All these gifts he brings to the new house in which you and those who departed with you have now settled, in the name of the gentle and good Provost there, Dom Felix Silva Matos, whose name was passed on by those who knew him well during his years in the aldeias. As a man of the Faith he never once laid an injurious finger on native or African, nor on any who shared the bloodlines of the two. Moreover, in sending these treasures, including the book, to you, I am of the mind that no officials of the Crown, nor the Bishop of Bahia, nor least of all the Holy Office, if it should make a visitation, will impound them.
The most valuable of all, however, is this written missive, as you will certainly soon agree. As you also shall see, you will gain full access to it only by the application of another trick you conveyed to those in your care, underlining how well your lessons took root, like cuttings, even in distant fields. Thus the special care I have taken. If you should please see fit, do let the lit candlewick linger upon this document once you have read it, as that would be in the utmost order, though it is of no matter to me, for it should be declared that I am beyond the reach of those laws, earthly or divine, that would condemn you, on the very fact of possession of the written account I shall shortly begin.
Do know that the one to whom you had intrusted the preservation of the Faith is in no immediate harm. This letter sails to you, in its clever guise, out of an abiding desire to convey to you the truth of what occurred at ALAGOAS; rather than let the waters of rumor fertilize the vineyards of discussion in the capital, I have dowsed for you here the spring of truth. I gather that you already foresaw the calamity, at least from the perspective of the Lusitanians, that would descend upon this land, which is why you began to employ the vehicle of the Gospels to arouse a spirit of resistance not only among the members of the Order, but among the citizens of the Captaincy and the far and nether regions; for, as you often said, and I have heard many times repeated, while we do rightly fear the saber and the carbine, it could be a single man’s tongue, and the written record of its issue, that mark the greatest danger.
Yet even knowing this, did you foresee what was to come at Alagoas? Did you not foresee the implications of sending Joaquim D’Azevedo as your spiritual agent? Evidently not, and so I shall now recount to you how that absence of portents, like your Scriptures, failed you. That is, I shall now tell of that series of events, unforeseeable at least to some of those who lived them, that inverted worlds, bringing those whom you knew, or thought you knew, intimately, northward in retreat to Olinda from the south, just as you bore only the clothes on your back and your Bible in your departure south for the capital city of the Savior. How do I know these facts, their recounting never having passed any man’s lips? This, as with so many other things, I shall reveal in due time.
To return to the present narrative, I cannot be certain that you have heard even a single account from any of the other members of the Brotherhood who were there; no knowledge has revealed itself of where those creatures went who had long been in residence, or where they are today. Perhaps they too are at Bahia, or, like the numerous ghosts that haunt the coast of this infernal land, slipped onto a ship and are now promulgating their vileness in Cape-Verde or among the Luandans. May even Hell be rid of them. I ask only that you understand given all that has transpired since you last spoke face to face with any of those at that now accursed house, that some who have been condemned to the most foul contumely do reside, nevertheless, in Truth, and so this missive proceeds from that strange and splendid position.
It was, you will remember, during the period shortly preceding All Saints’ Day, which is to say in late October of that year, 1629, that you sent a certain priest, Dom Joaquim D’Azevedo, from Olinda to assume the position of provost of the foundation at Alagoas, in the southern region of the Captaincy of Pernambuco, of the Professed House of the Second Order of the Discalced Brothers of the Holy Ghost. You made the appointment; the order came from your hand. The Alagoas monastery had been without a leader since the untimely drowning, under mysterious circumstances, of the prior Provost, Dom Affonso Travassos, also sent by you, in the waters just after the Feast of Saint John, in June 1629; and one year before that, the prior leader, Dom Luiz Duran Carneiro, had succumbed, allegedly, to the temptations of the Devil himself, and disappeared into the interior. These occurrences were hardly known by anyone in the order, beyond those remaining at Alagoas, but you were unsure whether the news had spread throughout the various precincts of the nearby town and region. Yet either way, without a firm spiritual base the monastery there, much like its pastorate, risked falling into moral and mortal decay.
What most knew was that Padre Duran Carneiro and Padre Pero had constructed the foundation of that House by hand only a decade before, while D’Azevedo, that obscure figure and youngest son of that family of tax-farmers who had settled in the distant north, in the city of São Luis, in that former French colony of Maranhão, that one whom you would soon send as a shepherd to gather the flock back into the pen, was still engaged in private tutorial at home, and had not even set sail for studies and ordination in Coimbra. That was all that was well known.
This, then, is where it begins. At some point between Padre Travassos’s death and that fateful time in the spring of 1629, you, with the counsel of the Vice-Provost and several senior members of the Olinda House, decided that D’Azevedo would be the emissary of renewal in Alagoas. You selected him for what you took to be his scriptural acumen, his meticulousness with whatever task he undertook, his pecuniary skills, and literary gifts. There was also his youth, and his personal probity. You expected that he would right the Alagoas house like an overturned raft, and at every stage write you of how he did it and would next proceed.
Indeed this is what you would tell him once one of the novices — having beckoned him as he re-inspected for a third time the casks of wine in the house’s cellar to insure a correct count, his gift for precision and detail having already gained note — led him to your office. There you also delivered a brief speech about the importance of the house to the Faith in Alagoas and the priests’ role in establishing it, about which D’Azevedo was only dimly aware. You presented him with his letters of commission, written out and signed and sealed by you, as there was no time to gain the approval of the authorities in Bahia, let alone Lisbon. You told him that there were at Alagoas two priests, the said Pero and another, Padre Barbosa Pires, and one brother, Dom Gaspar Leite, sent from Olinda half a year before, whom D’Azevedo had just missed upon his return from Europe, as well as a peck of servants, all of them Africans and mulattos. Of the entire menage he heard only the essentials. You did not speak even obliquely of the malevolence lurking in that small outpost on the Atlantic Coast.
Padre D’Azevedo, cognizant of his oath and the necessity of duty, accepted willingly. He returned to the wine cellar, finished his inventory and handed it to a slave to submit to the Brother Procurator, then went and packed his trunk. Maybe he prayed, read several passages from Ezekiel or another book of Scripture which he thought might cast a light before him. He had not a single map of the plans or full estate, no contacts in the town, no specific orders written in your hand or any others, nor any guide but what what might have suddenly taken root in his head. The next morning he boarded the skiff to Recife, to catch the ship to Alagoas.