Captains of the Sands (15 page)

“What are you in for, churchmouse?”

“None of your business, monkey-face…” Pedro Bala answered the one with the sucked-in face.

Even the policeman laughed and explained Pedro’s story to the others. But the young black man was called and the others fell silent. They knew he’d knifed a man in a dive that night.
When the black man came back his hands were swollen from blows. He explained:

“He said I’m going to be tried for minor assault…And he gave me a couple dozen…”

He didn’t say any more, he looked for a corner, made himself comfortable. The others remained silent too. And one by one they went to the deputy’s office. Some were set free, others were sent to jail, others came back beaten. The storm had stopped and dawn was coming up. Pedro was the last to be called. He left his jacket where he had Ogun rolled up.

The deputy was a young lawyer who flashed a ruby on his finger and had a cigar in his jaw. When Pedro came in with the policeman the deputy asked for coffee in a loud voice. Pedro stood before the desk. The policeman said:

“This is the boy from the robbery in Campo Grande.”

The deputy made a gesture:

“Go see if that coffee is coming or not…”

The policeman withdrew. The deputy read the report of the policeman who had arrested Pedro Bala, looked at the boy:

“What have you got to say? And don’t you dare lie to me…”

Pedro told a long story in a frightened voice. That his father was a sloopman from Mar Grande and that day he’d come with his sloop and brought him along. But he’d gone right back to pick up another cargo and left him wandering around the city, because the sloop would be coming back to Bahia later in the afternoon and then he could go back with his father. But with the storm his father couldn’t make it back and he didn’t know anybody and was caught in the rain with no place to sleep. He asked a man on the street where he could sleep, the man answered at the police station. Then he asked the policeman to take him to sleep at the police station, but the policeman wouldn’t, then he acted as if he were going to rob the woman just to be taken, to be able to sleep under a roof.

“And I didn’t steal anything or run away…” he ended.

The deputy, who was sipping his coffee, said to himself:

“A child that age couldn’t have invented that story…” Then, since he had literary interests, he murmured: “You’ve got quite a tale there…” and he smiled good-humoredly.

“What’s your father’s name?” he asked Pedro.

“Augusto Santos,” the boy answered, giving the name of a sloopman from Mar Grande.

“If you’re telling the truth I’m going to let you go. But if you’re trying to fool me with that story, you’ll find out…”

He pushed a button to call the policeman. Pedro’s nerves were all tense. The policeman came in, the deputy asked him if Headquarters had a registry of sloopmen from Mar Grande who anchored by the Market docks.

“We do, yes, sir.”

“Go see if a certain Augusto Santos is listed and come back and tell me. And hurry up, my time’s almost up.”

Pedro Bala looked at the clock: it said five-thirty in the morning. The policeman took a few minutes, the deputy paid no more attention to Pedro, who was standing in front of his desk. Only when the policeman returned and said:

“There is one, yes, sir…He was at the dock today but he left right away…” did the deputy make a gesture with his hand and speak to the policeman:

“Let this kid go.”

Pedro asked permission to get his jacket. He tucked it under his arm and it didn’t look as if the image was wrapped up in it. They went back along the corridor and the policeman left him at the door. Pedro headed toward the Largo dos Alitos, went around the old barracks, turned down Gamboa de Cima. Now he was running, but he heard steps behind him. It seemed that he was being followed. He looked. Professor, Big João, and Cat were coming behind him. He waited until they caught up and he asked with curiosity:

“What are you doing in these parts?”

The Professor scratched his head:

“Can’t you see we got up early today. And we were walking here with nothing to do, that was when we ran into you running along…”

Pedro opened his jacket, showed them the image of Ogun. Big João laughed with satisfaction:

“How’d you put it over on them?”

They were going down the slope, slippery with the night’s rain. And Pedro Bala recounted his night’s adventure. Cat asked:

“Weren’t you just a little bit scared?”

At first Pedro Bala thought of saying no, then he confessed:

“To tell the truth, I was shit afraid…”

And he laughed at Big João’s pleased face. The sky was blue now, without clouds, the sun was shining and from the hillside they could see the sloops leaving from the Market docks.

The Christ Child was too big a temptation.

It didn’t feel like a midday in winter. The sun was dropping a clean light down onto the streets. It didn’t burn but the warmth of it was more like the caress of a woman’s hand. In the nearby park flowers were bursting out with colors. Daisies and sunflowers, roses and carnations, dahlias and violets. There seemed to be a delicate perfume on the street, very thin, but one that Lollipop felt entering his nostrils as if to intoxicate him. At the door of some rich Portuguese’s house he’d eaten the leftovers from a lunch that had almost been a banquet. The maid who’d brought him the full plate had said, looking at the streets, the winter sun, the men passing without their coats:

“We’re getting a beautiful day.”

Those words went along with Lollipop down the street. A beautiful day, and the boy went along unconcerned, whistling a samba that God’s-Love had taught him, remembering that Father José Pedro had promised to do everything to get him a place in the seminary. Father José Pedro had told him that all the beauty that fell and wrapped the earth and men was a gift from God and that it was necessary to thank God. Lollipop looked at the blue sky where God must be and thanked him with a smile and he thought that God really was good. And
thinking about God he also thought about the Captains of the Sands. They stole, they fought in the streets, they cursed, they laid black girls on the sand, sometimes they wounded men or police with switchblades or knives. But they were good all the same, they were friends of one another. If they did all that it was because they had no home, no father or mother, their life had no regular meals and they slept in a building that almost had no roof. If they didn’t do all that they would have died of hunger because rare were the houses where they were given food for one, clothing for another. Not even the whole city gave enough for everyone. Lollipop thought they were all condemned to hell. Pedro Bala didn’t believe in hell, Professor either, they laughed at him. Big João believed in Xangô, in Omolu, in the gods of the blacks, who’d come from Africa. God’s-Love, who was a brave fisherman and a
capoeira
fighter without equal, also believed in them, mixing them in with the saints of the whites, who’d come from Europe. Father José Pedro said it was superstition, error, but it wasn’t their fault. Lollipop grew sad at the beauty of the day. Would they all be condemned to hell? Hell was a place of eternal fire, it was a place where the condemned burned during a life that never ended. And in hell there were unknown martyrs, the same as at the police station, the same as in the Reformatory for Minors. A few days before, Lollipop had heard a German monk describing hell in a sermon at Mercy Church. In the pews men and women received the fiery words of the monk like whiplashes on their backs. The monk was ruddy-faced and sweat stood out on his face. His language was mixed up and hell came out of it even more terrible, the flames licking bodies that had been beautiful on earth and had been given over to love, hands that had been agile and given over to theft, to handling knives and switchblades. In the monk’s sermon God was righteous and punishing, he wasn’t Father José Pedro’s God of beautiful days. Afterwards it was explained to Lollipop that God was the supreme goodness and supreme justice. And Lollipop wrapped his love of God in a covering of fear of God and now he was living between the two feelings. His life was the unfortunate life of an abandoned child and that’s why it
had to be a life of sin, of almost daily thefts, of lies at the doors of rich houses. That’s why in the beauty of the day Lollipop looks at the sky with eyes large with fear and asks the pardon of God, so good (but also so just…), for his sins and those of the Captains of the Sands. Because they weren’t to blame. Life was to blame.

Father José Pedro said that life was to blame and did everything to improve their life, because he knew it was the only way of getting them to have a clean existence. One afternoon, however, when the priest was present and João de Adão was present, the dockworker said that the badly-organized society was to blame, the rich were to blame…That as long as nothing was changed the boys couldn’t be men of goodness. And he said that Father José Pedro would never be able to do anything for them because the rich wouldn’t let him. Father José Pedro had been very sad that day and when Lollipop went to console him by explaining that he didn’t agree with what João de Adão was saying, the priest answered, shaking his head:

“There are times when I get to thinking that he’s right, that this is all wrong. But God is good and he’ll know how to fix it…”

Father José Pedro thought that God would pardon them and he wanted to help them. And since he couldn’t find the means, but found a barrier before him (everybody wanted to treat the Captains of the Sands either as criminals or as children just like those reared with home and family), he was a bit in despair, sometimes he was perplexed. But he hoped that God would inspire him one day and until then he went along with the boys, managing sometimes to keep them away from evil acts. He was even one of those most active in wiping out pederasty in the group. And that was one of his great experiences in learning how to act in dealing with the Captains of the Sands. As long as he told them they had to put an end to it because it was a sin, something immoral and ugly, the boys laughed behind his back and continued sleeping with the youngest and the prettiest. But the day the priest, this time aided by God’s-Love, asserted that it was something unworthy of
a man, that it made a man the same as a woman, worse than a woman, Pedro Bala took extreme measures, he expelled the passive ones from the group. And no matter what the priest said, he didn’t want them there anymore.

“If they come back, filth comes back, Father.”

In a manner of speaking Pedro Bala excised pederasty from among the Captains of the Sands the way a doctor cuts out a sick appendix from the body of a man. The difficult part for Father José Pedro was reconciling things. But he went about trying and sometimes he would smile with satisfaction at the results. Except when João de Adão laughed at him and said that only revolution could obtain all that. High up there in the upper city the rich men and women wanted the Captains of the Sands in jail or in the Reformatory, which was worse than jail. Down below there on the docks, João de Adão wanted to put an end to the rich, make everything equal, give the children schools. The priest wanted to give houses, schools, love, and comfort to the children without revolution, without putting an end to the rich. But there was a barrier all around. He felt lost and asked God for inspiration. And with a certain terror he saw without wanting to that when he thought about the problem under consideration that the dockworker João de Adão was right. Then he was taken by fear, because that wasn’t what they’d taught him, and he would pray for hours on end for God to give him illumination.

Lollipop had been Father José Pedro’s great conquest among the Captains of the Sands. He had the reputation of being one of the evilest of the gang, they said that once he’d put a knife to the throat of a boy who didn’t want to loan him money and stuck it in slowly, without trembling, until blood began to flow and the other one gave him everything he wanted. But they also said that he took his switchblade and cut Chico Lardass when the mulatto was torturing a cat that had ventured into the warehouse in search of rats. On the day that Father José Pedro began to talk about God, heaven, Christ, kindness, and mercy, Lollipop began to change. God was calling him and he heard his powerful voice in the warehouse. He saw God in his
dreams and he heard the call of God that Father José Pedro spoke about. And he turned completely around for God, heard God’s voice, prayed to pictures that Father José Pedro had given him. The first day they began to make fun of him in the warehouse. He smacked one of the younger ones and the rest fell silent. The next day the priest told him that he’d done a bad thing, that you had to suffer for God, and then Lollipop gave his switchblade, which was almost new, to the boy he had hit. And he didn’t hit anyone anymore, avoided fights, and if he didn’t avoid stealing it was because that was the means of life they had, they had no other way at all. Lollipop heard the call of God, which was intense, and he wanted to suffer for God. He would kneel for hours on end in the warehouse, sleep on the bare floor, pray even when sleep was trying to make him keel over, flee the black girls who offered him love on the hot waterfront sands. But then he was in love with God-pure-goodness and he suffered in order to pay for the suffering God had gone through on earth. Then came that revelation of the God of justice (God became vengeance for Lollipop) and the fear of God entered his heart and mingled with his love of God. His prayers were longer, the terrors of hell mingled with the beauty of God. He would fast all day long and his face became thin like a hermit’s. He had the eyes of a mystic and he thought he saw God in his dreams at night. For that reason he kept his eyes away from the buttocks and breasts of the black girls who walked along as though dancing before everybody’s eyes on the poor streets of the city. His hope was to be a priest of his God someday, to live only for his contemplation, to live only for him. The goodness of God made him hope to attain it. The fear of God’s taking vengeance for Lollipop’s sins made him despair.