Roy was fourteen when he read a story about the Brazilian bandit Lampião in a book entitled Famous Desperados. Baseball practice had been called off because of rain, and he did not want to go home and have to listen to his mother complain about the shortcomings of her current husband, so Roy went to the neighborhood library and found the book lying by itself on a table. He sat down and looked at the contents page; there were chapters about Jesse James, the Dalton Gang, Baby Face Nelson, even Robin Hood, among others, all of whom he already knew something about, but Lampião––whose real name was Virgolino Ferreira da Silva––Roy had never heard of.
Lampião, it said in the book, means lantern, or lamp, in Portuguese. He lived and marauded with his gang in the 1920s and ’30s in Northeastern Brazil, in the back country, or backlands, called the sertão. After his father was killed by police, when Virgolino was nineteen years old, he vowed to become a bandit and was given the nickname Lampião because he was the light that led the way for his followers, who included both men and woman. His girlfriend’s name was Maria Bonita; she left her rancher husband to go with Lampião and ride with his band of outlaws, leaving her daughter, Expedita, to be raised by Lampião’s brother, João.
The Brazilian word for bandits was cangaceiros, which came from the word canga or cangalho, meaning a yoke for oxen, because a cangaceiro carried his rifle over both of his shoulders like a yoke on an ox. Roy was enraptured by the place names of towns and backlands provinces that Lampião and his outfit traversed: Pernambuco, Paraíba, Alagoas, Chorrocho, Barro Vermelho, Campo Formoso, Santana do Ipanema, and many others. Lampião achieved a reputation similar to that of Robin Hood, sharing the spoils with the poor while robbing the rich. There was no real consistency about this, of course, as Lampião’s generosities were often arbitrary, but nonetheless the myth grew over the years that he and his band, which varied in number between ten and thirty, moved freely about the backlands. He was regularly written about in newspapers and magazines throughout Brazil and dubbed the King of the Cangaceiros. A Syrian named Benjamin Abrahão even made a film starring Lampião and Maria Bonita.
Lampião and ten of his bandit gang, including Maria Bonita, came to an ignominious end, however, when they were gunned down by police in their hideout on the São Francisco River. The soldiers cut off hands and feet of the outlaws, to preserve as souvenirs, and each of the dead desperados was decapitated. Their heads were put on display first in Piranhas, and then in the local capital of Maceió. Finally, the heads of Lampião and Maria Bonita were sent to Salvador, the capital of Bahia, where they were exhibited in a museum. A photograph in the book of several of the heads, surrounded by their guns, hats and other belongings, fascinated Roy, especially since one of the faces closely resembled his own.
It was just drizzling when Roy came out of the library and there was very little light left in the sky, which was deep purple. As he walked toward his house, he thought about Lampião and his bandit brother, Ezekiel, nicknamed Ponta Fina, “Sureshot”, escaping on horseback across the São Francisco, pursued by government soldiers, described by a witness as rawboned, dirty and desperately tired-looking. The bandits were constantly on the run, and in addition to their practice of thievery and murder, Lampião and some of his men occasionally castrated, branded or sliced off ears of those who opposed or offended them, believing that these particularly brutal acts of violence would intimidate others who would dare refuse to assist them or get in their way.
The rain began again, harder than before, so Roy stopped underneath the awning in front of Nelson’s Meat Market on Ojibway Boulevard. The downpour reminded him of an episode described in the book of the time monsoon rains came suddenly one year near Raso da Catarina when Lampião and several of his cohorts were fleeing after raiding the property of a wealthy rancher. They were caught in open country and forced to take shelter under their standing horses and had to endure it when the horses urinated on him. Lampião was proud of the legend of himself as a rough, roguish, romantic character, glorified by journalists––some of whom he paid to propagate his myth––in the faraway big cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Roy wondered if the dwarfish, skinny, half–blind bandit king had consoled himself with these thoughts as his bedraggled steed pissed on him.
A man and woman came and stood under the awning with Roy. The man was tall and thin and was wearing a brown suit with a red tie. The woman was wearing a green dress and her blonde hair was wet and matted from the rain. She fussed with it a little, then they both lit cigarettes. Roy noticed that the woman had a deep two–inch blue scar under her right eye she tried to conceal with make–up that had been mostly worn away by the rain.
“I heard they tied him to a tree,” she said to the man, “then slit his throat and stole his wallet.”
“No kiddin’,” said the man.
“Yeah,” she said, “took his shoes, too. They were real bandits.”