Plantation Boy - Menino de Engenho - Chapter 35

My grandfather received a letter about my father. I heard him discussing it with Uncle Juca. They did not realize that I was there in the visiting room looking at some old magazines. The director of the asylum had written to ask if my father were to continue as an inmate as, for several months now, he had not received any payment.

“I think you should pay. After all, he is your son-in-law.”

“That’s what I’ve decided. I’ve written to Lourenço to ask him to take care of it.”

It came as a shock to me to hear about my poor father’s misfortune. I knew that he was ill, but hearing that he was destitute touched me to the core. I told Aunt Maria what I heard of the conversation. She didn’t want to tell me anything.

“It’s not a matter for you. Go out and play!”

I could not enjoy playing out that day. All I could think about was my father tied up in a room, screaming.

One day a crazy man had come to the plantation on his way to the asylum. The man looked at us as if he wanted to eat us with his eyes and he made desperate efforts to loosen the cords that tied his arms. At night it pierced my heart to hear his anguished screams. When he departed in the morning for the station, I went to look at him. He was gentle as a lamb with a little boys smile on his lips.

“The devil has gone out of his body,” they said.

My father must have been like that man, locked up in a room with bars on the window, yelling and screaming in despair, treated like a dangerous animal.

“They go to heaven,” people said about the madman, “They are as innocent as the angels.”

However, there were madmen who were possessed by the devil. They invoked his presence and the demons would take possession of their bodies.

Without any doubt my father was not one of these. He would be innocent like the others, and would go to Heaven. And this consoled me a little when thinking about this situation.

 But thoughts of madmen began to absorb my mind. And I began to be afraid of going mad as well. On the plantation everyone said,

“He’s his father’s son, though he’s the image of his mother. He’s got the same spirit as his parents.”

Maybe I too would end up like my father. Those dark thoughts made me feel sad.

“It’s because his girlfriend’s gone away,” they said.

The memory of the poor man with deranged eyes and tied up with cords tormented my tender heart. My preoccupation with sickness, already begun in infancy, was to trouble me throughout my youth.

A doctor came to the plantation to examine me on account of my asthma. He asked me about everything; the cause of my mother’s death, what my father had suffered from. He said that in my case I needed a thorough treatment, indeed, a course of injections. But, because there on the plantation he was unable to undertake such a treatment, he prescribed some remedies to be taken orally.

I became a prisoner of medicine bottles and ridiculous diets. My grandfather was very concerned. No one was to shout at me. On one occasion my cousin Silvino wanted something that I wanted too. They gave it to me and he complained;

“Carlinhos is ill, so nobody must make him cross.”

This only made me even more ill at ease and out of sorts. I went back to my canaries and my sheep. They didn’t talk to me about sickness and they weren’t afraid that I would die. My habit of solitary meditations returned, and I began talking to myself. I didn’t go down to the river to bathe any more, and they shouted at me if I went out in the sun, and I wasn’t allowed to stay out talking after dark at the old slave quarters.

“Come in now, Carlinhos!”

That was all I ever heard. My life was becoming like that of my captive canaries, while my cousins were allowed to enjoy the magnificent summer weather jumping about and playing, enjoying the strong sun by day and the silvery moon at night. They didn’t want me to go with them anywhere, and the black boys were afraid of getting into trouble if they took me with them.

I could see my cousins, roasted red by the sun, sucking on whatever fruit they could find and I was consumed with bitterness. The excessive care from which I suffered was changing me. I began to nurse a real anger against anyone who opposed my wishes. Even Aunt Maria, so gentle with me, so full of tenderness for her adopted son, was subjected to my bad temper, my strops and my sulks.

They only allowed me out in the afternoon to walk my sheep. But I had to return before the damp of the evening.

I ran off as often as I could to the outskirts of the plantation. The children of the tenant farmers were not afraid to play with me. They were unaware of my family’s anxieties. Whole afternoons I would hang around Maria Pitu’s house, the sheep tied up eating leaves from the bushes, while I, free to play with my playmates, did everything that was forbidden to me back at the main house. Maria Pitu had three children. One was ill, poor thing, and always sat in a box, his enormous head hanging down. He didn’t walk and he didn’t talk either. His head hung down, face forward, like a weight, but he looked at the world with lively burning eyes. He had been like that since the day he was born. His mother treated him like a pet animal. She would feed him with a wooden spoon. Then she would leave him in the box and forget about him. This almost inhuman creature horrified me. But his eyes were the same as any other person’s. Black and lively they were, looking at me with an interest that disturbed me.

He was treated differently to the other children. For a start he had no name. He had never been baptized. They called him Big Head, and he would respond to this name with a grimace on his soft mouth which made me feel sick. Sometimes the shrieks that came from his mouth made me afraid. It was hunger. So they gave him a piece of crust to chew on.

His mother never tired of saying that she wished him dead.

“Our Lord God should take that thing away from this world. He’s a cripple. All he gives is work. It would be a blessing for himself if he were gone.”

But he would not die. Indeed, he was quite robust, and very satisfied with that life of misery. I would go back home thinking about him. I had heard it said that his father had died from drinking too much. The child had been born that way on account of the rum.

These problems inherited from fathers filled me with dread. I too had a father who I might take after. And everyone on the plantation thought as much. They all approached me with caution.

And the medicine they gave me three times a day left a bitter taste in my mouth. Then I would think of Big Head’s father who had drunk like a fish and who had brought into the world such a child.

My ruminations came from wells poisoned by pessimism. Just a boy, this corrosive acid dripped down on my childhood, rotting the joy of being alive.

And my family made me suffer even more, not allowing me the innocent pleasures of being a little boy. That devil of a doctor had shut me up in a hell, there, indoors, yards from the paradise of the open air.

Bad thoughts began to nestle in my mind. They would fly away, but they would always be back, in the solutions they offered me, in the dreams they made me dream, in the hatreds that dragged me down. Beneath the sapodilla trees, sat in their shade, looking out for canaries, all I had were bad thoughts. Inside me a creature was growing who wasn’t me. The forced seclusion of a boy who needed air and sunshine was making me lose my soul rather than curing my body. I thought of Maria Clara with a longing I had never known before.

The joys of the time we had spent together were mixed with a perverse desire to possess her. My impulses belonged rightly to a boy older than I was. I would stand for hours on end in the cowshed watching the cows that had been sent from other plantations to breed with my grandfather’s bulls, and I would watch the mares whinnying in the enclosure for their stallions. Sex grew on me quicker than my legs or arms.

The Negress Luisa made herself my accomplice in depravity. Unlike the other black women, who did not abuse us, she was a sort of black angel of my childhood. She would take me to my room to put me to bed, and when we were alone in the bedroom she would do ignoble things with me. I was a child to whom the catechism was unknown. I knew little about praying. And this dangerous absence of religion meant that I had no fear of sin. The girl initiated me, still a greenhorn, into her lascivious ways. I don’t know how to describe what she did with me. She would take me to bathe in the river, sullying my childhood chastity with her animal lust. The dark shadow of sin combined with my already existing desperation of a child checked at every turn, further distanced me from the great joy of the life all around me.

On the plantation they were distilling the sugar cane. The miserable workers in the distillery invented songs to the Sugar King who created the firewater that burnt their mouths like the fire of a furnace. Meanwhile, the hot treacle crackled and spat.

The axles of the ox-carts groaned under the weight of the cane, drivers spurred on the donkeys with their whips, wagons trundled along the roads to Labarada and Medalha.

The black boys used to hitch a ride on the carts and in so doing they learnt the craft of the master carters. Such was the rhythm of the working life.

Visitors arrived from Pilar. They were Captain José Medeiro’s boys, dressed in the uniform of the diocesan college. They didn’t ride sheep anymore, ashamed of such childishness. They told me stories about their boarding school. The golden buttons on their jackets filled me with envy

My grandfather talked with the Captain and Father Severino and Mr. Samuel, the local judge, about the local politics, the next elections, and the jury that was to be selected to judge a man who was a client of my grandfather’s.

That evening, when they were all going home the black boys followed them, carrying tins of syrup and gourds of broth on their heads. These visits, which were an event on the plantation, meant nothing to me now. All I thought about were my lascivious escapes with my Wicked Angel, my delicious masturbations with Luisa. I began to form a strange attachment to her, an attachment that dragged me around after her skirts wherever she went. I didn’t like the black men who she whispered to. That great lover’s sickness, the worry of being cheated on, came over me. An unwelcome jealousy wrapped itself around my heart. The woman told me that I still had the smell of milk around my mouth and she arranged assignations with men in the sweet smelling recesses amongst the fruit trees.

My attachment to Luisa was an all-consuming vice. Sex lay upon me like an abominable slavery.