The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [312]
The nearsighted journalist didn’t allow him to go on this time either. “They didn’t know what it was, but they were monarchists nonetheless—in their own way, which no monarchist would have understood,” he blurted, blinking. “They knew that the monarchy had abolished slavery. The Counselor praised Princess Isabel for having granted the slaves their freedom. He seemed convinced that the monarchy fell because it abolished slavery. Everyone in Canudos believed that the Republic was against abolition, that it wanted to restore slavery.”
“Do you think my friends and I planted such a notion in the Counselor’s head?” The baron smiled again. “If anyone had proposed any such thing to us we would have taken him for an imbecile.”
“That, nonetheless, explains many things,” the journalist said, his voice rising. “Such as the hatred of the census. I racked my brains, trying to understand the reason for it, and that’s the explanation. Race, color, religion. Why would the Republic want to know what race and color people are, if not to enslave blacks again? And why ask their religion if not to identify believers before the slaughter?”
“Is that the misunderstanding that explains Canudos?” the baron asked.
“One of them.” The nearsighted journalist panted. “I knew that the jagunços hadn’t been taken in by just any petty politician. I merely wanted to hear you say so.”
“Well, there you are,” the baron answered. What would his friends have said had they been able to foresee such a thing? The humble men and women of the sertão rising up in arms to attack the Republic, with the name of the Infanta Dona Isabel on their lips! No, such a thing was too farfetched for it to have occurred to any Brazilian monarchist, even in his dreams.
Abbot João’s messenger catches up with Antônio Vilanova on the outskirts of Jueté, where the former storekeeper is lying in ambush with fourteen jagunços, waiting for a convoy of cattle and goats. The news the messenger brings is so serious that Antônio decides to return to Canudos before he has finished the task that has brought him there: securing food supplies. It is one that he has set out to do three times now since the soldiers arrived, and been successful each time: twenty-five head of cattle and several dozen kids the first time, eight head the second, and a dozen the third, plus a wagonload of manioc flour, coffee, sugar, and salt. He has insisted on leading these raids to procure food for the jagunços himself, claiming that Abbot João, Pajeú, Pedrão, and Big João are indispensable in Belo Monte. For three weeks now he has been attacking the convoys that leave from Queimadas and Monte Santo to bring provisions to A Favela via Rosário.
It is a relatively easy operation, which the former storekeeper, in his methodical and scrupulous way and with his talent for organization, has perfected to the point that it has become a science. He owes his success above all to the information he receives, to the men serving as the soldiers’ guides and porters, the majority of whom are jagunços who have hired themselves out to the army or been conscripted in various localities, from Tucano to Itapicuru. They keep him posted on the convoy’s movements and help him decide where to provoke the stampede, the key to the whole operation. In the place that they have chosen—usually the bottom of a ravine or a section of the mountains with dense brush—and always at night, Antônio and his men suddenly descend on the herd, raising a terrible racket with their blunderbusses, setting off sticks of dynamite, and blowing their whistles so that the animals will panic and bolt off into the caatinga. As Antônio and his band distract the troops by sniping at them, the guides and porters round up all the animals they can and herd them along shortcuts that they’ve decided on beforehand—the shortest and safest trail, the one from Calumbi, has yet to be discovered by the soldiers—to Canudos. Antônio and the others catch up with them later.
This is what would have happened