• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2251 0

and the bare stretch of ground that was the village square, in which there was nothing but a handful of coconut palms and a wooden cross. The whites stayed on their haciendas round about the village and this proximity was not coexistence but rather a permanent state of undeclared war that periodically took the form of reciprocal incursions, violent incidents, sackings, and murders. The few hundred Indians of Mirandela went around half naked, speaking a local dialect seasoned with little spurts of spit, and hunting with bows and poisoned arrows. They were surly, wretched specimens of humanity, who kept entirely to themselves within their circle of huts thatched with icó leaves, with their maize fields between, and so poor that neither the bandits nor the flying brigades of Rural Police entered Mirandela to sack it. They had become heathens again. It had been years since the Capuchin and Lazarist Fathers had been able to preach a Holy Mission in the village, for the moment the missionaries appeared in the vicinity, the Indians and their wives and children vanished into the caatinga, till the Fathers finally gave up and resigned themselves to preaching the mission only for the whites. Abbot João doesn’t remember when it was that the Counselor decided to go to Mirandela. For him the disciples’ time of wandering is not linear, with a before and an after, but circular, a repetition of interchangeable days and events. He does remember, on the other hand, how it came about. After having restored the chapel of Pombal, the Counselor took off toward the North one morning, heading across a succession of razor-backed hills that led directly to the Indian redoubt, where a family of whites had just been massacred. No one said a word to him, for no one, ever, questioned the Counselor’s decisions. But during the long day’s journey, with the blazing sun seemingly trepanning their skulls, many of the disciples, Abbot João among them, thought that they would be greeted by a deserted village or by a shower of arrows.

Neither thing happened. The Counselor and his followers climbed up the mountainside at dusk and entered the village in procession, singing hymns in praise of Mary. The Indians received them without taking fright, without hostility, in an attitude of apparent indifference. They saw the pilgrims install themselves on the open space in front of their huts, light a bonfire, and throng round it. Then they saw them enter the Church of the Ascension of Our Lord and pray at the stations of the cross, and then later, from their cabins and little animal pens and fields, those men whose faces were covered with ritual scars and green-and-white stripes listened to the Counselor give his evening counsel. They heard him speak of the Holy Spirit, which is freedom, and of Mary’s sorrow, extol the virtues of frugality, poverty, and sacrifice, explain that every suffering offered to God becomes a reward in the life to come. They then heard the pilgrims of the Blessed Jesus recite a Rosary to the Mother of Christ. And the next morning, still without having approached them, still without giving them so much as a smile or making a single friendly gesture, the Indians saw them leave by the path to the cemetery, where they stopped to tidy the graves and cut the grass.

“The Counselor was inspired by the Father to go to Mirandela that time,” Abbot João says. “He sowed a seed and it finally flowered.”

Catarina doesn’t say anything, but João knows that she is remembering, as he is, how one day some hundred Indians suddenly turned up in Belo Monte, bringing with them, along the road from Bendengó, their belongings, their old people, some of them on stretchers, their wives and their children. Years had gone by, but no one doubted that the surprising appearance of these half-naked people daubed with paint meant that they were returning the Counselor’s visit. The Cariris entered Canudos, accompanied by a white from Mirandela, Antônio the Pyrotechnist, as though they were entering their own house, and installed themselves in the open country adjoining the Mocambo