“Pai . . . oh, please, Pai!” Juraci pleaded, sobs shaking his body.
“Stop it!” Antônio shouted. “For the love of God, child, listen to your father!”
Antônio was still struggling with Juraci and did not see the priest walking quickly in their direction until he was almost upon them.
“Let me take the child,” Celso Cavalcanti said.
Antônio stared into those blue-green eyes. For an instant, he held the padre’s gaze. What was there? Compassion? Agony? Sorrow for him? A macaco priest! he thought savagely, and looked away.
“I will see that no harm comes to him,” Celso said gently.
Despite himself, Antônio sensed that this padre could be trusted.
“You hear the padre, boy?”
Juraci dug his head deeper into the stiff leather.
“Your son?”
“Yes.”
“The boy’s name?”
“He is Juraci Cristiano.”
“Come, Juraci. I won’t hurt you.”
Antônio pushed Juraci away from him but still held his shoulders. “Haven’t you always been brave? Like our Teotônio?” Juraci managed to nod. “Go with the padre to Bettina.”
“His mother?”
“Dead.” He showed no emotion. “Bettina is a friend.”
For the last time, as Celso took a step toward the boy, Antônio told Juraci to go quietly. “Pai will find you, son.”
“Stay with him,” Celso said suddenly.
“It’s too late.”
“Merciful God, what hope do you have back there?”
“Take the boy!” Antônio said gruffly. “For the love of Jesus, yes — take my son! One day he’ll understand.”
“Pai . . .”
But Antônio was walking away furiously toward the other rebels, who were already moving back into the ruins. At the bomb-shattered hovels, Antônio turned his head. As he watched the priest walking toward the great crowd of women and children with his son, he gasped in horror:
“Oh, my God. My God!”
It was not Juraci Cristiano he saw there but Antônio Paciência, son of Mãe Monica, being led to join the sad herd of slaves waiting in the sun at the jurema trees.
There were fewer than three hundred rebels, many of whom were wounded. João Grande and sixteen men crept away into the caatinga. The rest stayed, carrying on the battle lane by lane until they were driven back into the cordoned-off area with the last one hundred houses. Three days later, at 2:25 P.M. on October 5, the government soldiers stormed a trench, killing the last defenders, among them a mulatto and a venerable caboclo. They died side by side, these two fanatics who had answered the call of Antônio Conselheiro.
One was Plácido de Paula, Woodcutter, who had come late to the fight in silent anger after he had seen great angel Gabriel go up in flames.
The other was Patient Anthony, who had asked little of the great men of the earth and had got nothing. Antônio Paciência — Brasileiro!
New Jerusalem was razed. For two days and two nights, fires burned across the plain; before the earth cooled, the sky to the east was black with a legion on wing, the first flock of urubu coming to perch upon the ruins of Canudos.
In the interests of science, Antônio Conselheiro’s body was dug up and his head cut off and dispatched to the Bahia, where it was to be probed for indications of madness.
Ten days after the battle, Padre Celso Cavalcanti was on his way back to the coast, jammed into the rear coach of a packed train with Hônorio da Silva and the correspondent of the Estado de São Paulo, Euclides da Cunha. Sitting on the floor in the space between the seats was another passenger drowsy in the stifling atmosphere: Juraci Cristiano.
After the conquest of Canudos, Celso had gone to inspect the rebel citadel with Bittencourt and his staff. When they reached the trench where the last defenders had fought, Celso saw Antônio Paciência among the dead.
The women and children were in a camp not far from the infirmary at Favela. Celso had gone there to tell Bettina about Antônio Paciência and to ask what would become of the boy.
“I said I would take him, Padre.”
“Where will you go?”
“I don’t know. My brother is on a fazenda at Bom Conselho, and I have an uncle at Uauá.”
The boy wanted to know when Pai Antônio was coming to fetch him.
As gently as he could, Celso told him about his father’s death.
Celso had told Bettina there was a church-run home for orphans at the Bahia, where he would find a place for Juraci.
“It’s best, Padre,” she had responded.
As the train clattered over the rails, Juraci Cristiano would occasionally open his big brown eyes and gaze on the dusty boots and shoes of the men on the benches. Padre Celso had been kind to him: He had given him a shirt and trousers at Monte Santo. Still Juraci was frightened and wouldn’t look the macacos in the eye.
During the six hours since the train left, Celso and his two companions had lapsed into long periods of silence. For the past ten minutes, Euclides da Cunha had been staring out of the window, while Hônorio sat with his arms folded, a look of boredom on his face.
The train passed through an enormous tract of eroded land, and Euclides turned to the others: “Was it always like this? Entirely barren?”
“I can’t imagine its ever being fertile,” Celso said.
“It doesn’t take much to deplete such soils,” Euclides said. “The good grass cover and better trees deteriorate. The thirst plants conquer the land yard by yard, like an unwelcome invader.”
Hônorio’s heavy eyebrows shot up expressively.
“The caatinga, Major, not human invaders,” Euclides added evenly.
Still, Hônorio retorted, “We did not invade; we came to restore peace.”
“When it was too late.”
“Too late?”
“Yes. As with past generations, we sat by complacently while behind our backs a maniac roamed the sertão. When we turned around to see what was happening in the heart of our country, it was too late: We were forced to meet barbarity with barbarity.”
“Really?” The muscles on Hônorio’s face went rigid.
Celso attempted to ease the tension: “Canudos shocked the nation. We can only pray it delivers us from age-old vices—”
“Yes, Padre! Pray it makes us focus on the reality of Brazil,” Euclides said.
“What reality?” Hônorio asked tightly.
“Let’s stop deceiving ourselves with foreign ideas. We’re wasting our time considering theories and solutions that simply won’t work for Brazil.”
“Now you’re saying something, Euclides da Cunha!”
Hônorio took this to be an indirect attack on the affectations of the Frenchified monarchists. “Europe loved our Pedro Segundo, they remind us. The most civilized man in the Americas! Does it matter that the Corte was Pedro’s oasis, his little elitist haven? And the rest of Brazil — a desert. So! The republic ended that tyranny. What we have is a total break with the past!”
“Antônio Conselheiro and the sertanejos failed to realize this,” Euclides said.
“Look, you two. I saw their poverty and ignorance. The plight of the sertanejos is a disgrace. But both of you — excuse me, Padre — are preaching to a man who’s glimpsed a better future.”
Euclides laughed softly. “Haven’t we had enough visions, Major?”
“Not a vision, Euclides. I’m thinking of my cousin, Aristides Tavares da Silva. I tell you, when he’s around, the air crackles with electricity. He and his uncle Firmino Dantas already made a fortune with coffee. It wasn’t enough. Aristides is pouring millions into a textile mill . . . footwear . . .a road-building company.”
Aristides da Silva’s name was well known far beyond São Paulo, where he was playing a prominent role in the Paulistas’ drive to modernize their state, already the richest and most powerful in the nation.
“Every time I see Aristides, he has a new scheme, with the Itali
ans in his factories and workshops. I tell you, the Paulistas and their immigrants — one hundred thousand a year — they’re going to make Brazil’s motto a reality: Progress and Order!”
“Progress is essential, my friend,” Euclides agreed. “But we must be careful that it doesn’t carry us even farther away from the sertão.”
“Agreed,” Hônorio replied, “but those factories and industries will give us the means to educate our masses. Besides, the European immigrants who aren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty set an example for our degenerate horde!”
Contempt for those of mixed race was common in Brazil at the time. Even Euclides, who defended the sertanejos as the bedrock of the Brazilian people, took a dismal view of miscegenation. “But can we hope to uplift the mestizo?” he asked. “He is unstable, restless, inconstant. He lacks the strength of his savage ancestors, the intellect of the superior race.”
“My friends, you’re contradicting yourselves,” Celso Cavalcanti interjected.
“How so?” Hônorio asked defensively.
“You just said we’ve been too ready to accept foreign ideas and methods; yet you turn away from the very reality of Brazil you say you seek to address. And that reality is that the races have intermingled here for four centuries. What purpose does it serve to concern ourselves with the theories of Gobineau and other intellectually superior Europeans? If I stand in the Praça de Sé at the Bahia, I see around me men of every shade: blacks; whites; mulattoes; morenos; caboclos. This is the reality of Brazil: a new race is evolving here in the tropics, not a pale imitation of the Europe
Hônorio persisted. “What prospects are there for the future of this new race?”
“The future?” Euclides da Cunha queried. He looked down at Juraci Cristiano and said simply, “Perhaps he will know the answer.”
The three men had parted at Salvador in October 1897, Hônorio and Euclides da Cunha traveling on to the south, Celso returning to his duties at the archbishopric. Celso’s detailed report of the rebellion had received the praise of the Church authorities. There had been much talk of steering the sertanejos back to orthodoxy, but in the end, Celso’s report had been allowed to gather dust: With one priest for every fifteen thousand souls in Brazil, the Church was hard-pressed to minister to its town congregations, let alone reach out to the population of the sertão.
Celso had found a place for Juraci Cristiano at a Salvador orphanage, where the sisters were at first skeptical about training this barbarian waif who bore the name “Christian.” But Juraci turned out to be a patient, obedient child, if withdrawn and melancholy, possessing a natural intelligence and ability.
Celso never forgot the remark Euclides da Cunha had made about Juraci. In January 1903 he wrote to da Cunha having just read Os Sertões:
“My dear Euclides, I thank God a thousand times over that there was one among us with the courage to tell the truth.”
Da Cunha’s masterpiece, written over a five-year period and published in December 1902, was a detailed account of the Canudos campaign, evoking the full horror of the conflict. Euclides depicted the stark reality of the caatinga and the lives of those who dwelled in the backlands. Os Sertões was a powerful plea for unity between seaboard and sertão; between the privileged class and the poor. With his pen, this soldier/engineer who had thrown down his sword achieved what no Brazilian before him had been able to do: He brought a generation face to face with the sertanejos, their own people who had been total strangers to them. And in so doing, he stirred the conscience of the nation and made it search its soul. It was the beginning of true Brazilian nationality.
“Padre Celso, look out of the window, please. What do you see?”
“Boys playing,” Celso replied, beginning to smile.
“Yes!” The man made a sound with his lips, mimicking a spluttering engine. Celso laughed as the sound rose, filling the room. Abruptly the other man stopped making the noise. “They’re possessed, I tell you. It’s been like this for weeks.” He pointed to a dark corner of his office. “There is the evidence — the handiwork of the young devils.”
There were bits of wood and tin, pieces of cardboard, and what looked like a broken box kite.
“I tried reasoning with them. I threatened. I thrashed the worst offenders. Nothing calms their fever,” the man continued to complain. “Morning, noon, and night it rages. I see them in class with their eyes glued to the blackboard. Their minds? Miles away! Up in the sky! Heaven knows, it’s not the angels they see there! Senhor Santos Dumont may think he’s done a grand thing hurling himself through the air of France!”
It was a morning in December 1906. The speaker, Brother Rodolphe, who himself came from France, was Latin master at a school of the Marists in Olinda. For weeks now, he and his fellow teachers had had to deal with an aviation craze among their pupils that reached its peak when two boys tried to glide off the roof of a dormitory on a contraption with wings of papier-mâché. The aviators had plunged downward into a mango tree, unhurt but with Brother Rodolphe below proclaiming a twenty-four-hour fast, the time to be spent on the earthbound task of writing out five hundred lines of Virgil.
Celso had returned to Recife from the Bahia in July 1903 and was an assistant of the bishop of Pernambuco. His visit to the Marists’ school this December morning, the start of the boys’ Christmas break, was personal: He was here to fetch Juraci Cristiano, who had been at the school the past year.
“Your boys are not alone, Brother Rodolphe. Alberto Santos Dumont has set all Brazil awhirl.”
“It’s unnatural. It’s dangerous—”
“And it’s grand! Your own France, all Europe, the world salutes Santos Dumont!”
Brazilian national pride had soared in the five weeks since Alberto Santos Dumont made the first recognized flight in Europe, covering 722 feet in his aérodromo, as he called his 50-horse-powered machine.
“And Juraci Cristiano?” Celso asked, wanting to know how the boy had behaved.
Rodolphe gave an immense sigh, whether of relief or heightened exasperation Celso couldn’t tell.
“He gave you trouble?”
“Our Juraci? Oh, no, Padre, Juraci Cristiano didn’t lose his head. He’s a worker. Reads well. Writes well. His Latin . . . I’m satisfied.”
Before they reached a dormitory at the end of the passage, they heard the excitement of thirty boys who were packing up their belongings. The instant Brother
Rodolphe opened the door, a wave of silence swept the big room.
“Juraci Cristiano?”
He was thirteen years old, tall for his age, thin, with his father’s narrow-shaped face, deep brown eyes, and aquiline nose, and a light brown complexion from his mother, Rosalina Marques. Shy and sensitive, he greeted Padre Celso in a soft voice, while glancing apprehensively at Brother Rodolphe.
“Have you packed your things?” Celso asked after greeting him.
“Yes, Padre Celso.”
“Then come, Juraci. We’ve a long way to go today.”
Two hours later, Celso and Juraci Cristiano were riding the Great Western from Recife to the station at Jacuribe Norte on their way to Engenho Santo Tomás, where Juraci Cristiano was to spend the Christmas holiday, his first visit to the lands of the Cavalcantis.
The boy spoke only when addressed by Celso and sat gazing out of the window as the train passed through Recife’s outer suburbs in the Capibaribe valley. Houses were encroaching on lands formerly occupied by sugar engenhos; some casas grandes still dominated small stands of canes, but in many places only the buildings remained, their upper stories visible behind high stone walls. Between the mansions, clustered among wild banana and other trees, were vast conglomerations of shanties. Beyond Caxanga, the tropeiros’ halt where muleteers coming in from districts not served by the Great Western and branch lines still congregated, the countryside gradually took on a traditional appearance with ever-vast fields of cane and patches of forest, most of the latter secondary growth.
The train was p
ulling out of a station fourteen miles outside Recife when Celso put down a book he was reading. “Brother Rodolphe tells me he’s pleased with you, Juraci.”
Juraci Cristiano straightened his back against the wooden bench. His look became guarded.
“He was happy to see you attend your studies when the other boys went crazy over Santos Dumont’s aérodromo.”
Juraci Cristiano clenched his hands and anxiously bit his lower lip.
“Dr. Fábio and Aunt Renata will also be glad to have Brother Rodolphe’s report.”
But Juraci suddenly looked miserable. His eyes averted, he said, “Padre Celso must know the truth. I was with them, Padre.”
“Really?”
“Luís and I—”
“Luís?”
“Luis Cardoso, the grain seller’s son. Luis is my friend.” He stopped, having great difficulty with this confession to Padre Celso, whom he loved more than anyone else. Often at night there were memories of Canudos: Pai Antônio; fire and smoke; great angel Gabriel. But the past was confused, a nightmare, the one sharp image Pai Antônio shouting that he must be a good boy. Then he had been in a train with Padre Celso, leaving for the Bahia. . . .
“What did you do?” Celso asked.
“Luis and I made the drawings, Padre.”
“And where did you learn this, my little genius?”
“We saw it in a book, Padre.” He looked at Celso’s face with desperate anxiety as he awaited the rebuke. The great kite Luis and he had “invented” had been the same that had dumped two other boys in the mango tree. Their accomplices had not revealed their part in the disaster.
Celso Cavalcanti quickly picked up the book he had been reading. “You must explain to me, Juraci, how these things work,” he said, holding the book up to hide his smile.
“I will, Padre Celso, I promise.” Juraci looked out of the window again. Several times he thanked his patron saint, Antônio, for Padre Celso’s lack of anger.
And Celso thanked God for this child who had come to mean so much to him. In the nine years since the Canudos rebellion, Celso for the most part had kept his charity toward the boy private; only with his Uncle Fábio and a few others did Celso share his joy as Juraci progressed further and further from the hopelessness of his past.
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