With his sense of his brethren firm and the slaves fully at his command, D’Azevedo commenced his restorative work. He had the monastery’s entire exterior washed and whitewashed. He had the gate, from one end to the other, repaired and restiled. He had lanterns placed at regular paces about the front and rear of the grounds, so that a night traveler would not find himself in darkness so utter, and took care to prevent that any of them should lead to a conflagration. He had signs carved and mounted throughout the corridors, so that anyone could, by reading them, reorient himself. He had markers placed in even rods amidst the fields to identify and segregate the differing crops. He had a visitors’ book placed in the front hall. He had new rules written and distributed to his brethren, and had Brother Gaspar, as D’Azevedo looked on, recite them to the slaves. He requested a periodic audience with each of the three monks, and a regular gathering of them all, outside of daily prayers and Masses, once a month. From Padre Pero he asked for a short, written census of the town’s residents, and an oral report of the status of the Faith in the town and surrounding villages. Also once every several months one of the fathers would have to offer the divine sacrament of Mass to the slaves, and although he did not want them to read the Holy Scripture, or anything else for that matter, as much of it as that they could understand would be told to them, and they must confess their sins too.
In all things, save work and prayer, he reminded his brethren, their order required modesty, chastity, renunciation, mortification, dedication to the interior life. Less food, less wine, no chatter. At the austere morning meal and at dinner, at which he would always pass on the stews and dried meats, they were to read aloud from the first five books of the Bible or a similarly pious text. At the gravesite of Padre Travassos, which Dom Gaspar had pointed out to him and which bore no stone, he himself placed a new one, topped by the last coins from his doublet pocket.
In this way the house settled into a new and heretofore unfelt rhythm. Padre D’Azevedo’s abiding aim, it appeared, was the sustenance of the foundation, but he did exchange letters of greeting with its municipal officials, the judiciary, the militia leaders, and the representatives of the wealthiest families, many of whom were one and the same, and then rode out to meet with several of them, opening up correspondences which he faithfully maintained. Given the constant threat of the French, though co-religionists, and the Netherlanders, who were not, he felt he must act to ensure a front line of defense, secured through amity and a shared belief in the preservation of the Faith. D’Azevedo meanwhile submerged himself in the monastery’s archives, initiating the process of expanding its subscriptions and soliciting books from the main house in Olinda, as well as from the capital at Bahia, and from Lisbon, Coimbra and Évora, in preparation for a library that would benefit the priests, and, perhaps down the road, the envisioned college. He read and reread the ledger books, so as to wring out every possible real that might be hidden or misentered there.
Each of his fellow monks saw him as though through a prism, each viewing a differing facet of a carefully cut, rare stone. They all would have concurred in calling attention to his knowledge on an array of matters; his scholarship, so evident in his individual and group remarks with them, in the letters he drafted to the mother house in Olinda and to a range of correspondents across the country, and in his impromptu Scriptual tuitions at Mass; and his faithful obeisance to the rules he himself had established and would not rewrite depending upon the circumstances. He wrote in a clear hand; he did not equivocate in his speech; he quoted the Old Testament in Latin from memory perfectly. None inquired about, though Dom Gaspar was intrigued by, his private theological-philosophical project, to which he devoted a portion of each day, and he spoke nothing of it. He did not lead by force, or intimidation, or legerdemain, or threat of recourse to the Olinda House, which is to say through you, but by example. In the main, though he knew he was dealing with several refractory personalities, he detected no disquiet. To Gaspar, to whom he assigned greater duties, including now serving as his secretary and novice master when new ones arrived, and in whom he placed great confidence, his presence appeared not just a ballast, but a blessing.
Long hours spent in the study of any text will reveal inner, unseen contours, an abstract architecture. This is as true of sacred books as of those poems written in the pursuit of courtly or earthly love, or even of language itself. The ancient Mosaic law had accommodated this insight to the disadvantage of the surface layer, of images, while the Roman Church, akin to the preliterate cultural forms from which it in part arose, allows for the existence of a mystical understanding and experience of these abstractions. The careful scholar cannot but help but become aware of the conflict: when one speaks of the word, or Word, what is one truly speaking of? Who is the architect, man, and — or — a—God? Attempts to apprehend this new reality, these tensions, went initially by the names of philosophy, theology, science. What is it to know, know deeply? Is knowledge not always a form of power that, taken too far, cannot be turned against itself? The texts continually opened these doors and subsequent ones for D’Azevedo, who conveyed them, using ciphers, to some of his distant correspondents.
Several months into the new provost’s tenure, after a brief campaign that, he believed, had successfully changed perceptions of the monastery in the town’s eyes, he began weekly tutorials for a small cohort of boys he selected from the upper ranks of the town’s citizenry. Though each of these boys had their own personal tutors at home, D’Azevedo suggested to their parents that in the event they did not receive training at another college, and to ensure adequate preparation for further study in law, medicine, the classics, or the priesthood, especially should they seek to serve at the Royal Court or in the administrative center in Bahia, he might provide them with supplementary training. As a result, each Tuesday through Thursday, amidst his other duties, D’Azevedo guided the sons of the Espinozas, the Palmerias, the Cardozos, the Alonso Lopeses, the Figueirases, and the Pimentels, in the study of the Old Testament; Latin and Greek; the natural sciences, especially botany, and mathematics; in disputation and philosophy; and Hebrew.
The boys rode out to the monastery or arrived by coach, bunked in a room furnished only with cots, stools, a wash basin, and woven baskets for their personal effects, that D’Azevedo had set aside especially for that purpose, with one of the child slaves their only attendant. Early Friday morning they rode back to resume their own usual routines at home. In this way he was planting the seeds of a school, and, it seemed, doing the very work you had tasked him to. He alone taught the boys, and maintained an atmosphere of utmost rectitude. It has often been subsequently said that this small cohort, once spread across the Empire and beyond, never lost sight of the ethos he nurtured there.