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  He had barely arrived in São Paulo when he told Ana to pack up so they could return immediately to Sabará and reassert their mining rights. And that’s what they did.

  The return trip was easier and more comfortable than the one Ana had made when she fled the burning village. It was the dry season, the weather mild. The three-month-long journey—familiar to Garcia, who knew how to avoid dangerous or risky stretches—was made without anxiety or fear. If on earlier trips her haste and agony on account of the war had made her unable to appreciate the beauty along the way, this time Ana was able to calmly take in the endless mountains covered in virgin forest and the vastness of the open fields that stretched as far as the eye could see. Lying in her hammock at night at their well-protected camp, she listened to José Garcia tell of his adventures and to the singing of the slaves; when the time came to rest at high noon, she rested near tranquil or turbulent rivers, waiting as the slaves prepared a lunch of fresh fish with porridge as she cooled off at the edge of the peaceful riverbed.

  Ana enjoyed comparing her life to the course of a river, a body of water that had always held an irresistible fascination for her. As an explorer, José Garcia considered rivers a natural and invaluable roadway. He knew that without them the Paulistas could never have traversed the backlands and conquered new territories.

  Seated atop a riverbank, in the cool shade of the intertwining canopies of a few tiny trees, Garcia began to tell Ana how the explorers’ incursions were always made alongside rivers, which was the safest way to avoid becoming lost, dying of hunger or thirst, and, at least from one side, avoiding surprise attacks. He explained how advantageous it was that the rivers of São Paulo ran through the flatlands, far from dangerous waterfalls, and were easy to navigate, which made the explorers’ advance through unknown lands considerably easier.

  But there are rivers and then there are rivers, he would say. There were good rivers and bad rivers. There were those that allowed easy navigation—calm, serene—and you can trust those, he told her. Others, not so much—those were wild rivers that concealed gales, eddies, and maelstroms, and were full of waterfalls and other traps: dangerous tree trunks, debris, stretches of pestilent waters that breed disease. There are still others under the control of hostile tribes, who are ready to cut short your journey and your life. And then there are the inopportune angry, moody rivers, subject to attacks of rage or weakness depending on the weather.

  The Rio Tietê, he often repeated, had always been a benevolent river, and even when navigating it became difficult, you could rely on it. It was a remark that local tribes certainly wouldn’t agree with, since for them the Tietê had always been a river of slavery, a river of cruelty, the river that carried their predators into the backlands and carried them out dragging miles and miles of Indian villages in chains behind them.

  The Rio Paraná, José Garcia went on, that was a bad river. It had no waterfalls, but it was treacherous, with dangerous currents and shifting winds. That river called for an abundance of caution.

  That’s how, listening to her husband talk about the rivers, Ana began to like José Garcia. Before that, he had been an unknown, a man who had changed the course of the waters of her life, but who remained someone she barely knew. Then, on their long journey, she allowed herself to be seduced by his self-assuredness and the experience of a man who knows his own value and the value of what he finds in his path.

  The late Baltazar, being an outsider, hadn’t known anything about the land and had tried to overcome this lack of knowledge and his insecurity with aggression and arrogance. Ana hadn’t been happy with him. Even early on, because she felt no admiration for him, she could see his faults, his haughty ignorance. She remembered one instance in the first days of their trip from Pouso da Capela to the region surrounding the Rio das Velhas, when, dying of hunger, he discarded a sour but edible tamarind in favor of the sweet but laxative gel of the aloe vera plant, despite protests from the Indian slaves. Still nearly a child, she had thought that because he was older and more experienced and was from the kingdom—imagine that!—he certainly knew more than everyone and must have had his reasons; but when night arrived and she saw him trembling and sweating, doubled over with uncontrollable diarrhea, Ana understood that he was no better than anyone else. The disdain she slowly began to feel for her husband no doubt contributed to the tragic end of their union.

  But with José Garcia, she had gotten to know the other side of the same coin. The knowledge and confidence of the seasoned explorer was seductive, and she was happy to have such a man at her side. Besides which, he wasn’t old like Baltazar; he wasn’t young, either, but he was handsome, elegant, a man with skin the color of wheat, a neat mustache, and a pair of eyebrows that met above his eyes like a dense forest.

  Ana de Pádua was happy.

  When they arrived in Sabará, they resumed their life in Garcia’s large, reconstructed house. Gold seemed to spurt forth like water from their mines, and when their first child, Gregorio Antonio, was born before they’d lived a whole year together, José Garcia was already a fabulously rich man. As were a great number of those living in the area.

  The wealth and the splendor coming from the mines were soon reflected in the villages. The governor-general had convinced a Paulista—the Paulistas were the only ones who knew the region well at that time—to open the Caminho Novo das Minas, a new road connecting the mining regions directly to Rio de Janeiro. It was a dangerous road, but it allowed the passage of men and beasts, bringing not only more and more Emboabas who invaded the region, but also more and more goods to attend to the growing demand of the newly rich. Caravans of mules, hauling every sort of commodity, began to replace the backs of Indian and black slaves as the mode of transport for supplying the burgeoning market. They came from São Paulo, they came from Rio, they came from Bahia, and their arrival provoked great agitation and excitement across the villages and farms. They also brought scores and scores of African slaves to work in the mines and slave women for the private little courts of society women.

  The lives led by the gold prospectors were, frankly, lives of leisure. While the slaves toiled in near-subhuman conditions, these “respectable men” gathered for banquets beneath the refreshing shade of the leafy trees on the banks of the crystal-clear streams: tablefuls of vegetables, roasted chicken and suckling pig, chicken stew, succulent fruits, jaw-breaking sweets made with generous amounts of sugar, wines imported from the royal court. They never missed Mass or the rosary and, to emphasize their deep faith, they parted with huge sums to ensure their churches boasted the same riches as those of the mother country; altars of pure gold, statues from the most refined artisans, sumptuous works of architecture. They sought to imitate the Portuguese nobility, importing fabrics to make clothes unfit for the tropical climate, building eye-catching houses, hiring artists, buying expensive jewelry. Some even announced their passage through the streets with trumpet-toting slaves; others transformed their riding saddles into small works of luxury and art.

  Euphoria and excitement hung over the city.

  At home, Ana reigned over her court of slaves. She was surrounded by black women in her bedroom, in the rooms of her home, on the streets. They fanned her, dressed her, served her food, and brought messages and news back and forth.

  If you were to see them today, the group of ladies seated on the veranda, talking, laughing, nibbling on tropical fruits and finger foods—and, of course, if you ignored the fashions of the day—you would think you were watching a group of friends enjoying themselves. Evidently, this was mere appearance. There was a clear and unshakeable hierarchy among them; each woman knew perfectly well where her place was.

  A greedy spirit when it came to gossip, Ana soon formed a powerful network of information in the town where the homes, with the comings and going of slaves and their rooms without doors, were constantly exposed to strangers’ eyes and ears. She knew of all the political intrigues and bedroom secrets, the disputes and sworn enemies, the fornicating
priests, the First Communions that cost a fortune, the Capuchins who hid gold beneath their cassocks or in hollowed-out statues of the saints, the slave women who hid gold in the curls of their hair. She knew of the gentleman who took black lovers, whom they made to parade around wearing nothing but silver and gold necklaces. She knew of central government decrees and the arrival of government officials.

  Ana knew everything.

  Sometimes she would comment on these matters to Garcia; others she kept to herself. Her network of informant slave-women was her private pleasure, her unique form of power. Ana was a pioneer in the great modern addiction to information. That pure delight of being well-informed that has developed to an unimaginable degree and which is ever more common, giving way to those who, like Ana in her time, feel their endorphin levels rise merely at knowing something—anything at all—before and in greater detail than others, as though such a thing gives them a sort of special and ineffable power.

  Whenever José Garcia’s friends visited, Ana would sit in her high-back chair in the living room, a beautiful and apparently challenging bit of needlepoint in her hand, and, when she thought the time right, would contribute to the conversations surrounding the situation at the mines that stretched late into the night.

  The war may have ended, but resentment of the central government and the Portuguese remained. There was gold in abundance, it was true, but the gold belonged to that land, and still the Portuguese Crown demanded a fifth of all gold extracted. With the new road leading directly to Rio de Janeiro, the central administration no longer depended on the Paulistas to show the way to the mines, and had severely tightened its control over the region and also, principally, collection of its part of the gold-mining tax.

  We won’t call the meetings that took place a conspiracy, because they weren’t. They were merely conversations between friends who shared the criticisms that come only naturally under any government. But it’s also best not to forget that these were the first people to settle the Captaincy of Minas Gerais and they had certainly, without knowing it, begun to plant the seed of independence that would later spread throughout the region, which by no coincidence was the stage for the War of the Emboabas, one of the first struggles in Brazil against Portuguese dominance.

  Ana, privy to all the news and gossip in town, didn’t take long to discover that José Garcia was an unfaithful husband. He had not one, but many women, slaves and free women, and many bastard children. Ana understood that this was just how things were in this region of riches and adventure, but she didn’t like it one bit, and the jealousy nearly killed her. When she allowed her sense of humor some breathing room between bouts of despair at her husband’s betrayal, she would ironically claim that it was the late Baltazar taking revenge from beyond the grave, and that she had been infected with his same fatal disease.

  She tried everything she knew and everything she had been taught in an attempt to stop Garcia from ever looking at another woman. When they made love, she would utter the rite of the host into her husband’s mouth, “hoc est enim corpos meum,” to consecrate him the same way the priest consecrated the body of Christ during Mass, an incantation of sorts that others had guaranteed would be effective at deterring her husband from seeking another woman’s body. She repeated the prayer of the Sorceress of Bahia, Antonia Nóbrega, whose fame had spread even to Minas with those who had come from Bahia: “José Garcia, I enchant you and enchant you again with the wood of the holy cross, and with the thirty-six philosopher angels, and with the enchanting Moor, that you might never leave my side, and that you might share with me all your knowledge and give me all that you have, and love me more than any other woman.” She performed the wine spell, taking Garcia’s semen from her own vagina after sex and mixing it secretly into her husband’s wine, which he drank from a silver chalice he had ordered from Portugal, unlike the more common tin cups from which Garcia refused to drink.

  Since none of this worked, Ana decided that she could at least put an end to her husband’s extramarital fornicating inside their home, and sold all of the family’s female slaves between the ages of ten and forty, leaving only a few old black women and male slaves for the housework. The flock of women who remained around her saw their joy greatly reduced. Ana was no longer so happy herself, and the old black women hardly shared the same cheerful mischievousness of the young girls who had surrounded her previously with their laughing, their mischief, and their jokes.

  Ana had three children. A year after the birth of Gregorio Antonio, Clara Joaquina was born. Two years later came Bernarda Bárbara, who died at three months of age and was buried at the mother church, in the company of Sabará’s finest. Her tiny casket was made of pure gold, and her little body was covered with jewels before being lowered into the grave. After that, Ana never became pregnant again.

  From a young age, Clara Joaquina was a sickly and difficult girl. She cried often, demanded everything, and considered herself the center of the world. She would throw tantrums, quarrel with everyone, pinch the slaves, and she hated her older brother, her father’s favorite. Gregorio Antonio, on the contrary, was an easygoing boy, but he sought to keep his distance from his sister. They were raised by different nursemaids and had separate circles of friends. Even so, Clara Joaquina never left her brother alone—she was always after him, pestering him, sowing rumors about him. She sought to pit him against their mother and father, she accused him of everything, scratched him with her nails and pulled his hair.

  When Gregorio turned twelve, José Garcia sent him to study in Lisbon. He had relatives back in the kingdom, of pure Old Christian stock, as Inácia Benta used to say, who would look after the boy.

  Ana appeared to have inherited the same perplexity in the face of the expectations placed on her as a mother as experienced by her own mother, Guilhermina. Both Clara Joaquina and Gregorio Antonio owed their upbringing more to slave women than to their parents. There was an unbridgeable distance between Ana and her children, a mutual ignorance, a void filled with a lack of intimacy, a space of dread and hesitation, and, for this very reason, perhaps, a degree of indifference.

  Ana knew what kind of person her daughter was, but she never understood what to do about it. She saw her daughter’s troublemaking and the tiny cruelties visited upon the slave women, the poor people of the town, animals. She saw through the innocent act Clara Joaquina put on before her father, to her selfishness and her intrigues. Yes, Ana knew all about that. She just didn’t know what more she could do other than to go around undoing her daughter’s harm.

  If Clara Joaquina struck a slave, Ana sought some way to compensate for this mistreatment. She once convinced José Garcia to free two slave women, a mother and daughter whom Clara treated with particular cruelty, to the point of leaving whip-scars on the girl’s face.

  If Clara told her father that Dona Gertrudes’s son, who also studied in Portugal, had written his mother a letter in which he said Gregorio Antonio spent his life drinking in the taverns of Coimbra night after night, Ana advised José Garcia to consider his daughter’s words untrue, because they were—this bit of news did not, in fact, concern José Garcia’s son, but rather Dona Gertrudes’s own nephew.

  If Clara told some well-respected woman in Sabará that her husband went to visit his lovers in his travels to Vila Rica, well, Ana didn’t so much as try, because she knew that there was no way to undo that kind of harm.

  When her daughter married Diogo Ambrósio, a wealthy cattle dealer from Rio de Janeiro, Ana thought it might perhaps straighten Clara out. The marriage of eighteen-year-old Clara Joaquina was arranged between her father and her future husband. Much older than his bride, Diogo Ambrósio was however welcomed by her because she sought with their marriage to increase her wealth and prestige, and to achieve her dream of moving to the most important city in the entire colony.

  Less than a year after her daughter married and years before her son would return after graduating law school at the University of Coimbra, Ana de Pádua disappea
red. Her disappearance was much discussed by everyone for quite some time. But it was, in fact, a quite simple story.

  Ever since she had discovered Garcia’s infidelity, Ana focused practically her entire life and thoughts on her husband’s fornicating. It was, in a sense, a sort of occupation at which she spent her days: as soon as she learned of a new affair, she immediately set out to meet her rival, tell her off, and clarify a few things about what the other woman could expect from Ana in the future.

  It was as though she believed that a healthy dose of the truth could remove any danger. Many times it did: the fear she instilled in her rivals, generally young women, with her combination of insults, threats, and a brief description of what, going forward, life would be like as lover to the husband of the powerful Ana de Pádua, could curb the seduction of Garcia whose charm, let’s be frank, was already in visible decline and whose wealth was not and never had been an exception in those parts.

  On one of her betrayal raids, accompanied by two slave women and a trusted male slave, Ana mounted an ambush at a ravine where she knew her infamous new rival could often be found strolling.

  There, lying in wait, she began to think about her life. She thought about her father, whom she had never again sought out and of whom she only received news from travelers who told of how Pouso da Capela was growing and how old Bento, with his gentle manner, had become a patriarchal figure respected by all. Her father had sent some of his statues of saints, making her cry because of their beauty, but also because they so closely resembled her mother.

  She thought about her faraway son, a stranger to her life, living in a city overseas and doing things she couldn’t even begin to imagine. She thought about her daughter, whom she also hardly knew despite living side by side for many years, with her troublemaker’s personality, her propensity to inflict suffering.