Brazil (1986) (edit title/settings)

Brazil has a large cast of characters. The Cavalcantis of Santo Tomás and the da Silvas of Itatinga and most of the incidents involving these families are fictional. Aruanã, Secundus Proot, Black Peter, the Ferreiras, Patient Anthony, Armand Beauchamp, Henrique Inglez, Bábá Epifánia – these, too, are imaginary characters. The towns of Rosário and Jurema in Pernambuco and Tiberica in western São Paulo do not exist.

King Afonso I of the Kongo; Nóbrega and Anchieta; Tomé de Sousa; Mem de Sá; Raposo Tavares; Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen; “Ganga Zumba;” Marquis of Pombal; Bento Parente Maciel; Tiradentes; Emperor Pedro II; President Francisco Solano López; Eliza Alicia Lynch; Joaquim Nabuco; Anthony, the Counselor; Juscelino Kubitschek; the Vilas Boas brothers; Herbert “Betinho” de Sousa; – these are real characters and what is said of them relates to recorded history.

The enslavement and massacre of the Brazilian Indians; the path-finding and prospecting journeys of the bandeirantes; the Lisbon earthquake; the republican uprising at Minas Gerais; the Paraguayan War; the abolition of slavery; the rebellion at Canudos; the birth of Brasília – these principle Brazilian historical events are faithfully summarized within the context of the novel, which takes places over five centuries up to the quincentennial celebrations in April 2000.

<SPOILER ALERT -- THIS IS A SYNOPSIS OF A NOVEL THAT RUNS TO 340,000 WORDS. NONETHELESS, THE PLOT SUMMARY CONTAINS INCIDENTS AND SCENES THAT REVEAL KEY ELEMENTS OF THE STORY.>

PROLOGUE: The TUPINIQUIN (1491-1500)

The novel begins in May 1491 at the malocas of a Tupiniquin clan in the Atlantic rain forest near present-day Porto Seguro. On the eve of his initiation into manhood, Aruanã faces the problem of a father, Pojucan, who has made himself an outcast among his people. Captured by an enemy clan, Pojucan refused to submit to the ritual slaughter of prisoners, fleeing back to the Tupiniquin, who greeted his return as an act of cowardice.

Naurú, the village pagé, demands Pojucan’s death. Before this sentence can be executed, Aruanã gets caught in the conflict between his father and the shaman and is despised by his peers and playmates.

Pojucan has one ally in the village: Ubiratan, a warrior of the distant Tapajós, who has ended up among the Tupiniquin after capture and flight from a northern tribe. Pojucan proposes that he accompany the Tapajós on a journey back to his own people. They’re ready to leave when Aruanã, scorned and humiliated by Naurú, joins them.

The trio travel through the rain forest crossing lands that will encompass Brazil. Pojucan dies on the journey, slain by two jaguars on a floating island in a great stream. The others reach Ubiratan’s village on the Mother of Rivers, which we know today as the Amazon. Aruanã spends several years with the Tapajós, growing to be a fine warrior and encountering Tocoyricoc, an ancient wanderer who drifted to these parts from the realm of the Inca.

Through Tocoyricoc, Aruanã sees that an existence among strangers cannot replace a life with his own Tupiniquin, and finally, he returns to the village of his forefathers. Accepted back, he exults in the very ceremony that his father despised: The slaying of captives taken in war and the cannibalistic rite that follows. In contrast, there are moments of tenderness shown at the birth of his first son with Juriti, “The Dove,” on the eve of the arrival of the Portuguese.

BOOK ONE: THE PORTUGUESE (1526-1546)

Nicolau Cavalcanti is second-in-command of one of three ships sent from Lisbon to patrol the Brazilian coast against French corsairs in 1526. They anchor in the bay near the Tupiniquin village, where Aruanã is an elder. French interlopers have established a brazilwood trading post in the area.

A quarter-century since Aruanã witnessed the arrival of Pedro Álvares Cabral’s ships, the Portuguese first showed little interest in Terra da Santa Cruz. Their fortune lies in the Conquest of the Indies and the Arab spice routes. Nicolau Cavalcanti was schooled in that violent arena, rising from cabin boy to gunner to officer during the command of Afonso d’Albuquerque.

The Cavalcantis, like many Portuguese families of the 14th and 15th centuries, originally hailed from another locale – Florence—settling in Portugal on the eve of Prince Henry, “The Navigator’s,” great explorations. Nicolau’s family is well-placed with an estate at Sintra but lacks royal connections.

Nicolau leads a shore party that destroys the French settlement. Aruanã’s Tupiniquin watch the attack, and though they enjoy good relations with the French, do nothing to assist them. Their inaction is prompted by Aruanã’s son-in-law, Affonso Ribeiro, a degredado, an exile banished for crimes committed in Portugal. Nicolau visits the Tupiniquin malocas, where he is entranced by Ribeiro’s daughter, Jandaia, and makes love to her.

Le Tigre, “The Tiger,” a Dieppe corsair engages the patrol and sinks two ships. Nicolau’s vessel escapes, but its captain is killed, and command passes to Nicolau. Undermanned, damaged, he sails across the Atlantic to a Portuguese refuge on the Congo River. He visits the lands of the Mani Kongo, king of the Bakongo, a Christian convert who goes by the name of Affonso, Duke of Nsundi, and models his court on that of Lisbon.

Nicolau cannot be blamed for the defeat at Porto Seguro and returns safely to Lisbon, but the affair reduces his chances of advancement. He writes a memorandum to the king, in which he argues that the French will not be routed until a proper base is established in Brazil.

In 1533, King João III creates hereditary captaincies providing extensive land grants along the Brazilian coast: Duarte Coelho Pereira, a Goa veteran, is one of the donatários.

Nicolau and his wife, Helena, and their sons, Pedro and Henriques, sail with Duarte Coelho to Pernambuco, where they settle at Iguarassu. The local Indians, friendly at first, turn hostile when they find more is expected of them than occasional logging of brazilwood. Sporadic conflict grows. Nicolau travels to Porto Seguro, where he persuades Affonso Ribeiro to move to Pernambuco with his family, among them Salpina, Aruanã’s daughter, and Jandaia, who becomes Nicolau’s mistress.

In 1536, Nicolau and Ribeiro discover a lush valley two days’ journey from Dom Duarte’s capital of Olinda. Nicolau gets a grant of twelve square leagues, almost 75,000 acres – to a man from Portugal, a kingdom in itself.

Helena gives birth to Tomás, the first of these Cavalcantis born on Brazilian soil. Jandaia, too, brings her lover a son. Nicolau’s joy is tempered by the departure of Henriques, who returns to Portugal with no vision of prosperous valleys planted with sugar cane.

Enslaved Potiguara and Caeté, “who can be bought for the price of a sheep,” prove reluctant field workers. Nicolau and other planters petition King João for slaves from Africa. In 1545, a caravel from Mpinda brings sixty Africans from the Congo to Pernambuco. Cavalcanti buys three men and three boys for his plantation, which he calls Engenho Santo Tomás.

At a festa at Affonso Ribeiro’s malocas, a degredado kills the son of a local chief, sparking an uprising against the colony. Forty warriors penetrate the valley of Santo Tomás. Pedro, Nicolau’s first-born, is slain. The engenho is besieged by Caeté warriors. Helena and Jandaia stand shoulder to shoulder to drive off a surprise night attack. A relief force led by Affonso Ribeiro rescues the beleaguered settlement, which is abandoned. As Nicolau leaves, he sees smoke enveloping the stockade, but vows to return to Santo Tomás.

BOOK TWO: THE JESUIT (1550-1583)

Padre Inácio Cavalcanti, Nicolau’s nephew, arrives at Bahia de Todos os Santos, Bay of All Saints, four hundred miles south of Pernambuco in March 1549. He is one of six Jesuits under Padre Manuel de Nóbrega accompanying Tomé de Sousa, first governor-general of Brazil. A year later, Nóbrega orders Inácio to travel to Pernambuco, where he visits his uncle, Nicolau Cavalcanti.

Engenho Santo Tomás is one of the captaincy’s most promising plantations with extensive cane fields and an ox-powered sugar mill. The thirty African slaves are a burden to Inácio but not overwhelmingly so; such servitude has been commonplace in Portugal for more than a century. But he is shocked by the condition of the Indian workforce overseen by the mulatto sons of Affonso Ribeiro.

Inácio makes a circuit of the captaincy scandalized by the immorality he finds among the vice-ridden inhabitants, including lascivious priests of Olinda who keep concubines and parade their progeny before him. Duarte Coelho Pereira and his saintly wife Dona Brites are exceptions, but the donatário is old and infirm and unable to govern effectively.

A hemorrhagic epidemic rages at the malocas of Affonso Ribeiro. Inácio confesses the dying degredado. Ribeiro begs the priest to take Salpina, Aruanã’s daughter, back to the Tupiniquin, together with Unauá and Guaraci, the children of Jandaia. In his delirium, Ribeiro reveals that Jandaia is the mother of Nicolau’s bastards.

Inácio confronts his uncle who warns him to see the reality of Santa Cruz, a land of pagans who will raise their bloodstained hands to mock him. Helena asks Inácio not to judge her husband, who has given fifteen years of his life to the conquest of a harsh wilderness. She has shared these years and she understands and forgives Nicolau.

In January 1552, three years after Governor de Sousa’s arrival, Bahia de Todos os Santos – Salvador – is a secure, thriving base. A year passes before Inácio can leave for Porto Seguro. The boy Guaraci takes off on his own, impatient to be with his mother’s people. When Nóbrega finally gives permission for Inácio to go to the Tupiniquin with Salpina and Unauá, they arrive at Aruanã’s malocas as the clan prepares to devour an enemy. Inácio intervenes, carrying off the corpse for burial. Infuriated and perplexed, the Tupiniquin nevertheless allow the priest to begin his mission.

At Porto Seguro, Inácio finds Guaraci a slave of Domingos da Silva and his son, Marcos, who came upon the boy lost and starving on his journey from the Bahia. Inácio forces the da Silvas to release their captive.

Inácio gently rejects Unauá’s advances, a temptation on the eve of going to perform the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises at a place deep in the primeval forest. He returns to find the malocas destroyed by slavers led by Marcos da Silva. He encounters a band of survivors led by the Aruanã, who spares his life. Crushed by the failure of his mission, Inácio returns to the Bahia.

Seven years later, Padre Inácio welcomes Governor Mem de Sá to a great aldeia, the mission village of St. Peter and St. Paul, which has eight-hundred converts of all ages. This triumph is the vision of Nóbrega and José de Anchieta, who see the aldeias as safe havens for the natives. Among the children baptized this day with the governor as his godfather is “Peter,” a survivor of a raid against a Tupinambá clan.

Inácio accompanies Mem de Sá’s army, when a Tupiniquin uprising threatens Porto Seguro and Ilheus. Inácio’s cousin, Tomás Cavalcanti, leads a Pernambucan detachment that joins in the subjugation of the coastal clans, no more poignant than in the slaughter of 1,200 natives on a beach at Ilheus. A 22-day march by Tomás’s column leads to a stockade, where the legendary warrior-chief Aruanã makes a final stand.

The aldeia of St. Peter and St. Paul is swept by a pestilence carried across the Atlantic. The epidemic carries off two-thirds of the mission inhabitants before spreading to the malocas of natives not yet contacted by the Portuguese.

Paulo – Mem de Sá’s godchild, Peter – leads twelve converts into the interior of Bahia, calling himself “Santo Antônio,” and his wife, “Mother of God.” Paulo seeks a promised land where the Tupinambá nation can be reborn.

Twenty years on, Padre Inácio perseveres with two hundred souls in the crumbling aldeia. Word comes of a backlands clan, who want to join the mission of St. Peter and St. Paul. His faith unquenchable, Inácio goes to meet them in the thorn-studded caatinga, “the white forest.” His final moments bring a glorious vision of Our Lady and her favored Saint, in reality Santo Antônio and his wife, who inhabit this stony earth with their disciples.

BOOK THREE: THE BANDEIRANTES (1628-1692)

In August 1628, fourteen-year-old Amador Flôres da Silva and his friend, Ishmael Pinheiro, run away from São Paulo de Piratininga to join the bandeira of Captain-Major Antônio Raposo Tavares, who is leading three thousand men south to the Spanish colony of Paraguay. Amador is the grandson of Marcos da Silva and Unauá, who was captured in the raid on Aruanã’s malocas. Seduced by da Silva, Unauá came to bear his children and to be a devoted wife to the man who brutalized her people.

The bandeirantes, “flag bearers,” are pathfinders, prospectors, militiamen and slavers, as on this expedition directed against the Jesuit missions of Paraguay. Amador is the youngest of sixteen surviving sons and daughters of Bernardo da Silva, a seventy-five-year old mameluco (offspring of Indian and white,) who is one of Raposo Tavares’s trusted lieutenants. Tenente Bernardo has been slave-raiding in Paraguay since long before Amador was born, the incursions facilitated by the fact that Brazil is now a Spanish possession. The crown of Portugal passed to Phillip II of Spain in 1581, after the death of King Sebastião in battle against the Moors at Alcaer-Quibir caused the extinction of the house of Aviz.

Tenente Bernardo feigns anger at Amador’s failure to stay with the cows and pigs at their São Paulo settlement, but privately welcomes this “last-born pup” to his side. Ishmael Pinheiro, the son of an armador, who finances the bandeiras, is sent home by his father, with the advice that he learns to profit by war, not to fight. Amador teams up with two boys whose fathers are attached to Bernardo’s militia: the mameluco Valentim Ramalho, from a great clan related to the castaway João Ramalho, who settled Piratininga plain before the founding of São Paulo; and Abeguar, son of a Tupiniquin slave.

Bernardo leads a reconnaissance of the reduction of San Antonio. His party is ambushed and the tenente wounded. Raposo Tavares visits San Antonio to seek redress. Padre Pedro Mola defends the Guarani, as the Jesuits call the Indians, seen as protecting their fields against the marauders. The bandeirantes have no justification to attack the mission – not until three months later, when spies report that Mola has given sanctuary to runaways from São Paulo.

Tenente Bernardo lies grievously ill and near-blind from his wounds, but insists that Amador guide him to battle. The defenders of San Antonio possess twenty muskets against five times that number in the army of Raposo Tavares. The mission falls, but victory is bitter-sweet for Amador. Bernardo da Silva breathes his last on the great plaza at San Antonio.

Sixty-eight hundred captives are rounded up for the slave market at São Paulo, hundreds perishing on the forty-day march to Piratininga.
Over the next 10 years, Amador and his fellow Paulistas attack the missions carrying off 60,000 natives, until the Jesuits and their Guarani converts finally fight back. At Madrid, where the Company of Jesus enjoys royal favor, the priests seek the arrest of leaders of the bandeiras and their transportation to Lisbon in chains.

Raposo Tavares accepts his one chance for clemency. He raises a company of 150 Paulistas to fight the Dutch occupiers of Pernambuco. With Portugal under Spanish control, Lisbon and its possessions have become embroiled in Philip IV’s exhausting conflict with England, France and Holland. The Dutch invaded Brazil, landing in Pernambuco in the same year Amador was on his first bandeira with Raposo Tavares, and expanded their control from the border of Bahia to Maranhão on the Rio das Amazonas.

Amador has never married, but is the father of two daughters and a son, with Carijó and Tupiniquin concubines. He worships his mother, Rosa Flôres, only one discordant note marring their relationship: Rosa’s support for Maria Ramalho, Valentim’s sister, an inhumanly ugly creature who has made it her life’s challenge to drag Amador to the altar. Maria has persevered in her quest for a decade, ever since wrestling Amador to the ground to become his first lover. There have been many couplings since, but always Amador escapes marriage by marching off with a bandeira.

Amador joins the expedition to Pernambuco. When he bids farewell to his mother at the da Silva lands thirty miles west of São Paulo, Maria Ramalho is there. ”She haunts me – a shadow forever hovering in the background,” Amador tells Ishmael Pinheiro. Ishmael reminds Amador that he’ll be marching down the Serra do Mar with Raposo Tavares and will be saved. “Will I?” Amador asks, glancing at the motionless figure on a nearby bench, her head turned toward him.

In January 1640, an eighty-six vessel armada under Conde de Torre, Dom Fernão Mascarenhas, fails to outgun and outmaneuver a Dutch squadron off Pernambuco. The Paulista contingent is dumped ashore before the fleet scatters. They join an insurgency harassing the Dutch and their Tapuya allies. Amador is with a patrol caught in the valley of Santo Tomás by Jan Vlok, a brutal Hollander, whose men wipe out the mamelucos, all save Amador who is wounded and left for dead.

Amador awakes in a casa grande, the big house on the property of Fernão Cavalcanti, whose family has occupied Santo Tomás for more than a century. After five years of futile attempts to expel the Hollanders, Cavalcanti and other planters accept the overtures of Governor Johan Maurits, count of Nassau-Siegen, a liberal and humanist, with a genuine love for Brazil. Cavalcanti serves with a planters’ council organized by Maurits, who gives colonists loans to rebuild engenhos and buy slaves, and will not interfere with Portuguese religion and customs.

Amador knows that the Pernambucanos revile the mamelucos as “mongrels” and “outlaws,” which only deepens his torment over Joana Cavalcanti, Fernão’s daughter, a free-spirited girl who befriends him. What dreams he has of Senhorita Joana are dashed by the arrival of the Dutch artist, Secundus “Segge” Proot, a pupil of Rembrandt van Rijn, who comes to paint the wonders of the second Eden. “Amador, the Bandeirante,” is a subject for his brush strokes. Joana, too, sits for Segge, who captures her heart, her love for him disastrous to her father. Fernão Cavalcanti enlists Amador to save his daughter from the heretic by taking Segge into the wilderness to paint the Indians at their malocas.

Amador and Segge wander the sertão for four years, a backlands odyssey in the desert-like caatinga, across the high cerrado, and through the depths of the rainforest to the Rio das Amazonas. They join forces with the story-teller Ibira, a Tupinambá from the headwaters of the Tapajós. Ibira’s tales of a tribe of warrior women and a lake of gold fill the pair with dreams of El Dorado and the Amazons. They’re swarmed by vampires in the caatinga and taken prisoner by cannibals, who keep them as “cows” ready for slaughter. Rescue comes from Kaimari, chief of a clan of Paresí, with whom they spend ten months, before accompanying Paresí traders to “Love-Me-River,” the Madeira-Mamore, which they ascend towards its confluence with the Amazon.

“Dear God, what a stream! A river sea!” Segge exclaims when they reach the Amazon in July 1644. Segge’s rejoicing turns to a vision of hell, when they encounter an army of slavers from Belém do Pará rounding up the inhabitants of a Tapajós town. Bento Maciel Parente tells them that Johan Maurits was recalled to Holland in May 1644 and most of the Dutch garrison withdrawn. -- A ten-year truce between the Dutch and the Portuguese was ratified in 1641, following restoration of the Bragança throne.

Amador and Segge part ways at the Rio Tapajós. Amador accepts Bento Maciel’s savage treatment of the Tapajós. Segge daringly liberates Tabaliba, the Tapajós chief, who takes him to the one ally of the Indians: Abel O’Brien from County Clare in Ireland. O’Brien is a survivor of a settlement by Roger North, an officer of Walter Raleigh. Bento Parente Maciel’s father put the English and Irish to the sword, including Abel’s love, Rebecca Goodheart.

Able O’Brien and Segge Proot lead a force such as has never been seen before on the Rio das Amazonas to attack Maciel Parente at Death Bird Island sixty miles downriver from the Tapajós town. The slavers’ flagship, Desterro, mounts eight brass cannon and four swivel guns; around the vessel ride eighty canoes bearing slavers and six hundred Tupinambá auxiliaries. The flotilla is attacked by one hundred and fifty war canoes, Abel and Segge at their head, with fire buckets and grenades. Desterro’s nine-pounders fire with a roar and a flash that ignite the explosives in Segge’s canoe killing him instantly. Bento Maciel clears the channel and lands Tupinambá on shore with orders to spare none. Where they fail, the piranhas succeed. Abel O’Brien is caught and beheaded on Death Bird Island.

In June 1645, Amador reaches Engenho Santo Tomás, where a musket-wielding Joana Cavalcanti greets him. Fernão Cavalcanti is in hiding with Pernambucan insurgents, following the betrayal of a planned uprising against the Dutch. Captain Jan Vlok, who massacred Amador’s comrades, commands the local district. And, biggest surprise to Amador, the lovely Joana is married to Jorge Cavalcanti, Fernão’s elder brother, a pompous grandee who spent a decade at the Madrid court before returning to claim his portion of the engenho.

Amador joins Fernão Cavalcanti serving with insurgent leader João Fernandes Viera. They are sent on a secret mission to Palmares, a vast quilombo or stronghold of runaway slaves, whose support the patriots seek against the Dutch.

Nhungaza, captain of the royal regiment at Palmares, escorts the Portuguese to Shoko, capital of the kingdom of “Ganga Zumba.” In fifteen years, Ganga Zumba has attracted fourteen thousand slaves to the foothills of the Serra do Barriga, where he follows the traditions of his people in Africa. Dutch squadrons and planters’ militia have failed to recapture a single slave. Ganga Zumba refuses to send his warriors to battle. Seven years is how long a peça (slave) can expect to live in Brazil, Ganga Zumba tells Cavalcanti. “We have lived fifteen years in these hills – two lives for a peça.” It will be madness to march back to lands where long ago they would have been dead.

At Monte das Tabocas on August 3, 1645, Viera’s troops repulse a Dutch battalion under Colonel Hendrik Haus, which includes the bloodthirsty Jan Vlok. Vlok seeks revenge by striking at the rebels’ plantations and taking their womenfolk hostage. His first target is Engenho Santo Tomás. Fernão’s wife, Domitila, and Joana are carried to Haus’s main camp at the plantation of the widow Dona Ana Paes. Fernão and Amador are in the vanguard of an assault on the Hollanders, which sees the surrender of Haus and the killing of Vlok by Amador who refuses quarter to the heretic.

In November 1645, Amador climbs the crags of the Serra do Mar to São Paulo de Piratininga. Reunited with his family, his greatest joy is finding his mother Rosa Flôres in good health. Maria Ramalho, too, as hideous as Amador remembered her, comes to him riding upon a grey gelding, a huge smile on her round, fleshy face. “Amador Flôres, the Lord sent you back to me!”

Twenty-seven years later, Amador plans a great expedition underwritten by the armador Ishmael Pinheiro. Nine times since his return from Pernambuco, Amador left São Paulo to pursue his march of glory. Three times his bandeiras went in search of emeralds, gold and silver. Ishmael reads a letter from Dom Pedro, prince regent of Portugal to “his wise, far-seeing and discreet subject Senhor Amador Flôres da Silva, conqueror of the sertão” asking that Amador go to discover the treasure of Marcos de Azeredo. Azeredo claimed to have found a mountain of emeralds, but died before revealing the location. – For a prince of Portugal to offer Amador royal honors is the ultimate triumph for a mameluco.

Maria Ramalho is as worthy a wife as Amador’s mother predicted she would be. They have four children: three girls and Olímpio, a muleteer, as stubborn as the packs of beasts he operates between Santos and São Paulo. Maria Ramalho also raises Amador’s eight bastard son and daughters. Trajano, from a Tupiniquin woman, is Amador’s favorite, marching with him on his bandeiras. When they’re away, Maria Ramalho controls their house and lands, everything from managing the slaves to the harvest. She is renowned for her quince preserve, which earns her a handsome profit, most of which goes to financing Amador’s expeditions.

In 1674, Amador leads seventy-six Paulistas and three hundred and eighty natives over the Mantiqueira Mountains to the highlands of Brazil and a range known as Espinhaço, the Spine. Olímpio accompanies his father and Trajano, but when he wants to join the search for Azeredo’s mine, Amador orders him to stay at their headquarters at Sumiduoro.

Four years later, one third of the original bandeira is dead or missing. There have been finds of green stones, every sample rejected as worthless by Procópio Almeida, the expedition’s goldsmith. In the sixth year, Trajano da Silva plots to end Amador’s obsession, but is betrayed. Amador summarily condemns his favorite son and sees him hanged at Sumiduoro.

Twenty months later, Amador discovers emeralds and finally heads back to São Paulo, only to die en route in his sixty-seventh year. Procópio Almeida empties the pouch of stones the old bandeirante carried at his side, not emeralds but flawed tourmalines. The goldsmith saw the lie as the only way to end the madness.

In 1692, Maria Ramalho, almost eighty, and Olímpio visit Ishmael Pinheiro. Maria and her son bring a cask filled with gold to settle Amador’s huge debt to the armador. Over the years, Olímpio and Procópio returned to the highlands on shorter expeditions: Two days’ journey north of the old camp, they found a river of gold, the beginning of the great mines of Brazil. “Your father’s dream, Olímpio,” Maria says. ”What did it matter that Amador hunted emeralds? He led the way!”

{SPOILER ALERT -- THIS IS A SYNOPSIS OF A NOVEL THAT RUNS TO 340,000 WORDS. NONETHELESS, THE PLOT SUMMARY CONTAINS INCIDENTS AND SCENES THAT REVEAL KEY ELEMENTS OF THE STORY.>

BOOK FOUR: REPUBLICANS AND SINNERS (1755-1792)

Paulo Benevides Cavalcanti is the first of his family to be sent from Pernambuco to study at Coimbra in Portugal. In October 1755, Paulo and Luis Fialho Soares, a fellow student who hails from Minas Gerais, are waiting to embark on the Estrêla do Mar, sailing for Brazil in mid-November. They spend a weekend at Sintra with a fellow graduate, Marcelino Augusto Fonseca, whose father Dom António Fonseca is a wealthy merchant.

The young men stand in awe of a guest in the Fonseca salon: Sebastião José Carvalho e Melo, Minister of Foreign Affairs and War. No man in Portugal except King José is more powerful than Carvalho e Melo. The minister expresses contempt for the ruling clique of nobles and ecclesiastics who he blames for impoverishing the royal coffers. The gold strikes in Brazil in the 1690s have been followed by finds of vast diamond fields in a “Forbidden District,” 130 miles in circumference, reserved for the Crown. Carvalho e Melo complains that half the gold and diamonds from Minas Gerais goes to London to pay for Portugal’s debts. His strongest criticism is leveled against the Jesuits at the Portuguese court and in South America. It is common knowledge that the Minister and the Company of Jesus are on a collision course.

At 9.45 A.M. on November 1, 1755, All Saints Day, Paulo Cavalcanti is at the window of a four-story house on a precipitous street northeast of Rossio square in the heart of Lisbon. Luis Fialho is attending mass at the Basilica de Santa Maria, below Castelo do São Jorge. A tremor shakes the house, and ten seconds later, a devastating shock. Terremoto! The word crashes through Paulo’s senses. Earthquake!

In fifteen minutes, one third of Lisbon is reduced to rubble. An hour later, Paulo is on the Terreiro do Paço, the palace square, when a monstrous tidal wave races into the mouth of the Tagus. It roars inland, smashing through anchorages, demolishing buildings and sweeping away the Cais de Pedra, a marble-faced quay, with hundreds who sought safety here. Paulo survives the cataclysm and reaches Rossio. Carvalo e Melo is surveying the damage. A fidalgo suggests that they move the capital to Coimbra. The minister dismisses the idea, even as the skyline is lit with fires. “I will rebuild Lisbon,” he vows.
Luis Fialho Soares is wrongfully arrested for looting and thrown into the Tower of Belêm, where Paulo finds him after a month-long search. Dom António Fonseca gets Carvalho e Melo’s help in securing the young Brazilian’s release.

In May 1756, Bartolomeu Rodrigues Cavalcanti hosts a five-day festa to celebrate Paulo’s safe return to Engenho Santo Tomás, where a thirty-room casa grande with private chapel dominates the high ground occupied by six generations of Cavalcantis. Bartolomeu Rodrigues’s control of the vast estate with one hundred and fifty one slaves is firm but benign. The 68-year-old patriarch and Dona Catarina have five daughters and three sons. Geraldo at nineteen is the younger of Paulo’s brothers – a pleasant, lazy youth with a grand disinterest in most things; Graciliano is twenty-one, restless and impatient, and possessing a violent temper.

Estevão Ribeiro Adorno, descended from the great clan of Affonso Ribeiro, is head vaqueiro at Fazenda da Jurema, the Cavalcanti ranch in the interior of Pernambuco. In July 1756, Paulo and Padre Eugênio Viana, Santo Tomás’s priest, make the ten-day journey to Jurema, for the annual count of the herd of 5,500 beasts roaming 130 square miles of scrub. To Viana, Ribeiro Adorno and his people represent a never-ending exodus of the weak, the dispossessed, and the landless from the fertile Canaan of the coastal valleys to the backlands. By the time civilization advances here, will it come up with a brutal and impetuous race lost in the caatinga, Viana wonders presciently.

Paulo marries Luciana Costa Santos, the daughter of an independent cane grower in a valley controlled by the Cavalcantis. Five months after his brother’s wedding, Graciliano takes as lover Januária Ribeiro Adorno, who visits the engenho with her father on a cattle drive to the coast. Graciliano runs off with the girl to the Cavalcanti’s town house at Olinda. Bartolomeu Rodrigues leads six men to fetch Graciliano, who is carried back to Santo Tomás after a thrashing. Three weeks later, Graciliano leaves for good, riding off to the wilderness of Jurema and wild Januária.

At Lisbon in September 1759, King José I, issues a royal edict banning all Jesuits from his domains, a triumph for minister Carvalho e Melo, soon to be Marquis de Pombal. Two priests at the aldeia of Rosário near Santo Tomás join the exodus of 629 Jesuits from Portuguese America. Elias Souza Vanderley is appointed director of the settlement, with minute regulations to reform the natives and free blacks and integrate them into Portuguese society. One of Vanderley’s first tasks is to erect a pelourinho, a sixteen-foot pillory, symbol of the king’s authority.

Pedro Prêto, “Black Peter,” is a great grandson of Nhungaza, captain of the royal regiment of Ganga Zumba. A former slave, Pedro flourished under the Jesuits, becoming a skilled carpenter and serving with Rosário’s council of elders. Vanderley begins his regime by ordering Black Peter to remodel the priests’ quarters, where the director is soon ensconced with a supply of cachaça and concubines.

In July 1766, Director Vanderley, grown huge and bloated, witnesses the punishment of a thief at the pelourinho: Black Peter is condemned to one hundred lashes. Pedro was sent to fell and trim a stand of brazilwood trees found by Indians on lands without an owner. Five loads were delivered to Rosário when a peddler came by with an empty wagon. He offered payment in silver for seven logs. When Vanderley learned of the sale, he threw Black Peter into jail.

Three days after the flogging, as Pedro lies lacerated and exhausted, Vanderley and his overseer, Little George, rape Jovita and Vera, the daughters of Black Peter. When their father learns of the crime, he takes a double-bladed ax and kills the director in his bed before fleeing Rosário with two accomplices. Inspired by his ancestor who stood with Ganga Zumba, Black Peter begins a slave insurrection that spreads through the valleys of Pernambuco.
Paulo Cavalcanti rides with a militia hunting for Pedro and his band. A surprise attack at a creek beyond Rosário leaves the company without mounts and supplies. Paulo and two mixed-breeds go on foot to an engenho to seek horses. The front door is flung open by Black Peter, whose men occupy the plantation. Paulo is brutally tortured and murdered, Pedro himself dealing the death blow.

Graciliano returns to Santo Tomás summoned by his grieving father. Bartolomeu Rodrigues presses his head against the dusty leather of Graciliano’s long coat. “Meu filho! Meu filho! My son, it is over,” the senhor says, asking forgiveness for his pride and vanity. Graciliano vows to avenge his brother. “Paulo lies in the chapel,” Bartolomeu Rodrigues says. “Go softly, Graciliano. Make your vow to him.”

Graciliano leads a rustic cavalry of forty-two vaqueiros and engenho workers to the Serra do Barriga and the ruins of Palmares. Black Peter and his band are dug in at the former royal enclosure of Shoko. The vaqueiros storm a fortified embankment meeting a hail of bullets, but in ten minutes the fight is over. Pedro escapes to a rocky summit above the quilombo. Graciliano follows the fugitive to the Place of Stones and kills Black Peter in Ganga Zumba’s sanctuary.

Benedito Bueno da Silva has a reputation for courage equal to that of his ancestor Amador Flóres da Silva. He is the grandson of Olímpio Ramalho, the muleteer who struck gold in Minas Gerais. Benedito Bueno continued the mighty pathfinding adventures of men like Amador by leading river convoys to the goldfields of Cuiabá in Mato Grosso, a circuitous voyage of 3,500 miles. Since 1739, when he was thirteen, Benedito Bueno has made thirty journeys with the “monsoons,” so called for their seasonal departures from Porto Feliz, a canoe landing eighty miles northwest of São Paulo on the Rio Tieté.

At Itatinga on a horseshoe bend of the Tieté forty miles beyond Porto Feliz, Benedito Bueno got a land grant of nine square miles where he moved his wife and sons from the original da Silva property. Like his forbears, Benedito Bueno wanted to be in the sertão beyond effective reach of authority, where he could wield absolute power over the fifty-six souls at Itatinga and over the men of his pirogues. He enjoyed this independence for twenty years. With an increasing drift of colonists from São Paulo, a settlement grew up at Tiberica, a cattle halt south of Itatinga, granted town status in 1766. Silvestre da Silva, Benedito Bueno’s first-born son, welcomes these developments, accepting that the age of the bandeirantes is coming to a close and settling down to develop Itatinga.

On a morning in April 1788, Silvestre and two visitors witness the agony of Benedito Bueno laid low by a gnawing toothache. André Vaz da Silva, descended from Trajano who was executed by Amador, is a merchant at Vila Rica de Ouro Prêto, the capital of Minas Gerais. The second visitor is André’s friend, Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, alferes, a second lieutenant in the Sixth Company of Dragoons of Minas Gerais. The dragoon is a man of many talents, one that earns him his nickname Tiradentes, “Tooth-Puller.” Silva Xavier travels with his dental equipment and deftly does his work, extracting the monsoon captain’s decayed molar.

Alferes Silva Xavier and André Vaz share the Mineiros’ discontent at the plunder of Brazil by the royal treasury at Lisbon. The Crown’s demand of a thousand arrobas of gold a year – five hundred thousand ounces – was paid for a decade until the gold supply diminished. Now in arrears, the inhabitants of Minas Gerais are threatened with the derrama, a tax on every free man and slave, to make up the shortfall. Appeals for local enterprises such as a foundry are rejected to preserve Lisbon’s monopolies and British dominance of the Brazil trade.

At Itatinga, Silva Xavier expresses disgust at despotic government and suggests an alternative by reading to his hosts from the Declaration of Rights by the people of Virginia. Silvestre da Silva calls this is a prescription for revolution. These truths, Tiradentes responds, are the voice of reason against turmoil. They were given by men claiming their natural right to reject tyranny.

At Vila Rica de Ouro Prêto, a city of 80,000, Luis Fialho Soares, who survived the Lisbon earthquake with Paulo Cavalcanti, belongs to a cross-section of influential Mineiros – magnates, lawyers, priests, soldiers and farmers, poets and intellectuals, who meet regularly, their discussions driven by the winds of freedom blowing between the crags of Minas Gerais. Luis Fialho’s son, Fernandes Soares, returns from his medical studies in France, where he knew José de Maia, a fellow Brazilian dedicated to liberating their homeland. Fernandes and Maia met Thomas Jefferson at Nimes, when the Minister was taking the waters at Aix after a fall in which he cracked his wrist. Jefferson has no authority to promise direct aid, but is sympathetic to the idea of a free and independent Brazil.

Silva Xavier emerges as leader of the disparate group fanning an insurrection against Her Majesty Maria I’s government. Within three months, the Tooth-Puller’s war of words brings Minas Gerais to the brink of revolution. The imposition of the derrama is widely anticipated in February 1789, a royal extortion seen as ideally suited for the launching of a rebellion. A war of independence is expected to last three years, the new American republic to be launched under the banner of Libertas, quae sera tamen, “Liberty, even though late!”

André Vaz and Fernandes Soares transport a wagonload of gunpowder over the Mantiqueira Mountains, challenged by a band of highwaymen led by Dançerino da Corda. They outwit Rope Dancer and deliver the explosives to a fazenda in readiness for the uprising.
February passes without imposition of the new tax by the governor of Minas Gerais, visconde de Barbacena. Silva Xavier and the poet Alvarenga Peixoto, a wealthy fazendeiro and militia colonel, want to march immediately, but others hesitate. Silvério dos Reis, a tax farmer who owes the royal treasury the equivalent of a ton of gold goes to strike his own bargain with visconde de Barbacena: a full pardon for his debts in exchange for exposing the conspiracy against the Crown.

Alferes Silva Xavier and twenty-eight others involved in the “Inconfidência Mineira” are arrested and transported to the dungeons of Rio de Janeiro, where they are held incommunicado for thirty months. In 1792, Silva Xavier and ten men are sentenced to death. André Vaz and Fernandes Soares are banished to Africa for ten years. The royal tribunal spares the lives of all but one of the condemned: Tiradentes. Silva Xavier is led through the streets of Rio de Janeiro to be hanged at the field of Santo Domingo. ‘I have kept my word, I die for liberty,” is the Tooth-Puller’s last glorious confession.

BOOK FIVE: SONS OF THE EMPIRE (August 1855 – March 1870)

Antônio Paciência, “Patient Anthony,” is eight on a day in August 1855, when the slaver Saturnino Rabelo buys him from Heitor Baptista Ferreira at Fazenda da Jurema. The Cavalcantis sold their ranch to the Ferreira family half a century ago. Senhor Heitor is a poderoso do sertão, “great man of the earth,” chieftain of a feudal-like clan whose lands encompass three hundred square miles. Ferreira is aware that his son, João Montes, raped the slave Mãe Mônica and is the boy’s father. He is unmoved by Mãe Mônica’s plea to keep her child.

Antônio Paciência joins a column of 167 slaves being marched from the north of Brazil sixteen hundred miles south to the coffee groves of São Paulo. Brazil’s internal traffic is a response to a ban on the slave trade from Africa, which saw 3,650,000 blacks carried to Brazil over three centuries, almost ten times the number that reached English America.

Policarpo, a Mozambican-born slave in his late twenties, befriends Antônio on the long journey up the Rio São Francisco valley. Antônio has heard others talk respectfully of “Dom Pedro Segundo,” but knows nothing about this poderoso said to have power over all Brazil. Policarpo has seen the grand patrão riding along the rua Direita at Rio de Janeiro in an open carriage with eight cream-colored horses: Dom Pedro II, emperor of Brazil.

The Bragança royal family moved to Brazil five decades earlier, escorted from Portugal by a British squadron even as a Napoleonic army invaded the kingdom. The court of Queen Maria I was established at Rio de Janeiro, the colony elevated to a kingdom in the reign of her son, João. Dom João returned to Lisbon at the demand of the Cortes, the Portuguese parliament, leaving behind his 21-year-old son, Pedro, as his regent in Brazil.

When the Cortes insisted that Pedro also return to Europe, eight thousand citizens called on him to resist. On September 7, 1822, at the small stream of Ipiranga near São Paulo, Pedro proclaimed Brazil’s independence from Portugal. Two months later, Emperor Pedro was crowned in the cathedral at Rio de Janeiro, beginning an agitated nine-year reign that saw a republican uprising in Pernambuco, war with Argentina, and a succession of royal bastards fathered by His Majesty.

Pedro’s marriage to Archduchess Maria Leopoldina, daughter of Francis I of Austria, produced six children, including Pedro de Alcantara, who was five in 1825, when Pedro was forced to abdicate in his favor. Pedro I died in Portugal three years later and Pedro II ascended to the throne. The boy emperor was adopted with affection by the Brazilian people and served as a powerful symbol of national unity. A benevolent, erudite monarch, Pedro II is prone to melancholy in the radiant tropical land he was born to rule, yearning for the retreat of a scholarly life.”Were I not emperor, I would like to be a teacher,” he says.

On January 28, 1856, Antônio Paciência is with 175 slaves presented to prospective buyers at Saturnino Rabelo’s barracks at Sorocaba, sixty miles west of São Paulo. Rabelo is particularly attentive to one fazendeiro, who is seeking no fewer than thirty purchases:

Ulisses Tavares da Silva, the son of Silvestre and grandson of Benedito Bueno, is in his late sixties. Accompanying him is his grandson, Firmino Dantas da Silva, a pale slender youth. Ulisses Tavares was a student at Coimbra when Portugal was invaded and took up arms against the French; in September 1810, he was wounded at Bussaco, where 51,000 British and Portuguese defeated 65,000 Frenchmen. Five years later, back in Brazil, he’d gone to war again, for the conquest of the Banda Oriental, lands which were lost three years later extinguishing Brazil’s hope of extending its southern border to the Rio de la Plata.

In the mid-1830s, fazendeiros above the Rio Tieté had begun to grow coffee. By 1856, Ulisses Tavares is working 127 slaves and has more than 300,000 coffee bushes on a thousand acres at Itatinga. For his services to the empire, Dom Pedro II has made Ulisses Tavares da Silva a baron, his title derived from the lands he owns: Barão de Itatinga.

At Rabelo’s barracks, the baron selects twenty-five males and five females, Policarpo “Mossambe” among the adults he chooses. Antônio Paciência sits with the moleques, little black boys, and two other mulatto boys, feeling the misery of parting from Policarpo. But the children are hurried over to stand in front of Ulisses Tavares, who likes the look of the dark-skinned mulatto with his big eyes and honest face. To his relief, Antônio is bought by the baron.

Antônio is perplexed when they halt at Tiberica and the baron’s grandson marches him to the most prosperous store in town. Ulisses Tavares himself outfits the boy in a white blouse and long gray trousers hitched up with bright red braces. He is made to ride beside the driver of the baron’s carriage on the six miles to Itatinga, where the sprawling mansion occupied by Ulisses Tavares and his family stands amid tufted royal palms.

Antônio waits at the entrance to the house, while Firmino Dantas fetches a young girl, whom Antônio takes to be Firmino’s sister. She is Teodora Rita Mendes da Silva and in a week’s time, she will be thirteen, a tempestuous girl with small black eyes and a sharp tongue. Teodora Rita is the wife of 67-year-old Ulisses Tavares, a widower who doted on the child since meeting her at her father’s house two years ago. Emilio Mendes, a wealthy fazendeiro and dear friend of the baron, gave permission for their marriage.

Ulisses Tavares tells his child bride that Antônio Paciência is for her, a gift for Teodora Rita’s birthday.

On November 12, 1864, Marqués de Olinda, a Brazilian vessel, is stopped and seized by a Paraguayan warship, the packet’s crew and passengers interned at Asunción. This is one of several actions that precipitate the War of the Triple Alliance that sees Brazil, Argentina and the Colorado faction of Uruguay taking the field against Paraguay. President Francisco Solano López leads an army of 40,000 soldiers, mostly Guarani and their mestizo descendants, with a corps of foreign engineers responsible for Paraguay’s defenses, including the fortress of Humaitá on the Rio Paraguay, “the Sevastopol of South America.”

Ulisses Tavares confidently predicts that Brazilian forces will occupy Asunción in three months and crush the ambitions of “Emperor López, Napoleon of the Plata,” and his Irish mistress, Eliza Alicia Lynch. Firmino Dantas da Silva will lead ninety-two voluntários da patria from Tiberica, including Antônio Paciência and Policarpo Mossambe, among six slaves “donated” to Dom Pedro II’s army by Ulisses Tavares. At a grand ball on the eve of leaving for the war in February 1865, Firmino Dantas is swept off his feet by Renata, the daughter of August Laubner, a Swiss apothecary settled at Tiberica.

At Riachuelo on a great bend of the Rio Paraná, a Brazilian squadron with nine ships engages a Paraguayan fleet in a bloody battle that rages seven hours. Second-Lieutenant Fábio Alves Cavalcanti is assistant surgeon on the corvette Jequitinhonha, which runs aground in range of Paraguayan shore batteries, almost half her crew killed or grievously wounded, before the Paraguayans break off action and withdraw above the Paraná.

The Tiberica voluntários serve with the First Corps under General Manuel Luís Osório, when the Allies invade Paraguayan soil in April 1866. “O Pensador,” (“The Thinker,”) as Firmino Dantas’s fellow officers call him, has no stomach for war, unlike his cousin Clóvis Lima da Silva, artillery major with the Batería Mallet. – Clóvis is descended from André Vaz da Silva, who died in exile in Africa. – The cousins take the field together at Tuyuti, where thirty-five thousand men with a hundred field guns are attacked by twenty-three thousand Paraguayan cavalry and infantry. Firmino Dantas is terror-struck when his position is overrun by Guarani cavalrymen. The guns of Batería Mallet hold, until Manuel Luís Osório himself leads an infantry charge that smashes the Paraguayan line. Policarpo Mossambe is singled out by Osório for a battlefield promotion to corporal.

Tuyuti is the first of many land battles in the bloodiest war fought between nations in the Americas. At Curupaiti, an advance battery six miles below Humaitá, Policarpo and Antônio storm an abatis; a shell explodes in front of the tangle of branches killing Policarpo and knocking Antônio senseless. Five thousand Brazilians and Argentinians lie dead; the Paraguayans count only fifty-four casualties. Two weeks after Curupaiti, Emperor Pedro II issues a decree freeing 25,000 slave soldiers serving in the Imperial army, too late for “Policarpo Brasileiro,” as Antônio salutes his friend.

Hadley Baines Tuttle, a young Londoner who fought at the Crimea, is an assistant to Colonel George Thompson, a former British army officer serving in Paraguay. They build forty-two miles of trenches and fortifications at Humaitá and eight riverside batteries that keep twenty Brazilian warships at bay for more than a year. The waters of the Rio Paraguay are made deadly with hundreds of floating torpedoes devised by Luke Kruger, an itinerant tinkerer from Pittsburgh in the United States, master-torpedoman for Marshal-President López.

In the third year of the war, the two armies are ground to a halt, a murderous summer seeing thousands of men carried off by cholera and typhoid. Three times López seeks peace, but is unwilling to accept a demand that he leave Paraguay. Dom Pedro’s minister of war, marqués de Caxias, takes command of the Brazilian forces and readies 30,000 men for the encirclement of Humaitá. In a second Paraguayan attack on Tuyuti, now main supply base for the Allies, Clóvis Lima da Silva is taken prisoner; Firmino Dantas is severely wounded at the very site where he cowered during the earlier battle.

At Paso la Patria hospital, Firmino is treated by Lt. Surgeon Fábio Alves Cavalcanti, from whom he learns that Renata Laubner is a nurse volunteer in Paraguay. He has a chance to see Renata when the ship carrying him back to Brazil stops at Corrientes, but he stays aboard, quite correct in sensing young Cavalcanti’s own love for a perfect angel from Tiberica.

Major Hadley Tuttle commands the Batería de Londres on February 19, 1868, when the Brazilian squadron runs the gauntlet at Humaitá. The Brazilian passage is made possible by three new iron-plated monitors built at Rio de Janeiro and armed with 70-to 120-pounders. Valiant Paraguayan bogavantes paddle their canoes to make a bold assault on the lead monitor, leaping to the Alagoas’s deck and tearing at the hatches with their bare hands until bullets from the turret rake them down.

Invested by land, Humaitá surrenders six months later, and the Allies advance toward Asunción. President López sets up new lines in the Lomas Valentinas hills below the capital, where the Allies are bent on dealing the death blow to his army. At Avaí, 22,000 men clash in a four-hour battle in which the Paraguayan battalions are annihilated, but 4,200 Brazilians and Argentinians also go down.

Antônio Paciência is a stretcher-bearer at Avaí. Long past midnight, he is with two comrades, Tipoana, a Pancuru Indian who goes by the nickname of “Urubu,” and Henrique Inglez, a mulatto, the son of an English actor who has lived in Brazil for forty years. The trio is adept at finding spoils as they move across battlefields thickly sown with friend and foe.

The first Allied troops enter Asunción on January 1, 1869, greeted by several thousand poorer Guarani and mestizos, and for every man, four or five women, emaciated and almost nude. The ravaging of the city begins as rumors spread of the hidden fortunes of El Presidente and La Lynch; night after night, the sky glows with fires set by rampaging soldiers. On January 14, the marqués de Caxias, issues Order of the Day Number 272: “The war has come to an end.” Seventy-two hours later, Caxias collapses during a thanksgiving service and relinquishes his command.

In April 1869, Hadley Tuttle and thirty-nine raiders burst through the valley of Pirayu from their base camp at Cerro León east of Asunción. They’re aboard an armored train with two sandbagged flatcars pulled by Piccadilly Pride, a rickety locomotive that served on the Sevastopol-Balaklava line. They head for the headquarters of the new Brazilian commander, Prince Louis Gaston, Comte d’Eu, son-in-law of Emperor Pedro II.

López has raised a new army of 13,000, drawn from every corner of Paraguay. His arsenal has cast eighteen new field guns and stockpiled 600,000 shells. López rises to combat, too, those suspected of plotting to overthrow the dictator. These foes include his older brother, Venancio; his sisters; and, his mother, Dona Juana López. Throughout the war, Eliza Alicia Lynch has remained totally loyal to El Presidente.

Piccadilly Pride makes a smooth run to the Brazilian camp, where her field guns open up setting fire to everything within range. When the Brazilians begin to retaliate, Hadley Tuttle backs up beyond a bridge, which they blow up before racing for home. They’re two miles from the head of Pirayu valley, when three hundred Rio Grande do Sul cavalrymen catch up with the train charging beside the flatcars with lance and sabre. Other horsemen storm ahead to lay a log barrier across the rails into which Piccadilly Pride rockets, her overheated boiler blowing with a terrific explosion.

On August 16, the Brazilian sledgehammer is raised on a plain called Acosta Ňu, where comte d’Eu brings four divisions with twenty thousand men to face 4,300 Paraguayans. Colonel Clóvis Lima da Silva, released from captivity; Fábio Alves Cavalcanti; and Antônio Paciência are all witness to what happens on this wintry day. At 7.a.m. Clóvis’s guns open fire; by mid-morning infantry attacks begin with thousands advancing on the Paraguayan trenches. From the north, the first blocks of cavalrymen are unleashed from a body of eight thousand. For nine hours the Paraguayans withstand the onslaughts before they are overrun. “Ce’st magnifique!” said comte d’Eu. “Ce moment de la victoire!”

The soldier’s holding the plain at Acosta Ňu bought precious time for Francisco Solano López who escapes with a vanguard of two thousand. Behind them they leave two thousand dead, eighteen hundred are boys, some just children of six and seven lying beside flintlock muzzle-loaders.

López eludes his pursuers for six months. He is trapped at Cerro Corá, “The Corral,” 230 miles northeast of Asunción, with five hundred men and boys. And here, too, is Eliza Lynch and their five sons. López orders Eliza to flee in a carriage with four of their offspring, the fifth son leading her escort, fifteen-year-old Colonel Juan Francisco López. A Brazilian kills Juan when the carriage is surrounded and he refuses to surrender. At the Corral, a battle lasts fifteen minutes, before a lancer spurs his horse toward El Presidente and slashes his abdomen. On a high bank a mile north of the camp, López is helped off his horse by his staff. Brazilians find him sitting in the mud next to a small palm. Shot at point-blank range, “I die with my country,” are his last words.
In five years of war, ninety percent of the men and boys of Paraguay are slain. The Allies lose 190,000 men, the majority of them Brazilians.

{SPOILER ALERT -- THIS IS A SYNOPSIS OF A NOVEL THAT RUNS TO 340,000 WORDS. NONETHELESS, THE PLOT SUMMARY CONTAINS INCIDENTS AND SCENES THAT REVEAL KEY ELEMENTS OF THE STORY.>

BOOK SIX: THE BRAZILIANS (November 1884 – December 1906)

Dr. Fábio Alves Cavalcanti is on the platform at the Teatro Santa Isabel in Recife on a Sunday in November 1884, when abolitionist Joaquim Aurélio Nabuco denounces slavery in Brazil. A Free-Womb law offered conditional liberty to slave children born after 1871 but only 118 of 400,000 of these ingénuos (innocents) have been freed. Only the northern province of Ceará has declared itself free of slavery, its abolitionists spurred on by a strike of Fortaleza’s boatmen who refused to ferry out to ships slaves who were to be transported to the south.

Rodrigo Cavalcanti, older brother of Fábio, is senhor de engenho of Santo Tomás, where eighty-five slaves labor alongside 180 families of agregados (“associates”) and gangs of itinerant cane cutters. Rodrigo agrees that slavery must go, but wants it to die out gradually, as the Free-Womb law provides; with a million slaves on the coffee plantations of the south, he fears a bloody convulsion that could threaten the monarchy, already challenged by Republican agitators. Dom Pedro II is 59, his health impaired by diabetes and malaria; Princess Isabel is popular but her French husband, Comte d’Eu, considered likely to be instrumental in a third empire.

Fábio’s home and medical practice are at Boa Vista, Recife, and his life there a total break from the patriarchal regime of the engenho. He sees an evil for Brazil in the vast landholdings that keep hundreds of impoverished families tied to large estates like serfs. Fábio’s concern for the landless mass is genuine. But each time he returns to Santo Tomás, he has the feeling of coming home. He is in Rodrigo’s debt for the welcome given him and Renata on their return from Paraguay. They have three children, Ana and Amalia, and a son, Emílio.

Rodrigo’s youngest son, nineteen-year-old Celso, is living at Fábio’s home in Boa Vista, while attending Recife Law School. The house is open to a regular stream of abolitionists and freemasons, from whom Celso gets ideas that make Rodrigo fear he is an incipient “anarchist.” A groundless concern though Celso does harbor a secret passion to be a priest.

Celso joins six men who meet in secrecy in a house on the rua da Cruz in Recife’s old quarter. They are members of Clube do Cupim, which takes its name from the cupim, the termite, and its motto, too: Destroy without Noise. The club helps slaves fleeing from the plantations of Pernambuco to the coast and by sea to Ceará. The chairman of the Termite Club is “Agamemnon de Andrade Melo,” an actor popular with audiences at the Teatro Santa Isabel. He is none other than Henrique Inglez, the younger, who prowled the battlefields of Paraguay robbing corpses with Tipoana and Antônio Paciência.

Henrique Inglez tells Celso that forty “pineapples” – code word for fugitive slaves – are ready to flee the district of Rosário. Thirty-two are from Engenho Santo Tomás. Rodrigo is in Europe, buying machinery for a sugar mill, leaving Celso’s brother, Duarte, in charge of the plantation. At a rendezvous on the old road to Rosário, Celso meets Jorge Chinela, “Slipper George,” a Cupim agent. They begin a perilous 75-mile journey to the coast traveling by night. By day, they hide the slaves at an abandoned engenho central which is searched by mounted capangas from Santo Tomás and other plantations. The henchmen leave without finding Celso, Slipper George and the fugitives in the cavernous mill. Three hours later Duarte Cavalcanti rides up with the Guarda Nacional, but they, too, fail to trap the runaways. Four nights later, Celso and Slipper George make a final dash to Itamaracá Island, where the slaves are ferried to a vessel that takes them to freedom.

At the inauguration of Usina Jacuribe, Rodrigo Cavalcanti celebrates the launch of a factory to process canes from Rosário’s plantations. He sees the usina as ultimate triumph for generations of Cavalcantis in the valleys of Santo Tomás and the promise of maintaining their vast latifundia in perpetuity.
Bábá Epifánia, a BaKongo slave manumitted according to terms of Ulisses Tavares da Silva’s will, belongs to the caiphazes (named after the Jewish high priest Caiaphas),militant abolitionists in São Paulo province. In October 1887, at the quilombo of Tamanduatei-Mirim, eighty miles west of Tiberica, Epifánia and Nô Gonzaga plot the flight of one hundred of Itatinga’s 370 slaves.

Firmino Dantas da Silva runs the fazenda on the Rio Tietê, with its 750,000 coffee trees, cane fields, sawmills and herds of cattle. At his side is Aristides Tavares, the son of Ulisses Tavares and Teodora Rita. (The baroness lives in Paris, a vivacious belle among a glittering colony of Brazilians.) Firmino is married to Teodora Rita’s sister, Carlinda Mendes, plump, domestic and deeply superstitious. Epifánia, a wet nurse to the da Silva children, is a sorcerer, whose arts of magic Carlinda relies on for protection against the evil eye of Exú. Firmino Dantas is himself bewitched by Jolanta, the poet Amêrico dos Santos’s daughter, who he keeps as mistress at Tiberica.

Epifánia drugs the overseers of slave gangs clearing the jungle at Itatinga. Nô Gonzaga and the caiphazes escort one-hundred-and-twenty-eight slaves to a railhead six hours’ away. When their flight is discovered, Aristides rides to Tiberica to summon Eduardo da Silva, Colonel Clóvis’ oldest son, who is chief of police nicknamed “Cockroach Killer” for his ruthlessness. His second-in- command is Cadmus Rawlings, a Confederate veteran who came to Brazil after the Civil War. Sergeant Rawlings lives with a dark-skinned mulatta and their three children but has no trouble reconciling his domestic situation with his abhorrence of Negroes.

The police find the São Paulo train stopped half-an-hour away from the railhead, the engineer beaten into admitting that they are waiting for Itatinga’s runaways. The passengers are ordered out of the coaches and Aristides sees his old wet nurse among them. Cadmus Rawlings raises his riding whip to Baba Epifánia, but Aristides stops him. Nô Gonzaga and his men show themselves, rising up on top of the coaches and in the grass beyond. Eduardo da Silva fires first and is shot dead. Aristides is wounded. Cadmus Rawlings empties his six-shooter, as other Tiberica policemen drop their weapons and flee. Gonzaga’s troop give a cheer as Rawlings rides off with the corpse of Eduardo da Silva and the young fazendeiro, who is in no danger. Twenty-three slaves are caught on the flight down the Serra do Mar to Santos, but the rest join 4,500 runaways at Jabaquará quilombo.

On Christmas Day, 1887, Firmino Dantas and Aristides offer 203 remaining slaves a small wage for the next harvest and freedom in two years. By the end of the week, all but thirty-three slaves abandon Itatinga, a scene repeated through the “Black Triangle” of Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. On May 13, 1888, Princess Isabel acts as regent for Dom Pedro who is in Europe, signing “The Golden Law” that abolishes slavery in Brazil. That same year, 100,000 Italian immigrants arrive to work in the coffee groves, 115 colonos welcomed to Itatinga by Firmino and Aristides.

On the Isla Fiscal in Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay, 4,000 guests attend a fantastic ball given by Emperor Pedro II on November 9, 1889. Rodrigo Cavalcanti, Baron of Jacuribe, is confident that the monarchy will endure. Lieutenant Honôrio da Silva, an army officer like his father Clóvis, is a republican and believer in the Positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, with its motto of Order and Progress. Aristides is at the ball with his wife, Anna Pinto; he sees a tottering empire brought to the brink by dissension between Pedro’s ministers and the military. The Revolution of November 15 takes place with a single shot fired as the Bragança dynasty is swept away and the United States of Brazil proclaimed.

Two days later, Aristides and Honôrio are on the palace square at 3.00 A.M. when Dom Pedro and his family leave for Europe. ”Alferes Silva Xavier lit the torch of freedom one hundred years ago,” says Honôrio. “God knows, Tiradentes is watching.”

Colonel Clóvis Da Silva marches with 5,000 troops sent to crush an uprising in the backlands of Bahia, 250 miles north-west of Salvador. Antônio Conselheiro – “The Counselor” – is an anchorite who predicts the end of the world in 1899 and sees a New Jerusalem where Dom Sebastião, the Portuguese king who fell in battle against the Moors in 1578, returns to rule the Faithful. Conselheiro attracts 20,000 followers to Canudos, variously described as fanatics, bandits and monarchists. Three earlier expeditions are repulsed with heavy loss of life.

Clóvis positions his guns on a ridge below Monte Favela four thousand feet from Conselheiro’s crude citadel with its labyrinth of streets and alleys and massive unfinished church. On their first night at Canudos in July 1887, General Artur Oscar’s column is attacked by 3,000 rebels. Clóvis hears a cry that sends a chill down his spine: “Macacos! Macacos! Macacos!” The same insult hurled by Guarani on the bloody fields of Paraguay.

It is Antônio Paciência who mocks the gunners. Returning to Fazenda da Jurema after the war, he was overjoyed to find his mother, Mãe Mônica, alive. Acknowledged as a bastard son by Heitor Ferreira, Antônio joined the vaqueiros of Jurema and served as a jagunço, a clan gunman. In 1882, Chico Tico-Tico, his best friend, is murdered. Antônio is implicated when Chico’s son, Zé Cavalcente, shoots the brother of his father’s killer; Antônio is sentenced to eight years’ hard labor. He escapes into the sertão and finds a home with Vivaldo Maria Marques, a salineiro (harvester of salt.) Antônio joins Marques as a salt trader and marries his daughter, Rosalina, with whom he has two sons, Teotônio and Juraci Cristiano.

In 1893, Antônio and Vivaldo settle at Canudos with their families, personally invited by The Counselor for their salvation. Antônio is one of several hundred Paraguayan war veterans and emerges as a commander. Zé Cavalcante’s gang of bandits rides with the rebels cutting a bloody swathe through the caatinga in ambuscades of government troops.

The morning after the surprise attack on Monte Favela, Clóvis and his gunners begin a lethal bombardment that lasts thirty minutes before a counterattack brings hundreds of rebels to the ridge. In the hand-to-hand fighting to save his guns Clóvis is mortally wounded. Five miles away Antônio Paciência and Zé Cavalcente rout General Oscar’s supply train.

Padre Celso Cavalcanti, from the archbishopric at Salvador, ministers to 817 wounded on Monte Favela. In the years since his work with the Termite Club, Celso has not lost his concern for the oppressed. He supports the Church’s fight against fanaticism but is aware of intolerable conditions among the sertanejos that drive them to accept the promises of false prophets like Conselheiro. Celso comforts Major Honôrio da Silva, who is with Cláudio Savaget’s Second Column, but the lancer dismisses the priest’s compassion for an accursed tribe.

God’s Thunderer, a Whitworth siege gun, and eighteen other pieces pound the lower town. Antônio’s son, Teotônio, tags along with a squad sent to destroy the Whitworth and dies in a hail of bullets. Rosalina perishes in a rain of shells from a mile-wide arc of guns. In the caatinga beyond the beleaguered citadel, Honôrio da Silva’s company adopts the tactics of the jagunços flushing out bandits in the thorn-studded scrub. Zé Cavalcante’s band are caught in the open, their leader himself killed. Marshal Carlos Machado Bittencourt, minister of war, takes over the campaign. The siege lines tighten, outlying barrios overrun, the church towers knocked down in the incessant bombardment.

Sickness rages through the town. Antônio Conselheiro is one of the victims, dying two days before the investment of Canudos is complete. The sertanejos continue to resist, Major Honôrio’s lancers storming earthworks where defenders fight to the last against the rush of steel and fire. Padre Celso finds a confidant who shares his views about the abandonment of an oppressed class of Brazilians beyond reach of civilization: Euclídes da Cunha, a military man turned correspondent for the Estado de São Paulo.

Two thousand government troops storm the plaza and raise the green and gold banner of Brazil over the battered ramparts of New Jerusalem. A three-hour ceasefire is granted to allow women and children to cross the lines. Antônio Paciência’s leads Juraci Cristiano to safety, Celso Cavalcanti taking the boy from him with a promise that he will be unharmed. Three days later, Antônio falls with the last defenders of Canudos.

Juraci Cristiano is placed in an orphanage at Salvador. Celso returns to Recife from the Bahia in 1903 as an assistant to the bishop of Pernambuco. Henrique Inglez is at Dr. Fábio house when Celso speaks about Juraci and his father at Canudos. Henrique tells them of his time with Antônio Paciência in Paraguay. Fábio and Renata offer whatever help Juraci Cristiano needs and pay for him to go to the Marist’s school at Olinda. In December 1906, Celso collects the boy from school and takes him to Engenho Santo Tomás, where he spends the Christmas holidays with the Cavalcantis, welcomed into the Casa Grande by Baron Rodrigo. Celso knows this is only one child, but takes joy in imagining that others like Juraci Cristiano will find opportunity to flourish in Brazil. The land of the future. Their land.

EPILOGUE: THE CANDANGOS (April 1956 – April 1960)

Roberto da Silva is imbued with the daring and drive of his bandeirante ancestors. Fifteen when he first took off from a dirt strip outside Tiberica, in 1944 he flew with the First Pursuit Group on missions in northern Italy in support of the “Smoking Cobras,” a Brazilian force of 25,000 men attached to Mark Clark’s Fifth Army, the only South American soldiers to go to war alongside the Allies. Roberto is a civil engineer, who heads up the da Silva’s construction company in São Paulo, one of twenty-four family-owned enterprises in addition to Itatinga, where four million coffee trees flourish on the red earth above the Rio Tietê.

On April 19, 1956, Roberto visits his father, Amílcar da Silva, son of Aristides Tavares, at Itatinga bringing news of a bold move by the new president, Juscelino Kubitschek: Brazil is to have a new capital in Goiás on the high central plateau. Amílcar dismisses Brasília as the crazy idea of a new pharaoh. Roberto embraces the plan as a beacon for Brazil that will end the inertia that has kept Brazilians clinging to lands near the coast and reverse a tidal wave of poor swarming into the favelas (taken from “Monte Favela” at Canudos) of Rio and other cities.

In the valley of Santo Tomás, Anacleto Pacheco has cut cane for forty-four years. Pacheco has fathered twenty-three children, twelve of whom died, most in infancy. Raimundo, twenty-three, is the only one of Anacleto’s grown sons working on the plantation. The family rents a small patch of land from the Cavalcanti brothers, Durval and José, who run Usina Jacuribe, which processes cane from every plantation in Rosário district.

In September 1958, Raimundo Pacheco meets Eduardo Corrêa of the Ligas Camponêsas (Peasant Leagues,) an agrarian reform movement. Raimundo is influenced by Corrêa’s talk of ending the cambão, the “yoke,” whereby one day a month families like the Pachecos are obliged to labor without pay as partial recompense for use of the land they occupy. Anacleto has heard Senhor Durval denounce the Leagues and threaten to evict any worker spreading their poison in his valleys.

Dr. Juraci Cristiano runs two clinics at Santo Tomás, one at the old Casa Grande, which has been boarded up for twenty years. With the support of the Cavalcantis, Antônio Paciência’s son studied medicine and established a practice at Recife. Juraci’s own radical views led him to the Communist-backed Alianca Nacional Libertadora (ANL,) which caused a rift between him and Alvaro Cavalcanti, father of Durval and José. When the ANL was banned by President Getúlio Vargas, militant Communists staged an uprising which was suppressed. Juraci took no part in the insurrection but was briefly jailed with the instigators. The Cavalcantis eventually relented and allowed the “old Communist” to return to their valleys.

Anacleto Pacheco begins to understand the slavery of the “yoke.” He confides in Dr. Juraci, who agrees that the cambão is a curse but warns Pacheco not to challenge Durval Cavalcanti. Change is bound to come, he says, but it will be slow. – How slow? He wonders. “A century from now? When Raimundo Pacheco and his sons are in their graves, with their calloused hands crossed on their chests?”

Seven tenants led by Anacleto and Raimundo ask the Cavalcantis to abolish the cambão, the delegation hoping for a sympathetic hearing from Senhor José, known to show concern for the cane workers. Durval rejects the appeal and orders Anacleto and his family summarily evicted, because of their contact with the Peasant Leagues.

Joazinho Villa Nova, head capanga, and his enforcers load the Pachecos’ belongings onto a truck and dump the family on the Rosário road. Raimundo is injured in a separate confrontation and taken to Juraci Cristiano’s clinic, where Durval finds him. Cavalcanti rejects Juraci’s bid for mercy for the Pachecos, but orders Joazinho to leave Raimundo in the doctor’s care. The rest of the family is headed for the caatinga, where Anacleto’s half-brother keeps goats. Raimundo chooses to ride the pau-de-arara, the “parrot’s perch,” roosting in the back of a truck heading for the site of Brasília, where there is work for the sertanejos. He looks for the last time on the green valley where he was born. “Yes, son, for the Cavalcantis, this is Canaan,” Juraci Cristiano says.

In March 1959, Shavante Indians attack road builders on a 232-kilometer section of the Brasília-Belém highway under construction by Roberto da Silva’s company. Roberto and Bruno Ramos Salgado of the Serviçio de Proteção dos Indios (SPI) fly to a camp at Kilometer 189, deep in the Amazon rain forest. Salgado is half-Parési, descended from “Mad Murilo” Salgado, a notorious Indian hunter; his own father, Izaias, butchered Caripuna and Pacaas Novas who harassed men building the Madeira-Mamoré railroad. Izaias was himself pacified when he joined the Telegraphic Commission under Colonel Cándido Rondon, who forbade the slaying of Indians, with the credo, “Die if necessary, but never kill.” Bruno follows this example with the SPI, which Rondon founded.

An expert tracker, Bruno leads Roberto and two workers into the forest beyond Kilometer 189. At a river crossing, a young Shavante warrior appears on the bank with a long bow and war club. Unarmed and gesturing friendship, Bruno goes to the Shavante, who is quickly joined by four others. Salgado begins an impromptu dance, leaping and running along the riverbank; Indians speed along beside him, symbolic of the great log races their people run. The tension diffuses, the full band of nineteen emerges, accepting gifts Roberto offers, mirrors, fish hooks and other trinkets. Bruno, who works with Shavante established in settlements along the Rio das Mortes, offers to locate the band at one of the SPI posts. In the morning, the Shavante are gone.

In 1960, Roberto and his family attend the inauguration of the new capital. Senhor Amilcar doesn’t forget his skepticism about “pharaoh” Juscelino’s mirage in the desert. His wife, Dona Cora, laments that her old friend, Max Grosskopf, a renowned São Paulo restaurateur, is operating “Chez Maximilian” in a favela, as she sees Cidade Livre outside Brasilia, a gaudy neon-lit antidote to the precise vision of Oscar Niemeyer and Lucío Costa. Mariette Monteiro da Silva, Roberto’s nineteen-year-old daughter, is thrilled by Brasilia sharing her father’s a grand, magnificent gesture toward the future.

On April 21, 1960, tens of thousands of candangos¬ – a Kimbindu word applied to 60,000 Brazilians who built the new capital, simply ‘a man who works hard’ – parade along the mall toward the Plaza of the Three Powers. Roberto walks among them, as does Raimundo Pacheco, who came on the parrot’s perch. President Kubitschek inaugurates the capital of the United States of Brazil, in honor of Lieutenant Joaquin José da Silva Xavier, who gave his life for the liberty of his people. At a window on the twentieth floor of the twin skyscrapers, Amilcar da Silva gazes out, not at the gleaming city, but far in the distance to where the cerrado is darkening:

This vast sertão, not only over the next hill or across the next river, but deep within the soul. A call to Paradise or Hell for our forefathers. Were they out there, now, Amador Flóres da Silva and Benedito Bueno – all those who had opened the way for this conquest? Were the old bandeirantes gazing back in awe at this city – this El Dorado they had sought for so long?

AFTERWORD (March – April 2000)

Tóninho

Padre Antônio “Tôninho” Paciência, Juraci Cristiano’s grandson, is the priest at Magdalena, poorest parish of Rosário. In March 2000, the Landless Workers Movement (MST) holds a meeting in the church hall at which thirty families led by sharecropper Luis Alves de Sá declare themselves ready to march with the landless army. Ten days later, Padre Tôninho and MST organizers lead ninety-two adults and sixty-eight children, who invade Engenho Santo Tomás. They set up camp on a 900-acre parcel, originally the site of a Tobajara clan’s malocas, later the stamping ground of the degredado Affonso Ribeiro’s tribe. The Cavalcanti’s never grew a stalk of cane here.

Clodomir Cavalcanti and his wife Xeniá Freitas de Melo have restored the Casa Grande, where Padre Tôninho occasionally officiates in the chapel and enjoys the same welcome as shown Dr. Juraci. Clodomir is president of the local Farmers’ Association, an outspoken opponent of Sem Terra (“Without Land”) but condemns landowners who take the law into their own hands and whose hired gunmen have killed 1,000 people in a decade. He tells Tôninho he will go to court to have the squatters evicted, but can’t guarantee what other owners will do.

“Affonso Ribeiro,” as the MST camp is called, withstands a four-hour siege of terror by justiceros armed with rifles and dynamite bombs. Padre Tôninho is ambushed by gunmen, his VW shot up and wrecked. Clodomir Cavalcanti rescues him from the overturned car, miraculously unhurt, and takes him to the Casa Grande. From the window of the great house, Clodomir can see the patch of jungle with the new settlement of Affonso Ribeiro and the people who came to seek a new country, not for the great men of the earth alone but all Brazilians.

Mariette da Silva Prado

Mariette da Silva Prado belongs to the powerful Clube das Monções, where a statue of Benedito Bueno da Silva dominates the entrance to what is practically an institution of Tiberica’s men, who still bristle at the entrada of women like Dona Mariette. Roberto’s daughter is bold and tough, and tireless in pursuing her goals that include running the Casa dos Meninos, a children’s shelter founded by her in Riachuelo, the biggest of Tiberica’s favelas. The Casa cares for 200 boys and girls, among them forty meninos da rua, from the city’s 3,000 children of the streets.

Mariette became first woman mayor of Tiberica in 1987, winning as candidate for the Workers’ Party against Oscar Amaral Dutra. Dutra was hailed for the “miracle” of Tiberica that saw the município advance to a bustling manufacturing center of 190,000. Dona Mariette’s two terms were spent fighting waste and corruption that made Tiberica a cesspool of bribery during the old chefe’s twenty-four-year rule.

Roberto, retired to Itatinga, still one of the finest and richest coffee plantations in the world, was not surprised when his daughter took up the banner of the Workers’ Party. When she was in her twenties, Mariette was with the right, an organizer of the “March of the Family with God for Liberty,” in São Paulo on March 19, 1964 to protest the government of João Goulart. Twelve days later the army launched a coup that instituted a military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for twenty-one years.

In 1965, Marietta was traveling in Europe, when she met Gilson Prado, a student at the London School of Economics. Married in 1966, they set up home in São Paulo, where Gilson lectured at the University of São Paulo. In March 1973, Prado was picked up by DOPS, the Department for Political and Social Order, because of involvement with the militant Catholic Action. Eleven days after his abduction by the political police, Gilson’s body was turned over to his widow. The official autopsy claimed that Gilson died by hanging in his cell, but a fellow detainee revealed that he was perversely tortured for three days. Mariette herself came under suspicion. Roberto wanted his daughter and two grandsons to leave the country, but she refused to go.

At the Casa das Meninos on April 12, 2000, Marcos Gonzaga, who shines shoes outside the five-star Paraupava Hotel, seeks help in finding his sister Rosalie. She is a runaway who has been seen with the daughter of Pedro Dominguez, king of Tiberica’s garbage dump. Marcos is frightened to approach Pedro Rei – “King Peter” – who controls a malodorous empire where men, women and children mine the landfill like garimpeiros looking for gold.

Dona Marietta goes with Marcos to Pedro Rei, who suggests they look for Rosalie and his daughter in Ipêlandia, a suburb next to Tiberica’s factories teeming with bars and brothels. A street kid who knows Teresa Dominguez leads them to a vacant lot with an abandoned bus, where the girls take the men who pay them for sex. Teresa refuses help, but thirteen-year-old Rosalie who is obviously pregnant lets Marcos take her hand and lead her outside.

In Tiberica in four months’ time Rosalie’s child will be born in the favela. It will give its first cry in an unjust country. Brazilians like Mariette da Silva hear that cry.

Bruno Ramos Salgado

“The Old Devil” is eighty years old in 2000, long retired from the National Foundation for the Indigenous (FUNAI) successor to the Indian Protection Service (SPI.) Bruno Salgado lives at the tiny village of Kaimari in the Serra dos Paresís, a living hero who risked his life to save the forest people of Rondonia. He remains a scourge of interlopers, especially illegal loggers who he despises for destroying the rainforest.

Ten years earlier, rival tree cutters killed three men near Kaimari, including Edson Monteiro, a Pataxó from the state of Bahia, whose Indian name was Apurinã. Salgado found a lone survivor in the jungle camp: Tajira, Monteiro’s four-year-old son, whose father brought him to the jungle after his mother died. The Old Devil’s friends at FUNAI could not locate the boy’s relatives and the child stayed with Salgado, a blessing to his protector who has no children of his own.

In April 2000, Bruno resolves to find the boy’s people, knowing no one will be there for Tajira when he is gone. The pair leave Kaimari for Pimento Bueno, the nearest town, where they take the Porto Velho-Cuiabá bus, and from there to Brasília, and finally across the highlands of Minas Gerais to the coast. Their destination is Santa Cruz Cabrália, fifteen miles north of Porto Seguro, where a group of Pataxó Indians live. They arrive on April 25, 2000 amid celebrations to mark the 500th anniversary of the Portuguese captain, Pedro Álvarez Cabral’s dropping anchor off the islet of Coroa Vermelho.

On the eve of a commemorative mass at Coroa Vermelho, Bruno and Tajira go to the house of Ticua Mattos, a grand old dame of the Pataxó, who takes one look at the boy and declares him to be the son of Apurinã, who went to cut wood in Mato Grosso and never came back. Ticua sends for Obajara, Tajira’s uncle, who is astounded by the news about his nephew, sad that the boys’ parents are dead, but joyful that he is back with his people.

The Old Devil stands at the edge of the huge crowd, a blustery wind bending the palms at the altar in front of a towering Cross. The mass is attended by 300 bishops and fellow clerics celebrating the hour in which Friar Henrique of Coimbra prayed with Cabral’s men and the Tupiniquin who were there to rejoice with the Long Hairs. Pataxó, Shavante, Nambikwara, Yanonami and Indians from all over Brazil listen solemnly as descendants of the discoverers ask forgiveness for the sins and errors of five centuries. There is no Tupiniquin to hear the apologia.