The Land

PART ONE

The Land Calls Me

I

IF HE’S ALIVE he’ll come back someday, I always said.

What did you say?

At that hour I could draw a straight line from the top of my head to the sun and climb up it, just like a monkey on a rope, until I reached heaven — I never needed to know the time.

It was noon, and I knew because I was stepping on a shadow the size of my hat, the only sign of life in the familiar old square where no one poked his head outside for fear of roasting his brains. The only ones crazy enough to be there were myself and the old man mounted on a sweating horse, who had turned up like a ghost inside a cloud of dust to delay me beneath the Lord’s cauldron.

Anybody in these parts will swear to it, anybody with a memory under his hat and decency in his heart. I always said he’d come back some day. And hasn’t he?

You’re right.

Changed much? I hope at least he hasn’t forgotten the way to my house. We’re of the same blood.

He hasn’t forgotten, Uncle, I answered, feeling that I was making a necessary clarification not just to one man, but to an entire population for whom my brother’s return seemed to have greater significance even than the time Dr. Dantas Junior came to announce that our town had been put on the map, thanks to his word and his efforts as our well-chosen Federal Representative. It was a most wonder­ful day, as wonderful as an election day (though without the tumult, the beer and the food of election days) because everything happened suddenly, without warning. The representative got up on a hastily made podium in front of the market, waved his dusty jacket over his head and said that the loyal and hospitable Junco was now a proper town. Now we could manage our own affairs without hav­ing to answer to the municipality of Inhambupe — and it was precisely that part of his speech people liked best. Still, even that day is fading from memory, though nothing else has happened since.

What really hadn’t changed at all was the place: mud-­brick houses with red tile roofs and lime whitewash. But the burning question was to know if my brother still remembered each and every relative he had left behind in these parts, each one: he who, without having a square inch of land where he could fall down dead, one day hitched a ride in a truck and disappeared into the great world to be transformed as if by enchantment into a rich handsome man with gold teeth, a loose, hot, wool suit, Ray-Ban sunglasses, a transistor radio (talkative little bastard) and a watch that sparkled brighter than the sunlight. A monu­ment in flesh and blood. Living proof that this place could sire great men — and I, not even born when he went away, was on my way to see if I could rouse the great man out of two decades of sleep, because the great man seemed to come back only to stay in bed. Get up, you old dog, before the bats eat you. Wake up, before the suffering soul of your beloved grandfather asks you for a complete account of your travels. Hurry, because he’s coming out of his grave to tap you on the shoulder: Seventy of them. You’re worth seventy of these fellows from here. Why, Padrinho? Because you’ve already been to four states, haven’t you, boy?

I was dying to go for a swim in the old pond (yes, the one we’ll all drown in) and wanted my brother to go with me. I was thinking of finding a jenny-ass, the most spirited one around, for the famous Nelo to recapture the ecstasies of an old love.

Tell him he was born right there, my uncle pointed toward the slaughter-pen. And tell him I carried him on my shoulders.

Nelo remembers everything and everyone, Uncle. I’ve never seen such a fine memory, I insisted, so as not to leave the slightest doubt in his mind. Only then would he allow me to continue on my way.

I’m pleased, my uncle smiled, adopting his formal, serious manner; and the horse covered me with another cloud of dust.

My sandal crushed my shadow as I advanced through a silent, suspended moment, as if there were no wind left in the world. An omen, perhaps? Something horrible, most horrible, might be happening.

Nelo! I yelled from the street. "Come and teach me how to float on top of a mulungu trunk. They tell me you used to be good at it!" I didn’t hear what he answered, rather, there was no answer. There wasn’t, yet there was. Out on the farm I once heard about a ghostly bird that would come to bother a young girl every time she went out into the yard at night, at any hour. Perhaps my brother had just chirped into my ear through the beak of that unseen night-bird in which I had never believed. Shaken, I ran up and knocked on the door, and one knock was enough to push it open, so that I was the first to see him hanging from a rope fastened to the hammock hook.

Stop that, Nelo! I slapped him on the left side of his face, and it must have been a hard slap, because his head turned and fell toward the right. "Stop it, for the love of God!’’ I repeated, slapping his other cheek, and again his head rolled to the opposite side.

There.

I would never again want to climb a rope up to heaven.

II

So it was that a place forgotten in time awoke from its stupor to make the sign of the cross. Junco: a scarlet bird called Sofrê, which learned to sing the national anthem. A speckled hen called Sophie, which learned to hide her nests. An ox named Sufferer. A yoke: winter begins, summer ends. The most beautiful sunrise in the world and the longest sunset. The smell of rosemary and the words lily-of-the-valley. I never saw a lily-of-the-valley. Shards: of red tile, of glass. The sound of hoes being sharpened, of cattle-drivers’ mournful calls along the road, of men scrat­ching a living from the land. My mother’s black tobacco­-juice spittle, my father’s mute complaints, my grand­mother’s red and white roses. Roses of love: I’ll love you till I die.

This is the land that spawned me.

Lampião the bandit passed through here.

No he didn’t. He sent a message saying he was coming but he didn’t actually come.

Why not?

Why should Lampião waste his time coming here? This is the end of the world.

Girls looking out the window at the road seem to say — yes, it is the end of the world. They are dreaming of the boys who went to São Paulo and never came back to fetch them. They are waiting for the bank clerks from Alagoinhas and the oil workers from Petrobrás, They are waiting, but not for country hicks. City boys only. They’ll eat their words some day, they’ll die man-crazy old maids with shrivelled cunts, growl the frustrated bachelors. Horny is a dirty word and comes from the devil. Like sin, like other dirty words: cunt, asshole, son-of-a-bitch. Cows, heifers, mares and jennies also have cunts. They’re not so choosey.

Even the married ones have lost their heads, drag­ging their men and their daughters off to the big towns. This refrain is heard at Pedro Infante’s general store and bar, sanctuary for complainers. Many’s the husband who goes go off in search of work, only to come back alone and penniless. The place for a farmer is on the farm.

Slow and solitary, Junco survives its griefs in the knowledge that it has seen worse times, and still bears witness to past disasters. In 1932 the place was almost crossed off the map of the State of Bahia and inscribed on the map of hell, during the worst drought the region had ever known, a drought marked to this day in each cattle skull impaled on a fence post, to bring good luck.

People fell down dead from hunger and thirst, just like the cattle. It cut you to the heart to see it.

The first rains of ’33 promised an abundant harvest, but they didn’t go beyond the promise. Later came deluge, ague and malaria: and the people died trembling with cold.

It’s worse in wartime, when the son cries out and the father can’t hear him, says Caetano Jabá. He wasn’t the only one to follow the rebel uprising of Antônio Conselheiro, although he had been the only one to come back alive, tell­ing the story of the soldier whose throat he had cut with his tobacco-knife as the soldier peacefully ate a plateful of jabá-bird meat and dry manioc flour on the bank of a stream. Instead of a medal, they gave Caetano a nickname and a hoe with which he digs his sustenance to this day, at the age of a hundred-odd.

In the year two thousand this old world will be burned up by a ball of fire, and after that, Judgement Day will come, says Jabá, teaching the Sacred Prophecies as he rests from the burden of death-guilt he carries on his shoulders. And I know that day isn’t far off. Why just look here: our grandfathers had plenty of pasture, our fathers had much less and we don’t have any. The other men listen attentively to Caetano Jabá — he has lived and experienced much. That’s in the Holy Scriptures too. Much land, few signs. Many heads, few hats. One flock for one shepherd.

Here come the hicks from Junco, say the people in Inhambupe.

Or used to say, when the open-bed truck carrying the yearly load of people to Our Lady of Candeias stopped at the gas pump outside the Hotel Rex. The people would sit on hard wooden benches under a canvas tarpaulin. Now the road bypasses the town, and Inhambupe has nobody to insult.

Let us pray for the soul of the departed Antônio Conselheiro. Much do we owe him. When he was in Inhambupe he was stoned without mercy. He called down a curse:

May this place grow just like the tail of a jackass!

The people asked themselves, How does a jackass’ tail grow?

Downwards.

But all tails grow downwards.

But when the jackass’ tail grows, the owner cuts it to make the animal more valuable.

The asphalt road to Paulo Afonso didn’t get this far, but then, it left Inhambupe on one side too. The place grows like a jackass’ tail.

All that remains is the waiting, under the open sky.

Any day now the Antichrist will appear. That’ll be the first sign. Then the sun will grow, and turn into a ball the size of an oxcart wheel, and then . . . Papa used to say, Mama used to say, everyone used to say.

Nobody said, however, whether the coming of Ancar was in the Holy Scriptures. Ancar: the bank that arrived in a jeep one Sunday morning at Mass time, to lend money to whoever had