“Why of course, my Lord, Padre Joaquim,” Dom Gaspar responded, in tones that sounded as if they were meant as much to reassure himself as D’Azevedo. He clasped D’Azevedo’s ample sleeve, and led him outside.
It was summer, and morning, so the sunlight at first blinded D’Azevedo. Squinting, he saw standing side by side the two other members of the House. Dom Gaspar guided him to them, and made introductions. Here stood the chalky-faced Barbosa Pires, his beard a coal apron suspended from his lower lip, a richer black than his thinning tonsure. He had, D’Azevedo noted to himself, a humped back, and a severe stutter. Beside him towered Padre Pero, a robust man of middle age, deeply tanned, his mouth framed by full voluptuous lips that drew the eyes to them, a laborer in build, worldly in the manner of someone who had been reared near Portugal’s European capital. Dom Gaspar, the hospitaller, expressed the gratitude of his fellow monks for D’Azevedo’s presence, but said that they had not known when to expect him. Padre Pero, to whom you had written a letter announcing the decision, said he had never received it: Padre Barbosa Pires, in his torturous manner, seconded his elder.
Resuming his comments about the monastery, Dom Gaspar could see that D’Azevedo was growing unsteady on his feet, and with a gesture summoned a stool, which a tiny man, dark as the soil they stood on, his florid eyes fluttering, brought out with dispatch. They continued on in this manner, Dom Gaspar speaking — Padre Pero very rarely interjecting a thought, Padre Barbosa Pires mostly nodding or staring, with a gaze so intense it could polish marbles, at D’Azevedo — detailing a few of the House’s particulars: its schedule, its routines, its finances, its properties and holdings, its relationship with the neighboring town and villages, and with the Indians. The servant was one of eight people owned by the monastery, several of whom had been rented or leased out to various people in the town. D’Azevedo’s family still held bondspeople, though on the larger matter, particularly as it related to a professed house, he was agnostic.
When it was his turn to speak, D’Azevedo explained the threadbare plans as you had broached them with him, augmented by others he had conceived during his passage by sea: the proposed changes to the house, how he would take some time to identify his second in command, how there would be a renewed effort to bring the town and neighboring villages into doctrinal line, how eventually, with satisfactory growth, this house might ultimately gain its independence from Olinda, how a college might rise with it as well. He emphasized in particular nurturing whatever roots of faith already existed here, and in the nearby region, so its residents might assist in the House’s work, ultimately, he said, repeating your exact words, “to propagate the Lord’s Word far and wide.”
The brethren listened, though Padre Pero seemed at times to be looking through him, while Padre Barbosa Pires was inspecting some point deep in his own interior. Dom Gaspar, however, hung on every word. At one point he paused to look at them and could not tell the three men apart; all had full black beards, all had a hump, all were deeply tanned. He closed his eyes until he felt a finger, Dom Gaspar’s, tap his shoulder, and when he looked again, all three men were as different as they had been minutes before. After D’Azevedo finished, with obvious effort, Dom Gaspar helped him to his feet, and ushered him to his office, where he might review the various ledgers and other important documents, alternating with rest, until the midday Mass.
As they headed back into the building, Fr. D’Azevedo asked, “My dear brother, whom shall I thank, in addition to our Father, for bearing me to my room and putting me to bed? I should like to offer my especial thanks, given my state of exhaustion last night, and, apparently, this morning.”
Dom Gaspar turned to D’Azevedo, who was bracing himself against a wall, again trying to orient himself in the white maze of corridors, and answered, “Then you shall have to thank yourself, for you did so yourself, your Grace.” The provost halted in a spot where one hallway twisted into another and, clasping the loose fabric of D’Azevedo’s sleeve firmly, lest the unsteady man fall away from him, Dom Gaspar continued, “I am not sure which of the Negroes bore your coffer; perhaps the one named João Baptista, whom they call amongst themselves Kibanda, who brought you your seat in the cloister. Maybe another. None of us heard your Grace come in last night, though the slaves reported to us this morning that you were here.” At this D’Azevedo paused, trying again to recall anything of the previous night, any assistance, especially by the black who had brought the stool, whose face he could not at all remember, but Dom Gaspar, like a horse drawing a plough across early spring soil, tugged him forward, onward, and before he knew it he was seated in his office, the Provost’s.
D’Azevedo started to arrange the books on his desk, but promptly fell into a delirium. He was borne back to his monastic cell, and stayed there, tossing and turning for several days, attended periodically by Dom Gaspar, who was also the infirmarian, and, he thought, the Negro João Baptista, until he recovered. As soon as he felt fit enough to leave his room, and resume his duties, about a fortnight after he had arrived, Dom Gaspar took him on tour of the monastery’s grounds, which were ampler in acreage than he had imagined. There was the main house, consisting of the main building with two wings, bracketing the cloister, which was enclosed on its back side by a stone wall. Several other buildings dotted the grounds to the north: the stable, the slave quarters, a coop, a work-shed, a privy. The monks kept several horses, a dairy cow, and chickens; grew maize and tobacco; maintained a garden, despite the poor soil, with European and American vegetables and herbs; and husbanded a small nursery of trees: avocados, papayas, acerolas, tangerines, limes, mangoes. Palms bearing coconuts formed a towering ridge beyond the gate. What they could not consume the house had contracted, under patent with the governor of the captaincy, to sell in the market near the port, as well as at one held monthly in town.
Tending to all of this, as well as all of the domestic tasks the monks did not undertake themselves, Dom Gaspar said, were the bondsmen, several of whom had arrived with the monk postulants themselves, one of whom was a gift of the leading local landowner, another a bequest, and two of whom were the result of natural increase by women on neighboring plantations; these two boys had been returned to the monastery when they reached working age. The last of the men had been won in a lottery. Three had been lent or rented out to planters in the neighboring towns, but were now back until the fall harvest arrived. None were women, as the presence of that sex would, as other houses of the Lord had witnessed, have posed an insurmountable threat to the monks’ oaths. Dom Gaspar recited the slaves’ names, and D’Azevedo had them written down: Aparecido, Benedito (commonly known as Bem-Boi), Jorginho (who they called Zuzi), Miguel (Muéné, who was frequently called Negão), and Zé (José Africano), and the children Filhinho (either Fela or Falodun) and Zé Pequeninho (sometimes called Ayoola). It was only after he finished that D’Azevedo told him his count was off, and Dom Gaspar remembered he had forgotten João Baptista, whom, he added, they sometimes called Jibada. D’Azevedo requested that Dom Gaspar show him where all the records, of the slaves and every other aspect of their property, were kept, so that he might have the clearest sense possible of the monastery’s holdings.
As with the house and estate themselves, so with his brethren: with each day their personalities came ever clearer into scope. Most senior among them, Padre Pero, having been present at the monastery since its founding, might have served as a fount of knowledge about its history and development, as well as that of the region, but was by his very nature, D’Azevedo learned, ill-tempered, and taciturn. After a career in the military, he had exchanged the sword for the Word, preaching the Gospel in the countryside, evangelizing among white and native alike, later serving as a liaison and spiritual counsel to the municipal administration. He among the monks also kept a close watch over the bondspeople, with much the same intensity as he oversaw the livestock. Next, Padre Barbosa Pires, with that jet beard, who scuttled from task to task. He rang the bell in the morning and evening, called everyone to prayer and dinner, prepared vestments for Mass, oversaw the kitchen. He too was laconic, and appeared always to be trying to decipher something in D’Azevedo that the new priest kept scrambled. Ever at Barbosa Pires’s side was the honey-cheeked child Filhinho, whom he referred to playfully, but without humor in his eyes or voice, as his “punchbag.” And then there was Dom Gaspar, sent but a year before, as D’Azevedo had been sailing back from Europe, diligent, eager to help, so gentle in manner, the person best equipped to welcome visitors and now watch the monastery’s books.