The journey to Rio was an unpleasant one, though Londônia had his comforts. From the ship, he could see that this second city, on the Guanabara Bay, was, despite its mythical mountains and bristling flora, markedly more rustic than the capital. But he had grown up on a sugar estate, far from the poles of civilization, and could adapt. As Londônia walked through the port area to hire a horse to reach the garrison, he found himself in the midst of a public scene. There was shouting, shrieks; a shoeless mulatto, his face and shirt and breeches clad in blood, scampered past him, followed by a large slave woman sporting a bell of petticoats, screaming. What on earth was this? Then another man, short, emaciated, with the sun-burnt face of a recently arrived Portuguese, emerged from the wall of bodies, his right hand thrusting forward a long dagger. Londônia tried to slip out of the way and brandish his sword in defense, but his reflexes, dulled after the protracted incarceration, failed him.
As soon as word reached the military officials in Bahia, he received several raises in rank; his body was brought back to Sergipe d’El Rei for a proper funeral. An auxiliary bishop officiated at the burial. It was only several months later that his wife, who had given birth and returned to her parents’ home, learned of her husband’s misfortune. She was now a wealthy woman. Their son, whom she originally named Augusto, was henceforth known as Augusto Inocêncio. She soon remarried, producing several more sons and daughters, and resettled with her new husband, a soldier who was related on his maternal side to the Figueiras family, near the distant and isolated village of São Paulo.
On Dénouement
In 1966, the model Francesca Josefina Schweisser Figueiras, daughter of army chief General Adolfo Schweisser and the socialite Mariana Augusta “Gugu” Figueiras Figueiras, married Albertino Maluuf, the playboy son of the industrialist Hakim Alberto Maluuf, in a lavish ceremony in the resort town of Campos do Jordão. The event, conducted by His Eminence, the cardinal, in the Igreja Matriz de Santa Terezinha, with a reception on the grounds of the newly inaugurated Tudor-style Palácio Boa Vista, was covered in society pages across the Americas and Europe. They were divorced shortly after the country’s return to democracy two decades later, in 1987.
Their youngest son, Sergio Albertino, was known as “Inocêncio,” a family nickname given, for as far back as anyone could recall, to at least one of the Figueiras boys in each generation. Sergio Albertino’s marked simplicity of expression and introverted manner confirmed the aptness of this name, by which he quickly and widely became known. Yet from childhood this same Inocêncio—“emerald eyes, skin white as moonstone, a swan’s neck”—also periodically exhibited willful, sometimes reckless behavior, engaging in fights with other children, committing acts of vandalism, setting fire to a coach house on the family’s estate that housed the cleaning staff. He met with numerous and repeated difficulties in his educational progress. No tutor his mother enlisted lasted longer than a few months. Bouncing between boarding schools in the United States, Switzerland, Argentina, and Brazil, he developed a serious addiction to heroin and other illicit substances. An encounter with angel dust at a party thrown by friends in Iguatemí led him to drive a brand-new Mercedes coupe off an overpass, but he was so intoxicated that he suffered only minor injuries. After a short involvement with a local neo-Nazi group and repeated stays in rehabilitation centers, he dropped out of Mackenzie Presbyterian University, in São Paulo, where he had enrolled to study business, a profession which his family had long dominated. An arrest for possession of ten grams of cocaine, a tin of marijuana and three Ecstasy tabs led to a suspended sentence. His community service included working with less fortunate fellow addicts in other parts of the city. Quickly befriending several of these individuals — friends of his parents remarked in the most restrained manner possible that from childhood the boy had possessed uncouth predilections and tastes — he increasingly spent time in city neighborhoods in which most people of his background, under no circumstance, would dare set foot. The bodyguards his parents hired gave up trying to keep track of him. One evening in midsummer, he left the flophouse — where he was staying with a woman he’d met on a binge — to score a hit….
“Oh, this terrible ancient pain
we feel down to our bones
that fills the contours of our dreams
whenever we’re alone—”
On Brazil
São Paulo, once a small settlement on the periphery of the Portuguese state, is now a vast labyrinth of neighborhoods upon neighborhoods, a congested super-metropolis of more than fourteen million people, the economic engine of Latin America. As Dr. Arturo Figueiras Wernitzky has noted in his magisterial study of the region, millions of poor Brazilians, many of them from the northeastern region of the country, including the states of Bahia, Sergipe and Pernambuco, have migrated over the last four decades to this great city, its districts and environs, suburbs and exurbs, primarily in search of work and economic opportunities.
Among these nordestino migrants, many of them of African ancestry, were members of the Londônia family from the towns of the same name in the states of Bahia, Sergipe, and Pernambuco, who constructed and established unauthorized settlements, or favelas, across the city of São Paulo, lacking sewage and electricity, and marked by the highest per capita crime rates outside of Rio de Janeiro — murders, assaults, drug-dealing, and larceny, as well as well-documented police violence.
Among the most notorious favelas is one of the newest, as yet unnamed, only marked on maps by municipal authorities by the letter—N. — perhaps for “(Favela) Novísima” (Newest Favela), or “(Mais) Notório” (Most Notorious), or “Nada Lugar” (No Place), though it is also known, according to journalists and university researchers like Figueiras Wernitzky, who are examining its residents as part of a larger study of demographic changes in the region, among those who live in it, as “Quilombo Cesarão.”
AN OUTTAKE FROM THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Origins
In January 1754, Mary, a young Negro servant to Isaac Wantone, wealthy farmer and patriot of the town of Roxbury, Massachusetts, gave birth in her master’s stables to a male child. An older Negro servant, named Lacy, also belonging to Wantone’s retinue, attended Mary in her prolonged and exacting labor, during which the slave girl developed an intense fever. For an half-hour after Mary delivered the child, a tempest raged within her as she lay screaming in a strange tongue, which was in part her native Akan. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she expired. Lacy uttered a benediction in that same language, and thereafter presented the infant to her master, Mr. Wantone, as was the custom in those parts. When he saw the copper-skinned newborn, eyes blazing, upon whom the darkness of Africa had not completely left its indelible stamp, the master, adequately versed in the Scriptures, promptly named him Zion, which in Hebrew means “sun.”
Knowing his servant not to have been married or even betrothed at the time of the child’s birth, Wantone rightly feared the sanctions laid down by Puritan and colonial law, which in the case of illegitimate paternity included whippings, fines rendered against the mother of the child, its father, and quite probably the master, be he same or otherwise. Wantone also might have to put in an appearance before the General Court. Though not a gentleman by birth (he was of yeoman stock and self-read in the classics), Wantone had fought admirably among his fellows in King George’s War and had by dint of many years’ toil built up an excellent estate. Moreover, he subscribed unwaveringly to the Congregational Church. And, on all these accounts, he declined to have his reputation or standing in the slightest besmirched by such a scandal. He had therefore conspired to conceal Mary’s condition for the full length of her term by keeping her indoors as much as possible and forbidding her to venture out near the local roads, where she might be spied by neighbors or passersby. He also forbade his servants and children to speak of the matter, lest their gossip betray him. Toward neither plan did he meet with rebellion; so it is said that one’s sense of the law, like one’s concept of morality, originates in the home. The child’s father, whose name the taciturn girl had refused to speak, Wantone identified as Zephyr, a sly black-Abenaki horsebreaker in the service of his neighbor, Josiah Shapely. Among the members of his own household, however, he himself was not entirely above suspicion, especially given the child’s complexion. In any case, Zion would, according to plan, officially be deemed a foundling.