The War of the End of the World

  But the story that came to be the flesh of his flesh was that of Robert the Devil, the son of the Duke of Normandy who, after committing all manner of evil deeds, repented and went about on all fours, barking instead of speaking, and sleeping with the animals, until, having been granted the mercy of the Blessed Jesus, he saved the Emperor from attack by the Moors and married the Queen of Brazil. The youngster insisted that the cantadores tell it without omitting a single detail: how, in his days of wickedness, Robert the Devil had plunged his knife with the curved blade into countless throats of damsels and hermits simply for the pleasure of seeing them suffer, and how, in his days as a servant of God, he wandered far and wide in search of his victims’ kin, kissing their feet when he found them and begging them to torture him. The townspeople of Custódia thought that João would one day be a backlands minstrel, going from town to town with his guitar on his shoulder, bringing messages and making people happy with his songs and tales.

  João helped Zé Faustino in his store, which supplied the whole countryside round about with cloth, grain, things to drink, farm tools, sweets, and trinkets. Zé Faustino traveled about a great deal, taking merchandise to the haciendas or going to the city to buy it, and in his absence Dona Angela minded the store, a hut of kneaded mud with a poultry yard. The woman had made her nephew the object of all the affection that she was unable to give the children she had not had. She had made João promise that he would take her to Salvador someday so that she might throw herself at the feet of the miraculous statue of O Senhor de Bonfim, of whom she had a collection of colored prints pinned above the head of her bed.

  As much as drought and epidemics, the inhabitants of Custódia feared two other calamities that impoverished the town: cangaceiros and flying brigades of the National Guard. In the beginning the former had been bands gotten together from among their peons and kinfolk by the “colonels” who owned haciendas, to settle by force the quarrels that broke out among them over property boundaries, water rights, and grazing lands, or over conflicting political ambitions, but as time went by, many of these bands armed with blunderbusses and machetes had freed themselves from the “colonels” who had organized them and had begun running about loose, living by killing, robbing, and plundering. The flying brigades had come into being in order to combat them. Cangaceiros and flying brigades alike ate up the provisions of the townspeople of Custódia, got drunk on their cane brandy, and tried to rape their women. Before he even reached the age of reason, João had learned that the moment the warning shout was given all the bottles, food, and merchandise in the store had to be stowed away immediately in the hiding places that Zé Faustino had readied. The rumor went around that the storekeeper was a coiteiro—a man who did business with the bandits and provided them with information and hiding places. He was furious. Hadn’t people seen how they robbed his store? Didn’t they make off with clothes and tobacco without paying a cent? João heard his uncle complain many times about these stupid stories that the people of Custódia made up about him, out of envy. “If they keep on, they’re going to get me into trouble,” he would mutter. And that was exactly what happened.

  One morning a flying brigade of thirty guards arrived in Custódia, under the command of Second Lieutenant Geraldo Macedo, a young Indian half-breed known far and wide for his bloodthirstiness. They were chasing down Antônia Silvino’s gang of outlaws. The cangaceiros had not passed through Custódia, but the lieutenant stubbornly insisted that they had. He was tall and solidly built, slightly cross-eyed, and forever licking a gold tooth that he had. It was said that he chased down bandits so mercilessly because they had raped a sweetheart of his. As his men searched the huts, the lieutenant personally interrogated everyone in town. As night was falling, he strode into the store, beaming in triumph, and ordered Zé Faustina to take him to Silvino’s hideout. Before the storekeeper could answer, he cuffed him so hard he sent him sprawling. “I know everything, you Christian dog. People have informed on you.” Neither Zé Faustino’s protestations of innocence nor Dona Angela’s pleas were of any avail. Lieutenant Macedo said that as a warning to coiteiros he’d shoot Zé Faustino at dawn if he didn’t reveal Silvino’s whereabouts. The storekeeper finally appeared to agree to do so. At dawn the next morning they left Custódia, with Zé Faustino leading the way, followed by Macedo’s thirty men, who were certain that they were going to take the bandits by surprise. But Zé Faustino managed to shake them after a few hours’ march and hurried back to Custódia to get Dona Angela and João and take them off with him, fearing that they would be made the target of reprisals. The lieutenant caught him as he was still packing a few things. He may have intended to kill only him, but he also shot Dona Angela to death when she tried to intervene. He grabbed João by the legs and knocked him out with one blow across the head with the barrel of his pistol. When João came to, he saw that the townspeople of Custódia were there, holding a wake over two coffins, with looks of remorse on their faces. He turned a deaf ear to their words of affection, and as he rubbed his hand over his bleeding face he told them, in a voice that suddenly was that of an adult—he was only twelve years old at the time—that he would come back someday to avenge his aunt and uncle, since those who were mourning them were their real murderers.

  The thought of vengeance helped him survive the weeks he spent wandering aimlessly about a desert wasteland bristling with mandacarus. He could see black vultures circling overhead, waiting for him to collapse so as to fly down and tear him to bits. It was January, and not a drop of rain had fallen. João gathered dried fruits, sucked the sap of palm trees, and even ate a dead armadillo he found. Finally help was forthcoming from a goatherd who came upon him lying alongside a dry riverbed in a delirium, raving about lances, horses, and O Senhor de Bonfim. He revived him with a big cupful of milk and a few handfuls of raw brown sugar lumps that the youngster sucked. They journeyed on together for several days, heading for the high plateau of Angostura, where the goatherd was taking his flock. But, before they reached it, they were surprised late one afternoon by a party of men who could not be mistaken for anything but outlaws, with leather hats, cartridge belts made of jaguar skin, knapsacks embroidered with beads, blunderbusses slung over their shoulders, and machetes that hung down to their knees. There were six of them, and the leader, a cafuzo with kinky hair and a red bandanna around his neck, laughingly asked João, who had fallen to his knees and was begging him to take him with him, why he wanted to be a cangaceiro. “To kill National Guardsmen,” the youngster answered.

  For João, a life then began that made a man of him in a very short time—“an evil man,” the people of the provinces that he traveled the length and breadth of in the next twenty years would add—as a hanger-on at first of parties of men whose clothes he washed, whose meals he prepared, whose buttons he sewed back on, or whose lice he picked, and later on as an accomplice of their villainy, then after that as the best marksman, tracker, knife fighter, coverer of ground, and strategist of the cangaço, and finally as lieutenant and then leader of it. Before he was twenty-five, his was the head with the highest price on it in the barracks of Bahia, Pernambuco, O Piauí, and Ceará. His miraculous luck, which saved him from ambushes in which his comrades were killed or captured and which seemed to immunize him against bullets despite his daring, caused the story to go round that he had a pact with the Devil. Be that as it may, it was quite true that, unlike other men in the cangaço, who went around loaded down with holy medals, made the sign of the cross whenever they chanced upon a wayside cross or calvary, and at least once a year slipped into some town so that the priest could put their consciences at peace with God, João (who in the beginning had been called João the Kid, then João Faster-than-Lightning, then João the Quiet One, and was now called Satan João) appeared to be scornful of religion and resigned to going to hell to pay for his countless heinous deeds.

  An outlaw’s life, the nephew of Zé Faustino and Dona Angela might have said, consisted of walking, fighting, and stealing. But ab
ove all of walking. How many hundreds of leagues were covered in these years by the strong, muscular, restless legs of this man who could walk for twenty hours at a stretch without tiring? They had walked up and down the sertão in all directions, and no one knew better than they the folds in the hills, the tangles in the scrub, the meanders in the rivers, the caves in the mountains. These aimless wanderings across country in Indian file, trying to put distance between cangaço and real or imaginary pursuers from the National Guard or to confuse them, were, in João’s memory, a single, endless ramble through identical landscapes, disturbed now and again by the whine of bullets and the screams of the wounded, as they headed toward some vague place or obscure event that seemed to be awaiting them.

  For a long time he thought that what lay in store for him was returning to Custódia to wreak his vengeance. Years after the death of his aunt and uncle, he stole into the hamlet of his childhood one moonlit night, leading a dozen men. Was this the journey’s end they had been heading for all during the long, bloody trek? Drought had driven many families out of Custódia, but there were still a few huts with people living in them, and despite the fact that among the faces of the inhabitants, gummy-eyed with sleep, whom his men drove out into the street there were a number that João did not recognize, he exempted no one from punishment. The womenfolk, even the little girls and the very old ladies, were forced to dance with the cangaceiros, who had already drunk up all the alcohol in Custódia, while the townspeople sang and played guitars. Every so often, the women and girls were dragged to the closest hut and raped. Finally, one of the menfolk began to cry, out of helplessness or terror. Satan João thereupon plunged his knife into him and slit him wide open, the way a butcher slaughters a steer. This bloodshed had the effect of an order, and shortly thereafter the cangaceiros, crazed with excitement, began to shoot off their blunderbusses, not stopping till they had turned the one street in Custódia into a graveyard. Even more than the wholesale killing, what contributed to the forging of the legend of Satan João was the fact that he humiliated each of the males personally after they were dead, cutting off their testicles and stuffing them into their mouths (this was his usual procedure with police informers). As they were leaving Custódia, he had one of the men in his band scribble on a wall the words: “My aunt and uncle have collected the debt that was owed them.”

  How much truth was there in the stories of atrocities attributed to Satan João? For that many fires, kidnappings, sackings, tortures to have been committed would have required more lives and henchmen than João’s thirty years on this earth and the bands under his command, which never numbered as many as twenty men. What contributed to his fame was the fact that, unlike other leaders of cangaços, Pajeú for instance, who compensated for the blood they shed by sudden bursts of generosity—sharing booty they had just taken among the poor of the place, forcing a landowner to open his storerooms to the sharecroppers, handing over all of a ransom extorted from a victim to some parish priest so that he might build a chapel, or paying the expenses of the feast in honor of the patron saint of a town—no one had ever heard of João’s making such gestures with the intention of winning people’s sympathies or the blessings of heaven. Neither of these two things mattered to him.

  He was a robust man, taller than the average in the sertão, with burnished skin, prominent cheekbones, slanted eyes, a broad forehead, laconic, a fatalist, who had pals and subordinates but no friends. He did have a woman, a girl from Quixeramobim whom he had met because she washed clothes in the house of a hacienda owner who served as coiteiro for the band. Her name was Leopoldina, and she was round-faced, with expressive eyes and a firm, ample body. She lived with João during the time he remained in hiding at the hacienda and when he took off again she left with him. But she did not accompany him for long, because João would not allow women in the band. He installed her in Aracati, where he came to see her every so often. He did not marry her, so that when people found out that Leopoldina had run away from Aracati to Jeremoabo with a judge, they thought that the offense to João was not as serious as it would have been if she were his wife. João avenged himself as though she were. He went to Quixeramobim, cut off her ears, branded Leopoldina’s two brothers, and carried her thirteen-year-old sister, Mariquinha, off with him. The girl appeared early one morning in the streets of Jeremoabo with her face branded with the initials S and J. She was pregnant and there was a sign around her neck explaining that all the men of the band were, collectively, the baby’s father.

  Other bandits dreamed of getting together enough reis to buy themselves some land in a remote township where they could live for the rest of their lives under another name. João was never one to put money aside or make plans for the future. When the cangaço attacked a general store or a hamlet or obtained a good ransom for somebody it had kidnapped, after setting aside the share of the spoils that he would hand over to the coiteiros he’d commissioned to buy him weapons, ammunition, and medicines, João would divide the rest into equal shares for himself and each of his comrades. This largesse, his cleverness at setting up ambushes for the flying brigades or escaping from those that were set up for him, his courage and his ability to impose discipline made his men as faithful as hound dogs to him. They felt safe with him, and fairly treated. Even though he never forced them to face any risk that he himself did not confront, he did not coddle them in the slightest. If they fell asleep on guard duty, lagged behind on a march, or stole from a comrade, he flogged them. If one of them retreated when he had given orders to stand and fight, he marked him with his initials or lopped off one of his ears. He administered all punishments himself, coldly. And he was also the one who castrated traitors.

  Though they feared him, his men also seemed to love him, perhaps because João had never left a comrade behind after an armed encounter. The wounded were carried off to some hideout in a hammock litter suspended from a tree trunk even when such an operation exposed the band to danger. João himself took care of them, and, if necessary, had a male nurse brought to the hideout by force to attend to the victim. The dead were also removed from the scene of combat so as to bury them in a spot where their bodies would not be profaned by the Guardsmen or by birds of prey. This and the infallible intuition with which he led his men in combat, breaking them up into separate groups that ran every which way so as to confuse the adversary, while others circled round and fell upon the enemy’s rear guard, or the ruses he came up with to break out when the band found itself encircled, enhanced his authority; he never found it difficult to recruit new members for his cangaço.

  His subordinates were intrigued by this taciturn, withdrawn leader different from themselves. He wore the same sombrero and the same sandals as they, but did not share their fondness for brilliantine and perfume—the very first thing they pounced on in the stores—nor did he wear rings on every finger or cover his chest with medals. His knapsacks had fewer decorations than those of the rawest recruit. His one weakness was wandering cantadores, whom he never allowed his men to mistreat. He looked after their needs with great deference, asked them to recite something, and listened to them very gravely, never interrupting them in the middle of a story. Whenever he ran into the Gypsy’s Circus he had them give a performance for him and sent them on their way with presents.

  Someone once heard Satan João say that he had seen more people die from alcohol, which ruined men’s aims and made them knife each other for stupid reasons, than from sickness or drought. As though to prove him right, the day that Captain Geraldo Macedo and his flying brigade surprised him, the entire cangaço was drunk. The captain, who had been nicknamed Bandit-Chaser, had come out into the backlands to hunt João down after the latter had attacked a committee from the Bahia Autonomist Party, which had just held a meeting with the Baron de Canabrava on his hacienda in Calumbi. João ambushed the committee, sent its bodyguards running in all directions, and relieved the politicians of valises, horses, clothing, and money. The baron himself sent a message to Captain Macedo o
ffering him a special reward for the cangaceiro’s head.

  It happened in Rosário, a town of half a hundred dwellings where Satan João’s men turned up early one morning in February. A short time before, they had had a bloody encounter with a rival band, Pajeú’s cangaço, and merely wanted to rest. The townspeople agreed to give them food, and João paid for what they consumed, as well as for all the blunderbusses, shotguns, gunpowder, and bullets that he had been able to lay his hands on. The people of Rosário invited the cangaceiros to stay on for the feast they would be having, two days later, to celebrate the marriage of a cowboy and the daughter of a townsman. The chapel had been decorated with flowers and the local men and women were wearing their best clothes that noon when Father Joaquim arrived from Cumbe to officiate at the wedding. The little priest was so terrified at finding cangaceiros present that all of them burst out laughing as he stammered and stuttered and stumbled over his words. Before saying Mass, he heard confession from half the town, including several of the bandits. Then he attended the fireworks show and the open-air lunch, under an arbor, and drank toasts to the bride and groom along with the townspeople. But afterward he was so insistent on returning to Cumbe that João suddenly became suspicious. He forbade anyone to budge outside Rosário and he himself explored all the country round about, from the mountain side of the town to the one opposite, a bare plateau. He found no sign of danger. He returned to the wedding celebration, frowning. His men, drunk by now, were dancing and singing amid the townfolk.