Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters Page 3

  In some way, Jean-Maurice was fated for a tragic destiny. Born in Rouen, near the port, the son of a prostitute and a father he never met, he was raised by an aunt whose life was spent being poisoned day by day in a small textile factory, unable to give her unwanted nephew more than a blanket on the filthy kitchen floor to sleep on, endless threats about the punishment that a life of sin could bring a man, and rancor. That place could not rightly be called a home—and Jean-Maurice never did. Not yet eight years old, he abandoned Rouen aboard an illegal ship, or, more frankly, a pirate ship. It was on this and other similar ships that he grew up, a hefty young man with broad shoulders, perhaps a tad surly and a bit slow in the head, but able and knowledgeable about the sea and weapons—all in all, a good seaman.

  He soon found himself highly sought-out in the port—strong, loyal, a jack-of-all-trades capable of fighting and killing to help his fellow sailors without a second or even first thought.

  Jean-Maurice did not know how many lives he had taken in battles or beyond them, and could not even remember the first man he killed; he only vaguely recalled the Portuguese man who, before closing his eyes for the final time, tugged at Jean-Maurice’s shirt with unexpected force and, in the midst of death’s delirium, asked him to take the cross he wore around his neck back to Lisbon. The unusual nature of the request moved Jean-Maurice to tear the silver cross from around the dead man’s neck and, without another thought, retie the leather strap around his own neck, only to immediately forget the Lisbon part of the request in the heat of battle. The cross remained there out of pure apathy, dangling across his chest, and whenever someone asked him about it, he replied, “I have no idea!” And he truly didn’t.

  The last pirate ship he had sailed on set anchor along the Brazilian coast and had already been loaded with more than two hundred tons of Brazilwood, two thousand jaguar pelts, four hundred parrots, and a hundred tamarins—not to mention medicinal oils, pepper, and cotton—when it was attacked just before departure by several Portuguese ships carrying angry sailors who sought revenge for having lost, on that very same trip, one of their fleet to another group of French pirates.

  So much blood was shed on the beach that day that it changed the color of the water. Of course, it takes enormous quantities of blood to dye the sea red, but I’m not exaggerating or resorting to metaphor here. That wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened, and it wouldn’t be the last. Many other beaches around the world have turned red during large-scale massacres, you can be sure of that.

  From what we can tell, Jean-Maurice was the only one to escape, and even though he ended up dead regardless, at least his cause of death was a bit unconventional. Strictly speaking, I can’t respond for him, but I’m fairly certain that, had he been able to choose between the two, he most certainly would have chosen to be devoured by Tebereté.

  During his two-month long captivity, the young Tupinambá girl was like a dream. She fed him several times per day, bathed him in the river, and, with great care and several herbs to dull the pain, stripped him of all his body hair, leaving his skin soft and smooth. Later, as though trying to make up for the suffering she’d caused him, she would cover his body in honey, rock him back and forth in his hammock, and make love to him whenever possible. She would dance and sing for him and teach him games and new words in Tupi. She would comb his chestnut-colored hair, adorn him with feathers and other bodily decorations, and gently and lovingly stroke his skin, though she still paid great attention to the results of her work, the rapid accumulation of fat in the desired spots. She didn’t leave him alone for so much as a minute, so attentive, caring, and skilled in her craft she was that she managed to cure the low spirits afflicting the young man, who, unfamiliar with the native ritual, had begun to believe in his own good fortune.

  Jean-Maurice only became troubled when groups of noisy and excited old ladies circled his hammock and began to pinch his buttocks and thighs, smacking their lips. They would cackle and shriek in their wild, undecipherable language, forcing him to utter the words that Tebereté had taught him but whose meaning he hadn’t quite grasped: “Look how fat and tasty I’ve become, perfect for your food!”

  Whenever he took too long to speak or refused to repeat the words, Tebereté reproached him with a stern gaze.

  At night, when neighbors from other tribes appeared in the village or when the tribe assembled to drink cauim wine and dance, Jean-Maurice was brought to the center of the village and put on display, to be inspected, smelled, and pinched. Shortly thereafter they would make him jump up and down and repeat ad nauseam the phrases he’d been taught, while the natives laughed and danced noisily around him, apparently having the time of their lives: “I am your food!” he proclaimed, “Look how I grow fatter and fatter!” If he made a mistake or took too long to say his part, an angry Tebereté would cast him a disapproving look.

  When at last the day arrived for them to eat Jean-Maurice, Tebereté performed her task with zeal. That night, at peace, she made love to him several times in the hammock, though not to the point of exhausting him. At sunrise, she led him to the river and gave him a special bath with several perfumed herbs, later covering his entire fattened body with wildflower honey. But this time, to Jean-Maurice’s surprise, when he pulled her toward him at the moment he felt himself growing erect after so much playful rubbing, Tebereté refused angrily, batting away his hands. Startled at her rejection, the captive took offense and began to sulk, unaware of the scale of the tragedy about to befall him.

  With great pleasure, Tebereté combed the young man’s hair one last time and adorned him with several necklaces made especially for the occasion. Later, placing a ceremonial rope around his waist, she led him to the ritual grounds, surrounded everywhere by the howling of the women and children who drew closer. There at the village center, the tribe was gathered en masse together with some guests; they had all painted their bodies in ways he’d never seen before, and had assumed poses that were unrecognizable to him.

  It was there that Jean-Maurice sensed, for the first time, that the day had arrived for him to become their feast.

  His first reaction was to try to wriggle free and run, but seeing how he was surrounded, looking around until his eyes met Tebereté’s reproachful air, he decided to control his fear and his instinct to run. After all, he too was a warrior, courageous, a man accustomed to the idea of death and, since no escape was possible, he judged it better to die a hero’s death so as to give this final satisfaction to the Tupinambá girl who had cared for him as no one ever had before.

  And so, as the natives’ hypnotic dance intensified under the effects of the cauim, and his warrior-executioner, possessed, spun around him like some colorful wild bird, raising his enormous club in the air and shouting Jean-Maurice’s last rites. Jean-Maurice responded with the words Tebereté had taught him to recite. So concentrated was he on dying a proper death that he didn’t even see the club as it was buried in his skull. He fell face-down without so much as a sound, an omen of the good times that awaited all those who had gathered to feast on him.

  Letting forth a cry, toothless old women unable to chew the Frenchman’s flesh ran to drink his blood while it was still hot, clicking their tongues. They then gathered up his brains so that nothing went to waste.

  Tebereté knelt down next to her lifeless captive and quickly shed her ritual tears before slathering her chest in blood so that the child growing in her womb learned to recognize the taste of the enemy at a young age.

  The Tupinambá immediately went to work: a staff was inserted into the dead man’s anus to prevent the release of excrement; they later scalded him with boiling water to remove his skin, and then quartered him to roast and grill each body part. The dripping fat was gathered in a clay jar to be used later in cassava porridge.

  Jean-Maurice, given his size and the quality of his flesh, no doubt provided a spectacular feast that stretched on into the night. Early the next morning, Tebereté, her belly full and her heart satisfie
d for having completed her task with such delicious results, continued chewing at one of the nose bones from the white hero, father to the daughter that now stirred in her belly.

  Now, just look how interesting science can be. There was a time when anthropologists and historians thought that the anthropophagy practiced by the earliest Brazilian tribes served a merely symbolic and magical function: as they ate their enemy, the victors absorbed his strength and perpetuated the entire tribe’s desire for vengeance through this group ritual. Today, however, archeologists and researchers maintain that cannibalism also served a nutritional purpose: during a period of population growth and scarcity, enemy flesh provided necessary protein to the victors. Of course, this interpretation may well be influenced by the excessive nutritional worries that loom over our modern times, but several arguments appear to support this theory, among them the natives’ appreciation for the taste of human flesh, as was clearly the case with the ravenous Tebereté.

  Following the death of Jean-Maurice, Tebereté was taken as a wife by Poatã, an iron-fisted warrior and tribal hero. When her daughter was finally born, the daughter of Jean-Maurice the heroic enemy, it was the tribe’s shaman who chose her name.

  He chose the name Sahy—water of the eyes, the tear.

  For something terrible was in store for the tribe.

  By some insidious, undetectable event, a dark cloud hung over them. Life’s natural joy appeared to have been spoiled. A stain blemished the once radiant air, which now brought with it a series of threats.

  Inside their tiny, dark cabins, the shamans sat reflecting, restless, troubled, and anxious, unable to see or understand what they saw but sensing, intuiting, that some great horror drew near.

  But what? Where would it happen? What was in store for them?

  Unrelenting, they performed their ritual dances, summoning the gods with their maracas, breathing in the hot smoke of dry leaves emerging from the eyes, mouths, and ears of enormous skull-shaped gourds. Then they burned more dry leaves, smoking more and more, asking, begging, and imploring the guardian spirits for an explanation that would never come.

  Their world was slowly coming undone, a great evil was growing. But what was this evil, exactly? Where did it come from?

  The shamans slept, still under the influence of the smoke. Their dreams were troubled, nebulous, cloaked in darkness. Even in the dream world, the spirits brought no answers, no comfort, no serenity.

  Sahy grew up alongside her mother and Poatã, but life in the village had changed a great deal, and changed for the worse. The days were no longer so carefree and the nights no longer full of joy. Tebereté would fight with Poatã because he had fewer machetes than his brothers. In fact, Tebereté picked fights with everyone. She felt uneasy, irritable, and the only person she didn’t fight with was Sahy, whom every night she would tell the story of her white father.

  The men had spent decades gleefully chopping down Brazilwood trees to trade them for machetes, fishhooks, scissors, and knives. The women too had developed a wild desire for the white man’s tools and implements. They wanted more and more, as though infected with some sort of disease.

  Curious, Tebereté began to follow the white men who were constantly appearing in the area, and was always one of the first to arrive on the beach when a new ship dropped anchor. One time, she convinced Poatã to join her, and together they stole a hatchet and three fishhooks from a mair, a Frenchman who had ventured out to do some fishing in a nearby river while he waited on the captain’s order to board the ship. But Tebereté wanted a knife.

  Whenever a ship entered the cove, hundreds of natives would approach and surround it, either by swimming or in boats. Banding together, they’d climb aboard, talking and gesticulating frenetically, tugging at objects, showing their own, begging. Women who’d barely reached puberty, full-grown women, old women with saggy breasts, all of them clamored toward the boat, stepping forward, grabbing; they wanted necklaces, they wanted machetes, they wanted knives.

  The seaman batted them away like mosquitoes. One day, in search of her knife, Tebereté tried to grab a sailor by the clothes and pull him to a corner, but he pushed her away, irritated and impatient to rid himself of her hands and those of two old women, the three of them yelling things he was neither able nor wanted to understand.

  Tebereté refused to let go and, exasperated, he violently shook her off as the two old women shrieked. Tebereté fell over a rusty old nail that had come loose from the ship’s deck. Though it had pierced her skin, she felt no pain; she merely saw the nail and removed it quickly, slipping it into the folds of her labia before jumping into the sea. As soon as she returned to her village, she showed the nail to Sahy and made a special leather strap from which to hang it around her neck. Tebereté considered the nail a charm stronger even than her quartz eyes.

  Little did she know, neither were good luck charms. There would be no more good luck for the Tupinambá.

  Some days later, Tebereté fell ill. It may have been an infection from the rusty nail, or something else: at that point, several people from her village were succumbing to illnesses that the shamans, with their herbs, their smoke, their magic, were unsure how to cure in the midst of their bewilderment.

  Sahy, meanwhile, believed her mother’s illness could be cured with one extremely rare herb and, on the advice of a shaman, set out into the forest to find it.

  She was sixteen at the time, and she never came back.

  She was not present when death took her mother, who, burning up in agony, waited for her to return, the tears she shed more for her daughter than herself. Above all, Tebereté lamented that she would not be able to give her daughter the necklace with the nail that, as soon as she passed, would certainly be claimed by the two old women, the same old women who were on the ship at the moment she fell and who, for this very reason, considered themselves rightful owners of that strange iron ornament.

  Desolate Wildnerness

  SAHY

  (1531-1569)

  On the day she was captured, Sahy had a dream: an enormous jaguar, young, beautiful, its paw capable of killing a man in one blow, runs through the forest, strong, majestic, bounding to and fro, in full control of her powers. But suddenly this vitality, this joy, this wonder and power begin to fade, and the jaguar continues moving forward, continues running, but soon stumbles, her strength gone, her radiance gone, she falls, she gets back up, she loses consciousness, her breath fails her, she rises to her feet, falls yet again.

  She felt a burning in her side, her skin on fire, and when she woke, Sahy thought to herself that the jaguar was not her, but her mother.

  Only when she fell like an animal into her captors’ net later that afternoon did Sahy understand that the jaguar was indeed her, and that, had she paid closer attention to her dream, had she understood, she never would have headed off into the forest and would have avoided the fate that befell her.

  From that day on, Sahy became a marauna, a person who pays close attention to dreams and has the ability to interpret them. And so she became inclined toward observation and reflection, dedicated to thought and not action, capable in some way of seeing the past with new eyes and predicting what was to yet to come.

  THE CASTILIAN

  Everyone referred to Vicente Arcón as “the Castilian,” but no one knew for certain where he was born or what his real name was. The son of Spanish petty nobles, at the age of twenty-three he used his own sword to kill his wife and brother—whom he suspected of having an affair—in one of the outbursts of bloody fury that characterized his life. On the run from the law, he enlisted to serve on a ship embarking on a secret mission to discover the route to the mysterious Rio da Prata, the river named after a native king who dined with silver utensils at a table of pure gold, and who had life-size gold reproductions of all the flora and fauna of his kingdom installed in his palace gardens, so that they would reflect the sun and be visible for miles.

  But the Spanish vessel shipwrecked in Brazil, on the coast
of Santa Catarina, and if the Castilian managed to reach the shore, more dead than alive, it was thanks to his tenacity, his physical stamina, and the conviction that he had been born to conquer the sea rather than be conquered by it. These traits brought him near-legendary status in the new land, where he had decided to remain and build his empire. Molded as a hidalgo of insatiable ambition and intelligence, in fewer than ten years Vicente Arcón had under his control an army of more than five hundred indigenous warriors and dominion over the trading of enslaved natives in the region. He constructed an entire fort, where he lived with several native wives and hundreds of indigenous slaves. In a short time, his weapons stock was larger than that of most provincial governors; he had several small-caliber cannons, harquebuses, swivel-guns and arbalests, spears, swords, cotton-padded jerkins to defend against arrows, and all the gunpowder he needed.

  The Castilian would leave his fort to make periodic incursions to capture more natives and then sell them to the colonizers who had begun to settle in the country. He also built brigantines of cedar and perobawood, and traveled up and down the Brazilian coast selling his goods.

  Vicente Arcón was not present among the group that captured Sahy. His men brought her back along with the other natives they’d captured that day, and the group of captives was piled up and tied down to the deck of the brigantine, headed for Bahia.