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sorcerer had been at the English Cemetery the night before to commit the crime specified in Article 365.
    The officers, however, protested, and a major meeting was called to prevent the issuing of an arrest warrant. The captain respected his men, his brothers in the First District. He did not want to act without consensus, and he tried to convince them that something major was afoot in the Mauá Square jurisdiction, and that they were being kept in the dark by the chief of police.
    Just then, the sound of loud voices interrupted the discussion: the officers tasked with entering and searching the sorcerer’s house had just returned, and they brought with them a man they had arrested trying to enter the shanty after calling the old man’s name.
    â€œThat’s the man who gave me the earrings.”
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    The first record in the history of Rio de Janeiro of the desecration of a cemetery is a 1551 letter by an anonymous Jesuit priest addressing the Provincial Superior in Lisbon, a document that Serafim Leite attributed to Father Nobrega.
    The story is more or less as follows: a group of Tamoio Indians, proud and well-armed, left the village of Uruçumirim to capture Maracajás who lived in Paranapuã. They landed in what is now Ribeira Beach and soon spotted the enemy.
    The fighting was fierce, but the Tamoios had the advantage right up until more Maracajás from other regions arrived and began repelling the invaders. The Tamoios then fled, taking a few prisoners with them. The scene is described in very lively fashion, complete with the whistling of arrows and the thump of war clubs—proof of the “furor with which the Brazilian natives attack their adversaries.”
    But what most impressed Father Nobrega—if indeed he was the author of the letter, because there is evidence that he was in Pernambuco at the time—was not the violence of the combat, but rather the ignominy of the revenge.
    A brief digression is in order. The Tupi, contrary to other peoples—such as the Portuguese, the Gypsies, and the Ethiopians—do not accept that death occurs simply when life is interrupted. With the exception of the great Tuxauas—avengers and cannibals, like Cunhambebe, for example—a person dies only when the skull is fractured. From that moment on, the soul begins a dark journey through death’s paths, battling the
anhangas
, the cannibal spirits, so as to overcome annihilation and achieve absolute eternity in the Land of No Evil.
    So, the Maracajás (Father Nobrega tells us)—knowing or sensing that the Tamoios would return to the battlefield in order to break the skulls of their fallen comrades, and thus guarantee their tally—instead of burying their own dead, buried the Tamoios that they had slaughtered as if they were Maracajás.
    Thus, the skulls that the Tamoios split five years later, on that same battlefield, were those of their own relatives.
    It was said later that it was this act of fratricide that weakened them, until they were finally vanquished by the Temiminós of Arariboia (who are Maracajás too), in the war that culminated in the founding of the city.
    Rio de Janeiro, thus, arose from a desecrated cemetery. And the tradition continued. By 1567, even though the city’s founding landmark had been transferred from Sugar Loaf Beach to Castelo Hill, the modest little mud-and-thatch church (which also housed the sacred icon of Saint Sebastian, the city’s patron saint) remained in the old town. And this little church was almost ruined in a landslide during heavy December rains. In rebuilding the church, it was discovered that the tomb of Estacio de Sá, who had been buried with a huge gold cross on his chest, had been violated.
    The cross, of course, had vanished. And years later, in 1583, when the mortal remains of the founder were finally transferred from the original chapel to the city’s new site, they noticed the second outrage: