Five days into the clearing effort, the perimeter of the square was passable, a path for carts well established. A notification arrived at the clearing site with orders from Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello, the King’s Secretary of State that all rubble was now to be dumped along the river’s edge.
Pêro was part of a core group of men, in search of wives and children. At first, they did not engage, but as the days passed, descriptions of whom they were seeking and what they looked like and what they were wearing on All Saints Day became nightly discussion topics.
“My girls had ribbons of white woven into their braids and Paulinha wore her light blue linen dress,” Pêro explained to the group around the nighttime fire.
“María has a mole on her upper lip and my boys are ten and fifteen, t
