D’Azevedo searched the shelves for any books that might provide guidance, but his eyes landed upon none. Instead, after a few minutes, he sat down at his desk, looking straight at João Baptista, whose return gaze induced a steady, intensifying calm, and said:
“You, João Baptista, have been accused by Padre Pero of very serious charges, do you understand?”
João Baptista, still in the process of self-cleansing, nodded.
“Can you speak?”
“Yes,” the slave said, his voice as soft and distinct as crumpling vellum.
“Very well, please speak your answers, João Baptista,” D’Azevedo said. “Padre Pero alleges that you were planning to burn down this monastery and all of us in it. He also alleges that you sent some of the slaves, the property of this monastery, like yourself, into flight. There is also the matter of your dressing in the manner and likeness of a woman, and there may be other evils and vilenesses that I shall learn about when I have further opportunity to speak with Padre Pero and Padre Barbosa Pires.”
João Baptista set the rag on the edge of D’Azevedo’s table, and smiled. “Before we proceed, I would ask that you call me Burunbana, as that is my name.”
The impudence of the black man took him aback. Not only was it not a slave’s station to challenge a white person, let alone a superior, but he had only ever heard João Baptista, like all the slaves, respond in the most basic fashion.
“João Baptista, I will not have you speak to me in that manner.” He continued: “In this house we use Christian names. I have read the record by which you came here, by acquisition via a lottery after the death of your owner, a lay brother at a now shuttered Carmelite friary at Sirinhaém, north of here on the Pernambucan coast, and there you were baptized João Baptista.”
“Your records do say such a thing occurred,” came the reply. “They may baptize me a thousand times in that faith, with water or oil, no matter. The one who died was named João Baptista dos Anjos, by his own hand, and they imposed his name upon me as a penalty because he took his life, though that is another matter. I would nevertheless ask again that you call me Burunbana, as that is my name.”
“Did you foment a plot to set fire to this monastery and kill all of us in it, and did you assist in the escape of any persons bonded to this house?”
First laughter, then: “Fire? We could have slashed your throats with daggers, we could have poisoned the stews or the wells; we have done none of these, and not just because of the threats and brutality here, which you have closed your eyes to, or because of the authorities in Alagoas or Lisbon who would hang us. Now I ask one final time that you call me Burunbana, as that is my name.”
D’Azevedo slammed his palm on the tabletop. “I am the Provost of this house, and you will not speak with me this way. When you speak with me you will use your Christian name—”
“As you use yours, Manoel Aries ben Saúl?”
The priest shot up from his seat and retreated toward his wall of books. “What did you say?”
“As you use yours, Manoel Aries? Or should I call you Joaquim D’Azevedo? Which do you prefer?”
“How do you… where did you hear… that name?”
“I would ask that you take your seat, and call me as I have asked, Burunbana, as that is my name.”
D’Azevedo returned slowly to his own stool, never removing his eyes from Burunbana. “Buranbana,” he said.
“Thank you,” Burunbana replied. “I know that you are Manoel Aries D’Azevedo, the son of Saúl, known as Paulo, and Miriam D’Azevedo Espinosa, known as Maria. I know that they fled Portugal and settled among the secret community in the city of São Luis, once belonging to the French and now under the aegis of the Portuguese—”
“But how…” Aries D’Azevedo said.
“—and that at the urging of your parents you assumed the last name of your mother, D’Azevedo, when you left your home and entered this order, where you took the name Joaquim, which both faiths honor. I know that you have written to her in that tongue you speak among yourselves; that you have written to others in Olinda and in the town in that tongue; that your thoughts come to you first in that tongue sometimes before they transform into the language of the Lusitanians.”
“Who are you?”
“I know that you do not peer into the water to see your reflection, though you have one; that you have never once willingly tasted the pork or shellfish served in the stews and soups the local women bring here; that your loins are cut as are all the men of the Book and as the followers of Mohammed. I know that you conceal limes for one of your holidays, and beneath a secret floor in your coffer harbor marbles for another, and special candles for a third. I know that you placed not just a stone, but coins and a ribbon at the grave of Padre Travassos, whom you had heard might be one of your own.”
Aries D’Azevedo lowered his voice while glancing at the door, which he remembered he had locked. “What evil spirit do you have familiarity with, or who has revealed all of this to you?”
“I know all this and more, such as that you are giving those boys from the town special knowledge for they, as you do, wear the Roman faith like a mask, so that you can send them out to sustain the heritage of your ancestors, just as I do mine. I also know that you are in great danger if you remain here, because you are in the presence of real evil, but that evil is not mine, nor, in your case, will it come from the Dutch.”
Aries D’Azevedo walked around his office. Although he was sure Burunbana did not turn a single degree, it was if those eyes were accompanying him from point to point.
“Why were you dressed as a woman, and what is this evil that you speak of?” He was now standing behind Burunbana, who, though physically quite small, seemed to be taking up an increasing amount of space.
“I am a Jinbada, or as one says in your language, Quibanda. I can read the past and the future. I can speak to the living, as now, and to the dead. I can feel the weather before it turns and the night before it falls. Every creature that walks this earth converses with me. I am such a one who is both. Sometimes the spirits fill and mount me as one and the other. Truly I was not familiar with your evil until I arrived on these shores. From the time I landed here the devils bade me serve them, forcing me to lie with them when I did not want to, and commanding all the women, men and children to do the same.”
“Burunbana,” Aries D’Azevedo began, but the illogic of what he was hearing, coupled with the revelations already uttered scattered his thoughts, like his secreted marbles, about the room.
“Those two have put all the Africans to wickedness and grief, from the sun’s rise till it sets. When the brother Gaspar first arrived they took care to cloak their malevolence, as your Satan often wears a cape when he strolls in the sun. I read you when you first passed through that gate, and believed you could assist in our and your own liberation. Padre Pero slew Travassos, drowning him in the lagoon, because that one tried to prevent him from using me for nefarious purposes, and Barbosa Pires drove away Duran Carneiro by denouncing him, as one of your people, to the civil officials here and to the representatives of the Holy Office in Bahia.”