottles of cachaça, or Brazilian rum, and drank it almost every night.
One morning soon after the four of them worked silently, as usual, with only a remark or another. They stopped to rest and eat, and then worked more. When the sun climbed high they started making their way back to their mules, the sacks with the day's takings tied to their belts.
As Gabriel and Heinrich walked side by side up the slope, the Austrian was suddenly pulled back, as if by a great force. Gabriel had no time to turn around and find out what was happening to his friend; a heavy blow landed on his cheek.
The pain took longer to be felt than the fact that all sounds had become muffled. He was falling, but had the presence of spirit to put his knee out to land on it. It was D'Ajuda who had hit him, and had obviously expected him to be thrown flat on the ground. As he looked up, Gabriel saw that he had a machete in his hand.
Wouldn't it have been easier to just cut me down, you fool? Gabriel thought.
It took all the strength he had, from his core, to go up again instead of falling. He stood up very quickly and threw himself forward, butting his forehead violently against D'Ajuda's. He heard bone crack and saw the man fly back onto the ground. Gabriel's nose had begun to bleed; he must have broken it.
When he managed to look around, he saw that there were two other men there, apart from Dantas. He recognized Chica's brothers.
D'Ajuda was on the ground, his hand covering a mouth that was bleeding. Gabriel quickly picked up his machete and began turning again, but he felt something behind him, over his shoulder. Where the beautiful slave stands, he thought. He realized it was a hand, and saw the knife gleaming in it. He tried to put his own wrist up as a shield, but it was too late.
There was the cold feeling of steel across his neck, and a gash that smarted in the air. He felt the blood begin to flow as he was kneed in the back and fell forward on his face.
His blood flowed quickly. He lay on the ground, trying not
to move. The three men left standing clearly considered him gone, as they took the bag of diamonds and ruffled his pockets. He could hear them talking,
"Is he dead?" Dantas was asking. "Nobody can know about this! You two have to do it!"
"I cut his throat," one of Chica's brothers said.
"We need to get rid of him."
He was being lifted up and carried towards the river. He saw Heinrich's lifeless body and sightless eyes as they passed him. In a minute I will be like that, he thought.
He heard the splash as he was thrown in, and he felt the cold water envelop him. As it carried him away, he thought: Clara.
Seven. The No-No
"So, do you intend to go after the No-No today?" the Count of Olmeda asked his friend José Miranda Valente, Baron of Ramos, on an October afternoon of 1807.
Ramos nodded. "I think she will be saying Yes-Yes very soon!"
The other men sitting around the table started to laugh, and wish the Baron luck, while he only smiled confidently and tapped the floor with his cane.
To avoid discussing Napoleon and his threats, they were instead talking about Clara, who had become known as Não-Não, or No-No, because of the amount of times she had said no to her suitors in the last four years.
"What makes you think you'll succeed where others have failed?" Olmeda asked.
"Ah! I have an accomplice!" the Baron said with a satisfied smirk.
"An accomplice! Don't tell me it's that mother or hers. Well, the way Não-Não is getting on in age the mother must be getting quite desperate. Perhaps she will end up saying Yes-Yes to any number of us!" Olmeda drawled, and his friends laughed again and clapped.
Juliana could imagine such talk, and she had become more aggressive, if possible, in her efforts to marry Clara. There could be an invasion of the country by the French, the deposing of their royal house and a very hard life for all of them very soon.
She had been pushing Clara toward the men she knew held properties abroad, whose entire fortune would not be compromised if a war began. Portugal had no chance to defend itself against the most brilliant general since Julius Caesar; Napoleon had already deposed other monarchs, and a lot of Europe now lay at his feet.
