The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [32]
This idea was whirling round and round in my brain as Brother João Evangelista de Monte Marciano was telling me that, after preaching for seven days in Canudos, amid an atmosphere of silent hostility, he found himself being called a Freemason and a Protestant for urging the jagunços to return to their villages, and that as he pleaded with them to submit to the Republic, their passions became so inflamed that he was obliged to flee for his life from Canudos. “The Church has lost its authority there on account of a crazy man who spends his time making the whole mob work all day long building a stone temple.” I was unable to share his consternation and instead felt only happiness and sympathy for those men, thanks to whom, it would appear, there is being reborn from its ashes, in the backlands of Brazil, the Idea that the forces of reaction believe they have drowned in the blood of revolutions defeated in Europe. Till my next letter or never.
[IV]
When Lélis Piedades, the Baron de Canabrava’s barrister, officially notified the Tribunal of Salvador that the hacienda of Canudos had been invaded by thugs, the Counselor had been there for three months. The news soon spread throughout the sertão: the saint who had wandered the length and breadth of the land for a quarter of a century had put down roots in that place surrounded by stony hills called Canudos, after the pipes made of canudos—segments of sugarcane stalk—that the people who lived there used to smoke. The place was known to cowhands, for they often stopped with their cattle for the night on the banks of the Vaza-Barris. In the following weeks and months groups of the curious, of sinners, of the sick, of vagrants, of fugitives from justice, come from the North, the South, the East, and the West, were seen heading for Canudos with the presentiment or the hope that they would there find forgiveness, refuge, health, happiness.
On the morning after he and his followers arrived, the Counselor began to build a Temple, which, he said, would be made all of stone, with two very tall towers, and would be dedicated to the Blessed Jesus. He decided that it would be erected opposite the old Church of Santo Antônio, the chapel of the hacienda. “Let the rich raise their hands,” he said, preaching by the light of a bonfire in the town going up. “I raise mine. Because I am a son of God, who has given me an immortal soul that can earn heaven, the only true wealth, for itself. I raise them because the Father has made me poor in this life so that I may be rich in the next. Let the rich raise their hands!” In the shadows full of sparks a forest of upraised arms emerged then from amid the rags and the leather and the threadbare cotton blouses. They prayed before and after he gave his counsel and held processions amid the half-finished dwellings and the shelters made of bits of cloth and planks where they slept, and in the back-country night they could be heard shouting, Long live the Virgin and the Blessed Jesus and death to the Can and the Antichrist. A man from Mirandela, who made fireworks and set them off at fairs—Antônio the Pyrotechnist—was one of the first pilgrims to arrive, and from that time on, whenever there were processions in Canudos, set pieces were ignited and skyrockets burst overhead.
The Counselor directed the work on the Temple, with the advice and assistance of a master mason who had helped him restore many chapels and build the Church of the Blessed Jesus in Crisópolis from the ground up, and designated the penitents who would go out to quarry stones, sift sand, and haul timber. In the early evening, after a frugal meal—if he was not fasting—consisting of a crust of bread, a piece of fruit, a mouthful of boiled manioc, and a few sips