Read Online Counternarratives by John Keene - Free Book Online

him for what you took to
be his scriptural acumen, his meticulousness with whatever task he undertook, his
pecuniary skills, and literary gifts. There was also his youth, and his personal
probity. You expected that he would right the Alagoas house like an overturned raft,
and at every stage write you of how he did it and would next proceed.
    Indeed this is what you would tell him once one of the
novices—having beckoned him as he re-inspected for a third time the casks of wine in
the house’s cellar to insure a correct count, his gift for precision and detail
having already gained note—led him to your office. There you also delivered a brief
speech about the importance of the house to the Faith in Alagoas and the priests’
role in establishing it, about which D’Azevedo was only dimly aware. You presented
him with his letters of commission, written out and signed and sealed by you, as
there was no time to gain the approval of the authorities in Bahia, let alone
Lisbon. You told him that there were at Alagoas two priests, the said Pero and
another, Padre Barbosa Pires, and one brother, Dom Gaspar Leite, sent from Olinda
half a year before, whom D’Azevedo had just missed upon his return from Europe, as
well as a peck of servants, all of them Africans and mulattos. Of the entire menage
he heard only the essentials. You did not speak even obliquely of the malevolence
lurking in that small outpost on the Atlantic Coast.
    Padre D’Azevedo, cognizant of his oath and the necessity of duty,
accepted willingly. He returned to the wine cellar, finished his inventory and
handed it to a slave to submit to the Brother Procurator, then went and packed his
trunk. Maybe he prayed, read several passages from Ezekiel or another book of
Scripture which he thought might cast a light before him. He had not a single map of
the plans or full estate, no contacts in the town, no specific orders written in
your hand or any others, nor any guide but what what might have suddenly taken root
in his head. The next morning he boarded the skiff to Recife, to catch the ship to
Alagoas.
    D’Azevedo arrived at the port of his chief destination as evening was
falling. The voyage, not far, but over unusually turbulent seas, spent him. The
heat, heightened by the approach of summer and the shoreline humidity, drained him
more. He had vowed, however, to launch, like an arrow aiming for its target, into
the heart of his new position as soon as he touched upon land. Though you had
ostensibly sent word of his imminent arrival, it apparently had not reached Alagoas,
so the house there had not dispatched an emissary to meet him. Rather than lodging
at an inn, as was the custom for people arriving so late in the day, he hired a
driver and cart and, after explaining his destination they headed there, climbing an
undulant escarpment along the bend of the river, along whose southern banks spread a
town of indeterminable size, bracketed by pockets of forests and, to the north and
east, the immense lagoon, at this hour dark as mourning cloth, from which the city
took its name, and then further west, inland and upland until the landscape bowled
into pasture, amidst which stood the monastery’s main gate as the wall of the nearby
forest and the moonless night’s utter blackness, from all sides, enfolded them.
    The Brotherhood’s House in Olinda, which D’Azevedo had just left, rose
up in two windowed rows with bracketed latticed balconies, its walls white, its
rooms commodious, its doors hewn of the finest Brazil wood, a vision of order, with
a church of estimable beauty at one end, and a dining hall and kitchen at the other,
with a library, a balneary, and comfortable lodgings for guests, all ringed by
ample, well-tended fields, as well as a number of smaller, skillfully constructed
structures. The structure that D’Azevedo now faced, presumably the monastery, lit by
a single lantern suspended from a pole midway between the