Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters Read online

  As for himself, José Garcia took part in his first expedition when he was still a child, little more than twelve years old. He went not with his father but with an uncle, Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva, on an expedition to the land of the Goyaz Indians. José and a cousin, named Bartolomeu after his father and a bit older than José, were part of the infamous expedition of Anhanguera the Elder—the Old Devil, the legend himself—who set the rivers aflame with alcohol and terrorized the Indians.

  Some years later in 1722, when this same cousin, Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva, managed to organize an important expedition to return to that region in search of the gold he knew existed there, he invited José Garcia to go with him. But Garcia, already a bit out of shape and soft from the life of luxury he had been leading in the mining region, thought it best to decline. Had he accepted, perhaps the cousins would have together been better able to remember the route they had taken the first time as boys, thereby avoiding the three long years the expedition of Anhanguera the Younger spent wandering lost through the backlands before it finally reached the gold of the Goyaz Indians.

  The explorers who joined Anhanguera’s expedition were part of a long line of Paulista slave hunters, and they continued their taming and conquest of the new land. By that time, however, they had the benefit of being better equipped, with leather boots, clothing suited to their task, and well-trained riding horses. It was these explorers who would be the first to arrive in that region, and the first to discover the gold in the mines. They considered themselves owners of the place and did not look kindly upon outsiders, such as the Emboabas—as they called men invading from Bahia, Pernambuco, and especially the old country—who had begun to arrive in large numbers.

  José Garcia was among the first to arrive in the region surrounding the Rio das Velhas, and was shocked as he became richer with each passing day and with startling speed. Barely a day over thirty, he began to feel the itch to settle down. An itch, in fact, that he had begun to feel one afternoon after seeing a young woman in a black shawl pass through the streets, which were muddy after a summer storm. Having nothing to do at that moment, and provoked perhaps by the forbidding black shawl, or a desire to irk the Emboaba who ran the town lodge (everyone knew the young woman was the Portuguese man’s wife), José Garcia dismounted his horse and, in a display of utmost courtesy, carried her in his arms across an enormous mud puddle.

  The young woman lowered the shawl from her face and flashed a grateful smile. Remaining just out of sight, José Garcia decided to follow her to a distant point along the river and there, hiding behind a termite mound, he watched her undress to bathe. Whether because it had been ages since he’d seen a woman undress with such gracefulness, or because this scene only increased his resolve to irk Baltazar, or else for no other reason than the chemistry that makes the world go round, José Garcia never again managed to get Ana de Pádua off his mind. And because word traveled fast in that tiny little world of theirs, he soon learned of the beatings Baltazar inflicted on his wife.

  Ana, too, had already taken note of the Paulista, famed as one of the richest men in the entire region, with hundreds of human chattel—Indians and blacks—and inclined to freely spend the fortune his slaves unearthed for him in the mines. With the swagger common to his people, José Garcia rode through the streets at a gallop on his handsome Bahian racehorse, kicking up dust and drawing attention. Ana had heard all about him: how he had begun building a two-story house, the first in those parts; how his horses’ saddles were adorned in gold and precious crystals; how he put on huge banquets for his guests, serving roasted chicken and suckling pigs, pacas, and deer seasoned with sumptuous glazes, cornbread and maize loafs, sponge cakes, and flowing casks of imported wine that lasted until sunrise.

  José Garcia would send messages to her through his slaves. Ana de Pádua responded by begging him not to think of her; her husband was capable of anything. José Garcia replied that he, too, was capable of anything, and told her to set a day and time for him to take her away from there. Ana de Pádua, gently protesting, begged him to stop, for her husband would certainly kill her if he suspected anything.

  In the meantime, the animosity between the two factions disputing the riverbeds only grew. Groups on each side were meeting constantly to discuss every little development in this dispute, and the tiniest quarrel, no matter how insignificant, assumed the proportions of an unpardonable offense. On the one side stood the Paulistas, superior in number and otherwise, who considered themselves the natural owners of that section of land; on the other side was the greed and boldness of the adventure-seeking Emboabas, who arrived prepared for anything, worsening an already tense situation that soon gave way to open confrontations. One of the first was José Garcia’s killing of Baltazar.

  Ana and Garcia had met fleetingly one afternoon on the distant banks of a stream. The Paulista asked her to go with him, insisting she should not worry about retaliation from Baltazar. Ana neither agreed nor disagreed. She wavered, unable to arrive at a decision, not because she wished to continue to endure Baltazar’s abuse, but because she felt her fate was beyond her control, the river of her life subject to rushing waters it seemed would take her to unknown depths. Ana was not one for tragedy. She enjoyed the pace of everyday life, the little things that change here and there without our realizing that a new world is slowly taking shape without our lifting a finger, without theatrics, without great surprises. Ana was a courageous and decisive woman, but only when it came to small things within the limits of the world she knew. Whereas she became paralyzed in the midst of important events, or when faced with the unexpected, unable to decide what to do or where to go. It hadn’t been so when her mother died. But in that case Ana decided to take control of the situation after a still greater change—her mother’s death—had already taken place and life had returned once again to the way it more or less had been. Only then had she been able to say that she understood exactly why her mother had taken on the jaguar bare-handed, that Ana would have done the same, would have acted with determination, courage, and all the rest. And so she was able to see to her mother’s burial. But in the midst of the whirlwind, in the eye of the actual hurricane, she would hesitate, confused.

  Ana stood motionless before the unexpected direction her life was taking. That night, Baltazar, drunk and without any apparent reason, removed his leather belt and told her, “Today you’re going to get to know the buckle, and we’ll see if that doesn’t quiet you down,” before beating her as never before, as though he had guessed it would be the final time. Garcia’s spies heard Ana’s hoarse cries and took little time to report back to their boss.

  Baltazar didn’t have so much as the time to stagger to his feet when José Garcia and his band of men burst into the inn like a horde of wild beasts. But at least he knew why he was about to die; José Garcia told him why, just before shooting him in the head: “A coward who beats his wife deserves to die on his knees.”

  Without waiting for the last of Baltazar’s life to trickle out of him, Garcia destroyed everything inside the inn, and without giving Ana time to verify that her husband was in fact dead, ordered her to grab her things and took her with him to his home.

  But Baltazar was dear to his people, and the Emboabas, furious at his execution, and perhaps more furious at the sight of so many broken, unusable goods, considered the incident yet another act of despotism on the part of the Paulistas. Stealing the Portuguese man’s wife was one thing; but killing him was another matter entirely. Challenging Baltazar to a duel, like an honorable man, could have resolved the issue to everyone’s satisfaction, but invading his inn with a band of criminals to kill him in cold blood and then lay waste to everything was an affront. Given the existing animosity between the two groups, Baltazar’s death was just one more reason for things to grow ever more heated.

  As tensions and confrontations reached an all-time high, word was that the Paulistas were of a mind to rid the region of all the Emboabas, and that Baltazar and his lodge were m
erely the first step. Rumors began to circulate that the Paulistas were preparing a full-scale massacre of the outsiders, and that they had sworn to steamroll every last one of the Emboabas, their families, and their children. When the Emboabas heard all these “diabolical rumors,” as the Paulistas would later call them, the outsiders felt threatened and banded together, deciding it was better to launch an offensive than suffer an attack themselves. They had more weapons and ammunition than the Paulistas and by that time outnumbered their rivals.

  First, they attacked the town of Sabará. Their Indian allies shot flaming arrows at the Paulistas’ homes, nearly all built with thatched roofs, and they were soon reduced to crackling bonfires, forcing the inhabitants to flee, including José Garcia. Ana de Pádua, at a gallop on the back of a horse that was more frightened than she was, thought she should find Juvêncio and ask him to take her back to her father’s house in Pouso da Capela. But José Garcia had other ideas, and decided to send her south to stay with his parents in São Paulo. War had broken out, and he wanted Ana safe.

  After a journey that took more than three months, Ana arrived at the town of São Paulo de Piratininga with the help of slaves and her husband’s most trusted men. She wasn’t feeling well after the recent undercurrents coursing through the river of her life. To make matters worse, José Garcia’s relations—his sister, nieces, and cousins—greeted her with distrust and hostility. She felt entirely alone. They lived in an enormous house two stories tall, with walls of stucco and a tiled roof, on the same street as the Church of São Francisco. She thought the city looked sad; it was filled with abandoned homes, homes whose owners preferred to live on their plantations outside the city or who were off waging the campaign against the Emboabas.

  Inácia Benta, sister to José Garcia, had lost her husband to fever. But being a daughter, wife, and sister to explorers, she persevered and continued earning a living by selling Indian slaves. Her business was to lend small sums to those organizing incursions into the backlands, receiving in return half of the slaves found on each trip. It was good business and she, too, had grown rich, without the help of her brother. As a result of her wealth, she treated Ana de Pádua badly in the beginning. She found her sister-in-law’s lineage lacking for the family’s standards. She asked Ana where her parents had come from, and Ana would speak of her great-grandmother’s trunk and a Dutch grandfather, but none of this touched Inácia, who thought Ana’s color compromising, darker than was suitable. She told Ana that the Garcia e Silvas were a family of certifiable Old Christians, without a drop of Moorish or Jewish blood, and that she hoped it would stay that way.

  Ana spent hours alone sitting on the windowsill, waiting for news to arrive from the mining region.

  News did arrive, but it was not good. There were reports of villages rising up against each other and bloody confrontations spreading everywhere. The Emboabas had appealed to the governorate general. The governorate had sent troops from Rio de Janeiro to stop the fighting, but it had sided with the outsiders. The Paulistas, inferior in numbers and arms, had been forced to retreat.

  Whenever a messenger arrived, members of the family—almost all women—gathered to hear the news. Ana stood in the back, but she could clearly hear everything that was said and the murmur of indignation that the news provoked in the others, since the messenger nearly always brought news of defeat.

  The Paulista women, long accustomed to receiving news of their husbands’ and adventurous relatives’ victories as they tamed the backlands, were shocked at their unjust and unexpected change of fate. “The gold belongs to us, and us alone!” they protested, heartbroken. “We were the ones who discovered these mines. We’re the ones who have a right to them.”

  “Somebody needs to teach these Emboabas a lesson,” they raged. “God Almighty, how can such a thing be happening?”

  “And what about the help these outsiders are receiving from the government in Rio, this government of Portuguese usurpers who want control of our riches?” still others protested.

  When news arrived of an absolute massacre in the middle of the woods, in a spot that became known as Betrayal Grove, the women, furious at what they’d heard, marched out into the streets. They implored the whole town not to leave unanswered the horrible deaths of their countrymen, who had trusted the abominable Emboabas and laid down their arms only to be massacred with untold cruelty, countrymen whose memory would live on through future generations.

  The horror! Shameless cowards! Revenge will be ours!

  Ana de Pádua was pulled along through the streets, and suddenly saw in this uprising one last sliver of hope amid those solitary under-currents coursing through the river that was her life. From that day forward, she became one of the most ardent defenders of the honor of Paulistas, leaving her sister-in-law and nieces in awe of her ardor and enthusiasm in the defense of José Garcias’s interests. With that, she was finally accepted into the family.

  After successive defeats, the Paulistas returned to São Paulo, but to their great misfortune, they were welcomed with disgust and scorn. José Garcia was not among them; wounded in battle, he was recovering his health at the home of allies.

  The women, unwilling to accept the bloodshed and the loss of their wealth, demanded retaliation and revenge. They gathered in one another’s houses and stormed the streets in large groups, shouting and exhorting the others: “We cannot let the Emboabas think they own this country! We will take back what’s ours! We will avenge our dead!”

  Ana and her sister-in-law were two of the leaders who went from house to house, dragging women out to the streets and stirring up the small town as never before. So great was the commotion that no one thought to tell them to go back home. On the contrary. Roused to action by the two women, humiliated by defeat, irritated with the loss of their mining sites, the Paulistas gathered in the Palace of the São Paulo Chamber of Deputies, whose doors were open to the people, and decided to organize an expedition to Minas to force the outsiders to return their farms, their mining sites, and their slaves.

  One sunny August morning in 1709, an expedition of some thirteen hundred set out from the Pátio do Colégio in São Paulo, the leaders on horseback and the rest on foot. They were joined along the way by groups from several towns throughout the state of São Paulo: Itu, Paranaíba, Sorocaba, Jundiaí, Moji, Taubaté, and Guaratinguetá.

  But yet again, fate was to conspire against them.

  After a difficult march lasting more than four months to the town that today is São João del Rei, they found the town protected behind a wall, ready to rebuff their attack. Attempts were made to arrive at a truce, but the confrontations continued without respite for eight days and nights, leaving many dead and wounded on both sides, without delivering either victory. The two sides locked horns in battle after battle, until the news arrived that troops were on their way from Rio de Janeiro, sent by the governorate general in support of the Emboabas, and the Paulistas were forced to return home yet again.

  And so, a pall set in over the Paulistas, and the war for the gold mines that had been discovered in the Portuguese colony two centuries after the Portuguese had arrived came to an end.

  José Garcia, still recovering from his wounds, did not participate in the failed revenge campaign, and Ana only saw him after it all had come to an end, when he was finally able meet her again in São Paulo.

  He found Ana very much adapted to domestic life. She had learned to sew, to do needlepoint, and make candied sweets. She had found two books in a trunk at the house that had left her entranced: the Mysteries of the Passion of the Christ and the Exemplary Novelas of Miguel de Cervantes. Though she had learned to read with Bento Vasco, this was the first time she had picked up and read an entire book. She also enjoyed taking her nieces to the Rio Agongabay, and to lie beneath the shadows of trees to admire the golden wheat fields of the farms on the other side of the river as the little girls played in the tall grass.

  She had begun to go to the churches, too. Her rather in
complete religious education had been administered by her father in his tiny hillside chapel. Visiting the churches of São Paulo, Ana became fascinated with the structures that, though hardly sophisticated for the time (the village in the middle of the fields of Piratininga was not a rich one), were by any account larger than anything she’d ever seen, and they cemented her love for the churches she would later watch being built in Sabará. She was captivated by the pomp and ritual of Mass, the clergymen’s fine vestments, the extreme formality of it all, the cloying smell of the incense and especially, especially, with the inebriating music of the organ.

  For the very first time, Ana understood something her mother used to tell her. At moments when everything seemed to grow quiet after her powerful voice carried through the open fields near the river, when the trees, the birds, the waters, and the wind appeared to go silent out of reverence for the extraordinary voice they had just heard, Guilhermina, without turning to face her daughter, perhaps so Ana wouldn’t see the sadness written in her features, would say: “My girl, you will never truly know what music is, or the power it holds, until you hear the sound of an organ.”

  As she listened to the sound of the organ, the memory of her mother’s voice intertwined with the music and Ana cried, not exactly out of sorrow, but with emotion at the beauty she had been blessed to witness that day, in that church, in that city. Ana became a religious woman and a mystic for aesthetic reasons.

  José Garcia, on account of his battle wound, now walked with a limp. He had managed, however, to keep ownership of the majority of his mines, in no small part because, important man that he was, the governor-general considered it more convenient to leave José at peace rather than further embittered, beyond the humiliation of defeat, over a loss of wealth. It required effort to bring peace to the region, which certainly included measures to avoid raising the ire of men of Garcia’s caliber.