The old man thought that they were about to be sent on their way a second time. He began an explanation, but the lean man interrupted him.
“That’s all right, Dad. You can come in,” he said. “We don’t catch the fever here. A worker’s got a tough hide.”
They went in. The other men who were asleep in the hut now woke up. There were five of them in all. The hut had but one room, with mud walls, a zinc roof, and an earthen floor. This was at once parlour, bedroom, and kitchen. Their toilet was the out-of-doors, the groves, the forest. They placed the body on one of the wooden bunks where the men slept, and remained standing around it. The old fellow then took a candle from his pocket, lighted it, and placed it at the head of the deceased. It was already half burned down, having served as illumination for the dead in the early part of the night, as it was to do again when they reached the house where the daughters lived.
“And what do they do?” the Negro asked.
“What does anybody do in Ferradas?” said the old man. “They’re all whores.”
“All three of them?”
“Yes, sir, all three.”
There was a moment’s silence as they stood around the emaciated corpse with its growth of beard streaked with white.
“One of them was married,” the old man went on. “Then her husband died.”
“He was pretty old, too, wasn’t he?” said the Negro, pointing to the dead man.
“He was all of seventy.”
“Old enough to be our grandpappy,” said one of them who had taken no part in the conversation before. But no one laughed.
The lean man found the bottle of rum and a bowl that passed from hand to hand. Another of those who lived in the hut, and who had arrived at the plantation that very day, wanted to know what kind of fever it was that had caused the man’s death.
“No one knows, to tell you the truth. It’s a forest fever; you catch it and you’re a goner in no time. There’s no remedy that will do you any good—not even a regular doctor. Not even Jeremias and his herbs.”
The Negro then explained, for the benefit of the newcomer from Ceará, that the witch-doctor lived all by himself in the forests of Sequeiro Grande, in a ruined shack stuck off among the trees. It was only in cases of great emergency that anyone went to look for him there. Jeremias subsisted on the roots of trees and on wild-growing fruits. He knew how to cure bullet-wounds and snake-bites. In his shack the snakes ran around loose, and every one of them had its name just like a woman. He had remedies for bodily ills and for lovers’ ailments as well. But he could do nothing about this fever.
“I heard of it in Ceará, but I never believed it. They tell so many stories about this country; you hear some whoppers.”
The lean-looking worker asked what it was they said: “Is it good or bad?”
“Both good and bad, but more bad than good. They say there’s a mint of money to be made here, and they tell how so-and-so got rich the minute he stepped off the boat; they say the streets are paved with it, that it’s as common as dust. On the bad side they say there’s the fever, the jagunços, the snakes—a lot of bad things.”
“And yet you came down here.”
The man from Ceará did not reply to this; it was the old man who spoke.
“Having money may be a bad thing in itself,” he said, “if that’s all that you think of. A man is a worm if all he can see in life is money; he becomes blind and deaf when he hears them talk of it. That’s why there’s so much trouble in these parts.”
The lean man nodded his head. He, too, had left father and mother, sweetheart and sister, to come after money in this land of Ilhéos. The years had gone by, and he was still gathering cacao in Maneca Dantas’s groves.
“There is a heap of money here,” the old man continued, “but what folks can’t see—”
The candle was casting its light on the dead man’s thin face. He appeared to be listening attentively to the conversation round about him. The bowl of rum was passed another time. It had begun raining outside and the Negro closed the door. The old man gazed long and hard at the corpse with its bearded face.
“Do you see him?” he said, and his voice was weary and hopeless. “He worked for more than ten years at Baraúnas for Colonel Teodoro. He had nothing, not even his daughters’ company. He spent ten years of his life in debt to the colonel all the time. Then the fever took him off, and the colonel would not even give a penny to help the girls bury him.”
His companion took up the tale at this point: “He even said that he was doing a lot by not sending the daughters a bill for what the old man owed him. He said a whore made a lot of money.”
The lean man spat disgustedly. The big ears of the deceased appeared to be listening. The man from Ceará was a little alarmed by it all. He had arrived that day; one of Maneca Dantas’s foremen had hired him in Ilhéos, along with a number of others who had come down by the same boat. They had reached the plantation that afternoon and had been assigned to the various workers’ huts. The Negro now undertook to enlighten the new arrival, draining the bowl of rum as he did so.
“You’ll see tomorrow.”
The old man who had helped carry the body then went on: “I never knew anybody who was worse off than a worker in a cacao grove.”
The lean man thought this over.
“The capangas are better off,” he said. “If you are a good shot,” he added, turning to the native of Ceará, “your fortune’s made. Down here the only folks that have money are those that are good at killing, the assassins.”
The newcomer from the north opened his eyes in astonishment. The dead man frightened him, vaguely; here was concrete proof of what they were talking about.
“Good at killing?” he repeated.
The Negro laughed.
“A lad who’s a dead shot,” the lean man went on to explain, “can live like a lord. He can hang around town with the women, he always has money in his pocket, and he never fails to collect his wages. But the worker in a grove—well, you’ll see tomorrow.”
He was the second man who had spoken of “tomorrow,” and the one from Ceará was by this time curious to know what was going to happen then. Any one of them could have told him, but the lean man went on.
“Bright and early tomorrow,” he said, “the clerk down at the store is going to send for you to make up your kit for the week. You haven’t any tools to work with, so you’ll have to buy some. You’ll have to buy a scythe and an ax, a knife, and a pickax; and all that’s going to set you back something like a hundred milreis. Then you’re going to have to buy flour, beef, rum, coffee, for the whole week. You’re going to have to lay out another ten milreis for food. At the end of the week you’ll have fifteen coming to you in wages”—the man from Ceará did a mental sum, six days at two and a half, and agreed—“that’ll leave a balance of five milreis, but you won’t get it; you’ll have to leave it there to apply on what you owe for the tools. You’ll be a whole year paying off that hundred milreis without seeing so much as a penny of your wages. Oh, maybe at Christmas time the colonel will advance you ten milreis to go spend with the whores in Ferradas.”
The lean man said all this in a jesting manner, but his tone was half cynical, half tragic and discouraged. Then he asked for some rum. The man from Ceará was silent and sat staring at the corpse.
“A hundred milreis,” he said at last, “for a knife, a scythe, and a pickax?”
“In Ilhéos,” the old man told him, “you can get an ‘alligator knife’ for twelve milreis. At the plantation stores you can’t get one for less than twenty-five.”
“A whole year,” the man from Ceará repeated. He was calculating as to when the rain would fall once more on his drought-ridden native province. He had planned to go back as soon as the rains came to the parched earth, planned to return with money enough to buy a cow and a calf. “A whole year.” He stared at
the dead man, who appeared to be smiling.
“There’s something else for you to think about. Before you get through paying off what you owe, your debt will have increased. You will have had to buy a pair of work-pants and a shirt. You’ll have had to buy medicine, which God knows is dear enough. You’ll have to buy a revolver, which is the only money well laid out in this man’s country. And you’ll never get out of debt. Down here,”—and the lean man made a sweeping gesture with his hand which took in all those present, both those that worked at the Monkeys and the pair that had come with the corpse from Baraúnas—“down here everybody’s in debt; no one has anything coming to him.”
There was fear now in the eyes of the man from Ceará. The candle was burning low, casting a reddish light on the corpse’s face. It was raining outside.
“I was a lad in the days of slavery,” the old man said as he rose. “My father was a slave, my mother also. But it wasn’t any worse then than it is today. Things don’t change; it’s all talk.”
The worker from Ceará had left his wife and daughter there. He had been going to return as soon as word came of the first showers, his pockets bulging with money from the south, money to begin life anew in his own country. But now he was afraid. The candlelight was increasing and diminishing the dead man’s smile. The lean man agreed with the old fellow.
“There’s no difference,” he said.
The old man put out the candle and stuck it in his pocket; then slowly they lifted the hammock, he and his younger companion. The lean man opened the door for them.
“And what about his daughters,” the Negro inquired, “the whores?”
“Yes?” said the old man.
“Where do they live?”
“In the rua do Sapo. It’s the second house.”
Then the old fellow turned to the man from Ceará:
“Nobody ever goes back from here. You’re tied to the store from the day you come. If you want to leave, go this very night; tomorrow will be too late. If you want to go, come along with us; maybe you’ll be good enough to help us carry him. Afterwards it will be too late.”
The newcomer was still in doubt. The old man and the youth were standing there, the hammock slung over their shoulders.
“And where will I go? What will I do?”
No one had an answer for him; that question had not occurred to any of them. Not even the old man, nor the lean man with the cynical, jesting voice. Nor the young man, either. They stood staring at the door. The Negro crossed himself out of respect to the corpse, but at that moment he was thinking of the three daughters, the three whores. Rua do Sapo, second house. He would go around there the next time he was in Ferradas. The man from Ceará stared after the pair as they were swallowed up in the night.
“I’m going, too!” he suddenly exclaimed.
Feverishly he began throwing his things together and, sobbing a farewell, he ran out. The lean man closed the door behind him.
“And where’s he going to go?” Seeing that no one replied to his question, he answered it himself: “To another plantation, where it will be the same thing as here.”
He blew out the light.
10
Some while before, from the door of his bedroom, Horacio had bidden Lawyer Virgilio good night; the latter was sleeping in the front room.
“Sleep well, colonel,” came the sonorous and fastidiously polite response.
In the silence of the room Ester was opening and closing her hands upon her bosom, as though to stifle the beating of her heart. From the drawing-room came Maneca Dantas’s measured snores. Their friend, having yielded to the attorney the guest-room which he usually occupied, was lying in a hammock that had been strung up in the parlour. From the darkness Ester followed the movements of her husband. She was experiencing a very definite sensation, the feeling of Virgilio’s presence in the other room. Horacio was undressing in the dark, and she could hear the sound made by his boots as he dropped them to the floor. Seated on the edge of the bed, he was in a joyful mood; he had been almost childishly happy ever since Ester, at the table, had consented to play the piano at his request. From where he sat he could hear his wife’s breathing. Taking off his shirt and trousers, he put on his nightgown with little red flowers embroidered on the front of it.
Then he rose to shut the door that led from the bedroom to the room where the child slept, watched over by Felicia. Ester had been strongly opposed to this arrangement and had insisted that the door must remain always open; for she was afraid that during the night snakes might come in and strangle the little one. But Horacio was now slowly closing it. With eyes wide open in the dark, she continued to follow his movements.
She knew that he was going to take her tonight; he always closed the door between the two bedrooms when he wanted to possess her. But tonight—and this was the strangest of all the strange things that had happened that evening—for the first time Ester did not have that obscure feeling of repulsion which was renewed in her whenever Horacio sought to make love. Other times she would unconsciously huddle in the bed as a shudder ran over her, along her belly, up and down her arms, and around her heart. She would feel her body closing to him in anguish. But tonight she felt nothing of all this. Was it, possibly, for the reason that, while her eyes from the darkness of the room might be spying on Horacio, her mind was in the front bedroom, where Virgilio was sleeping? But was he sleeping? Perhaps he was not; perhaps he was thinking of her, as his own eyes pierced the darkness and the door, made their way down the corridor and through the other door, for a glimpse of her body beneath the cambric nightgown. She shuddered at the thought of it. The very presence of Virgilio in the other room gave her an expansive feeling. She smiled, and Horacio thought that her smile was for him. He, too, was happy tonight. For him it was a new dawn, an unhoped-for spring, a happiness to which he had never dared look forward. He was holding her lovely head in his hands, when suddenly there was a knocking at the front door. Pausing in his caress, Horacio listened attentively. He could hear Maneca Dantas rising as the knocks were repeated, could hear the bolt being drawn and the door opened as his friend inquired who was there. Ester’s head was in his hands, and her eyelids now slowly parted. Maneca’s footsteps were drawing near, and Horacio was compelled to abandon his wife’s body and its pleasing warmth. His eyes grew small with a sudden anger at this unfortunate interruption on Maneca’s part. From the corridor the latter’s voice could be heard.
“Horacio! Friend Horacio!”
“What is it?”
“Come here a minute. It’s something serious.”
From the other room came Virgilio’s voice: “Am I needed?”
“You can come, too, doctor,” Maneca told him.
“What is it, Horacio?” Ester asked, in a choking voice, from the bed.
Horacio turned to her. Smiling, he put a hand to her face.
“I’m going to see. I’ll be back.”
“I’ll go, too.”
As he left, she rose from the bed and slipped on a dressing-gown. It had occurred to her that she would thus be able to have another glimpse of Virgilio this evening. Horacio went out the way he was, the lighted lamp in his hand, clad in the voluminous nightshirt that came all the way to his feet, with the funny little flowers down the front of it. Virgilio was already in the drawing-room with Maneca Dantas when Horacio came in. Horacio at once recognized the third person present—he was Firmo, who had a grove near the forests of Sequeiro Grande, and he was obviously tired as he sat there in a chair with his mud-spattered boots and his face streaked with grime.
Hearing Ester’s steps, Horacio said: “Bring us something to drink.”
She barely had time to note that Virgilio did not sleep in a nightgown as the other men did. He was clad in very fashionable pyjamas, and was smoking with beautiful self-assurance. Maneca Dantas took advantage of Ester’s absence to draw on a pair of trousers over h
is nightshirt, but the effect was all the more comical, with the tail of the gown sticking out from behind. Firmo was explaining things to Horacio.
“The Badarós,” he was saying, “tried to have me done away with.”
Maneca cut a ridiculous figure in that get-up, with his anxious manner, but the question that he now asked revealed a profound knowledge of the capangas employed by the Badarós.
“And how does it come that you are still alive?”
Horacio also was waiting for an answer to this question, and Virgilio was eyeing him: the colonel with his wrinkled forehead looked enormous in that funny nightgown.
“The Negro,” said Firmo, “became frightened and missed his aim.”
“But are you sure it was one of the Badarós’ men?” Horacio wanted to be certain.
“It was Negro Damião.”
“And he missed?” Maneca’s voice was full of incredulity.
“He missed. He must have been drinking. He came out and ran down the road like a crazy man. There was such a fine moon. I could see his black face.”
“Well, then,” said Maneca, speaking slowly, “you had better have them light some candles in the church. To escape a bullet of Negro Damião’s is a miracle, and a big one I should say.”
They were all silent as Ester came in with the rum bottle and the glasses. She served them, and Firmo gulped his drink down at once and asked for another, which he consumed with equal promptitude. Virgilio was admiring the back of Ester’s neck, where the furrow showed white beneath her loosened hair as she bent over to serve Maneca. He watched Horacio as the latter stood there in the act of taking a glass from his wife’s hand. He felt a desire to laugh, the colonel was so ridiculous; he was like a circus clown in that embroidered nightgown of his, with his pock-marked face. At the table he had been a timid fellow who had failed to understand the major part of what Virgilio and Ester were saying. He had been more comic than anything else, and the young attorney had felt himself the master of this woman whom chance had stranded there in an environment that was not her own; despite his gigantic frame, the cacao-planter had given an impression of weakness; he was a person of no importance, incapable of proving an obstacle to the plans already forming in Virgilio’s mind. It was Firmo’s voice that brought the lawyer back to reality and the present scene.