The Violent Land

by Jorge Amado

  Her “séances” having proved so successful, Eufrosina then began treating diseases by spiritualism, with comparative success. This was an encroachment on the domain of Dr. Jessé Freitas, the physician at Tabocas, who came over to Ferradas once a week to look after the sick and who was also called in on nights of gun-play; and he now joined forces with Friar Bento against Eufrosina. For she was taking his patients away; fever-sufferers were now going to the medium instead of the doctor. Friar Bento took the matter up with Horacio, but the latter did nothing about it. It was for this reason, so they said, that the friar had made up that story about Horacio and the spiritualist séance; for the monk—according to Ferradas—had a venomous tongue. Anyway, it was after this that he began spreading the story.

  At a certain séance in Eufrosina’s house, so ran the tale, they had sought to summon the spirit of Mundinho de Almeida, one of the earliest conquistadores of the region and the most terrible of them all, whose fame, though he had been dead for years, persisted—they still spoke of him as the very symbol of wickedness. Eufrosina had done all she could to “materialize” him, but without success. It was a long and exhausting struggle, with the medium making a tremendous effort and fairly splitting herself with her tremblings and her trances. Finally, after more than an hour of these exertions, when those present had grown weary of so much concentration, Mundinho de Almeida appeared, very tired and in a great hurry. Let them tell him what it was they wanted and be quick about it, for he had to return at once.

  “But why all the rush, brother?” inquired the medium in a dulcet tone.

  “We’re very busy in hell these days; everybody’s very busy,” was the spirit’s churlish response; and by his crustiness the older ones vowed that they did indeed recognize him as none other than Mundinho de Almeida.

  “But why are you so busy?” Eufrosina insisted, giving voice to the general curiosity.

  “We’re piling up firewood all day long. Everybody’s working, sinners and devils alike.”

  “And why so much firewood, my friend?”

  “We’re making a bonfire for the day when Horacio arrives.”

  Such were the tales told in the town of Ferradas, Horacio’s fief, the bandits’ den. From here it was that the grubbers of the land set out for the forest. It was a world of its own, a primitive and a barbarous one, whose sole ambition was money. Every day strangers arrived in quest of a fortune. From Ferradas the newly opened highways spread out over the cacao country. From Ferradas Horacio’s men set out to enter the forest of Sequeiro Grande.

  On this particular day the town was abuzz with the news that the old man with the corpse had brought. Juca Badaró had already passed through on his way to Tabocas, but he would not be able to return by that route; he would have to take another road home. For from morning to afternoon Ferradas had put itself upon a war footing. Jagunços were pouring in to guard Horacio’s warehouse; and in the taverns men drank more rum than usual. Early that night Horacio came.

  He came with a great retinue, a score of horses, and a burro train to carry the luggage. They were on their way to Tabocas, where the following day Ester was to take the train for Ilhéos. She was mounted after the fashion of the time, on a side-saddle with silver mountings, and she carried a silver-headed riding-whip in her hand. At her side rode Virgilio on a mottled-grey horse. Behind them, at Horacio’s side, his low, squat figure weighing heavily on his mount, his face marked by a long knife-scar, came their friend Braz, owner of a grove at the edge of the Sequeiro Grande forest and respected throughout the cacao region. He carried a repeating-rifle on the saddle in front of him, and his hand that held the reins rested on it. Bringing up the rear were a number of plantation lads and pack-drivers, rifles on their shoulders, revolvers in their belts, and, last of all, Maneca Dantas.

  Maneca had failed in his mission to Colonel Teodoro Martins, owner of the Baraúnas plantation; the latter was siding with the Badarós.

  They came riding in a closely compact group, raising a cloud of red dust in the road. With pack-drivers shouting at their beasts of burden and all the other noise and stir, one might have thought that this was a small detachment of an army invading the town. They came in at a gallop; and at the head of the street Horacio rode up to the front, his horse pawing the earth as the colonel drew up sharply before the house of Farhat, the Syrian, where they were to spend the night. The pawing steed, rearing on his hind legs and lifting his rider from the saddle, as the latter, whip in hand, reined him in—all this gave the effect of an equestrian statue of some ancient warrior. The plantation lads and the pack-drivers now scattered out through the town, which was agog with excitement. There was little sleep in Ferradas that night. It was like a bivouac before the morrow’s battle.

  4

  With their long whips cracking on the ground, the pack-drivers made their way through the mud-laden streets of Tabocas as they shouted at their beasts to keep them from wandering off along the side-lanes and down the newly opened thoroughfares.

  “Hey! Diamante! Dianho! Get up, there! Straight ahead, you damned burro, you!”

  Leading the procession, with tinkling bells and showy breast-trappings, came the burro that best knew the road, the “little mother of the troop.” The colonels made a point of decking out these “little mothers” as an emblem of their wealth and power.

  “Whoa, Piranha! Get up, Borboleta! The Devil’s in that mule—”

  And so their long whips would crack in the air and on the ground as the animals with their sure, slow pace stirred up the mud of the street. From a doorway some acquaintance would call out the most overworked gibe that the town knew:

  “How goes it, wife of a donkey-driver?”

  “I’m on my way to see your mother right now.”

  Now and then herds of lowing oxen would come in from the backlands and would either remain in Tabocas to be sold for slaughter or continue on to Ilhéos. The leather-clad cowboys would then dismount from their high-mettled ponies and would mingle with the donkey-drivers as they drank rum in the taverns or went to the houses of prostitution in search of a woman’s caress. Horsemen with revolvers in their belts would from time to time gallop through the town, and children playing in the mire would scamper for safety. A thousand times a day that mire was stirred up as cacao and still more cacao was brought in to be deposited in the enormous warehouses. That was the kind of town Tabocas was.

  It had had no name at first, consisting as it did of four or five houses on the bank of the river. Afterwards it became the town of Tabocas as more houses were built, one after another, and streets without any sort of symmetry were opened by the hoofs of burros bringing in the dried cacao. A railway branch line had been extended to the village from Ilhéos, and this led to the building of still more houses. Nor were these houses, like those in Ferradas, Palestina, and Mutuns, mere unpainted huts of beaten clay with wooden planks for windows, flimsy structures thrown up in haste and serving rather as shelters than as dwellings. In Tabocas there were brick houses and houses of stone and plaster with tiled roofs and glass windows, while a part of the main street had been paved with cobblestones.

  The other streets, it is true, were mudholes pure and simple, daily churned by the pack-trains that came in from the entire region round about, bearing hundred-pound bags of the precious crop to be stored in numerous warehouses that had been constructed. A number of export firms already had branches in Tabocas, where they bought cacao directly from the planters; and if a branch of the Bank of Brazil had not as yet been installed, there was at least a banking representative who spared many of the colonels the trouble of a train trip to Ilhéos to deposit or withdraw their money. In the middle of a large grass-planted square the Church of St. Joseph, patron saint of the region, had been erected, while almost directly opposite, in one of the few two-story buildings that the town boasted, was the Masonic Lodge, which numbered among its members the majority of the plantation-owners and which
gave balls and maintained a school.

  Houses were also springing up on the other side of the river, and already there was talk of building a bridge to connect the two portions of the “city”; for the one thing upon which the inhabitants of Tabocas strenuously insisted was that their village be elevated to the rank of a city and become the seat of government and of the administration of justice, with a prefect of its own, a judge, a prosecutor, and a police deputy. A name had even been suggested for the new municipality: Itabuna, which in the Guarani Indian tongue means “black rock,” allusion being to the big rocks that stood on the banks and in the middle of the river, upon which the washerwomen spent the day at their labours. But inasmuch as Tabocas lay within Horacio’s bailiwick, he being the largest landowner in the vicinity, the government of the state had paid no heed to the inhabitants’ appeal. The Badarós asserted that it was all a plot on Horacio’s part to seize political control of the region. Accordingly, Tabocas continued to be a borough of the municipality of São Jorge dos Ilhéos. Nevertheless, many of the residents, in writing letters, referred to it not as Tabocas, but as Itabuna. And when one of them who happened to be in Ilhéos was asked where his home was, he would reply, in a tone of great pride: “I am from the city of Itabuna.”

  There was, as a matter of fact, a police officer in Tabocas, who represented the highest authority in the town—nominally, that is, for the supreme authority was in reality Horacio. This officer, a former army corporal, was a small, lean fellow, but a nervy one, and had managed to hold on to his job in spite of all the threats of Horacio’s ruffians. He was clever, too, being careful not to abuse his authority; he never interfered in a row unless there was serious bloodshed or someone had been killed. Horacio got along well enough with him, and had even, more than once, backed the corporal against his own jagunços. Whenever the colonel came to Tabocas, Corporal Esmeraldo always went around to have a little chat with him, and at such times he never failed to bring up the subject of a possible reconciliation with the Badarós. Horacio would laugh that ingrowing laugh of his and would clap the corporal on the shoulder:

  “You’re a straight-spoken fellow, Esmeraldo. Why you keep on working for the Badarós is more than I can understand. But any time you need a friend, I’m at your service.”

  Esmeraldo, however, had a deep veneration for Sinhô Badaró, a feeling that dated back to the days when they had roamed the forest together, here in this land of cacao. In these parts it was said that Sinhô’s men were loyal to him out of friendship, and that anyone who went to work for him never left him; he was not like Horacio, a man to betray his friends.

  In Tabocas whoever was a friend and political follower of Horacio’s was careful to maintain an attitude of hostility toward the Badarós and their henchmen. Invariably at election time there were rows, gun-fights, and killings; and Horacio always won and always lost, for the votes were fraudulently counted in Ilhéos. They voted the living and the dead, and many of the former cast their ballots under threat from Horacio’s ruffians. Tabocas in those days was full of jagunços, who stood guard over the homes of the local bigwigs: that of Dr. Jessé, who was Horacio’s perpetual candidate; that of Leopoldo Azevedo, leader of the government party; that of Dr. Pedro Matta; and now that of Lawyer Virgilio, the new attorney, as well. Each party had its own apothecary’s shop, and no patient who voted for the Badarós would think of patronizing Dr. Jessé, but went to Dr. Pedro instead. The two physicians continued to maintain personal relations, but said terrible things about each other when their backs were turned. Dr. Pedro alleged that Dr. Jessé neglected his patients, being a good deal more concerned with politics and with his cacao grove. Dr. Jessé on the other hand asserted, and the population bore him out, that Dr. Pedro had no respect for women, and that no husband or father of a family was safe in trusting his wife or daughter to him for an examination. There was likewise a dentist for each faction. In brief, the entire town was thus divided, with the two parties exchanging gross insults in the newspapers of Ilhéos. Horacio, now, had already sent for a printing press, with the object of starting a weekly in Tabocas, which Lawyer Virgilio was to edit.

  The attorneys of the town were numerous, six or seven of them, and all earned their living out of the scandalous “ousters”; for this form of “legal” process flourished here even more than it did in Ilhéos. Men who for years had owned land and plantations would lose them overnight, thanks to a well-drawn “ouster.” There was not a colonel who would do business without first consulting his lawyer, by way of assuring himself against the possibility of a future eviction of this sort.

  There was a Negro in Tabocas, one Claudionor by name, who raised his two or three thousand pounds of cacao, and who once worked an “ouster” of a little different sort that made him famous—he was even mentioned in the Bahia papers. The victim was Colonel Misael, whose fortune even in that day was a matter of legend. A cacao-planter who raised many thousands of pounds, he was at the same time a banker in Ilhéos and a stockholder in the railroad and in the docks; he was, in short, a power to be reckoned with economically, and he had a son-in-law who was a lawyer. In spite of all this, however, the Negro Claudionor got the better of him. In the seclusion of his own little plantation Claudionor had thought the thing out, and Lawyer Ruy helped him to carry it through.

  Appearing one day before Colonel Misael, Claudionor asked him for the loan of seventy contos de reis with which to buy a grove. Swearing roundly, Misael advanced him the money on a short-term loan: six months in which to pay; for the colonel had a plan of his own, which was to take Claudionor’s plantation when the latter failed to meet his obligation. Being illiterate, the Negro signed his name with a mark to the promissory note. Then, on his way home, he stopped off at Tabocas and contracted for the services of a primary-school teacher. Taking the latter with him, he set himself to learn to read and to sign his name. Six months later, when the note fell due, Claudionor denied that he owed the money; he had never had any loan from Misael; it was all a trick on the colonel’s part. The best proof of this, so his attorney, Lawyer Ruy, argued, was that Claudionor could read perfectly well and was able to sign his name. Colonel Misael accordingly lost the seventy contos de reis and Claudionor increased his own holding and was able to make an extra contribution at the feast of St. Joseph that year.

  The truth of the matter was, it could not properly be said that there were only six or seven lawyers in the town, for that number merely included those who resided there. But those who lived in Ilhéos also practiced in Tabocas, while those in Tabocas had clients in the city. It was only a ride of three hours and a half by train, and one day it would be no more than forty-five minutes, when, as the region grew more prosperous, the new graded road-bed should have been constructed.

  And so, amid “ousters,” political struggles, intrigues, holy days of the Church, and Masonic festivals, Tabocas continued to live its life—a town that had not even had a name, and which now thought of calling itself Itabuna. Many a time was the blood of men slain in brawls mingled with the mire of its streets, to be churned under by the slow-paced burros. There were even occasions when Dr. Jessé, upon arriving with his instrument-case, would be unable to locate the wound on account of the mud with which the victim’s body was covered. Even so, the fame of Tabocas was widespread; men spoke of it in the remote backland regions, and a certain newspaper in Bahia had referred to it as a “centre of civilization and progress.”

  5

  Raising her hand, Margot pointed to the bit of street that was visible through the open window, by which she meant to indicate the entire town of Tabocas.

  “This is the most out-of-the-way place in the world. It’s a cemetery.”

  As Virgilio drew her to him, she poutingly left her chair and came over to seat herself upon his knees.

  “You’re a bad little girl.”

  Angrily she bounded to her feet.

  “That’s what you always say—I’m always the one
that’s to blame. You knew what this place was like before you came down here. I remember Juvenal’s telling you that you ought to go to Rio if you wanted to make a name for yourself. I don’t know why you chose to come here instead.”

  Virgilio opened his mouth as if about to speak, then stopped, deciding that it was not worth while. Had it been the month before, he undoubtedly would have spent an enormous amount of time in explaining to Margot that his future lay here, that if the opposition party won the election—and everything pointed that way—he would be the candidate for deputy from this region, the most prosperous in the state of Bahia. He would have tried to explain that the road to Rio was much more easily travelled by the highways of the cacao country than by a coastwise voyage in a seagoing liner. Tabocas was the land of money; within a few months’ time he had made more there than he would have made in years of practice in the capital.

  He had explained all this to her more than once; but Margot was always longing for the festivals, cafés, and theatres of Bahia. In a way he understood the sacrifice she was making. It had all begun when he was in his fourth year in school. He had made Margot’s acquaintance in a house of assignation, had slept with her a few times, and she had soon become smitten with him. And when he had been on the verge of abandoning his studies, owing to the death of his father, who had left the family affairs in bad shape, she had offered him everything she possessed and in addition her earnings each night. He had been deeply touched by this; and after one of the political leaders had found him a place in the party office and on the staff of the opposition newspaper, he had kept up his relations with Margot for her own sake alone; he had formed the habit of paying her room rent, had slept with her every night, and they had even gone to the theatre together. The only thing was he had not lived with her openly, for this would have created a scandal that might have had a bad effect upon his career. But nevertheless it was in Margot’s room that he, Juvenal, and other classmates had planned the student campaign that was to make him class orator, and it was at her side that he had written his baccalaureate address.