On missions in northern Italy, Roberto’s squadron flew in support of a Brazilian land force of 25,000 men attached to Mark Clark’s Fifth Army and deployed along the “Gothic Line.” Hitler had predicted that the Brazilians would be ready to take the field against him the day Brazil’s snakes took to smoking pipes; consequently, the Brazilian soldiers called themselves “the Smoking Cobras.” The only South American soldiers to go to war alongside the Allies, the Smoking Cobras — caboclo, sertanejos, black Bahianos, brown and white boys from Rio — triumphantly accepted the unconditional surrender of the first German division to lay down arms in Italy.
When Roberto da Silva returned home in late 1945, he had — to his father’s surprise and immense relief — immediately concerned himself with the da Silva enterprises, notably the construction firm, which was into the business of building roads.
“Roads,” Roberto said now, continuing to scratch intersecting lines across the tablecloth. “From north to south, east to west. Roads to unite the country, to draw our people together.” The new capital, he declared passionately, would alter the colonial mentality, put an end to the inertia that kept Brazilians clinging to lands near the coast. Compared with countries like Peru and Chile, Brazil was vast indeed, but her settled areas were very little greater than those countries combined: There had been no Pacific to beckon the pioneers of Brazil west, as in the United States — only the massifs of the cordillera.
“In this sense, Pai, Brasília will be a beacon: Whether a man thinks of it as El Dorado or not, it will invite him to a new conquest.”
“And instill in him new hope,” Raul Andracchio added. Andracchio was in his forties, the descendant of an Italian family who had emigrated to Brazil in the 1890s. “There’s a tidal wave of the poor swarming into Rio from the sertão. Half a million in the favelas.” Taken from “Monte Favela,” the word now described the squatter-shack settlements clinging to the hills and in the swampy lowlands of Rio de Janeiro. “We see the same thing developing in São Paulo. Open the door to the interior, provide land for these people, and we’ll turn the tide.”
Senhor Amílcar shrugged. “The Nordestino may want to make something better for his family out there, but tell me honestly, what Carioca is going to plant himself in the jungle?” He looked at his wife, whose family was from Rio de Janeiro. “Can you see your brother and his wife leaving the capital?”
Dona Cora, who had been shaking her head during most of this conversation, said that her brother Luis, an official with the Ministry of Education, would quit his post and go back to teaching. And her sister-in-law? “Ana would consider it Purgatory — worse than Siberia!”
“Yes!” Senhor Amílcar agreed. “A place of banishment.”
“Perhaps that’s what’s needed,” Roberto said mischievously. “With all due respect to Senhor Luis, life in Rio is too easy. There are too many temptations. A man needs incredible willpower to pass Copacabana and lock himself in a government building on a sunny day. The officials may feel banished, but at least they’ll get some work done in Brasília.”
“A bush capital,” Senhor Amílcar retorted in English. “That’s what the world will see. I repeat: It’s madness. It’s a luxury Brazil can’t afford.”
“Perhaps, Pai, it’s just the opposite: It’s a chance we can’t afford to pass up. Kubitschek has said as much, and I agree with him: If we can do this — if we can build Brasília — we can do anything!”
Senhor Amílcar frowned. “Pharaoh Juscelino may just leave us with a mirage in the desert.”
Two years after the first bulldozers went to work on the dry red soil of Goiás at the site of the future capital, a group of peasants in the valley of Santo Tomás made their own bid to break with the past.
The man who came to be identified as their leader was a fifty-nine-year old cane cutter, Anacleto Pacheco, though it was in fact his son Raimundo who was the primary instigator of the agitation at Usina Jacuribe in the latter half of 1958.
Anacleto Pacheco had cut cane for forty-four years, stalk by stalk, twelve stalks to a bundle, between one and two hundred bundles a day depending on his health and humor. His recall of the past was invariably linked to some major event at Santo Tomás: the Flood (1927); the Burst Boiler (1935); the Pestilence (1947), when the cane fields were invaded by hordes of a small rodent, the irara. He had started cutting cane in Senhor Duarte Cavalcanti’s time, then served Senhor Alvaro, the son of Duarte, until Alvaro’s death in 1950, and now worked for Alvaro’s sons, Senhor Durval and Senhor José.
Anacleto’s family occupied two and a half acres of land in the southern region of the valley of Santo Tomás, for which they paid rent to the Cavalcantis. Anacleto regularly attended the weekly fair in Rosário, but he could count on one hand the times he had traveled farther than the town.
Pacheco’s face bore a look of stolid patience. The caboclo had fathered twenty-three children with three wives, two of whom were dead; the third, Maria, a Bahiana mulatta, he had met at the Rosário fair eight years ago. Twelve of his offspring, too, had died, most of them in infancy. Raimundo, twenty-three, was the only one of his grown sons working on the plantation; four others had left the cane fields for the city.
On the first Saturday in September 1958, Anacleto Pacheco and his friend Bald Valdemar were sitting under the large mango tree in front of the cane cutter’s house. The sun had not yet begun to dip behind the hills and already there was a fire in their bellies from cachaça. From time to time, Maria would come to the door of the mud-walled abode to eye them sourly. The short, chubby mulatta was fuming because Anacleto had come back from the usina store having forgotten the batteries for the radio. Three young boys, two of whom were sons of Anacleto and Maria, played outside in the dirt, kicking a soccer ball. Futebol was an obsession with them, as it was with the team from Usina Jacuribe, who battled opponents from other sugar factories with as much gusto as if they were members of the national team that had just this year captured the World Cup. As far as Anacleto was concerned, it was a bad day for Brazil when people went around chanting “Pelé! Pelé! Pelé!” like the name of a blessed saint.
It was getting dark when Raimundo Pacheco, who had spent the day in Rosário, came home. He joined the two men at the tree, where the conversation turned to the latest juicy topic at the usina: Senhor Durval had dismissed a bookkeeper under what seemed to the workers mysterious circumstances. Some were speculating that the man had stolen money; others, that he had grabbed the breasts of the social worker, Senhora Xeniá Freitas de Melo.
Here, too, was an innovation Anacleto Pacheco did not take to: the “social worker.” Maria Pacheco had attended a meeting at which the senhora told the wives and daughters of the usina workers that things would go better for the poor if they learned to help themselves. Senhora Xeniá was going to teach them how to keep their houses clean, and to sew their own clothes, and to weave tapestries they could sell at the Rosário fair. It was all nonsense, Maria said. Didn’t she sweep the floor every day? Take the boys to the clinic for injections? And where was she supposed to find the time to make tapestries? But anyway, she added snidely, everyone knew that the social worker’s mind was on more than the poor: Senhora Xeniá was weaving a “tapestry” of her own — a net to catch Senhor Durval’s son.
Mention of the social worker prompted a remark by Raimundo: “There was a young white from Recife in Senhor Nilton’s bar today. He says the senhora is wasting her time with a sewing school: The women have other, more important lessons to learn.”
“Uh-huh!” said Bald Valdemar, making an obscene gesture with his fingers.
“Who was he?” Anacleto asked.
“A man named Eduardo Corrêa. He’s with the League.”
“Coming to Santo Tomás, eh?” Anacleto said, reaching for the bottle of cachaça. “They’ll cut his balls off.”
Anacleto had been present when Senhor Durval denounced the Ligas Camponêsas as nests of Communists who wanted to tear the very soul from a man. Three months ag
o, speaking to the workers at Santo Tomás on the occasion of the feast day of St. John, the senhor had warned that anyone attempting to spread the Red poison in these valleys would be thrown off the land in no time flat and with just the clothes on his back. Some peasants and migrant workers arriving for the cane harvest this September in other districts had had contact with the Ligas Camponêsas, but so far no member of the organization was known to have set foot on Cavalcanti property.
The Ligas Camponêsas had their origin in a mutual-benefit society founded four years earlier by 140 tenant families on a plantation forty miles from the coast — Engenho Galiléia — owned by one Senhor Oscar Beltrão. In late 1954 these tenants, with the help of a local judge, founded the Agricultural and Stock-Raising Society of the Planters of Pernambuco. Among its aims was the formation of a cooperative to buy seeds and implements, the building of a chapel, the hiring of a schoolteacher, and the purchase of coffins to spare its members the ultimate indignity of being buried as paupers.
Old Oscar Beltrão welcomed his tenants’ initiative and consented to being honorary president of the society, which was launched with a festa at Galiléia. The senhor also gave permission for some trees to be felled for the construction of the chapel. But the first timbers had no sooner been hewn than Beltrão changed his mind: He withdrew as honorary president and, moreover, demanded the tenants immediately disband their society or face eviction from Galiléia.
Senhor Beltrão had been influenced in this abrupt decision by his family and by neighboring senhores de engenho who managed to convince him that the society was the vanguard of Communist subversion, which, if allowed to flourish at Galiléia, would spread an epidemic of sedition throughout the district.
The tenants refused to comply with Beltrão’s order, and following repeated attempts by private enforcers to remove them from Galiléia, in January 1955 the society’s officers took their case to Francisco Julião, one of the few Recife lawyers willing to represent the peasant and small farmer. Julião was also by this time a prominent political figure, having been elected a Pernambucan state deputy in 1954.
The forty-three-year-old firebrand saw in the society a grassroots movement among the landless. As legal adviser to the organization, he promoted it in the state assembly and at meetings throughout the cane-growing region. Called simply “the League” by members of the society, in the mouths of its opponents it became “the Peasant League,” evoking memories of a failed attempt by the Brazilian Communists to start a peasant movement a decade before.
The new Peasant Leagues, with their main platform of agrarian reform, spread rapidly until, by late 1958, they could claim to represent some fifty thousand peasants in Pernambuco and neighboring states. At Galiléia, the tenants were still on Senhor Beltrão’s land and within sight of victory: Besides waging the protracted battle to prevent their eviction, Julião was pressing in the assembly for state expropriation of Engenho Galiléia with compensation to the Beltrão family, the plantation thereafter to be farmed as a cooperative.
As his father poured himself another drink, Raimundo talked more of his encounter with Eduardo Corrêa in Senhor Nilton’s bar: “He says too that the League has much to offer the women, if only they’d listen. It’s all here in this notice.” He had dug into his trouser pocket and was unfolding a large sheet of paper.
Anacleto went into the house for a moment and returned with a lantern, which he handed to his son. “Well? And what does it say, this notice?”
Raimundo alone of Anacleto’s grown sons had at least rudimentary reading skill. He cleared his throat and, scanning the sheet quickly, began to paraphrase:
“It says that when we got the republic, things were better for a lot of people, but not for the peasants. For them it was worse. We’re no better than slaves, Pai - that’s what this says! We work and work and work for the great senhores and still we have nothing.”
“We have this!” Bald Valdemar cried, taking a long swig from the bottle.
“And our land, don’t forget,” Anacleto added.
“But it isn’t ours, Pai. We don’t own it; we rent it!”
“It gives us food — ”
“Which we have to give to the patrão,” Raimundo shot back.
“So! What would the League have us do?” Anacleto said.
“They would have us break with the system, Pai. How much would you say we owe the usina store by now, for instance?”
Anacleto shrugged.
“And we work ten, twelve hours a day, when we should be working eight, nine at most.”
“You’re talking crazy now, Raimundo,” Anacleto said, shaking his head.
“I’m talking democracy, Pai.”
“Democracy!” Anacleto suddenly smiled. “The man who gave you this — ”
“Eduardo Corrêa.”
“He’s big? Strong?”
“For what?”
“Joazinho!”
Bald Valdemar guffawed. There wasn’t a man within the district, he said, stupid enough to cross Joazinho Villa Nova, head capanga for the Cavalcantis. He, Valdemar Pires Fonseca, thanked God that in all these years as cart driver he had had no trouble with Joazinho. What the Leagues said was true: Life was tough. It would be tougher — much tougher — if one got on Joazinho’s bad side.
“That’s right,” Anacleto said, his words beginning to slur together. “Senhor Eduardo can take his democracy somewhere else. We don’t want trouble at Santo Tomás.”
“He didn’t say he was coming here,” Raimundo said.
“Good! Throw away that paper and forget about him. Leave us in peace.”
“To work for free?” Raimundo responded. He was referring to the cambão — the “yoke” — whereby one day a month they were obliged to labor for the Cavalcantis without pay as partial recompense for the use of the land.
“What’s got into you?” Anacleto asked, peering into his son’s flushed face.
“Oh, Pai, don’t you see? The Leagues are right.”
“This Senhor Eduardo — he’s poor?”
“He has a car,” Raimundo said. “But that — ”
“Then what does he know about the poor? Has he cut cane? Has he fought with the Portuguese at the usina store? What does he know?”
“He says we’re being cheated,” Raimundo persisted.
“All gone!” Bald Valdemar announced, waving the empty cachaça bottle in the air.
“Help my friend,” Anacleto said to Raimundo, glad to have an excuse to end this depressing discussion.
The next morning when Anacleto Pacheco moved leadenly to the mango tree, where he wanted to sit very quietly and let his body come to life again, he saw the crumpled Ligas Camponêsas notice on the ground where Raimundo had probably dropped it. Probably. Anacleto was having difficulty remembering just what occurred last night. With a trembling hand, he picked up the paper. Unconsciously, he folded it and tucked it into his shirt pocket. He would think about it.
For three weeks, Anacleto Pacheco thought about the cambão. And Raimundo, too, brought it up, especially on the Friday when they rendered the yoke, cutting several hundred bundles, from sunrise to sunset. Raimundo stood between the rows of cane, wielding his machete and singing a song he’d made up about the present they were giving Senhor Durval — little drops of sweat that turned to pearls in the hand of the patrão.
Anacleto Pacheco began to understand. But when Raimundo even hinted at refusing the cambão, Anacleto shook his head:
“Santo Tomás is my place. I’m not stupid. I don’t want trouble with Senhor Durval or Senhor José. I don’t want Joazinho standing on my neck.”
Now, almost a month after Raimundo’s first mention of the League man in Senhor Nilton’s bar, and his going on and on about the cambão, Anacleto decided to discuss the problem with a man he trusted above all others.
On the morning of October 4, also a Saturday, he borrowed Bald Valdemar’s mule and rode to the clinic, several miles away. He waited in the shade next to the old engenho o
f Santo Tomás for an hour and more until the sick had got their medicine, and only then entered the building, pulling off his hat as he did so.
“Doutor?” he called softly.
There was a sound of a cabinet being closed and then the doctor stepped out from the surgery, into the front room. “Bom dia, Anacleto,” he said, smiling and extending his hand.
“Bom dia, Doutor,” Anacleto replied, quickly adding that he was in excellent health.
“Well, then, what can I do for you, my friend?”
In a rush, Anacleto began to tell the doctor about Raimundo’s meeting with the man from the Leagues, Senhor Eduardo Corrêa.
Juraci Cristiano leaned against the edge of a table as he listened to Anacleto Pacheco, certain worries the old man expressed stirring up memories of his own concerns at different periods in his life. It was more than half a century — Juraci turned sixty-five in March 1958 — since Celso Cavalcanti had taken him from the praça at Canudos. Few beyond his family and most intimate friends knew that he had been there, the child of a fanatic called Antônio Paciência, for even now, trying to comprehend the tragedy of that place caused him almost unbearable anguish and he rarely spoke of it.
Monsignor Celso Caetano Cavalcanti, without whom Juraci’s life would have been so different, had died in 1918, at only fifty-two, during the great flu epidemic. Already honored by Rome, Celso was nevertheless ready to descend into the fetid mocambos, where he labored among stricken thousands until the hour he himself was dying.
Twenty-five at the time, Juraci — supported and encouraged by Celso and Fábio — was in his final year of medical school in Salvador, and upon qualifying, he returned to Recife, where he worked for many years at the Hospital Português and at a Church-sponsored clinic for the destitute of São Antônio district. In 1923 he married the daughter of an impoverished senhor de engenho from Pernambuco, with whom he had four children, all but the last-born, Antônio, now married.
Juraci had always felt a part of the Cavalcanti family — that is, until Celso died and, soon after, both Dr. Fábio and Dona Renata, within a year of each other. He felt their absence all the more keenly when his increasingly radical views were cause for a nearly permanent rift between him and the archconservative Alvaro Cavalcanti.
Brazil Page 114