Cora and Sylvia, too, were making their first trip here. Cora had turned down Roberto’s offer to go sight-seeing: She had no intention of leaving this comfortable apartment that belonged to the da Silvas’ bankers until it was time to hear the president’s excuses for throwing away so much money. Besides, she needed time to decide which dress to wear for the inaugural ball, which was to be held — most appropriately, in Cora’s opinion — in the cavernous bus station. From the moment she stepped onto the plane at São Paulo, Dona Cora had made it clear that she was coming only to keep Senhor Amílcar company, her husband being part of a São Paulo state delegation.
Senhor Amílcar was of the same mind as his wife. For most of the year, they lived in their town mansion at São Paulo, in the heart of the Paulista capital, a city of 3.5 million now, greatest metropolis in South America.
Senhor Amílcar did not forget that he had said Juscelino Kubitschek’s vision of Brasília might turn out to be a mirage in the desert. Brasília was real enough, but planted out here in the sertão, where was this dream city to find its power and energy? It would never grow like São Paulo, not in a hundred years!
Senhor Amílcar himself had made several trips up to Brasília, the last only two months ago, when he and Roberto had been present as four convoys that had set out simultaneously from Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, Cuiabá, and Belém converged on the new capital, a symbolic caravan of national integration. With the major work on the Brasília-Belém highway complete, the da Silvas still had several smaller contracts in the federal district itself, Amílcar da Silva having no objection to profiting from Juscelino Kubitschek’s mirage.
And, for all his misgivings, Senhor Amílcar could not hide a sense of pride in what was being achieved here in so short a time. Just four years ago, there had been only a modest ranch house, the Fazenda do Gama, near two streams that had been dammed up in the lake, and beyond the fazenda, the open cerrado, with the rhea and the jaguar. It was pure Brazilian madness, this gleaming city in the middle of nowhere. But perhaps men like his two sons might just work a miracle and make it a success.
And Mariette, too, he thought, as he listened to his granddaughter’s bubbling enthusiasm in the jeep. “Who knows, my dear girl,” he said. “Perhaps when you’ve got your law degree, you can come and use it out here in the sertão.”
“Oh, Grandpapa, I wouldn’t mind that at all,” she exclaimed breathlessly. “Not at all!”
Back at the apartment, Roberto announced that he was taking them to dinner at the best restaurant in Brasília.
“The Brasília Palace by the lake?” Cora asked expectantly.
“No, I’m sorry, Dona Cora, but the Palace is under siege. Perhaps General Marcelo could find a place for us, but you wouldn’t enjoy it, not with hundreds jammed in there.”
General Marcelo Araujo da Silva, the son of Honório da Silva, was the third generation of that branch of the family to follow a military career. Senhor Amílcar had known Honório well, but General Marcelo, who had distinguished himself with the Smoking Cobras in Italy, had gone to Minas Gerais after the war and become distant from the Tiberica da Silvas. But there was talk enough among the family to know that the general was a rising power in the military who remained ever vigilant against the Communists and other agitators among the masses, especially in the troubled Northeast.
“Then where are we going?” Cora asked, petulantly.
“Chez Maximilian. Your old friend Max’s place.”
“In that favela?” Cora said, recoiling.
Max Grosskopf, from an old German immigrant family, had sold a restaurant he owned in São Paulo and moved up here, where he’d opened Chez Maximilian in Cidade Livre, a settlement seven miles outside Brasília. Intended as a temporary nucleus for workers and their families not housed in construction camps, Cidade Livre was home to tens of thousands, its neon-lit, unpaved streets crowded with restaurants, banks, shops — a gaudy and unruly antidote to the precise order of Brasília.
Despite Dona Cora’s initial anxiety about visiting Cidade Livre, once they were in the restaurant, with Max himself fussing over them, she became more spirited; it comforted her, too, that Chez Maximilian was filled with other members of high society also seeking an alternative to the rush on the Brasília Palace.
“Poor Max! What a mistake he’s made,” Cora said over her schnitzel. “He had such a lovely place in São Paulo.”
“He’ll move to Brasília one of these days, Dona Cora,” Mariette said. “Make a fortune, too; you’ll see. And he’ll be proud to have been one of the pioneers.”
“A candango?” Cora said, with a derisive laugh.
“Exactly!” Roberto said vehemently, clapping Dona Cora on the shoulder as if she’d said something terribly clever.
Late morning April 21, Senhor Amílcar stood with the Paulista delegation watching one of the numerous ceremonies honoring Brasília’s official replacement of Rio de Janeiro as capital.
An endless parade was inching along the mall toward the Plaza of the Three Powers. Ten thousand men, led by a dozen bands. Between their ranks, huge machines rolled forward ponderously, monolithic pieces of earth-moving equipment bedecked with buntings and flags. The men wore boots, jeans, straw hats. They were the men who had built Brasília: the candangos.
Roberto da Silva was among them, walking beside one of his company’s Caterpillars, which was being guided by Fernandes Estevam, son of a great motorista from the Bahia. Dried Meat cheered wildly as they approached President Juscelino Kubitschek and other dignitaries on the reviewing stand.
Amílcar da Silva was just behind the president’s party and waved in response to an exuberant gesture from Roberto. One of the da Silvas’ workers who saw Senhor Amílcar wave came to an exaggerated halt and saluted smartly. Senhor Amílcar laughed and returned the salute.
The caboclo went on his way, limping slightly, the result of an old wound. But that was all past now, the trouble Raimundo Pacheco had known in far-off Pernambuco. Two years ago he’d come to Brasília in the parrot’s perch and he’d made a go of it here, working alongside thousands of others who’d migrated from the Northeast.
The celebrations lasted for hours, and of course there were speeches, the one that drew the most emotional response by Juscelino Kubitschek himself.
“Some of you have come from Minas Gerais, some from other neighboring states, the majority from the Northeast. You came because you heard the message that a new star was to be added to the other twenty-one on our flag. Brasília is here only because of you, candangos, to whose ranks I am honored to belong . . .
“On this day, April twenty-first, in honor of Lieutenant Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, at the one hundred thirty-eighth year of independence and the seventy-first of republic, I, under the protection of God, do hereby declare the city of Brasília, capital of the United States of Brazil, inaugurated.”
That evening, Amílcar da Silva stood alone at a window on the twentieth floor of one of the twin skyscrapers. The room behind him was filled with guests attending a reception given by a group of Paulista legislators. Roberto had gone to fetch Cora, Sylvia, and Mariette, who’d returned to the apartment early in the afternoon to get ready for the ball at the Rodoviária. Amílcar gazed out, not at the gleaming city below, but far off into the distance, to where the cerrado was darkening.
*
This vast sertão, not only over the next hill or across the next river, but deep within the soul. A call to Paradise or to Hell for our forefathers. Were they out there now, Amador F1ôres da Silva and Benedito Bueno — all who had opened the way for this conquest? Were the old bandeirantes gazing back in awe at this city — this El Dorado they had sought for so long?
THE ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO BRAZIL - THE CANDANGOS
AFTERWORD
March - April 2000
Tôninho
Padre Tôninho told no one where he was going on a morning in October 1996. He wrote a note for his housekeeper, Maria Pedra, saying he was leaving on a short
journey and would return in three days. Maria was not to worry about him. At 4:00 a.m., Tôninho climbed into his VW Beetle, driving through the empty streets of Magdalena parish in Rosário, Pernambuco and taking the road to the interior. That afternoon, he was in Petrolândia on the Rio São Francisco, and stayed the night at a hotel by the river.
Tôninho crossed the São Francisco the next morning, ten miles below Petrolândia. He stopped to consult a map before turning onto a dirt road that led southwest into the sertão of Bahia. The land grew desolate. Barren hills studded with stunted vegetation, eroded gullies scored by violent rains of the past, fields turned to powder. Vilas lay ashen in the sun. Beasts were pitifully thin. Humans fared no better, groups of men in dusty clothes stood idly in the shade, eyes turning slowly as the VW clattered past them. The rains had not come and the sertanejos were again at the mercy of a cruel, dry earth.
Five miles from his destination, Tôninho stopped for directions. An old vaqueiro with time on his hands offered to ride with him. He thanked the man but said he wanted to visit the place alone. Fifteen minutes later, he stopped the car at the side of the road in the heart of the caatinga, as melancholy a landscape as any seen that morning.
He got out and picked his way between dusty-gray entanglements, here and there a solitary spiky sentinel thrusting twenty feet above the arid underbrush. Suddenly, the caatinga vanished and he stood at edge of a vast depression with low hills, resembling a great rolling plain. In places, the ground was cracked and bare; elsewhere a covering of tough grasses and tiny bromeliads had appeared almost magically.
He was not alone. As he walked across the open ground toward a small rise on which stood a ruin, he didn’t see the young woman working in a long cutting off to his right.
“Olá!” she hailed him. “Bom dia.”
He greeted her. “You’re not from these parts.”
“With this accent?” she said laughing. Her name was Jennifer Coleman and she was from Stonington, Connecticut. A student at the University of Miami Center for Latin American Studies, Coleman was in Brazil doing fieldwork for her MA dissertation.
“And what brings you to Canudos . . . ?”
“Tôninho,” he introduced himself. His eyes swept the ruins on the hill. “Dr. Juraci Cristiano, my grandfather, was born in Canudos.”
Padre Antônio Paciência — “Tôninho” — is thirty-five, tall and lean, and with a spare frame. He has the same aquiline nose, brown eyes and dark-skinned countenance as his ancestor, Antônio Paciência, who was born a slave and died a rebel in the service of the Counselor, Antônio Conselheiro. When Tôninho made his pilgrimage to Canudos in October 1996, it was ninety-nine years since Brazilian government troops killed 20,000 men, women and children at the New Jerusalem in this valley watered by the Vasa-Barris River.
For forty years, Canudos lay below Cocorobó barrage, built by a government that flooded the blood-soaked basin to erase evidence of the sertanejo rebellion. Nothing was visible except a grassy island, where goats and sheep grazed, rowed over by a local herdsman. The year 1996 brought one of the worst droughts in memory. Week after week, the waters of Cocorobó fell, lower and lower, until the ruins of Canudos began to emerge under the red, hot sun.
Most prominent were the remains of the Counselor’s church, standing on one of the knolls. Two heavy arches and supporting walls of the huge rectangular sanctuary had survived cannonades from the Whitworth batteries and “God’s Thunderer,” a 32-pounder dragged up from Salvador to demolish the lair of the Anti-Christ. Below the church lay the trench where Antônio Paciência stood with the handful who fought until the end of their world.
Dr. Juraci Cristiano, Antônio Paciência’s only surviving child, lived at Canudos until just before his fifth birthday. Dr. Juraci had researched the uprising for The Biography of a Patient Man, which he was writing at the time of his death in 1981. — His grandson recently found the manuscript about the life and times of his namesake and planned to finish it for publication.
Padre Tôninho felt a deep, personal connection to the people of Canudos, so that when he read about the “resurrection” of the Counselor’s city, he immediately went to visit the site. He wanted to make the pilgrimage alone, but afterwards wasn’t sorry that the young American student was there. Jennifer Coleman was spending a semester with a University of Bahia archaeological team, given a unique opportunity to revisit the past when Cocorobó dried up. Tôninho found her intelligent and sensitive, with a fine grasp of her subject — Coleman’s dissertation deals with the Rebellion of Canudos — and genuine sympathy for the Brazilian masses.
She took him on a tour of the ruins, across rubble-strewn ground where 5,200 habitations had stood. Patches of hardened clay indicated the foundations of houses; here and there, a section of broken wall; an outdoor oven that had collapsed into a pile of stones. There was a burial ground 100 yards from the fortress-temple. When the army razed Canudos, they burned most of the dead. In the trench, where the last defenders fell, rusted weapons and spent cartridges were unearthed alongside the bones of the faithful.
They sat beneath the arches of the big church, talking about Antônio Conselheiro and his followers. Historians published the Counselor’s sermons in 1974: These revealed a devout man who advocated social justice, diligence and love among human beings. It was now recognized that the 20,000 who died were not a bandit rabble but landless peasants scourged by drought and abandoned by their government. Most were black people and mulattos scorned by racist elites of the day, who favored a “whitening” of Brazil and weren’t against exterminating a barbarian race in the backlands.
Padre Tôninho looked at the trench, where his forebear perished. “A hundred years since the last shot was fired,” he said. “And still the battle goes on.”
Antonio “Tôninho” Paciência was born in Recife, Pernambuco in 1965, the only child of Juraci Cristiano’s third son, Alberto, and his wife, Elena. When Tôninho was three, his father died in a car accident and the boy and his mother went to live in his grandfather’s house.
Dr. Juraci had been taken from the battlefield of Canudos as a child by Celso Cavalcanti, from the Cavalcanti family of Engenho Santo Tomás. Padre Celso, later Monsignor Cavalcanti, and his family generously supported Juraci’s education that saw him graduate as a doctor. In the 1930s, Juraci’s radical politics led to his imprisonment following a failed communist-led revolution in Recife.
With rare exception, the senhores de engenhos of Santo Tomás, who have been in Pernambuco since the founding of the captaincy in the sixteenth century, have been pillars of the landed oligarchy. Dr. Juraci’s close ties to the family prevented a total break and he gradually restored his relationship with them. Disillusioned when the “Bread, Land and Liberty” movement in which he was involved collapsed in 1934, he rarely took an active role in party politics. This did not lessen his commitment to helping the masses living under a merciless system.
When Tôninho was a boy, Dr. Juraci was in his eighties but remained in charge of the clinic at Santo Tomás. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, Tôninho went to the engenho with his grandfather, riding in Juraci’s ancient Packard. Everyone was petrified of driving with Dr. Juraci, but he was destined to die peacefully in his sleep just two weeks short of his eighty-eighth birthday. Only days earlier he had steered the Packard out to the valley of the Cavalcantis to attend his patients.
Tôninho was sixteen when his grandfather died and had been making the trips to the plantation with him on and off for ten years. “I’ve memories of Dr. Juraci at the wheel of the Packard with a big truck hurtling toward us. Grandpa sat like a rock. He said he’d nothing to fear because the archangel Gabriel protected him.” — When asked why he chose Gabriel as his guardian, Dr. Juraci told his grandson that the archangel had watched over him at Canudos.
Tôninho remembers his grandfather talking to him about how things worked in Brazil. He would discuss anything from the peasants’ struggle for land to the church. — “All these politicians only
look to the next election. The Church has until Judgment Day to carry out its work.”
“There was much I didn’t understand, but one thing I know is that Dr. Juraci taught me what was right and wrong in our land. One time I recall vividly, he took me to an old handfed sugarcane mill. He demonstrated how overseers chopped off a slave’s arm caught in the rollers. ‘Slaves were treated worse than beasts in Brazil,’ he said. Sometimes, it would be a simple lesson, as on a day a woman brought her child to the clinic. He let me watch him examine the little thing. ‘Do you remember what you had for dinner last night?’ he asked me. I told him. ‘This baby hasn’t eaten for three days,’ Dr. Juraci said.”
The influence of the ‘old communist,’ as the Cavalcantis called Dr. Juraci, not without some affection, led to Tôninho’s decision to become a priest. He began his service with the church in Recife’s slums, where he worked until 1994 when he went to the parish of Magdalena in Rosário.
Padre Tôninho had just finished lunch on March 31, 2000, when Maria Pedra came to tell him that three young men wanted to see him. She didn’t know them, but they said they were from Sem Terra — “Without Land,” the Portuguese nickname for the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST.)
With 500,000 members, the MST is the largest, strongest and best-organized grassroots movement in Brazil. Since 1985, the movement has led the struggle for agrarian reform by invading and occupying idle lands and getting the government to expropriate them for the new settlers.
Padre Tôninho’s visitors were recruiting members for the MST in Rosário. They asked if they could use the church hall that night. Tôninho supported their campaign and had no objection. Magdalena is the poorest parish in Rosário, a sleepy rural town in the zona da mata, still called the “forest zone” of Pernambuco, though where once there were trees, there has long been green waves of sugarcane. Most residents of Magdalena, if they can find jobs, labor for a pittance as field workers; bóia fria, they’re called, literally “cold meal,” for they head off at five in the morning, eat a cold lunch beside the canes, and return around seven in the evening. By the time they get home, their supper of rice, beans and manioc is cold.
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