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  She laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

  Birds of a thousand colors flocked toward the heavens and the verdant trees slowly closed in around the two of them.

  You might not believe it, but Inaiá was the first woman Fernão had known. The young man from Lisbon had no doubt laid his hands on a working girl or two on dark nights near the port, but on account of his tender age, his inexperience, or his innocence, he’d been content not to take it further.

  While Inaiá continued exploring Fernão’s strange white body, its every scent and its workings, he also explored the body of this young woman with the reddish skin, taking in her smell, her taste like the forest. The two of them stood there between the leaves, Inaiá laughing, always laughing, as was her radiant nature, and Fernão finding cause for laughter in hers, the two of them young, complete, at peace.

  THE YOUNG FERNÃO, A “BRAZILIAN”

  Fernão was a cabin boy on the crew of a ship that transported Brazilwood, whose sailors were, for this reason, called “Brazilians.” This was his second time arriving at the coast of the Land of Parrots.

  His first time there, he’d been little more than twelve years old, and it was also his first sea voyage. The son of tavern owners from the port of Lisbon, he grew up listening to tales of the high seas and their wonders, dangers, and riches. All he wanted in life was to one day travel to the Indies—or, better still, in the dream he dreamed every night and which he’d not confessed to anyone, to one day be part of a crew that would discover a new land where gold, silver, and diamonds were so abundant that they would make even the poorest of cabin boys rich. Where he would defeat one-eyed men with horns in a bloody battle, and where the women would be beautiful and affectionate and easy to talk to, their feet adorned with glimmering fish scales.

  Fernão was practically still a child, but he possessed the savviness of those who grow up closely observing the world around them. At the tavern, it was he who demonstrated the most interest in serving the sailors, and after befriending them, they found him a post as a cabin boy on one of the ships making expeditions to that new land in search of the coveted Brazilwood. It was a ship belonging to the fleet led by Fernão de Noronha, and the young man from Lisbon knew that this was the best way to begin to live out his dreams of adventure and make his way to the Indies.

  The ship’s mission—like any other that set sail from that port with the same objective—was clear: bring back to Portugal as much Brazilwood as possible, as quickly as possible, and as cheaply as possible. To achieve this, the rules of the ship were strict and the discipline, military. The cabin boys were at the very bottom of the ship’s chain of command, even beneath the sailors, and their lives were anything but easy. It was they who performed the most demanding tasks: they hoisted the sails, answered to the sailors, and were subject to all manner of mistreatment and punishment.

  But the young Fernão considered himself lucky on that first trip. He loved the sea and never tired of watching it, wondering at it, learning more about it to predict its every shift and caprice. A tireless young man, he performed small favors for anyone and became the most highly sought cabin boy on the ship, covering every last inch of the vessel, and in no time at all he knew that ship as well as the tiny tavern where he’d been born. Not a single comment escaped him as he walked up and down the vessel, and he was soon taking advantage of the sailors’ passion for betting to earn a few ducats by wagering when a small correction in the ship’s route to the southeast might occur, for example, or which foods might be served as part of the following day’s ration.

  When the ship arrived in the new land, the young man grew ecstatic at the intensity of the light falling over the white beach, with the natives and their nudity, their feathers and body paint, the broad grins on the women’s faces, the smell of the trees and sweet fruits, the exuberant vegetation, and a reality he had been incapable of imagining in his wildest dreams.

  Restless despite hours of punishing work helping the natives to stack logs of Brazilwood on the ship, Fernão would lie on the sand, breathing in the fresh air and the varied smells he was slowly able to distinguish from one another. He thought that he’d found the land of his dreams, no other place could be so beautiful, not even the Indies.

  With the ducats won placing bets during the sea-crossing, he was able to buy animals from the natives—one of the few things permitted each ship’s crew—and bought a magnificent parrot, one of the most coveted new products in Portugal. A fantastic animal that, aside from the beauty of its green and red feathers, was able to speak and provide great entertainment for everyone. He also gained a handsome jaguar pelt after winning a bet with a sailor over the exact date they would once again set sail for Portugal.

  On the return voyage, Fernão spent his resting hours teaching the parrot to talk, as many other members of the crew did with theirs. Some would teach the birds to exchange pleasantries—“Yes, me captain,” “No, seenhoree”—while others taught the birds vulgarities—“Darling Lisb’n girl, give me your hand and other sweet parts”—and others still, wishing to sell them for a fine price to high-ranking clergymen, taught them prayers. It was great fun, and Fernão soon discovered another way of earning a few extra ducats: capitalizing on his natural talent as a parrot professor.

  Soon after arriving in Portugal, he had already made arrangements for a second voyage to Brazil. This time, however, fate did not smile on the young man. Bad weather followed the ship nearly the entire trip, food came in smaller rations than ever, and the cruelty of the ship warden far surpassed anything Fernão had known during his first voyage. For sneaking a few minutes of shut-eye, the cabin boys were whipped until they lost consciousness, and Fernão no longer had the same liberty to roam the ship as before. Worse yet, soon after the ship arrived on the Brazilian coast, it was discovered someone had stolen machetes and hatchets to trade with the natives. Fernão was one of those accused, more on account of the ship warden’s ill will than for any real guilt. Prohibited from leaving the ship to walk along the coast that he loved and considered more beautiful than all of his dreams, Fernão, resentful and rebellious, had no difficulty deciding to desert. When the ship set sail again for Portugal, Fernão and another shipmate, Cipriano, a burly Portuguese man known for his ability with a harmonica, managed to leap into the sea and reach shore.

  Soon thereafter, Fernão met Inaiá and befriended the natives. However, Fernão and Cipriano, knowing that it would not be long before more ships arrived, thought it better to distance themselves from the area where they were certain to be pursued by subsequent crews. They decided to continue on to the trading post at Cabo Frio, a long journey made by canoe and days of walking.

  They were joined by Inaiá and two of her sisters.

  Who knows what reasons the women had for leaving their tribe. They may have decided to follow the men for nothing more than the thrill of adventure. Or perhaps they had been more or less forced. Or they could well have gone with the ambition of gaining access to the coveted objects of the white man. Though Fernão and Cipriano were mere deserters, they brought with them the possibility of contact with a world that had already become part of the natives’ dreams and imaginations.

  The Portuguese had built three trading posts along the lush coast, which had been transformed into a gigantic area for Brazilwood production. The consortium of so-called New Christians whom the Portuguese Crown had sent to explore the new colony sought the greatest amount of wealth at the smallest expenses possible—a process to which this country seems inescapably fated to this very day. The trading post at Cabo Frio was nothing more than a crude wood shed encircled by a fence of tree trunks carved to a point. The Portuguese had left a small number of their men there with a handful of bows and arrows and a couple of crates.

  Fernão and his group received a warm welcome, but they chose not to settle at the trading post. They instead sought a clearing in the nearby woods, on a slope where they could glimpse a crystal waterfall where colorful fish plunged toward t
he rushing waters below. They built a hut of aroeira and jatoba wood, using dry Buriti palm leaves for the roof.

  Inaiá showed Fernão which plants were edible, how to plant cassava, which types of wood were resistant to rot, and how to make fishing traps from the fiber of palm tree trunks. Fernão would carry fish, still writhing to break free, in his bare hands, and hunt capybara, tamarin, and armadillos. Inaiá would make cassava pancakes and nourish her man with hearts of palm, yam, pineapple, cashew fruit, pitomba, mangaba, imbu, jabuticaba, every sort of berry imaginable and every variety of guabiroba. She taught Fernão how to paint his body with the dark blue paint of the genipap tree and the yellow pigments of the pineapple bromeliad. At the riverbank, she would wash and arrange her hair, and she practically forced the young European to take a bath at least once per day as she laughed and played.

  Fernão spent a good part of his time teaching parrots to talk and traded them with the men at Cabo Frio, who, in turn, would trade them with the ship crews that came to extract Brazilwood. Since they had deserted, Fernão and Cipriano had changed their names and the story of how they’d arrived there, telling others they had shipwrecked. If someone in those parts had ever doubted them, it was never mentioned. To ensure their safety, however, they avoided any sort of direct contact with Portuguese seafarers.

  The starry nights were warm and pleasant. Fernão learned to play the natives’ flute and composed original songs together with Cipriano and his harmonica to entertain the three sisters.

  Within the year, Inaiá gave birth to a daughter. She called the girl Tebereté, and the father nodded his head approvingly.

  Yes, they were in paradise. You ask me if they were in love? What is love; what was love then? I don’t dare answer. But as to whether they enjoyed making love with one another; whether Fernão never sought out other native women because the thought never occurred to him; whether the two of them spent hours rolling about on the leaf-ridden ground, laughing and crying out; whether Fernão bathed in the river after being pulled in by Inaiá, who wanted to rid him of his foul odor; whether Inaiá thought of nothing but bringing him back to her hammock where they could further amuse themselves while avoiding the insects that lurked in the leaves—all this can indeed be confirmed.

  If that was what love was, then yes, they loved each other.

  Over time, Fernão’s young and adventurous spirit led him to mull over the idea of setting out for the Kingdom of Serra da Prata, which he’d heard astonishing stories about from his Tupiniquim friends. He had even seen, in a hut belonging to a Tupiniquim chief, a rude chalice of pure silver that was said to have come from there. They also spoke of a trail, a path to the south, in use since time immemorial. He surmised he could gather a group of white men and natives for his expedition, as long as they could obtain the necessary arms and munitions.

  Fernão launched into preparations: he learned from the natives to make bows of jacaranda and ipê wood, adding sharp edges at either end of bamboo or—as he preferred—shark teeth, and to make sturdy clubs of hard rosewood and cords from the bark of the embauba. His curiosity endless, Fernão learned to craft weapons and traps and to identify medicinal plants. Inaiá explained the use for each plant and when night arrived she offered him paricá, a powdery aphrodisiac and narcotic similar to rapé snuff.

  Fernão had begun to imagine himself as an owner of lush, virgin lands where crystal rivers hid treasures like gold and silver in their azure depths.

  But there would not be time for so many dreams.

  One dawn, after a night spent beneath a full moon, a sudden, piercing cry rung out. Inaiá was startled out of her sleep: it was the battle cry of the Tupinambá.

  The group was small but fearsome.

  Howling, yelping, and screaming, beating the ground with their feet, they attacked. Battle music streamed forth from their hollowed-out gourds, fifes, and flutes, their necks adorned with heavy necklaces made with the teeth and bones of enemies they had killed and eaten.

  The young Fernão fell to the ground, struck by several arrows. A few short steps away, Inaiá died instantly when a poison dart struck her above the heart. Cipriano and his wives were killed inside their hut.

  Howling and leaping back and forth, the group’s chief raised his club to the sky and, with one fell swoop, victoriously brought it down on Fernão’s dream-filled head.

  Only the shots coming from the white men at the trading post, who’d grown alarmed with all the commotion, were capable of sending the attackers into retreat, frustrating the tribe’s intent to take parts of the dead as nourishment for the return journey.

  The warriors, however, did have enough time to snatch Tebereté and the other children, and to set fire to the huts and corpses, leaving them there to burn like incandescent torches beneath the warm sun of that new tropical day.

  TEBERETÉ

  (1514-1548)

  The group of Tupinambá warriors had intended to attack the trading post of the Portuguese, but they had come upon Fernão and Inaiá’s hut along the way, and it had proved irresistible. Attacks or ambushes from rival tribes were quite common at the time, and the assault on the trading post was part of an alliance between the Tupinambá and the French, who disputed the Brazilwood trade on the coast of this new land against the alliance of the Portuguese and Tupiquim.

  It was a period of uncertainty.

  The Portuguese and the French, all of them traffickers of Brazilwood, some within the law and others outside it, were constantly locking horns on the Brazilian coast. Each group had begun developing allies, natives from different tribes who, in return for clothing, hats, knives, and machetes were the ones to cut, saw, split, halve, and chop down the enormous trees and carry them to the ships on their bare shoulders.

  Tebereté, a pudgy child only a year old, was presented as a gift to the Tupinambá chief, morubixaba of the entire region of São Vicente, because she was a special young girl: her eyes, a rare, nearly translucent green against her reddish skin, were reminiscent of the quartz of their labrets, the lip-plates used by the warriors as a good luck charm.

  She grew up with the Tupinambá as though she were one of them. And though her childhood was spent among an enemy tribe, she grew up just as her mother had: full of laughter, frolicking in the rivers, games with the forest animals, an abundance of fruits, trees to climb, vines to swing on, joy, cassava, tasty food, flour. It was still possible to be happy in the Land of the Parrots, and Tebereté grew up strong and plump, with long, straight black hair, and her talisman eyes.

  The first important event in her life took place soon after she entered puberty: her father brought home a white prisoner to be eaten.

  When the warriors arrived, Tebereté was with the rest of the tribeswomen, young people, and children who followed the prisoner as he was paraded through the village. They threw stones at him, squeezed his arms so as to feel his fat, and howled: “Our food has arrived! Look at those arms! We are going to eat you, peró, you great big Portuguese man, but first you will make us laugh!”

  That was their custom: the prisoner who would become the main dish in the tribe’s next feast was welcomed with great euphoria and regaled so that he could fulfill each step of their ritual, which involved not only feeding the tribe, but entertaining it. It was a classic combination of bread and circuses, that most ancient combination so dear to humanity. Once the tribe settled down, Tebereté’s father called her forth to tell her that she would assume the role of the wife responsible for fattening up “the Portuguese man.” He pointed to a hammock. She was to take good care of him, watch his every move, feed him, and cure him of his melancholy so that the warrior’s final days were not spent in misery. The morubixaba wanted his future dinner well-fed, fit for a feast, and in good spirits.

  Proud, Tebereté drew close to her captive, marveling at his size and the importance of her task. She carefully removed his tattered clothing, lifted his arms to examine his armpits, stuck her nose close, and was overcome with nausea. She choked back h
er vomit and continued examining him. She pulled at his hair, peered inside his ears, and felt immediate disgust. She ran her hand along his skin, squinting to make out what lay beneath his body hair, and squeezed and pinched along his body to see just how much work she had ahead of her. She took stock of his buttocks and found them to be satisfactory. She liked the sight of his thighs and crouched down to see what was to be found inside the hard shells that covered his feet, but another wave of nausea, this time more intense, stirred her stomach. Tebereté was convinced that before she did anything else, it would be necessary to bathe the white man in the nearby creek to rid him of that putrid, rotting smell.

  During this thorough exam, the captive, Jean-Maurice, pondered his next move. His ship had been attacked by two Portuguese vessels. Taken by surprise and without the means to escape while they were still anchored, the French squeezed into lifeboats and fled for the beach, where they were mercilessly slaughtered by the Portuguese and their native allies. The battle was the most violent Jean-Maurice had ever witnessed, leaving the beach full of bloody cadavers. By mere chance, he had managed to escape and run like a madman from the arrows and gunshots, finding refuge in the dense forest, walking for two days before being captured by the Tupinambá. When the natives seized him, he thought they would kill him right then and there; he was later overcome with surprise at being left with this young woman who was currently pulling him toward the river. It was his first voyage to Brazil, and though he understood nothing of what the natives said, he had a premonition of what fate had in store for him. He knew quite well that they were cannibals, he just didn’t know the purpose of the young woman’s careful inspection.

  JEAN-MAURICE, THE “PORTUGUESE” NORMAN

  Born in Normandy, there was nothing Portuguese about Jean-Maurice. But by a mishap of fate—or perhaps because he wore a Portuguese cross around his neck and did not have the same light complexion of the French, or mairs as the natives called them—the Tupinambás thought he belonged to the band of Portuguese, the perós, whom, for a variety of reasons, they had grown to detest. A pity, because had this misunderstanding been resolved by an interpreter, Jean-Maurice would not have become food for the natives. Two factors worked against the young man: first, his healthy physical constitution and tendency to gain weight, and second, Tebereté’s love for human flesh. And so, the immense pressure that the young woman placed on her father to kill the man quickly allowed no time for some interpreter to cross paths with the tribe and clear up the question of his lineage.