The War Of The End Of The World (14 page)

I asked him if they were prepared for more attacks, since the bourgeoisie reacts like a wild beast when the sacrosanct right of private ownership of property is violated. He left me dumfounded by murmuring that all land belongs to the Good Lord Jesus, and that the Counselor is building the largest church in the world in Canudos. I tried to explain to him that it was not because they were building churches that the powers that be had sent soldiers to do battle with them, but he answered that it was precisely for that reason, since the Republic is trying to wipe out religion. I then heard, comrades, a strange diatribe against the Republic, delivered with quiet self-assurance, without a trace of passion. The Republic is bent on oppressing the Church and the faithful, doing away with all the religious orders as it has already suppressed the Society of Jesus, and the most notorious proof of its intentions is its having instituted civil marriage, a scandalous act of impiety when the sacrament of marriage created by God already exists.

I can imagine the disappointment of many of my readers, and their suspicions on reading the foregoing, that Canudos, like the Vendée uprising at the time of the French Revolution, is a reactionary movement, inspired by priests. It is not as simple as that, comrades. As you know from my last letter, the Church condemns the Counselor and Canudos, and the
jagunços
have seized the lands of a baron. I asked the man with the scar on his face if the poor of Brazil were better off during the monarchy. He immediately answered yes, since it was the monarchy that had abolished slavery. And he explained to me that the Devil, using Freemasons and Protestants as his tools, overthrew the Emperor Dom Pedro II, in order to restore slavery. Those were his very words: the Counselor has inculcated upon his followers the belief that the republicans are advocates of slavery. (A subtle way of teaching the truth, is it not? For the exploitation of man by money owners, the foundation of the republican system, is no less a slavery than the feudal form.) The emissary was categorical. “The poor have suffered a great deal but we shall put an end to that: we will not answer the census questions because the purpose of them is to enable the government to identify the freedmen so as to put them in chains again and return them to their masters.”

“In Canudos no one pays the tribute exacted by the Republic because we do not recognize it or acknowledge its right to arrogate to itself functions and powers that belong to God.” What functions and powers, for example? “Marrying couples and collecting tithes.” I asked what they used for money in Canudos and was informed that they allowed only coins with the effigy of Princess Isabel, that is to say, the coin of the Empire, but as this latter scarcely exists any more, in reality the use of money is gradually disappearing. “There is no need for it, since in Canudos those who have give to those who do not, and those who are able to work do so for those who are not.”

I told him that doing away with private property and money and establishing communal ownership of all things, in whatever name it be done, even in that of nebulous abstractions, is a daring and courageous act on behalf of the disinherited of this earth, a first step toward redemption for all. I also pointed out that such measures would sooner or later bring down upon them the harshest sort of repression, since the ruling class will never allow such an example to spread: there are more than enough poor in this country to seize all the haciendas. Are the Counselor and his followers aware of the forces that they are arousing? Looking me straight in the eye, without blinking, the man recited a string of absurd phrases to me, of which I give you a sample: soldiers are not the strength but the weakness of the government; when the need arises, the waters of the Vaza-Barris will turn to milk and its gorges to maize couscous; and
jagunços
killed in battle will be resurrected so that they will be alive when the army of Dom Sebastião (a Portuguese king who died in Africa in the sixteenth century) appears.

Are these devils, emperors, and religious fetishes the elements of a strategy that the Counselor is using to launch the humble on the path of rebellion, a strategy which, in the realm of facts—unlike that of words—is a most effective one, since it has impelled them to rise up in arms against the economic, social, and military foundation of class society? Are religious, mythical, dynastic symbols the only ones capable of rousing from their inertia masses subjected for centuries to the superstitious tyranny of the Church, and is this the reason why the Counselor makes use of them? Or is all this sheer happenstance? We know, comrades, that there is no such thing as chance in history, that however fortuitous its course may seem, there is always a rationality lying hidden behind even the most puzzling outward appearances. Does the Counselor have any idea of the historical upheaval he is provoking? Is he an intuitive type or a clever one? No hypothesis is to be rejected, and, even less than others, that of a spontaneous, unpremeditated, popular movement. Rationality is engraved within the head of every man, however uncultured he may be, and given certain circumstances, it can guide him, amid the clouds of dogma that veil his eyes or the prejudices that limit his vocabulary, to act in the direction of the march of history. A man who was not one of us, Montesquieu, wrote that fortune or misfortune is simply a certain inborn tendency of our organs. Revolutionary action, too, can be born of this same propensity of the organs that govern us, even before science educates the minds of the poor. Is this what is happening in the backlands of Bahia? The answer can only be come by in Canudos itself. Till my next letter or never.

The victory of Uauá was celebrated in Canudos with two days of festivities. There were skyrockets and fireworks displays prepared by Antônio the Pyrotechnist and the Little Blessed One organized processions that wound in and out amid the labyrinth of huts that had sprung up on the hacienda. The Counselor preached every evening from a scaffolding of the Temple. Worse trials still awaited them in Canudos; they must not allow fear to overcome them, the Blessed Jesus would aid those who had faith. The end of the world continued to be a subject he very often spoke of. The earth, worn out after so many centuries of giving forth plants and animals and sheltering man, would ask the Father if it might rest. God would give His consent, and the acts of destruction would commence. That was what was meant by the words of the Bible: “I bring not peace, but a sword!”

Hence, while in Bahia the authorities, mercilessly pilloried by the
Jornal de Notícias
and the Progressivist Republican Party for what had happened in Uauá, organized a second expedition with seven times as many troops as the first and equipped it with two Krupp 7.5 caliber cannons and two Nordenfelt machine guns and sent it off by train, under the command of Major Febrônio de Brito, to Queimadas, with orders to proceed immediately on foot from there to punish the
jagunços
, the latter were readying themselves in Canudos for Judgment Day. A number of the more impatient of them, eager to hasten that day or to give the earth the rest it deserved, went out to sow desolation. In a furious excess of love they set fire to buildings on the mountain plateaus and in the scrub forests that isolated Canudos from the world. To save their lands, many owners of haciendas and peasants presented them with gifts, but they nonetheless burned down a goodly number of farmhouses, animal pens, abandoned dwellings, shepherds’ huts, and hideouts of outlaws. It was necessary for José Venâncio, Pajeú, Abbot João, Big João, the Macambiras to go out and stop these zealous visionaries eager to bring rest to nature by reducing it to ashes, and for the Little Blessed One, the Mother of Men, the Lion of Natuba to explain to them that they had misunderstood the saint’s sermons.

Not even in these days, despite the many new pilgrims who arrived, did Canudos suffer from hunger. Maria Quadrado took a group of women—which the Little Blessed One named the Sacred Choir—off to live with her in the Sanctuary so that they could help her support the Counselor when he was so weak from fasting that his legs gave way, feed him the few crumbs he ate, and serve as his protective armor so that he would not be crushed by the pilgrims who wanted to touch him and hounded him to beg for his intercession with the Blessed Jesus for a blind daughter, an invalid son, or a husband who had passed on. Meanwhile, other
jagunços
took on the responsibility of providing food for the city and defending it. They had once been runaway slaves—Big João, for instance—or
cangaceiros
with a past that included many murders—as was the case with Pajeú or Abbot João—and now they were men of God. But they nonetheless continued to be practical men, alert to earthly concerns, aware of the threat of hunger and war, and as in Uauá, they were the ones who took the situation in hand. As they reined in the hordes of arsonists, they also herded to Canudos the heads of cattle, horses, mules, donkeys, goats that the haciendas round about resigned themselves to donating to the Blessed Jesus, and sent off to the Vilanova brothers’ warehouses the flour, the seed grain, the clothing, and most importantly the arms they collected in their raids. In just a few days, Canudos was filled to overflowing with resources. At the same time, solitary envoys wandered about the backlands, like biblical prophets, and went down as far as the coast, urging people to come to Canudos and join the elect to fight against that invention of the Dog: the Republic. They were odd-looking emissaries from heaven, dressed not in tunics but in leather pants and shirts, whose mouths spat out the coarse obscenities of ruffians and whom everybody knew because once upon a time they had shared their misery and a roof overhead with them, till one day, brushed by the wings of the angel, they had gone off to Canudos. They were the same as ever, armed with the same knives, carbines, machetes, and yet they were different now, since all they talked about, with a contagious conviction and pride, was the Counselor, God, or the community that they had come from. People extended them their hospitality, listened to them, and many of them, feeling hope stir for the first time, bundled up all their possessions and took off for Canudos.

Major Febrônio de Brito’s forces had already arrived in Queimadas. They numbered five hundred and forty-three soldiers, fourteen officers, and three doctors chosen from among the three infantry battalions of Bahia—the Ninth, Twenty-sixth, and Thirty-third—whom the little town welcomed with a speech by the mayor, a Mass in the Church of Santo Antônio, a meeting with the town council, and a day that was proclaimed a holiday so that the townspeople could take in the parade, complete with drumrolls and bugle fanfares, around the main square. Before the parade began, volunteer messengers had already taken off north to inform Canudos of the number of soldiers and arms in the expeditionary force and the line of march it was planning to follow. The news came as no surprise. What cause for surprise was there if reality confirmed what God had announced to them through the words spoken by the Counselor? The one real piece of news was that the soldiers would come this time by way of Cariacá, the Serra de Acari, and the Vale de Ipueiras. Abbot João suggested to the others that they dig trenches, bring gunpowder and projectiles, and post men on the slopes of Monte Cambaio, for the Protestants would be obliged to come that way.

For the moment, the Counselor’s mind appeared to be more occupied with getting on with the building of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus as quickly as possible than with the war. He still appeared at dawn every day to supervise the construction work, but it kept falling behind because of the building stones; they had to be hauled from quarries located farther and farther away as time went by, and hoisting them up to the towers was hazardous since the ropes sometimes broke and as they fell the huge stones brought scaffoldings and workers crashing down with them. And sometimes the saint would order a wall that had already been built to be torn down and built again somewhere else or would order windows done over because an inspiration had told him that they were not oriented in the direction of love. He could be seen circulating among the people, accompanied by the Lion of Natuba, the Little Blessed One, Maria Quadrado, and the women of the Sacred Choir, who kept constantly clapping their hands to keep the flies from bothering him. Every day three, five, ten families or groups of pilgrims arrived in Canudos with their carts and their tiny herds of goats, and Antônio Vilanova would assign them an empty spot in the labyrinth of dwellings so that they could build one for themselves. Every evening, before giving his counsel, the saint received the newcomers inside the Temple that as yet was without a roof. They were led through the crowd of faithful and ushered into his presence by the Little Blessed One, and even though the Counselor tried to keep them from falling to their knees at his feet to kiss them or touching his tunic by saying to them “God is other,” they did so nonetheless, whereupon he blessed them, gazing at them with eyes that gave the impression that they were continually fixed on the beyond. At a given moment, he would interrupt the welcoming ceremony by rising to his feet, and everyone would stand aside as he made his way toward the little ladder leading to the scaffolding up above. He preached in a hoarse voice, without moving, on the usual subjects: the superior nature of the spirit, the advantages of being poor and frugal, hatred toward the impious, the need to save Canudos so that it would be a refuge of the just.

The crowd of people listened to him with bated breath, convinced. Religion filled their days now. As they came into being, each narrow winding street was named after a saint, in a procession. In every corner there were niches and statues of the Virgin, of the Christ Child, of the Blessed Jesus, of the Holy Spirit, and each neighborhood, each occupation erected altars to its patron saint. Many of the newcomers took new names, thereby symbolizing that a new life was beginning for them. But sometimes dubious customs were grafted upon Catholic practices, like parasitic plants. Thus, certain mulattoes began to dance as they prayed, and it was said that they believed that by stamping their feet on the ground in a frenzy they were flushing out sins from their bodies with their sweat. The blacks gradually grouped together in the northern section of Canudos, a block of mud and straw huts that later became known as the Mocambo—the Slave Refuge. Indians from Mirandela, who unexpectedly came to live in Canudos, prepared in full view of everyone herb concoctions that gave off a heady odor and sent them into ecstasy. In addition to pilgrims, there arrived, naturally, miracle workers, peddlers, curiosity seekers. In the huts that grew like cysts on each other, there could be found women who read palms, rogues who boasted of being able to speak with the dead, and
cantadores
who, like those in the Gypsy’s Circus, earned their daily bread by singing ballads or sticking pins into themselves. Certain healers claimed to be able to cure any sort of sickness with potions of acacia and nightshade, and a number of pious believers, overcome by an excess of contrition, recited their sins at the tops of their voices and asked their listeners to impose penance on them. On settling in Canudos, a group of people from Juazeiro began to practice the rites of the Brotherhood of Penitents in that city: fasting, sexual abstinence, public flagellations. Although the Counselor encouraged the mortification of the flesh and asceticism—suffering, he would say, strengthens faith—he finally became alarmed and asked the Little Blessed One to examine the pilgrims as they arrived in order to keep superstition, fetishism, or any sort of impiety disguised as devotion from entering with them.

This motley collection of human beings lived side by side in Canudos without violence, amid a fraternal solidarity and a climate of exaltation that the elect had not known before. They felt truly rich because they were poor, sons of God, privileged, just as the man in the mantle full of holes told them each evening. In their love for him, moreover, all differences that might have separated them came to an end: when it was anything to do with the Counselor, these men and women who had numbered in the hundreds and were beginning to number in the thousands became a single, reverent, obedient being, ready to do anything and everything for the one who had been able to reach past their abjection, their hunger, their lice, to fill them with hope and make them proud of their fate. Though the population kept multiplying, life was not chaotic. The men set out from Canudos on missions, the pilgrims brought cattle and supplies in, the animal pens were full, as were the storehouses, and the Vaza-Barris fortunately had enough water in it to irrigate the small farms. As Abbot João, Pajeú, José Venâncio, Big João, Pedrão, and others prepared for war, Honorio and Antônio Vilanova managed the city: they received the pilgrims’ offerings, distributed plots of land, food, and clothes, and supervised the Health Houses for the sick, the old, and the orphaned. And it was they who heard out the contending parties when there were quarrels over property rights in the community.

Each day there arrived news of the Antichrist. Major Febrônio de Brito’s expedition had proceeded from Queimadas to Monte Santo, a place it profaned on the evening of the twenty-ninth of December, its strength lessened by one infantry corporal, who had been fatally bitten by a rattlesnake. The Counselor explained, without ill will, what was happening. Was it not a blasphemy, an abomination, for men with firearms, bound on destruction, to camp in a sanctuary that drew pilgrims from all over the world? But the ungodly must not be allowed to set foot in Canudos, which that night he called Belo Monte. Working himself into a frenzy, he urged them not to bow down to the enemies of religion, whose aims were to send the slaves to the stocks once again, to impoverish people by making them pay taxes, to prevent them from being married and buried by the Church, and to confuse them with such clever hocus-pocus as the metric system, the statistical map, and the census, whose real purpose was to deceive them and lead them into sin. They all stayed up the whole night, with whatever weapons they had within reach of their hands. The Freemasons did not come. They were in Monte Santo, repairing the two Krupp cannons knocked out of alignment as they were being hauled over the rough terrain, and awaiting reinforcements. When they marched off in columns two weeks later, heading up the Cariac´ Valley in the direction of Canudos, the entire route that they would be following was teeming with spies, apostates hiding in refuges for goats, in the tangled underbrush of the scrub forest, or in dugouts concealed beneath the carcass of a cow, with the eyeholes in its skull serving as peepholes. Swift messengers brought news to Canudos of the enemy’s advance each day and the obstacles that had held them up.

When he learned that the expeditionary force had finally arrived in Mulungu, despite its tremendous difficulties in hauling the cannons and the machine guns, and that, faced with near-starvation, it had been obliged to sacrifice its last head of beef cattle and two dray mules, the Counselor commented that the Father must not be unhappy with Canudos since He was beginning to defeat the soldiers of the Republic before the battle had even begun.