Wednesday 29 June 2016

Plantation Boy - Menino de Engenho - Chapter 3



None of the pictures that I have of my mother show her as I remember her, her soft features, the sorrowful beauty of her gaze. She would spend all day with me. She was small and dark and when I was by her side I forgot about my toys. Dona Clarisse, as the servants called her, was always gentle and dignified. Her orders were polite requests, spoken in the soft and tender tones of a convent school girl. Indeed, she had been brought up by nuns. Her own mother had died when she was only a baby and her father had never remarried. She was a plantation owner's daughter, but from what they told me about her manners, she seemed more like a lady who was raised for a life of seclusion from the world.
At night she would lull me to sleep. I would lie in her arms listening to her humming softly, the most perfect of infant pleasures.
She would drown me in hugs and kisses. And when my father came home, sunk in the depths of despair, I remember seeing her crying, but she was always willing to forgive and forget the awful words that her husband would throw at her. The servants loved her, and she always treated them with kindness and with good humour.
I spend hours on end bringing to mind a picture of my angelic mother with all the colours of my imagination. I can see her now, taking care of me, giving me a bath, dressing me. My memory still holds all sorts of small details about her that time will never destroy.
Hers was a cruel destiny: to die as she did, the victim of the uncontrollable rage of the man she had loved so much: and then, that she, such a modest and private person, that her picture should fill the pages of the gutter press, that so many lies should be told about her private life.
The death of my mother filled my whole life with a desperate sadness. How could destiny be so unjust with her, with a person who was so pure and good? This awareness of the arbitrary hand of fate made me a little boy who was somewhat sceptical and sometimes tormented by bad dreams.

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