Plantation Boy - Menino de Engenho - Chapter 4

Three days after the tragedy they took me to the plantation that belonged to my maternal grandfather. I was going there to live with him. A new world was opening up for me. I can still remember the train journey and some of the men who were travelling with us in the same carriage. My Uncle Juca, who had come to collect me, told me the whole story, telling me that my father was crazy. Everyone was looking at me with pity in their eyes.

"I can only imagine how Colonel Cazuza must feel," one of them said, "At his age, to suffer such a tragedy!"

I understood that they were talking about my grandfather.

"Such a good man and yet so unfortunate with his family."

My Uncle Juca said nothing to that. And then the conversation turned to the weather that winter, which was fine and promised a good harvest of sugar cane. And then they went on to politics.

For me the train was something new. My nose was stuck to the window pane as the fields and the forests rolled by, watching the telegraph poles and the lines in between them waving up and down in the wind.

When we arrived at a station it was even more interesting. There were boys with rubber balls, others carrying bundles of cane, and people hurrying about to send a message or hoping to receive one. And there were some poor people receiving alms.

One woman came up to me, full of sweetness, and said;

"What a lovely little boy! Where's your mother, my little one?"

I was afraid of her. And the thought of my mother made me cry. I frightened the poor woman, and she went away telling people she thought me a bit odd. My uncle took me to get a drink. And then the train continued upon its way and I amused myself again as I did before.

"Time for us to get off," my uncle told me.

I was sorry to have to leave the train. At the station a little black man was waiting for us with a horse, and spurs and a whip and a white cloth. My uncle put the cloth on the horse's back and mounted. Then the little black man lifted me up next to him. It was my first horse ride.

"The plantation's not far away," my uncle said.

I looked around as we trotted along and I thought everything looked new and pretty. The station was close by a weir in the river that was overhung with greenery. The roads were full of mud and puddles and everything was lush. From time to time we would meet an ox ambling across the road we were travelling. My uncle told me that all the land around us belonged to my grandfather. A little further on we glimpsed a white house and a large cowshed.

"That's where we're headed for, but we still have to ride for some time yet."

My mother had always talked of the plantation as a corner of heaven. There was a maid that she had brought with her from the plantation who used to tell us stories about the plantation, about bathing in the river and all the different fruits, and the games the children played, so I imagined the plantation as something from a fairy tale, a magical kingdom.  

When I got there, with my Uncle Juca, the porch was full of people who had come to greet us. A girl who looked a lot like my mother hugged me and kissed me. Sitting in a chair next to a bench there was an old man. They took me to receive his blessing. He was my grandfather. 

Some of the boys came and stared. Everybody scrutinized me from tip to toe.

They took me to the kitchen. The maids wanted to see Dona Clarisse's little boy. They turned my arrival into a cause for a party.

"Go and show the boy to Aunt Galdina!"

And they took me to a room in the servants' quarters. It was a dark stuffy little room. There on a bed lay an old black woman.

"Aunt Galdina, this here is Dona Clarisse's little boy. He's just come from Recife with Mr. Juca."

The old woman beckoned me over to the side of the bed, inspected me closely with screwed up eyes, like a short sighted person trying to read, and then burst out crying.

"He looks just like his mother."

I left the old woman's room in tears. The girl who looked like my mother, and who was in fact her younger sister, took me away to change my clothes.

"I'm going to be your mother now. I know you'll get to like me. Come on now, big boys don't cry."

And she hugged me and kissed me with a tenderness that reminded me of my mother's kisses. She took out some fresh clothes from my bag and dressed me and combed my hair.

"Go and play out with the boys."

The boys were waiting for me, but they didn't come near me. Distrusting me, they looked at my fancy clothes, the otherness of my appearance.

But, bit by bit, they drew closer, and by the afternoon they had taken me into their gang.

We went into the garden to pick some plums and guava. What they called the garden was in fact a giant orchard. A lot of my childhood was spent there in the shade of the fruit trees.

That first night I didn't sleep long. Early in the morning they took me to drink milk fresh from the cow. The milk was frothy and warm, a mother's milk. 

My grandfather walked about, wrapped up in a thick woollen overcoat, talking with some, giving orders to others. A mist like smoke covered the copses on the hills. My playmates from the previous evening were all busy, some carrying the milk tins, others helping the herdsmen in the shed. It was all just so wonderful, the cattle, the warm frothy milk, the cold morning air, the tall and solemn figure of my grandfather.

Uncle Juca took me down the river to bathe. With a towel draped round his head and a large glass in his hand, he called me over.

"You're a country boy now!"

We went down a slope to the River Paraíba, which at that time of year was but a small stream in the middle of the sandy river bed.

"We're going to Stoney Pond."

A little further on, under the spreading branches of a large tree that dragged along the ground, was one of those little pools the river and its currents had carved out of its banks. It was there that with my Uncle Juca, who before his bath drank a glass of his remedy (for the blood), that I became a part of my grandfather's plantation. The cold water in the early morning made me shiver. My uncle drew me further into the middle, showing me how to swim.

To this day I have a special fondness for the memory of that first swim. For a city boy like me, used to washing under a tap, that pool surrounded by green vegetation, shaded by the thick branches of the tree, was something from another world.

On our return to the main house Uncle Juca laughed,

"Now you're one of us, you've been baptized."

Breakfast was ready when we got back. There was a long table in the dining room and a lot of people sitting down for the meal. My Aunt Maria sat at the head of the table and my grandfather to her right. The food was already on the table, couscous, curds, manioc and maize. It wasn't just members of the family either. Sitting at the other end of the table, eating in silence, were some humble folk. Later on, these people would be my good friends. They were the overseers and the masons, who ate the same food as the lord of the plantation in the good and very human camaraderie of the shared meal.