The Violent Land (25 page)

A municipal ordinance prohibited burro trains bearing cacao from coming into the centre of the city. The principal streets of Ilhéos were all of them paved, two of them with brick, a token of progress of which the inhabitants were inordinately proud. The burros would come to a halt in the streets next to the station, and the cacao would then be brought into town in horse-drawn carts, to be stored in the big warehouses near the harbour. However, only a small portion of the crop that was sent to Ilhéos for shipment was any longer carried on the backs of burros; mostly it came by rail or was transported in barges from Banco da Victoria by way of the Cachoeira River, which emptied into the sea at this point.

The harbour was the chief concern of the city's residents. At that time there was only one wharf at which ships were able to moor, and when more than one came in on the same day, the other cargoes had to be unloaded in small boats. A company had accordingly been incorporated for the purpose of improving and exploiting the port, and there was talk of building more wharves and big docks and of dredging the harbour entrance, which was dangerously shallow.

Ilhéos had sprung up on a cluster of islands and stood on a point of land between two hills, known as União and Conquista; and it had also invaded the neighbouring islands, on one of which was situated the suburb of Pontal, where the wealthy had their summer homes. The population of the place had grown astonishingly since the raising of cacao had become general in the region, for practically the entire crop from the southern part of the state of Bahia was shipped to the capital from there. There was but one other port, Barra do Rio de Contas, and it was a very small one, where only sailing vessels could anchor. The citizens of Ilhéos dreamed of exporting cacao directly abroad some day, without having to ship it by way of Bahia. This provided a constant theme for editorials in the local press: the need of deepening the harbour so that ships of greater tonnage might pass. The opposition newspaper would take advantage of the topic to attack the government, while the government organ also alluded to it from time to time, printing items to the effect that “our most worthy and hard-working municipal prefect is engaged in negotiations with the state and federal governments with a view to a final solution of the harbour question.” But the fact of the matter was that nothing ever came of it, as the state government consistently put obstacles in the way, in order to protect the income of the port of Bahia. The subject none the less, phrased in almost identical words, served to fill out the platforms of both political parties and the speeches of both candidates for the prefecture. If there was any difference, it was a slight stylistic one, the platform for the Badaró candidate having been written by Lawyer Genaro, while that of Horacio's man came from the far more brilliant pen of Lawyer Ruy.

In Ilhéos the fortune of a colonel was measured by the houses that he owned, each one seeking to put up a better one, until little by little their families became used to spending more time in town than they did at the plantation; but still these houses remained closed a good part of the year, being occupied chiefly at Church festival time. The town was without diversions. The men, it is true, had the café, and there were the wine-shops where the Englishmen connected with the railroad drowned their sorrows in whisky and shot dice, where the
grapiúnas
exchanged revolver bullets; but for the womenfolk there remained nothing but visiting between families, gossiping about the private lives of others, and the enthusiasm that was awakened in them by the feast-days of the Church. Then, when work on the nuns' school had been begun, a few of the ladies had banded themselves together to raise money for the building fund by staging fairs and balls.

The Church of St. George, patron saint of the region, was a large, low structure wholly lacking in architectural beauty, but with an interior that was rich in gold-work. It overlooked a square that had been laid out as a garden. There was also the Church of St. Sebastian, next to the café and facing the sea; and on Conquista Hill, opposite the cemetery, was the Chapel of Our Lady of Victory, dominating the city from a height. In addition there was a Protestant church for the Englishmen from the railroad, which had won a few local adherents as well. And finally, in the matter of religion, there were various “spiritualistic séances” in the side-streets, becoming more numerous every day. All in all, the city of Ilhéos with its outlying boroughs and its cacao plantations was in ill repute with the Archdiocese of Bahia, where much was made of the lack of religious sentiment among the inhabitants, the absence of menfolk from Mass, the widespread prostitution—in short, it was a terrible place, a land of assassins. The number of priests that the city proper or the municipality as a whole could boast was small indeed in comparison with the number of lawyers and doctors; and as for the few padres that there were, many of these, as time went on, became cacao-planters with little interest in the salvation of souls.

A case in point was Padre Paiva, who carried a revolver under his cassock and who was not in the least perturbed if a row was started in his presence. He was the political leader for the Badarós at Mutuns, and at election time he brought in swarms of voters—it was said that he promised them a veritable slice of heaven and many years of heavenly life on this earth if they cast their ballots the way they should. He was a councilman at Ilhéos, but was not in the least interested in the religious life of the city. The only cleric who had such an interest was Canon Freitas, who on one memorable occasion preached a sermon in which he contrasted the amount of money spent by the colonels at the café and on prostitutes with the small amount he was able to collect for the building fund of the school. It was a violent, passionate sermon, but it had no practical result whatsoever. The Church continued to live off the womenfolk, and they lived for it, for the Masses, the processions, and the feasts of Holy Week; and so, exchanging juicy morsels of gossip, they went on decorating the altars and making new tunics for the holy images.

The city lay between the river and the sea, a truly lovely site, with cocoa palms growing all around. A poet who once had come to Ilhéos to give a lecture had referred to it as “the city of palms in the wind,” a bit of imagery that the local papers were fond of quoting every so often. And in truth all the palms did was to grow and be tossed by the breeze. The shrub that really influenced Ilhéos life was the cacao tree, even though not a single one was to be seen inside the city itself. But it was there, behind all the life that went on in São Jorge dos Ilhéos. Behind every business deal that was made, behind every house that went up, behind every shot that was fired in the street—it was there. There was no conversation in which the word “cacao” did not play an essential part. Over warehouses, railway trains, ships' holds, wagons, and citizenry there hovered, ever, the odour of chocolate, which is the odour of dried cacao.

Another municipal ordinance forbade the carrying of weapons, but very few persons ever knew that it existed and those who were aware of it never thought of respecting it. Men were to be seen going through the streets clad in boots or shoes of coarse leather, khaki trousers, and a cassimere coat, with a revolver under the last mentioned garment. Men with rifles slung over their shoulders crossed the town and no one paid the slightest attention to them. As a consequence, in spite of its pretentious dwelling-houses, its stone mansions and paved streets, Ilhéos still had something of the appearance of an armed camp. At times, when ships crowded with immigrants from the backlands of Sergipe and Ceará arrived and the inns near the station were filled to overflowing, tents would be set up facing the harbour, kitchens would be improvised, and the colonels would come down there to pick workers for their plantations. Lawyer Ruy once pointed out one of these camps to a visitor from the capital. “There is the slave market,” he said. He said it with a certain air of pride mingled with contempt; for he really loved this city which had sprung up overnight around the harbour, which had grown with the cacao region, and which was now rapidly becoming the most prosperous of any in the state.

There were few of those who had been born there who were of any importance in the life of the town. Almost all the planters, doctors, lawyers, surveyors, politicians, journalists, and contractors had come from the outside, from other states, but they nevertheless had a deep affection for this land which was so rich and so full of adventure. They all called themselves “
grapiúunas,
” and when in Bahia were readily recognizable everywhere by the pride with which they spoke. “That fellow is from Ilhéos,” the Bahians would say. In the cafés and business houses of the capital they made a swaggering display of their wealth, spending their money without thought as to value received, never haggling over the price of anything, and always ready to start a rumpus without knowing what it was all about. In the houses of prostitution at Bahia they were looked up to, feared, and anxiously awaited. In the offices of those wholesale firms which did business in the interior of the country, merchants from Ilhéos were always shown the highest consideration and enjoyed an unlimited credit.

From the whole of northern Brazil people came down to this land of southern Bahia. Its fame had travelled far; it was said that money rolled in the streets there and that no one thought anything of a two-milreis piece. Ships came choked with immigrants, bringing adventurers of every sort, including women of all ages, for whom Ilhéos was either the first hope or the last. In the city all mingled together; for the poor man of today might be the rich man of tomorrow, the pack-driver might be a big plantation-owner, and the worker who did not know how to read might one day be a respected political leader. Cases in point were cited, and they never failed to mention Horacio, who had begun as a mule-driver and was now one of the largest planters in the region. And the rich man of today might be the poor man of tomorrow, if another richer than he, with the aid of a lawyer, worked a clever “ouster” and succeeded in taking his land away from him. What was more, any of today's living might tomorrow be lying dead in the street, a bullet-hole in his chest. For over and above the court of justice, the judge, the prosecutor, and the citizen jury was the law of the trigger, which in Ilhéos was the court of final appeal.

At this particular time the city was beginning to deck itself out with gardens and the municipality had sent for a famous gardener from the capital. For doing this it was attacked by the opposition paper, which asserted that “what Ilhéos needs more than gardens is streets.” But all the same, the
opsicionistas
were very proud as they pointed out to visitors the flowers growing in public squares, which before had been planted in wild grass. As for streets, men and burros were opening those as they brought in their cacao to the harbour, where the seafaring ships were riding at anchor. And so it was about this time that the port of Ilhéos began to show on the latest economic maps with a cacao tree to mark its location.

The opposition newspaper, known as
A Folha de Ilhéos,
came out every Saturday; and on this particular week-end the issue was one marked by an unheard-of violence. The paper was edited by Filemon Andréa, a former tailor who had come down from Bahia to Ilhéos and had there abandoned his trade. It was well known about town that Filemon was incapable of writing a line, that even the articles that bore his signature were written by others. He was, in short, a blockhead, and how he had come to be the editor of a newspaper no one could say. He had previously done political chores for Horacio; but when the latter bought a printing press and type-cases to set up a weekly, everybody was surprised at his choice of editor.

“Why, he can hardly read.”

“But,” explained Lawyer Ruy, “he has a reputation for being an intellectual—a very good reputation. It is a question of aesthetics,” and he puffed out his cheeks as he uttered the word. “Filemon Andréa! The name of a great poet!” he concluded.

The residents of the town generally held Lawyer Ruy himself responsible for the editorial articles that appeared in
A Folha de Ilhéos;
and as election time drew near and the two papers began their wordy warfare, hurling insulting adjectives at each other, the entire populace was divided into hotly wrangling groups. On the one side there was Lawyer Ruy with his verbose style, his rounded periods and redundant phrases, and on the other side was Manuel de Oliveira, with Lawyer Genaro at times to assist him. Manuel was a printer by trade who had worked on various newspapers in Bahia. Juca Badaró had made his acquaintance in the cafés of the capital and had there hired him to come down and direct the destinies of
O Comercio
. He was more clever and more direct than his rival and always came off with the greater laurels.

As for Lawyer Genaro's articles, they were filled with judicial citations. The attorney for the Badarós, he was commonly looked upon as the most cultured person in the city, and his fellow townsmen spoke admiringly of the hundreds of books that he possessed. He led a very reserved life, making his home with his two children, and almost never left the house. He was abstemious and was never seen in the wine-shops or the café; and as for women, it was rumoured that Machadão was in the habit of going to his house twice a month to sleep with him. She was an old woman by now, having come to the city when it was barely beginning to expand—she had been the feminine sensation of Ilhéos twenty years before. Now she kept a house for girls, but no longer practiced prostitution herself. The one exception she made was Lawyer Genaro, who, as she put it, could not get used to sleeping with another woman.

Possibly it was for this reason that the leading editorial in
A Folha de Ilhéos,
which on this particular Saturday took up practically the entire front page of the small opposition weekly, referred to Lawyer Genaro as a “Jesuitical hypocrite”; and in this issue he was let off the easiest of all the Badarós' friends. The editorial in question dealt with the firing of Venancio's registry office at Tabocas, which
A Folha de Ilhéos
violently condemned as an “act of barbarism against the laws of a civilized community and harmful to the reputation that the municipality of Ilhéos enjoys in the mind of the country at large.” As for Colonel Teodoro, his name called forth whole columns of abuse, a magnificent collection of insulting nouns and adjectives: “bandit,” “habitual drunkard,” “a natural-born gambler who has made a profession of it,” “a sadistic soul,” “unworthy of living in a civilized community,” “blood-thirsty,” and so forth. But with all this, enough was left over for the Badarós, Juca appearing as one noted for his “cheap conquests among women of easy virtue,” and for being a “shameless whoremaster and protector of bandits,” while against Sinhô the usual accusations were levelled: he was a “master hand at an ouster,” a “
jagunço
leader wallowing in his ill-gotten gains” and “responsible for the death of dozens of men,” an “unscrupulous political boss,” and so on.

The editorial demanded justice. Legally, it stated, there could be no question as to the property rights to the forest of Sequeiro Grande. That forest had been surveyed and the title entered at the registry office. It was not the property of any one individual, but of a number of cacao-planters, among them one or two outstanding ones, it was true, but the majority, so the editorial asserted, were small cultivators. What the Badarós were after was to obtain for themselves sole possession of this tract, thus not only defrauding the legitimate owners of their rights, but interfering with the development of the region as well; for “the trend of the century was toward the subdivision of large estates, as could be seen in the case of France.” The article went on to state that Colonel Horacio, a progressive-minded, forward-looking individual, upon resolving to fell the forest of Sequeiro Grande and plant the land in cacao, had not been thinking of his own interests alone, but of those of the municipality, having associated with him in his undertaking all the small planters whose groves bordered on the forest. This was what you called being a good and useful citizen. How compare a man like that with the Badarós, who, “ambitious and unscrupulous,” were thinking only of enriching themselves?
A Folha de Ilhéos
ended its editorial by announcing that Horacio and the other lawful owners of Sequeiro Grande meant to have resort to the courts; and as to what might happen afterwards, should the Badarós attempt to prevent the felling of the forest and the planting of the land, the latter alone would be responsible. It was they who had first employed violence, and the blame would be theirs for whatever might ensue. The article ended with a Latin quotation:
“Alea jacta est.”

Those who were accustomed to following these newspaper polemics were greatly excited by all this. In addition to the fact that the present exchange of insults bade fair to be an unprecedentedly violent one, it was noted that the editorial in
A Folha de Ilhéos
was not the work of Lawyer Ruy, with whose style the readers were long familiar. He was a good deal more rhetorical; he could make a very good speech to a jury, but in the columns of the paper he was not so forceful. This editorial showed more energy, better reasoning powers; and the adjectives were sharper-pointed. It was not long before it was known that the author of the piece was Lawyer Virgilio, the attorney for the opposition, who lived in Tabocas, but was in Ilhéos at the moment. It was Lawyer Ruy himself who, when someone congratulated him upon the article, had revealed its author's identity. It was further recalled that Virgilio was directly involved in the matter, inasmuch as he had been the one to enter the survey at the registry office which Teodoro had burned. And the gossiping tongues went on to recall the fact that he was also interested in Horacio's wife. Undoubtedly in its edition the following Wednesday
O Comercio
would have something to say about this phase of the lawyer's private life and that of Horacio, and the public was looking forward to it with relish.

To everyone's surprise, however,
O Comercio
in its reply to the opposition editorial—a reply that was by no means overly calm—proceeded to ignore the subject about which the whole town was talking. To begin with, the paper informed its readers that it would not employ the “language of the gutter” like that “clown” who had so vilely attacked the Badarós and their political associates. Neither did it propose to delve into the private life of anyone, as was the custom of the “filthy organ of the opposition.” It must be said, however, that this latter promise was hardly fulfilled, since the article took pains to go into the entire past life of Horacio, “that ex-mule-driver who has got rich no one knows how.” Mixing public with private matters, the writer on the one hand recalled the colonel's trial for the slaying of three men, and how, “owing to the chicanery of lawyers who are a disgrace to the profession, he had escaped a just sentence but had not escaped the public's condemnation”; and on the other hand there were some extremely personal remarks about the death of Horacio's first wife, with an allusion to “those mysterious instances, with which we are all familiar, of members of the family who have suddenly disappeared and been buried at night.” Neither did
O Comercio
wholly keep the promise it made with respect to language. Horacio was referred to as a “low-life assassin,” while Lawyer Ruy was the “inveterate drunkard,” the “dog that barked but did not bite,” the “disgraceful father of a family who spent his life in the wine-shops and gave no thought to his wife and children.”

The individual who evoked the most violent adjectives of all, however, was Lawyer Virgilio. Manuel de Oliveira began that portion of his article dealing with the attorney—his “biographical sketch” of the latter—by stating that he “would have to dip his pen in the gutter to write the name of Dr. Virgilio Cabral.” It proved to be something more than a “sketch,” for the author went back to Virgilio's student days in Bahia—“the best-known face in all the brothels of the capital”—and spoke of the financial difficulties he had encountered in completing his course, “having had to live off the crumbs fallen from the table of that old buzzard Seabra.” Margot also entered the picture, even though her name did not appear. The paragraph referring to her ran as follows:

Meanwhile, it was not only politicians of ill repute who filled the belly of this disorderly young loafer during his student days. A fashionable cocotte was also the victim of his blackmailing habits. Having deceived the young beauty, this bounder of a student proceeded to live at her expense, and it was with the money that she earned in bed that Dr. Virgilio Cabral managed to obtain his law degree. It is hardly necessary to add that, after having been trained in the service of the mule-driver, Horacio, the wretch abandoned his victim, that beauteous and kind-hearted creature who had aided him in buffeting the odds of fortune.

Despite the fact that
O Comercio
was a good deal larger paper than
A Folha de Ilhéos,
the article filled a page and a half. It went into the firing of Venancio's office in great detail, explaining to the public what an “indescribable kind of ouster” it was to undertake to register title to a property on the basis of an old survey that had no legal validity whatsoever, in connection with which, moreover, an erasure had been made, the names of Horacio and “his henchmen” having been substituted for that of Mundinho de Almeida. As for the burning of the registry office, it was Venancio himself who was the guilty party—“that false servant of justice who, when Colonel Teodoro asked to see the survey, preferred to set fire to the place, thereby destroying the proofs of his own villainy.” The Badarós, on the other hand, were pictured as saints, incapable of harming a fly. As for the “wretched insults” hurled by the “clownish spokesman for the opposition,” they were powerless to impugn the good name of persons so well thought of as the Badaró family, Colonel Teodoro, on “that illustrious luminary of science and the law, Dr. Genaro Torres, the price of all cultured
grapiúnas
.” Finally reference was made to the “threats of Horacio and his hound-dog followers.” The public in the days to come would remember who it was that had first threatened bloodshed, and would weigh the moral responsibilities “in the scales of popular justice.” Nevertheless, let Horacio know that he was not frightening anyone with his “ridiculous fanfaronades.” The Badarós knew how to employ the weapons of justice and the law, but they also,
O Comercio
promised, would be able to make use of any other one that their “disloyal adversary” might select. On whatever terrain, they would see to it that “conscienceless bandits of that stripe and their unscrupulous lawyers” received their just deserts. And in conclusion, replying to the “
Alea jacta est
” of the opposition, the editorial in
O Comercio
likewise had recourse to a Latin quotation:
“Quousque tandem abutere, Mule-driverus, patientia nostra?”
This last represented Lawyer Genaro's contribution to Manuel de Oliveira's article.

Ilhéos, on the street corners, revelled in it all.