The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  He was growing more and more afraid of this companion of his since childhood, for after the murder of their mistress, Big João became less and less like his former self. He scarcely said a word to him, and, on the other hand, he continually surprised him by talking to himself in a low voice, his eyes bloodshot. One night he heard him call the Devil “Father” and ask him to come to his aid. “Haven’t I done enough already, Father?” he stammered, his body writhing. “What more do you want me to do?” The Kid became convinced that Big João had made a pact with the Evil One and feared that, in order to continue accumulating merit, he would sacrifice him as he had their mistress. He decided to beat him to it. He planned everything, but the night that he crawled over to him, all set to plunge his knife into him, he was trembling so violently that Big João opened his eyes before he could do the deed. Big João saw him leaning over him with the blade quivering in his hand. His intention was unmistakable, but Big João didn’t turn a hair. “Kill me, Kid,” he heard him say. He ran off as fast as his legs could carry him, feeling that devils were pursuing him.

  The Kid was hanged in the prison in Salvador and Senhorita Adelinha’s remains were transferred to the neoclassic chapel of the plantation, but her murderer was not found, despite the fact that the Gumúcio family periodically raised the reward for his capture. And yet, after the Kid had run off, Big João had made no attempt to hide himself. A towering giant, half naked, miserable, eating what fell into the animal traps he set or the fruit he plucked from trees, he roamed the byways like a ghost. He went through the towns in broad daylight, asking for food, and the suffering in his face so moved people that they would usually toss him a few scraps.

  One day, at a crossroads on the outskirts of Pombal, he came upon a handful of people who were listening to the words of a gaunt man, enveloped in a deep-purple tunic, whose hair came down to his shoulders and whose eyes looked like burning coals. As it happened, he was speaking at that very moment of the Devil, whom he called Lucifer, the Dog, Can, and Beelzebub, of the catastrophes and crimes that he caused in the world, and of what men who wanted to be saved must do. His voice was persuasive; it reached a person’s soul without passing by way of his head, and even to a being as addlebrained as Big João, it seemed like a balm that healed old and terrible wounds. João stood there listening to him, rooted to the spot, not even blinking, moved to his very bones by what he was hearing and by the music of the voice uttering those words. The figure of the saint was blurred at times by the tears that welled up in João’s eyes. When the man went on his way, he began to follow him at a distance, like a timid animal.

  The two persons who came to know Galileo best in the city of São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos (called simply Bahia or Salvador) were a smuggler and a doctor; they were also the first to explain the country to him, even though neither of them would have shared the opinions of Brazil that the revolutionary expressed in his letters to L’Etincelle de la révolte (frequent ones during this period). The first of them, written within a week of his shipwreck, spoke of Bahia: “a kaleidoscope where a man with some notion of history sees existing side by side the social disgraces that have debased the various eras of humanity.” The letter referred to slavery, which, although abolished, nonetheless still existed de facto, since in order not to die of starvation, many freed blacks had returned to their former masters and begged them to take them in again. The masters hired on—for miserable salaries—only the able-bodied, so that the streets of Bahia, in Gall’s words, “teem with the elderly, the sick, and the wretched, who beg or steal, and with whores who remind one of those of Alexandria and Algiers, the most depraved ports on the planet.”

  The second letter, written two months later, concerned “the infamous alliance of obscurantism and exploitation,” and described the parade each Sunday of wealthy families headed for Mass at the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Praia, with servants carrying prayer stools, candles, missals, and parasols so that the sun would not damage the ladies’ complexions; “these latter,” Gall wrote, “like the English civil servants in the colonies, have made whiteness a paradigm, the quintessence of beauty.” But in a later article the phrenologist explained to his comrades in Lyons that, despite their prejudices, the descendants of Portuguese, Indians, and Africans had mingled with each other quite freely in this land and produced a motley mixture of mestizos: mulattoes, mamelucos, cafuzos, caboclos, curibocas. And he added: “Which is to say, that many more challenges for science.” These human types and the Europeans who landed on its shores for one reason or another gave Bahia a variegated and cosmopolitan atmosphere.

  It was among these foreigners that Galileo Gall—who at that time spoke only the most halting Portuguese—made his first acquaintances. In the beginning he lived in the Hôtel des Etrangers, in Campo Grande, but once he struck up a friendship with old Jan van Rijsted, the latter gave him a garret above the Livraria Catilina to live in, and got him pupils for private lessons in French and English so that he would have money to eat. Van Rijsted was of Dutch origin, born in Olinda, and had trafficked in cocoa beans, silks, spices, tobacco, alcohol, and arms between Europe, Africa, and America since the age of fourteen (without ever once landing in jail). Because of his associates—dealers, shipowners, sea captains—he was not a rich man; they had stolen a fair share of the goods he trafficked in. Gall was convinced that bandits, be they great criminals or mere petty thieves, were also fighting against the enemy—the state—and undermining the foundations of property, albeit unwittingly. This furthered his friendship with the ex-scoundrel. Ex because he had retired from the business of committing misdeeds. He was a bachelor, but he had lived with a girl with Arab eyes, thirty years younger than he, with Egyptian or Moroccan blood, with whom he had fallen in love in Marseilles. He had brought her to Bahia and built her a villa in the upper town, spending a fortune on decorating it so as to make her happy. On his return from one of his voyages, he found that the beauty had flown the coop after having sold every last thing in the villa, making off with the small strongbox in which Van Rijsted kept hidden a bit of gold and a few precious stones. He recounted these details to Gall as they were walking along the docks, contemplating the sea and the sailing vessels, shirting from English to French and Portuguese, in an offhand tone of voice that the revolutionary admired. Jan was now living on an annuity that, according to him, would allow him to eat and drink till his death, provided that it was not too long in coming.

  The Dutchman, an uncultured but curious man, listened with deference to Galileo’s theories on freedom and the conformations of the cranium as symptomatic of conduct, although he allowed himself to take exception when the Scotsman assured him that the love which couples felt for each other was a defect and a source of unhappiness. Gall s fifth letter to L’Etincelle de la révolte was on superstition, that is to say, on the Church of O Senhor de Bonfim, which pilgrims had filled with ex-votos, with legs, hands, arms, heads, breasts, and eyes of wood and crystal, asking for miracles or giving thanks for them. The sixth letter was on the advent of the Republic, which in aristocratic Bahia had meant only the change of a few names. In the next one, he paid homage to four mulattoes—the tailors Lucas Dantas, Luiz Gonzaga das Virgens, João de Deus, and Manoel Faustino—who, a century before, inspired by the French Revolution, had formed a conspiracy to destroy the monarchy and establish an egalitarian society of blacks, half-breeds, and whites. Jan van Rijsted took Galileo to the little public square where the four artisans had been hanged and quartered, and to his surprise saw him leave some flowers there.

  Amid the shelves of books of the Livraria Catilina, Galileo Gall made the acquaintance one day of Dr. Jose Batista de Sá Oliveira, an elderly physician and the author of a book that had interested him: Comparative Craniometry of the Human Types of Bahia, from the Evolutionist and Medico-Legal Point of View. The old man, who had been to Italy and met Cesare Lombroso, whose theories fascinated him, was happy to learn that he had at least one reader of this book that he had p
ublished at his own expense and that his colleagues considered extremely odd. Surprised at Gall’s knowledge of medicine—albeit continually disconcerted and frequently shocked by his opinions—Dr. Oliveira found in the Scotsman an excellent conversational partner, with whom on occasion he spent hours heatedly discussing the physical mechanisms of the criminal personality, biological inheritance, or the university, an institution that Gall railed against, regarding it as responsible for the division between physical and intellectual labor and hence the cause of worse social inequalities than aristocracy and plutocracy. Dr. Oliveira took Gall on as an aide in his medical practice and occasionally entrusted him with a bleeding or a purge.

  Although they sought out his company and perhaps respected him, neither Van Rijsted nor Dr. Oliveira had the impression that they really knew this man with the red hair and beard, shabbily dressed in black, who, despite his ideas, appeared to live a tranquil life: sleeping late, giving language lessons at his pupils’ homes, tirelessly walking about the city, or spending entire days in his garret reading and writing. Sometimes he disappeared for several weeks without telling them beforehand, and when he reappeared they discovered that he had been off on one of the long trips that took him throughout Brazil, in the most precarious circumstances. He never spoke to them of his past or of his plans, and since he gave them the vaguest of answers when they questioned him regarding them, the two of them resigned themselves to accepting him for what he was or what he appeared to be: an exotic, enigmatic, eccentric loner, whose words and ideas were incendiary but whose behavior was innocuous.

  After two years, Galileo Gall spoke Portuguese fluently and had sent off several additional letters to L’Etincelle de la révolte. The eighth, on the corporal punishments that he had witnessed being administered to bond servants in the streets and the public squares of the city, and the ninth, on the instruments of torture employed in the days of slavery: the rack, the stocks, the neck chain or gargalheira, metal balls attached to the ankles, and infantes, rings to crush the thumbs. The tenth, on O Pelourinho, the municipal whipping post where lawbreakers (Gall called them “brothers”) were still flogged with rawhide whips, which were for sale in stores under the marine nickname of o bacalhau—codfish.

  He spent so many hours, by day and by night, wandering about the labyrinthine streets of Salvador that he might well have been taken for someone in love with the city. But what Galileo Gall was interested in was not the beauties of Bahia; it was, rather, the spectacle that had never ceased to rouse him to rebellion: injustice. Here, unlike Europe, he explained in his letters to Lyons, there were no segregated residential districts. “The mean huts of the wretched lie side by side with the tiled palaces of the owners of sugar plantations and mills, and ever since the drought of fifteen years ago that drove thousands of refugees here from the highlands, the streets teem with children who look like oldsters and oldsters who look like children, and women who are broomsticks, and among this multitude the scientist can easily identify all manner of physical afflictions, from those that are relatively harmless to those that are terrifyingly severe: bilious fever, beriberi, dropsy, dysentery, smallpox.”

  “Any revolutionary whose convictions as to the necessity of a major revolution are wavering”—he wrote in one of his letters—“ought to take a look at what I am seeing in Salvador: it would put an end to all his doubts.”

  [III]

  When, weeks afterward, it became known in Salvador that in a remote town called Natuba the brand-new Republic’s tax decrees had been burned, the government decided to send a squad of Bahia State Police to arrest the troublemakers. Thirty police officers, in blue-and-green uniforms and kepis still bearing the insignia of the monarchy that the Republic had not yet had time to change, set out, first by train and then on foot, on the arduous journey to this place that for all of them was no more than a name on a map. The Counselor was not in Natuba. The sweating police officers questioned the municipal councillors and the inhabitants of the town before taking off in search of this rebel whose name, popular name, and legend they would bring back to the coast and spread in the streets of Bahia. Guided by a tracker from the region, their blue-and-green uniforms standing out in the radiant morning light, they disappeared into the wilds on the road to Cumbe.

  For another week they followed the Counselor’s trail, going up and down a sandy, reddish-colored terrain, with scrub of thorny mandacarus and famished flocks of sheep poking about in the withered leaves. Everyone had seen him pass by, the Sunday before he had prayed in this church, preached in that public square, slept alongside those rocks. They finally found him, seven leagues from Tucano, in a settlement called Masseté, a cluster of adobe huts with round roof tiles in the spurs of the Serra de Ovó. It was dusk; they caught sight of women with water jugs on their heads, and heaved a sigh of relief that their search was nearly over. The Counselor was spending the night with Severino Vianna, a farmer who had a maize field a kilometer outside the settlement. The police trotted out there, amid juazeiro trees with sharp-edged branches and thickets of velame that irritated their skin. When they arrived, in near-darkness, they saw a dwelling made of palings and a swarm of amorphous creatures crowded around someone who was doubtless the man they were looking for. No one fled, no one began yelling and shouting on spying their uniforms, their rifles.

  Were there a hundred of them, a hundred fifty, two hundred? There were as many men as women, and the majority of them, to judge from the garments they were wearing, appeared to have come from the poorest of the poor. In the eyes of all of them—so the police officers who returned to Bahia were later to tell their wives, their sweethearts, the whores they slept with, their buddies—was a look of indomitable determination. But in reality they did not have time to observe them or to identify the ringleader, for the moment the sergeant in charge ordered them to hand over the man known as the Counselor, the mob attacked them, an act of utter foolhardiness in view of the fact that the police had rifles while they were armed only with sticks, sickles, stones, knives, and a couple of shotguns. But everything happened so fast that before they knew it the police found themselves surrounded, dispersed, pursued, beaten up, and injured, as they heard themselves being called “Republicans!” as though the word were an insult. They managed to shoulder their rifles and shoot, but even when men and women in rags fell to the ground, with their chests riddled with bullets or their heads blown off, nothing daunted the mob and soon the police from Bahia found themselves fleeing, dazed and bewildered by this incomprehensible defeat. They were later to say that among their assailants there were not only the fanatics and madmen that they had expected but also hardened criminals such as Pajeú with the slashed face and the bandit whose acts of cruelty had earned him the nickname of Satan João. Three police officers were killed and left unburied, food for the carrion birds of the Serra de Ovó eight rifles disappeared. Another policeman was drowned in the Masseté. The pilgrims did not pursue them. Instead, they concerned themselves with burying their five dead and caring for the wounded, as others, kneeling at the Counselor’s feet, offered their thanks to God. Until far into the night, the sound of weeping and prayers for the dead could be heard amid the graves dug in Severino Vianna’s maize field.

  When a second squad of Bahia Police, numbering sixty officers, better armed than the first, detrained in Serrinha, they discovered that there had been a subtle change in the attitude of the villagers toward men in uniform. For even though the enmity with which police were received in the towns when they came up into the hills to hunt bandits was nothing new to them, they had never been as certain as they were this time that obstacles would be deliberately put in their way. The provisions in the general stores had always just run out, even when they offered to pay a good price for them, and despite the high fee offered, no tracker in Serrinha would guide them. Nor was anyone able this time to give them the slightest lead as to the whereabouts of the band. And as the police staggered from Olhos D’Agua to Pedra Alta, from Tracupá to Tiririca and f
rom there to Tucano and from there to Caraíba and Pontal and finally back again to Serrinha, being met with nothing but indifferent glances, contrite negatives, a shrug of the shoulders on the part of the cowherds, peasants, craftsmen, and women whom they came across on the road, they felt as though they were trying to lay their hands on a mirage. The band had not passed that way, no one had seen the dark-haired, dark-skinned man in the deep-purple habit and nobody remembered now that decrees had been burned in Natuba, nor had they heard about an armed encounter in Masseté. On returning to the capital of the state, safe and sound but thoroughly demoralized, the police officers reported that the horde of fanatics—fleetingly crystallized, like so many others, around a deeply devout woman or a preacher—had surely broken up and at this point, frightened by their own misdeeds, its members had no doubt scattered in all directions, after having perhaps killed their ringleader. Hadn’t that been what had happened so many times in the region?

  But they were mistaken. Even though events apparently repeated old patterns of history, this time everything was to be different. The penitents were now more united than ever, and far from having murdered the saint after the victory of Masseté, which they took to be a sign sent to them from on high, they revered him all the more. The morning after the encounter, the Counselor, who had prayed all night long over the graves of the dead rebels, had awakened them. They found him very downcast. He told them that what had happened the evening before was no doubt a prelude to even greater violence and asked them to return to their homes, for if they went on with him they might end up in jail or die like their five brothers who were now in the presence of the Father. No one moved. His eyes swept over the hundred, hundred fifty, two hundred followers in rags and tatters there before him, still in the grip of the emotions of the night before as they listened to him. He not only gazed upon them but appeared to see them. “Give thanks to the Blessed Jesus,” he said to them gently, “for it would seem that He has chosen you to set an example.”