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By Root 1957 0

’s hideout. Before the storekeeper could answer, he cuffed him so hard he sent him sprawling. “I know everything, you Christian dog. People have informed on you.” Neither Zé Faustino’s protestations of innocence nor Dona Angela’s pleas were of any avail. Lieutenant Macedo said that as a warning to coiteiros he’d shoot Zé Faustino at dawn if he didn’t reveal Silvino’s whereabouts. The storekeeper finally appeared to agree to do so. At dawn the next morning they left Custódia, with Zé Faustino leading the way, followed by Macedo’s thirty men, who were certain that they were going to take the bandits by surprise. But Zé Faustino managed to shake them after a few hours’ march and hurried back to Custódia to get Dona Angela and João and take them off with him, fearing that they would be made the target of reprisals. The lieutenant caught him as he was still packing a few things. He may have intended to kill only him, but he also shot Dona Angela to death when she tried to intervene. He grabbed João by the legs and knocked him out with one blow across the head with the barrel of his pistol. When João came to, he saw that the townspeople of Custódia were there, holding a wake over two coffins, with looks of remorse on their faces. He turned a deaf ear to their words of affection, and as he rubbed his hand over his bleeding face he told them, in a voice that suddenly was that of an adult—he was only twelve years old at the time—that he would come back someday to avenge his aunt and uncle, since those who were mourning them were their real murderers.

The thought of vengeance helped him survive the weeks he spent wandering aimlessly about a desert wasteland bristling with mandacarus. He could see black vultures circling overhead, waiting for him to collapse so as to fly down and tear him to bits. It was January, and not a drop of rain had fallen. João gathered dried fruits, sucked the sap of palm trees, and even ate a dead armadillo he found. Finally help was forthcoming from a goatherd who came upon him lying alongside a dry riverbed in a delirium, raving about lances, horses, and O Senhor de Bonfim. He revived him with a big cupful of milk and a few handfuls of raw brown sugar lumps that the youngster sucked. They journeyed on together for several days, heading for the high plateau of Angostura, where the goatherd was taking his flock. But, before they reached it, they were surprised late one afternoon by a party of men who could not be mistaken for anything but outlaws, with leather hats, cartridge belts made of jaguar skin, knapsacks embroidered with beads, blunderbusses slung over their shoulders, and machetes that hung down to their knees. There were six of them, and the leader, a cafuzo with kinky hair and a red bandanna around his neck, laughingly asked João, who had fallen to his knees and was begging him to take him with him, why he wanted to be a cangaceiro. “To kill National Guardsmen,” the youngster answered.

For João, a life then began that made a man of him in a very short time—“an evil man,” the people of the provinces that he traveled the length and breadth of in the next twenty years would add—as a hanger-on at first of parties of men whose clothes he washed, whose meals he prepared, whose buttons he sewed back on, or whose lice he picked, and later on as an accomplice of their villainy, then after that as the best marksman, tracker, knife fighter, coverer of ground, and strategist of the cangaço, and finally as lieutenant and then leader of it. Before he was twenty-five, his was the head with the highest price on it in the barracks of Bahia, Pernambuco, O Piauí, and Ceará. His miraculous luck, which saved him from ambushes in which his comrades were killed or captured and which seemed to immunize him against bullets despite his daring, caused the story to go round that he had a pact with the Devil. Be that as it may, it was quite true that, unlike other men in the cangaço, who went around loaded down with holy medals, made the sign of the cross whenever they chanced upon a wayside cross or calvary, and at least