Plantation Boy - Menino de Engenho - Chapter 7

My Aunt Sinházinha was an old woman of around sixty years old. The sister of my grandmother, she had lived for many years with her brother-in-law. Having married one of the richest men in these parts, Quincas of Salgadinho, she had lived separately from her husband since soon after the wedding. She was a strange and turbulent character. The story went that one morning she had been found in one of her father's sugar mills, tied to a cart, with a note from her husband to her father, returning his daughter. It was she who was in charge of my grandfather's household and it was a despotism without restraint. It was she who kept the keys to the store and she who bossed about the maids. She was an absolute tyrant. My grandfather had never remarried. The presence of his sister-in-law in his house was quite enough. 

The moment I first set eyes on her, with her wrinkled face and her harsh voice, I felt that something evil was approaching me. The old woman was to be the torment of my childhood. My Aunt Maria, an angel compared to this monster, did not have the power to resist her strength and her whims. The poor maids and the boys suffered a hard and cruel servitude at the hands of this woman. She always kept a little black girl as a personal maid, someone who would sleep at the foot of her bed, and who she could bully and humiliate and subject to her brutal pleasures. She lived to complain, to find fault  -  dust on the furniture, food that had vanished from the pantry, anything to find an excuse to beat the servants.

The maids hated her. My cousins would flee from her like the plague. And when she went to visit a daughter who lived in the city everyone breathed a sigh of relief, as if the hangman had just left town. Then my Aunt Maria would take charge and there would be gentleness and peace all around, living under the regency of a fairy princess.

Later on when I would come to read the stories of cruel queens, such as the perverse intrigues of Ann Boleyn, I would believe it all, because I would think of Aunt Sinházinha.