The War Of The End Of The World Read Online Free PDF Page B

abolished slavery and that the measure had wreaked havoc on the sugar plantations of Bahia, which all of a sudden were left with no labor force? It was months before the news of the decree reached the backlands, the way news always reached these remote parts of the Empire—delayed, distorted, and sometimes no longer true—and the authorities ordered that it be publicly proclaimed in the town squares and nailed to the doors of town halls.
    And it is probable that, the year after, the Counselor and his followers again learned, long after the fact, that the nation to which they unwittingly belonged had ceased to be an empire and was now a republic. It never came to their attention that this event did not awaken the slightest enthusiasm among the old authorities or among the former slaveowners (who continued to be owners of sugarcane plantations and herds of cattle or sheep) or among the professional class and the petty government officials, who regarded this change as something like the coup de grâce for the already dying hegemony of the ex-capital, the center of Brazil’s political and economic life for two hundred years and now the nostalgic poor relation, watching everything that was once theirs—prosperity, power, money, manpower, history—move southward. And even if they had learned of this, they would not have understood, nor would they have cared, for the concerns of the Counselor and his followers were altogether different. Besides, what had changed for them apart from a few names? Wasn’t this landscape of parched earth and leaden skies the same one as always? And, despite having suffered several years of drought, wasn’t the region continuing to bind up its wounds, to mourn its dead, to try to bring what had been ruined back to life? What had changed in the calamity-ridden North now that there was a president instead of an emperor? Wasn’t the tiller of the land still fighting against the barrenness of the soil and the scarcity of water so that his maize, beans, potatoes, and manioc would sprout and his pigs, chickens, and goats stay alive? Weren’t the villages still full of idlers, and weren’t the roads still dangerous on account of the many bandits? Weren’t there armies of beggars everywhere as a reminder of the disasters of 1877? Weren’t the itinerant storytellers the same? Despite the Counselor’s efforts, weren’t the houses of the Blessed Jesus continuing to fall to pieces?
    But in fact something had changed with the advent of the Republic. To people’s misfortune and confusion: Church and State were separated, freedom of worship was established, and cemeteries were secularized, so that it was no longer parishes but towns that would be responsible for them. Whereas the vicars in their bewilderment did not know what to say in the face of these new developments that the Church hierarchy had resigned itself to accepting, the Counselor for his part knew immediately what to say: they were impious acts that to the believer were inadmissible. And when he learned that civil marriage had been instituted—as though a sacrament created by God were not enough—he for his part had the forthrightness to say aloud, at the counsel hour, what the parishioners were whispering: that this scandal was the handiwork of Protestants and Freemasons. As were, no doubt, the other strange, suspect new provisions that the towns of the sertão— the backlands—learned of little by little: the statistical map, the census, the metric system. To the bewildered people of the hinterland, the sertanejos , who hastened to ask him what all that meant, the Counselor slowly explained: they wanted to know what color people were so as to reestablish slavery and return dark-skinned people to their masters, and their religion so as to be able to identify the Catholics when the persecution began. Without raising his voice, he exhorted them not to answer such questionnaires, and not to allow the meter and the centimeter to replace the