“Of course. Tomorrow.” He walked out of the room and stopped to add, “It’s so good to see you again.”
He went down to the living room, where Rukkamma was already browsing the book he’d brought for her.
“Who made this dictionary?” she asked, trying not to look too dissatisfied.
“The man who sold it to me said it’d been compiled by a Carmelite nun.”
She shook her head. “You know for how long the miners have been asking me for a Portuguese dictionary, but I can’t teach them anything with this; it has too many mistakes. Those Church people should be more careful before they send material like this to the printing shop.”
He sat down and thought for a while before replying, “My next assignment will be in Paris. We’re preparing a big negotiation of land inheritance for a duke’s family. I’m not sure which stores in Paris sell books in Portuguese, but I’ll try my best.”
Rukkamma frowned. “Can French dukes own land in Zaire?”
“This one had papers saying he did.”
“I see. Why haven’t you written papers saying you’re the king of Spain?”
“That’s something I could do. King Paulo the First doesn’t sound so bad. Although the Lawyers’ Inquisition would burn me for fraud.”
She wanted to laugh, but Paulo’s remark made her think of all the friends they’d lost to the ire of the colonial government. She let her silence suffice as a sign of her discomfort.
“How’s the school?” he asked instead, correctly guessing her wish for a change of subject.
“We’ve been studying the properties of light this month. One of the boys designed a curious experiment with slitted screens; we don’t know what to make of it. And my star pupil swears that her new arrangement of lenses has found a tiny planet between Mars and Jupiter.”
Paulo reveled in the pride he felt for his wife. The secret meeting place where she taught the miners’ children had become much more than a school; after she’d finished translating into Kiswahili the treatises of Indian logic her father had entrusted her with, her students had begun pursuing their own interests with a passion that kept her spirits high. Out of sight of the Franciscans, who had come to Zaire to build schools where children learned to count and add, to read the lives of saints and to recite lists of Roman Emperors, Rukkamma was teaching them to construct logical arguments, to gather empirical evidence, to appraise the testimony of dead wise men against new observations, and to constantly question their own assumptions. She hadn’t ceased to learn herself; she’d manage to procure from a Mozambican merchant an Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Organon, which came bundled with an obscure New Organon composed by an Englishman just before the Danish invasion. Paulo had brought her from one of his travels a copy of Galileo’s calculations of motion and acceleration; based on that, a student had designed an improved pulley for the miners, who had been careful to hide from the provincial governor the true origin of the innovation. Another student had put magnifying lenses together and made intriguing observations of minuscule creatures swimming in water; Rukkamma had last heard he planned to turn his contraption to look at plant leaves. There was a girl who claimed to have proved that air had weight, and another who had compiled generations’ worth of data from her parents’ rabbit farm and was working toward the principles that determined whether a new breed would have brown or white fur. Rukkamma herself was making huge progress in her comparison of languages, and had become convinced that Greek and Latin shared an ancient kinship with Sanskrit and Persian. She’d had no success extending the link to the languages spoken in the south of India, but she kept at the task.
No part of her work was known outside her school. For the most part, her neighbors were like Paulo, open to ideas, but her father’s words still echoed in her. She must not allow the Iberians to hear what they were doing. The isolation gave her the peace of mind to keep working undisturbed, but it also meant she had no one to tell her where she’d made an error. She felt as though she were driving a carriage with blind horses.
One reassuring development was that now some of her students’ parents had shown interest in going to her school. She was teaching them the three official imperial languages and in exchange they taught her what was remembered of Zairean history. She’d encouraged them to write what they knew, but their lessons with her were all the free time they had. She kept her adult classes small so as to not draw the Church’s attention; miners were typically believed to be drinking or attending Mass whenever they were not working or sleeping. She knew the time was coming when the children would apply their reasoning skills to Catholic dogma and find it wanting, and she still didn’t know how the town was going to handle the impending decline in Mass attendance. Inevitably she was going to get noticed. But for the time being she just wanted more books, more students, and more chances to push her daughter away from the empire’s influence.
“How about you?” she asked him. “Anything noteworthy?”
“In Zurich I made the acquaintance of our dear bishop’s crafty older brother.”
“Did he give you trouble?”
Paulo paused to listen for Neema’s movements. His involvement with a number of groups that conspired against the everyday abuses of the Iberian Empire was the one part of his travels he preferred not to mention to his daughter. “I showed him the title deeds of the Farmers’ Association, and he showed me a moldy parchment with the seal of the Holy Roman Emperor.”
Rukkamma laughed, careful to not be too loud. “He can’t hope that to be still valid.”
“I know; that thing’s been over for centuries. But imagine the kind of connections a Catholic family must have amassed if it was able to produce a bishop in Canutic territory.”
“What did the judge say?”
“I don’t know yet. I mailed the farmers’ lawsuit to Madrid just before boarding my return flight. He must’ve made his decision by now.”
“You sound like you don’t place much hope in the result.”
“I don’t. The laws of Madrid are conceived to favor the empire on every question. You’ve seen the pleas I send every month against slave raids. Every lawyer I know is doing the same. The fact remains that no authority, either in Zaire or in Spain, is willing to even consider the issue.”
The mention of slavery darkened Rukkamma’s expression.
“What is it?”
She adopted the controlled tone she’d learned to use whenever she felt the topic had become too delicate. “One of the miners was conscripted the day before yesterday.”
“I’m sorry. Did you know him?”
“No. But that shouldn’t matter. I’ve been trying to not let it affect the pace of our work, but everyone in the school is talking about it.”
“What are they saying?”
“Someone convinced the governor that he’d be more profitable elsewhere. I believe he was auctioned this morning.”
“Do you know where they took him?”
“One of my kids heard he’s bound for Peru. Sent to the mines, most likely.”
Paulo said nothing more. There never was anything that could be said.
“He’s just nineteen,” she continued. “If I had known his family, he could’ve been at my school, at least for a couple of years. He could be doing what the rest are doing; he could have turned to chemistry, or algebra, or—”
“That would’ve given him no guarantee against conscription.”
She looked at her husband as if he’d hit her. “Are you saying you don’t believe I’m guarding those children against slavery?”
“What you’re doing matters, but—”
“It was you who showed me the royal decree that ordered a preference for the ‘uncultivated!’ Don’t try to tell me I’m making no difference!”