Backlands (25 page)

Let us continue our story.

There is no reliable information on the role of Antônio Conselheiro’s father, Vicente Mendes Maciel, in this deplorable feud. His contemporaries describe him as an “irritable man, inclined to be distrustful and somewhat delusionary, but of excellent character. He was very capable and in spite of being illiterate he managed the business of his estates, keeping all the accounts and measures in his head without having to keep any written records of debts owed him.”

The son, subjected to the discipline of a strict father known for his integrity, was given an education that kept him isolated from his family’s violent life. Living witnesses who knew him then remember him as a quiet, shy young man who lacked the happy enthusiasm of early youth. He kept to himself and avoided youthful diversions, rarely leaving his father’s place of business in Quixeramobim. There he devoted himself to the duties of the conscientious cashier, letting his first twenty years go by empty and wasted. He could not help but hear, however, the legends and stories that were told about his own flesh and blood, often with many embellishments as is the custom of backland story-tellers. In these stories, his relatives were often the protagonists who displayed the traditional rare courage. Any influence the stories may have had on the young man was energetically discouraged by the stern elder Mendes Maciel, and they did not unsettle the spirit of the boy. Perhaps this remained latent, ready to surface under more favorable conditions, but it is certain that until his father’s death in 1855, twenty years after the tragic events we have recounted, Antônio Maciel continued to lead the same quiet and respectable life.

Faced with the responsibility for his three unmarried sisters, he showed rare self-sacrifice. It was only after he married them off that he sought a match for himself, and this union would destroy him.

His life took a dramatic turn from this point forward. His wife was yet another burden added to his hereditary baggage, and marriage would unbalance a life that had begun under better circumstances.

From 1858 on everything he did indicated that he was a changed man. He lost his sedentary habits. Incompatibility with his wife, or what is more likely, his wife’s bad disposition, would destabilize his situation. He started to move frequently between cities and towns, picking up various kinds of work.

Although he was restless, it was clear that he was engaged in a struggle of character that he was determined to win. Left without any fortune in this preparatory phase of his life, and despite the difficulties of his marital life, whenever he reached a new destination he tried to find honest work. In 1859 he moved to Sobral and found a position as a cashier. However, he did not stay there for long. Going on to Campo Grande, he was hired as a clerk to a judge, but his stay there was brief and he was off to Ipú, where he became a court clerk.

It is noticeable that he showed a growing interest in jobs requiring less effort. He was distancing himself from the discipline of his youth and displaying a tendency for more exciting and less productive forms of activity. He was heading for a life of vagrancy. At the same time, his domestic troubles were robbing him of his former serenity.

This period of his life still reveals him to be guided by worthy sentiments. Around him, political battles were raging that offered him many career opportunities. He would have been welcomed because of his family connections. He consistently avoided this, however, and in his constant decline it is possible to see him losing ground slowly, struggling to stay in control but painfully exhausted.

Suddenly he experienced a violent reversal. The downward slide of his life came to an end with a terrifying fall. His wife left him in Ipú for a police officer. This was his undoing. Overcome with shame, the unhappy man sought the refuge of the backlands, remote places where nobody would know who he was and where he could find shelter in absolute obscurity.

He traveled to the south of Ceará. He spent a night in Pão Branco, on the Crato highway, where a relative put him up. There he attacked his host. A brief police investigation was suspended, when the victim dropped charges, saving him from prison. He then headed south again and disappeared from sight. . . .

Ten years went by. The unhappy boy from Quixeramobim was completely forgotten. Only occasionally would someone recall his name and the scandal that had ended his life in that place, one in which a certain well-placed police sergeant was a romantic protagonist. The name Antônio Maciel was barely spoken in his homeland. For all intents and purposes, he was dead.

In Bahia a dour hermit appeared with hair to his shoulders, a long matted beard hiding an emaciated face—a monstrous figure with piercing eyes, wearing a blue homespun robe and leaning on the classic staff that supports the pilgrim’s halting steps.

It is unknown what his life had been during this long time. An old backlander who was captured in the last days of the campaign had something to say about this but he was very vague and could give no dates or details. He had met him in the
sertão
of Pernambuco, one or two years after he had left Crato. From the words of this witness, I concluded that Antônio Maciel had made a vivid impression on the minds of the people of the backlands. He had appeared in those places with no fixed destination. He made no mention of his past. He spoke in brief phrases and monosyllables. He wandered from one place to the next, seemingly mindless of which direction he took, indifferent to danger, eating little or nothing and occasionally sleeping in the open along the roadside as if fulfilling some kind of prolonged, crude penance.

It was not long before those simple people thought him to be an apparition or a ghost. When this unusual man of about thirty years appeared at the ranches of the pack drivers, all festivities ceased. This was only natural. His squalid and emaciated figure, in a tattered robe, would emerge silently from the barren, haunted landscape, making the people think he was a ghost. Then he would move on, leaving the superstitious backlanders stunned. And so he came to dominate them without meaning to do so.

This primitive society, because of its ethnic characteristics and the influence of the unholy missions, found it easier to understand life in terms of incomprehensible miracles. This man’s mysterious way of life was bound to give him prestige, which only encouraged his delirium. The legends and assumptions that grew up around him were fertile ground for his hallucinations. His insanity thereby manifested itself. The intense admiration and respect that he commanded in time made him the arbiter of disputes and the favored counselor in all decisions. The crowd thus spared him the need to confront his own emotional state, a process of introspection that usually accompanies the progression of insanity in diseased brains. He was a creation of the multitude, who refashioned him in their own image. It broadened the horizons of his life and propelled him backward to the errors of prophets two thousand years past. The people needed someone to translate their own vague ideations and to guide them on the mysterious pathways to heaven.

And so a monstrous evangelist was made. He was but an automaton, a puppet of the masses. In the end, all he did was to summarize the backward thinking of three races. And he continued to grow in stature until he was projected onto the stage of history.

From the Pernambuco backlands he went on to Sergipe, arriving in the city of Itabaiana in 1874. He arrived there as he did everywhere, unknown and suspect, creating a strange impression with his unusual clothes—a blue robe without a belt, a broad-brimmed hat, and sandals. On his back he carried a leather bag containing paper, pen and ink, an
Abbreviated Mission,
and the
Hours of Mary.

He lived on what people gave him and refused to take anything he did not need for his daily consumption. He sought out solitary resting places. He would not accept a bed, at most a bare plank, and if that were not available, he would sleep on the bare ground.

He wandered around like this for a very long time until he finally arrived in the backlands of Bahia. Meanwhile his fame had been spreading. He was no longer alone but being followed on his aimless route by the first of the faithful. He did not call them. They came to him spontaneously, happy to share his trials and deprivations. In general, these were idlers from the lowest social classes and were regarded with suspicion. They were a ragged crowd of human failures who were used to living by begging and stealing.

One of his followers carried a unique kind of temple common to that nascent religion: a crude oratory made of cedarwood, enclosing an image of Christ. On the stops along the way, they would hang this from a tree branch and kneel to pray. Then, holding it up high, they would process into the towns and villages, wailing their hymns.

In 1876 the Counselor made his appearance in Itapicurú de Cima. By this time he was very famous, as documented in this account published that year in the capital of the empire.

An individual has appeared in the northern
sertão
who is called Antônio Conselheiro, and who exercises great influence on the lower classes, using his mysterious appearance and ascetic costumes to impress these ignorant and simple people. His hair and beard are long. He wears a cotton tunic and eats sparingly. He looks almost like a mummy. Accompanied by two religious women, he intones prayers and hymns and preaches to the masses, meeting with them wherever the religious authorities allow. He plays to their religious beliefs and draws them in at will. He seems to be an intelligent man, but uneducated. (Lammert folio, 1877)

These absolutely true statements, from a document published hundreds of miles away,
²⁶
are a good indication of his growing fame.

The town of Itapicurú was about to be the place where his extraordinary career ended. In the same year, to the astonishment of the faithful, he was suddenly arrested. He was imprisoned on the false charge of murdering his wife and mother. His exceptional way of life and old domestic troubles in some way made this credible. The story was a chilling one.

The legend goes that the mother had a terrible dislike for her daughter-in-law and was determined to do away with her. For this reason, she informed her son that he was being betrayed. Astonished, he asked for proof. She promised to provide it without delay. She advised him to pretend to go away on a journey but to stay in the area because that night he would see his wife’s lover enter their home. He accepted this plan and after the poor man had ridden out of town, he reined in his horse, turned around, and proceeded quietly back to a hiding place where he could observe the house and act quickly as needed. He remained there for many hours until finally, in the depths of the night, he indeed saw a figure approaching his house. The stranger approached cautiously and was about to climb into one of the windows. He did not give the intruder time to enter the house. He took him down with one shot. With a single leap, he entered his home and shot his sleeping, unfaithful wife. Then he went back to take a look at the man he had killed. He saw in horror that it was his own mother, who had disguised herself to carry out her hellish plan. Appalled by what he had just done, he took off like a madman, leaving everything behind, and he fled to the backlands.

Popular imagination, as can be seen, was beginning to romanticize his life with tragic originality.

The hand of the law finally found him just as his mental disorder reached its definitive state and he was becoming entirely immersed in the dream from which he would never awaken. His ascetic tendencies arose in full force out of the crude discipline he had practiced for fifteen years, when he apprenticed himself to the martyrs of the ancient church. He had suffered the brutal tyrannies of hunger, thirst, exhaustion, anxiety, and deep distress. There was no torture he had not experienced. His dried-out skin was a broken and withered shell over his lifeless flesh. Pain itself had become his drug. He bruised and injured his flesh with hair shirts more abrasive than any nettle. He dragged himself over stones, scorched himself in the embers of the drought, exposed himself to the rigors of the night air, and in his transitory moments of rest he slept on a punishing bed of brushwood.

He had verged on death many times during his prolonged fasts, in an ascetic state that would have surprised Tertullian, that foreboding proponent of the slow elimination of matter “shedding his blood, that heavy and unwelcome burden to the soul impatient to leave the body.”
²⁷

For someone trained in this tyranny of suffering, the order to go to prison was a small incident. He acted with indifference and forbade his followers to act in his defense. He surrendered and they took him to the capital of Bahia. There his strange appearance aroused great curiosity. His face was like a death mask, unseeing and unsmiling; he had the repugnant appearance of a disinterred corpse, his long robe resembling a black shroud; his matted, dirty hair fell to his shoulders and entangled with the stiff hair of his unkempt beard, which hung to his waist.

As he walked through the streets he was greeted with applause as well as gestures of exorcism by frightened believers. The devout women, including many who were reformed prostitutes, were terrified by the sight of him.

The dumbstruck judges interrogated him.

They accused him of old crimes, committed many years ago in his home state. He listened to the interrogation and the accusations in stony silence. The guards, who had escorted him, it was learned later, had mistreated him in a cowardly fashion along the way. He did not voice a single complaint and maintained his stoic indifference. There was just one curious detail revealed by a person whose word is above reproach—on the day they embarked for Ceará, he asked the authorities to shield him from public view, the one thing that most irritated him.