Backlands (27 page)

Not surprisingly, this alarming appeal went unheeded. Nothing was done until mid-1887, when the diocese of Bahia again intervened, with a request to the provincial authorities to “restrain the individual Antônio Vicente Maciel, who with his subversive activities does harm to church and state and takes people away from their daily lives to follow him, trying to convince them that he is the Holy Ghost.”

With this information in hand, the provincial judge resorted to a minister of the empire, asking that a place be found for the madman in the insane asylum in Rio. The minister replied with a denial of the request and the notable justification that there were no vacancies in that institution. The magistrate then informed the local prelate of the admirable way in which the government had disposed of the matter. Thus began and ended the legal measures that were taken under the empire.

The Counselor continued unchallenged on his perverted mission to fire up the populace. The first legends began to circulate. We will not try to record all of them.

At the time he was establishing the settlement of Bom Jesus, astounded eyewitnesses report that when the beautiful church was being built, ten workers were straining to lift a heavy beam. The Predestined One stepped on the beam and ordered two of them to lift it along with him on it. They succeeded in doing what all the others had not been able to do, without the least exertion.

I heard another strange story from people who had not allowed themselves to be converted to his fanaticism. He arrived at Monte Santo and decided there should be a procession up the mountain to the very last chapel at the summit. The ceremony began in the afternoon. The crowd made its way slowly up the steep slope, intoning prayers and pausing humbly at each station. He led the way, a stern and sinister figure, his head uncovered, his long hair blowing in the wind, and leaning on his signature staff. Night fell. The penitents lit their torches and the procession along the silhouette of the mountain was like a luminous highway weaving its way up to the top.

When he reached the holy cross at the summit, Antônio Conselheiro was out of breath and he sat on the first step of the rough stone stairway, eyes raised ecstatically to the heavens, his gaze lost in the stars. The first wave of faithful began to overflow into the small chapel, while others remained outside, kneeling on the sharp rocks. The pensive mystic arose, for he was intolerant of weariness. As his followers opened a path for him he made his way into the chapel, his eyes lowered and head bowed, still panting for breath. As he approached the main altar, he raised his pale face, which was framed by his wild hair. A tremor went through the terrified crowd. Two bloody tears were rolling slowly down the smooth face of the Holy Virgin.

These and other legends still circulate through the backlands. It is only natural. Antônio Conselheiro was a type of antihero, whose sick mysticism was a compendium of all the superstitions and errors that have debased our nationality. He attracted the people of the backlands, not because he dominated them, but because their aberrations dominated him. The environment worked in his favor, and he had a grasp of the practicality of the absurd. He obeyed the irresistible finality of old ancestral impulses and while gripped by these impulses he had the outward appearance of a confident evangelist. It was this confidence that disguised his insanity.

One day the vicar of a backlands parish saw a man approach who was extremely thin and exhausted. He had long, unkempt hair; a beard that trailed to his chest; and the traditional figure of a pilgrim, who lacked not even the crucifix hanging from his girdle. His robe was dirty and tattered and he carried a leather water pouch and a long staff. The priest offered him food, but he would not take more than a crust of bread. He was offered a bed but he preferred a wood plank on which he lay down with no cover, fully clothed, still wearing his sandals.

The next morning this strange guest, who had said little until then, asked the priest if he would give him permission to preach at the feast day that was going to be celebrated in the church.

“But, Brother, you are not ordained, and the church does not allow it.”

“Let me make the
via sacra
.”

“I cannot allow that, either—I must do it myself,” the curate replied again.

The wanderer simply stared at him for a while and then wordlessly removed a cloth from his tunic and wiped the dust from his sandals, a classic and peaceful protest of the apostles.

As the reactions against him grew more negative, however, he became bitter, and the unconditional master would show irritation whenever his will was thwarted. Once, at Natuba, when the curate with whom he had a disagreement was absent, he ordered that stones be carried to him for the repair of the church. When the priest returned and confronted this invasion of his sacred domain, he was very angry and decided to put an end to this disorder. He was a practical man; he appealed to human greed. At the city council meeting a few days before, an order had gone out to property owners to pave the sidewalks in front of their homes. So the priest offered to the people the stones that had been collected for the chapel. This time the Counselor did not limit himself to wiping the dust off his sandals. As he left town, he uttered his first curse.

Sometime later, at the request of this same priest, a local politician asked him to return. The church had fallen into ruins, the cemetery was grown over, and the parish had sunk into poverty. If the place was to be restored it would require someone who could handle the credulous local population. The missionary deigned to accept the invitation but he did so with conditions and an arrogance that was new to his formerly peaceful character. He remembered the insult that he had received. His personality was changing for the worse.

He was against the republic and he preached rebellion against the new laws. From 1893 onward, he assumed a combative stance that was entirely new.

This came out of a trivial incident.

When the autonomy of the municipalities was decreed, local chambers in the interior of Bahia posted on the traditional bulletin boards, which were a substitute for the press, regulations regarding the collection of taxes and other public information. Antônio Conselheiro was in Bom Conselho when these new procedures were instituted. He was irritated by these new intrusions of the government and he planned a quick retaliation. He gathered the people on a market day and, amidst seditious shouts and the popping of firecrackers, he ordered the bulletin boards to be burned in a bonfire in the square. Raising his voice over this “auto-da-fé” that the authorities had neglected to prevent, he began to preach open insurrection against national laws.

He soon realized the gravity of his behavior and he left town, going north on the Monte Santo road.

The event had repercussions in the capital, and numerous detachments of police were sent out to apprehend the dissident and to dissolve the groups of troublemakers, who were no more than about two hundred men. The troops reached them in Massete, a remote and sterile piece of land between Tucano and Cumbe, near the Ovó Mountains. The thirty well-armed police immediately began to attack the ragged pilgrims, confident they would wipe them out in the first round. But they found that they were facing a band of fearless
jagunços
. The result was that they were thoroughly beaten and they fled, following their commanding officer who was the first to turn heel.

This minor skirmish was unfortunately to be repeated many times on a broader scale.

Having accomplished this feat, the pilgrims resumed their march, following the prophet on his hegira. They no longer sought out the towns, as before, but made the desert their destination. Their confrontation with the police meant that more aggressive persecution was in store for them and they felt that they could deal better with their new enemies in the wild terrain of the
sertão
. In fact, a fresh contingent of eighty regular army troops again set out from Bahia. They did not go any farther than Serrinha, where they turned back without entering the backlands.

Antônio Conselheiro, however, had no illusions about the sudden retreat that saved him. He gathered his ragged band of faithful, which grew larger every day, along the far trails of the
sertão
, this time with a specific direction in mind.

He knew the
sertão
. He had traveled it on an uninterrupted pilgrimage for twenty years. He knew the isolated places where the police could never find them and he was marking these hiding places in preparation for the evils that lay ahead. He unwaveringly steered his course due north.

The believers followed him. They did not ask where they were going. They marched for long days on end over steep slopes, sterile tablelands, and empty plains. They walked to the slow cadence of their hymns and the measured pace of the prophet.

Canudos in the 1890s was a cattle ranch on the banks of the Vaza-Barris and consisted of around five hundred mud-and-thatch shacks. As early as 1876 a priest who went there, as the vicar of Cumbe and others had gone, to tend to the spiritual needs of this totally isolated population, reported that the idle and suspect residents of the still productive ranch were, “armed to the teeth and engaged almost exclusively in drinking sugarcane liquor and smoking strange clay pipes with long stems more than a meter long” made of a reed called
canudo-de-pito
from the riverbank.

Thus, even before the arrival of the Counselor, this remote settlement whose name is easily explained harbored the germs of disorder and crime like the majority of the hamlets in our backlands. When he arrived there in 1893, the place was in complete decline, its outbuildings abandoned, its dwellings vacant, and the ancient main house, located on a spur of Mount Favela, was roofless and in ruins, with only the outer walls standing.

The revival and rapid growth of the town began in that year. This unstable settlement of wandering backwoodsmen, clustered around the old existing church, was in a short time to become transformed into the mud-walled
jagunço
Troy. It would become a holy site, flanked by mountains, where the long arm of the detested government could never reach them. Its curious topography became in the imagination of those simple people the first wide, steep step of the stairway to heaven.

It is not surprising that successive bands of settlers coming from all directions from the most remote towns and settlements would converge on this place. The baron of Jeremoabo records: “Some places in this and neighboring districts, and even from the state of Sergipe, were depopulated due to the great flow of families into Canudos, the site chosen by Antônio Conselheiro as his center of operations. It was painful to see them put up everything they owned for sale at the fairs for next to nothing: horses, cattle, goats, as well as their homes, their land, and their possessions. Their overwhelming desire was to sell everything and take their earnings to the saintly Counselor.”

And thus it was that many homes were dissolved. A constant flow of migrants came from Inhambupe, Tucano, Cumbe, Itapicurú, Bom Conselho, Natuba, Maçacará, Monte Santo, Jeremoabo, Uauá and environs, as well as Entre Rios, Mundo Novo, Jacobina, Itabaiana, and other remote locations. The rare travelers who risked crossing the
sertão
would run into successive groups of the faithful, burdened with their few possessions, carrying sticks of furniture, baskets, and home altars to this chosen place. Traveling alone at first, these bands would meet at crossroads and then continue on together until they finally reached their common destination at Canudos.

The settlement grew at a dizzying pace, spreading over the hills. The improvised dwellings were so crude that the homeless crowd was able to put up as many as a dozen a day. And as this huge shantytown grew, its physical characteristics seemed to reflect the moral character of the social elements that took refuge there. It was the materialization of a collective insanity. It was a living document with implications that could not be ignored, a piece of corpus delicti evidence of the derangement of a population. It was done at random, in a state of obsession.

This monstrous aggregation of mud huts clearly defined the sinister civitas of wrongdoing. The new town arose in a few weeks, a city of ruins. It was born old. Seen from a distance, spread out over the hills over an enormous area, split by ravines and rugged slopes, it had the appearance of a city that has been shaken and thrown about by an earthquake. Streets could not be distinguished. Instead there was a desperate maze of alleys, barely separating the chaotic jumble of hastily built hovels facing every point of the compass, their roofs pointing in all directions, as if they had been feverishly constructed in a night by a crowd of lunatics.

The hovels were a grotesque parody of ancient Roman dwellings. Made of sticks and divided into three tiny compartments, they had a narrow hallway; an atrium that served as a kitchen, dining room, and living room; and an alcove or bedroom on one side, a dark hole barely visible through a low, narrow door. Covered with layers of clay about eight inches thick, spread over layers of
icó
branches, they looked like the shacks of the ancient Gauls from the time of Caesar. They were something between a cave and a house. If our dwellings are a sign of our evolutionary status, then the clay huts of the
jagunços
were deplorably similar to the wigwam of the redskins. They are equally uncomfortable and repugnantly destitute, reflecting not so much poverty as racial decrepitude.

When the eye became accustomed to the semidarkness of those cramped quarters, one could make out a few odd pieces of roughly hewn furniture: a low bench, two or three footstools, an equal number of cedarwood boxes or baskets, a food container suspended from the ceiling, and the hammocks. That was the extent of the furniture. There were no beds or tables. Hanging in the corners were a few minimal accessories: the
bogó
, or leather pouch for carrying water; wicker baskets made of liana fiber; the
aiós,
hunting bags made of caroa fiber. At the far end of the single room, the visitor would see a crude altar, with the same unfinished appearance as other objects in the room—poorly carved saints and images that symbolized the mestizo religion with its tendencies toward idol worship: Africanized Saint Anthonies looking like gross fetishes, and Blessed Virgins as ugly as Megaeras.