Mirrors (42 page)

In 1725, when she was six, a slave ship brought her from Africa and she was sold in Rio de Janeiro.

When she was fourteen, the master spread her thighs and taught her a trade.

When she was fifteen, she was bought by a family from Ouro Preto, who then rented her body to the gold miners.

When she was thirty, the family sold her to a priest who practiced on her his techniques for exorcism and other nocturnal exercises.

When she was thirty-two, one of the demons that lived in her body smoked through her pipe and howled through her mouth and made her writhe on the ground. For that she was sentenced to a hundred lashes in the public square of the city of Mariana, and the punishment left her arm paralyzed for life.

When she was thirty-five, she fasted and prayed and mortified her flesh with a hair shirt, and the mother of the Virgin Mary taught her to read. They say that Rosa Maria Egipcíaca da Vera Cruz was the first literate black woman in Brazil.

When she was thirty-seven, she founded a home for abandoned female slaves and whores past their prime, which she financed by selling cakes made with her own saliva, an infallible remedy for any disease.

When she was forty, many people loyally attended her trances, where, wrapped in a cloud of tobacco smoke, she would dance to a chorus of angels, and the Baby Jesus would suckle her breasts.

When she was forty-two, she was accused of witchcraft and locked up in the Rio de Janeiro jail.

When she was forty-three, theologians confirmed she was a witch, because she withstood without complaint a lit candle held for a long while under her tongue.

When she was forty-four, she was sent to Lisbon, to the prison of the Holy Inquisition. She entered the torture chambers to be interrogated and was never heard of again.

BRAZIL SLEPT ON A BED OF GOLD

It sprouted from the ground like grass.

It drew crowds like a magnet.

It shined like gold.

And gold it was.

The bankers of England celebrated each new strike as if the gold were theirs.

And theirs it was.

Lisbon, which produced nothing, sent the gold of Brazil to London in exchange for loans, fancy clothing, and all the needs of a parasitic life.

At the heart of gold’s splendor lay Ouro Preto, “Black Gold,” so named because black were the rocks that held the gold, nights with suns deep inside, although the place could just as easily have earned its name from the black hands that dug the gold from mountains and riverbanks.

Those hands grew more and more expensive to buy. The slaves, who formed a clear majority in the mining region, were the only ones who worked.

And even more expensive was food. No one grew anything. In the early years of mining euphoria, the price of a cat was equivalent to the gold a slave could dig in two days. Chicken was cheaper, only a day’s worth of gold.

After more than a century, the price of food was still beyond belief, as were the lavish celebrations of the mine owners, who lived on a perpetual spree. But the gushing spring of gold, which once seemed inexhaustible, began to dwindle. And it became harder and harder to squeeze out of the mines the taxes that financed the torpor of the Portuguese Court, worn out from so much resting in the service of the bankers of England.

In 1750, when the king of Portugal died, the royal coffers were empty. And it was they, the bankers of England, who paid for his funeral.

DIGESTIONS

Potosí, Guanajuato, and Zacatecas ate Indians. Ouro Preto ate blacks.

The silver that came from forced labor hit Spanish soil in Seville and bounced. It landed some distance away, filling the bellies of Flemish, German, and Genovese bankers, and those of Florentine, English, and French merchants, to whom the Spanish Crown and all its income were mortgaged.

Without the silver from Bolivia and Mexico, a veritable silver bridge across the sea, could Europe have become Europe?

The gold that came from slave labor hit Portuguese soil in Lisbon and bounced. It landed some distance away, filling the bellies of British bankers and merchants, the kingdom’s creditors, to whom the Portuguese Crown and all its income were mortgaged.

Without the gold from Brazil, a veritable golden bridge across the sea, could the Industrial Revolution have taken place in England?

And without the buying and selling of slaves, would Liverpool have become the most important port in the world, and would Lloyd’s have become the king of insurance?

Without capital from the slave trade, who would have financed James Watt’s steam engine? What furnaces would have forged George Washington’s cannons?

FATHER OF THE MARIONETTE

Antonio José da Silva, of Brazilian birth, lives in Lisbon. His puppets bring laughter to the Portuguese stage.

For nine years he has been unable to use his fingers, mangled in the torture chambers of the Holy Inquisition, but his characters carved from wood, Medea, Don Quijote, Proteus, still delight and console adoring crowds.

It ends early. It ends at the stake: for being a Jew and a buffoon, and because his marionettes fail to show due respect to the Crown or the Church or the hooded executioners who make fools of themselves chasing each other onstage.

From the box of honor, João V, the king of Portugal known as the Magnanimous, observes the auto-da-fé where the king of puppets burns.

Thus this Antonio bids farewell to the world, while on the very same day of the same year, 1730, on the other side of the sea another Antonio says hello.

Antonio Francisco Lisboa is born in Ouro Preto. He will be called Aleijadinho the Cripple. He too will lose his fingers, not from torture but from a mysterious curse.

ALEIJADINHO

Brazil’s ugliest man creates the finest beauty in colonial art.

In stone, Aleijadinho sculpts the glory and agony of Ouro Preto, the Potosí of gold.

Son of an African slave, this mulatto has slaves who carry him, bathe him, feed him, and tie the chisel to his stump.

Assailed by leprosy, syphilis, or who knows what, Aleijadinho has lost an eye and his teeth and his fingers, but the rest of him carves stone with the hands he lacks.

Night and day he works, as if bent on revenge, and his Christs, his Virgin Marys, his saints, his prophets shine brighter than gold, while the fount of gold itself grows ever more chary in fortunes and prodigious in misfortune and unrest.

Ouro Preto and the entire region agree with the precocious appraisal offered by the Count of Assumar, who was its governor:

“It seems as if the earth exhales tumult, and water riots; the clouds vomit disobedience, and the stars disorder; this climate is the tomb of peace and the cradle of rebellion.”

PALACE ART IN BRAZIL

The brush of Pedro Américo de Figueiredo e Melo, an artist of the epic genre, depicted the sacred moment for all eternity.

In his painting, a lively horseman unsheathes his sword and utters the earth-shattering cry that gives birth to the Brazilian nation, while the Dragoons of the Honor Guard pose for the occasion, weapons held high, plumes on war helmets and manes on horses aflutter in the breeze.

Contemporary accounts do not coincide precisely with those brush-strokes.

They say the hero, Pedro, a Portuguese prince, squatted on his haunches on the bank of a stream called Ipiranga. His supper had not sat well with him and he was “doubling over to answer the call of nature,” in the words of one chronicle, when a messenger brought a letter from Lisbon. Without interrupting his efforts, the prince had him read out the letter from his royal parents, which contained certain affronts, perhaps aggravated by his bellyache. In the midst of the reading, he stood up and swore lengthily, which official history translated in abbreviated form as the famous cry:

“Independence or death!”

Thus, that morning in 1822, the prince tore the Portuguese insignia off his cassock and became emperor of Brazil.

THE AGES OF PEDRO

Bearing nine years of age and eighteen names, Pedro de Alcântara Francisco Antônio João Carlos Xavier de Paula Miguel Rafael Joaquim José Gonzaga Pascoal Sipriano Serafim de Bragança e Bourbon, prince and heir to the Portuguese crown, disembarked in Brazil. The British brought him here along with all his court to keep him safe from Napoleon’s assaults. At the time, Brazil was Portugal’s colony and Portugal was England’s colony, although the latter went unsaid.