At 8:00 P.M., a priest who had been called to a dying soldier emerged from a canvas shelter on the extreme right of the field hospital. He walked thirty yards and then stopped, looking in the direction of the fresh graves. After a time, he continued toward a tent he shared with two army chaplains, but stopped again. He changed direction and began to walk quickly to the north and the main encampment.
It was Celso Cavalcanti, thirty-one years old, looking plump now beneath his worn, stained cassock. Exhaustion marked his features; but his blue-green eyes burned with their characteristic fervor. Eleven years since the day he received Rodrigo Alves Cavalcanti’s blessing to enter the priesthood, Celso had been attached to the archbishopric at Salvador. His superiors saw great things in store for Padre Celso, provided he curb his impatience and modify his questioning nature.
The archbishop himself had sent Celso to observe events at Canudos, a duty to be combined with helping the chaplains of General Cláudio do Amaral Savaget’s Second Column, with whom Celso had marched from the coast. On June 25, Savaget had been eight miles from Canudos. Over the next three days, three hundred men fell along those eight miles as the column battled past ambuscades and through deep gorges where the fanatics waited to crush man and beast with huge boulders they had dislodged and sent against them. But the greater blow had been to reach Monte Favela and find the First Column battered and its supply train taken. With the three trails to the base camp fifty miles away equally perilous, the army sent to conquer Canudos was besieged.
At the main encampment, Celso Cavalcanti asked where the officers of a Second Column cavalry squadron were billeted, and was directed to a tent close to the headquarters of Artur Oscar and Savaget. As he walked there, Celso thought of what he would say to Hônorio Azevedo da Silva, whose father he had buried earlier in the day.
They had met soon after the column left the port of Aracaju, Sergipe. Major Hônorio was a stocky, powerful lancer, his military bearing leaving no doubt the profession of arms had been his first and only choice. It was his outspoken belief that civilian rule notwithstanding, the army had to keep Brazil on course: “It’s simple, Padre Celso: the army must exercise the moderating power, just as Emperor Pedro did. Until the nation grows up, the army must be its guardian, as much to prevent the excesses of Frock Coats as to punish the rabble in these backlands.”
Celso had taken issue with these views, but their arguments had been friendly; the major welcomed Celso’s opinions, especially on the sertanejos, about whom Hônorio knew little. In all these years since his work with agents of the Termite Club, aiding runaway slaves, Celso had not lost his concern for the oppressed: He supported the Church’s fight against the rash of fanaticism among the sertanejos, but was not without awareness of the intolerable conditions that drove the poor to accept the promises of false prophets such as Antônio Conselheiro.
On the march from the coast, Hônorio had mentioned that his father belonged to the da Silva family of Tiberica, São Paulo, and Celso asked if he happened to know his Aunt Renata’s father, August Laubner. Only slightly, Hônorio had replied, but told Celso that his cousin Aristides Tavares da Silva had been instrumental in getting August’s son, Mauricio Laubner, elected to the São Paulo legislature.
When Celso reached Hônorio da Silva’s tent, greetings were exchanged, and two men with Hônorio got up and left. The major’s batman, a former slave, had knocked together a table with pieces of ammunition boxes. An oil lamp hung from a tent pole, throwing a dim light on the major’s face and accentuating his black mood.
For a while, with Celso sitting opposite him on the edge of a tin trunk, Hônorio reminisced about his father.
“The colonel and I had our disagreements,” he admitted at one point. “He was a professional of the old school; he wanted the army out of politics. It wasn’t easy for him, after Marshal Deodoro was gone. He took a desk job, convinced it was only a matter of time before they pushed him out of the army. But he acted with absolute dignity; he never said a word in public against his superiors. And then, suddenly, he was back in the field.”
Abruptly, Hônorio lost his composure: “Damn these fanatics! The colonel stood for everything just and honorable in Brazil. Damn them!”
Celso reached out a comforting hand.
“Earlier today . . . there was a group on the Geremoabo road coming to join Conselheiro. We killed them.” Celso started to speak, but Hônorio interrupted him: “Don’t waste your breath, Padre. They were as guilty as the rest. They deserted the fazendas of men who try to keep order in these backlands. They came to live — and die — like savages.”
“It’s not so simple, Hônorio.”
“No, Padre, it’s not! The savages in our past were simple brutes of the forest. They ate each other and danced for the Devil in their isolation.”
“The sertanejo, too, lives in isolation. But of a different kind. Spiritual.”
“They’re criminals, these sertanejos! They butcher innocent families, destroy fazendas, terrorize villages.”
“Hônorio, we abandoned them in these backlands. Church, empire, state, the authorities at the coast . . . we turned our backs on this barbaric region. And because we did, our coastal civilization is impotent here. The sertanejo knows only two masters: the poderoso and the drought.”
The rickety table shook as Hônorio rapped it. “Listen to me, Padre. I may not know the north, but I do know that the sertão is crisscrossed with cattle trails from fazenda to village, from the interior to the coast. The Rio São Francisco flows more than a thousand miles through the backlands. The Central Railway runs through the heart of the caatinga. How can you say the sertanejo is abandoned?”
“You can’t imagine, Major, the vastness of this sertão,” Celso began.
“Isn’t it true that for centuries there’s been movement here? Cowboys, priests, peddlers, slave traders, army recruiters — I could go on. The jungle of Amazonas is the place to look for a lost tribe, not here in Bahia.”
“You don’t know these backlands,” Celso said flatly.
“I know the plight of the poor in Brazil, Padre. I stand for Order and Progress, remember — a total break from a past in which, rich or poor, we were pawns of the Braganças. I want a new society in Brazil based on reality, not the deranged vision of Antônio Conselheiro.”
“We all want this, Major — a land free of the ignorance and impenitence that has allowed Conselheiro to take advantage of the sertanejos.”
“No one took advantage of them. No one forced them to pack up and head for Canudos. They came because they wanted to be part of this nest of bandits, isolated in these hills, and thank God for it! Thank God this corrupt element in our society, these lunatics, are isolated in one place. And I will destroy them — the prophet Antônio and every one of his accursed tribe!”
“Where’s Teotônio?”
“I don’t know.” Rosalina, sitting on the ground with her mother, Idalinas, and one of her unmarried sisters, Maria, did not look up at Antônio Paciência as she rasped a manioc tuber.
Juraci Cristiano was playing near the women. Upon becoming a man, Teotônio had given his little brother his bag of glass marbles.
“He didn’t come here?”
“No. Perhaps he’s with my father?”
“I was there. Vivaldo hasn’t seen him, either.” Thus far, the battle-shy Vivaldo had managed to avoid the fighting by working in the town armory.
Rosalina turned her head sideways to look at her husband. “It’s not the first time he’s been missing.”
“True.” Antônio was worried all the same.
It was July 24, 1897. The mounted bands of Zé Cavalcante and others still rode far out across the caatinga; and paths to trenches and dugouts in the surrounding hills remained open. But the major effort was the defense of Canudos itself. For sixteen days following the attack on June 28, the sertanejos had kept the macacos pinned down around Favela, with enemy supply lines cut off. On July 14, the first substantial mule trains had got thr
ough from Monte Santo: Four days later, Artur Oscar and Savaget had launched a massive assault across the Vasa-Barris to the barrios southeast of the main town. After forty-eight hours of furious combat, the soldiers had been driven back with heavy losses, but they were on the hills below Favela now and had dug in near the ruins of the outlying settlements. In eleven days since July 18, Canudos had come under fire from nineteen guns, God’s Thunderer now sited to shoot its 32-pound shells deep into the town.
The lower part of Canudos was in ruin. Entire rows of huts had been blasted apart. A large section of the headquarters building was demolished, and one wall of the old chapel was down. The new church had been pounded: One tower was damaged and half its south wall battered. The two Krupps had been moved here; the rebel gunners had used up most of their shot against the main assault on the barrios, and weren’t eager to spend their last rounds.
The people of Canudos did not count their dead. Among the living, there had been several hundred desertions, whole families heading for the Cannabrava hills. The majority stayed, though many who still had homes in the lower town left to join others living like beasts in the open plain above Canudos.
The houses of Antônio Paciência and Vivaldo were in a section of the upper town that had taken little damage, though even here piles of rubble were growing. When the guns opened up, women and children would flee to the open ground above the town; if they were lucky, they would have homes to return to when the shelling stopped.
“I have to go back,” Antônio said. He commanded the trenches opposite the barrios east of Canudos.
“If the boy comes here, I’ll send him to you,” his wife said.
“No — send him back to his post.”
“If he comes . . . ” she murmured with resignation.
Teotônio had been at his post at noon when a dozen men led by a young jagunço arrived. They had received General João Abade’s approval for a special mission against the enemy. When they left the guard post to cross the Vasa-Barris, Teotônio slipped into the reeds behind them. A quarter-mile beyond the river the sertanejos found him at their rear, but did not send him back.
The squad spent the afternoon working its way through the dry scrub toward one of the hills below Favela, where they waited hours for nightfall.
In the middle of the night, they started up the hill. They crept over the stony ground on their bellies, skirting a sentry post. They were 150 yards from their objective when their jagunço leader gave the order to charge: thirteen men and a boy rising up from the caatinga to hurl themselves forward against God’s Thunderer, standing dark and silent in the distance.
Thin-legged and scrawny, Teotônio shot forward at the heels of the leaders. The jagunço and three other men carried spluttering grenades, but they threw them too soon, and the missiles exploded in front of the Whitworth.
The gunners asleep behind the 32-pounder leapt to arms. Elsewhere in the camp, scores of soldiers jarred awake by the blasts grabbed pistol and sword and closed in on the raiding party.
Teotônio was shot down, three bullets striking him in his chest and back. Twelve men fell with him. One sertanejo fled back into the caatinga, badly cut up but able to return to Canudos. He gave his report to João Abade, telling him his comrades were dead. Since he hadn’t spoken to the boy Teotônio, he said nothing about him to the general.
As he had for the past two nights, Antônio Paciência made his way to the makeshift infirmary to check among the wounded for his son. Vivaldo accompanied him. It was still unspoken between Antônio and Rosalina, but both strongly believed Teotônio had fallen into the hands of the enemy. Just moments ago, Antônio was told that a boy had been brought to the infirmary. Despite himself, he felt a surge of hope.
Of the two men in charge there, one was a curandeiro who specialized in native medicine, the other a man from Ceará who had worked in a hospital years ago. The Cearense, a caboclo known simply as Simão Medico, “Simon Medic,” hailed Antônio Paciência as soon as he saw him and Vivaldo approaching. He was holding a lantern above a young mulatto with a stomach wound swathed in strips of rag. It wasn’t Teotônio. “Better for your son, Antônio Paciência, if the end came swiftly.”
Simão Medico’s callous remarks reflected a prolonged resignation to suffering. Nineteen years ago, when he was twenty, he had fled the great Ceará drought of 1877-79 and gone up to Belém do Pará to join thousands recruited to work among the rubber trees of Amazonas. But, at Belém, Simão and five hundred other Cearense got jobs that promised far greater rewards than latex gathering: They were contracted as laborers for a railway being built in the jungle along the Madeira and Mamoré rivers. P. & T. Collins, of Philadelphia, U.S.A., had got a contract to build a 320-kilometer railroad to bypass the great rapids and allow landlocked Bolivia access to the passage of the Amazon. At Santo Antônio, the base camp, Simão Medico had worked in the infirmary: never a day passed without a third of the railroad builders hospitalized. After eighteen months, the project was abandoned with only seven kilometers completed, the firm of P. & T. Collins bankrupt. Of the five hundred Cearense laborers, three hundred died.
Simão Medico had stayed thirteen years in Amazonas. In 1891, he had returned to Ceará, finding the sertão just as he had left it in 1878 — in the midst of a devastating drought. “And I thanked Almighty God to be back. I wanted to fall on my knees to kiss this dry earth. I’m one of the lucky ones, Antônio. You think slavery has ended in Brazil? Go to Amazonas and see the life of the sertanejos of Ceará.”
Simão Medico had arrived at Canudos soon after its occupation by Antônio Conselheiro. He was one of The Counselor’s most ardent followers. Though perfectly lucid most times, he had been seen on his knees beside men who were already dead, beseeching them to utter revelations about Dom Sebastião and others they were embracing in Heaven.
When they left Simão Medico, Antônio and Vivaldo walked in silence for a while. Until Teotônio’s disappearance, Vivaldo had rarely expressed his doubts about the rebellion, but in the past two days, he had become despondent.
“Antônio Conselheiro looks very weak,” Vivaldo said, almost in a whisper. “If The Counselor goes, what’s left, Antônio?”
“Others will continue the struggle.”
“And in the end? When not a stone at Canudos is left unturned?”
Antônio continued to stare straight ahead. “Are you thinking of running, Vivaldo?”
“No, Antônio! Never! The Counselor promises a thousand years of peace on earth when the battle ends, isn’t that so?”
“For those who keep the faith, Vivaldo.”
Vivaldo stole a sideways glance at his son-in-law. Perhaps, he thought, for those who believe in miracles.
Three nights later Vivaldo Maria Marques vanished, leaving behind his wife and two daughters. No one believed that the salineiro was a victim of the enemy. A distraught Idalinas submitted to the flails of her sister beatas and put herself on a fast that brought her close to death. It was atonement, she said, for the coward who had deserted Bom Jesus.
Following the burial of Hônorio’s da Silva’s father on June 30, week by week, as they campaigned at Canudos, the major and his men underwent a transformation.
At first, the change was hardly noticeable: one cavalryman in a leather waistcoat; one with a pair of gauntlets; one wearing a leather apron; one covering his horse’s quarters with a hide reaching almost to the animal’s hocks. Each sortie beyond Monte Favela saw more men riding out in the armor of the vaqueiros, until by early September, nine weeks after the first major battle, Honôrio da Silva and his men were indistinguishable from their enemies. The similarity went deeper than the reddish leather carapaces they had donned: Most of the lancers were gauchos, the cowboys of Rio Grande do Sul, accustomed to racing across the grassy plains of the south. To a man, they found the caatinga loathsome, but they did not fear it. Repeatedly through July and August, they thundered between the walls of thorn and cacti: On some days, they were after wild steers, their rawhide
lassoes snaking through the air; on others, they chased the sertanejos, riding far across the caatinga in search of rebel horsemen, the clashes with the vaqueiros of the dry lands taking on all the elements of a deadly personal duel between brothers.
The fourth expedition had come very close to repeating the earlier disasters. Half starving and short of water, the army had depended on the sertanejos serving in its ranks for the fruits and tubers of the caatinga; these and the wild cattle driven in by the cavalrymen were all they had had to subsist on for weeks until the supply trains began to get through from Monte Santo. During August, three thousand reinforcements had arrived, coming to replace two thousand men wounded or exhausted by sickness. In August, too, word came that Marshal Carlos Machado de Bittencourt, minister of war, was to take personal charge of the campaign.
Late morning September 10, Hônorio da Silva and his fifty-four cavalrymen rode up to a fazenda in the Serra Vermelha east of Canudos. The owner and his vaqueiros, all armed to the teeth, were waiting for them. The fazendeiro gave Honôrio, a surly greeting, Hônorio asked if the jagunços had been there. “Yes, Major. Last night. The Devil himself winking at me.”
“How many bandits?”
The fazendeiro, Luis Teixeira, gestured with his rifle toward the horses trampling the ground in front of his house. “Forty, fifty . . . as many as your men.”
“You fed them? Watered their ponies?”
“I’m alive, no?”
“Careful, Senhor Luis.”
“Major?”
“Your neighbors tell a different story.”
“My neighbors?” Teixeira rolled his eyes. “God preserve me! Great liars, Major. Goat stealers.”
“Which way did the jagunços ride?”
“I heard one mention the Geremoabo road.”
“To Canudos?”
“No, Major. To the north.”
Brazil Page 109