Backlands (9 page)

There is an unexpected vista awaiting the traveler crossing this region. He will get the feeling that he is treading the ruins from an earthquake as he climbs now up the hills closest to Canudos.

He reaches the summit of Favela and he gazes out across the whole area spread out before him. There is nothing to remind him of the view he had seen before. Lying beneath him is the antithesis of what he had seen. The same features and the same ground have been turned upside down under a harsh covering of rocky terrain and scabrous
caatinga
brush. And yet the combination of so many harsh and strange features, as the scattered breaks in the ground show the location of pits and caves, the ditches leading to precipices, lays a completely new perspective before him, and he comes to understand how credulous rustics in their innocent imaginations can come to believe that “heaven is out there.”

Up ahead and down below, the hamlet rises up out of the same fractured terrain. When this is seen from that point, however, as distance softens slopes and levels them, all the many low hillocks that stand out at lower levels, extending uniformly in all directions, give the illusion of a great rolling plain.

A majestic ring of mountains all around . . .

Canabrava to the northeast, with its convex, simple profile; Poço de Cima closer by, steeper and higher; Cocorobó to the east, up and down with its narrow passes and scattered spurs; the straight steep slopes of Calumbi to the south; the ridges of Cambaio extending westward; and to the north the agitated contours of Caipã. These are all linked and joined in the gradual configuration of a huge closed curve.

As he observes these proud peaks from level ground where they shut off the horizon, the traveler gets the heartening impression that he is standing on a very high plateau, a remarkable plain resting on the summits of the mountain ranges.

Along the rutted flats below, small watercourses worm along slowly, scarcely visible, serpentine. . . .

Only one of them can be made out, the Vaza-Barris. It runs across the land, twisting and meandering. A larger hollow can be seen caught up in one of these curves, surrounded by hill. . . . Filling it completely is a crowd of shacks looking like a heap of roofs. . . .

From the brief indications laid out before, one can gather that the geological and topographical characteristics, as well as other physical agents, are so intermingled in these places that it is impossible to ascertain which of their characteristic influences predominates.

On the one hand, however, there has been a strong influence of earlier conditions on later ones, which has led in turn to an increase in the influence of the original conditions, all of which persist in a sort of mutual set of influences. From this perennial conflict, as it has become, and endless vicious circle the mesological traits of the region become quite evident. There is no way to describe it in all of its modalities. We are lacking in the most ordinary observations thanks to the proverbial indifference we have shown concerning matters of this region as we rest in the comfortable ease of well-fed beggars.

No scientific pioneer has yet undergone the harshness of this corner of the backlands for sufficient time to come up with any definitions.

Martius passed through these parts with the main aim of taking a look at the meteorite that had fallen on the banks of the Bendegó, and the area has been familiar to European academics since 1810 thanks to A. F. Mornay and Wollaston. Forging through the savage region,
desertus australis
as Martius christened it, he paid scant attention to that land covered by a luxuriant flora,
silva horrida
in his alarmed Latin. Those who came before and after him on foot, pricked by the stubble on the same trails, gave the impression of someone running away. Those backlands, then, always avoided, are unknown even today and will remain so for a long time to come.

What follow are some vague conjectures. We passed through the region at the beginning of a broiling summer, and so we saw it only within that frame of reference and in its worst aspect. What we write here carries some defective traces of that single, isolated impression, an unfavorable one as well, held in balance as it is between the calmness of thought and the crippling emotions of war. In addition to this we have only the data provided by a single thermometer and a dubious barometer, a pitiful scientific arsenal with which to go into battle there. These tools will not give us even the vaguest features of a climate that varies with the slightest change in the disposition of its topography. This makes for quite different weather in villages along the edge of the region. Monte Santo, for example, on a first comparison is much better off than Queimadas, which differs from that of villages to the north, with no continuity of aspect, as one might expect to see given its intermediate location. The proximity of mountainous massifs keeps the climate stable, and it makes one think of some maritime locale that has suddenly appeared in the middle of the continent: an insignificant variation in heat; a sky where the air is totally transparent and unchangingly clear; and the prevailing winds, from the southeast in winter and from the northeast in summer, alternate with rare regularity. It is like an island. No matter what location a traveler leaves from, if he heads north he will be struck by the strong transitions: It will get hotter, the blue of the sky will be clouded over, the air will hang heavy, and the winds will blow in no set direction. This is what he will face as he is drawn with an intense attraction into the unsheltered expanse before him.

At the same time this excessive climate will be reflected in the thermometer as it varies wildly in degrees. In October the temperature swings from 120ºF in the shade to frigid temperatures in the predawn hours.

With the arrival of summer the imbalance is even stronger. It reaches maximums and minimums until at the height of the dry season time goes along with an unnatural variation of broiling days and freezing nights.

The contrasts of this naked land are in permanent conflict, as the absorbent and emissive capacities of its makeup will store up the heat of the hottest times of day and then suddenly release it. The temperature can turn from baking to ice cold in a matter of twenty-four hours. The sun will beat down on it and it will absorb the rays, multiplying and reflecting them as it radiates them out in dazzling reverberations, from hilltops, from fissured slopes, and broken chips of silica gleam in a shimmering pattern of sparks. The atmosphere vibrates along with the ground below in the vivid undulation of a furnace mouth where, in the array of heated rocks, an effervescence is visible in the air; and the day, incomparable in its splendor, strikes the silent nature where it settles down, motionless in its bosom, with the quiet of a long spasm, under the leafless branches of the defeated shrubbery.

Night falls without a sunset, suddenly, in a leap of shadow over a red strip to the west, and all this heat is lost in the space of a very intense irradiation as the temperature suddenly falls with one single, frightening drop. . . .

There are still harsh variations, however. Driven by the northeasterly winds, thick vapors puff up into cumulus clouds and scud along over the heated sands at dusk. The sun disappears and the column of mercury remains motionless or, most often, it will rise. Night comes on with fire. The earth irradiates like some dark sun as the stinging impression of invisible sparks can be felt, and yet all the heat flows back into it, returned by the clouds. The barometer falls the way it does when a storm is near, and it is almost impossible to breathe in that unnatural sultriness where all the scorching heat from the day’s hot hours has been thrown back up during one single hour of night.

In a contrast that can be explained, all this takes place during the summer paroxysms of drought, when there is an interchange of scorching days and frigid nights that adds to the many worries the backlanders have in their martyrdom.

With the same imbalance of the forces that work on the land, the winds arrive and usually stir up a broad swath of whirlwinds. During the month when it is strongest, the northeast wind lets it be known everywhere from what direction it is coming.

These windstorms will disappear for long months, however, and periods of heavy calm will predominate. The air lies motionless under the placid gleam of fiery days. Imperceptible then is the motion of the rising currents of heated vapor that suck the scant humidity out of the earth. And when this becomes prolonged it is an indication of the sad prelude to drought, as the dryness of the atmosphere reaches quite abnormal levels.

We are viewing it not through the rigor of any classic processes, however, but thanks to some unexpected and bizarre hygrometers.

As we pass through the area around Canudos at a certain time toward the end of September, getting away from the dull and monotonous sound of shooting, we descend a hillside and come upon a kind of irregular amphitheater in a place where the hills have been laid out in a circle around a single valley. Low, flourishing caper bushes give way to scattered clumps of prickly pear cacti and their bright flowers, giving the place the look of an old, abandoned garden. On the edge a tall
quixabeira
tree towers over the frail vegetation.
¹³

The setting sun has cast the broad shadow of the foliage across the ground, and under its protection, arms akimbo, his face turned to the sky, a soldier is resting.

He has been resting for . . . three months.

He died during the attack of July 18. The butt of his Mannlicher rifle had been cracked, his cartridge belt and cap tossed to one side, and his uniform was in tatters. All this pointed to the fact that he had died in hand-to-hand combat against a powerful adversary. He had fallen, most certainly, from a blow to his forehead, which had left a black scar. And when the other dead had been buried, days later, he had not been noticed. He did not share, therefore, the common grave, less than three feet deep, into which, together in one last formation, his comrades fallen in battle had been buried. The fate that had taken him away from his abandoned home had given him one last concession: It had spared him the gloomy closeness of the repugnant ditch. It had left him lying there for three months, arms outspread and face to the sky with its burning suns and its pale moons, its gleaming stars. . . .

And he was intact. He had only withered. He was mummified, his facial features preserved in such a way as to suggest a weary warrior getting his strength back with a bit of sleep in the shade of that beneficent tree. No worm, that most common of tragic analysts, had damaged his tissues. He was being returned to life’s whirl without any repugnant decomposition, imperceptibly flushed out. He was a sort of apparatus that was showing in an absolute but suggestive way the extreme dryness of the air.

The horses that had been killed on that day had the appearance of stuffed museum specimens: their necks a bit longer and thinner, their legs desiccated, and their skeletons showing, shriveled and hard.

At the entrance to the Canudos encampment one of them stood out impressively from the rest. It had been the mount of a brave man, Second Lieutenant Wanderley, and it had fallen along with its rider. As it slid down the steep incline, badly wounded and struggling, it came to a stop and remained there, facing frontward halfway down the slope, caught between two boulders. It was almost upright, its feet firm on a stone outcropping. . . . And there it stood, transformed into some fantastic animal, upright on the hillside, almost in a halted leap in the last attack of a paralyzed charge, with every appearance of life, especially when the harsh blasts of the northeasterly wind caused its long and wavy mane to flutter. . . .

When those gusts, coming on suddenly, are joined by the columns of updraft in wild whirlwinds that are like miniature cyclones, the dehydration of that stark environment can be felt to an even greater degree. Every particle of sand hanging over the hard, furrowed soil irradiated out in every direction, transformed into a hot glow of light. This was the quiet combustion of the earth.

Along with that, during the long periods of calm some bizarre optical phenomena occur.

From the top of Mount Favela the sun pierces straight down, and nature is still in the heavy atmosphere. As we look out over the open, distant plains the ground is invisible.

Our fascinated look is disturbed by an imbalance in the unequally worn layers as we seem to be peering into the distance through a huge, intangible prism, and we are unable to catch sight of the base of the mountains, as though they were suspended there. Then, to the north of Canabrava, in an enormous expansion of quivering plains, we see sparkling undulations, a strange throbbing of distant waves, the magical illusion of a gulf of the sea, broad and upon which, with the colors of the rainbow, the scattered light falls, refracts, and leaps back in blinding sparkles. . . .

The backland of Canudos stands as an index to all the backlands of the North. All of these are contained there. It brings together all of their main aspects on a reduced scale. In many ways it is the center of a zone common to all of them.

As a matter of fact, its peninsular shape, with one end at the Cape of São Roque, lets the inner borders of six states, Sergipe, Alagoas, Pernambuco, Paraíba, Ceará, and Piauí, touch it or stand only a few leagues away.

In this way it is quite natural that the climatic vicissitudes visited on these places bear down upon it with the same intensity. The most incisive manifestation of this is defined in a word that holds the greatest terror for the rustic early settlers who have labored there—
drought
.

We shall avoid any extensive study of the causes of the drought, which more rigorous minds have attempted and failed to explain, and delve more deeply into a description of the phenomenon. We shall touch upon it by means of various complex and fugitive agents. We must point out, however, that this inexorable stroke of fate can be seen as an inflexible string of numbers. Its cycles, in fact, for that is what they are in the technical rigor of the term, come and go in such notable rhythm that they remind one of the unfolding of some yet unknown natural law.