The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [29]
I did not go there to explore the terrain with a view to bringing to it one of those pedagogically violent messages that in the opinion of many comrades it is indispensable that we deliver to military barracks, convents, and all bastions of exploitation and superstition in general in order to break down the taboos with which these institutions are customarily surrounded in the minds of workers and demonstrate to them that they are vulnerable. (Do you remember the groups in Barcelona who advocated attacking convents so as to restore to the nuns, by impregnating them, their status as women that their sequestration had robbed them of?) I went to this monastery to converse with a certain Brother João Evangelista de Monte Marciano, for as fate would have it, I had chanced to read a curious Account of which he was the author.
A patient of Dr. José Batista de Sá Oliveira, whose book on craniometry I have already spoken to you of, and with whom I collaborate on occasion, he is a relative of the most powerful man in these parts: the Baron de Canabrava. As Dr. Oliveira was purging him for tapeworm, the man to whom I refer, Lélis Piedades, a barrister, recounted how a hacienda belonging to the baron has been occupied for nearly two years now by madmen who have turned it into a no-man’s-land. Lélis Piedades is the one entrusted with the responsibility of pleading before the courts for the return of the hacienda to the baron, in the name of the right of ownership, which the aforementioned baron naturally feels it his duty to defend with fervor. The fact that a group of the exploited has appropriated the property of an aristocrat is always pleasing news to the ears of a revolutionary, even when the poor in question are—as the barrister maintained while seated on the basin, pushing hard to expel the tapeworm already done in by chemistry—religious fanatics. But what made me prick up my ears was hearing all of a sudden that they reject civil marriage and practice something which Lélis Piedades calls “promiscuity,” but which anyone intimately acquainted with the ways of society will recognize as the institution of free love. “With proof of corruption such as that, the authorities will necessarily be obliged to expel the fanatics from the property.” The pettifogger’s proof consisted of the aforementioned Account, which he had obtained through collusion with the Church, to which he also lends his services. Brother João Evangelista de Monte Marciano had been sent to the hacienda by the Archbishop of Bahia, who had received depositions denouncing the heretical practices of its occupiers. The monk went to see what was going on in Canudos and returned very shortly, frightened and incensed by what he had seen.
His Account indicates as much, and there can be no doubt that for the Capuchin the experience was a bitter one. For a liberated mind what his Account suggests between its turgidly ecclesiastical lines is exciting. The instinct for freedom, which a class society stifles by way of those machines to crush what is inborn—families, schools, religion, and the state—guides the footsteps of these men who give every appearance of having rebelled, among other things, against that institution whose aim is to bridle feelings and desires. Their avowed reason being the refusal to obey the law permitting civil marriages, promulgated in Brazil following the fall of the Empire, the people of Canudos have taken to forming unions freely and to dissolving them freely, so long as both the man and the woman agree