At this point the disaster that was to ruin the family for the second time overtook them. In good years, the rains began in December; in bad ones, in February or March. That year, by the time May came round, not a single drop of rain had fallen. The volume of water in the São Francisco diminished by two-thirds and barely sufficed to meet the needs of Juazeiro, whose population quadrupled with the influx of migrants from the interior.
That year Antônio Vilanova did not collect a single debt owed him, and all his customers, both the owners of large haciendas and poor people of the region, canceled their orders for goods. Even Calumbi, the Baron de Canabrava’s choicest estate, informed him that it would not buy so much as a handful of salt from him. Thinking to profit from bad times, Antônio had buried seed grain in wooden boxes wrapped in canvas in order to sell it when scarcity drove the price sky-high. But the disaster took on proportions that exceeded even his calculations. He soon realized that if he didn’t sell the seed he had hoarded immediately, there wouldn’t be a single customer for it, for people were spending what little money they had left on Masses, processions, and offerings (and everyone was eager to join the Brotherhood of Penitents, who wore hoods and flagellated themselves) so that God would send rain. He unearthed his boxes then: despite the canvas wrapping, the seeds had rotted. But Antônio never admitted defeat. He, Honório, the Sardelinha sisters, and even the children—one of his own and three of his brother’s—cleaned the seed as best they could and the following morning the town crier announced in the main square that through force majeure the Vilanova general store was selling its seed on hand at bargain prices. Antônio and Honôrio armed themselves and posted four servants with clubs in plain sight outside the store to keep buyers from getting out of hand. For the first hour, everything went well. The Sardelinha sisters handed out the seed at the counter while the six men held people back at the door, allowing only ten people at a time to enter the store. But soon it was impossible to control the mob, for people finally climbed over the barrier, tore down the doors and windows, and invaded the place. In a few minutes’ time, they had made off with everything inside, including the money in the cashbox. What they were unable to carry off with them they reduced to dust.
The devastation had lasted no more than half an hour, and although their losses were great, nobody in the family was injured. Honorio, Antônio, the Sardelinha sisters, and the children sat in the street watching as the looters withdrew from what had been the best-stocked store in the city. The women had tears in their eyes and the children, sitting scattered about on the ground, looked numbly at the remains of the beds they had slept in, the clothes they had worn, the toys they had played with. Antônio’s face was pale. “We have to start all over again,” Honório murmured. “Not in this city, though,” his brother answered.
Antônio was not yet thirty. But the ravages of overwork, his exhausting travels, the obsessive way in which he ran his business, made him look older. He had lost a lot of hair, and his broad forehead, his little chin beard, and his mustache gave him the air of an intellectual. He was a strong man, somewhat stoop-shouldered, with a bowlegged walk like a cowhand’s. He never showed any interest in anything but business. While Honório went to fiestas and was not unwilling to down a little glass of anisette as he listened to a cantador or chatted with friends plying the São Francisco at the helm of boats on which bright-colored figureheads were beginning to appear, Antônio had no social life. When he wasn’t off somewhere on his travels, he stayed behind the counter of the store, checking the account books or thinking up new lines of business to go into. He had many customers but few friends, and though he turned up on Sundays at the Church of Our Lady of the Grottoes and occasionally was present at the processions in which the flagellants of the Brotherhood mortified their flesh in order to aid souls in purgatory, he was not thought of as someone possessed of extraordinary religious fervor. He was a serious, serene, stubborn man, well equipped to confront adversity.
This time the Vilanova family’s peregrination through a region brought low by hunger and thirst was longer than the one they had undertaken a decade before as they fled from the smallpox epidemic. They soon were left without animals. After an encounter with a band of migrants that the two brothers had to drive off with their rifles, Antônio decided that their five pack mules were too great a temptation for the starving human hordes wandering about the backlands. He therefore sold four of them in Barro Vermelho for a handful of precious stones. They butchered the last remaining one, had themselves a banquet, and salted down the meat left over, which kept them alive for a number of days. One of Honôrio’s sons died of dysentery and they buried him in Borracha, where they had set up a shelter, in which the Sardelinha sisters offered soup made from Spanish plums, rock cavy, and yellow lupine. But they were unable to hold out very long there either, and wandered off again toward Patamuté and Mato Verde, where Honório was stung by a scorpion. When he was better, they continued on south, a harrowing journey of weeks and weeks during which the only things they came upon were ghost towns, deserted haciendas, caravans of skeletons drifting aimlessly, as though hallucinated.
In Pedra Grande, another of Honôrio and Assunção’s sons died of nothing more serious than a head cold. They were in the midst of burying him, wrapped in a blanket, when, enveloped in a cloud of red-colored dust, some twenty men and women entered the village—among them a creature with the face of a man who crawled about on all fours and a half-naked black—most of them nothing but skin and bones, wearing threadbare tunics and sandals that looked as though they had trod all the paths of this world. Their leader was a tall, dark man with hair that fell down to his shoulders and quicksilver eyes. He strode straight over to the Vilanova family, and with a gesture of his hand stopped the brothers, who were already lowering the corpse into the grave. “Your son?” he asked Honôrio in a grave voice. The latter nodded. “You can’t bury him like that,” the dark-skinned, dark-haired man said in an authoritative tone of voice. “He must be properly interred and sent upon his way so that he will be received at heaven’s eternal feast of rejoicing.” And before Honório could answer, he turned to those accompanying him: “Let us give him a decent burial, so that the Father will receive him in exaltation.” The Vilanovas then saw the pilgrims come to life, run to the trees, cut them down, nail them together, fashion a coffin and a cross with a skill that was proof of long practice. The dark man took the child in his arms and laid him in the coffin. As the Vilanovas filled the grave with earth, the man prayed aloud and the others sang hymns of blessing and recited litanies, kneeling round about the cross. Later, as the pilgrims were about to leave after resting beneath the trees, Antônio Vilanova took out a coin and offered it to the saint. “As a token of our thanks,” he insisted, on seeing that the man was refusing to accept it and contemplating him with a mocking look in his eyes. “You have nothing to thank me for,” he said finally. “But you would be unable to pay the Father what you owe him even with a thousand coins such as this one.” He paused, and then added gently: “You haven’t learned to count, my son.”
For a long time after the pilgrims had departed, the Vilanovas remained there, sitting lost in thought around a campfire they had built to drive away the insects. “Was he a madman, compadre?” Honôrio asked. “I’ve seen many a madman on my travels and that man seemed like something more than that,” Antônio answered.
When the rains came again, after two years of drought and disasters, the Vilanovas had settled in Caatinga do Moura, a hamlet near which there was a salt pit that Antônio began to work. All the rest of the family—the Sardelinha sisters and the two children—had survived, but Antônio and Antônia’s little boy, after suffering from gummy secretions round his eyes that made him rub them for days on end, had gradually lost his sight and though he could still distinguish light from dark he was unable to make out people’s faces or tell what things around him looked like. The salt pit turned out to be a good business. Honôrio, the women, and the children spent
their days drying the salt and preparing sacks of it, which Antônio then went out to sell. He had made himself a cart, and went about armed with a double-barreled shotgun to defend himself in case he was attacked by bandits.
They stayed in Caatinga do Moura about three years. With the return of the rains, the villagers came back to work the land and the cowhands to take care of the decimated herds. For Antônio, all this meant the return of prosperity. In addition to the salt pit, he soon had a store and began to deal in riding animals, which he bought and sold with a good profit margin. When the torrential rains of that December—a decisive moment in his life—turned the little stream that ran through the settlement into a river in flood that carried off the huts of the village and drowned poultry and goats and inundated the salt pit and buried it beneath a sea of mud in a single night, Antônio was at the Nordestina fair, to which he had gone with a load of salt and the intention of buying some mules.
He returned a week later. The floodwaters had begun to recede. Honôrio, the Sardelinha sisters, and the half-dozen laborers who now worked for them were dejected, but Antônio took this latest catastrophe calmly. He inventoried what had been salvaged, made calculations in a little notebook, and raised their spirits by telling them that he still had many debts to collect and that like a cat he had too many lives to live to feel defeated by one flood.
But he didn’t sleep a wink that night. They had been given shelter by a villager who was a friend of his, on the hill where all the people who lived on lower ground had taken refuge. His wife could feel him tossing and turning in the hammock and see by the light of the moon falling on her husband’s face that he was consumed with anxiety. The next morning Antônio informed them that they must make ready for a journey, for they were leaving Caatinga do Moura for good. His tone was so peremptory that neither his brother nor the womenfolk dared ask him why. After selling off everything that they were not able to take with them, they took to the road once more, in the cart loaded down with bundles, and plunged yet again into the unknown. One day they heard Antônio say something that bewildered them. “That was the third warning,” he murmured, with a shadow in the depths of his bright blue eyes. “We were sent that flood so we’d do something, but I don’t know what.” As though embarrassed to ask, Honório said to him: “A warning from God, compadre?”
“Could be from the Devil,” Antônio replied.
They continued to knock about from place to place, a week here, a month there, and every time the family thought that they were about to settle down, Antônio would impulsively decide to leave. This vague search for something or someone disturbed them, but none of them protested against this constant moving about.
Finally, after nearly eight months of wandering up and down the backlands, they ended up settling on a hacienda belonging to the Baron de Canabrava that had been abandoned ever since the drought. The baron had taken all his cattle away and only a few families had stayed on, living here and there in the surrounding countryside, cultivating little plots of land on the banks of the Vaza-Barris and taking their goats up to graze in the Serra de Canabrava, green the year round. In view of its sparse population and the fact that it was surrounded by mountains, Canudos seemed like the worst possible place for a merchant to set up in business. Nonetheless, the moment they had taken over what had once been the steward’s house, now in ruins, Antônio acted as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He immediately began to think up new lines of business that he could go into and set about organizing the family’s life with the same high spirits as in days gone by. And a year later, thanks to his perseverance and determination, the Vilanovas’ general store was buying up and selling merchandise for ten leagues around. Again, Antônio was constantly out on the road.
But the day that the pilgrims appeared on the hillside of O Cambaio and entered Canudos by its one and only street, singing hymns of praise to the Blessed Jesus at the top of their lungs, he happened to be home. From the veranda of the former steward’s quarters, now converted into a combination house and store, he watched as these fervent creatures drew closer and closer. His brother, his wife, his sister-in-law saw him turn pale when the man in dark purple who was heading the procession came over to him. They recognized those burning eyes, that deep voice, that gaunt body. “Have you learned to count yet?” the saint asked with a smile, holding out his hand to the merchant. Antônio Vilanova fell on his knees to kiss the newcomer’s fingers.
In my last letter I told you, comrades, of a popular rebellion in the interior of Brazil, that I learned of through a prejudiced witness (a Capuchin friar). I can now pass on to you more reliable testimony regarding Canudos, that of a man who is himself one of the rebels, sent out to journey all through the backlands, his mission doubtless to make converts to their cause. But I can also tell you something exciting: there has been an armed encounter, and the jagunços defeated a hundred soldiers headed for Canudos. Are there not clearer and clearer signs that these rebels are fellow revolutionaries? There is an element of truth in that, but only relatively speaking, to judge from this man, who gives a contradictory impression of these brothers of ours: sharp insights and normal behavior exist in them side by side with unbelievable superstitions.
I am writing to you from a town whose name you no doubt would not recognize, a region where the moral and physical servitude of women is extreme, for they are oppressed by landowner, father, brothers, and husband alike. In these parts, the landowner chooses the wives for his relations and the womenfolk are beaten right on the street by their irascible fathers or their drunken husbands, a matter of complete indifference to those who witness such scenes. Food for thought, comrades: we must make certain that the revolution will not only do away with the exploitation of man by man, but also that of women by men, and will establish, along with the equality of classes, that of the sexes.
I learned that the emissary from Canudos had been brought here by a guide who is also a tigreiro, a hunter of jaguars (fine occupations: exploring the world and killing the predators preying on the flocks), thanks to whom I managed to see him. Our meeting took place in a tannery, amid hides drying in the sun and children playing with lizards. My heart began to pound when I laid eyes on the man: short and heavyset, with that pale complexion somewhere between yellow and gray that half-breeds inherit from their Indian forebears, and a scar on his face that told me at a glance that he had been a bandit or a criminal in the past (in any event, a victim, since, as Bakunin explained, society lays the groundwork for crimes and criminals are merely the instruments for carrying them out). His clothes were made of leather—the usual dress of cowherds, I might add, enabling them to ride through thorny brush country. He kept his sombrero on his head and his shotgun at his side all during our interview. His eyes were deep-set and sullen and his manner shifty and evasive, as is often the case here. He did not want the two of us to talk together by ourselves. We had to do so in the presence of the owner of the tannery and his family, who were sitting on the floor eating without looking at us. I told him that I was a revolutionary and had many comrades in the world who applauded what the people in Canudos had done, that is to say, occupying lands belonging to a feudal owner, establishing free love, and vanquishing a company of soldiers. I don’t know if he understood me. The people in the interior are not like those in Bahia, who thanks to the African influence are loquacious and outgoing. Here people’s faces are expressionless, masks whose function would seem to be to hide their feelings and their thoughts.
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 Rep
ublic 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.”