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By Root 2082 0

’s trail, going up and down a sandy, reddish-colored terrain, with scrub of thorny mandacarus and famished flocks of sheep poking about in the withered leaves. Everyone had seen him pass by, the Sunday before he had prayed in this church, preached in that public square, slept alongside those rocks. They finally found him, seven leagues from Tucano, in a settlement called Masseté, a cluster of adobe huts with round roof tiles in the spurs of the Serra de Ovó. It was dusk; they caught sight of women with water jugs on their heads, and heaved a sigh of relief that their search was nearly over. The Counselor was spending the night with Severino Vianna, a farmer who had a maize field a kilometer outside the settlement. The police trotted out there, amid juazeiro trees with sharp-edged branches and thickets of velame that irritated their skin. When they arrived, in near-darkness, they saw a dwelling made of palings and a swarm of amorphous creatures crowded around someone who was doubtless the man they were looking for. No one fled, no one began yelling and shouting on spying their uniforms, their rifles.

Were there a hundred of them, a hundred fifty, two hundred? There were as many men as women, and the majority of them, to judge from the garments they were wearing, appeared to have come from the poorest of the poor. In the eyes of all of them—so the police officers who returned to Bahia were later to tell their wives, their sweethearts, the whores they slept with, their buddies—was a look of indomitable determination. But in reality they did not have time to observe them or to identify the ringleader, for the moment the sergeant in charge ordered them to hand over the man known as the Counselor, the mob attacked them, an act of utter foolhardiness in view of the fact that the police had rifles while they were armed only with sticks, sickles, stones, knives, and a couple of shotguns. But everything happened so fast that before they knew it the police found themselves surrounded, dispersed, pursued, beaten up, and injured, as they heard themselves being called “Republicans!” as though the word were an insult. They managed to shoulder their rifles and shoot, but even when men and women in rags fell to the ground, with their chests riddled with bullets or their heads blown off, nothing daunted the mob and soon the police from Bahia found themselves fleeing, dazed and bewildered by this incomprehensible defeat. They were later to say that among their assailants there were not only the fanatics and madmen that they had expected but also hardened criminals such as Pajeú with the slashed face and the bandit whose acts of cruelty had earned him the nickname of Satan João. Three police officers were killed and left unburied, food for the carrion birds of the Serra de Ovó eight rifles disappeared. Another policeman was drowned in the Masseté. The pilgrims did not pursue them. Instead, they concerned themselves with burying their five dead and caring for the wounded, as others, kneeling at the Counselor’s feet, offered their thanks to God. Until far into the night, the sound of weeping and prayers for the dead could be heard amid the graves dug in Severino Vianna’s maize field.

When a second squad of Bahia Police, numbering sixty officers, better armed than the first, detrained in Serrinha, they discovered that there had been a subtle change in the attitude of the villagers toward men in uniform. For even though the enmity with which police were received in the towns when they came up into the hills to hunt bandits was nothing new to them, they had never been as certain as they were this time that obstacles would be deliberately put in their way. The provisions in the general stores had always just run out, even when they offered to pay a good price for them, and despite the high fee offered, no tracker in Serrinha would guide them. Nor was anyone able this time to give them the slightest lead as to the whereabouts of the band. And as the police staggered from Olhos D’Agua to Pedra Alta, from Tracupá to Tiririca and from there to Tucano