Αnother figure haunted this plot with eyes of envy and terror: Manuel, the overseer and Mariana’s biological father. He saw his daughter’s rise not as luck, but as a curse. Consumed by the guilt of being unable to protect her and the fear of the influence she was gaining over the mistress, Manuel began to spread rumors among the slaves.
“There is witchcraft in the Big House,” he would whisper by the fires of the slave quarters. “The mistress is bewitched by Black blood.”
This increased the tension. The slaves feared that the demons summoned by the Baroness would bring misfortune to everyone.
But Isabel had a confidante, albeit a distant one. In Lisbon, her cousin Dona Catarina, a courtesan known for her debauched life, received frequent letters. These missives traveled for months in the holds of merchant ships, carrying secrets that could lead Isabel to the stake.
In them, the Baroness described the acts with shocking graphicness, asking for advice on aphrodisiac potions made with Brazilian herbs, boasting of her “domesticated crioula.”
In 1790, the obsession reached its peak. The plantation produced like never before, tripling exports. Isabel attributed this prosperity to the renewed vigor she extracted from Mariana.
Αs if in a delirium, she believed the sugar was sweet because her sin was intense. But this prosperity was built upon unprecedented brutality.
The slaves worked eighteen hours a day, and the moans of pleasure coming from the Big House mixed with the screams of pain coming from the whipping post.
The first major turning point happened in 1791. Mariana appeared pregnant.
Paternity was uncertain—possibly the result of a forced encounter with a slave to disguise the nature of the relationship with the mistress, or perhaps something worse. But Dona Isabel’s reaction was one of sickly possessiveness. Instead of discarding the slave or the child, she claimed the pregnancy as if it were her own.
