The Pop’s Rhinoceros (81 page)

Glancing in to shore, he saw a few men move on the deck of the caravel. Wagons drawn by small oxen and piled high with bright green sugarcane trundled up and down the waterfront. Most of the canoes were gone now. He considered having the men lower the longboat and row him to shore. Peres’s instructions awaited him there, instructions concerning the beast. An embalmer’s manual would be more appropriate now. Or a missal. Before he could act on these thoughts, he saw a large rowboat set off from one of the jetties, manned by
Negroes who pulled powerfully on the oars. A white man sat toward its stern. He watched it draw near.

“Dom Jaime Teixeira! Dom Jaime Teixeira! Dom Fernão de Mello, Captain of São Thomé, requests the honor of your presence and commands me, Dom Pero de Cintra, to carry to you his warmest greetings. …”

His legs began to shake as he climbed down the rope ladder. Still weak, he thought. The Negroes swung the boat about. Instead of returning to the jetty, they made directly for the shore, leaping out into the water and hauling the boat the last twenty feet to the beach with her two passengers still sitting in her. Dom Pero’s chatter washed over him as he staggered up the shingle, the lack of motion quite unfamiliar to him after so many months aboard the
Ajuda
. The caravel was called the
Picanço,
commanded by a gentleman of the name Dom Ruy Mendes da Mesquita, the first of the Mina fleet to arrive that year, and a full month ago at that, under license from Dom Afonso da Torres, which would—according to Dom Pero—greatly irritate Dom Christobal de Haro, who held the contract as far down the coast as Cabo Santa Caterina, the reason being the trades blowing weakly or strongly that year, or late, or in the wrong direction. … Teixeira listened with half an ear while they walked along the waterfront. A sound drifted in the air, audible only when Dom Pero paused to draw breath, a strangely agreeable wailing, but very faint and punctuated with brief stops and starts. Eventually he motioned for Pero to be silent and then he realized that it was singing.

“The Negroes chant while they are at their milling,” Pero explained. He indicated the area behind the crude sheds they had passed, and Teixeira guessed that he must mean the roofs he had seen from the ship. But even as he listened, the singing suddenly stopped.

“Ah,” said Pero. “That will be Dom Fernão. They always stop when he passes them at their work. It is a noise he cannot abide. Come, we are to meet him at the fort.”

The fort turned out to be a kind of palazzo, built entirely of wood and thatched in the same manner as every other building on the island. A raised terrace surrounded it on all sides, and on each of its four corners stood a small cannon whose function seemed more ornamental than anything else. Two men were standing over one of these. One was pointing to something, and the other, nodding and laughing, was Dom Francisco. At the sight of him, the laughter stopped.

Dom Fernão de Mello approached and made a deep bow. He was of medium height, thickset, jowled and double-chinned. The heaviness of his face was offset by a pair of watery-blue eyes that made him appear strangely childlike, a perpetually swelling youth on the verge of a perpetually swelling tantrum. He spoke deliberately and generally to Teixeira, as though addressing a crowd that had gathered there only to hear his opinion. Once their greetings were done, the four men moved inside and began discussing the revictualing of the
Ajuda
. Prices were agreed, quantities and quality haggled over briefly. Dom Francisco bargained
with Mello while Teixeira looked on, increasingly puzzled at the ease of these negotiations. Mello was known the breadth of the Indies as the man who had refused food to the starving men of the Mina garrison because they could not pay for it in gold. Granted, that was almost a decade ago now, but there were other stories, and worse, and here was the chandler-in-chief of the Guinea Coast humbly agreeing to whatever the lumpish Dom Francisco suggested. They would begin lading that very night and should be done in three days, perhaps two. Teixeira and Dom Pero watched them banter and bicker, the latter making no effort to hide his astonishment at this sudden transformation in the Captain of São Thomé. They were still making their final handshakes, Mello commenting with rueful admiration that Dom Francisco drove a harder bargain than King Manolo himself, when Teixeira interrupted to ask after his dispatch.

Both men fell silent. Mello turned to Dom Francisco, and Dom Francisco cleared his throat.

“That’s all settled,” he began gruffly. “I’ve already looked the thing over. We’re to keep to our original course.” He paused then. “Your sickness forced me to take appropriate action and being, I mean to say seeing, seeing that I am the master of the
Ajuda,
then I took it upon myself…” He came to a halt there, the clumsily rehearsed explanation foundering in his own ill-disguised discomfort.

Teixeira kept his face expressionless. The earlier sudden stifling of their laughter was growing clearer. Knowing that he would not see it otherwise, Dom Francisco had taken advantage of his illness to open his, Teixeira’s, dispatch. Mello, no doubt, had inveigled him into it and then concocted the witless prevarication that Don Francisco was dutifully parroting now.

Outwardly he said, “Of course, Dom Francisco. In the event of my death it would have been necessary that you act in my place, and that would hardly be possible without instructions. …”

His voice was calm, almost toneless. Good, he thought, go on. “Nevertheless it would be awkward if Dom Fernão de Peres should learn that his dispatch’s intended recipient was wholly ignorant of its contents. Original course or no, it might be best if I looked the thing over, do you not think?”

There was a short silence after he finished. Mello looked again to Dom Francisco. Dom Francisco looked back, baffled.

“The dispatch, Dom Francisco?” prompted the Captain of São Thomé.

The other reached into his doublet confusedly, then burst out, “But it’s back there, where you …”

“Ah, you left it there. Your pardon, I thought you had picked it up.”

Teixeira felt himself grow calmer while they played out this little pantomime, then Mello led him back through a series of rooms to one used as a study. The parchment lay on a small writing desk, Peres’s seal instantly recognizable, its wax broken as expected. Mello handed it to him and left without another word.

Greetings, Dom Jaime. I have entrusted this to the hands of Duarte Alema, Captain of the
Picaneo,
and Ruy Mendes de Mesquita, her pilot, who sail from Belem to the Guinea
Coast and São Thomé. You will receive it from the hands of Dom Fernão de Peres, Captain of that island and Dom Manolo’s loyal servant. …

He snorted at that, then read on. Peres praised him for his tenacity in reaching São Thomé through the rigors of the voyage. There were references to the horrors of the Cape, then more praise for himself, then more exhortations. The fervent hope that they would meet soon and safely was expressed in both formal and familiar terms. He was wished good health and informed that he was remembered nightly in the prayers of both Dom Fernão de Peres and his wife. He almost laughed at this. The notion that Peres might conduct himself in private devotions was ludicrous to anyone who had spent two seconds in his company. The dispatch ended there, and his brief good humor with it. The beast had not been mentioned, nor its destination, nor … He put the parchment on the desk.

Then a grin spread over his face. He imagined Mello’s exasperation as his patient subtleties lapped at the rocky headland of Dom Francisco’s stupidity. Perhaps he changed character, swapping to a warm wash of bonhomie, two hard-living
fidalgos
on a godforsaken rock in the middle of the sea. … That would be better, and still, Teixeira felt sure, Dom Francisco was quite possibly unaware that his celebrated dealing to victual the ship was no more than a blind orchestrated by his sudden good friend the Captain of São Thomé to cover the fact of which he was also unaware and would have been outraged to learn, namely that he had been bribed. And Mello—Teixeira chuckled aloud at this—would be similarly unaware that there was no need to bribe the man in the first place. Dom Francisco would have opened it for a cup of Madeira and a slap on the back in any case. … He would have read it, and found nothing. And then Mello would have read it and found the same. It told him nothing, too, and in the manner by which it told him that it was
intended
to tell him nothing, he caught a faint sniff of the dubious statecraft, the double- and triple-blinds that were the very air that Peres breathed at Ayamonte. It was a whiff of the old fox himself. Peres and his wife at prayer … That was too good for words. Peres’s wife had been dead for two decades.

He laughed without restraint, loud enough to bring Dom Pero running to inquire if all was well.

“Never better,” he said, still laughing. He was the servant of a man who had cut him adrift in the middle of an ocean with a dying monster for company. Soon he would be the disgraced servant of the same man, who would tether him to the beast’s cadaver and cut him adrift in the more treacherous currents of the court, where he would drown.

Mello and Dom Francisco had disappeared when they reemerged. Dom Pero watched him warily while explaining that the Captain would give what he termed “a banquet’ that night for the gentlemen of the two vessels arrived at São Thomé. In the meantime he had been instructed to show Dom Jaime whatever he wished of the island.

“Where are Dom Estêvão and Dom Gonçalo?” he asked the man, and was told that they were supervising the transport of the stores. He considered joining
them, but if Peres’s “instructions” told him anything, it was that it no longer mattered what he did here or how he spent his time. “I should like to see the mills,” he said. Dom Pero shouted for two horses to be saddled.

The Negroes’ singing rose in waves, in fat chords of sound that swelled and stopped, then started again. A man’s voice barked the chant in the intervals, and the music followed from that, twisting obediently when a new element was introduced, following until it was replaced by a new modulation and the song moved forward again, huge and low in the air. They passed through trees and high grasses that Teixeira could not identify. The track widened and they came face-to-face with the factory.

The roofs he had seen from the ship stretched away from him now in a single enormous thatched canopy. It was divided into sections only by the different tasks performed beneath it. The Negroes worked stripped to the waist, overseen by other Negroes who swaggered about amongst them, carrying long sticks or machetes. Nearest them it appeared that hundreds of cooking pits had been dug in the ground, each with a large kettle suspended above it. The men tending these alternated between feeding the fires below the pots and stirring and skimming their contents.

“We burn the water off the molasses here,” said Pero. “Then it is sent to the curing houses.”

“Where do these men come from?” Teixeira asked then.

“The traders buy them at Mpinde or Gató. Most are sent on to Mina or Pernambuco, but all of them pass through São Thomé. We have the pick of them,” Pero said then. “Or did.”

“Did?”

“The trade has slowed of late. There have been problems. … Not here, of course. On the mainland. The natives have stopped trading, or the Mani has banned them again. We do not know. Such things have happened in the past. Something strange. …” He caught himself there and forced a cheerful expression upon his features. “Shall we view the crushing?”

The workforce employed on the reduction of the molasses was dwarfed by that crushing the juice from the cane. Teixeira was presented with the same tableau reproduced a thousandfold: a Negro standing straddled over a long wooden basin, in his hands a heavy trunk of wood with which he pounded the raw cane until both it and he were soaked in the liquor. Their chants took the rhythm from this work, and the air was at once thick with the heavy smell of the juice and vibrant with the song that went on and on, seeming to have no end. The same kettles he had seen over the fires were brought around, the sugar-juice emptied into these and carried away. Men toting huge bales of raw cane would follow, empty the pulped megass, and replace it with new stalks. Then the process would begin again. As the men carrying away the megass threaded a path back through the workers, the pounding would already have resumed.

“Where are they going?” he asked Pero, pointing to one of the bearers.

“To the Hill,” said Pero. “Dom Fernão has been building it for many years now. Some of the megass is dried for fuel. The rest goes to the Hill.”

“I should like to see it,” he said.

The overseers glared at Pero as he steered a path through the men. Emerging finally on the other side of the factory, Teixeira looked up at the Hill. At first he thought the whole pile was smoldering, for it steamed and seemed to give off heat. The steam stank of decomposition, however, and the men climbing up its sides some little way to their left showed no hint of fear. They carried loads of pulverized fiber, and as they ascended their legs sank to the knees in the cane-mulch. Each step meant pulling one leg free and planting it deep in the hot compost, then shifting the body’s weight forward and repeating the process for the other leg. Teixeira was about to ask what purpose this decomposing monument was supposed to serve when a commotion started up. Four men, overseers by their weapons, were pursuing a fifth up the side of the Hill, all five scrambling madly and shouting in a language he did not understand. Two of the overseers carried ropes, and as Teixeira watched they caught up with their quarry, who was brought down and silenced for a second by a blow to the side of his head. Then he was shouting again, and Teixeira heard the pleading tone in his voice turn to panic as the ropes were produced. They had him tied in a trice and then were dragging him like a log by his ankles, farther up and around the slope.

“Thieving,” said Pero by way of explanation. The men quickly disappeared from sight, but he was already moving left around the base of the Hill, forcing his horse through the line of bearers, who had not slowed their pace or even looked up at the disturbance. When he caught sight of them again, two of the overseers were digging a pit high up on the side of the Hill, kneeling to scoop out the rotting stalks with their bare hands. When they were done, all four simply upended the man and lowered him headfirst into the hole until only his legs were showing. Even bound, Teixeira could see the violence of the man’s struggles. Then the four crouched to gather armfuls of the megass and began tamping it into the pit with their feet. Within a minute they were done, and all that was visible of their victim was his calves and feet protruding from the side of the Hill. The line of bearers continued climbing as before, but now the overseers were marshaling them along a new route, shouting and lashing out with their sticks as though the act they had performed excited them or provoked them to this. Teixeira watched as the first bearer dropped his load where the thief had been buried, then the next, and the next. … He became aware that Pero had joined him.