ON BRAZIL, OR DÉNOUEMENT: THE LONDÔNIAS-FIGUEIRAS
On Brazil
Male Found Beheaded in Settlement Ranked Among Most Dangerous in Metro Area
STAFF REPORT
The nude, headless body of a male was discovered shortly after dawn in an alley off Rua dos Cães, at the edge of the new and unauthorized favela of N., on the periphery of the industrial suburb of Diadema, by an officer from the São Paulo Metropolitan Police department. The department and the São Paulo State Police have opened a joint investigation….
According to Chief Detective S.A. Brito Viana, authorities still have not confirmed widespread rumors that identification found on the body indicates the deceased is banking heir Sergio Inocêncio Maluuf Figueiras, 27, who has been listed as missing since the early summer….
On Brazil
From the 1610s, the Londônias were the proprietors of an expanding sugar engenho in the northeasternmost corner of the captaincy of Sergipe D’El-Rei. The plantation began some meters inland from the southern sandy banks of the Rio São Francisco and fanned out verdantly for many hectares.
The first Londônia in New Lisbon, José Simeão, had arrived in the Royal Captaincy of Bahia in the last quarter of the previous century after receiving a judgment of homicide in the continental courts. Before this personal calamity, he had spent several decades serving as a sutler to the King’s army. Because his first wife had died during childbirth while he was posted in Galicia, once he arrived in the land of the pau brasil, he promptly remarried. His new wife, an adolescent named Maria Amada, came from the interior of Portugal’s abundantly expanding territories, and was a product — according to Arturo Figueiras Pereira Goldensztajn’s introduction to the Crônicas da Familia Figueiras-Londônia-Figueiras—of one of the earliest New World experiments: the coupling of the European and the Indian. José Simeão and his wife settled in the administrative capital, São Salvador; he worked as a victualler and part-time tailor, drawing upon skills acquired in his youth, and she produced several children, only one of whom — Francisco, who was known as “Inocêncio” because of his marked simplicity of expression — lived to adulthood.
Francisco Inocêncio followed his father’s path into the military. Instead of provisioning, he became an infantryman. By the time he was 25, he had taken part in several campaigns against Indians, infidels, foreigners, and seditionists in the western and southern regions of the King’s territories. His outward placidity translated, in the midst of battle, into a steadfastness that even his opponents quickly came to admire. Facing arrows or shot, he neither faltered nor flinched; when his flatboat capsized, he calmly surfaced on the riverbank, pike in hand. A commission and promotions were soon won. But there is only so much gore that sanity can bear. He eventually resigned to settle in the remote northernmost region of São Cristovão, Sergipe D’El-Rei, near the Captaincy of Pernambuco, where he set up a small estate. Not long thereafter he married the widow of a local apothecary.
Though his wife was not beyond her childbearing years, Francisco Inocêncio adopted her son, José, who was thenceforth known as José Inocêncio, and her daughter, Clara. From his mother, they say, José Inocêncio inherited a will of lead and a satin tongue. These gifts led to his greatest achievement, which was to ally himself with and then marry into the prominent and clannish Figueiras family, which had acquired deeds of property not only in the capital city but throughout the sugar-growing interior. The Figueirases were also involved in trade, as agents of the crown, in sugar and indigo processing, and in the nascent banking system. As a result, they were rumored to be conversos. In any case, the royal court benefited greatly from their ingenuity, as did the colonial ruling class, of which Londônia soon became a member. To the connected and ruthless flow the spoils.
Within a decade, José Inocêncio had quadrupled the acreage of his father’s estate, acquiring in the process several defaulted or failed plantations, some, according to his rivals, by shrewd or otherwise extralegal maneuvers. He had plunged into this business with the same zeal with which his father had once defended the crown, which is to say, relentlessly.
José Inocêncio was entering the sugar trade as ships were disgorging wave upon wave of Africans onto the colony’s shores, and he viewed this as a rising historical and economic trend, the product of the natural order. The mortality rate for slaves was extraordinarily high in 17th-century Brazil. It was higher still on Londônia’s plantation. He could not abide indolence or anything less than an adamantine endurance, so he devised a work schedule to ensure his manpower was engaged productively at every moment of daylight. Nightfall barely served as a respite. Those who did not fall dead fled. He was thought of by his fellow planters as “innovative,” “decisive,” “driven,” a man of action whose deeds matched his few words; in the face of such immediacy and success who needs a philosophy or faith?
On the estate itself, things were moving in the opposite direction. The final straw came when he ordered Kimunda, a frail cane cutter who had collapsed from hemorrhages while on his way to the most distant field, tied to an ass and dragged until he regained consciousness. As stated in the schedule, which each slave was supposed to have memorized, Kimunda was expected to work his section of the field from sun-up to midday, circumstances be damned. The result was that a cabal from the Zoogoo region mounted an insurrection, seizing swords and knives and attempting to lay their hands on gunpowder. José Inocêncio quelled it with singular severity. Sometimes the fact of the lesson is more important than what is actually learned. Half a dozen of the plotters, including Cesarão, a particularly defiant African who had become the de facto leader of the coup, after torching a field of cane and a dry dock, escaped across the river into the wilds of what is now the Brazilian state of Alagoas.
José Inocêncio swiftly rebuilt his operation. He viewed himself as a man of estimable greatness, of destiny. It is undeniable that he had possessed what might be classed as an exemplary case of proto-capitalist consciousness, for afterwards he sought out as diverse and well-seasoned a workforce as possible. Growing markets have no margin for mercy. Several years before his death, he received a litany of honors from the crown.
The Londônias-Figueiras
The Londônia family: Londônia’s eldest son José Ezéquiel strongly resembles his mother in appearance, his father in canniness and business acumen. Short, heavy-set, with a broad jawline covered by a thick, black, immaculately groomed beard, like most of the Figueiras clan. He is described in some tendentious contemporary accounts, according to Figueiras Pereira Goldensztajn, as almost “rabbinical” in mien. Eventually he inherits his father’s estates, and his branch of the family gradually expands them along with his mortgage empire until the collapse of the sugar economy, despite which these Londônias head a new feudal hierarchy in the region for generations.