Brasyl (17 page)

Slavery is an alien state to me; those few I have seen in Paris are
novelties: as a society we practice the subtler oppressions of
seigneury. God forfend that this plague of draft animals should cross
to France! Not a day passes that we are not passed by flotillas of
tethered rafts laden to the waterline with bound slaves: men, women,
children, all red, all naked as innocent Adam and Eve. This is a
monstrous traffic. The prices at Belém do Pará are
insultingly low; the Indian has not our resistance to diseases, and
life on the engenhos is so hard and dispiriting few see more than
five years—few desire more than five years. This economy serves
the senhores de engenhos well: a slave pays for himself in two
cruelly hard sugar harvests; everything after that is profit. In five
years the owner has returned double on his investment, so there is no
incentive not to work them to death. I am told many Indians simply
put an end to themselves rather than face such an existence. Yet the
supply of red flesh up the great river is seemingly as endless as its
flow of waters: whole nations are being "descended," as the
euphemism runs here.

What may I tell you of my traveling companion? For a start, he is
more chaperone than traveling companion: I am in no doubt whatsoever
that his advent alone secured my permission to travel upriver, the
usefulness of my researches to the mercantile Portuguese being
balanced against their sensitivities at being tenuous owners of a
vast, largely unmapped, and almost wholly undefended territory that
our kingdom has historically viewed with envy. No matter, it is the
least of incivilities; indeed, it is almost a flattery that they
consider me so important a spy that they have placed me under the
watchfullness of as extraordinary a man as Father Quinn, SJ.

You know well my scant regard for the religious, but every so often
one meets a member in holy orders of such force of personality, such
qualities and charisms that one is forced to speculate, what could
possibly have moved this man to take his vows? Luis Quinn is surely
one of these. Of an Old Catholic family dispossessed of its lands and
forced into the port trade by the accesssion of the House of Orange,
he is a great bear of a man—Irish, a race of lumbering, uncouth
giants much given to brooding and the taking of slights and
offenses—yet in the Ver-o-Peso, when we fought in mock duel, he
moved with a grace, an energy and economy that I have never seen in
any of his compatriots, and also an unregenerate ferocity that leads
me to speculate what may have led him to his vow and habit.

He is an intelligent man. I have never met a Jesuit who was not at
worst a pleasant conversationalist, at best a fine intellectual spar.
Languages I have always found peculiarly broadeningtro the mind: to
speak is to think; language is culture. Father Quinn speaks his
native Irish in two dialects, the western and the northern; Latin and
Greek of course; English; Spanish; French; Portuguese; Italian; can
get by in Moroccan Arabic and claims to have taught himself the Tupi
lingua geral, which is more commonly spoken than Portuguese on these
waters, on the crossing from Lisbon. How that rowdy family of voices
must shape the interior of a man's skull is a fine speculation.

Last night, in the long and tedious dark that falls so early and
swift in these latitudes, I showed him the working model of the
Governing Engine. I demonstrated how the chain of cards fed from the
hopper and thus governed the lifting patterns of the weft harnesses
in the loom. "Thus the most commplicated of brocades can be
simply rendered as a series of holes or solids in the card:
mathematically, substance or absence, ones or nulls. In a sense, an
entire weave of cloth can be reduced to a single chain of figures:
ones and zeroes." He handled the device and toyed intelligently
with the wooden mechanism, observing how the pegs on the riser-heads
fell into the holes and held the weft down, while the solid card
pressed down on those same pins and caused the harnesses to rise.

"I can see how it might be possible to use such a set of cards
to playa program in a musical automaton," he said
perspicaciously. "It is a much more flexible system than the
pins on musical boxes; one mechanism could play any piece that could
be rendered in holes and solids—ones and nulls, as you suggest.
One of those new-fashioned fortepianos would be an ideal instrument,
being not so far from a loom in its construction. A loom of music,
one might say."

I speculated then of other tasks that might benefit from the
automotivation of the Governing Engine: arithmetical calculation was
easily simplified, and Jean-Baptiste, whose touch of genius the
punched card was, developed a number of card-sets that could perform
mathematical computations as complex as factorization and deriving
square roots, notoriously cumbersome and time-consuming.

"I must confess that this thought fills me with intellectual
excitement," I said to Quinn as we stood by
Fé em Deus
's stern rail, taking what cool the evening offered. "If such
straightforward arithmetic computations can be reduced to a string of
ones and nulls, might not all mathematics be ultimately reducible to
the same basic code? The great Newton's laws of motion, his rules for
the gravitational forces that order the physical universe, these too
may be simply reduced to ones and zeroes, something and nothing.
Might this simple machine—given a sufficiently large stack of
properly coded cards—be capable of rendering the entire
universe itself? A universal governor?"

I shall not soon forget his reply: "Your words come close to
blasphemy there, friend." To him, I was reducing the vast
created order, and everything in it, to something even less than
Newton's dumb mechanism, to a mere string of somethings and nothings.
That Earth and the heavens could be governed, in effect,
ex nihilo
—by nulls, by the absence of God-was not lost on this acute
man. He said, "Mathematics is the product of the mind, not the
mind of mathematics, and all creations of the perfection of God."

I should have understood that he was offering me a space in which to
pause, even to withdraw from what he saw as the logical and, to him,
heretical consequences of my speculation. Bur the wide vistas of
mental abstraction have always called me on, to run like a horse
turned loose after years at the mill; or perhaps the mad, dying
horses of Brazil? I asked him to consider the auto-motive fortepiano:
the same mechanism that turned digits on the cards into notes could
be reversed, encoding the strokes of the keys into marks on a card,
to be punched into holes. Thus we could obtain an exact record of a
player's performance at that moment and no other; in effect, the very
thoughts and intents of Mr. Handel or Father Vivaldi preserved
forever. This record could be copied many times, as a book is
printed, a permanent memory of a performance, not subject to the
frailties and imaginings of human memory. A model of part of mind: I
surmised that within a very few years of the Governing Engine's
general acceptance into the world of industry, ways would be found to
record and code other aspects of the human mind.

"Then thank God that our souls are more than mere numbers,"
Quinn said. He hefted the Governing Engine and for an instant I
feared he might fling it into the river. He set it down on the deck
as he might a colicky child. "A model of a model of a mind. Your
engine, M. Falcon, will make slaves of us all."

And so it is that human intelligence is the slave of doctrine,
shackled and sold as utterly as any of the wretches that drift past
us on those waterlogged slave rafts. The divine is invoked and there
can be no more argument. Damnable Jesuit condescension! The arrogance
of his assumption to possess all truth, that no debate need be
entered into for I could only be correct insofar as I concurred with
his doctrine. We spoke no more that night: we retired to our
hammocks, he to banish the mosquitoes with the fumes of the powerful
cigars he favors, I to rage and draw up arguments and counterblasts,
exposing follies and inanities. It will be fruitless; truth is not
ours to discover; it is what is revealed. It angers me to see a man
of such gifts and intellectual grasp reduced to the state of child by
the dogma of his order.

God keep you and save you, my dear sister, and my affections to
JeannPhillipe and little Bastien, Anette, and Joséph—he
must be quite the pup now! Surely Jean-Baptiste must by now have
returned to France and is making a recovery from his bloody flux;
convey my warmest brotherly affections. Beyond São José
Tarumás there will be few, if any, opportunities for
communication, so this may be the last letter you receive from me
until I complete my experiment. If you should see Marie-Jeanne, the
simple imparting of these words would give her comfort and certainty
while we are necessarily parted:
My mind is made up, I am decided:
yes, I shall, yes. With all my heart.

With loving affection

Your brother

Robert.

Luis Quinn made his first exercise at dawn. The Fé em Deus lay
anchored to a cable from the northern bank, a guard against escape
though the slaves slept chained to their oars. Rags of mist coiled
across the water and clung to the trees that crowded down to the
cracked, muddy strand. The river was an ocean, its farther bank
invisible through the vapors stirred from its deep-secreted heat.
Sound hung close to the surface, pressed low by the layers of warm
and cool air; it seemed to come from all sides at once, from immense
distances. Luis Quinn found himself holding his breath, holding every
creak of joint and pulse of blood still to unpick the weave of voices
channeled along the river. The pagan roar of howler monkeys—they
no longer terrified him as they had that second night out from Belém
when they seemed the infernal host of Babylon—the frogs, the
insects, the whoop and scrape of the morning birds, but beyond them
... splashing? Oars? He strained to hear, but an eddy in the flow of
heat and cool swept the faint noise back into the general chorus.
Suddenly all other senses were overwhelmed by the smell of deep
water, cool and sacred. A joy so intense it was pain made Luis Quinn
reach for the rail. He could feel the river run, the world turn
beneath him. He was infinitesimal, embedded in glory and unknowing,
like a nut in its thick casing on the branch of a great tree. Quinn
turned his face to the pearl-gray hidden sun; then pressed his hand
to his heart. Sin to worship the creation before the creator. And yet
... He set his leatherbound book on the rail, undid its lacing,
opened the handwritten pages. A joy, a fire of another kind, his
painstaking translation of the
Spiritual Exercises
into Irish.
The Second Week. Fourth Day. A Meditation on the Two Standards.
Loyola, that subtle soldier: the untranslatable pun.

"A glorious morning indeed, Father."

The violent loudness of the voice as Quinn prepared to descend into
quiet was like a blow. He lurched against the creaking, unsound rail.

"Forgive me, Father, I did not mean to alarm you."

Falcon stood at the aft of the ship half-shadowed by the awning. He
too balanced an open book on the rail, a soft suede-bound sketchbook
in which he drew with charcoal.

"Our superior general prescribes dawn as the best time for
meditation."

"Your superior general is right. What is today's subject?"

"The Two Standards, of Christ and of Lucifer." At many
junctions and embarkations in his life Luis Quinn had returned to the
disciplines of the Spiritual Exercises. The packet from Coimbra to
Lisbon had been brusque business, he no more than freight. The
calm-bound crossing to Salvador was for prepararion, for the lingua
geral and the writings of the great explorers and missionaries. The
slow crawl up the coast to Belém do Pará had been the
opporrunity to study his follow traveler and subject—this
small, fierce man of strangely juxtaposed convictions and doubts and
swift, ill-concealed humors. But the river, that province of time as
much as distance, unchanging and never the same from breath to
breath, was the true embarkation to the celebration of discipline.
"We are commanded to envision a vast plain about Jerusalem, and
mustered upon it around his banner the armies of our Lord; and in the
same work of the mind's eye that other vast plain around Babylon,
where around the banner of the deceiver are gathered the forces of
Lucifer."

"How do you imagine it, the standard of Lucifer?"
Fé
em Deus
was waking; the movements of the crew sending luxurious
ripples across the glassy water.

"Golden of course, like a bird, a proud bird of prey with
feathers of flame and diamonds for eyes. He was a Lord of Light,
Lucifer. Quite quite beautiful and so skillfully made that the
diamond eye enchants and seduces everyone who sees it so they think,
Yes, yes, I see myself reflected there and I am good. Excellently
good. Who would be drawn to it if it did not mirror their vanities
and answer their hopes?"

Falcon gave his whole weight to the rail and looked out into the
morning, where bands of blue were appearing as the higher mists
evaporated. "You have a great gift for visualization, Father. I
find that I must augment my memory with material aids." Quinn
glanced at the doctor's book. The double-page was covered in a
drawing of the visible shore, the line of the trees, the taller tops
rising above the general canopy, the jumble of high birds' nests, the
zones of the strand: the scrub vegetation—a writhe of black
denoted the jacaré in the lee of the bleached fallen
branch—the edge-grasses and the cracking reach of the exposed
muds and silts. Captain Acunha never tired of saying he had never
seen the river so low. The whole was annotated with comments and
footnotes in a strange cursive.