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

  Finally, she thought of the way her life’s river had become a river of troubled waters that did nothing but constantly carry everyone around her far away, as it was also doing with her husband, and how it had transformed her days into a sequence of the same trivial things that seemed to lack meaning, lack substance, lack purpose.

  She thought of God, who was also something distant, whose significance she also struggled to understand.

  The news that before had been so enticing to her, the unfolding of even the most insignificant event, no longer brought her the least bit of pleasure, since she could no longer count on the merry mischief of the young black girls who used to surround her, but only the melancholy wisdom of the old black women. The stirring of her river’s waters no longer captivated her as before, after she had been contaminated by the obsession to possess her husband for herself alone, of clutching onto him as though she could wrench out the answers to her anguish from inside him, as though this would return the meaning and beauty to the river of her life.

  The storm struck suddenly and without warning. Lighting, thunder, raindrops that battered the ground as though they wished to pierce straight through whatever they crossed on their descent. Ana gave the order for the three slaves who had accompanied her to leave their hideout and return to town as fast as they could. Only she stayed behind, watching the river flow, hypnotized by the hard raindrops that landed quickly and violently in the demonic river-waters as though they were made of pure metal. So she was alone when she was struck head-on by a bolt of lighting, electrocuting her with a single, instantaneous blow.

  She, along with her horse, died instantly. They tumbled down into the ravine and Ana’s body, or what was left of it, was lost to the river.

  Without a body, there was no funeral.

  Garcia ordered the house covered in black sheets for a period of mourning that lasted seven weeks. He ordered five hundred Masses said for Ana at the Church of Nossa Senhora dos Martírios, which she had helped to build, and a hundred of these Masses were sung to the sound of the organ she loved so much. These were the most expensive Masses, and José Garcia paid the parish right then and there, with bars of the purest and finest gold.

  CLARA JOAQUINA

  (1711-1740)

  A band of cattle men drew close to the city.

  The celebratory ringing of the herd’s lead cow could be heard from a distance, and the noisy approach of pack mules could be seen, surrounded by handsome horses at a regal gallop.

  The men arrived in high spirits, knowing they would be received well.

  At the front of the group came the “godmother,” a brown mule with a distinguished look and a natural elegance, harnessed with style and trained to guide the animals that carried all kinds of goods. Following closely behind were several groups of horses, each with its own point man, each marching sprightly and at a careful distance from the others so that they would neither trip over one another nor disturb the order were something to happen along the way.

  At the back of the procession rode the owner of the caravan, Diogo Ambrósio, mounted upon a splendid black horse trimmed up with a shiny silver harness. Imposing atop his steed, a red wool cape tossed over his shoulders, his hat dangling gracefully against his back, his high boots of white leather and silver-handled dagger in his bootleg, he was a man fully aware of his importance. His farmhands and cattle-handlers marched at his side, all of them with the haughty air of men who considered themselves braver and more masculine simply because they held the mysteries of the backlands and because they knew the well-being of the people across several towns depended on them.

  As they entered the city and passed through the square, Diogo Ambrósio nodded his head in greeting to Clara Joaquina, who was leaning out the window of the family’s two-story home.

  That first time he entered the town by that street, he had also nodded toward another window on the opposite side—that belonging to Idalina, daughter to Dona Gertrudes. But he only ever looked to that window once. That very same day, Clara Joaquina made sure a message made it to Diogo informing him that Idalina was already promised to a student at Coimbra, and that the only young woman in town who was worthy, skilled in the home, and available was the daughter of José Garcia, owner of several mines and farms, the pretty girl who lived in the large house on the corner of the square.

  The wealthy cattleman understood perfectly. Only the disillusioned and humiliated Idalina never understood why Diogo Ambrósio didn’t nod to her window as he left the city, but toward that of her neighbor, the unbearable Clara Joaquina.

  On his next visit, Diogo brought Clara Joaquina gifts from Rio de Janeiro: a pair of topaz earrings, a church dress of black velvet with blue taffeta sleeves, a mantilla of Spanish silk, and flat-heeled shoes from Valencia adorned with silver buckles, highly valued for their cork soles. And then he made the necessary arrangements with José Garcia.

  On his third trip, he brought a beautiful white camel-hair wedding dress, decorated with the Portuguese lace.

  Their wedding was a simple affair and took place as demanded by the groom’s life on the road, but there was a Mass sung and the union was celebrated with great pomp and much incense per the bride’s demands, followed by a banquet served at the estate of José Garcia and Ana de Pádua.

  DIOGO AMBRÓSIO

  The fame of the wealthy cattleman from Rio de Janeiro, who insisted on rubbing elbows with his men, had spread throughout the mining region.

  Born to a family of near-nobility that had been granted a land allotment by the Portuguese Crown, Diogo’s father was intendant to the governor of the Captaincy of Rio de Janeiro who, sometime around 1600, had the rather creative idea of constructing purely out of Brazilwood what was to be the world’s largest ship. This governor, whose name was Salvador de Sá, was an enthusiast of the new land’s riches, and intended to prove with this ship-building endeavor the excellent quality of the tropical woods and the colony’s extraordinary potential. Diogo’s father was the young man charged with supervising the selection and felling of the trees and the transport of the lumber to the shipyard built on Ilha do Governador. It was there where, during nearly four years of work, Indian carpenters supervised by specialists from Europe prepared the giant galleon, christened with great jubilation and pride the Eternal Father. It was a highly successful endeavor, and when the galleon pulled into the port of Lisbon it was cause for wide-eyed admiration for its light-weight construction that much improved its maneuverability, and for its durability and ability to carry large loads.

  Upon the success of the ship, those who contributed were generously rewarded by the governor. Diogo’s father was given a land allotment near Rio de Janeiro, close to the city of Campos. There, his children grew up amid a sugarcane plantation, a chicken farm, and more than three hundred domesticated Indian slaves, purchased with the inheritance belonging to his wife, a daughter to Spanish nobility. Diogo, the fourth child in a family of nine, was fascinated from a young age with the great distances that stretched across the backlands, and saw the sale of goods to the fabulously rich mining region as a way to establish his independence from his brothers and create his own wealth.

  His ambition was to be wealthier and more important than his father. He made a point of overseeing everything himself, and a life spent in the backlands and on journeys with his mules and a few trusted men was the kind that best suited his adventurous and enterprising temperament. What’s more, he highly valued the prestige he enjoyed as a wealthy cattleman.

  Diogo Ambrósio sold every type of commodity he carried at a hefty price, and he was an important buyer of products from the tiny localities along the way that, little by little, he slowly organized to suit his own vision and necessities. The way he saw it, if a farmer in Pouso Alto grew cassava and produced all the flour Diogo needed, another in Mato Aberto, the next stop over, ought to provide him with corn, another with tobacco, and yet another in Carapinha, on the other side of the hill, with sugarcane candy. Diogo Ambrósio was als
o the supplier of medicines, letters, messages, and news from the outside world, duties conferring a certain importance that reinforced his condescending view of the people of the smaller villages and towns.

  He considered his marriage to the young heir to rich mines yet another excellent deal, a deal that would add gold and more prestige to that which he already possessed.

  He never even suspected the surprises that the capricious Clara Joaquina had in store for him, not by a long shot! And she, for her part, never imagined the series of disappointments she would face from the very outset of her married life.

  The first disappointment was the trip across the backlands to the house where they would live. For the village girl, who knew only the celebratory aspect of the troops’ arrival and whose travels had been few and far between, and those being little more than short jaunts to neighboring villages like Vila Rica and Congonhas, the rhythm of the mules and the horses began to bother her after just a few hours. Her body ached, her stomach contracted with hunger, and much to her distress, the troops encountered a disgusting throng of black flies that first afternoon. Swarms of whizzing insects suddenly burst into the middle of the troops, circling the heads of the horses, sending the animals into a wild, unbridled gallop through the fields as they tried to escape the biting and buzzing pests. Clara Joaquina would have been thrown by her skittish horse had Diogo Ambrósio not grabbed her by the waist, rescuing her from the animal’s desperation. There began the first of a near-uninterrupted series of fits of yelling, crying, and complaining.

  There were attacks of nerves when burrs stuck to her skirts and socks, and she screamed without restraint each time they passed through the tall sedges that sliced her skin like broken glass. She feared crossing swollen rivers and hated the frequent mud sloughs where animals got stuck up to their bellies, their distressing whinnies heard leagues away.

  Given her girlish inexperience, her dresses and shoes suited for city life, and her complete inability to find beauty in nature, Clara Joaquina’s life soon became a living hell.

  At night, Diogo would set up his young wife’s hammock in a clearing he’d ordered his men to open as best they could, using extreme care to hang the burlap mosquito net so that it safely covered the hammock all the way to the ground, sealing it off like a tent. All the same, Clara Joaquina couldn’t sleep with the constant attacks from mosquitos, the caterpillars creeping across the ground, the spiders descending like acrobats through the air. Before going to bed, a female house slave who had accompanied her as part of her dowry would rub her down in tobacco juice to remove the ticks that anxiously stuck to her tender, sweet, and soft young skin. After lying down, she would order the girl to stay close, practically forcing her to sleep standing up next to her hammock to scare away any critters. She would wake up time and again throughout the night and her screams, in turn, would wake the entire camp.

  She would scream at night because she felt the sticky crawl of a caterpillar along her arm or because she saw bats clasping onto the slave’s skin; she would scream in the morning when she found her shoes infested with giant ants. She screamed in the afternoon each time she saw a gigantic anaconda basking in the sun at the edge of a tiny island in the middle of a river they would have to cross. Or when she felt the acute, intolerable pain of a wasp bite after the insects were attracted by the scent of her fear. She would panic every time it stormed, leaving her soaked and trembling with cold. Her husband would order her slave servant to rub the bites with sugarcane liquor and salt, and prepare hot lemon juice to keep her from growing weak.

  At first, Diogo Ambrósio tried to be patient, explaining to Clara Joaquina what life was like in the backlands and how he wouldn’t expose her to any real danger, but Clara Joaquina seemed to harbor an irrational dread of the jungle.

  Diogo became even more diligent in his attempts to establish little habits that gave structure to this sort of life, as he and his men often did. As though familiarity through repetition could bring a bit of predictability to the unknown and create the monotony necessary to provide stability from day to day, balancing out the frequent surprises they’d encounter. There was a time to march and a time to rest; they observed some basic mealtime rituals; they made sure to create the necessary conditions for a good night’s rest.

  When they arrived in familiar resting places, whether at some friend’s farm or a ranch where they’d planted crops for their return, Diogo Ambrósio tried to improve his wife’s mood by organizing rustic banquets from the harvest: young cassava, sweet corn, beans, hearts of palm. He had his men roast meat from the hunt—monkey meat prepared several different ways, paca meat, deer meat, partridge. He offered her ripe bananas, juicy oranges, watermelon sweet as sugar. Desserts with sugarcane syrup and boiled cassava that melted in their mouths.

  Diogo did what he could, but he grew increasingly irritated with the woman he’d taken as his wife, whom he accused of being “softer than cornmeal mush.”

  Clara Joaquina’s second major disappointment was the village where they settled down. One of the reasons, or, better yet, the true reason she had wanted to marry the cattle dealer was her belief that, since he was from Rio de Janeiro, her fate as a married woman would be to live in the famous town that floated through the heads of young girls from the rural mining villages. But no, the house in Rio that belonged to Diogo Ambrósio’s family, where they went above all for religious holidays, had been practically abandoned since the invasion of French pirates who, in 1710 and 1711, had pillaged the city. On the very day the pirates began their invasion, Diogo’s aging mother had gone to the baptism of a friend’s grandson. But terrorized by what she saw and by the escape she’d had to make with her two daughters at her side, she swore she would dress in black for the rest of her life and never again return to the ravaged city.

  Her son Diogo, for his part, raised on the farm, had nothing urbane about him, and he didn’t particularly like the city; the house where he intended to live with his young wife sat on his portion of his father’s allotment, seven leagues from the tiny town of São José do Matosinho. On top of this, it was much simpler than José Garcia’s house in Sabará; a man who spent most of his time traveling, Diogo had little concern for creature comforts.

  And now we’ve arrived at the third and most crucial of Clara Joaquina’s disappointments: her disappointment with her own husband, whose imposing figure and elegance when mounted on his handsome steed disappeared the very same moment his feet touched the ground. When mounting his wife, he no longer had a trace of this horsebound elegance and gallantry. Whenever the mood struck, he would pull Clara Joaquina any which way, pushing her up against the wall, lifting her skirt only as high as was necessary and, without the least interest in seeing an inch of her naked body, penetrated her, panting, panting, and then that was it. Everything ended suddenly, and without so much as looking at her, he would pull up his pants, fix his shirt, and leave the bedroom, leaving her where she stood, her skirt only barely wrinkled.

  Now what? Clara Joaquina asked herself after the first time. Is that it?

  Poor Clara Joaquina!

  Poor Diogo Ambrósio!

  Diogo had realized that his marriage was a mistake during that first fateful journey when, after his wife’s continued screaming, he came to the conclusion that he couldn’t stand her. He even thought about returning her to her family, but decided against it when he remembered the mines he would inherit. Anyway, he had married her for the gold and the children he intended to sire. Those were the reasons he needed a wife, and despite her irritating daintiness, she at least seemed to be healthy. He decided he would leave her at the house on the estate to give birth and raise their children. That was the life Miss Cornmeal Mush would lead, and that was that.

  When Clara begged him to take her to Rio, he resolutely denied her requests without giving an explanation for his motives. In fact, he barely spoke to her. When she began to insist, he told her once and for all that she wasn’t to try his patience with such things, he wasn�
�t about to take her anywhere, because it was clear that she couldn’t handle the trip, and even if she could, he couldn’t handle another trip at her side.

  Then he mounted his horse and rode off.

  Clara Joaquina became a sort of prisoner, and her life a private hell on the deserted farm.

  Diogo didn’t bring her news of her family, either, thinking he’d avoid any further arguments or hassles. He didn’t tell her about her mother’s death until several years after the fact. When he told her how her brother had returned from Coimbra and was now taking over her father’s businesses, he regretted it as soon as he saw the hate flare up in Clara’s eyes.

  Diogo would scarcely arrive from one trip before setting off again—when possible, the very next day. There were so many reasons that Clara Joaquina no longer knew for certain why she was filled with hatred each time she heard the sound of the troops gathering in the dark early morning hours and Diogo Ambrósio raising his gruff voice above the din of whinnying, horse hooves, and barking dogs, to offer up a prayer to clear the way before them as his folded hands traced a cross in the air:

  “Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; and for Thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the Divine Power of God, to cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.”

  On such dark mornings, Clara Joaquina wished for her husband’s death. She wished him death by a rattlesnake, or crushed to death by the giant anaconda she had seen that distant day on the tiny river island, his bones popping and piercing his skin. Or shot through with arrows by the Tapuia Indians and left to bleed out in the open air, his rotting corpse devoured by ants and caterpillars.