Menino de Engenho - Plantation Boy - Chapter 5

I had been brought up in a city apartment. All I knew of the country was what I had seen from the tram on the way to Dois Irmãos. All the way I would gawp at the mango trees and the children playing around them. The differences between my father and my grandfather meant that my mother could never visit the plantation. So, as a boy, I would invent a whole world that I could never know. Whenever I asked my mother to take me to the plantation she would invent an excuse, saying that my father had too much work. So my arrival in this magical kingdom made a great impression on me. Every little detail fascinated me.

After breakfast I was sent off to the mill, where there was still some cane to be processed.

"You've almost missed seeing the mill at work." Uncle Juca told me. It was an enormous building, close to the main house, with a tiled roof and guttering, and a white shed for the oxen. I don't know why boys like machines so much. I had eyes for nothing else except for the mechanism and the two giant wheels turning round and round. Then I began to notice the workmen loaded with bundles of cane, taking them to the boiler. Uncle Juca began to tell me how sugar was made. There was Master Candido with a gourd of lime water which he poured into the pots and onto the boiling cane, the cold water producing a sweet pungent vapour that you could taste in your mouth.

"This is where the sugar is cooked. I'll take you to where it's purified."

Two men carried buckets of liquid syrup to the presses and poured them through holes in the planks. In this building the boss was the 'purifier', a black man, whose hands were covered in the dirty mud that covered the openings of the presses. My uncle explained to me how the black mud turned the sugar white. The tanks of processed syrup, with dried up toads floating on the yellow scum, turned my stomach.

Then we went to the furnace, where the liquid that had been drained from the sugar was still hot. What interested me again was the mechanism, the grinding of the great wheel, the feverish movements of the balls that regulated the pressure.

When they called me for lunch I was still mesmerised by the slow lazy wheel that hardly moved at all, and the restless agitation of the frenetic balls.