Carnival of Spies

by Robert Moss

  “They say he was to become professor of theology at Louvain,” Tatu remarked. “But he came to Recife. Father Badό says that a man with a heart who sees the mocambos has no choice except to become a revolutionary.”

  “So he belongs to the party?” Harvey asked eagerly.

  “No,” Tatu shook his head impatiently. “Though the archbishop talks about him as if he does. He’s a friend, a man of trust. His communism is from the heart.”

  Tatu explained that since Father Badό had become active in the interests of the poor, he had been threatened with one ecclesiastical sanction after another and finally forbidden to celebrate Mass. The Archbishop had asked the superior of his order to send him back to Belgium. Deaf to all the complaints of the hierarchy, Father Badό went on with his self-appointed mission, losing patience only when grateful families brought him ex-votos — little tin replicas of limbs or organs he had supposedly cured — as if he were a saint in one of those gilded churches in town.

  The priest rushed in and plunged his hands into a bowl of water. He rinsed them vigorously, then rubbed at his face with a wet towel.

  “I’m a terrible host,” he apologized, shaking hands with the newcomers. “No soda, no tea, not even coffee — imagine, to be in Brazil without coffee! But—” he wagged a finger triumphantly “—I do have cachaça, and when a poor man has cachaça, he can live without a great many lesser things.”

  They all accepted, except for Harvey, who mumbled something about an upset stomach.

  The Belgian priest threw a shot glass of the fiery spirit down his throat, snapped his jaws shut, then opened them again in a gasp of pleasure or pain, perhaps both.

  “I have a friend — a Jesuit — who warned me that if I drink too much cachaça, I will start to hallucinate. I told him I hallucinate already!”

  Johnny was refilling his pipe. The priest followed his motions with visible interest.

  “Do you mind?” Johnny asked politely.

  “Let me smell before I tell you.”

  Johnny lit the pipe and Father Badό sniffed ostentatiously.

  “That’s good!” he enthused. “Latakia?”

  “It’s a London blend. It has some Turkish in it.”

  “I knew it. Once I understood something about smoking. But here, I am content with my little mulatas. Ah, thank you—”

  Apparently on cue, Tatu presented him with a box of black cheroots.

  “I will share these with Floriano,” he announced. “He is the local witch doctor. We never argue about matters of theology.”

  “Only about cigars?” Johnny suggested.

  “You have it!” Father Badό laughed. “Only about matters of substance.”

  Behind all his surface jollity, the priest looked utterly exhausted, ready to drop.

  “My friend Tatu doesn’t come bearing gifts for no rea-son,” Father Badό prompted.

  “Father, we are going to the interior. We need to make contact with certain men.”

  “Which men?”

  “With Lampiao and other captains.”

  The priest’s face darkened. “You’re making a mistake,” he said curtly. “It is not the way, even if you could persuade them to join you.”

  “You have always told us that to see what men are reduced to here is to become a revolutionary,” Tatu appealed to him. “Can we make a revolution without guns and men who are trained to use them?”

  “You were away for the rally,” Father Badό, answered him obliquely. The priest was active in the National Liberation Alliance, the party’s front movement. The movement had organized a big demonstration in front of the governor’s palace, to call for the breakup of the big estates and the expropriation of the foreign monopolies. Thousands had turned out.

  “The authorities were terrified,” Father Badό told them. “They met us with machine guns and cavalry. As the crowd advanced towards the palace, the order came for the cavalry to charge. There they were — three hundred men on horseback, sabers flashing. They broke into a trot. The hooves shuddered against the cobblestones. We could see the horses snorting and steaming, the moist upper lips of the troopers. Everyone was scared, but the soldiers were more scared than the demonstrators. There was a girl from Rio with us, a dramatic speaker. To listen to her was like listening to opera. She squeezed through the ranks and ran out in front of the horses. I thought she would be trampled to death. She had her arms outstretched. Her voice rose, wild and terrible, above the shouts and the thunder of hooves. ‘Soldiers, shoot your lieutenant!’ And again, ‘Soldiers, you belong to the people! Shoot your lieutenant!”

  “We could see the officer, leading from behind, as you would expect. Some of the soldiers in the front rank faltered and reined back their mounts. They weren’t going to ride over a girl. The officer pulled out his revolver and yelled out threats, ordering them on. Then one of the troopers wheeled his horse around and rode back. Others followed. The line broke and the crowd surged forward. We could see the officer, bellowing and shooting his pistol into the air. Finally, his fear got the better of him. He galloped off, calling over his shoulder to his men to follow. The soldiers were not ready to fire on the people. For three days, the movement owned the streets. It was like a fiesta.”

  As the priest talked, Johnny watched a cockroach the size of his big toe scuttle out of a crack in the wall and drop to the floor.

  “You see what can be done without violence,” Father Badό said.

  “It’s from Gorky,” Johnny remarked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The girl from Rio must have read Gorky’s Mother. The trick may not work the next time. Sometimes violence is necessary.”

  “Are you a Russian?”

  “No. But I’ve travelled in Russia.”

  “Is it true that they have closed the churches?”

  “Many of them.”

  Father Badό sighed deeply. “That will happen here, too,” he said, “unless the church takes the side of the people.”

  “So you’ll help us?” Tatu intervened.

  “I will give you a letter to a father at Juazeiro.” The priest’s tone was one of resignation. “He is like a chaplain to these people. But you must be careful. His vision is not the same as ours.”

  “May we ask one more favour?”

  “What is it?”

  “May we use your chapel? To store a few things?”

  The canvas sack with Harvey’s radio equipment had been left near the open door.

  Father Badό frowned. “You know I am forbidden to give Holy Communion. But my church is still consecrated ground.”

  “That’s why the police will never search it.”

  The priest studied the two foreigners. “Is either of you Catholic?”

  “My father was Episcopalian,” Harvey said brightly. Father Badό snorted and looked at Johnny.

  “I’m a seeker,” Johnny said.

  “That’s not such a bad answer,” the priest responded. “When I came to Brazil, I lost my faith. I’m still searching for it. But as long as you are searching, your soul is alive. You may use my church,” he said, getting up. “But you must promise to do nothing to endanger my mission. There are many families that depend on me.”

  “You have our word,” Johnny said, warming to this cachaça priest in rope sandals.

  5

  The wood-burning locomotive huffed around a great bend in the line where soldiers stood guard over the tracks. The railroad workers had been fighting a running battle with the British-owned company for months. The soldiers were there to stop the strikers’ families from blocking the tracks. They were not happy poking their bayonets at women who rocked their babies in their arms and waved little green-and-yellow Brazilian flags. In the daytime, party organizers slipped in and out of the Great Western railyards, singling out foremen and scabs for attack, sowing the seeds of more disruption. At night some of the same organizers gathered in the bars and honky-tonks where the troops from the nearby barracks at Socorro pas
sed their free time. The soldiers were happy to accept a few free drinks, and many of them listened to the talk that accompanied the beers. Most of them had been sent down from Natal, because the state government did not trust its own enlisted men. They wanted to be back with their own families, not bullying those of other men.

  Father Badό was not the only priest who had joined the movement. Captains and lieutenants, as well as sergeants and other ranks, had formed cells inside the barracks and met in secret with the party’s regional directorate. In the huge railyards of the Great Western Company, the largest concentration of industrial workers in the north would be in the vanguard of the rising. And on the way to the train, Tatu showed Johnny the blackened skeletons of mansions that had been razed five years before, in the revolution that had brought President Vargas to power but had done nothing to change the condition of the poor; they were proof that the passivity of the mocambos had its limits.

  Tatu, so reticent and retiring in Petrôpolis, took on new life now he was back among his own people. But he was obviously nervous about the trip to the interior. He kept finding excuses to put it off, until Johnny and the Californian — who had acquired a Colt .45 and an appetite for adventure — announced that they were ready to leave by themselves.

  Beyond the narrow belt of green coastal plain, the land for miles on either side of the tracks had been stripped bare. Every tree had been cut down to feed the furnaces of the locomotives. Beyond this man-made desolation they entered a desolation that escaped man’s control, a tormented landscape of thorn trees and dried-up gullies that was worse than open desert, because it narrowed the horizons.

  They completed the journey to the down-at-heel river port of Juazeiro on a truck without springs. Father Bades friend glared at them through the one clear lens of his spectacles; the other had been blacked out. He wore a heavy silver crucifix, but the stains on his cassock could probably have revealed his eating habits for the past three months. His long beard was matted and rank. His manner did not improve after he had scanned the letter from the Belgian priest. But he allowed that he might know where to find Lampiao. Of course, his church was poor; the roof was falling in. With the famous Father Cicero gone, fewer people made the pilgrimage to Juazeiro.

  “The tears of the Blessed Virgin no longer flow.”

  This mystified Johnny. He looked at his companions and volunteered to make a modest contribution to the Lord’s work in Juazeiro. All three of the travellers were weighted down with padded money belts stuffed with gold and silver coins with which they hoped to buy the bandits’ support. The holy man of Juazeiro undertook to provide them with a guide to an isolated ranch two days’ ride into the backlands, where Lampião had last been heard from.

  More of their money went on the horses, lean, miserable beasts that hardly looked strong enough to support Johnny’s weight. Alceu, the guide appointed by the priest, supervised the purchase, and it was obvious he was getting a commission from the sellers. Alceu was walleyed with a stubbly chin, pointed like a fox.

  The priest came to see them off.

  “You’re Communists, aren’t you?” he said.

  “What if we are?”

  The priest merely shook his head. Johnny pressed his heels against his horse’s narrow flanks. As they moved off, kicking up a little cloud of dust, he heard the priest humming.

  “E tempo de muricy,” Tatu sang along to the tune. “Cada urn cuida de si.”

  “What are you singing?” the Californian asked.

  “It’s an old ballad of these parts,” Tatu said.

  “How do the words go?”

  “It’s time to die,” Johnny translated. “Every man for himself.”

  Harvey swallowed and adjusted his bandanna. “That’s quite a send-off.”

  The guide stood in his stirrups and pointed. “There!”

  It was odd to see the man straight-backed. For hours he had seemed more asleep than awake, lolling forward against the neck of his scrawny mare.

  Johnny peered into the distance. He could see nothing except the eternal catinga, the forest of thorn trees that clawed and cut deep, like a frightened, squirming cat. He was glad Tatu had made him buy leather chaps and a leather jacket, though it was hard to breathe inside them in the brilliant, diamond-sharp light of day. Now the forest of thorns was ghostly in the dusk. Land and sky seemed to meld under a fine shower of ash. The earth, baked hard by the sun, could hold warmth no better than moisture. He felt the chill coming down, seeping into his bones.

  Without warning, the guide yanked at the bit, forcing his mount to turn in a narrow circle. He jabbed with his spurs and the little mare carried him past the other riders in a surprising burst of speed.

  “Alceu, wait! Where are you going?” Tatu shouted at him.

  “I did my part!” the guide yelled back. “No further!”

  Tatu looked ready to ride after him.

  “Let him go,” Johnny ordered. “We must be almost there.”

  He could make out something now — a wisp of smoke, perhaps from a cooking fire.

  “But how will we find our way back?” Tatu protested. “We have a compass.”

  Whatever lay ‘ahead, Johnny was anxious to get to it. He was beginning to savour the anticipated pleasure of very ordinary things, like drinking from a rainwater barrel instead of a sour, brackish hole in the clay, of getting out of the saddle and out of the boots that pinched his ankles, of sitting within four walls with company — however unpalatable — that he could see.

  Crossing that wilderness on unmarked trails, they had never been truly alone. .People loomed up out of nowhere and vanished again like wraiths: cowboys slouched in their saddles like Alceu, at the tail of a sorry heard of half-starved cattle; families of retirantes, broken by the drought, feeling on foot toward a death by salt water; ragged bands trooping the other way, deeper into the backlands, with a mystic fire in their eyes, on their way to the miracle priest who had made real blood flow from the host in the mouth of a poor woman taking Holy Communion. Once their path had crossed that of a gang of bearded, sun-blackened jaguncos, quick with a gun or a knife, who escorted them in utter silence for a mile or so. Johnny kept his hand on the butt of the Winchester slung behind his saddle till they melted away into the scrub.

  “They’d as soon kill you as look you in the eye,” the guide had laughed. “They’ll wait till you’re asleep, or your back is turned.”

  Now Johnny could see a house in a clearing, a modest place built of rough-hewn logs, with a barn behind and a fenced-in enclosure where a few horses were loose.

  A sound unlike anything he had heard before carried across the thorn trees. It reminded Johnny of the pieces of an old tin roof, sawing against each other in a driving gale. He realized he was listening to a harmonica.

  Tatu turned very pale.

  “Mulher Rendeira,” he said. “It’s the song of Lampião.”

  “It’s what we came for, then,” Johnny responded, kicking his horse on.

  “I don’t like it,” Tatu protested, keeping pace a head behind. “Where is everybody? They must see us coming.”

  The mouth organ stopped playing in the middle of a bar.

  “There’s someone now,” Harvey called out. “He’s waving to us!”

  Johnny could make out a silhouette at the very edge of the clearing, among the thorn trees, indistinct in the gloom, except that the man seemed impossibly tall. His arms were spread, but not in greeting. Perhaps it was only a scarecrow.

  No. Johnny was close enough now to see the man’s eyes, which were dark and alive. The man’s shirttails hung loose and flapped against a branch like washing on a line. His outstretched arms were rigid, nailed to the thorn tree in a grim parody of the crucifixion. His boots and his trousers were gone. All that lived in that body were the ants, which had occupied the sockets of the eyes and the bloody refuse that hung between the legs.

  “Jesus,” the American gasped. His immediate reflex was to reach for his Colt.

  “Pu
t that away!” Johnny growled at him.

  Tatu’s instinct was swifter, and possibly surer. He threw himself over the neck of his horse and galloped off in the direction the guide had taken.

  A bullet whistled after him.

  At the same instant, someone in the shadows threw a rope around Harvey’s neck and dragged him off his horse. The big revolver went off, kicked and fell from his hand.

  Johnny found himself looking down into twin shotgun barrels.

  “Get down,” the man behind the shotgun ordered. “It’s the same to me whether you die now or later.”

  Johnny obeyed. More bandits loomed up out of the scrub.

  There must have been twenty of them, several of them sporting bits and pieces of army or police uniforms.

  They searched Johnny, removing his belt, his pistol and his watch.

  There were whoops of elation when they found the money belt.

  They made him take off all his clothes down to his undershorts, trussed his hands behind his back and hauled him inside the house.

  They flung him on the floor in the kitchen, where a wood stove was burning. The one who appeared to be their chief hacked at a slab of charred beef with his knife while he asked questions. His face was knotted and seamed like old wood, and he wore a silver earring and silver bracelets on his wrist.

  “We heard about you before you even got to Juazeiro,” the bandit announced. “They call me Captain Eldtrico. Even the bushes talk to me.”

  “You’re making a mistake, Captain. We have come in friendship. There are letters to prove it.”

  “What letters?”

  One of Eldtrico’s men extracted the packet from Johnny’s saddlebag. The bandit chief stared at them, obviously baffled.

  “Shall I read them to you?”

  “You? You can’t even speak Portuguese like a man. You read—” he threw the bundle at a man wearing eyeglasses.

  The first letter was addressed to Captain Virgulino Ferreira, better known as Lampião.

  “You are lucky you met me instead of Lampião,” Captain Eldtrico declared. “He is not such a patient man.”