. . . — THE MAN — . . .
“AN INTENSE DREAM, A VIVID RAY”
I
ON THE MORNING OF AUGUST 15, 1909, Euclides da Cunha, — the most famous writer in Brasil, — was murdered by his wife’s lover.
The TOLD story : Euclides uncovered the betrayal; pulled up furious, strapped, — snapped; shot poor, young, apollonian Dilermando de Assis three times : wimpy Euclides, the intellectual with the soldierless jib-cut, missed : Dilermando, the wife-f****r with mean aim, shot back, — hit; Euclides dead : two bullets in the heart.
Portentous apocrypha (!) : passersby ask, as he lays dying, “what insanity is this, Dr. Euclides?!” . . .
His wife, Anna, married Dilermando, — who was 17 years younger than her. Five years later, Euclides Jr. tried to avenge his father, shot at his step-dad; Dilermando shot back and killed another Euclides. . .
In 2014, Anna’s diary turned up, given to her grand-daughter by a descendent of the lawyer who represented Dilermando in court (where he was acquitted : self-defense); 45 pages, trying to justify the death of her husband and son; she opens,
“I am here to accomplish a sacred task, unload my conscience and bring peace to my spirit, saying that out of the three of us, Euclides, Dilermando, and me, three criminals, the most responsible one is me.”
. . . how much did Euclides know?
When he came back from two years in the Amazon, his wife was pregnant; the baby didn’t survive, — soon she had another one, a little blonde kid Euclides raised as his own, he called him “the corn stalk in the middle of the coffee plantation” . . .
Euclides : a rage-prone workaholic, — spent his wedding night screaming at Anna, —he’d had bouts of insanity before : when he was in military school, he got thrown out for throwing his sword on the ground in protest of the Empire. . .
Dilermando : kind, studly, present, — Anna writes in her diary what attracted her most to Dilermando was his tenderness, — ; she wanted to divorce Euclides but he wouldn’t let her; — they lived in their messy mélange until what. . . ?
Anna knew Euclides was in a deleterious tizzy his final morning : her son warned her the night before, dad is pissed. . . she stayed put, burrowed militantly with Dilermando, in ambush, awaiting Euclides’s onslaught.
Why was the Brasilian public so ready to accept Euclides da Cunha was insane?
II
ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 22, 1897, Antonio Conselheiro was found dead, — emaciated in supine prayer, — in the New Church in the center of Canudos.
He was the founder of Canudos ; a town of — not counting women & children, old & infirm, — ten thousand men, jagunços, armed to the teeth, living in clapboard stacked shacks in a religious community orbiting a heresiarchal sun : Antonio Conselheiro.
The newfound Brasilian Republic exterminated the people of Canudos in a slapdash civil war, — NO : it’s not a warwhen the people don’t know there’s a political battle, they’re simply defending their home;
it was an unholy internal wipe-out like the Albigensian Crusade, — in the name of the ORDER & PROGRESS newly emblazoned on the National Flag. . .
In 1897, the city-boy Euclides da Cunha was sent out to rural Bahia to report on the end of the conflict; believing, like most Brasilian urbanites,
“We had, suddenly, resurrected and in arms in front of us, an old society, a dead society, galvanized by a madman. We did not recognize it. We couldn’t recognize it.
We rose, abruptly, tumultuated by the abundance of modern ideas, leaving behind in the secular penumbra in which they lie, in the heart of our country, one third of our people. . . we deepened, revolutionarily, fleeing the fleetest concessions with the exigencies of our own nationality, the contrast between our way of life and that of the rude native sons more alien in our land than the immigrants from Europe.
Because an ocean didn’t separate them from us, but three centuries. . .”
Euclides, coruscating with IDEAS : set out on his tortuous trek, expecting to find unconscionable barbarism, — unrecognizable aliens; — instead, he witnessed the bloody shadow left behind by Brasil’s new light;
saw the dark version of himself : Antonio Conselheiro. . .
Antonio was a sertanejo from the backlands of Brasil, — the region known as the SERTÃO. . . a sertanejo : the product of centuries of miscegenation between white settlers, indigenous peoples, and the descendants of African slaves;
the most controversial aspect of Os Sertões is what Euclides writes about this mixing,
“The mestizo is almost always an unbalanced type. . . fulgurant spirits, at times, but fragile, unquiet, inconstant, dazzling one moment and right-away extinguished, lacerated by the fatality of biological laws. . .
every man is, above everything else, an integration of racial forces of which his brain is a heritage. . .”
REMEMBER : the man who wrote this was a product of the same mixing, describing himself in a poem,
“This caboclo, this tame jagunço, mixture of Celt, of Tapuia, and of Greek.”
A friend of Euclides described,
“his disdain for clothes, his face with its prominent cheekbones, his glance now keen and darting, now far away and absorbed, and his hair which fell down over his forehead, all of which made him look altogether like an aborigine, causing him to appear as a stranger in the city, as one who at each moment was conscious of the attraction of the forest.”
What did Euclides feel when he wrote about the madness he believed inherent in his own blood? Did he feel inside himself an erumpent insanity he needed to corral thru the cold grip of science?
. . . Antonio, before he was Conselheiro, — the Counselor, — lived in a hardscrabble little town; his prophetic journey began when his wife ran off with a police officer;
from then on, he peregrinated the backlands incomparably for 22 years, wearing a belt-less blue smock, living on the slim pickings of John the Baptist, — locusts, wild honey, — his legend fecundly famigerating, till he’d entucked himself in a permanent citadel, surrounded by unconditionally faithful sectarians & shivering feary accomplices. . .
Canudos : where Antonio Conselheiro and Euclides da Cunha would face off in the grand testament of both their lives.
. . . — THE LAND — . . .
“BEAUTIFUL & STRONG, IMPAVID COLOSSUS”
III
IT TOOK ME 40 DAYS TO READ OS SERTÕES. . .
The language-terrain is as grand, forbidding, inhospitable as the sertão itself; — many readers end up like the poor deraisoned raisin’d warrior Euclides describes :
“The setting sun casted, long, its shadows over the ground and protected by it — arms openly spread, face upturned to the heavens — a soldier rested.
Rested. . . for the last three months.
His body was intact. Pruned, is all. Mummified, conserving the physiognomic traces, in a way which induced the exact illusion of a tired fighter, revitalizing himself in tranquil sleep under the shadow of that beneficent tree.
Not even a worm—most vulgar of the tragic analysts of matter—had maculated his tissue. He was returning to life’s whirlwind without repugnant decomposition, through an imperceptible draining-off process.
Here was an apparatus that revealed absolutely, and in the most suggestive manner, the extreme aridity of the atmosphere.”
STYLE sprouts from SUBJECT ; penetrable limpidity in the face of Euclides’s sombral leviathan would simply be a LIE. . .
Euclides da Cunha is a geological thinker; look how he describes Antonio, as a rock aberration :
“It is natural that these profound layers of our ethnic stratification should insurrect in an extraordinary anticlinal — Antonio Conselheiro.”
He realizes what makes a collective WE begins in the soil; years pile sedimentarily: people become disparate, eroded, symbiotic with wind & river; — in perfect union with the threats to their survival ; and his STYLE formalizes this :
“The struggle for existence which in forests translates to an irrepressible tendency toward light, unraveling bushes into woody vines, elastic, distended, fleeing the drowning shadows and heightening themselves clinging more to the sun’s rays than the trunks of the secular trees — here is the total opposite; it is more obscure, more original, and more moving.
The sun is the enemy whom it is urgent to avoid, elude, or combat.
. . . the most robust plants carry, in their extremely abnormal aspects, emblazoned, all the stigmas of the soundless battle.”
The clarity-shunning language carries the scars of the claudicant, bloody creation of Brasilian identity :
— which IS as much those exterminated in Canudos as the exterminators. . .
The truth is buried deep in the sertão.
IV
THERE WAS NEVER A CONVERSATION.
The great problem of Brasilian (any!) society : the lack of communication between the people and the elites.
Euclides translates the jagunços’ protest; formalizes the communication struggle by writing ornate, arduous, otiose, — the style becomes EVERYTHING. . .
The legend of Canudos proliferated cancerous & unruly ; there was no parley : elites heard-tell something unacceptable was happening, —
here was a ferveling cauldron of miscegenation, living outside the purview of earthly institutions : eyes firmly fixed skyward,
“Canudos was made up of the most disparate elements. . .
an unconscious and brute mass, growing without evolving, through the mere mechanical juxtaposition of successive layers, in the manner of a human polyp. . .
immersed completely in the religious dream; living beneath the sick preoccupation of the life to come, their world within that protecting girdle of mountains. With no thought of institutions to guarantee a destiny on earth.
All else was meaningless. Canudos was their cosmos.”
A tempestuous cult swirling around an ascetic king. . . here was a dream of Brasil : true racial harmony beneath the tropical sun; LOOK : the free women in ecstasy,
“All ages, all types, all colors. . .
The mangled rats’-nests of deep-black crioulas; hard and flowing hair of caboclas; scandalous turbans of Africans; brunette and blond manes of legitimate white women, all mixed up, without a ribbon, without a hairpin, without a flower. . .
Madonnas encoupled with furies, beautiful deep eyes, in whose blackness blazes ecstatic madness. . . beneath the unruly hair, it was a cruel profanation drowning in that repugnant ruffianism which exuded in one breath the suffocating reek of filthy carcasses and the slow psalming of lugubrious prayers. . .”
The Brasilian military looked down from Mount Favela, saw the 5,200 houses in close quarters, heard the solemn whispers of a different path for the nation : — decided this potential future must be annihilated.
. . . — THE FIGHT — . . .
“FROM THE HEROIC PEOPLE A RETUMBANT YAWP”
V
WHO WERE THE BARBARIANS?
A classic story : U look into the darkness : the darkness subsumes U ; the Brasilian troops were angry & vindictive, — these prehistoric retrogrades were getting their licks in,
— it became a matter of vengeance; the troops started torturing the prisoners,
“They would demand they shout vivas to the Republic. Or substituting this dolorous irritation for the frank and insulting mockery of cruel allusions, in a hilarious and brute chorus of pungent jibes. And they beheaded them or hacked them up with stabs.”
It was not a campaign, it was a slaughter. . .
But the jagunços fearsome resistance earned the soldiers’ respect; while the army was at war with the parsimonious terrain & atmosphere, — with hunger, — the jagunços were used to this life,
“The jagunços ferocity was balanced by the selvaticness of the land.”
. . . literally in cataclysmic conflict with their shadow side, the army often couldn’t see who they were fighting;
— the indomitable warriors were MYTH before the battle was even won,
“the jagunço now began to appear as a being apart, teratological and monstrous, half-man and half-goblin; violating all biological laws by staging inconceivable resistances; hurling themselves, never seen, intangible, against the adversary; sliding, invisible, through the caatinga, like snakes; gliding or tumbling down steep cliffs like a specter; lighter than the musket he dragged; and skinny, dry, fantastic, melting into a spirit. . .”
Euclides witnessed much of this brutality, and it changed him; he came in believing in PROGRESS, but realized if this is modernity, modernity is a DUMP :
“a sanguinolent drama of the Stone Age was here taking place. The actors, on one side and the other, blacks, caboclos, whites and yellows, brought, intact, on their countenances the indelible imprint of many races—and they could only be united upon the common plane of their lower and evil instincts.”
As the battle wore on they realized what had always been true : they were the people they were fighting, — like when they walked thru the ruins of Canudos,
“the dilapidated soldiers, filthy, without caps, without uniforms, with hats of straw or leather on their heads and old worn out sandals on their feet, wearing the same uniform as the enemy.”
ORDER & PROGRESS always win. . . but they are false words, — glittering illusions scrubbed clean of the messy, bloody struggle for a vision of supremacy. . .
VI
WHAT IS A MORAL VICTORY WORTH?
The battered troops returned from the campaign with a profound admiration for the inviolable backlanders, who fought until the last man,
“Let us bring this book to a close.
Canudos did not surrender. The only case of its kind in history, it held out until complete purging. Expunged inch by inch, in the precise meaning of those words, it fell on October 5, toward dusk, when its last four defenders fell, dying, all of them. There were only four : an old man, two full-grown men, and a child, facing a furiously raging army of five thousand soldiers.”
They walked thru the fiery ruins of the community they exterminated from the face of the earth and noticed,
“the anguished life that the inmates of those hovels must have led. . .
Told, most expressively, by the nakedness of the cadavers. They were in every position: laid out, supine, face to the heavens; chests bared with the medals of their favorite saints; rigid in the last whines of agony; crouched over improvised trenches, in the attitude in which death had found them.”
But the Republic had been secured. . . against people who were never a threat. . .
Euclides ends the book with Antonio Conselheiro’s skull; he thought, until the end : Antonio’s madness started the whole thing;
— the fatalistic insanity carved in the synapses of his brain,
“the corpse was decapitated, and that horrible face, sticky with scars and pus, once more appeared before the triumphers. . .
After that they took it to the seaboard, where it was greeted by delirious multitudes carnival with joy. Let science here have the last word. Standing out in bold relief from all the significant circumvolutions were the essential outlines of crime and madness. . .”
After Euclides was killed, shot thru the heart in Dilermando’s backyard, while he was on the ground, Dilermando looming over him, they autopsied his body, removed his brain, examined it closely and found several lesions. . . maybe from childhood malaria, maybe from years in the Amazon, maybe it was how he was born. . .
Euclides da Cunha set the parameters for how he would be viewed by the public by what he wrote about Antonio Conselheiro, — his counterpart in eternity, — madness was rutted into the brain from the get-go, he was always gonna explode. . .
We’ll never know what happened on the morning of August 15, 1909, but we do have the lasting effort of Euclides’s witness : Os Sertões, — his Canudos, — which might vanish from history, but like Antonio Conselheiro’s last stand, will always be a tumor, lodged in the spine of ORDER & PROGRESS. . .
