Juraci Cristiano was at a house at the top of the narrow lane. He saw his father and came running toward him. He was pitifully thin beneath his rags. Idalinas had pinned two religious medals onto his shirt, and told him not to fear the guns of the macacos, for if he died, he would be a little angel at the feet of Jesus. But Juraci was terrified all the same.
The house Juraci Cristiano had been visiting belonged to an aged caboclo, Plácido de Paula. Plácido himself did not know exactly how old he was, but he had been born in the time of King João of Portugal. Feeble, half blind, Plácido did not fight the macacos. However, his failing eyesight did not prevent “Woodcutter,” as he was known to all, from working on an immense carving he called “Gabriel,” an eight-foot-high angel, which had begun to look remarkably like The Counselor.
Plácido had been a wood-carver all his life, specializing in figures for the prows of barchas on the Rio São Francisco, but Gabriel was his most ambitious project.
Juraci spent many hours with Woodcutter. Juraci would sit ten feet away, watching the old man work with his chisels and gouges. Sometimes Woodcutter stared at him, and it seemed as though he was about to say something, but he never did.
When Juraci Cristiano ran up to his father, Antônio Paciência gave a forced smile. He asked after Woodcutter.
“He worked all morning, Pai.”
“Good. It’s time he finished great Gabriel,” he said. “Old Woodcutter is as brave as any man in the trenches,” he said. “He hears the guns. He sees the explosions. Nothing takes him from his work.”
“Where will we put Gabriel? We have no church.”
Antônio saw Rosalina look up at them. “There will be a new church —”
“When the macacos go!”
“Yes, son. A church of Santo Antônio, bigger than the one they destroyed,”
“Ai, Nossa Senhora! Pray for this,” Rosalina said suddenly. “Haven’t we suffered enough?”
Antônio knew how much Rosalina feared the coming battle. “We’ve beaten the macacos before, Rosalina. We can do so again.”
Juraci chanted, “Beat the macacos! Beat the macacos! Chase them, Pai!”
Antônio put a hand on Juraci’s shoulder. “There’s going to be a big fight, boy.
Stay close to your mother and Grandmother.”
“I’ll be brave, Pai. Like Teotônio.”
Antônio gripped the boy’s shoulder so fiercely that Juraci winced. “Pai? What is it, Pai?”
Almost to himself Antônio said, “I will give my life. I will give anything you ask, Good Jesus. But spare the son of Antônio Paciência.”
As it began to grow light on October 1, 1897, the government guns boomed, every cannon emplaced on a mile-wide arc facing Canudos, twenty-one pieces in all.
The rain of shells screaming over the caatinga, blowing apart the remaining houses held by the fanatics, lasted almost an hour.
Simão Medico saw a wall of fire race through the tinder-dry brush where two hundred wounded lay. The flames shot along hide shelters, trapping the incapacitated men below them; they leapt to the rags on the backs of men trying to outrun the fire on broken, rotting limbs. Some of the wounded tried to help their friends, frantically pulling at arms or legs, only a few with the strength to carry others beyond the inferno.
Deranged by the sight of his infirmary ablaze, Simão Medico, who in fits of religious mania had implored the dying to tell of Paradise, now stood at the edge of the flames, screaming incoherently at the victims. It was not heaven-bound saints he saw but devils scorched by the flames of hell. When a horribly burned patient ran up to him crying for help, he fled toward the caatinga.
Simão Medico escaped the flames, only to be shot minutes later by a government scout.
Xever Ribas, though denied entrance into the Society of Jesus, was with the black robes in spirit and liked to think of himself as a Padre Mola defying the Paulista slave raiders at the missions of Guiará. But, during the past week, the Spaniard had grown weak and dispirited: The night before, he had decided to make a run for it. He had reached the bank of the Vasa-Barris without meeting an army patrol, and was just stepping gingerly through the low, muddy water when he stopped.
“O Good Jesus. . . . O Counselor!”
Xever Ribas saw Antônio Conselheiro standing on the opposite bank, the light of Heaven emanating from his blue robe.
The remorseful Spaniard had turned around, hurrying back to help the faithful.
Xever Ribas had safely reached the sanctuary that housed the community’s saints, where he fell on his knees to beg The Counselor’s forgiveness for having considered desertion.
He was still in this position minutes later, head bowed, lips moving in silent prayer, when he was buried under a pile of rubble two perfectly aimed shells had made of the small building.
Idalinas Marques sat huddled in a pool of her own urine in a comer of the one-room shack, talking to Good Jesus and the saints. Rosalina was on the opposite side of the room, her arms around Juraci Cristiano, both mother and child struck dumb with terror.
No bombardment in the past had been as violent. Explosions rocked the ground and sent blasts of dust and smoke through cracks in the mud-and-reed walls and swirling around the hide cover that served as a door.
Idalinas’s beseeching was cut short as she struggled for air in the rank and suffocating atmosphere.
It was the beata’s last prayer. With a deafening noise, a Whitworth shell burst next to the house, demolishing the corner where Idalinas had been sitting. In that blinding instant, as tree-limb rafters gave way, the walls caved in and a shell splinter fatally pierced Rosalina’s brain. The blast tore Juraci Cristiano from his mother’s grasp.
Under rapid fire from Krupp guns just across the Vasa-Barris, Antônio Paciência and his men and boys scrambled out of their trench, following other rebels who disappeared into the ruins of houses.
Antônio Paciência mounted a broken wall and climbed to the highest point. To his left, the upper ridges of Favela and other hills lay golden in the rising sun. To his right, it was pitch dark beneath the black smoke, except where sheets of flame leapt between the houses, the fires fanned by a stiffening northeaster.
His senses were numbed by the devastation and by the noise, the cries and shrieks rising from the stricken town blending into one hideous howl of agony.
“What do you see, Antônio? What?” The question was shouted from below him.
Antônio replied in a low, agitated voice only he could hear: “The end of the world. O Jesus, yes, as The Counselor warned . . . the end of the world.”
“Viva Bom Jesus! Viva Conselheiro!”
Here and there, the old battle cries rose hopefully, but mostly the rebels waited in silence.
There were perhaps 500 in the trenches and at the church, another 500 in the crackling, smoldering hell behind them. One thousand survivors from 20,000 at New Jerusalem three months ago.
Behind the praça to the east and across the Vasa-Barris to the south, 2,500 soldiers waited for the order to wipe out the last rebel positions. Another 3,000 stood in reserve. Most men in the ranks differed little from their enemies: They were poor, uneducated, untroubled by questions such as those in the minds of Celso Cavalcanti and Euclides da Cunha. For them, Canudos was a blistering, fearful Hades where 5,000 comrades had fallen.
The machine gunners opened the action. For fifteen minutes, they cranked the Nordenfeldts until their wrists ached, pumping three streams of lead across the Vasa-Barris.
“Advance, men! Advance!”
Whistles shrilled. Bugles blew.
“Viva a Republica! Viva Brasil!”
Fifteen hundred bayonets weaved between the scrub as companies ran down toward the Vasa-Barris. Simultaneously, one thousand soldiers streamed from the eastern barrios toward the praça.
From the rebel positions, a few shouts, a few cries from men hit by machine-gun bullets. Not much else, as dirt-ingrained fingers tightened around triggers.
“Hold
your fire, men,” Antônio Paciência said.
Every rebel leader gave the same order. Here, at the praça, Antônio and his men wanted the macacos to run deep into the square before the fusillade began. Closer and closer they came — 500, 450, 350 feet away — and still Antônio had not given the order.
“Fire! Fire! Fire!” Antônio shouted in that instant.
The fanatics had pulled sixty men out of the trenches and sent them to the ruins north of the square, where, immediately firing, they dropped thirty soldiers. Now the men in the square were exposed to a murderous cross fire.
The soldiers at the Vasa-Barris fared no better. They were easy targets for rebels in the long trench at the river, as well as for dozens perched on the broken wall of the church.
At his headquarters, Marshal Bittencourt remained outwardly calm, but warned his generals: “Three months ago the army promised victory. Brazil has been patient with us. If we fail today, we will be totally disgraced.”
It was impossible to call on their artillery, because of the danger of decimating their own ranks. But there was an alternative they now employed: dynamite bombs.
Six bombs thrown from the canudos reeds blasted the trench at the river. Charging through the smoke and dust, a second massive assault wave hit the north bank of the Vasa-Barris and overran the defenders.
Antônio Paciência’s trench was under heavy fire from the soldiers at the old chapel. Twice, soldiers had run forward with spluttering bombs, only to be shot down, the explosions of the devices they carried killing them and many of their wounded comrades nearby.
It was approaching nine o’clock. Antônio had lost a quarter of his men. To the north, the blasts were coming very close now, with rebels visible as they ran back between the houses. Antônio fired across the praça until his rifle was empty. He reloaded, but said to a caboclo next to him, “They want their victory? Good! Let them have it!”
Antônio gave a succession of sharp blasts on his whistle. Quickly and without fuss, for they had been expecting the order, the sertanejos began to withdraw. At the church, too, as the first dynamite blasts shook the south wall, the defenders began to leave.
At 9:15 A.M., soldiers swarmed across the praça and up from the Vasa-Barris. Ten minutes later, two thousand men gave a jubilant cheer as a soldier unfurled the green-and-gold banner of Brazil above the battered ramparts of the temple of New Jerusalem.
At 9:30 A.M., the Vivas were silenced. Three men of the first squad to probe the gutted houses behind the church were shot dead.
“For the love of Christ, can’t the lunatics see it’s over?” declared a general who had led the men at the praça. “Do we have to burn them out house by house?”
An answer came from out of the ruins:
“Viva Bom Jesus! Viva Conselheiro!”
The general sat down on a rock in Antônio Conselheiro’s sanctuary as men were sent to fetch more dynamite bombs and cans of kerosene.
It was hours before a break in the fighting allowed Antônio Paciência to check on the fires in the direction of his house. Three streets away from his shack, he found Plácido de Paula and Juraci Cristiano, who ran sobbing to him.
“Pai! Pai! Pai!” His small, narrow face was contorted with agony, tears streaming down cheeks streaked with dirt and soot.
Antônio knew immediately. He picked up Juraci and went over to Woodcutter, who was leaning against a wall.
“My house?”
“Yes.”
“Rosalina? Idalinas?”
“Yes.”
“Ai, Good Jesus.” He felt Juraci’s tears on his own check. “My boy? He was with you?”
Woodcutter, who had found Juraci lying outside the shack, gave no answer.
“Pai! Oh, Pai Antônio!”
“It’s all right, Juraci. Pai’s here. It’s all right.”
Woodcutter began to walk away.
“Old man” — Woodcutter did not turn around — “thank you.”
Woodcutter moved slowly back toward their street, his gray head bent as his weak eyes searched the ground for obstacles.
Antônio put his son down and, squatting beside him, gently reminded the boy of what Grandmother Idalinas had told him — there was a place with Jesus for those who died at Canudos — but Juraci was inconsolable. After a few minutes, Antônio took the boy’s hand and started up a street to the home of Bettina, a friend of Rosalina’s, who had been widowed early in the war. Antônio hoped he would find her alive and be able to leave Juraci with her for the time being.
To reach Bettina’s house, they had to go up a street parallel to theirs. So many shacks had been flattened in the area that Antônio could see his own, where his wife and her mother lay. And he could see Woodcutter, whose shack also had burned to the ground. The old man stood staring at what looked like a huge fire-blackened tree stump: great angel Gabriel.
Wading through the debris with Juraci following him, Antônio went over to Plácido: “I’m sorry, old man. It was so much work.”
Woodcutter said nothing.
“God will punish them, Plácido.”
“Yes.”
Juraci stared with wide, wet eyes at the angel. The carving was smoldering, with wisps of smoke rising from it.
Antônio said that Plácido de Paula should come with them. “Where?”
He told him about Bettina.
Woodcutter shook his head and, kicking ashes aside, started to make a place for himself to sit down.
Antônio and his son left quietly.
“Is Gabriel dead, too?” Juraci asked.
Antônio had no answer.
Twenty-four hours after the capture of the praça, Celso Cavalcanti sat resting, his head in his hands, in a tent at a field hospital half a mile south of Bittencourt’s headquarters. Celso had been up all night with the dying and wounded, the last offensive having thus far cost five hundred casualties. At dawn this October 2, Canudos had again been bombarded, but the battle was at a virtual standstill. Soldiers were moving forward yard by yard, where each remaining house was a small mud-packed fortress, each lane barricaded with rubble and whatever the defenders could drag from shacks that had not been destroyed.
As Celso sat on the edge of a canvas cot in the ferocious afternoon heat, despite his utter exhaustion, unable to rest, he heard a commotion beyond the tent:
“They’ve given up! The fanatics have surrendered!”
Celso Cavalcanti pressed his knuckles against his forehead. “Thank God,” he said fervently. He began to close the small buttons at the top of his cassock, his hands shaking with his sudden and immense relief.
But Celso was again bitterly disappointed, for when he went to general headquarters, he learned that there was no surrender, only a three-hour ceasefire granted by Marshal Bittencourt at the request of the rebels.
“They’re sending us their women and children,” an officer told Celso.
Antônio Paciência and other rebels were escorting several hundred of their people toward the praça, where they were to be handed over to the government soldiers. Some children were naked; some women wore only a cloth around their privates, their breasts encrusted with dirt. Some walked silently; some wept; some begged water; some cried aloud for Antônio Conselheiro, that he should see them and carry them to Heaven.
They had known the situation was hopeless. No food. No water. And for those still able to fight, perhaps two hundred rounds per man.
As they had sat around their fire last night, the leaders had spoken about giving up. For some, surrender was unthinkable; they remained unswerving in their belief that they were fighting the Antichrist in a preliminary battle to Armageddon. For others, Antônio Paciência included, the best they could expect if they capitulated would be their return to a chain gang; the worst, which they considered more likely, a firing squad. And there were some, like João Grande, who contemplated flight. “Not one of us, if he took his chances in the caatinga, could ever be called a coward,” he said.
For the women and c
hildren and those too old to do battle, the fight was over. Fourteen women wouldn’t go, most because their men were still here, five because they refused to abandon the holy ground. Several old men, too, had chosen to remain rather than be taken prisoner by the macacos. One of these grandfathers approached the rebel chiefs as the refugees were about to be led out of the ruins:
“I won’t go.” It was Woodcutter, poor of sight and feeble in body. He had spent the night alone at the ruin of his house.
“You’re a brave one, old fellow, but go. Get some peace in the time that’s left you.”
“I had my peace here,” he said.
Joao Grande shouted “Old man!”
Woodcutter stopped in his tracks.
“If it’s your wish — stay! Fight the devils!”
Woodcutter did not say a word but raised one of his big hands, with which he had worked so painstakingly on Gabriel, balling it into a fist and shaking it as furiously as was possible for him.
The moment the ceasefire had gone into effect, at 1:00 P.M., Antônio left his forward post and went to Juraci:
“Pai?”
Juraci could just see the praça and the soldiers.
“Don’t be frightened,” Antônio said, squeezing his shoulder.
“Macacos!”
“They won’t hurt you.”
“But, Pai . . . oh, Pai—”
“Go!” Antônio said fiercely. Bettina took the child’s hand. “Go!”
Juraci burst into tears as Bettina pulled him away. Antônio stood in front of the men at the trench, his eyes fixed on his son. He shouted for Juraci to be good, to be brave, but the boy didn’t hear him.
Then, as the rear of the column passed deep into the square, Juraci Cristiano broke away from Bettina. As fast as his thin legs could carry him, he ran between the macacos, dashing back toward his father. A soldier tried to grab him but missed.
“Juraci!” He grabbed him roughly by the shoulders. “Listen to me, boy! I know what’s best. Bettina will see that the macacos don’t hurt you.”
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