Hônorio swung away from the fazendeiro and ordered his men to leave.
The cavalry troop had been scouring the caatinga west of Monte Favela for two days, in advance of battalions pushing north toward the Cannabrava hills to establish siege lines around Canudos. A similar operation was taking place to the west.
With a point of six riders galloping ahead as scouts, the main section reached the Geremoabo road two hours later and followed it east. Eight miles up the road, they were met by a scout who reported fresh tracks of a large body of horse on a cattle path leading north.
Strung out in single file, the leather-clad cavalrymen entered caatinga so thick it was impossible to deploy flankers. Each man searched the maze of thorn and cactus until his eyes ached.
Twenty minutes later, Hônorio’s troops were forced to slow their pace, the cattle path narrowing to a five-foot passage between the walls of thorn.
Suddenly there was a crash of rifle fire behind Hônorio. The first volleys knocked down six cavalrymen.
The soldiers began to break into the caatinga on both sides of the path. Hônorio and five men, firing as they advanced, plunged toward a group of jagunços on their right. A man next to Hônorio was shot in the face. Another trooper screamed as bullets struck his chest. Hônorio and the others got through the thorn barrier unscathed: In a small opening, they fell upon the four jagunços they found there. Hônorio had emptied his revolver, but with his saber he killed one bandit swiftly and half-severed the arm of another.
Soon the jagunços, whose tactics were to hit and run, had had enough. Those still on their ponies scattered into the caatinga, leaving more than half their number dead or wounded.
Zé Cavalcante had already been shot in the chest when his pony fell. Thrown to the ground, he broke his leg, but managed to grab his rifle and drag himself into a thick patch of thornbush, where he was hiding when the fighting stopped. He could hear the talk of cavalrymen, and the single shots as wounded jagunços were executed.
An hour and a half after the clash, the soldiers rode off in the direction of the Geremoabo road. Zé Cavalcante left his hiding place at nightfall, moving painfully over the stones to the cattle path. He wanted to reach a water pit at the deserted fazenda four miles away.
Two days later, a party of his men who had fled into the caatinga found him just beyond the fazenda. The urubu had started on the face of Zé, leaving hollow sockets beneath his wiry black brows.
Canudos came under daily bombardment as the siege lines advanced east and west of the plain in mid-September. The towers of the new church were leveled to the ground, the walls blasted apart, the guns moved here smashed. One hundred sixty-seven rebels died at the church under the repeated cannonading, but others still went willingly to defend the huge pile of rubble where Antônio Conselheiro himself had labored to build the temple of New Jerusalem.
Concurrent with the incessant bombardment and the march to isolate the insurrectionists, government battalions assaulted the rustic citadel. Marshal Bittencourt was a cool, methodical strategist who set out to conquer Canudos house by house. By mid-September, they had overrun the eastern barrios. There the advance was halted within sight of the main praça and the ruins of the new church, which the sertanejos continued to hold as a fortress. The rebels had several trenches on two sides of the church, some facing the praça, others above the Vasa-Barris.
But, as the siege lines closed around them, the defenders also lost ground in other outlying areas: Government patrols destroyed groups of houses on the upper plain, driving survivors down into an ever-decreasing area.
João Abade and several officers were killed in these attacks. Overall military command passed to João Grande. Big John was quick on his feet, an expert at capoeira, the lightning-fast mock combat the slaves had often turned to deadly purpose.
Antônio Paciência, who had ridden with Zé Cavalcante in the past, had not left Canudos for a month. He was now in command of 570 men and boys in the trenches at the church.
As night fell on September 22, hundreds of women began to make their way to the open ground near The Counselor’s temporary sanctuary on the west of Canudos.
Most walked silently along the narrow lanes, but some could not restrain their laments.
Antônio Conselheiro was dying.
Day by day, as he witnessed the destruction of his holy city, he had grown weaker, his skin jaundiced, his frame racked by coughing and vomiting. Plagued by dysentery, too, he had been confined to his cot a week ago, with Simão Medico and the curandeiro vying with each other to nurse him.
The crowd of women gathering outside The Counselor’s house was radically diminished from two months ago. Numberless women and their daughters had died in the bombardments and in the trenches, where they loaded rifles and carried ammunition. The incidence of sickness, too, already widespread, was increasing as food supplies dwindled.
At the meeting ground, most women sat down or squatted, motionless, their eyes turned toward the small house where The Counselor lay.
Rosalina sat with her mother, Idalinas Marques, and Juraci Cristiano, whom Rosalina had not let out of her sight since the presumed death of Teotônio. She looked ten years older than her thirty-one years. Her long black hair had become infested with lice and was shorn close to her scalp; her face was puffy, exaggerating sunken eyes that revealed all the terrors that haunted her mind.
The beata Idalinas, barefoot, in a grubby chemise, sat praying out loud and rocking back and forth. For Idalinas, her husband’s desertion had been compounded by the flight of one of her unmarried daughters with a group that managed to get through the encroaching siege lines; the other daughter, Maria, was gone, too — killed during an attack.
Juraci Cristiano sat pressed up against his mother, shivering in the cold night air. He looked at Grandmother Idalinas’s wild eyes, her blue lips and black teeth: Her cries terrified him. She had told him that Jesus was going to throw the stars at the macacos; the end of the world was at hand. Juraci Cristiano stared up fearfully at the heavens.
No women were permitted inside The Counselor’s house, where Xever Ribas was keeping vigil. He was joined by men of the Santa Companhia, three or four of them at a time coming to pray at a long table, where tall candies threw a wavering light on the images of the community’s most cherished saints.
Antônio Conselheiro lay on a cot against the wall on the right of the room. A stench rose from his soiled robe; his beard was streaked with vomit; his hands were drawn up on his chest, his fingers clutching the crucifix he had worn at his belt.
Toward nine, The Counselor suddenly opened his eyes. “My brothers . . . my company,” he said, in a quavering voice. His lips were dry and cracked. “Good Jesus sees our struggle.” He turned his head toward the open door, listening to the women. “Why do they cry, Xever?”
“They’re frightened, Counselor.”
“No! Jesus loves them! Tell them, Xever!”
Xever Ribas looked as emaciated as the dying prophet. He only nodded — out of exhaustion and out of profound disappointment: His vision of the New Jerusalem as the restoration of a great Jesuit aldeia was shattered.
A spasm of coughing left Antônio Conselheiro gasping for air. Then he grew calm, and spoke once more:
“I wanted to help the poor, Xever Ribas. Wherever I went in these backlands, I saw them suffering from hunger — in body and soul. Who was there to counsel them? The poderosos who cared more for a stray beast than for these lost souls? The priests who turned their backs? The colonels who needed them for their private armies?”
The Counselor, interrupted by another coughing fit, continued with a rambling diatribe against the republic — “It extinguished the light of Rome! It brought the Antichrist!” — interspersed with his prophecies about the end of the world. Momentarily, he would stop talking, struggling for breath. Xever Ribas and the men of the Santa Companhia saw that death was imminent.
“The Antichrist has not vanquished Canudos,” The Counselor said
in a hoarse whisper. “In Heaven, ten times ten thousand swords are raised to help us . . . A brilliant host . . . our Santo Antônio carrying the sword of truth . . . our little Dom Sebastião in shining armor, coming to restore Eden . . . Oh, Xever! The trees bloom. Creeks are filled. Beasts are fed. Men thirst no more!”
Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, saint of the sertanejos, died with Paradise before his eyes, his vision of El Dorado promised to the poor of New Jerusalem.
Idalinas Marques joined other beatas moving breathlessly through the streets of the upper town. The saints had a message for every person they encountered:
“Praise Good Jesus! Antônio Conselheiro has gone to fetch Dom Sebastião. The Counselor is coming back with the infante. Santo Antônio is coming to save us!”
The investment of Canudos was completed on the morning of September 24. That afternoon, regiments of lancers began to clear the upper plain, a wave of men and beasts rolling down from the base of the Cannabrava hills. Major Hônorio da Silva and his company, galloping forward on the east, were on the extreme left of the long line of horse.
Hônorio’s veterans tore through caatinga that daunted other troopers. They passed isolated houses destroyed by patrols that had earlier been detached from the siege lines. They covered a mile before they met the first resistance, from a band of sertanejos dug in below a small hill.
Instantaneously, the cavalrymen opened ranks, many beginning to fire from the saddle.
“The charge, bugler!” Hônorio commanded.
At the first note, the troop sped forward, screaming battle cries. But Hônorio remained tight-lipped, his dark eyes upon the blazing rifles ahead. A bullet ripped through his leather trousers, grazing him. His eye flashed to his leg, then back to the enemy fifty yards ahead. At the very last moment, Hônorio let fly with a mighty shout: “Viva Patria!”
The earthworks were heaped up four feet high, a useless defense against the murderous line of steel and fire. Hônorio and a dozen front riders clattered quickly over the sand and stones.
The sertanejos were outnumbered three to one. As the cavalrymen fell upon them, rebels who evaded the lance thrusts rallied. Small men they were, but they fought like giants. The rifles they had emptied against the chargers they used as clubs. The very stones of their earthworks they seized as missiles. Some leapt up bare-handed to unseat cavalrymen. Not one sertanejo attempted to flee. Not one survived.
The cavalrymen regrouped, counting six of their own dead, eleven wounded.
Hônorio da Silva rode slowly through the broken, blood-spattered bodies randomly strewn on the ground. “My God, what an enemy!” he exclaimed. “What an enemy!”
At the army hospital behind Monte Favela, south of the hill where Hônorio’s company clashed with the rebels, Celso Cavalcanti rose from the side of a soldier to whom he had given the last blessings.
Celso Cavalcanti had approached friend and foe with compassion during his three months in this unhappy place. He heard the confessions of the dying and prayed with them for Christ’s redemption. Daily he visited the wounded and sick, even the captured sertanejos in the stockade, doing all he could to comfort them.
As the battles raged on against the rebels, the heat, the superstition that plagued men’s minds in this isolation, Celso continued to agonize over what he regarded as a broader national tragedy — something he had once tried to communicate to Hônorio da Silva.
“Another sacrifice on the altar of madness.”
Celso swung around at the sound of the voice. He knew the man by sight, but had not been introduced to him since his arrival ten days ago.
“Euclides da Cunha,” the Estado de São Paulo correspondent introduced himself. “Padre Celso Cavalcanti?”
Celso nodded. Euclides da Cunha appeared to be close to his own age. The correspondent of the Estado de São Paulo wore a dark suit with two jacket buttons dangling by a thread; his pin-striped trousers were baggy-kneed and covered with dust; his bow tie had obviously been hastily stuffed under his collar flaps. He had high, pronounced cheekbones, a strong jaw, and unruly black hair, in keeping with his untidy dress.
“Who was he?” da Cunha asked, looking at the young volunteer.
Celso told him what little he knew: The soldier, a bank clerk in Rio de Janeiro, had been shot the night before during a rebel raid on the siege line east of Canudos.
“A year ago he had never heard of Canudos,” Euclides da Cunha said.
“A sacrifice to madness, you said?”
“What else, Padre?” He smiled faintly. “I was told you would understand. ‘Go see Padre Cavalcanti,’ my informant said. ‘He has some queer ideas about the jagunço devils.’”
“Major Hônorio da Silva?”
“It wasn’t the major. It’s not important. I want to hear your ideas.” He looked at Celso keenly. “They taught me the science of war at the Escola Militar. This campaign defies military logic, but I daresay when it’s over there’ll be answers. I’m more interested in the human aspect — What caused Antônio Conselheiro and his twenty thousand fanatics to raise the banner of the Dark Ages on the soil of Brazil.”
“Ai, Euclides da Cunha, my friend . . . I thought I was the only one who asked such questions.”
They left the tent and strolled down toward a river that was now a mere trickle between walls of sand. There was a rush of words between them as each sought to learn the other’s views. Born in Rio de Janeiro province, Euclides had spent some childhood years in the Bahia, his father’s birthplace. About his military career, he said only that he had resigned from the army a year ago to work as a civil engineer for the state of São Paulo. “I’m not a pacifist,” Euclides said at one point. “I took up arms to defend the republic once and I would do so again, but I abhor war.”
When Celso offered his views on the rebellion, da Cunha, his face taut with concentration, nodded emphatic agreement several times.
“I agree they’re an oppressed class, but is it their anger or their abandonment that led to the rebellion?”
“The two go together, I believe. Abandonment in this hell heightened their sense of deprivation.”
“When I left Salvador, I thought I had a good idea what to expect. I was wrong. The farther away from the coast, the more I felt that not only was I entering a foreign land; I was journeying into the past. If the sertanejo is a pariah owing to his poverty and ignorance, it’s because for three centuries we concerned ourselves with building up our civilization at the coast, abandoning a third, perhaps more, of our nation in these backlands.”
Celso slapped his thigh. “Just what I told Hônorio da Silva! The sertão was left behind, ignored. The major didn’t agree. The paths of the bandeirante and the Jesuit, the trails to the cattle markets, the Rio São Francisco — he insisted that all these provided access for the influence of civilization.”
“Then how does he account for this barbaric rebellion?”
“He shares the common view: Canudos is a nest of criminals representing the worst element in our society.”
“If we left Canudos believing this, ours would be the greater crime.” Euclides da Cunha resumed his pacing. “It’s interesting he should mention the bandeirantes.”
“But not surprising,” Celso said, smiling. “Hônorio belongs to the family of the old devil himself, Amador Flôres da Silva, the emerald hunter.”
“These criminals, as the major calls them, are mostly the descendants of the bandeirantes. More than this, I see them as the very core of our nationality. The men of the backlands are the bedrock of our race, and yet . . . they’re as alien to us as the Tupi were to the Portuguese discoverers. That young soldier’s sacrifice will be worthless if our cannon fail to open the way for a new conquest of the sertão — a relentless campaign to draw the sertanejos into our national life.”
Late that night in the rebel-held section of Canudos, Antônio Paciência climbed out of the trench opposite the praça and went to sit alone thirty yards away, leaning against an undamaged part of
the rear wall of the new church. He had a blanket around his shoulders, for the temperature had dropped greatly from the blazing heat of day. He heard gunfire in the distance — a party of Big John’s raiders on a night attack against the macacos.
Patient Anthony looked at the Southern Cross blazing brilliantly above. Others were searching the skies for a sign of the return of The Counselor, but Antônio expected no miracle at Canudos.
Day after day, he had seen more people killed; more wounded carried to Simão Medico, who waited with strips of rag, sharp knives, and pots of salve from wild plants. The survivors stayed put, worn out by hunger and fear.
Antônio expected the final battle to come any day. In the trenches, he saw men who faced this prospect with joy, singing psalms and calling upon The Counselor for help. Jagunços as brutal as the late Zé Cavalcante prayed with love for Christ the Redeemer as they sharpened machetes and stuffed bullets into cartridge belts. There were boys of twelve and younger, as confused by the references to Dom Sebastião as they were by their elders’ talk of Dom Pedro Segundo, in whose time, they were told, things had been better in Brazil. There were venerable sertanejos, too, who carried a rosary in one hand and a gun in the other; they listened respectfully as others spoke of Canaan here at Canudos, but their eyes revealed their skepticism.
At 5:30 A.M. Antônio was with his men in the trench when the cannonade began from a Krupp battery on a hill half a mile away. Twenty minutes later, in the wake of the barrage, fires were raging along several congested lanes.
Antônio left the trench and started home just before eleven. There had been only a brief exchange of shots with government soldiers in the ruins of the eastern barrios, but a mile from the trench, the smoldering ruins of shacks set afire this morning made him quicken his step.
He found Rosalina outside the house, squatting at an iron pot, adding edible wild plants to a gray mush. Idalinas was sitting at a table inside; the door was open, and a shaft of sunlight illuminated an unframed picture of the Virgin Mary on the wall next to her.
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