Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

Patient Anthony still recalled vividly his return to Fazenda da Jurema in 1870. That year the arid land of the caatinga bloomed. The first week of February, the sertanejos had raised their sun-baked faces to the heavens: Thick banks of cloud were rolling in on the northeaster. The first raindrops struck the parched ground, raising tiny puffs of red dust. In minutes, a torrential downpour filled the cracks in the earth, swirling over sandy depressions, flooding rock-hard creeks and riverbeds. The people of the sertão had witnessed a miracle. As far as the eye could see, a million blossoms colored the caatinga, from tiny mauve buttons underfoot to trees and cacti adorned with a riot of flame red, violet, and yellow flowers.

  Antônio reached the fazenda of Coronel Heitor Batista Ferreira four weeks after departing Recife, to which he had sailed from Paraguay with the Fifty-third Battalion of voluntários, together with his friends Henrique Inglez and Tipoana. Parting with Henrique, Antônio had traveled to the sertão with Tipoana and six other Pancurus from their village near the Rio Moxoto, journeying alone to Jurema on his quest to find Mãe Mônica. Half scared, half defiant, he had reached the fazenda on April 18, 1870, and had gone directly to the main house, where one of the fazenda’s capangas ordered him to wait outside while his presence was reported to the senhor coronel.

  Antônio waited for what seemed an interminable time before Coronel Heitor Batista Ferreira appeared in the doorway, a mountain of flesh in a sweat-stained undershirt and cotton trousers that barely contained his massive thighs. Then in his late sixties, the senhor coronel was so burdened by his obesity, he had difficulty walking even a dozen paces.

  “You’re Mãe Mônica’s son?” Batista Ferreira asked.

  “By your leave, Senhor Coronel,” Antônio replied, seeking permission to speak in the presence of the poderoso and receiving a nod. “I am Antônio Paciência.”

  “A liberto of Paraguay?”

  “I was given my freedom, yes, Senhor Coronel. I came back to Jurema to find Mãe Mônica. She—”

  “After so many years?”

  “I did not forget my mother, Senhor Coronel.”

  Batista Ferreira frowned heavily, his bloated jowls moving furiously as he expelled a jet of dark tobacco juice.

  “Mãe Mônica, Senhor Coronel?” Antônio persisted.

  “Your mother’s here.”

  “Jesus Christ bless Senhor Coronel!” Antônio Paciência cried joyously. “I was freed in Paraguay. I came back hoping to get the same freedom for my mother.”

  “The slave Mônica is free.”

  At first, Antônio did not grasp Batista Ferreira’s words. “Yes, Senhor Coronel. I hope for this.”

  “I liberated her two years ago, Antônio Paciência. She lives with Isabelinha, there by the jurema trees.”

  “Blessed Christ! Mãe Mônica alive and free! Oh, Senhor Coronel, God bless you!”

  Heitor Batista Ferreira smiled momentarily, but his frown just as quickly returned. “My son is away. He’ll want to see you,” Batista Ferreira said suddenly.

  “I will be here when Senhor João Montes calls for me.”

  Batista Ferreira then spoke to the capanga, standing a few feet away: “Take the mulatto to his mother.”

  The caboclo had taken Antônio along a path beyond the main cluster of buildings, stopping within sight of a mud-walled, thatch-roofed house one hundred feet away at the juremas. As Antônio ran toward the house, it crossed his mind that perhaps it was exactly here that the sad herd had been led away by Saturnino Rabelo.

  “Mãe Mônica! Mãe Mônica,” Antônio called out, even before he reached the front door, which was closed. “Mãe Mônica?”

  “Who is it?”

  “Antônio . . . Antônio Paciência,” he said breathlessly.

  There was no immediate response. The house had two small windows with wooden shutters; one of these to the right of Antônio had creaked open a few inches.

  “Isabelinha?” he asked, when he saw a youngish woman at the window. He had only a vague recollection of his half-sister. “I am Antônio Paciência.”

  “It’s not possible. The boy was sold by Senhor Coronel.”

  “Yes . . . yes, Isabelinha. I was sold. And I was with the slaves fighting in Paraguay. I was liberated.”

  The window was opened another inch. “The child Antônio left Jurema years ago.”

  “They took me to São Paulo. I worked in the coffee groves. Five years ago, I went to war with the voluntários. Oh, open the door, Isabelinha. You’ll see it’s me — Antônio.”

  The instant Isabelinha opened the door, Antônio Paciência saw his mother sitting at a table in the front room. His heart had been so full, it was almost too much for him to say her name:

  “Mãe . . . Mônica . . . Mother.”

  Slowly she raised her old face to him, the light from the doorway upon her short gray hair. There was fright in her eyes, and she looked for answers — not to him; to Isabelinha — but her daughter only smiled.

  “Oh, Mãe Mônica!” Antônio had gone to her and was kneeling at her feet. “It’s Antônio. Your boy, Antônio Paciência,” he cried, grasping her arms.

  Mãe Mônica’s hands began to tremble. “An—tônio?”

  With tears on his cheeks, Antônio embraced his mother, all the while pouring out words to convince her he was the child torn from her side so many years ago.

  When she finally believed, Mãe Mônica, too, wept and cried out with thanks to God: “Isabelinha! Our little Antônio . . . my son! He’s come home!”

  In the days that followed, there had been other happy reunions, such as that between Antônio and his boyhood friend Francisco Cavalcante — Chico TicoTico. “The Sparrow,” twenty-eight at the time, was a vaqueiro at Jurema and also served as gunman for the Ferreiras, who had remained the district chieftains in the município of Jurema. Depending on the locality where they operated, the landowners’ gunmen were known as jagunços, meaning simply “ruffian,” or cangaçeiros, from “canga,” a yoke for oxen. Utterly ruthless, brave, impetuous, many of the gunmen were former vaqueiros with an intimate knowledge of the sertão.

  It had been Chico TicoTico who — over a jug of cachaça two nights after Antônio Paciência returned — had shocked Antônio with a revelation delivered quite innocently. Antônio had already learned that his half-sister Isabelinha was the mother of two bastards by João Montes Ferreira, but he did not know that twenty-four years ago, Senhor João had raped Mãe Mônica at the clay oven behind the fazenda. “We all felt so sorry for Mãe Mônica,” Chico TicoTico said, referring to the time Antônio had been sold. “She was heartbroken when you were taken from her, and then, when Isabelinha lay with your father —”

  “My father!” Antônio’s face had contorted with agony.

  “You didn’t know, Antônio?” Chico TicoTico gasped.

  “João Montes Ferreira . . . my father . . . sold me. His son!”

  Antônio spent the night on the bank of the Riacho Jurema, fueling his hatred for Ferreira. Chico TicoTico found him at daybreak. “Friend, I understand your misery,” he said, sitting down beside Antônio, “but you wouldn’t do anything . . . foolish, would you?”

  That afternoon, João Montes Ferreira returned and summoned Antônio to come to the main house in the evening. Chico TicoTico accompanied Antônio, who donned his uniform and kepi for the meeting.

  Ferreira met them at the door. In his fifties then, he lacked the proportions of his father, but the resemblance was there in the puffy cheeks and developing paunch. Like his father, too, João Montes was a coronel in the Guarda Nacional. His eyes had roved from Antônio’s kepi to his boots. “So you earned your freedom, eh?” He had looked at his son admiringly. “And fought in the great battles against López?”

  “Tuyuti, Curupaiti, Humaitá — others, too, Coronel,” Antônio replied calmly.

  “I lost two sons with the Guarda Nacional.”

  “And what of the other son you lost? The one you sold to the slavers?”

  No one moved or said a word.
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  It was Ferreira himself who defused the explosive atmosphere: “Ai, Jesus knows, I’m not a cruel man, Antônio Paciência. I have other sons at Jurema. I look after them. Ask Isabelinha: I’m good to the boys. I’ll do the same for you. Stay at the fazenda, Antônio Paciência. I’ll help you.”

  Antônio had stayed — for seven years — riding with Chico TicoTico and the vaqueiros of Fazenda da Jurema. Mãe Mônica died peacefully in 1875, the same year that saw the birth of the second of two daughters Antônio had had with Carolina Cavalcante, a cousin of Chico TicoTico’s. In 1877, the great drought descended on the land: At Fazenda da Jurema, the Ferreiras’ gunmen, Antônio Paciência included, fought with squatters who had resisted eviction from the banks of the upper Riacho Jurema. They had eventually been driven out, but to little purpose, for the creek soon dried up and the Ferreiras’ herds had to be taken far up Rio Pajeú.

  For Antônio, the seca had brought personal sorrow: Carolina Cavalcante, with whom he’d lived for eight years, died from disease; and a year after the drought, Chico TicoTico was knifed by one of the squatters they had expelled from the fazenda. Chico TicoTico’s murder had had serious consequences for Antônio. Chico’s oldest son, eighteen-year-old José — “Zé” — wanted revenge for the stabbing of his father. The squatter who had killed Chico TicoTico had fled the district, but he had a brother who was with the police in the town of Jurema, north of the fazenda. When this trooper attempted to arrest Zé for disobeying a town rule against carrying weapons in the street, Zé shot him dead. Antônio had witnessed the killing, and left town with Zé, but four troopers soon apprehended them. Shots were exchanged and a trooper was wounded.

  Years later, Antônio would recall that day with bitterness: “Zé Cavalcante rode away like the devil was on his tail and didn’t stop until he’d crossed the São Francisco into Bahia. Zé had warned me to flee, too, but I, like a fool, went to the fazenda and told João Montes Ferreira everything, just as it had happened. I was with him when the sergeant and his men came to the house. ‘The law must be obeyed,’ was all he said. ‘Go peacefully, Antônio.’ Ai, good Jesus, I didn’t want to believe it, but it was true! He gave me to them, telling me not to worry: He would put in a good word for me at my trial. Oh, the son of a bitch! For ten years I’d done his dirty work for him, and this is how he repaid me! I told the bastard, my father, I’d eat cow shit before I opened my mouth to beg his help. I paid for it, though. The sergeant and his men knocked me senseless in front of him. Then they got the cow shit and wiped my face with it.”

  In August 1882, Antônio Paciência had been sentenced at Jurema to eight years’ hard labor. One night eleven months later, he had escaped, fleeing south to the sertão of Bahia. He had crossed the São Francisco in the canoe of a fisherman fifteen miles below Juazeiro. A mile below the south bank where he disembarked was a tributary, the Rio Salitre, which flowed from deep within the caatinga. It was along the Salitre, two weeks after escaping the chain gang, that Patient Anthony found the sanctuary that was to be his home for the next ten years.

  He had followed the Salitre south for two days. Toward sunset the second day, he had come to a riacho flowing into the Salitre: On the opposite bank of the creek stood the ancient ruin of an immense church. He had crossed over to it, intending to spend the night there, and was gazing up at the vine-choked pillars, the tangle of cactus that all but hid the altar, when he heard:

  “Yes, mulatto, say your prayers. There’s not much time left to you.”

  Antônio swung around at this calmly voiced threat, coming face to face with a dark, gloomy-looking man in a chimney-pot hat, aiming a bell-mouthed blunderbuss at him.

  This was Antônio’s introduction to Vivaldo Maria Marques. Then in his forties, Vivaldo was the son of a Portuguese who had immigrated from Setúbal, south of Lisbon, in the time of Pedro the First, with the hope of making a royal fortune. Instead, he — and later his son — had followed a trade the family had been carrying on for generations in the estuary of Setúbal: They were salineiros, harvesters of salt.

  When Antônio finally convinced Vivaldo that he had no intention of invading his property, the salineiro took him to a settlement half a mile up the Rio Salitre, where some forty people lived in a cluster of hovels behind the riverbank. Dwellings, people, cattle, mules, dogs — all were covered with a layer of clay dirt, the substance from which Vivaldo Maria Marques and his family extracted a living.

  That night, Vivaldo had seen the scars left by Antônio’s leg irons, but he asked no questions about Antônio’s past and plied him with meat, beans, and manioc.

  For months Antônio dug clay, until the wet season came and the river rose. Then the dirt-encrusted community rejoiced as the rains washed off the clay and salt that clung to everything.

  Often during those first months, as Antônio lay in a hammock too tired even to attempt to remove the clay coating his body, he had thought of moving on. But Vivaldo had treated Antônio well. And besides, there was Rosalina.

  Rosalina Marques, a big, strong girl with surprisingly delicate features, had been sixteen when Antônio met her in that year, 1882. She and Antônio became lovers during the first rainy season. Vivaldo had enthusiastically welcomed the match, for it made it less likely that the thirty-seven-year-old Antônio would desert him.

  Vivaldo had been proven right: Antônio stayed, and by the late 1880’s, he no longer dug clay but traveled with Vivaldo to sell salt at Juazeiro and in numerous small towns in the sertão east of Lagoa Grande. On one of these journeys in November 1890, a year after proclamation of the republic, Antônio and Vivaldo first saw The Counselor at Chorrocho, a town east of Juazeiro.

  The gaunt anchorite had been with a small band of devoted followers as worn by fasting as he himself. In his blue robe, with his gnarled staff in one hand, prayer book in the other, he stood in the shade of a giant acacia.

  Antônio and Vivaldo had listened to The Counselor’s sermon that day, his terrible warning of a Final Judgment, with the army of Dom Sebastião risen to put to sword every sinner in Brazil. The prophecies profoundly moved them, so that afterward they stayed on and joined a group of men who sat talking with The Counselor. The backlands had been stricken by drought that year — a sign of God’s displeasure with the republic, Conselheiro said. But, he promised, a day would come when Brazil would be cleansed of evil; the caatinga would become like a fertile garden!

  Eleven months after their first encounter with him, Conselheiro had come to a fazenda thirty miles east of the Rio Salitre, and stayed three weeks. Antônio Paciência and Vivaldo’s family, including the fervent Idalinas Marques, went to listen to him, for by then The Counselor’s fame had spread throughout the region.

  In fact, a profound religiousness existed in the sertão. Not a dwelling, however humble, lacked the image of a favorite saint chosen to watch over its inhabitants. The poorest pilgrims prayed to travel at least once in their lifetime to places like Monte Santo, just south of Canudos, and the grotto of Bom Jesus da Lapa. Above all, there was the awesome caatinga itself, where sons and fathers and their fathers before them had seen the rivers disappear and the earth die, a scorched temple where God scourged the unholy.

  In 1893, when Conselheiro went to Canudos to build his New Jerusalem, hundreds of peasants who had heard him preach began to migrate to the holy city.

  Early that year, Vivaldo and Antônio had crossed the caatinga to Canudos to sell salt. The Counselor had personally invited them to move to Canudos — for their salvation. When they decided to do this some months later, their move had been prompted by material as well as spiritual considerations. Year after year the salt clay at Lagoa Grande had been diminishing, until finally one morning in August 1893 Vivaldo, kicking over six tripods, announced, “We’re finished here. We’ll go to Canudos.”

  Having lived with Vivaldo Maria Marques and his family for ten years, Antônio Paciência accepted Vivaldo’s decision without question. He was forty-seven years old, and where else was he to go with hi
s family? Besides, he too had been impressed by The Counselor’s prophecies. There were nights when he would lie awake wondering whether the world would end soon — whether men like João Montes Ferreira, who had abandoned him like a dog, would be consumed in the fires of hell while he and those with him enjoyed everlasting peace at New Jerusalem.

  That very month, they left for Canudos — Vivaldo and Idalinas and their two unmarried daughters, and Antônio and Rosalina and their two surviving children. Rosalina had had five, but three had died in infancy. Eleven-year-old Teotónio was the boy who had come to Antônio at the fire where he stood with the commanders of the army of Canudos. The last-born, also a boy, was but four months old in August 1893.

  When they arrived at Canudos early in September 1893, one thousand people were living in the town. Over the next two years, the population had grown at a dizzying rate, the town spreading north of the Vasa-Barris and also east and west in barrios on the lands of an abandoned fazenda below Monte Favela. Antônio Conselheiro was supreme leader, with a council of four, responsible for military, civil, economic, and religious affairs. All lands, herds, and flocks were held in common, the head of each family allowed to keep only what was necessary for his table. The sale of cachaça was forbidden; unrepentant prostitutes were expelled; crimes committed in Canudos itself were severely punished.

  One of the keenest advocates of these measures and a close advisor of The Counselor was a Spaniard, Xever Ribas, who had been judged an incompetent novitiate by the Society of Jesus. Xever Ribas had arrived in Brazil in 1888 and had roamed the backlands of the northeast as an itinerant scribe, earning his keep by writing letters for the illiterate. The frustrated black robe had been at Canudos since the beginning of the settlement, seeing in it a triumphant return to the days of the Jesuit aldeias.

  The growing community had developed contacts with neighboring villages, selling their produce at the weekly fairs in Uauá and in other towns. With the Church, too, there had initially been peace, for Conselheiro made no attempt to perform holy offices, leaving this to an elderly curate who regularly visited Canudos from the nearby parish of Cumbe. But the larger Canudos grew, the less indulgent the Church authorities became, and in 1895 the archbishop at the Bahia sent two Capuchin friars to Canudos to order Conselheiro to disperse his flock. He had refused, and the Capuchins had returned to the Bahia with the report of an insurrection in the making.