“Forgive me, I presumed you would accept my hospitality, Brother.”
Father Diego’s Portuguese was flawless, but Quinn heard old Vascongadas in the long vowels.
“If you are aware of my task, then you must surely be aware that I cannot compromise myself. I shall sleep in the pirogue with my people.”
“As you wish.” Father Diego gave orders. Quinn identified a handful of Tupi loan words. “But may we at least share the Sacrament?”
“I should at the least be interested to see if the interior of your… misssion… matches its exterior.”
“You will find Nossa Senhora da Várzea a complete testimony to the glory of God in every aspect.” Gonçalves hesitated an instant on the steps. “Father Quinn, I trust it would not offend you if I said that word has also preeceded you that you enjoy a repuration with the sword.”
“I trained under Jésus y Portugal of Leon.” Quinn was in no humor for false humility.
“Montoya of Toledo was my master,” Father Diego said with the smallest smile, the shallowest dip of the head. “Now that would be fine exercise.”
Passing beneath the watchword of his order into the basilica, Luis Quinn was at once brought up by profound darkness. Shafts fell from the high clerestory, broken into leaf-dapple by the intricate grille-work, revealing glimpses of extravagant painted bas-reliefs. An altar light glowed in the indeeterminate distance; ruddy Mars to the scattered constellations of the votives. This was the dimension of a more intimate organ than the fickle eye. Luis Quinn breathed deep and extended his sense of smell. Sun-warmed wood, the rancid reek of smoking palm oil, incenses familiar and alien; green scents, herbs and foliages. Quinn starred, caught by a sudden overpowering scent of verdure: green rot and dark growing. Now his sense of space and geometry came into focus; he felt great masses of heavy wood above him, decorated buttresses and bosses, a web of vaulting like the tendrils of the strangling fig, galleries and lofts. Figures looked down upon him. Last of all his eyes followed his other senses into comprehension. The exuberance the craftsmen had dissplayed on the basilica’s exterior had within been let run into religious ecstasy. The nave was a vast depiction of the Last judgment. Christ the judge formed the entire rood screen; a starveling, crucified Messiah, his bones the ribs of the screen, his head thrown back in an agony of thorns each the length of Quinn’s arm. His outflung arms judged the quick and the dead, his fingertips breaking into coils and twines of flowering vines that ran the length of the side panels. On his right, the rejoicing redeemed, innocent and naked Indios. Hands pressed together in thanksgiving, they sporred and rolled in the petals that blossomed from Christ’s fingers. On the left hand of Jesus, the damned writhed within coils of thorned liana, faces upturned, begging impossible surcease. Demons herded the lost along the vines: Quinn recognized forest monsters; the deceiving curupira; the boar-riding Tupi lord of the hunt; a onelegged black homunculus in a red Phrygian cap who seemed to be smoking a pipe. Father Gonçalves waited at Quinn’s side, awaiting response. When none came, he said mildly, “What does Salvador believe of me?”
“That you have transgressed the bounds of your vows and faith and brought the Society into perilous disrepute.”
“You are not the first to have come here bearing that charge.”
“I know that, but I believe I am the first with the authority to intervene.” Gonçalvesbowed his head meekly.
“I regret that Salvador considers intervention necessary.”
“My predecessors, none of them returned; what befell them?”
“I would ask you to believe me when I tell you that they departed ftom me hale in will and wind and convinced of the value of my mission. We are far from Salvador here; there are many perils to body and soul. Fierce forest tigers, terrible snakes, bats that feed on man’s blood, toothed fish that can strip the flesh from his bones in instants, let alone any number of diseases and sicknesses.” Father Gonçalves gestured for Quinn to precede him to the choir. The screen gate was in the shape of the heart of Christ; Gonçalves pushed it open and bade Quinn enter.
The altar was the conventional wooden table, worked in the fever-dream fashion of Gonçalves’s craftmasters to resemble twined branches, the crucifix its only adornment, an indio Christ, exquisitely worked, sufferings incompreehensible to the Old World borne on his face and scourged, pierced body. But the crucifix had not taken Father Quinn’s breath, powerful and alien though it was; it was so monumentally overshadowed by the altarpiece behind it that it seemed an apostrophe. The east end of the church, where lights and ladychapel would have been in a basilica of stone and glass, was fashioned into one towering reredos. A woman, the green woman, the Saint of the Flood, wreathed in life and glory. Nude she was, Eve-innocent, but never naked. The saint was clothed in the forest: jewel-bright parrots and toucans, some decorated with real plumage, were her diadem; from her full breasts and milkproud nipples burst flowers, fruit, and tobacco; while from her navel, the divine omphalos, sprouted vines and lianas that clothed her torso and thighs. The beasts of the várzea dropped from her womb to crouch in adoration at the one foot that touched the ground and struck roots across the floor into the rear of the altar: capybara, paca, peccary, and tapir, the green sloth and the crouching jaguar. Her other leg was bent, sole pressed to thigh, a dancer’s pose; an anaconda circled it, its head pressed to her pubis. Her right hand held the manioc bush, her left the recurved hunting bow of the flood forest; and fish attended her, a star-swarm like the milky band of the galaxy reflected in black water, swimming through the woven tracery of tree boles and vines against which Nossa Senhora danced. But true stars also attended her, the Lady twinkled with glowing points of soft radiance: glowworms pinned to the altarpiece with thorns. Again Luis Quinn caught the noble rot of vegetation; as his eyes grew accustomed to the deeper gloom around the altar and the monstrous scale of the work revealed itself to him, he saw that where rays of light struck down through the tracery of the clerestory, precious orchids and bromeliads had been planted in niches in the screen of trees: a living forest. Our Lady of the Floods was beautiful and terrible, commanding awe and reverence. Luis Quinn could feel her forcing him to his knees and by that same token knew that to genuflect before her would be true blasphemy.
“I cannot receive Mass from you, Father Gonçalves.”
Again, the coy dip of the head that Quinn understood now concealed fury.
“Does not your soul crave the solace of the Sacrament?”
“It surely does, and yet I cannot.”
“Is it because of the Lady, or because of the hand that gives it?”
“Father Gonçalves, did you attack and raze a Carmelite mission and take its people into slavery’”
“Yes.” Quinn had expected no worming denial from Father Diego, yet the flatness of the acknowledgment shocked Quinn as if a pistol had suddenly been discharged.
“You did this contrary to the act of 1570 prohibiting enslavement of the indigenous peoples and the rule and example of our Order?”
“Come, Father, each to his role; you the admonitory, I the examiner. You are aware what that means?”
“You are empowered to judge and declare Just War against those who scorn the salvation of Christ’s Church. I saw the house of God burned to the waterline, our brothers and sisters in Christ put to the sword. I spoke with a postulant, a survivor, dreadfully burned. Before she died she told me she had seen angels walking on the treetops, the angels that adorn the masts of this self-consecrated basilica.”