Brazil's Great Classic

REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS--Euclides da Cunha. Translated by Samuel Putnam--University of Chicago ($5).

Around 1870 there appeared at the Brazilian port of Baia a "somber anchorite with hair down to his shoulders, a long tangled beard, an emaciated face, and a piercing eye." He was clad in a blue canvas garment and carried a pilgrim's staff. He was young Antonio Conselheiro. For ten years he had been wandering in the backlands of Brazil (hiding there in shame after his wife had run off with a policeman), eating little or nothing, indifferent to danger, speaking in cryptic, prophetic monosyllables, sleeping in the open, and becoming a terrifying, unforgettable legend. He was crazy.

In 1874 he turned up in the city of Itabaiana. Now he had disciples. They built a temple. Coming into a town, they would hang an image of Christ on a tree, kneel in prayer, lift the image aloft and triumphantly enter the town to the chorus of litanies. Antonio Conselheiro's sermons were barbarous and terrifying, clownish but dreadful, compounded of visions, prophecies, dogmatic counsels, delivered in a dull monotone, with downcast eyes, suddenly interrupted when he turned his eyes on his listeners and hypnotized them with his intensity. He preached:

"In 1898 there will be many hats and few heads."

"In 1899 the waters shall turn to blood, and the planet shall appear in the east with the sun's ray. . . ."

"There shall be a great rain of stars, and that will be the end of the world."

Demoniac Saint. Antonio Conselheiro believed that the Roman Catholic Church was doing the will of Satan. His morality combined the absolute license of free love with chastity exaggerated "to the point where woman is looked upon with horror"-- his followers accepted half of this, and practiced free love. Because his disciples renovated abandoned cemeteries, built new churches and restored old ones, the priests "good-naturedly tolerated the excesses of this demoniac saint who at least helped to increase their dwindled revenues." By 1877 Conselheiro was famous, feared, implacable, "a species of great man gone wrong," ascetic, thin, weary-looking, half dead with his mortifications of his flesh, disheveled hair falling to his shoulders and his beard falling to his bosom.

Creeping Vines and Metaphors. Conselheiro was a genuine fanatic, a 2nd Century hermit born in the days of railroads. In his own way, Euclides da Cunha, his biographer, was as fanatical. Rebellion in the Backlands is Brazil's great classic, 476 pages of prose, thick as the jungles of Matto Grosso, through which (even in translation) a North American must hack his way blindly, barely able to make out the thread of history in the overhanging metaphors and the creeping vines of Da Cunha's philosophizing. Conselheiro's teachings soon led to open revolt, in which 6,000 Federal troops spent three months trying to advance 100 yards against a handful of the prophet's followers. Euclides da Cunha was an army engineer and newspaper correspondent who went through the fighting and wrote his masterpiece as an "involuntary attack" on the Brazilian army. He wrote it at night, building bridges by day, and the wooden shack in which he composed it, beside his bridge over the Rio Pardo, is a venerated Brazilian relic. A plea for Brazilian unity, it is essentially an encyclopedia, almost as difficult reading as one, with its pages of geology as toilsome as the mountain they describe, its descriptions of droughts as parching as the plains. It is also as informative as an encyclopedia. As a report of military intelligence, with its microscopic account of the war against Conselheiro, it makes U.S. studies of battles in the Civil War seem almost superficial. Through its long expositions of climate, plant life, race, the social character of the backlands, extraordinarily vivid scenes flash at the reader. Rebellion in the Backlands did what Euclides da Cunha wanted it to do. It saved the story of Conselheiro from being buried with his corpse, chastened Brazilian militarists, and helped unify Brazil. But it queered its author with the army, and on Aug. 15, 1909, aged 43, Da Cunha was assassinated by a soldier.

Desperate, Hopeless, Suicidal. The battle in Rebellion in the Backlands is the story of a desperate, last-ditch, hopeless, outnumbered defense of a handful of backwoodsmen against the army. The rebels were fanatics, maddened, suicidal, skillful, soldiers in a holy war, throwing away their lives and dying stoically, silently.

A hundred soldiers were sent to the town of Canudos in November, 1896, to pacify Conselheiro's restless followers. They were routed. So was a second force of 543 men two months later. In February 1897, an expedition under Colonel Moreira Cesar set out with 1,300 men, 15,000,000 cartridges, 70 rounds of cannon shot. Moreira Cesar was tough, relentless, an epileptic. The objective was Canudos, a mountain village of 5,200 huts and two churches whose population had been swollen by crowds of Conselheiro's followers. It was 60 miles away over mountain roads that had defeated the earlier expeditions before they started out. Conselheiro's followers, the jagunc,os, had dug trenches, spied out the land, sharpened scythes and cattle prongs, repaired their antique muskets, even built crossbows, and prayed ceaselessly. As the expedition started, Moreira Cesar had an attack of epilepsy. It was a bad omen. His troops drove back Conselheiro's outposts, rushed on madly until they were in sight of Canudos.

Redoubtable Rubbish. But Canudos was a trap. "Canudos invited attacks . . but when the invaders, drunken with a feeling of victory, began separating and scattering out down the winding lanes, it then had a means of defense that was at once amazing and tremendously effective. In the somber story of cities taken by storm, this humble village must stand out as an extraordinary and a tragic instance. Intact, it was very weak indeed; reduced to a rubbish heap, it was redoubtable."

As Moreira Cesar's artillery opened up, the church bell began ringing, "summoning the faithful to battle." As his troops swept into the trap, he was wounded in the abdomen. "It is nothing," he said. Another bullet struck him. By nightfall the army was panic-stricken.

Death at Dusk. It took more than a three-month siege to reduce Canudos, Antonio Conselheiro died; the rebellion became a national crisis. On Oct. 5, 1897, a year after the first expedition, the last defenders of the village were killed. There were four of them, a boy, an old man, two grown men. They faced an army of 5,000 soldiers. They died in a trench which had also been dug to serve as a grave. When the soldiers stormed the trench they were paralyzed. "There before them, a tangible reality, was a trench of the dead, plastered with blood and running with pus. It was something beyond their wildest imaginings." The last defenders died at dusk. The next day the last of Canudos' 5,200 houses were destroyed. Thirty years after the prophet appeared at Baia his head was cut off and taken back to the coast "where it was greeted by delirious multitudes with carnival joy."

Brazil's classic is more grim than the roughest U.S. realistic novel, with only Moby Dick, which it somewhat resembles in diffuseness and prose, matching its somber vision of life.

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