The Violent Land (18 page)

The old man, who had lost his prominence in the gathering, thanks to Lucia's interruption, once more brought the conversation back to the events of the night.

“A
jagunço
,
” he said, “is going to be worth his weight in gold now. If the fracas is starting, the man who's a good shot is going to get rich. He can get himself a cacao grove.”

“I'm with the Badarós,” said Juquinha. “They've got the upper hand in politics, and I'm sure they're going to win. Sinhô and Juca are a couple of real men.”

“They're no match for Colonel Horacio,” said one of the others.

One man rose and left the room.

“Chico is going to offer his services already,” Juquinha remarked. “There's no rumpus that he's not mixed up in it. He's Colonel Horacio's man.”

A number of the other visitors now took their departure, being anxious to spread the news the old man had brought. They scattered out through the streets of Ferradas, which were not many in number, going from one acquaintance to another. The man from Ceará did not know what to make of it all.

“In this country,” he said, “all they talk about is death.”

“Death comes cheap here,” declared the old man sententiously. “You ought to be thankful you're getting out in time.”

“Are you running away?” asked one of the women.

“I'm getting out while I can.”

Juquinha laughed: “You're leaving just when things are getting good.”

The women who had gone home to put some clothes on now returned to the house. One of them brought some withered flowers which a man who occasionally came to see her had given her a couple of days before; she deposited them at the foot of the corpse. More men came in also, eager to hear the news; for word had gone through the town and the tale had grown with the telling. It was said that the corpse was that of one of the lads who had accompanied Firmo and that he had died of a bullet intended for the latter. By a miracle Firmo had escaped a shot fired by Negro Damião. Others, again, asserted that it was Firmo's own body that had arrived.

Friar Bento now came into the house of prostitution, and one of the women who had nothing on but a nightgown ran out hastily in search of a more suitable garment.

“God be with you,” said the man of God from the doorway, in his foreign-sounding voice. He then came down the hall, for first of all he wanted to know the news. After the old man had repeated the entire story in a humble voice, the friar went into the front room where the body was. Violeta with some embarrassment explained to him their money troubles, then made the necessary arrangements with the sacristan, giving him the twenty-milreis note, which had been the mulatto girl's contribution, and a few additional coins. Friar Bento thereupon began the prayers for the dead, men and women muttering the responsories:

“Ora pro nobis.”

Lucia wept softly as the three sisters stood huddled together. The young hammock-bearer still had his eyes on Maria. Was it not possible that she would consent to sleep with him this very day, after the burial? Had she not slept with Colonel Teodoro on the night after Pedro's funeral? Mechanically he repeated with the others:

“Ora pro nobis.”

The friar was running through the litany when from the doorway someone shouted:

“There comes Juca Badaró!”

They all ran out to the street, where Juca, accompanied by Antonio Victor and two other lads, was galloping by in a cloud of dust, along the road to Tabocas. Practically all of them, even to the sacristan, hastened out for a glimpse of the cavalcade. Friar Bento, leaning over the corpse and craning his neck, looked on from the window, without stopping his prayers. Only the three sisters and the young man who desired Maria remained with him beside the body. Juca Badaró and his
cabras
were by this time on the far side of town; and as they passed the big warehouse where Horacio's dried cacao was stored, they fired their rifles in the air as those in the street turned and fled to the safety of the house. The prayers for the dead were lost in a babble of voices. The young man was drawing near to Maria.

Years afterwards, when someone was passing through the town of Ferradas in the company of an old inhabitant, a first settler who knew the tales of the land of cacao, the latter would be almost certain to remark, as he pointed to the houses and to the streets whose mud had disappeared beneath the cobblestone pavement:

“This place was once the worst bandits' den in the country. A lot of blood flowed here in Ferradas back in the early days, when they were just starting to raise cacao.”

The town of Ferradas was Horacio's fief, being situated in the middle of his plantations. For some years it marked the boundaries of the cacao country. When men began planting the new crop at Rio do Braço, they little thought that it would end by doing away with the sugar plantations, the rum stills, and the coffee groves that were then to be found in the neighbourhood of Rio do Braço, Banco da Victoria, and Agua Branca, the three settlements that stood on the banks of the Cachoeira River, which empties into the ocean at Ilhéos. The cacao not only did away with the rum stills, the small sugar plantations, and the coffee groves; it even invaded the forest. And in its path sprang up the town of Tabocas and, farther along, that of Ferradas, when Horacio's men had felled the woods on the left bank of the stream.

For some time Ferradas was the most distant of the settlements from Ilhéos. It was from here that the
conquistadores
of the new land set out. Now and then, breaking a path through the forest, travellers would come from Itapira, from Barra do Rio de Contas, which lay just beyond the cacao region. Ferradas became a business centre, small in size but full of stir and bustle. Its growth, however, was destined to stop with the conquest of the forest of Sequeiro Grande, on the edge of which the town of Pirangy was to rise, a city built in two years' time. Long afterwards, with the rapid spread of cacao as a crop, Baforé, then a hamlet on the backlands trail, was to grow into a town and to exchange its name for the more euphonious one of Guaracy. But at the time of the conquest Ferradas was important, possibly even more important than Tabocas. There was talk to the effect that a branch line of the railroad was to be extended there, a project that occasioned much discussion in the taverns and in the apothecary's shop. But the railroad never came; for Ferradas happened to be in Horacio's political domain; he was its absolute ruler; and inasmuch as he was a
seabrista
—that is to say, a partisan of Seabra's—he found himself in the opposition, and the government, accordingly, would not approve the plan of the English to build a branch line to the town. And when Seabra finally did come to power and Horacio was on top, he was by that time much more concerned with having the railroad extended to Pirangy, on the edge of Sequeiro Grande.

Ferradas remained but a frontier outpost, but in those days its streets were thronged, it did a thriving trade, it was known to the big exporting houses in Bahia and was on the itinerary of the travelling salesmen. The latter would arrive on horseback, their sample-cases being carried by a train of burros; and for some days thereafter their white linen suits would stand out among the khaki ones worn by the natives, or
grapiúnas
as they were called. The salesmen would make love to the unmarried girls of the town, would dance when dances were held, would sip lukewarm beer while complaining loudly about the lack of ice, and would do a big business. And later, upon their return from their travels, in the cafés of Bahia, they would tell wild yarns of this town that was populated with adventurers and
jagunços,
where there was only one hotel, where the streets were paved with mud, but where every barefoot inhabitant had a pocketful of money.

“I never saw so many five-hundred-milreis notes in my life as I did in Ferradas,” they would say.

This was the highest-denomination banknote at that time. No one in the town, to hear the visitors tell it, had any change, and small coins were practically nonexistent. And they told other foolish stories, as travelling salesmen do.

“When anyone comes to Ferradas, Chico Martins, who runs the hotel, puts sugar in the bed where the guest is going to sleep.”

The listener would be duly astonished at this: “Sugar? But what for?”

“To attract the ants, and the ants eat the bedbugs.”

Smallpox and typhoid were endemic, and the best house in Ferradas was not, properly speaking, in the town, but rather in the forest. This was the pesthouse where smallpox patients were quarantined. It was said that no one ever came back from there. The infirmary was kept by an aged Negro who had had the black-pox and had been cured of it. No one would set foot in the strip of forest where the pesthouse stood. To the entire population it was terror-inspiring.

Ferradas had grown around the cacao warehouse that Horacio had built there. He needed a depository for the crop from his various plantations. And so dwellings had sprung up beside the warehouse, and in a short time a street with two or three intersecting lanes had been opened through the mud, and the first prostitutes and the first salesmen had begun to arrive. A Syrian had opened an inn, and a couple of barbers had come from Tabocas to set up shop, a fair was held on Saturdays, and Horacio would kill a pair of oxen and send their flesh in to be sold. Pack-drivers who came with a load of dried cacao from outlying plantations would spend the night in Ferradas, keeping close watch on their burros on account of the danger of cacao thieves.

But it was in connection with the appointment of a local police officer that the town first really came into the public eye. The prefect at Ilhéos, upon the insistence of Juca Badaró, had appointed a deputy for Ferradas, which was in itself an insult to Horacio, since it represented an interference with his jurisdiction. The authorities insisted that this was a town, and it made no difference if it did happen to lie within Horacio's domain. The administration of justice must be established there and an end must be put to all the assassinations and robberies that were constantly occurring. The deputy arrived one afternoon, accompanied by three sorry, anaemic-looking police troopers. They were mounted when they came, but they went back that night on foot and minus their clothes, after having received a terrific beating.

In connection with this incident the pro-government newspaper in Ilhéos printed an attack on Horacio, whereupon the opposition paper demanded to know “why a deputy should be appointed for Ferradas, when nothing was done about paving the streets or lighting the street corners.” Such improvements as the town possessed had been due to Colonel Horacio da Silveira. If the government wished to intervene in local affairs, why then did it not make some contribution toward the betterment of the community? Ferradas was a law-abiding place and had no need of a police officer; what it needed was paving, lights, and a water system.

But the arguments brought forward by the opposition press, representing Horacio's interests, proved unavailing. The prefect, who all the time was being spurred on by Juca, appointed another deputy. In this instance it was an individual who was known as a “bad man”—Vicente Garangau, long one of the Badarós'
jagunços
. He arrived with a dozen soldiers and much loud talk of what was going to happen. The next day he arrested one of Horacio's labourers who had kicked up a rumpus in a whorehouse. Horacio sent word demanding the fellow's release, and Vicente replied that Horacio himself should come and free the man. Horacio came, the man was freed, and Vicente Garangau was killed along the Macados road as he sought to hide on Maneca Dantas's plantation. They stripped him of his skin, cut off his ears and testicles, and forwarded these mementoes to the prefect in Ilhéos. From that time forth there was no police officer in Ferradas, for the very good reason that Juca Badaró could not find anyone who would take the job.

Horacio had had a chapel built and had brought down a friar to officiate in it. Friar Bento was more by way of being a
conquistador
of the land than a servant of Christ. His one passion was the nuns' school for girls which was being built under tremendous difficulties at Ilhéos, and all the money that he could scrape together he sent on to the sisters for the good work. For this reason he was not well liked in the town. His parishioners would greatly have preferred that he pay more attention to Ferradas; according to them, he should have been thinking of building a better church than the one at Tabocas, to take the place of the chapel. But all that Friar Bento could think of was the school, which was to be a monumental affair on Conquista Hill, in the city of Ilhéos. It was his own pet scheme, and he had had much trouble in persuading the Archbishop of Bahia to send the nuns down. If he had accepted the chaplaincy at Ferradas, it was merely with the object of raising all the money he could there. He was horrified by the indifference which the colonels displayed toward the upbringing of their daughters. They gave much thought to the education of their sons in medicine, the law, or engineering, the three professions that had come to take the place of the nobility of old; but as for their daughters, it was enough for them to learn to read and to sew.

The short of the matter was, Ferradas could not forgive Friar Bento for his utter lack of interest in the place. They accordingly began telling stories about him, one of which was to the effect that he slept with his cook, a young mulatto girl who had come from Horacio's plantation. And when she gave birth to a child, despite the fact that everybody knew that its father was Virgulino, who worked for the Syrian, they all stoutly maintained that it was Friar Bento's bastard. The friar knew of these tales, but he merely shrugged his shoulders; the thing that he was after was money for his school. Secretly he had a contempt for his parishioners, one and all, whom he looked upon as hopelessly lost, a lot of thieves and assassins, lawless folk with no respect for God or man. According to him, there was not a single inhabitant who had not long ago won for himself an eternity in hell. And he was in the habit of saying as much in his sermons at Sunday morning Mass, to the scant congregation that saw fit to attend.

This opinion held by the friar was more or less general throughout the cacao region, where Ferradas had become a synonym for violent death. But if the brand of Catholicism represented by the monk had little appeal for the residents of the town, spiritualism on the other hand flourished. The “believing ones” were in the habit of meeting at the house of Eufrosina, a medium who had begun to acquire a reputation in those parts; it was there that they assembled to listen to messages from dead relatives and friends. Seated in her chair, Eufrosina would begin stammering unintelligibly, until one of those present recognized the familiar voice of the dead. It was said that long ago the spirits—and especially the spirit of an Indian, who was Eufrosina's “guide”—had predicted the trouble that was to occur over the forest of Sequeiro Grande. These prophecies were much talked about, and no one in Ferradas was surrounded with so much respect as was the mulatto with the skinny figure as she made her way through the muddy streets.

Her “séances” having proved so successful, Eufrosina then began treating diseases by spiritualism, with comparative success. This was an encroachment on the domain of Dr. Jessé Freitas, the physician at Tabocas, who came over to Ferradas once a week to look after the sick and who was also called in on nights of gun-play; and he now joined forces with Friar Bento against Eufrosina. For she was taking his patients away; fever-sufferers were now going to the medium instead of the doctor. Friar Bento took the matter up with Horacio, but the latter did nothing about it. It was for this reason, so they said, that the friar had made up that story about Horacio and the spiritualist séance; for the monk—according to Ferradas—had a venomous tongue. Anyway, it was after this that he began spreading the story.

At a certain séance in Eufrosina's house, so ran the tale, they had sought to summon the spirit of Mundinho de Almeida, one of the earliest
conquistadores
of the region and the most terrible of them all, whose fame, though he had been dead for years, persisted—they still spoke of him as the very symbol of wickedness. Eufrosina had done all she could to “materialize” him, but without success. It was a long and exhausting struggle, with the medium making a tremendous effort and fairly splitting herself with her tremblings and her trances. Finally, after more than an hour of these exertions, when those present had grown weary of so much concentration, Mundinho de Almeida appeared, very tired and in a great hurry. Let them tell him what it was they wanted and be quick about it, for he had to return at once.

“But why all the rush, brother?” inquired the medium in a dulcet tone.

“We're very busy in hell these days; everybody's very busy,” was the spirit's churlish response; and by his crustiness the older ones vowed that they did indeed recognize him as none other than Mundinho de Almeida.

“But why are you so busy?” Eufrosina insisted, giving voice to the general curiosity.

“We're piling up firewood all day long. Everybody's working, sinners and devils alike.”

“And why so much firewood, my friend?”

“We're making a bonfire for the day when Horacio arrives.”

Such were the tales told in the town of Ferradas, Horacio's fief, the bandits' den. From here it was that the grubbers of the land set out for the forest. It was a world of its own, a primitive and a barbarous one, whose sole ambition was money. Every day strangers arrived in quest of a fortune. From Ferradas the newly opened highways spread out over the cacao country. From Ferradas Horacio's men set out to enter the forest of Sequeiro Grande.

On this particular day the town was abuzz with the news that the old man with the corpse had brought. Juca Badaró had already passed through on his way to Tabocas, but he would not be able to return by that route; he would have to take another road home. For from morning to afternoon Ferradas had put itself upon a war footing.
Jagunços
were pouring in to guard Horacio's warehouse; and in the taverns men drank more rum than usual. Early that night Horacio came.