Free Counternarratives by John Keene Page B

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,