The Abyss (4 page)

Six. Mining

In Brazil Gabriel also thought of that morning for years.

He thought of it as he carried sacks of heavy wet earth on his back, under torrential tropical rains. He thought of it as he moved stones, as he bent over the river bed with a pan and sifted gravel. He thought of it as he learned the motion of swinging a pickaxe over his head and back down, or of taking up a shovel and digging. He thought of it when he was covered in mud, his hands bleeding, his back hurting, his body exhausted.

As soon as he had arrived in Brazil the year before, he had made his way to Vila Rica, the city in the landlocked region of Minas Gerais that, as its name indicated, had become rich by mining.

Half of the gold and diamonds in the world were coming from there. Though he had hoped that the closed-port policy of the Portuguese crown would keep foreign contractors away, Gabriel had found that there were nevertheless still too many men looking for their fortune in Vila Rica.

He had known, too, that prospecting was now closed to private adventurers, as the government had decided that mining would be solely their monopoly. Gone was the time when a man could arrive, prove that he had found gold or diamonds, get a concession, pay a fifth of his findings as taxes and become rich.

The only way open to the restless men in Vila Rica now was smuggling. However, there were guards and police in every road in Minas Gerais to make sure that no smuggler evaded taxes or stole from the crown. Contraband still thrived, but constant deceit, or the possibility of spending the rest of his life in an Angolan jail, were not for Gabriel.

Among the disappointed men who gathered in Vila Rica, there was talk about the slave trade, which was creating some of the biggest fortunes in the colony. Gabriel was asked several times if he had money to invest in live human flesh, a notion that was so appalling to him that he could hardly hear the question without venting his fury.

Hopelessness was not an option for someone of his character, but he began to realize that his path was going to be more difficult than he had thought.

Then fate put him together with Heinrich Bayer. They had shared a table at an inn in Vila Rica, both bending over steaming dishes of pork, greens and manioc flour. An Austrian ─ all long limbs and eager flushed face ─ Heinrich had been allowed in Brazil through his embassy to draw the country and show the court in Vienna what Brazil looked like. Austrian princesses married their way to other thrones, and an eventual alliance between the very young Prince of Beira, heir to Portugal, and a Hapsburg girl would most likely happen in the future.

Heinrich had painted his watercolors and then disappeared; as he also had a passion for geology, he had become certain that diamonds could be found further north in the mountains of Bahia as well. He had sound reasons for thinking so, as he explained over a map not only to Gabriel, but to two other Portuguese men of good but ruined families, Thiago D'Ajuda and Roberto Dantas. 

Heinrich was talking of wild, unclaimed land; there were no guards, private contractors, or slaves there. They might be eaten by Indians or by spotted jaguars, but there would be very few miners, if any.

There might not be any diamonds either, but Gabriel had taken a gamble and put what was left of his mother's inheritance into the adventure; the others had invested what they could, and the four of them had set off together to explore an inhospitable chain of mountains.

For a year they had camped in the wild as they moved along the river looking for diamonds. In spite of how hard their life was, unlike the others Gabriel fell in love with Brazil.

When he woke up before dawn and made a fire to warm their coffee, breathed the clean mountain air and saw the flight of colorful birds; when in that mountain they managed to find wild boar, plentiful fruit and plants to eat; when he drank the cold water of brooks and swam in the clear natural pools formed by waterfalls ─or when he came across an orchid perched on a tree trunk in its vibrant, fragile beauty, he thought he could live like this forever.

If only Clara had married him…

The four men moved for months, looking at the river, digging, sifting, until they finally struck lucky: a bed yielded the precious rocks in their rough form. Bearded, dirty, tired, wet, they danced for joy on the banks of the river.

Then they found a place they liked, leveled the earth and built four tiny houses of mud bricks across a courtyard of beaten dirt. They would live there until they had extracted enough diamonds to be rich.

"Tag!"
 Heinrich would say as he emerged from his house in the morning; he would always be the second person to wake up.

The two of them would sit around the embers drinking their coffee, and eating fruit and cakes they made with shaved cassava. It was good nourishment for the morning ahead, which they would spend mining.

The nearest village was half a day's ride away, and there was no time to go there, except when an instrument broke and they could not fix it themselves.  In the few and widespread villages around, there were people all colors of the rainbow, from a few white Brazilians to the ebony black of the Yoruba or Sudanese, who were probably fugitive slaves. Then there were the many people of mixed race: the mulattos, the 
cablocos
 who were part white and part Indian, and the
 cafuzos
 who were black and Indian.

The miners stayed away from the villages, since no one ought to know that they had found diamonds in the bed of the river. Everything there was hard, everything was scarce, but it was the very isolation of the place which was going to make their fortune.

"Sometimes I think I will die of tedium," Dantas often said, lying in a hammock he had tied between two trees.

"I think I will die trying to fuck a tree!" D'Ajuda replied, shaking his hips. "Even the ass of that mule is beginning to look good!"

Heinrich blushed at this talk, which made the other two call him "altar boy". Gabriel was neither shocked nor interested, but after a while, his countrymen began to grate on him. It would have been better to stay with Heinrich, who was a sensitive man and an honest soul, and whom Gabriel very much liked.

Sometimes they had to go all the way to Salvador, the erstwhile capital of Brazil and one of its greatest cities. It was a ride that would take several days.

There they would sell a few diamonds to be able to afford things that they needed: blankets, hats, boots, horses, mules, hammers, shovels, pans. It was best to go into a big city and sell a very few tiny diamonds there, and then buy things in different places, as they would attract less attention. In a big city no one knew or cared where they were coming from: men arrived from different places and sometimes had gold powder, nuggets or diamonds. A lot of them were probably smugglers, buying houses and courting women in the city. The natives were too lazy to ask or find out anything about them ─ it was the people who were not from Salvador that Gabriel wanted to avoid, the ones who tended to ask questions.

In Salvador Dantas fell in love with a beautiful mulatto girl called Francisca, or Chica, while D'Ajuda made the rounds of the whorehouses. Heinrich and Gabriel would often stay behind in the camp, or go to Salvador together when the others were not going.

Gabriel met a 
cabloca
, a girl of twenty whose name was Iaci. She had toasted skin, almond-shaped black eyes, and a heavy curtain of silky black hair that fell to her waist. She also had a one-year old daughter by a Dutch sailor who had promised her things, then left her behind.

He was not in love with Iaci, but he liked her company. She did not talk much, and had no romantic notions about life; she didn't expect him to love her, and was grateful that they gave each other pleasure, and that he took care of her.

"You're a good man," she would tell him in her serious way.

"Am I?” Gabriel would reply, his gaze roaming the sea in front of her house. He could not speak about another woman who still occupied his thoughts, and who lived on the other side of the ocean.

In the meantime he was falling in love with Iaci’s child, Iara, a baby with golden skin and green eyes. He liked to sit with her in the hammock as her mother cooked the fish they would eat. The child would lie against his chest and sleep as he moved the hammock back and forth with his foot on the ground. Sometimes he would softly sing some sad, slow song from Portugal to her, or even the air of an opera.

Gabriel and Heinrich would never stay too long in Salvador, unlike their partners. Heinrich planned to one day go back to Austria and become wealthy; he dreamt of supporting artists and explorers, and traveling with them.

There were different plans for Gabriel; he would never stay there, or in any city. He saw all the people squeezed together, as if there were not enough space in the enormous landmass that was Brazil, and he saw their vices: prostitutes exhibiting themselves at the doors of shacks, men drinking until they fell in the middle of the street, gamblers fighting each other in corners, men with knives stuck on their waistbands, looking to rob and kill someone.

He was glad that he had no real need of people. He was still the Grand Inquisitor, he thought with a mirthless smile, remembering his brother.

On Sunday morning the prostitutes, the thieves, the gamblers and the drunkards climbed endless steps under the hot sun to make it to a Baroque church perched on a hill. There were many such churches in Salvador, but he had no need of any. The sinners would go in, somehow feel better about themselves, and then come out to sin again.

At night, as he strolled enjoying the cool air, he would sometimes pass the 
terreiros
, clandestine dirt yards where the Africans practiced 
candomblé
, the religion they had brought with them. They danced to the rhythm of drums, in the worship of many gods, or 
orixás
. The English and the Dutch had probably been more efficient at rooting out these parallel cults and evangelizing their slaves, Gabriel thought; the Portuguese had forbidden the pagan rites, but at the same time turned a blind eye to them. He had spoken to Brazilian whites who even believed some of the African superstitions.

One afternoon, as he drank coffee at the door of a small trade shop, an old slave woman stopped to stare intensely at him, until he raised his eyebrows at her. She approached slowly, supported by a cane and holding a smoking pipe with the other hand, from which fragrant tobacco smoke rose. She was dressed in dazzling white and had many necklaces made of shells; he wondered how she kept her clothes so clean.

Her eyes were clouded, but she still seemed to see out of them, as she said in a cracked voice, "Ogun is in you!" she said. "It can be a frightening thing, to look at Ogun, but I am not scared!"

She put the stem of the pipe back in her mouth and snapped her lips over it. Gabriel understood that the woman was speaking of an African god. He thought wryly that if she had been speaking of the religion he knew he would have given her short shrift, but that her exotic beliefs might at least surprise him.

He asked her if she wanted a coffee. The slave, probably a free woman now, smiled and said, "I love coffee!" She took a deep breath and almost managed to straighten her back. "I feel strong when I drink it!"

She chose a table by the counter and he sat down with her, ordering the coffee. Her fingers were gnarled and bent as she picked up the clay cup with the steaming drink and sipped gingerly. Then she closed her eyes and took a drag from her pipe. It was amusing to see someone so old enjoy such simple things.

"They go well together," she said, indicating the coffee and the pipe. Her eyes seemed to sharpen as she nodded at him. "You are Ogun all over. The god of war. I can see it! Strong, stubborn, never turning away from a difficulty, always conquering! Are you like that?"

Gabriel thought that she would tell him a few general things, then ask for money, but he liked her, and he didn't mind. He only smiled. She smiled back, and then began to cackle as if something highly amusing had occurred to her.

"Women are scared of Ogun, but they love him most of all!" she told him, and leaned closer as she breathed smoke out of her nostrils to add, "Very potent, do you see what I mean, very skillful!"

He was glad that she hadn't asked if he were like 
that
. In Brazil the greatest prudery lived side by side with a sort of amoral freedom in matters of sensuality. The woman leaned back and cackled more, and took more sips of her coffee. Gabriel was still smiling. There was always a god of war, he thought. How could there not be, when the human race thrived on strife?

Her smile died, though her toothless mouth stayed open. She was watching him. Gabriel watched her back quietly; she seemed to have gone almost into a trance. "You have beautiful eyes," she finally said. "They look like heaven, but there is hell in them. It's pride, isn't it? Terrible pride. Ogun doesn't like anyone to even look him in the face.  Ogun hates lies more than anything. Ogun is very vengeful."

His gaze finally fell before her steady one and he frowned at the ground, but she wasn't done. "Ogun is with you, but there is also a slave, in the shape of a woman. It's a very beautiful woman, made for love. She is by your shoulder, all the time."

This time Gabriel scoffed; of course there would be a woman, and children, and happiness, if only he paid her. "I don't keep slaves, and I never would," he said flatly.