It would not feel natural to go on a railway journey in Brazil without getting up in the middle of the night to catch a five o’clock train. When we rumbled away it was still pitch dark, and as the old kerosene lamp in the car blew out I fell asleep again. From daylight on there were many piles of wood for the engines along the way, and the white bones of cattle lay scattered through the brown brush. Here and there a few rib-racked animals were eating leaves. Men in brown leather hats, each twisted and warped by sun, rain, wind, and individual use into a distinctive shape, appeared at the rare stations. The flat land grew almost swampy, with now and then a hint of green, and at 10:30, with only a scattering of passengers left, we drew up at Iguatú, 265 miles from the coast, and the end of the line. Iguatú is completely beyond the land of beds. The room I got in a sort of miniature caravansary was furnished with two hooks, and nothing more. To these I managed to add a table and chair, with a moringa of what passed for drinking-water; and there was a shower-bath available whenever one could coax a man to lug a can of water up a ladder and fill another, perforated and suspended from the roof. Midday was no time to stroll in such a climate. I swung my hammock and fell to reading by the light of a glassless window that looked out upon a white-hot world in which the sheer sunshine fell like molten iron on every unsheltered thing.
I was back again below the sixth parallel of longitude, for to go inland from the capital of Ceará means journeying south rather than west. The town was flat, with the usual sandy praça, a windmill in its center, and tile-roofed mud huts scattered in every direction. One really could not feel much sympathy for a people who depend for water, for life itself, on a few mud-holes that may dry up at any time. Clothing is considered merely an adornment in Iguatú, and children in sun-proof hides were playing everywhere in the sand. The people prided themselves on being caboclos, or native Brazilians for generations back, and though there were a few blonds scattered among them, the great majority were of part Indian blood, with negro mixtures, but no full-blooded Africans. The treacherous, surly cabra, as the Brazilian calls the cross between Indian and negro, when none of that class is listening, was in considerable evidence. There was a childlike simplicity about the inhabitants which recalled those of Diamantina, though here the preponderance of Indian blood made the general indifference a matter of fatalism rather than racial cheerfulness. Many of the inhabitants had an indistinct notion that England, London, Europe, and New York were all different names for the same place—a place in which was being waged the great war of which they had heard rumors. One man asked me in great earnestness whether it was true, as some visitor had once asserted without winning credence, that “there are places in the world where it is so cold you have to wear garments on your hands,” In this region patriotism is a matter of separate mud-holes. A makeshift waiter to whom I was attempting to make some kindly remark about Iguatú interrupted me with, “Eu não son filho d’aqui, não, s’nho’—I am not a son of here but of ——,” naming some other mud town identical with this one but which to him was as Rome is to Oshkosh.
There were many picturesque countrymen about the market-place. Goat-skins and cowhides are the most important commerce here, especially with the drought killing great numbers of cattle, and caboclos, burned a velvety brown by the blazing sunshine, rode in with a few sun-dried cowhides and sold them for what the merchants chose to give, which seemed to be three vintems a kilogram, or less than a cent a pound. Every possible thing is made of leather in this land where starving cattle make it so plentiful—ropes, boxes, curtains, hats, even clothing. Nearly all the men wore hats some two feet in diameter, most of them made of leather, the cheaper ones merely of cowhide, which twists into uncouth shapes with long exposure to the elements, the better ones of sheep- or deer-skin. The others were woven from the carnauba leaf, looking much like the coarsest of our farmers’ straw hats.
I had concluded to buy the largest hat to be found in the shops when I caught sight of an unusually fine one on the head of a powerful and handsome young native in the crowd that was watching me from the street. When I had overcome the mixture of pride and bashfulness in which nearly all caboclos wrap themselves, I learned that his name was João Barboso de Lera, and that the hat had been made to his special order by an old woman expert living some ten miles away. It was most elaborately decorated, and it was evident that its possession raised the wearer high above the rank and file of his fellow-townsmen. His hat is to the youthful Cearense of the interior what spats and silk cravats are to the urban Latin-American. João, however, may have been in financial straits, for when I hinted in a mild and easily repudiated voice my willingness to buy his head-gear, he astonished me by accepting at once. It had cost him twelve milreis and was almost new; he thought ten would now be a fair price for it. I concealed my delight as we walked together to my lodging, where João deposited the hat on my table, crumpled up in his hand the bill I handed him, and wishing me, with a friendly but diffident smile, a joyful future, strode away bareheaded through the gruelling sunshine.
Later I learned that he was a valoroso, almost a bandit, who had “shot up” a neighboring town only a few days before and had several assassinations to his discredit. The hat is of cowhide, covered with fancifully patterned sheepskin, weighs almost two pounds and measures two feet from tip to tip, though the crown is little larger than a skull-cap. How the natives endure these under a cloudless tropical sun is beyond northern conception, but the Cearense countryman considers them the only adequate protection. Whole suits of leather are also worn in this region, tight trousers for riding, a short coat, and a sort of apron from neck to crotch in lieu of waistcoat, the whole ordinarily costing less than ten dollars. Whether or not the wearer overtaken by rain, followed by another space of the blazing sun, is removed from this garb by a taxidermist is another of the unsolved mysteries of the picturesque state of Ceará.
At Iguatú tobacco was sold in black rolls as large as a ship’s hawser, being wound round a stick in ropes thirty or forty yards long and sewed up in leather for muleback transportation. A kind of sedan chair on a mule, with canvas or leather curtains and fitted inside with cushions and all the comforts of home, is still used by the few wealthier women obliged to travel. The railway goes on quite a distance into the interior, but though there was a big two-span iron bridge near town across a mud gully that might be a river, traffic has been abandoned beyond Iguatú. The track southward was wrinkled and twisted out of all possible use as a railroad, and great heaps of rails which the company had hoped some day to lay all the way to the frontier of the state, and perhaps beyond, were rapidly rusting away in the ruthless climate.
The chief cause of this railway stagnation was Padre Cicero and his cangaceiros. Father Cicero is one of the chief celebrities of Brazil, his name being known from the Uruguayan to the Venezuelan boundaries. Thirty-two leagues beyond Iguatú is the town of Crato, of some importance industrially, and three leagues east of this lies Joazeiro, said to have more inhabitants than Fortaleza, though they are nearly all fanatical followers of their local saint, living in mud huts and all more or less of African blood. Here Padre Cicero, a saint in the purely Catholic sense of the word, reigns supreme. He is an old man, past his three score and ten, a native of Crato, who took orders in the seminary of Bahia and became parish priest of Joazeiro. The conviction of some woman that he had cured her of an ailment by miracle gave him the by no means original idea of establishing a shrine with a “miraculous Virgin.” Credulous fools were not lacking, and Joazeiro soon became the most famous place of pilgrimage in North Brazil, at least among the lower classes. Three large churches were built, and so persistently did people flock thither and settle down within immediate reach of miraculous assistance that Padre Cicero soon became too powerful to be handled by the state government. His picture occupies the saint’s place in all the country houses of the region, and he was said to have more than ten thousand followers, variously called cangaceiros and jagunços, whom he could use either as workmen or as a sort of outlaw force to impress his will upon the region. The trade winds which dry up the northern part of the state begin to drop their moisture in the vicinity of Crato and Joazeiro, making them green and fertile and giving the outlaw priest an added advantage. Several expeditions have been sent against him and he has been a prisoner in Fortaleza, Rio, and Rome, but always returns to power. Suspended by the Church, he is said to live up to the papal order by merely confessing and baptizing, without saying mass or otherwise conducting himself as a full-fledged priest. Those of a friendly turn of mind toward him assert that Father Cicero is a “good and pious man, a strict Catholic, who is doing his duty as he sees it and who has no other fault than too great a liking for money.”
There is always talk of this or that part of Brazil seceding; Ceará has already partly done so, thanks to the power of Padre Cicero. He is really the ruler of an autonomous state, from whom even the delegado and other government officials take their orders. For years the roads of southern Ceará have been unsafe, for his followers have robbed and killed with impunity, torturing and mutilating natives who oppose or give evidence against them, levying on political opponents, the rich, and merchants, though they have seldom ventured to trouble foreigners. They call themselves “romeiros” (pilgrims or crusaders), and the federal government has no more been able to conquer them than to put down the quarrel between the States of Paraná and Santa Catharina. Padre Cicero deposed the president of Ceará, and when a regiment of federal troops was sent to put down his “jagunços” they were treated as brothers by the fanatics and threw their weight against the state authorities. Like Rio and Nictheroy, the state was declared in a state of siege by “Dudú,” but those who know their way about the political labyrinth of Brazil claim that the soldiers ostensibly sent to put down the bandits—and who did more robbing and killing than the outlaws they came to suppress—had secret orders from the national boss, the “odious gaucho,” to aid the cause of the priestly despot. However that may be, Padre Cicero continues in full command of the region, all commerce of which is in his hands. He has surrounded Joazeiro with a high granite wall and smuggled in overland from Santos quantities of arms and ammunition, among them several cannon. He is notorious among Brazilian priests for his reputation of living up to his vows of chastity, though the rumor persists that this is due to physical drawbacks which have finally developed into his present mania for power and wealth. Old and feeble now, he had an Italian secretary and a complete staff, including a treasurer, and was said to do nothing but play saint and strengthen the belief of his followers that upon his death he will immediately appear among them again in another form. This last would seem to be a golden opportunity for an experienced actor with the proper qualifications and ample courage.
The entire ragged, leather-hatted town of Iguatú was down to see us off the next noon, wriggling the fingers of a crooked hand in friendly farewell, as is the Brazilian fashion. They are a simple, good-hearted, superstitious people, looking outwardly like fierce bandits, yet really childlike in their harmlessness, unless they are led astray by fanaticism or designing superiors. We had to struggle for seats because the thirty-four country people whom the government was assisting to go to the rubber-fields of the Amazon, rather than have them die at home of the drought, overflowed from the second-class car into the first. Many of these were pure white under their tan, but a more animal-like lot of human beings could scarcely be found in an ostensibly civilized country. Ragged, dirty, sun-scorched, prematurely aged by the rough life-struggle with their ungenerous soil and climate, their personal habits were as frankly natural and un-selfconscious as those of the four-footed animals. Children, ranging from the just-born to the already demoralized, rolled about the car floor, while men and women alike constantly passed from mouth to mouth bottles of miserable native cachaza and crude pipes, both sexes generously decorating the floor with their expectoration—a rare thing in South America. All this would have been more nearly endurable had they had any notion of their own drawbacks, but they were as convinced of their own equality, if not superiority, as are most untutored people—a semi-wild tribe lacking the virtues of real savages.
Everywhere the talk was of rain, to the Cearense the most important phenomenon of nature. Even the women knew cloud possibilities and studied the horizon constantly for signs of storm. They ended their more forceful sentences not with “if God wishes,” but “se chover—if it rains.” A man bound for the Amazon was holding one of the many babies when it played upon him that practical joke for which babies of all races and social standings are noted. “Menina!” he cried, “Parece que a secca não ‘sta’ tão grande aqui, não!—Girl! It looks as if the drought were not so great here, eh!”