The Violent Land Read Online Free PDF Page B

the bridge, bathed in moonlight. Those were nights of story-telling and of laughter, the fishing being little more than a pretext, with a clasp of hands as the moon hid itself behind a cloud.
    Ivone was always beside him. She was a girl of fifteen, but already at work in the factory, the spinning-mill. She was the man of the family, supporting her sick mother and her four small brothers, ever since the night when her father had slipped away. No one knew where he had gone; that was the last that was heard of him. Ivone had had to go to work in the factory in order to feed all those mouths, and these nights on the bridge were her only diversion. She would recline her head with its dark hair on Antonio’s shoulder and would give him her ripe, full lips to kiss each time a cloud came over the moon.
    As for himself, he with his two brothers cultivated a millet plot on the outskirts of the city; but the income was small, and there was said to be much highly paid work in the lands to the south, where there was a fortune to be made in cacao. And so it was that one day, like Ivone’s father, like his own older brother, like thousands of others, he had left the little town in his native province of Sergipe and had embarked at Aracajú. He had slept for two nights in a cheap waterfront hotel in Bahia, and then had taken third-class passage in a boat bound for Ilhéos.
    He was a tall, lean
caboclo,
with protruding muscles and big calloused hands. He was twenty years old, and his heart was filled with sadness. A sensation he had never known before now took possession of him. Did it come, perhaps, from that big red moon, almost the colour of blood? Or from the back-countryman’s mournful melody? The men and women, jostling one another on the deck, were speaking of their hopes, hopes bound up with those southern lands.
    â€œI’m headed for Tabocas,” said one man who was no longer young, with a scraggly beard and kinky hair. “They tell me it’s the coming place.”
    â€œBut they say it’s a wild one, too, with all the killing that goes on, God forgive me.” It was a little fellow with a hoarse voice who spoke.
    â€œI’ve heard tell of that, but I don’t believe a word of it. You hear all kinds of things.”
    â€œThat is as God may will.” This from an old woman with a shawl about her head.
    â€œI’m going to Ferradas,” announced a young lad. “I have a brother there who’s doing very well. He’s with Colonel Horacio, a man of money. I’m going to stay with him. He has a job for me. And then I’ll come back to get Zilda.”
    â€œYour sweetheart?” a woman wanted to know.
    â€œMy wife. We have a little girl two years old and another on the way. A pretty little kid.”
    â€œYou’ll never come back,” said an old man wrapped in a cape. “You’ll never come back, for Ferradas is the ass-hole of the world. Do you know what it means to work on Colonel Horacio’s plantation? Are you going to be a worker or a cut-throat? The colonel has no use for any man who’s not a killer. You’ll never come back.” And the old fellow spat fiercely.
    Antonio Victor heard this conversation, but the music that came from the other group, the lilt of harmonica and guitar, carried him back once more to the Estancia bridge, where the moon is lovely and life is at peace. Ivone had always begged him not to go. The millet plot would be enough for the two of them. Why was he so eager to go seek for money in a place of which they told such ugly tales? It was on those moonlit nights, with the stars filling the sky, so many of them and so dazzingly beautiful, feet dangling in the water of the river, that he had planned his departure for the Ilhéos country.
    Men had written back, men who had gone there, saying that money was easy to get, saying, also, that it was easy to get hold of a piece of land and plant it with a tree called