O Negrinho do Pastoreio: The Little Herder Who Finds All Lost Things
In the far south of Brazil — the gaúcho country of Rio Grande do Sul, where the pampa runs green to every horizon and the horse herds move like cloud-shadow — the people keep a legend that they themselves will tell you is the most beautiful and the most terrible they own. It is not about a monster. It is about a boy: a small enslaved boy, thirteen or fourteen, so alone in the world that the story insists on the completeness of his poverty — he had no name that anyone used, no family, and, in the detail on which everything will turn, no godparents : no one, in the whole reckoning of heaven and earth, sworn to stand for him. The countryside called him only o Negrinho — the little Black boy — and he belonged, in the full and awful sense of the word, to a rancher whom the legend describes with equal economy: rich, and cruel, and known for both. The boy's work was the pastoreio — the night-herding of a tropilha of thirty bay horses, the rancher's pride. The story's engine is...