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

  Every day, the whole day long, Clara Joaquina tried to imagine a way out. Her only contact with the world was through the slaves and Diogo Ambrósio’s right-hand men. There were also the other residents of the tiny neighboring village and the few travelers who would pass through the farm and request lodging.

  “I need to think,” she would say to herself. “There must be a way out of this hellhole. I need to think of how to get back at Diogo and get out of this place.”

  She thought about asking some traveler to help her flee, but she knew no one would dare because everyone was certain armed men would pursue her.

  She thought about asking them to carry a message to her father, who she wasn’t even sure was still alive. Not to her brother, though, no, she’d never do that—she preferred to die. But, unlike her mother, she didn’t know how to read or write correctly beyond signing her name. When her mother had sent her to study with Maestra Catarina, where she should have learned to sew, play piano, and to read, write, and count, she had instead preferred to sit at the window, observing the people passing through the streets. Or spend her time drawing pictures. She liked to draw women wearing fancy dresses and shoes covered in jewels.

  She still drew every now and then, but her once harmonious figures began to morph into tiny black monsters, small and deformed figures she drew in charcoal because when he traveled, Diogo Ambrósio often forgot to bring her the pencils and paper he knew she liked because he didn’t see any importance in it at all.

  She stored her precious pencil stubs in her family’s tiny mother-of-pearl jewelry box, given to her by her mother when she married—a jewelry box she found very ugly, very old, and not very interesting, but which for some inexplicable reason she did not throw out. Of all the things inside that Ana had told her belonged to her grandmother and great-grandmother, she only kept the jewelry. The old piece of red ribbon, the dried flower, all of this she tossed.

  Unable to count on the support of the slaves, who were faithful to their master and felt no sympathy for her or the air of superiority—which she never lost—that led her to disdain everything and everyone around her, she had only the five slave women she had brought with her from Sabará. But even these women, though they performed their duty as expected, lacked any sense of dedication or love for her.

  Clara Joaquina suffered from the most complete loneliness a person could feel—a cold, hard loneliness that was impenetrable from a place where no one felt any sort of affection for her.

  The figures she began to draw became more and more horrendous, monsters who began to coil around one another, who hung from trees, hid behind trunks, all of whom had the face of Diogo Ambrósio.

  It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the couple’s life became an invisible and silent war, a going around and around in the poisonous air filled with a more potent smell of rot greater even than that in the backlands.

  In the case of Diogo, perhaps it had truly begun when it dawned on him that his wife was avoiding having children, the only reason he had to justify his marriage. This discovery had been more significant than catching on to his wife’s ill-fated attempts to have him murdered.

  He began to take her at whim, up against the walls time and time again on the days he spent at the farm. For him, this private war with Clara Joaquina soon became a substitute—perhaps the only one possible—for a marriage that had been hopelessly doomed from the beginning. In a certain way, he enjoyed guessing at his wife’s next move, the traps she tried to set for him, her plans for the next attack, each little surprise.

  In the case of Clara Joaquina, her hate for her husband became her sole and most precious activity. She tried poisoning him, but he refused to touch any food or drink she put before him; on the few nights he spent at home, he preferred to eat and sleep with the hired hands in the bunkhouse. She put venomous snakes and crab spiders in his clothes, and loosened the saddle of his handsome steed. But without the support from any of Diogo Ambrósio’s men, nothing she tried would work.

  Being pinned up against the wall grew increasingly painful, and as her tactics for avoiding pregnancy were dubious and hardly scientific, she ended up losing that battle, too. When she finally became pregnant, she felt too weak to opt for an abortion with nothing more than the aid of her female house slaves.

  After the birth of their first child, Alencar, Diogo offered Clara Joaquina a truce, but she wouldn’t hear it. She was obsessive and unrelenting in her intentions: she would get revenge and leave that place.

  Between the months of May and August, there was a large open-air market in Sorocaba, a region of wide, green grazing fields where herds of mules and livestock marching north from Rio Grande do Sul on their way to Minas Gerais would stop to rest.

  Cattlemen like Diogo Ambrósio would go to the fair to purchase animals and hire additional help. They also went there to unwind when the town saw itself overrun with every sort of people—horse doctors, horse trainers, men selling toys and trinkets, circus performers, gamblers. It was a time of celebration and card games, and the cattlemen made the most of it.

  Many business deals were done there, too, and men spent fortunes at the cabarets, the casinos, and the circus shows. As far as Diogo Ambrósio was concerned, it was paradise.

  That same year, however, there was an unexpected guest at the Sorocaba Fair: the smallpox. Diogo Ambrósio was one of the lucky ones chosen by the nasty illness. The only reason he survived was because he was a man whose body was prepared to fight off threats. After enduring the many bloodletting sessions supervised by a doctor from the South, he was able to return home for an extended rest like none he’d ever had before.

  He didn’t stay in the big house with Clara Joaquina, but out in the bunkhouse, under the care of the old slave woman who had been his own nursemaid.

  One afternoon, a commotion broke out among the farmhands, followed by an uproar and yelling that ended in graveyard silence when Diogo Ambrósio rose from his cot to whip one of the hired hands, running him off and telling him to never return to the farm.

  In the he-said-he-said that followed, Clara learned, to her unimaginable surprise, that the situation was a result of the man being caught looking through the window into her room. Surprised by her husband’s wounded sense of honor, Clara had finally found the weak spot where she could bury her knife.

  She could barely contain her excitement at this discovery; the eruption and scale of her enthusiasm grew and grew, rising through her chest and up through her skull until it escaped. It kept her from sitting still, she had an irresistible need to move about, to rub her hands, to walk back and forth to the window, open it, close it, open it and close it, until the euphoria no longer choked her or overflowed now that it had greedily saturated the hollowness of her pathetic existence.

  “It will be easy! Oh, how easy it will be. Now you’ll see!”

  Each day acquired an unfamiliar excitement as she dedicated herself to preparing the much-sought revenge that was finally within reach.

  Of course, it was out of the question to seek out a slave to take her against the wall. It would have to be a traveler or, better and perhaps easier yet, one of the farmhands. If the first man who had been whipped and sent packing had tried something without her having suspected a thing, without her even knowing who he was, there must have been others with the same daring and desire.

  It doesn’t matter whether Clara Joaquina was beautiful or not, if she was eye-catching or not, if she was anything at all or not. What’s important here is that she was a woman among so many lonely men. A woman who wasn’t a slave, or an Indian, or the daughter of an Indian with a white man, or a black woman—but a woman with light-colored, clear skin, a woman who wore a gown with a full skirt and fancy shoes. For these things, strange as it may seem, Diogo Ambrósio made sure she never lacked: dresses from the cities, shawls from Portugal, shoes from Valencia. Much could be said of him, but Diogo could not be accused of not seeing that the mother of his children dressed well.

  Y
es, children plural, because after the truce following Alencar’s birth, Diogo Ambrósio had returned to waging his phallic crusade against the contraceptive methods of the time, and their daughter Jacira Antônia was born; a girl with curious, dark eyes that shined and looked all around in an attempt to make sense of the world. In the same way Alencar resembled his father physically, the girl resembled her mother, except for her deep, dark eyes and a dark triangle near the base of her neck whose peak inclined ever so slightly to the left.

  Like Alencar, Jacira was raised by the slave women, though much closer to her father, who worshiped his daughter. If Clara Joaquina resented her son for his physical resemblance to his father, she also resented Jacira for her emotional connection to her father. Unlike their mother and her brother, however, Alencar and Jacira adored each other, especially Alencar who, as the eldest, considered himself his sister’s natural protector.

  Clara Joaquina, the taste of revenge on her tongue, methodically laid her trap. She began to pay attention to her husband’s farmhands, men who, to her eyes, were disgusting and dirty like beasts. But she would have to choose one of them and, who knows, if she looked closely, perhaps she could look past the layer of clay, mud and other crude materials that seemed to stick to them like a second skin, a skin hardened during the days and nights, suns and moons, rains and putrid odors characteristic of the pestilent backlands. Or if she wasn’t able to see or feel a thing, to at least evade the hot breath on her face coming from the rotton depths of these men who were the very models of ugliness.

  But could it really be worse when she was with that miserable wretch Diogo Ambrósio?

  This time at least, she wouldn’t feel the bitter taste of hate, merely the sickening nausea and euphoria of revenge. And so, she saw no reason to take her time choosing. It could be any one of them, it didn’t matter who. Anyone. Except for those Diogo trusted most, the most servile, those who she knew would die for their boss.

  Except for these men, anyone would do. Anyone at all.

  And it ended up being one of the new men, hired at the Sorocaba Fair, who was dying of boredom, waiting for Diogo to recover so they could once again take to the road.

  It was all too easy. Except that it didn’t happen against a wall, for there were no walls in the patch of forest they ran off to, and the methods of the man from Sorocaba were less vexing than those of her husband. A bit more gentle and a tad more attentive, though Clara Joaquina didn’t linger on these differences.

  She only wanted to get over with it. To get over with it all.

  It was perhaps because she was so thrilled at discovering how to wound her husband that she made such a terrible mistake afterward, thinking that everything would end with her husband’s tragic embarrassment. Or perhaps that she simply forgot to think things through. Or perhaps she thought that once again someone would simply be run off or even killed, but only the hired hand in question, and that her husband’s honor would be washed clean with the blood of the offender and not that of the woman who brought shame upon him.

  Poor Clara Joaquina.

  Only her girlish inexperience—though at twenty-nine she was no longer a girl—or her lack of life experience due to all those years spent isolated and alone, could explain how she couldn’t see that this story could only end when she, more than anyone else, paid for her husband’s wounded honor.

  When Diogo Ambrósio drove his knife into her chest, after he had done the same to her lover, she was surprised, it’s true—but after the disconcerting realization that her blood was soaking her blue taffeta dress, somewhere deep down, she truly didn’t care. She felt victorious as she had never felt before. She had achieved what she wanted, and this was, honestly honest, completely honestly, all she cared about.

  In an absurd finishing touch, during this final moment of her pleasure, when she saw her daughter’s tiny face appear at the bedroom door with its curious little eyes, Clara Joaquina had a few final words for her husband as the dark blood spewed forth, in a flicker of extreme cruelty and without so much as thinking or caring that what she was about to say might be the noose around her own daughter’s neck:

  “Have you ever thought why your girl looks nothing like you? I’ll tell you. She’s a bastard. She’s not yours.”

  Then she died with an icy smile on her lips, with the conviction that, yes, in that final moment, her magnificent revenge was complete.

  Diogo Ambrósio’s initial reaction was to also get rid of the little girl right then and there. But the deep love he felt for her, perhaps, or perhaps because he thought too much blood had been spilled for a single man’s honor, or because he realized the cowardice and stupidity of such a gesture—whatever it was made him drop his knife and he instead punched the wall repeatedly in blind rage, that same poor wall against which he had made such an effort to conceive his children.

  When he was himself again, he snatched the girl, and, nearly out of control, mounted his horse like a blind man. Still wild with rage, he placed her on the back of his saddle and broke into a full gallop, not to the closest village but to another, several leagues away and far from the roads he often traveled.

  He took her to a village where a corporal named Jesuíno lived, a poor fellow who owed money for some goods Diogo had sold him. Arriving in the middle of night at the mud hut he had visited before, he jerked the sleepy girl to the door.

  In a dry, steady voice, he told the bewildered corporal, who had come out when he heard the approaching sound of horse hooves, that from then on he was to forget his debts and forget, too, that it was he, Diogo Ambrósio, who had left the young girl there.

  Without further explanation, he turned his back and set off once again.

  JACIRA ANTÔNIA

  (1737-1812)

  &

  MARIA BÁRBARA

  (1773-1790)

  Poor and feeble, Corporal Jesuíno’s only stroke of luck was the day he killed a rattlesnake that had nested in his commander’s kepi, saving the man from certain death. In return Jesuíno had received a runaway slave girl whose owner had resolved to sell her at all costs after breaking her pelvis and rendering her practically useless.

  Not that killing a venomous snake deserved a second thought in that era. In everyone else’s eyes, the corporal had only been doing his duty, and the fact that he killed a rattlesnake—a common occurrence, after all, since there were more snakes than anything else in that village, which itself was nothing more than a clearing in the middle of the woods at the end of the world—wouldn’t have caught anyone’s attention were it not for the commander’s dream the night before. In the dream, a rattlesnake slithered through one ear and, before crawling out the other, rattled around every last corner of his terrified brain, which was swollen like a big old ball. When he woke up in agony from his dream with his head pulsing with pain, the commander woke his wife, well-versed in prophecies and witchcraft, who without batting an eye ordered him to do two things early that morning: the first was to slather his scalp with a special concoction she had immediately begun to prepare that morning with ingredients from her personal pharmacopeia; the second was to find a way to perform two good deeds in one, in the name of Saint Benedict. They couldn’t be two separate good deeds. They had to occur simultaneously.

  Late that morning, at the small border post around which the tiny village had sprung up, the commander, driven insane by the tortuous pain attacking his brain and by his inability to hit upon a way to fulfill his double mission, decided to go out for some fresh air. That’s when it happened: the commander reached for the kepi, the rattler readied its attack, and by some miracle the poor cabo—who was generally oblivious to what went on around him—looked and saw, and still more miraculously grabbed his blunderbuss and pulled the trigger. Not only did he pull the trigger, but he shot the snake right in the head. A truly inexplicable and authentic miracle. The comandante’s hand remained suspended in mid-air, paralyzed.

  It was at that moment, too, that the owner of the crippled runaway slave g
irl showed up, offering her for a pittance to whoever wanted to do him the favor of taking the useless creature, or else he would have to beat her to death as she deserved.

  At that moment, the commander saw a clear signal from the heavens to perform his double-good deed, one for the corporal who had so spectacularly saved his life, and the other for the slave owner, from whose shoulder he was lifting a burden. What’s more, he secured the man’s goodwill should he need his help one day. So he paid a pittance for the black slave woman and gave her as a present to the corporal.

  Then, feeling quite satisfied with himself and considering his day won, he headed home to finally rest now that the swelling in his head had begun to recede, leaving the startled corporal the owner of a black girl who could barely walk.

  Seeing no other alternative, the new slave owner took the hobbling woman to his hut and there, walking with the crutch he made for her out of some wood from a mango tree, she lived long enough to bear him five children and serve as an adoptive mother to Jacira Antônia.

  Ever since Jacira had arrived on the back of her father’s horse on that morning lost to time, she had always been a serious girl who rarely smiled. The world, as she saw it, ought to be confronted with seriousness, if not distrust, and that is what she did with her big dark eyes.

  At the edge of her parents’ bedroom door, on that fateful day, she had been spared from seeing the bloody wounds on her mother’s body. From where she stood, she saw only her father’s back. But she no doubt noticed that something very wrong was happening there, and when her father pulled her up violently and hoisted her up onto his horse—her father, who had always looked upon her with affection and treated her so kindly—she felt that whatever this thing was that was wrong, was also wrong with her.

  She never figured out what had happened or what to think of it all. Meanwhile, the trust the girl of three had placed in her father caused her, unconsciously and without even understanding why, to accept her new life in some way. In the beginning, she was certain her father would arrive at any moment and once again set her upon his horse and gallop away. As time passed, she made a conscious effort to abandon this hope, but in the depths of her soul and until the day she died, that hope was to continue, a tiny flame that burned with the same unbearable desire to hear the hooves of a galloping horse, returned to take her back home.