Brasyl (5 page)

"If you say," says Edson. If she thinks he is ignorant, he
might as well put it to work. "But you could explain it to me
over lunch."

"I'd rather you just paid me now."

Down in the lounge, he throws the bag to Gerson while the bicha in
the suit prints out an invoice. A movement distracts Edson,
someone/thing among the quantum computers above. Impossible. No one
could get past them on the neon staircase.
Weird shit happens
around them
, Mr. Smiles had warned.

"We'd prefer cash," the bicha says. Whatever preferred
payment option, it's impossible.

"Don't be owing us," advises the Black Metalista. Edson's
money-sense cues him that he is the wealth behind the operation.

"I'll take the bag," says Fia. Edson snatches it away from
his brother. "So, gafieira?" he chances as the truck pulls
into a safe stop and the shutter clatters up. "José's
Garage, Cidade de Luz."

"Don't push it," says Fia quantumeira, but Edson can see
deep down, at the quantum level, she's a baile queen.

The mule went mad on the cobbled pier of the Cidade Baixa. The
insanity iell on it in an instant, one moment doggedly hauling the
laden wagon with the tenacity of its breed, the next shying in its
traces, ears back, teeth bared, braying. It tore free from the
barefoot slave who had been steering it halfasleep, such was the
stolid placidity of the mule, from the engenho to the dock where the
low, slow carracks rolled on the swell of the Bahia de Todos os
Santos, fat with sugar and Vila Rica gold. The slave snatched for the
bridle; the mule shied away from the hand, eyes rolling. The mule
reared, kicked. The wagon rocked, spilling white pillows of sugar
that split on the cobbles. The dockside whores, come down for the
arrival of
Cristo Redentor
in Salvador harbor—a ship
from Portugal, a navy ship—flew with cries and oaths. Soldiers
in the buff and crimson of the imperial infantry under the command of
a sword-carrying Teniente ran from the customhouse. The mule leaped
and plunged; the slave danced around before it, trying ro seize the
lead rope, but the cry had already gone out across the harbor:
The
rage the rage
.

"Help me!" the slave cried. A hoof caught the carter a
glancing blow; he reeled across the quay, blood starting from his
smashed jaw. The mule bucked and plunged, trying to twist off the
heavy cart. Yellow foam burst from its mouth. Its chest heaved, sweat
stained its hide. Cries, shrieks from the ladies in their headscarves
and petticoats. Slaves left their rail carts, their master and
mistresses, encircled the insane mule, arms outstretched. The
soldiers unshouldered their muskets. Eyes wide, the mule reared again
and launched into a full gallop along the pier. Slaves and soldiers
fled.

"The priest! For the love of God, Father!" the Teniente
shouted.

Father Luis Quinn looked up from where he had been supervising the
unshipping of his small trunk of possessions from
Cristo Redentor
. The mule and leaping cart bore down upon him like a blazing war
chariot from the Fianna legends. Luis Quinn threw his arms up. He was
a big man, larger and more imposing yet in the simple black robe of
his order, a piece of night fallen into day. The mule leaped straight
up into the air in its traces, came down foursquare, and stopped
dead, head bowed.

Every sailor, every officer, every soldier, every slave, every whore
in her bright jollyboat, stopped to stare at Luis Quinn. Slowly he
lowered his arms and stepped toward the twitching, foaming beast,
clicking and shushing under his breath all the words for horses he
knew in both his natal tongues, Portuguese and Irish.

"I advise you not to approach the creature, Father," the
Teniente called, a pale, European face among the caboclo faces of the
Salvador Auxiliaries. "We will shoot the beast and burn its
body; that way the rage will not spread."

"Hush, hush there," Luis Quinn said as reached out for the
rope halter. He could see the infantry forming a line, taking aim.
His fingers closed around the rope. With a cry more like a human
scream than any right sound of a beast the mule reared, flashing out
with its steel-shod hooves. Quinn twisted out of the path of the
killing hoof; then the mule leaped. For a moment it seemed suspended;
then mule and wagon plunged into the green water of rhe bay.
Whore-boats scattered. Luis Quinn saw the mule's head fight out of
the chop, eyes wild with the knowledge of its certain destruction,
the cream foam at its mouth now bloodstained. The weight of the cart
pulled it under. Luis Quinn saw its knees kicking against the
dragging green water; then it was lost. Empty sugar sacks rose to the
surface one by one as their contents dissolved like white,
night-blooming water flowers.

"Ah, the creature the creature." It had been but an animal,
but Luis Quinn nevertheless murmured a prayer. The Teniente, now at
Quinn's side, crossed himself.

"You are all right, Father."

"I am unharmed." Quinn noticed all across the dock the
soldiers, the slaves, even the strumpets, make the same blessing. He
did not doubt it was as much for his habit as the sudden fatal
madness of the mule. Thus had it been on the slow, calm-bound,
scurvy-racked voyage of
Cristo Redentor
from the bar of the
Tagus: mutterings, scratchings, charms, and prayers. A priest, a
black Jesuit, aboard. No luck upon this ship. "I heard mention
of a rage."

"A madness of horses first, latterly of all beasts of burden,
God between us and evil." The Teniente signaled for one of his
troopers to bear the father's trunk. As the young officer escorted
him toward the Custom House, Quinn opened his senses to this place in
which he had so freshly landed. He noted with a start that there was
not one horse. No animal at all on this great stone apron beneath the
sheer bluff of the Cidade Alta. No beast on the steep ladeira that
wound up the steep cliff between low and high Salvador. Human muscle
alone powered this city. The cobbled paths and quays teemed with
slaves pushing laden barrows and gurneys on iron rails, bent under
sacks slung from brow straps, carefully negotiating sedan chairs
through the thronging black and red bodies and fat white sacks of
king sugar. "As with all afflictions, rumors run wild," the
Teniente continued. The soldier, a ragged mameluco in half uniform of
frock coat and loose duck breeches, unshod like a slave, followed six
paces behind. "The rage is a thing of the indios from out of the
deep forest; it is the work of the Dutch or the Spanish; it is a
punishment from God. Not last week angels were seen in Pelourinho,
battling with knives of light, three nights in succession. It is
attested to by some of the best in Salvador."

"We have not heard of this in Coimbra."

"There is much in Brazil never reaches the ears of Portugal."
The Teniente halted short of the bustling portico of the Custom
House. "Ah. As I feared. It is always so when a ship's arrival
corresponds with the sailing of the sugar fleet. The Custom House is
the most hopeless jam; I cannot see you getting clear for hours. As a
crown officer, I am empowered to authorize your permissions of entry
to the colony."

"For a small consideration," said Luis Quinn,

"A trifling impost, that's all."

"I am under the direct authority of the Provincial of Brazil."
Luis Quinn retained the bones of his birth-accent; a linguist, a
speaker in tongues, he was well aware of the advantage its air of the
uncanny lent him. A big man, hands like spades, softly spoken as big
men so often are.

"Indeed, Father, but Brazil is not like other places. You will
find that little happens here without inducement."

Brazil is not like other places. So many had said that to him, from
Father James his spiritual director, even as he ordered him on the
task most difficult, to this cocky puppy of a soldiereen in his wig
and three-cornered hat gay with feathers.

"I do not think it would suit my cloth to be seen enjoying
preferment over others. No, I shall wait my turn in the Custom House,
Teniente. Sure when God made time He made plenty of it." The
officer bowed, but his mouth was sour. He took his bearer with him.

I ask only that I might be given a task most difficult.
In the
studies and libraries of the College at Coimbra, Luis Quinn's
request, made every year on the day of the patron of his native
Ireland to his spiritual director, had sounded rich in zeal and
honesty. Candlelight, cloisters work such deceptions. Every year for
five years the same reply:
When the need and the man meet.
This year, Father James, the mathematics instructor to the
missionaries to China where that art commanded special admiration,
had said,
My room, after compline.

"Brazil."

"Brazil, yes. Where all the sin in the world has washed up. A
request from the provincial of the College at Salvador for an
admonitory."

"To what purpose?"

"Our own provincial says only that he requires an admonitory
from outside the colony." Then, with a wry smile: "That
seems to me to imply a task most difficult."

Luis Quinn drew again in his memory Father James, a short laconic
Ulsterman with his province's flinty accent and humor. A fellow
refugee from the penal laws swept down the sea-lanes to Portugal.

Luis Quinn hefted his small sea chest and joined the noisy crowd at
the arcade. The ship had seemed like a prison, yet the world felt too
expansive, the horizon too close, the sky too distant, the colors too
bright and people too brash and clamorous. The sailors and the
captains, the feitores and the senhores de engenhos moved away from
him, touching their miraculous medals, bowing a nod:
Go through
there, Father; after you, Father.

Beyond the interminable questions and inspections and opening and
resealings of the Customs House were the carriers, squatting around
their feitor, a fat caboclo with ripped stockings and high-heeled
shoes.

"Father Father, a carry a carry." The slave was an indio,
bow back and bow legs, yet his muscles were like bands of iron. He
wore a brow strap that hung to beneath his shoulder blades. A pair of
rope stirrups dangled around his neck. He knelt on the cobbles before
a worn wooden mounting block.

"Get up get up," Quinn cried in Tupi lingua geral. "This
is the harness of a horse."

"Yes yes a horse, your horse," the slave answered in
Portuguese, eyeing warily his foreman. "The only horse not mad
or dead, mad or dead. I am strong, Your Holiness."

"Up up," Luis Quinn commanded in Tupi. "I will not
have any man for my beast of burden." He turned on the feitor;
the man's face paled at the righteous rage in Quinn's gaunt face.
"What manner of vile, luxurious creature are you? Here, what's
your price for your man to guide me to the Jesuit Colegio?" The
caboclo named a sum that even with the smell of the sea still on his
cheeks, Luis Quinn knew for usury. He imagined his
big
fist
striking into the middle of the greasy man's round face. Breath
shuddering in his lungs, Quinn fought the anger down. He threw a
handful of small coppers. The caboclo dived to snatch them up. The
slave made to lift Luis Quinn's chest. "Leave it. All I require
from you is guidance."

Carriers, each with a passenger clinging to his back, jogged past as
Luis Quinn toiled up the zigzagging ladeira. A group of sailors
released from
Cristo Redentor
held a race, kicking their
mounts with their heels, pricking their buttocks with their knives to
goad them into speed. They called greetings to Father Quinn as they
passed; amicable now that he was off their ship onto his God's
element.

"Animals!" he raged at them. "Beasts on the backs of
men! Down with you!"

Shamed and no little intimidated by the big man's righteous rage, the
sailors slipped from their mounts. As Quinn strode up through the
whiteclad carriers and gauze-shrouded chairs, riders climbed down
from their straining mounts and toiled with him up through the heat.
He heard their murmurs:
Black priest, fiery Vieira has returned.

Before the steps of the Jesuit basilica, Father Luis set down his
small pack. He reached inside the pocket of his robe for a wooden
cylinder, rounded at one end, the other stopped with cork. This he
drew and removed from it a cigar. He ran it briefly under his nose.
The first since Madeira. Luis Quinn held the fragrant leaf out to the
slave.

"This you can do. Find me a fire for this."

The slave took the cigar, bowed, and scuttled off across the thronged
square. Luis Quinn observed that he moved crabwise; half crippled by
his habitual labor. From individual to general, particular to
universal. A slave society. In such a society what is meant is never
said, what is said never meant. Secrets, subtleties, subterfuges—he
must expect nothing open or direct in this New World. Truth there
will be—truth there must be, but disguised. So like the ship,
where resentments and attachments alike must be hidden; alluded to by
codes and rituals of behavior so that every word holds both its
conventional meaning and its opposite and which is to be taken is
entirely dependent on a hundred subtle social clues. Daily bread to a
linguist who had learned the lingua geral in a single ocean crossing,
or even to a priest, skilled in the deceptions of the human heart.

Faces black, brown, coffee. Few white. No women, save for a few
slaves in wrapped fabric headdresses. The white women, the
Portuguese, were nowhere to be seen. Then he saw a subtle movement
behind a carved wood grille at an upper window, shadow within shadow.
The mistresses were sequestered in their great houses, veiled behind
the curtains of the sedan chairs, less free than their slaves. The
men's world of the street, the women's world of the house. Casa and
rua. Ways of home and ways of world. Hidden and public.