The Violent Land (31 page)

Virgilio lowered his head. The colonel was sending out to have Juca killed, but he wanted him to give the order to the
jagunço;
that way his name would be put on the roster of the brave in Ilhéos. He thought of Ester in the next room, crocheting, eating her heart out with jealousy. He thought of going away with her, of leaving this country for a civilized one—of going far away, away from these forests, these towns, this barbarous city, from this room, where these two colonels were advising him for his own good—
for his own good
—to send out and have a man killed. To flee with Ester, where the morning of every day would be different, the afternoons more beautiful, while at night the only laments would be the gentle sighs of love. In another, distant land—

Horacio's voice came to him across the room:

“Better make up your mind, doctor.”

The long winter rains were heavy ones, with the water singing on the roof-tops and running down the window-panes. The wind from off the sea was shaking the trees in the garden as the leaves and green fruit fell to the ground. Ester closed her eyes and had a vision of a floating leaf whirling madly in the air, with the raindrops falling on it and weighting it down until it sank to earth. It made her shudder and want to sleep, and she huddled with her lover, her thighs intertwined with his, her head on his broad bosom. Virgilio kissed her lovely hair and put his lips gently to her closed eyelids. She threw out a bare arm and encircled his waist. Sleep was coming, her eyes were growing heavier every moment, her body was exhausted from the violence of their recent embrace. Virgilio in a quick, nervous voice continued talking to her, for he wanted her to stay awake and keep him company. It was midnight and the rain had not stopped, but was coming down harder than ever, and with it came the sleep that relaxed Ester's body. He talked on, telling of things that had happened to him in his student days in Bahia. He even told of other women he had had in his life, to see if this would awaken her, cause her to fight against sleep. But Ester replied with monosyllables and ended by turning over on her stomach and burying her face in the pillows.

“Go on, dear, tell me—”

He saw that she was already asleep; and then it was that all the emptiness of his words came to him, all the things that he had been saying about his life as a student. Empty, wholly void of meaning and of interest. The raindrops were running down the window-pane—like tears, Virgilio thought. It must be good to be able to weep, to let suffering come out by way of the eyes and run down your face. That was the way it was with Ester. When she had learned of his dancing with Margot at the café, she had let the tears come, and after that it had been much easier to listen to and believe Virgilio's explanations. Many people were that way: they found consolation in tears. But Virgilio did not know how to weep. Not even when he had received the news of his father's sudden death in the backlands. And he had loved his father intensely; for he knew all that it had cost the old man to keep him in school; he knew of the pride his father had felt in him. But not even on that day had he wept. With a lump in his throat he had remained standing there in the street where an acquaintance had handed him his aunt's letter containing the news. A lump in his throat, but not a tear in those dry eyes, so dry they smarted. Not a tear.

Down the window-pane the tears of the rain were falling, one after another. Virgilio thought that the night was weeping for the dead of this land. There were so many of them, only a cloudburst would ever be able to atone for all the blood that had been shed! What was he doing here in this land; why had he come here? It was late now, there was Ester—the only thing was to go away with her. When he came, he had been filled with ambition, had had visions of rivers of money, a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, a political career, with all this fertile cacao region in the palm of his hand. At first that had been all that he thought about, and things had gone well; everything had turned out according to his wishes: he had made money, the colonels had confidence in him, he had won success as a lawyer, and things were going very well politically, also; the breach between the state government and Rio was widening, and for anyone who had eyes to see, it was a certainty that the former would not be able to maintain itself in power after the coming election, while it might even fall before then, seeing that there were those in Bahia who were talking of federal intervention in the state. The opposition leaders were in Rio de Janeiro at the moment, engaged in negotiations; they had been received by the President of the Republic, and the situation was becoming clearer every day. There was a very good chance that he would be the candidate for deputy next year, and should there be a change of régime, there was no doubt as to his election.

Then Ester had appeared upon the scene, and all this had ceased to have any importance for him. The only thing that mattered now was her body, her eyes, her voice, her desires, her love for him. After all, he could make a career in Rio just as well as here; as a matter of fact, that was what he had first thought of doing, upon taking his degree in law. If he could get a place in a law office with the right kind of clients, he would not fail to get ahead. The time that he had spent in Tabocas and Ilhéos would not by any means have been wasted. He had learned here in a year and eight months more than he had in five years at school. It was commonly said that an “Ilhéos lawyer” could practice law anywhere in the world, and it was the truth. Here all the subtleties of the profession were called for; a thorough knowledge of the law and of the methods of making a farce of it were necessary. Wherever he might go, he undoubtedly would have a splendid chance of success; for it was not for nothing that here in Ilhéos he was looked upon as one of the best attorneys at the local bar. Naturally, it would not be quite so easy there; he would not get ahead so quickly as he would here, where he already had made a name for himself and had entered upon a political career. Easy and quickly: those two words stuck in Virgilio's mind.

His rise here may have been a rapid one, but it had not been easy. Was it, by any chance, easy to have to send out and have men killed in order to be respected? In order to win the esteem of everyone and be able to hew out a political career? No, it was not easy. Not for him, at any rate, reared as he had been in another land, with other customs and other ways of looking at things. For the colonels down here, for the lawyers who had grown old in this country—for them it was easy—for Horacio, for the Badarós, for Maneca Dantas, for Dr. Genaro with all his pretensions to culture and his reputation for sobriety as a man who never visited a house of prostitution. They sent out to kill as they would to prune a grove, or as they might take out a birth certificate at the registry office. Yes, for them it was easy enough, and Virgilio had given some little thought to this strange fact. But now he found himself viewing differently these rude men of the plantations, these tricky lawyers of the city and the towns, who calmly sent their
cabras
out to wait for their enemies along the highway and fire upon them from behind a tree. His ambition now was, first of all, to go away with Ester; and second, to forget all about the terrible dramas that were a daily occurrence in this region. It had been necessary for him to be put in the position where he himself had to send out and have a man killed in order for him to be able to realize the horrible ugliness of it all and the manner in which this country weighed men down.

The workers in the groves had the cacao slime on their feet, and it became a thick rind that no water could wash away. And they all of them—workers,
jagunços,
colonels, lawyers, doctors, merchants, and exporters—they all had that slime clinging to their souls, inside them, deep in their hearts, and no amount of education, culture, or refinement of feeling could cleanse them of it. For cacao was money, cacao was power, cacao was the whole of life; it was not merely something planted in the black and sap-giving earth: it was inside themselves. Growing within them, it cast over every heart a malignant shade, slaying all good impulses. Virgilio did not hate Horacio, Maneca Dantas, much less the smiling Negro to whom he had given the order to ambush Juca Badaró that Thursday night, words that it had cost him so much to utter. No, if he hated anything, it was cacao itself. He felt himself dominated by it, and resented the fact that he had not had the strength of character to say no and let Horacio, alone, assume the responsibility for Juca's death.

The truth of the matter was he had not known to what an extent this land and its customs, everything that had to do with cacao, had taken possession of him. Once in Tabocas he had slapped Margot, and it was then that he realized for the first time that there was another Virgilio whom he did not know, different from the one who had sat on the bench at school, gentle and lovable, ambitious but merry-hearted, sympathetic to the troubles of others, sensitive always to suffering. Today he was a rude fellow—in what way was he different from Horacio? He was, indeed, like him; his reactions were the same. When he had first known Ester, he had thought of saving her from a monster, an abject and sluggish being. But what difference was there, after all? They were both of them assassins; they were both of them men who sent out
capangas
to kill; they both lived off the golden fruit of the cacao tree.

At that moment, Virgilio reflected, Juca would have received the bullet and would be no more than another corpse along the highway. But he would not, like the others, be buried beside a tree, with only a rude cross to mark his resting place. Juca was a wealthy planter; his body would be brought to Ilhéos and buried with great ceremony, and Lawyer Genaro would deliver an address at the cemetery comparing the deceased with historical figures of the past. Virgilio himself might even go to the funeral; for in this country it was nothing new for the assassin to follow his victim's casket to the grave—it was said that there were even those who, with mournful air and clad in ceremonial black, would help carry the coffin of the man they had killed. No, he would not go to Juca's funeral; for how would he ever be able to look Dona Olga in the face? Juca had not been a good husband, he had lived with other women, had gambled in the café; but all the same, Dona Olga would surely weep and suffer. How would he be able to look at her at such a moment as that? The only thing for him to do was to go far away, to travel, where he might forget all about Ilhéos, cacao, and deaths in the night; where he would no longer recall that night in Ester's house, the scene in the colonel's study when he had consented to their summoning the
cabra
. Why had he done so if it was not that he was irremediably bound to this land? As for his longing to take Ester away, what was that but a dream that was always receding into the future? Yes, he was bound to this land, hoping himself to become a cacao-planter, hoping in his heart of hearts that Horacio would be slain in one of the Sequeiro Grande fracases so that he might be able to marry Ester.

Only now did he admit to himself that this had been his desire all along, that he had been waiting day after day for the news of the colonel's death, for word that he had been brought down by one of the Badarós' bullets. Even as he laid his plans to procure employment in Rio and exerted himself to make more money so that they might be able to leave, meanwhile finding excuses for postponing his flight with Ester—all this while he had simply been waiting for what he looked upon as the inevitable to happen: for the Badarós to send out and have Horacio killed and thus put an end to the problem. This thought had occurred to him once before and he had endeavoured to put it out of his mind. If anything did happen and Horacio
was
killed, he told himself, he would advise Ester to come to terms with the Badarós, to agree to a division of the forest and the termination of the feud. But on this occasion he had deluded himself by the thought that he was regarding it merely as a likely event, telling himself that he could not fail in his duties as a family lawyer.

Now, in the bed here, as he watched the tears of the rain glide down the window-pane, he forced himself to admit the truth: that he was no longer free to leave this land, that he was definitely bound to it, bound to it by a corpse, by Juca Badaró, for whose murder he was responsible. And so there was nothing to do now but to go on waiting, day after day, until Horacio's turn should come and he, too, should be buried. Then he would have Ester; he would have the estate and the forest of Sequeiro Grande as well. He would be rich and repected, a political leader, a deputy, a senator, what would you? They would talk about him in the streets of Ilhéos, but they would greet him servilely and bow low to him. There was no other way out. There was no use thinking any longer of flight, of going away and beginning life anew; for wherever he went he would take with him the vision of Juca Badaró tumbling from his horse, a hand to his wound, a vision that Virgilio saw reflected in the dripping window-pane. He beheld it with dry, tearless eyes, and the thought came to him that his heart, too, was withered, overcast with the sombre cacao's shade.

There was no use thinking of flight. His feet were caught now in the slime of this earth, the soft cacao slime, a blood-slime as well. Never more would it be possible to dream of a different life. On this Thursday night, along the Ferradas highway, a man was bringing Juca Badaró down from his horse. Virgilio turned to embrace the woman beside him. Half asleep, Ester smiled.

“Not now, dear.”

His anguish increasing, he threw on his clothes as quickly as possible. He must let the rain fall upon him, upon his burning head, he must bathe his hands, foul with blood, his hands and his blood-stained heart. He forgot to exercise his customary caution as he went out through the garden and onto the railway tracks. Removing his hat, he let the rain trickle down his face, as though these were the tears he himself was unable to shed.