The lands of Santa Fé were stuck right in the
middle of my grandfather’s plantation. The lands of Santa Rosa went on for
miles and miles from north to south. Old José Paulino liked to look out as far
as he could and see nothing but his own domain. He liked to rest his eyes on
lands that were his. His whole purpose in life was to buy more and more land.
When he had inherited Santa Rosa it had been
small, but he had turned it into a kingdom, bursting its boundaries by annexing
neighbouring lands. The plantation followed the Paraiba and its fertile plains
and then headed inland into the forest. At Pedra-de-Fogo the Pernambuco shield
was on the road signs! It was more than three leagues from one end to the
other.
Not content with Santa Rosa my grandfather
owned eight more plantations, all bought with the profits from sugar and
cotton. The great days of his life were when he handed over a bill of exchange
and got back the deeds to the land that had fallen into his hands.
He had more than four thousand souls under his
protection. He was a feudal lord, but his subjects did not regard their
servitude as an outrage.
At Santa Fé, however, he had resisted his
hunger for lands. Whenever I looked at maps of the world and saw those small
countries squeezed in between great states I would think of Santa Fé. Santa
Rosa had grown next to it until it had surrounded it on every side. Santa Fé never
grew, but it never shrunk either. Its boundary stones were in the exact same
places as in the original deeds. The two plantations, Santa Fé and Santa Rosa,
were not rivals. It was like they were two brothers who were also great
friends, one that has been blessed by the Almighty, the other, not so much.
Poor Santa Fé! I’d only known it in its
decrepitude, and there’s nothing sadder in this world than a plantation going
to seed. It is a desolation, like the end of life itself, of total ruin, which
gives the farm land the look of an abandoned cemetery. Everything goes to ruin;
the cane grows wild, the forest encroaches, moss growing in the walls of the
ovens, the tenants fleeing to other plantations, everything put to one side,
everything sold bit by bit to feed its owners.
By the side of my grandfather I had seen that
nice old gentleman, Colonel Lula de Holanda, fall into ruin, even his authority
collapsing, with Santa Fé falling apart. He went about wearing a long beard,
like men in albums of portraits from times gone by. He always went about in a
one horse buggy, dressed in black. His life was a misery. He never planted cane
and he never borrowed a penny.
“Poor Lula” the other plantation owners would
say. “He’s late in planting again.”
His plantation even lost its pretty name. They
would call it Colonel Lula’s plantation. They said that he lived off a small
bequest from his grandfather. His visits to Santa Rosa were always formal. On
the road the bells were ringing and there came Colonel Lula with his family,
with the thin horses that pulled the carriage. They were always received in the
visiting room with a formality that was more usual for people who were visiting
for the first time. Nenen, his daughter had been educated in Recife. She spoke
differently to my people. I looked at her, a creature the likes of which I had
never seen before. She sat as if she were being punished, perfectly still, in
one position from the moment she arrived to the moment she departed. Dona
Amelia, who was very small, had also been turned to stone by etiquette. She
played the piano and she had married Lula de Holanda in Recife.
For us at Santa Rosa the visit of these
educated people was painful. Aunt Maria had difficulty making conversation. Any
topic of interest was off the table. So they all sat there in silence, looking
at one another till the evening, when they went.
We were interested in their little buggy, we
who rode everywhere in a wagon. It was the sort of buggy you would read about
in fairy stories. When Totonha told us her stories the princesses would ride
through the streets in a carriage like that of Colonel Lula, one that had
little bells that rang as it went on its way. Cinderella had lost a shoe
getting out of a carriage like this one.
I would pass by Santa Fé when I went to school.
It was a sad place, morning and afternoon. The forest had overrun the old sugar
mill. A few sugar canes, which the weather had permitted to survive, remained
in the middle of the meadow, which was now pasture. The tenants’ houses were now
falling down. Even old José Amparo the shoemaker lived better than these
people, and he didn’t plant a thing.
I would see Colonel Lula standing at his door. He
never took the tie off from around his neck. He would order the horse to stop
so he could hear from me news of Colonel José Paulino. He was very solemn, very
correct, like those ruined landowners from California that we would see at the
cinema, about to lose their lands and all they ever possessed.
There were all sorts of rumours about Colonel
Lula’s house. They said that the people there did not eat, that the black women
were on a permanent fast and that a tin of butter had to last for a whole
month; that the cows pulled the carts because there were no oxen; that Colonel
Lula had gold buried somewhere.
When you went on foot to Pilar you could see
through the garden gate his insane sister Dona Clara, walking back and forth,
talking to herself. With her long white hair hanging loose there never was such
a sorry sight. Nobody ever told what her story was. Maybe she didn’t have a
story to tell.
My grandfather treated his neighbour with a
certain respect, allowing him the presidency of the Council, as if wanting to
put right with honours destiny’s cruel reality. The black boys would tell me
that the original name of the plantation had been ‘Stop Here Please’ and that
Colonel Lula’s father had been a miser who had built his plantation with
passing labour. This miserliness was the root cause of all the disasters that
had befallen the plantation.
That dark destiny worried me. On our visits to
their house I would stop and look at the oil paintings, the beautiful
candlesticks, the carpets, the expensive furniture. There was a certain
nobility in that ruin. Dona Amelia would play the piano and the conversation
was formal. From time to time the mad woman would appear and sit in a corner,
looking at us from afar, her mouth moving like she was eating the words that
she wanted to say, muttering quietly but audibly.
One night there was a knock at the door of the
main house. It was a letter from Colonel Lula, calling for my grandfather urgently.
Afterwards we learned that the old man had locked himself in the house like a cornered
lion. A certain Dr. Luís Viana wanted to rob him of his daughter. Two Negroes
with hunting rifles, and Colonel Lula with his carbine! The doors were bolted,
the shutters locked. Lula’s wife and daughter were in the chapel, crying.
Colonel Lula had got hold of a letter. His daughter and Luís Viana were
planning to elope. But his daughter would not escape his house, not with him
alive to prevent it!
All this, however, was probably his
imagination. Nobody wanted to steal Dona Nenen. The whole affair just led to
ridicule. People made up rhymes mocking her and the supposed kidnap.
Colonel Lula liked to talk in a loud voice,
repeating his words with an authoritative, ‘do you hear me?’ at the end of his
sentences. He would say the same thing two or three times over. In the evenings
he would come over and talk with old José Paulino. I used to listen in. Only my
grandfather would pay him any attention.
“Poor Lula” he would say, when people told him
stories about his friend.
The price of sugar would go up and it would go
down, but Santa Fé just dragged on towards its inevitable demise, like a sick
person who does not have the money to pay the pharmacist.
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