Five years passed since that cursed dawn. The Santa Eulália Farm prospered under the relentless sun of the Paraíba Valley, with its endless rows of coffee plants laden with red fruit. The twins, Benedito and Bernardino, grew up like princes of the Big House. They wore imported linen clothes, learned French from a private tutor from Rio de Janeiro, and rode through the coffee plantations on ponies brought from São Paulo.
They had straight brown hair, fair skin that burned easily in the sun, and eyes that already carried the arrogance of those born to command. Colonel Tertuliano watched them with boundless pride, imagining the coffee empire they would inherit. But he did not know there was a third son alive, growing in the shadows of the farm, nourished by the forbidden love of a slave who had defied death.
Bernardo was 5 years old and lived hidden in the forest shack. He was a boy with brownish skin, dark curly hair, and eyes that shone with precocious intelligence. Benedita visited him every night, bringing scraps of food from the Big House, mended clothes, and all the affection she could steal from her own exhaustion. She taught him to speak softly, to hide when he heard the sound of horses, and never to leave the woods during the day. “You cannot be seen, my son,” she would say, caressing his face. “If the colonel finds out you exist, he will kill us both.”
Bernardo understood little, but he obeyed. His only company were the birds, the capuchin monkeys that stole his food, and the rare moments with Benedita. He did not know he had brothers; he did not know who his father was; he did not know his blood was the same that ran in the veins of the boys in the Big House.
Joana, Benedita’s daughter, now 11 years old, began to suspect her mother’s nightly disappearances. She was a clever girl with bright eyes and agile hands, working in the garden and helping in the kitchen. One night, she followed her mother in secret, barefoot and silent as a cat. She saw Benedita cross the yard, enter the woods, and disappear among the trees.
Joana waited a few minutes and followed the path, her heart thumping. When she got close to the shack, she heard voices. She peered through a crack in the wattle-and-daub wall and saw her mother cradling an unknown boy, singing a lullaby, kissing his forehead with tenderness.
Joana felt her chest tighten. Who was that boy? Why was her mother hiding him? Why was he more important than her? Joana returned to the slave quarters in silence, but doubt gnawed at her soul like a termite. In the following days, she watched her mother with redoubled attention—the tired eyes, the hands hiding bread in the waistband of her dress, the sighs coming from the depths of her throat.
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