Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  “Yes, Colonel!” Honôrio said stiffly.

  “We seek a government that will restore dignity to the army — the imperial army, Honôrio, there to serve Dom Pedro. That’s all Marshal Deodoro wants: to defend our military institutions, not destroy them.” Then Clóvis turned to Aristides: “Your republic will come one day, but not this time.”

  “Yes, Colonel,” Ari acknowledged simply.

  On the veranda, Honôrio said to Aristides, “I honor and respect my father. I don’t doubt what he says is true, but tell me, Ari, do you believe that it will stop with a show of force?”

  “Perhaps, but not likely. One step beyond your barracks, the mutiny is irrevocable.”

  “A week ago, Marshal Deodoro and my father would have nothing to do with us. Today, with Ouro Prêto threatening to arrest the marshal and call out the Guarda to confine us to the barracks, they agree there’s no choice: Ouro Prêto must go. Tomorrow?”

  “It’s in the hands of the gods.”

  “The gods, yes — and Benjamin Constant.”

  The Revolution of November 15, as it came to be known, was in many ways a remarkable affair. With a single shot fired in protest, the decaying Bragança dynasty was swept away.

  On Thursday night, Honôrio left to join his unit. Colonel Clóvis went to Marshal Deodoro’s house, into which a stream of dissident officers poured through the night as regiments of the Corte armed themselves for mutiny.

  The emperor and empress were at their summer residence in the mountains at Petropolis, forty miles away from the capital. At 4:00 A.M. on November 15, His Majesty received a telegram from Prime Minister Ouro Prêto warning that sections of the army were in a state of imminent insurgency. Dom Pedro saw no real danger from what he perceived as a tiny dissident faction. His Majesty proceeded to take his customary cold bath at dawn and prepare himself for early Mass.

  At 8:00 A.M., Deodoro da Fonseca, who was suffering a raging fever, a recurrence of attacks that had plagued him since his stay in Corumbá, led six hundred men to the quarters-general at the Campo de Santana. The marshal was diminutive in stature and had the look of a terrier about him, a broad jutting beard complementing the image. True to his word, he carried the sword of rebellion under the imperial flag and with Vivas for His Majesty as he marched with Clóvis Lima and other officers to the quarters-general, where the visconde de Ouro Prêto and several of his ministers had taken shelter.

  “Storm them!” Ouro Prêto demanded repeatedly of Adjutant-General Floriano Peixoto, the commander of the garrison in the quarters-general. “Capture their artillery!”

  Floriano Peixoto refused to obey. “The guns I faced in Paraguay were those of the enemy. The cannon I see before me, Minister, are Brazilian.”

  It was during this impasse that the minister of the navy arrived at army headquarters. The navy itself supported the rebellion, but the minister, the barão de Ladário, José da Costa Azevedo, was taken by surprise. As he stepped down from his carriage outside the barracks, he was told he was under arrest. The barão pulled out a revolver and fired at the rebel officers, who shot back, wounding him.

  After this single exchange, Floriano Peixoto threw open the gates of the quarters-general, allowing Marshal Deodoro and his officers to enter amid more Vivas and cheers for His Majesty. After demanding the resignation of Ouro Prêto and his cabinet, and guaranteeing to respect the will of the emperor, Marshal Deodoro marched his men through the city to the marine arsenal, where they were greeted with more Vivas by the navy officers and marines actively participating in the uprising. By late morning, Marshal Deodoro returned to his house to nurse his fever. As far as he was concerned, the revolution was over.

  At 1:00 P.M., Emperor Pedro and Dona Theresa arrived in the city from Petropolis. Dom Pedro went to the city palace near the waterfront, where the viceroys of Brazil had stayed in colonial days. At 3:00 P.M., Princess Isabel and the comte d’Eu joined him at the old palace, and Dom Pedro began to listen to urgent advice from many quarters; one idea was that he should return to Petropolis or move farther into the interior to establish a government around which his loyal subjects could rally. But it was as if the old palace of the viceroys had become a world unto itself, for beyond those musty corridors, a small but delirious crowd was celebrating.

  At 3:00 P.M., at the city hall, a group of Republicans prevailed on the municipal câmara to pass a motion calling for a federal republic: Estados Unidos do Brasil, the United States of Brazil.

  Aristides had been outside the city hall when the republic was proclaimed. The news had been greeted with a tumultuous new cry: “Viva a Republica!” and spontaneously from several thousand throats rose a chorus of the Marseillaise.

  Aristides was swept along with the crowd when word passed that the victorious Republican delegation was going to Deodoro da Fonseca’s house to offer the marshal the post of chief of the provisional government. Outside Fonseca’s house, Aristides kept watch for Clóvis da Silva but did not see him, though he recognized several of the visitors, among them Lieutenant-Colonel Benjamin Constant and the Bahian politician and journalist Rui Barbosa. Without question the most brilliant of the men contributing to the overthrow of the monarchy, Rui Barbosa had gone over to the Republicans a few days ago, a decision now bringing him the portfolios of minister of finance and acting minister of justice. At 7:00 P.M., the scene outside the city hall was repeated when it was announced that Marshal Deodoro had agreed to head the provisional government.

  Despite the jubilation of the crowd near the Campo de Santana, elsewhere in the city the mood of the Cariocas swung between indifference and confusion. Not a few nobles, however, heard the strains of the Marseillaise and feared the worst, locking themselves up in their palaces. Among the mass of black and brown citizens, too, not all stood dumbfounded: They heard the Marseillaise and were reminded of their own newly found freedom, for which they thanked Princess Isabel. The freedmen received the rumor that the emperor and his family were to be banished forever from Brazil with consternation: Here and there, the boldest spoke of rising in support of their beloved Redemptress.

  Aristides roamed the city with others until midnight, hoping to run into either of his cousins, but to no avail. It was almost 1:00 A.M. when he returned to Flamengo. As he climbed the steps to the veranda, he smiled at the reminder of the Smith & Wesson, heavy in his pocket, which he’d not had the slightest thought of using. He was about to enter the house when he saw a curl of smoke in the dark. Clóvis Lima da Silva was sitting in one of the many rattan chairs on the veranda.

  “Colonel?”

  “Yes, Aristides. It’s me.”

  Aristides approached him slowly, surprised to find him there.

  “I suspected for some days that Deodoro would agree,” Clóvis said. “I prayed he wouldn’t give in, but he did. I don’t doubt that he acts with the purest motives for the safety of the nation. Benjamin Constant, Rui Barbosa — they both swear by God that it’s so. I don’t question their patriotism, but I can’t celebrate with them. A festa! How will it be tomorrow, when Brazil struggles with the reality of your republic?”

  “I believe that the events of today were inevitable, Colonel.”

  “We should have waited, as Deodoro himself said a few days ago. We needed more time to prepare for a transition.”

  Aristides knew that Marshal Deodoro and the men around him had had no choice. For our Brazil, he thought passionately, and felt a strong urge to share his exhilaration with the colonel, but heard Clóvis Lima say, “Leave me now, Aristides.”

  “Good night, Colonel. I promise you our patria will prosper.”

  “I would dearly like to believe that, Ari.”

  Honôrio da Silva, ebullient, victorious, shared none of his father’s doubts, and demonstrated this to Aristides when they were together two days later in the early hours of the morning on the old palace square. The previous day, the emperor had been served with an order of banishment that gave him and his family twenty-four hours to leave Brazilian soi
l. Two o’clock this Sunday afternoon had been set as the time for their departure, but at 1:30 A.M., fearing that a daylight procession by the royal family could ignite a popular demonstration, army officers had demanded that they leave forthwith. At first Dom Pedro had refused: “I am not a runaway slave. I will not embark at this hour.” But the officers had insisted.

  Honôrio was with a section of his unit posted at a praça not far from the old palace. Cavalrymen had cordoned off the palace square since early on November 16. Honôrio knew one of the officers in charge, and he and Aristides had no difficulty getting through their lines.

  At last, just before 3:00 A.M., the first members of the royal household, Princess Isabel and the comte d’Eu among them, emerged from the palace and were escorted across the Praça to the quayside. Soon afterward, the emperor and empress made their short journey in a carriage. It was drizzling, but from where Honôrio and Aristides stood, they had a good view of Their Majesties in the gaslight of lamps at the boat landing.

  “Oh, dear God, how sad that it should end like this,” Aristides said, watching one of the ladies-in-waiting help the Empress Theresa as she bent down to put her lips to the ground.

  “To hell with them!” Honôrio grabbed his cousin’s arm fiercely. “Gaze upon this dark, wet square, Aristides. From this very spot, Brazil’s martyr of liberty started his walk to the gallows. What compassion did Queen Maria show Tiradentes?”

  Aristides felt an involuntary shiver, for what Honôrio da Silva said was true. “Perhaps Alferes Silva Xavier is watching . . .”

  Honôrio gave a short, tense laugh. “God knows, he is. Tiradentes lit the torch a hundred years ago. This dark night it blazes brightly all over our United States of Brazil!”

  On November 24, the packet Alagoas carrying the Braganças to exile in Europe rode slowly past the island of Fernando do Noronha, about two hundred miles off the coast, the last Brazilian territory they were to see. As the island began to drop astern, Pedro’s fourteen-year-old grandson suggested that one of the carrier pigeons aboard the Alagoas be dispatched with a final message to the patria.

  His Majesty stood on the deck, the breeze ruffling his white hair. “Saudade,” he said, thinking aloud. . . . Saudade, an expression of profound melancholy.

  “Saudades do Brasil,” Pedro wrote on a slip of paper, which was signed by all the family.

  The pigeon was released with the message tied to its leg. Within sight of the exiles, it dropped into the sea and vanished.

  XXI

  June 1897 - December 1906

  The creak of saddle leather and clack of iron-shod hooves upon stony ground scarcely intruded upon the silence as Clóvis Lima da Silva walked his horse toward the soldiers. The men moved to either side of a majestic mandacuru cactus that dominated the surrounding caatinga. They looked curiously at the colonel, wondering how he would react to their find.

  The dead soldier’s back was propped up against the spiny base of the mandacuru. Patches of his uniform were deep blue, the rest discolored, and down the side of each trouser leg was a broken red stripe. Protruding above the fastened top button of his jacket was a dark, uneven stump. The decapitated head lay off to one side, the face pressed down in the dirt.

  Clóvis da Silva halted ten feet away. He gave the corpse a cursory glance before turning to the men who’d found it. “Back to your lines,” he said. Clóvis did not follow them, but lowered his eyes once more to the body: The dark foreboding he had experienced the night of the revolution returned strongly here, deep in the sertão of northeastern Brazil, on a day in late June 1897.

  Almost eight years since the proclamation of the republic, Clóvis da Silva’s pessimism that day had been justified. Political quarrels, military uprisings, and a civil war had convulsed Brazil following Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca’s election, in February 1891, as first president of the new republic. Nine months after taking office, the marshal dissolved Congress and declared a state of siege. Faced with a rebellion, Deodoro had resigned in favor of his vice-president, Marshal Floriano Peixoto, who restored Congress but did not relax the army’s iron grip on the nation.

  There had been a rebellion by the navy and an uprising in Rio Grande do Sul. The naval revolt had been put down, but the fratricidal conflict in Rio Grande do Sul was still raging in March 1894 when São Paulo, the wealthiest state in the republic, exercised its political power to back the election of the first civilian president, a Paulista, Prudente de Morais. By August 1895, the Rio Grande insurrection had been suppressed. It seemed that the United States of Brazil was beyond its baptism by blood and fire.

  Twenty-two months later, on June 27, 1897, Clóvis da Silva was with five thousand men marching to crush an uprising in the backlands of Bahia, 250 miles northwest of Salvador. The beheaded soldier at the mandacuru was not the only evidence of disaster the First Column had found since leaving its base camp eight days ago. Other men lay dead in the caatinga, and all along the route was the awful debris of defeat — smashed equipment, a discarded boot, a kepi trodden into the dirt.

  The force to which Clóvis was attached was the fourth expedition to march this way. The previous November, 104 men sent from Salvador had had a quarter of their number killed or wounded before retreating from the village of Uauá. In January 1897, 557 men and officers, with two Krupp cannon and two Nordenfeldt machine guns, had been sent from the state capital; after a two-day engagement in which several hundred fell, they retreated.

  The third expedition set out a month later with 1,300 men commanded by the fiery Antônio Moreira César, renowned for his decisive action against the Rio Grande do Sul insurgents. Colonel Moreira César and his second-in-command, Colonel Pedro Nunes Tamarindo, were killed, along with three hundred men; the survivors fled, abandoning all their equipment, four Krupp guns included, in the caatinga.

  Clóvis’s foreboding was compounded by unanswered questions about the rebels, who were variously described as bandits, fanatics, and monarchists. After the defeat of Moreira César, newspapers at Rio de Janeiro had reflected a hysterical public’s belief that the uprising in the sertão was the vanguard of a movement to restore the Braganças. Dom Pedro had died in exile in Paris in 1891, and the empress two years before that, but Princess Isabel and her sons were still there to claim the throne. There were rumors of royalist sympathizers flocking to join the Bahia rebels, along with French and Austrian tacticians recruited in Europe.

  Clóvis accepted “bandits” and “fanatics” as more likely descriptions of the rebels. And one thing was clear: The instigator of the uprising was a madman. Antônio Conselheiro, he was called — “The Counselor.” Church authorities had had trouble with the man as long ago as the early 1870s, when he first began to disturb the spiritual peace of the sertanejos. Time and again the archbishop of the Bahia had received complaints from priests that The Counselor had invaded their parishes and disturbed the god-fearing sertanejos.

  Reports had it that The Counselor was originally from the town of Quixeramobim, in the province of Ceará, where he was born in 1828 as Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, a member of the vast Maciel clan, long prominent in Ceará and other far northeastern states. His father wanted him to be a priest, but Antônio Vicente preferred the cashier’s bench in his father’s dry-goods store, eventually becoming a clerk and working for his father until he was twenty-nine. In 1857 the elder Maciel died deeply in debt, forcing the closure of the store; that same year, Antônio Vicente married and took up bookkeeping at various fazendas in the district. Pursued by his father’s creditors, he moved to a town south of Quixeramobim, where, it was rumored, he sustained a blow that deranged him, when his wife deserted him for a police sergeant.

  The distraught Antônio Vicente fled farther south, through Pernambuco to Bahia, where he settled at Itapicurú, 120 miles directly north of Salvador. By 1876, he had become known as The Counselor and was attracting a wide following of peasants to his “Camp of the Good Jesus.” Soon the Itapicurú police delegate was appealing to Salvador
for help in suppressing the “excesses of the fanatics against good nature and authority.” The Counselor himself had prevented an open confrontation: Like the prophets of old, with a small band of pilgrims he entered the wilderness.

  For sixteen years, Antônio Conselheiro had roamed the sertão, passing through the caatinga from fazenda to fazenda, vila to vila. Finally, in 1893, The Counselor, sixty-five years old, found a permanent refuge: Canudos. The chosen ground lay 250 miles northwest of Salvador, on a great plain between rugged hills that, because of the lowlying caatinga surrounding them, appeared deceptively precipitous. Along the southern edge of the plain flowed the Vasa-Barris, which came down from the east and looped around to the northwest, and The Counselor elected to build his New Jerusalem beyond the banks north of that bend.

  Antônio Conselheiro and his followers were not the first to settle here. As far back as the eighteenth century, a settlement called Tapiranga by the natives had been the refuge of runaway slaves from the coastal plantations. The quilombo had survived for generations, its inhabitants and their descendants known in the district for their ironwork. From time to time, backlands bandits seeking a hideaway from the law had joined them. There had been periodic fairs at Canudos, where the ironworkers sold their wares and others offered long-stemmed smoking pipes made from the reeds — canudos — that grew beside the river.

  Clóvis had heard several descriptions of Antônio Conselheiro from sertanejos serving with his column. They spoke of The Counselor as a man of medium height with a body wasted by fasting and privation. His features were suggestive of the caboclo mix of white and native. He had dark, piercing eyes, and his shoulder-length hair and heavy beard were both mottled with gray. His daily garb was a blue robe with a black leather belt from which a wooden crucifix on a leather thong was suspended. He wore sandals and, on his head, a small blue skullcap; his hand clasped a great staff. He carried with him, too, wherever he went, A Missão Abbreviado, an ancient liturgical work, and a copy of Horas Marianas, a book of devotions.