1808: The Flight of the Emperor (28 page)

XXVIII

The Conversion of dos Santos Marrocos

R
oyal Archivist Luiz dos Santos Marrocos was one of the thousands of Portuguese associated with the court who remained in Brazil after the royal family's return to Lisbon. Exactly one month before the king's departure, he wrote the last of the 186 letters he sent to his father, Francisco, and sister Bernardina since arriving in Rio de Janeiro in 1811. The letter drips with lamentation and farewells: “Feeling myself to be totally abandoned in your memories, without knowing the reason for such an extraordinary occurrence, I will be suspending my correspondence for a while, seeing that it is useless.”
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Relations between the archivist and his family had been unraveling for some time. In the first three years after his arrival in Rio de Janeiro, the exchange of messages is intense, friendly, and affectionate. Little by little, however, the correspondence from Lisbon begins to thin out. “Five successive ships have arrived and Your Mercy has not given me the pleasure of receiving any news,” complains dos Santos Marrocos to his father on April 1, 1814. “Nor has my sister remembered to write me.”
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Four months later, another eleven ships had arrived with no news. Marrocos feels himself “estranged by everyone's silence . . . as if I no longer existed.”
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The fissures in their relationship coincide with the archivist's changes in attitude toward Brazil and its people. Dos Santos Marrocos arrived in Brazil
criticizing the climate, landscape, and habits and customs of the Brazilians, deploring everything and everyone. Gradually, his tone began to change, though. A decade later, he had become passionate about the city, the country, and the people. Moreover, he decided to stay in Brazil and support independence against the will of his Portuguese countrymen and crucially his own family. His personal transformation coincides with the geopolitical changes that Brazil and Portugal witnessed in that notable period of history. As a result, our archivist becomes a paradigm of a European colonizer caught up in the maelstrom of history at the beginning of the nineteenth century, who, surprised by events at first, attempts to react against them but later adapts to them and undergoes a sea change.

As indicated when he first appears in this present book, the surviving communication is one-way: We have only the letters that he sent to Lisbon, which were preserved by his father in the Royal Library at Ajuda. Either the son didn't do the same, or the vagaries of history destroyed them. We don't know the exact wording of the responses that he received, but we can indirectly grasp their content from excerpts in Luiz's own correspondence. It's also worth noting that, evidently no longer writing to each other after 1821, the father still kept all of his son's letters, preserving them and thereby transforming them into invaluable historical documents.
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In the earliest letters sent to Portugal, between 1811 and 1813, dos Santos Marrocos describes Brazil as the worst place on earth, full of disease, filth, vagabonds, and ignorant and immodest people. “They are undignified, arrogant, vain, and libertine; the animals are ugly and poisonous,” he declares.
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I do not like being trapped in this land, and feel myself in exile. . . . I am so shocked by this place that I want nothing from it, and when I leave, I shall not forget to clean my boots on the edge of the docks so as to not bring back any trace of this place. . . . When the topic is the shortcomings of Brazil, it makes for vast material of aversion and loathing  . . . and I am sure that I even curse it in my sleep.
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From 1814 onward, though, he changes his tune. Brazil becomes a beautiful, welcoming place, with hard-working and friendly people. In a
letter sent on November 1 of that year, dos Santos Marrocos gives thanks to God for the benefits of his new life in Rio de Janeiro. “I live in peace, in abundance, with all of the comforts that I need, with a good house, well-equipped and organized, with slaves and other conveniences,” he explains.
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“An aversion to this country . . . is a great error, which I consider to have said farewell to long ago,” he writes, correcting himself, after referring to the “good character of the situation with which God has favored me.”
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His change of heart had a name: Anna Maria de São Thiago Souza, a twenty-two-year-old carioca whom he met and began dating two years after arriving in Brazil. The daughter of a rich Portuguese merchant and a Brazilian woman, she came from a family that, according to Marrocos, was “clean, honest, and wealthy.”
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In his letters to his father, he describes her as “a saint of a woman,” serious and dedicated, of a kind unequalled even in Portugal. According to him, thanks to her mother's supervision, Anna Maria had escaped the laziness and ignorance that, in his opinion, characterized the daughters of Brazilians. “In spite of being a Brazilian, she is better than many Portuguese women,” he wrote.
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“Her sole defect is that she is a carioca,” he offered as a reservation in another letter.
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The couple married on September 22, 1814, the news only communicated to his family two months later. They had three children: Luiz Francisco, born on September 8, 1816, died a week later of a navel infection known in those days as “the seven-day disease.” A year and a half later on March 7, 1818, Maria Tereza was born. Finally, Maria Luiz entered the world on August 13, 1819.
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As we will see, however, the correspondence that conveyed these milestones of life concealed a secret kept for two hundred years.

After the birth of his first daughter, Maria Tereza, Luiz tells his father of refusing to hire a black wet nurse, the custom among the elite in Rio de Janeiro. “It seems to be more natural and decent that she is cared for by her mother than by negroes, for whom I feel repulsion and disgust,” he explains.
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A little before the birth of his second daughter, however, dos Santos Maroccos has changed his position radically. “I have just purchased a wet-nurse to do the breastfeeding, at a price of 179,200 réis,” he wrote his sister. He also tells of having brought home a newborn boy from the
orphanage with the aim of ensuring that the slave wet nurse's breastmilk would be ready by the time his wife gave birth.
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In a letter of July 21, 1811, which we saw earlier, he tells his father that he has bought a black slave for 93,600 réis. This slave reappears nine months later in one of his longer correspondences. The archivist tells his father of using a paddle to punish the slave only once. “It took a dozen hand-bashings for stubbornness,” he writes. “But I broke him of the vice.” Thereafter, Luiz describes him in a congenial manner:

 

He is one of my good friends, as much as I am one of his. He is very skilled and shows a lot of prudence. He serves very well at the table. He takes good care of the cleanliness of my clothing and shoes, always brushing them. He is very capricious in going around elegantly and owns lots of clothes. He is very loyal, wholesome, and sound in force.
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Before closing the letter, Luiz makes two odd observations about the slave: the first that he “had a great rancor for women and cats,” and the second his habit of watching over the archivist to prevent mosquitoes from attacking while he slept. “He has the unique ability to act as the sentinel at my feet while I am taking a siesta, with the only goal of shooing away flies so that they do not wake me.” Luiz hopes that “he will come to be a good slave, without the need for thrashings, being driven only by valor and friendship.”
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In addition to his rich family life, dos Santos Marrocos became wealthy in Rio de Janeiro. His connections with the nobility and with the prince regent himself had become closer, giving him higher social standing than he had enjoyed in Lisbon. In his letters, he relates to his father that, owing to the importance of his work in the library, he frequented the Royal Palace and kissed the prince's hand every day. Prince João frequently visited the library to consult works of arts and science.

Thanks to this proximity, in 1811 dos Santos Marrocos suggested to the prince regent that he create a library in Salvador containing duplicates of the books in the Rio de Janeiro library. The plan resolved two problems: to provide the Bahians with access to literacy and at the same time to provide
a destination for the books that had remained in crates since arriving from Lisbon, “all of them mined by termites, and the tapestries reduced to powder.” Preoccupied with more urgent matters, the prince ignored the suggestion, but seven years later the archivist renewed the proposal. This time, the newly crowned King João VI agreed and ordered thirty-eight crates of books shipped to Salvador. As a result, the Bahian library, founded in 1811, nearly doubled its holdings.
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An episode involving the British ambassador, Lord Strangford, demonstrates the importance of the Rio de Janeiro library to the Portuguese crown. In 1815, on returning to London after a sojourn of six years in Brazil, Strangford declined a present of twelve gold bars offered by the prince regent. João didn't take offense at Strangford's refusal, but he bristled when he found out that the ambassador had forgotten to return two old books borrowed from the Royal Library. Taking this act personally, Prince João made a formal complaint to the English government and sent his ambassador in London, Cipriano Ribeiro Freire, to retrieve them.
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In 1813, two years after arriving in Brazil, dos Santos Marrocos supervised the Crown Manuscripts, a collection of six thousand codices that, by order of the prince regent, the archivist would catalog and organize. These papers, their preservation highly valued by the crown, included originals of letters, reports, diplomatic dispatches, and other official documents dating to the beginning of the Portuguese Empire. In 1821, this collection of manuscripts returned to Lisbon with the court. The rest of the holdings of the old Royal Library remained in Brazil, later bought from Portugal by Emperor Pedro I to form the foundation of the National Library of Rio de Janeiro. The price paid for these books, 800 million réis (approximately $23 million today), corresponded to 12.5 percent of the indemnities demanded by the Portuguese government for recognizing Brazilian independence.
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In September 1817, Luiz ceased working at the library. Thomaz Antonio Villa Nova Portugal, the prime minister and king's advisor, had appointed him as an official in the Ministry of State Affairs of the Kingdom. He debuted his uniform in this new post on February 6, 1818, the day of João VI's acclamation ceremony. He returned to a more bookish routine on March 22, 1821—just weeks before the king's return to Portugal—in the
loftier post of “directorate and arrangement” of the Royal Libraries, with an annual salary of 500,000 réis, taking over from Brother Gregorio José Viegas, himself newly appointed bishop of Pernambuco.
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After independence, dos Santos Marrocos became a high-ranking official in the government of Emperor Pedro I. In 1824, he cut ties with the library to assume the post of chief official of the Ministry of Imperial Affairs, which he occupied until his death. His name appears at the bottom of two important texts of independent Brazil: the first imperial constitution of 1824 and the first patent law, signed in 1830. His signature doesn't mean that he authored these documents, only that he was the scribe, drafting the texts in the bureaucratic and legal language that was his specialty, in addition to handling the protocol and promotion in the official press.

In the letters written on the eve of João VI's return to Lisbon, Luiz tried to convince his family to move to Rio de Janeiro as well. Francisco declined his son's suggestion. But Luiz insists, trying to understand the reasons behind his father's refusal. “Is it the motherland?” he asks, referring to Portugal. “Aside from being a frivolous pretext of the senile and worrisome, the Portuguese motherland has been highly ungrateful for all of your devotion, and the fruits of your studies and labors since your earliest years.”

In the same letter, the longest of all the 186 we have, dos Santos Marrocos insists for the last time:

 

My father, now is the moment to decide. This is a matter of the utmost importance, and of the future survival of our family, amidst thousands of amenities. The first steps of this project seem appalling and difficult . . . but they are merely temporary. The circumstances offered are all favorable and concomitant with this end. . . . Leave this disgraceful lethargy in which you have lived and moaned for so many years. Leave a land that is no longer prosperous for you and has made you recede in your career, and come enjoy more relaxed and happy days, delighting in everything within reach of the appetite of your genius.
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Though a private letter to his father, this exhortation encapsulated the two kingdoms and their people at that decisive moment. Portugal was the
past: ancient ideas, the colonial system, and decadence. Brazil was new: the future, wealth, prosperity, and transformation. The end of their correspondence marked the separation of the dos Santos Marrocos family between these two worlds. “Founding a family in Rio de Janeiro resulted in a transformation of son into father that paralleled Brazil's own transformation from colony into the center of empire,” observes Kirsten Schulz.
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Luiz dos Santos Marrocos died on December 17, 1838, news laconically recorded in the next day's edition of the
Journal of Commerce:
“Luiz Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos, chief official of the Secretary of State of Imperial Affairs, passed away yesterday.” Buried in catacomb 85 of the Church of São Francisco da Paula in Rio de Janeiro, he was fifty-seven years old.
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