Chapter 8
Outside, Maria das Dores gives me a brief tour of the property.
Leandro doesn’t come along, instead retiring to his study.
I try not to take offense at that and fail.
I’m still reeling from the way he handled my question about meeting his parents.
The look on his face like he ate rotten fruit.
The sigh riddled with irritation. The tension in his shoulders.
And worst of all is what he said: Anyone who meets me should like me. A nonanswer if I ever heard one.
Feels like it’s about me. He would not have acted that way yesterday. Perhaps he remembers that the accident was partly my fault and resents me for it, after all.
Why couldn’t I have let him go to the cursed driver’s bench when he tried to?
So what if I didn’t get the proposal that night; Mother would have been furious but I would have handled that.
Leandro wouldn’t have brain fever, feeblemindedness, or whatever it is that he has, and I wouldn’t be left to decode the meaning behind his surliness. I was so careless to risk our lives.
As Maria das Dores and I walk the path outside, I mull over the incongruence in his reactions. As sullen as he was just now, he was sweet in my room earlier. He told me how happy he is that I’m here, and seemed genuine.
But there had also been the strange presence I felt as I awakened, the feeling of something right up against my face. But I think that was just a dream.
Why did his mood sour? His moods keep shifting between nervous and haunted and resentful and sullen. Those who nurse sullen fumes…The hum from the Inferno pops into my mind. The sinners who nurse sullen fumes in life, in death waste away in the putrid fumes of the River Styx.
Maria das Dores pauses before a patio that overlooks the valley and rolling fields beyond. The seats have no cushions, the bird feeder has no feed, and one chair is upturned, as though it got knocked over by a violent wind and no one ever bothered to set it back in its place.
“It doesn’t look like this patio is used much,” I say.
Maria das Dores smiles politely but doesn’t respond.
“Does Leandro have guests over often?” I ask.
She gives a slight noncommittal shrug.
I suppose she is loyal to her employer and doesn’t want to cause trouble for herself.
“Has anyone visited recently?” I pry, thinking of the lavender-rose room filled with jewels.
Her face scrunches up. “Just Doctor Lobo…oh, and the police inspector.”
“The police?” My brows go up. “Why did the police visit?”
She looks instantly nervous, as though she regrets sharing.
“I won’t tell Leandro about our conversation,” I say. “Why did the police inspector come?”
“I don’t know, Sinhá Madalena.”
“When did they—”
“I don’t know.”
She won’t meet my eyes. She turns away from me as though I’m a leper. Even for a loyal servant, her behavior strikes me as excessively guarded. Does she know something incriminating about Leandro?
It is good, I suppose, that there have been no lady guests. But the police visited? That is concerning in its own right.
We come to the top of a sloping hillside disturbed by rough, uneven shattered stones.
The air is quiet, and the sky is dense and cloudy, as though pregnant with rain.
A dozen gravestones jut out from the ground, shrouded in a thin fog and low-lying mist. The gravestones look like tombs from the sixth circle of Hell where heretics lie in flaming sepulchers.
Their tomb covers are lifted halfway, only to be shut on Judgment Day.
No holy words are spoken on such eerie land, where lie in unrest the spirits of the damned.
“Did you say something, Sinhá Madalena?”
“No.”
“You must not go that way”—Maria das Dores points downhill, toward the cluster of weathered gravestones—“that way it’s dangerous.”
“Is the Santa Tereza very old?”
She shoots me a tight look. “Yes. They say it was built at the beginning of the century.”
We pass guava trees and Maria das Dores says that she makes guava jam from scratch.
She shows me a modestly sized stable with a solitary grazing horse and a demure old man laying out hay.
I notice the weathered door at the lower level of the casa grande, with battered bolts on the outside.
The senzala. She says nothing about it. This reminds me that I haven’t seen any mill workers walking about.
“Are the men in the senzala right now?”
“What?”
“The senzala.” I point to the doors. “Are the men in there?”
She traces my fingers and gapes at the senzala doors as though only just seeing them for the first time.
“No one’s in there.”
“Then where are the men?”
“What men?”
“The men fixing the mill, tending the fields…”
She shakes her head, looking as baffled as I feel.
“Maria das Dores,” I say slowly. “Are there no men at work here?”
She blinks. “The mill hasn’t been operational in years.”
For all that is holy, I could just slap Leandro right now. He hasn’t even started the renovations?
“Take me to the mill.”
It takes us a few minutes to reach an outbuilding with a slanted, shingled clay roof.
There’s nothing in it but the old mill. Thick cobwebs stretch between the centerpiece gear’s teeth.
The belowground compartments for the distilled sugar liquid are dry and covered in algae at the bottom.
No one has even bothered to clean the space yet.
Dry leaves and patches of invasive weeds blanket the ground.
Not a single sugarcane stalk anywhere in sight, nor any hint of blackstrap molasses.
The shingled clay roof is exposed from below, patchy and discolored.
The posts holding up the roof are covered in white stains of varying sizes.
The walls are a hideous patchwork of cracked stone with deep craters black as obsidian.
The stone is so rough and broken that if I pull out any part of it, I’m sure the entire wall will collapse.
“We should get going.” Maria das Dores hovers at the edge of the outbuilding, not daring to come any closer.
I’m furious. What has Leandro been doing here all these months?
He certainly made it sound like progress was well underway.
I can’t recall if he said this in plain language or merely implied it, but there was a lot of I already spoke with so-and-so and we are going to build this and that.
Yesterday he talked about wall-embedded cabinets and teacups with mustache catchers…
Useless notions. Leandro is full of ideas, but—I fear—no action.
It’s dire. We need the mill to be operational for the fazenda to be profitable. Surely he’s living off his father’s finances now, but what about when we have a baby and a family of our own?
Has he been just having fun in town? That lavender-scented room. Has he been using this fazenda as a place to entertain women in private?
I wipe my damp temples and try to dispel the calamitous thoughts.
The mill’s gears look like they haven’t turned in twenty years.
I lean over the large front gear to inspect it and my heart freezes in my chest. Three arrow-shaped heads stare at me with lidless, unblinking golden eyes.
Their gray-scaled, limbless bodies coil into one another so tightly that they move as one.
One hisses, flicking its forked tongue. Another rises up, unblinking eyes mesmerizing me so that for a moment I am transfixed.
I gaze into its eyes, and there lies an alien expanse at once repellent and appealing.
It rears its head back, about to strike.
I scream and jump back.
“What is it?” Maria das Dores asks, wide-eyed.
“A nest of jararacas.”
She lets out a breathy “oh” and we quickly put space between us and the viper-infested mill.