Backlands (67 page)

The
sertanejos
had not expected that the troops would enter there. It was the part of Canudos opposite the Old Ranch House and most distant from the original line of attack. A new suburb had appeared here, called Red Houses. It was built after the defeat of the third expedition. The huts looked more like ordinary houses: Some had tile roofs. They were not fortified and did not have the trenches that were so common elsewhere. Because they were at a distance from the firing line they were full of women and children.

With the Twenty-fourth in the lead, they went along the riverbed and cleared out these houses in a few minutes. They were held up by the terrified women. The
jagunços
did not give up immediately. They fought as they fell back, and the soldiers became entangled in the narrow trails as they gave pursuit.

Now on the offensive, the attackers reenacted another of the inevitable scenes. Shoving their rifles through the mud walls, they fired at random and then knocked down the huts and threw lighted matches on the miserable possessions inside. The fires lit the way as the
sertanejos
kept falling back to the nearest hideout. Occasionally one of them would put up an incredible fight, at the cost of his life. At one hut, a man with his wife and daughter hanging on him threw them aside and jumped to the door, where he killed the first man he encountered with a terrible blow. It was Sublieutenant Pedro Simões Pinto, of the Twenty-fourth. Soon he was laid out on the floor surrounded by soldiers with drawn swords. As he expired he said, “At least I killed one of them.”

Another gave the men some diversion. It was a funny but horrible scene. In a corner of a room that the soldiers had broken into was an old Indian, unable even to sit up. He was emaciated and half-naked, covered with just a sheet. The old man was trying to fire an old birding rifle but could not even lift it. It fell back on him while his bony face made a grimace of helpless rage. The soldiers surrounded him and started to laugh a loud, derisive laughter.

This desperate resistance, which even the dying put up, slowed the advance. In a short time the attackers suffered thirteen casualties. The enemy was falling back but not running away. He stayed a few steps ahead—in the same house, in the next room, or behind the next wall. So they would not lose what they had gained, they made a barricade out the ruined houses and furniture. This was the usual and necessary thing to do. There was no neutral territory ahead. The
jagunço
was clinging tenaciously to the opposite slope, vigilant, practicing his aim.

The loud reverberations of this engagement to the north caused great excitement in the camp. The huts near the engineering commission became an enormous amphitheater from which to observe the drama. Focusing their binoculars through the cracks in the walls, the audience stamped, clapped, and hooted. The scene in front of them, although it was very real, took on the aspect of a play being performed on a crude stage in the sinister glow of flames that were fanned by the northeast wind. Yellow smoke shot up in huge puffs while tongues of fire licked the air. It was the lighting on the set that would occasionally reveal the entire stage or darken it, like the curtain that falls after the last act of a tragedy.

At times the settlement disappeared behind the smoke. Against this backdrop was a red disk, the sun in eclipse. Suddenly the curtain would be torn open by a stiff gust and then a triangular section of the village could be seen. Groups of panicked women and children were running south in great confusion. They could barely be distinguished against the dry foliage of the arbors near the square. The artillery on Mount Favela was subjecting them to a terrible pounding, and the poor things were caught between two lines of fire, the bullets on the one hand and cannon on the other. Some dove into the church ruins. At other times the figures were hidden by the dark smoke from the slow fire. It rolled over the rooftops, hovered over the ground, and spiraled upward with the undulating motion of a big wave, rising and falling with the wind. For a moment the smoke would clear, revealing the broken facade of the new church, and then everything would be covered again. Farther on, an empty stretch of the riverbed could be glimpsed or the circles of smoke could be seen twirling around the tops of the hillsides.

The fascinated gaze of those who did not participate in the battle was fixed on the fog curtain. Whenever it closed over the big amphitheater, the audience would go out of control, shouting and waving binoculars, trying to follow the plot that had been abruptly hidden from its view.

The action went on for an abnormally long time. Instead of occasional rifle fire, the shooting was steady and lively. The bullets popped like reeds in a cane fire. As a result, the anxious spectators thought the
sertanejos
might have broken through the northern lines. The echoes from the gunfire, reverberating off the hills and growing in strength under the thick blanket of smoke, distorted the perceptions of the onlookers. The cracking gunfire seemed to be very close, to the right and behind them, giving the illusion that the enemy might have escaped and was attacking them in sudden retaliation. Orders were shouted back and forth.

Then there was a distant din of shouts and vivas. The onlookers snatched up their binoculars and rushed to the lookouts. At that moment the wind opened a broad swath in the smoke and revealed the scene of the drama once again. They were much relieved and burst into cheers. The
jagunços
were in retreat. They could at last see a line of red flags stretching to the Cambaio road. Canudos was completely surrounded.

It did not take long for the news to reach the camp. Swift couriers rode to Monte Santo, and the news would be telegraphed to the entire country.

The settlement was circled by an uneven line of trenches, but there was no possibility of escape. To the east was the middle of the camp. In the rear of the black line, the Third Brigade held the center; on the north the recently won positions were guarded by the Thirty-first, the left wing of the Twenty-fourth, the Thirty-eighth, the right wing of the São Paulo Battalion, and the Thirty-second Infantry. They cut across the Uauá and the Várzea da Ema trails. Fortified garrisons were spaced out along the northeast sector at the end of the Cambaio road. A line ran south to Mount Favela and the dominant Seventh of September bastion.

Even though it was choppy, the circle had been drawn around the settlement. The insurrection was dead.

Photographs by 
Flávio de Barros