The Children, the Lady, the Burning Sand
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--" Verão morrer com fome os filhos caros, Em tanto amor gerados e nascidos; Verão os Cafres ásperos e avaros Tirar à linda dama seus vestidos; Os cristalinos membros e perclaros A calma, ao frio, ao ar verão despidos, Depois de ter pisada longamente Co'os delicados pés a areia ardente.
They will see their dear children die of hunger, children conceived and born in so much love; they will see the harsh and greedy Kaffirs strip the lovely lady of her clothes; her crystalline and radiant limbs they will see laid bare to the heat, to the cold, to the open air, after she has long trodden the burning sand with her delicate feet.
Adamastor, the giant of the Cape, is still naming the disasters that will fall on Portuguese ships rounding him. Here he foretells the wreck of Manuel de Sousa Sepulveda and his wife Leonor on the African coast: their children starving, the lady stripped by the local people, her bare feet on hot sand.
The stanza is one long prophecy of exposure. Twice Adamastor says "they will see" (Verão), and each time the object is a body that should have been protected: children who starve, a woman whose clothes are taken, limbs left to heat and cold and open air. Camões keeps the courtly vocabulary going the whole way down — linda dama, cristalinos membros, delicados pés — while the things described are starvation and stripping. The gap between the language and the facts is the point.
What a first reader misses is the tense. This is not a lament for something that happened; the giant is telling Gama's crew what has not happened yet. Camões' readers in 1572 knew the story of Manuel de Sousa Sepúlveda and Leonor, wrecked on the African coast in 1552 and dead on that sand — so the prophecy lands as memory. The victims are Portuguese, and the wound is self-inflicted: the route Gama is winning here is the route that will kill them.
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