Free The Violent Land by Jorge Amado Page A

as Colonel Horacio strolled slowly along between the evenly planted rows. These trees were five years old, and the plantation was now bearing its first fruits. Here, too, the forest lay beyond, threatening and mysterious as always. He and his men had cleared it, with fire, with sickle, with axes, and with scythes, felling the huge trees and routing the jaguars and the spirits. Then came the laying out of the groves, which was done most carefully in order that the yield might be the greater. And now, after five years, the trees were in bloom, and on this morning little nuts could be seen hanging from the boughs.
    The first fruits. The sun touched them with gold as Colonel Horacio strolled on. He was about fifty years of age, with a heavy-featured, saturnine, pock-marked face. Holding a roll of tobacco and a jack-knife, he was engaged in making himself a
cigarro
with his big calloused hands, those hands which, long ago, had wielded the whip over the burros when he was still but a pack-driver employed on a Rio do Braço plantation. Later those same hands had learned to manage a repeating-rifle, when the colonel had become a
conquistador
of the land.
    Many legends were current about him; not even the colonel himself was aware of all the tales that were told of him in Ilhéos and Tabocas, in Palestina and Ferradas, in Agua Branca and Agua Preta. The pious old ladies who prayed to St. George in the church at Ilhéos were accustomed to say that Colonel Horacio of Ferradas kept the Devil under his bed, imprisoned in a bottle. How he had come to make the capture was a long story, having to do with the sale of the colonel’s soul one stormy day. And the Devil, having become his obedient servant, now waited on all his desires, increasing Horacio’s fortune and aiding him against his enemies. But one day—and the old ladies crossed themselves as they said this—Horacio would die without confession, and then the Devil would leap out of the bottle and carry off the colonel’s soul to the depths of hell. The colonel knew of this story and was in the habit of laughing over it, one of those short, dry laughs of his which were more frightening even than his shouts of rage on certain mornings.
    There were other tales that came nearer to reality. When he was in his cups, Lawyer Ruy liked to recall the manner in which he had defended the colonel in a trial many years ago. Horacio had been accused of three particularly brutal murders. According to the indictment, not content with having slain one of his victims, he had cut off the man’s ears, nose, and tongue and had castrated him. Lawyer Ruy had been retained and was out for an acquittal. He put up a brilliant defence, making a plea in which he spoke of the “crying injustice” of the thing and of “slanders fabricated by nameless enemies without honour or self-respect.” The result was a triumph; it was one of those pleas which gave him his reputation as a great trial-lawyer. In eulogizing the colonel, he spoke of him as one of the most successful planters in that region, a man who not only had been responsible for erecting the chapel at Ferradas, but even now was undertaking to build the church at Tabocas; he was a respecter of the laws, twice councilman at Ilhéos, and a Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge. Could a man like that be guilty of so heinous a crime?
    Everyone knew, of course, that he
was
guilty.
    It happened over a cacao contract. On Horacio’s land the black man, Altino, together with his brother-in-law, Orlando, and a friend by the name of Zacarias, had entered into an agreement with the colonel to plant a grove for him. They had cleared the forest, had burned over the land, and then had planted cacao, sowing manihot and millet in between the rows in order that they might have something on which to subsist during the three years that it would take for the cacao trees to grow. When the three years were up, they came to the colonel