The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Galileo sighs in annoyance. He decides to take a sip from his bowl, burns his palate, makes a wry face. He blows on the bowl and takes another swallow. His forehead is furrowed with fatigue and irritation and there are dark circles under his eyes. Every so often he bites his lower lip. He is panting, sweating.

  “How long is that damned trip going to take him?” he growls after a time, sipping from his bowl.

  “Three or four days.” Jurema has sat down facing him, on the edge of an old trunk with leather straps. “He said you could wait for him, and when he got back he’d take you to Canudos.”

  “Three or four days!” Gall groans, turning his eyes heavenward in exasperation. “Three or four centuries, you mean.”

  The sound of tinkling sheep bells is heard outside, and the woolly dog barks loudly and leaps against the door, wanting to go out. Galileo gets to his feet, walks over to the palings, and takes a look outside: the canvas-covered wagon is where he has left it, next to the enclosure alongside the cabin in which a few sheep are penned. The animals’ eyes are open but they are still drowsy and their bells have stopped tinkling. The dwelling is on the top of a rise and on a sunny day one can see Queimadas; but not on this gray dawn with an overcast sky, when the only thing to be seen is the rolling, rocky stretch of desert below. Galileo walks back to the hammock. Jurema refills his bowl. The woolly dog barks and paws the dirt just inside the door.

  “Three or four days,” Gall thinks. Three or four centuries during which a thousand mishaps could happen. Should he look for another guide? Should he take off by himself to Monte Santo and hire someone else to show him the way to Canudos? Anything rather than stay here with the arms: his impatience would make the wait unbearable. Moreover, it was quite possible, as Epaminondas Gonçalves feared, that Major Brito’s expeditionary force would arrive in Queimadas before he could get away.

  “Weren’t you the one responsible for Rufino’s going off with the railroad men from Jacobina?” Gall mutters. Jurema is putting the fire out with a stick. “You’ve never liked the idea of Rufino’s taking me to Canudos.”

  “No, I’ve never liked the idea,” she agrees with such bluntness that for a moment Galileo feels his anger evaporate and nearly bursts out laughing. But she has spoken these words in all seriousness and looks him straight in the eye without blinking. Her face is an elongated oval, with prominent cheek and chin bones beneath her taut skin. Can the bones hidden beneath her hair be as prominent, as sharp, as eloquent, as revealing? “They killed those soldiers in Uauá,” Jurema adds. “Everybody says that more soldiers will march on Canudos. I don’t want him to be killed or taken prisoner. He feels a need to be on the move all the time. ‘You have Saint Vitus’s dance,’ his mother tells him.”

  “Saint Vitus’s dance?” Gall says.

  “People who can’t stay still,” Jurema explains. “People who go about dancing.”

  The dog begins barking furiously once more. Jurema goes to the door of the cabin, opens it, and pushes him outside with her feet. They hear him barking outside, and once again, the tinkling of sheep bells. With a gloomy expression on his face, Galileo follows Jurema with his eyes as she walks back to the fire and pokes at the embers with a stick. A wisp of smoke drifts away in spirals.

  “And besides, Canudos belongs to the baron and he’s always helped us,” Jurema says. “This house, this land, these sheep are ours thanks to him. You’re on the side of the jagunços, you want to help them. Taking you to Canudos is the same as helping them. Do you think the baron would like it if Rufino helps the thieves who stole his ranch from him?”

  “I’m certain he wouldn’t like it,” Gall mutters sarcastically.

  The sound of the sheep bells reaches their ears again, even louder now, and Gall rises to his feet and reaches the palings of the wall of the cabin in two strides. He takes a look outside: the trees, the clumps of underbrush, the patches of rock are beginning to stand out in the whitish expanse. The wagon is there outside, loaded with bundles wrapped in canvas the same color as the desert, and alongside it the mule, tethered to a stake.

  “Do you believe that the Counselor has been sent by the Blessed Jesus?” Jurema says. “Do you believe the things he prophesies? That the sea will become backlands and the backlands a sea? That the waters of the Vaza-Barris will turn into milk and the ravines into maize couscous to feed the poor?”

  There is not a trace of mockery in her words or in her eyes as Galileo Gall looks at her, trying to read in the expression on her face what she thinks of all the talk that she has heard secondhand. He is unable to tell: the thought crosses his mind that the long oval of her peaceful, burnished face is as inscrutable as that of a Hindustani or a Chinese. Or that of the emissary from Canudos with whom he talked in the tannery in Itapicuru. Then, too, it was impossible to know, by observing his face, what that taciturn man felt or thought.

  “In people who are dying of hunger, instincts are ordinarily stronger than beliefs,” he murmurs after drinking the last drop of liquid in the bowl as he carefully scrutinizes Jurema’s reactions. “They may well believe nonsensical, ingenuous, stupid things. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is what they do. They have done away with property, marriage, social hierarchies; they have refused to accept the authority of the Church and of the State, and wiped out an army company. They have fought against authority, money, uniforms, cassocks.”

  Jurema’s face is a blank; she does not move a muscle. Her dark, slightly slanted eyes gaze at him without a trace of curiosity, sympathy, surprise. She has moist lips that pucker at the corners.

  “They have taken up the fight at the point where we abandoned it, though they are not aware that they have done so. They are bringing the Idea back to life,” Gall goes on, wondering what Jurema can be thinking of the words that she is hearing. “That is why I’m here. That is why I want to help them.”

  He is panting for breath, as though he had been shouting at the top of his lungs. The fatigue of the last two days, and on top of it the disappointment that he has felt on discovering that Rufino is not in Queimadas, is beginning to overcome him again, and the thought of sleeping, stretching out, of closing his eyes is so irresistible that he decides to lie down under the cart for a few hours. Or could he perhaps sleep in here—in this hammock, for instance? Will Jurema think it shocking if he asks to do so?

  “That man who came from there, the one the saint sent, the one you saw—do you know who he was?” he hears her say. “It was Pajeú.” And as Gall does not appear to be impressed, she adds in a surprised voice: “Haven’t you heard of Pajeú? The most evil man in all the sertão. He lived by stealing and killing. He lopped off the noses and ears of people unlucky enough to run into him on the roads.”

  All at once the tinkling of the sheep bells can be heard again outside, along with anxious barks at the door of the cabin and the whinnying of the mule. Gall is remembering the emissary from Canudos, the scar etched into his face, his strange calm, his indifference. Was it a mistake not to have told him about the arms? No, since he couldn’t show them to him at the time: he would not have believed it, he would have been even more mistrustful, it would have jeopardized the entire plan. The dog barks frantically outside, and Gall sees Jurema grab the stick that she has put the fire out with and walk quickly over to the door. His mind elsewhere, still thinking about the emissary from Canudos, telling himself that if he had known that the man was an ex-bandit it might have been easier to talk with him, he watches Jurema struggle with the heavy crossbar, lift it, and at that moment something subtle, a noise, an intuition, a sixth sense, chance, tells him what is about to happen. For when Jurema is suddenly thrown backward as the door is violently flung open—with a shove or a kick from outside—and the silhouette of the man armed with a carbine appears in the doorway, Galileo already has his revolver out and is pointing it at the intruder. The roar of the carbine awakens the chickens in the corner, which flutter about in terror as Jurema, who has not been hit by the bullet but falls to the flo
or nonetheless, lets out a scream. On seeing the woman at his feet, the assailant hesitates, and it takes him a few seconds to find Gall amid the panicked flutter of wings, so that by the time he trains the carbine on him, Galileo has already fired, looking at him with a stupid expression on his face. The intruder drops the carbine and reels back, snorting. Jurema screams again. Galileo finally reacts and runs toward the carbine. He leans over and grabs it, and then catches sight, through the doorway, of the wounded man writhing on the ground moaning, another man coming on the run with his carbine raised and shouting something to the wounded man, and beyond him a third man hitching the wagon with the arms to a horse. Barely taking aim, he shoots. The man who was coming running stumbles, rolls on the ground bellowing, and Galileo takes another shot at him. “There are two bullets left,” he thinks. He sees Jurema at his side, pushing the door, sees her close it, lower the crossbar, and slip to the back of the shack. He gets to his feet, wondering when it was that she fell to the floor. He is covered with dirt and drenched with sweat, his teeth are chattering, and he is clutching the revolver so tightly that his fingers ache. He peeks out through the palings: the wagon with the arms is disappearing in the distance in a cloud of dust, and in front of the cabin the dog is barking frantically at the two wounded men, who are creeping toward the sheepfold. Taking aim at them, he shoots the last two bullets left in his revolver and hears what seems to him to be a human roar amid the barking and the tinkling sheep bells. Yes, he has hit one of them: the two are lying motionless, halfway between the cabin and the animal pen. Jurema is screaming still and the chickens cackling madly as they fly about in all directions, overturn things, crash into the palings, collide with his body. He slaps them away and looks out again, to the right and the left. If it weren’t for those two bodies lying practically one atop the other, it would seem as though nothing had happened. Breathing hard, he staggers amid the chickens to the door. Through the cracks he glimpses the lonely countryside, the sprawling bodies. “They made away with the rifles,” he thinks. “I’d be worse off if I were dead,” he thinks. He pants, his eyes opened wide. Finally he lifts the crossbar and pushes the door open. Nothing, nobody.

  He runs, half hunched over, to where the wagon has been standing, hearing the tinkle of the sheep bells as the creatures run round and round and back and forth inside the palings of the pen. He feels a knot of anxiety in his stomach, at the nape of his neck: a trail of gunpowder leads to the horizon, where it disappears in the direction of Riacho da Onça. He takes a deep breath, runs his hand over his little reddish beard; his teeth continue to chatter. The mule, tied to the tree trunk, is contentedly lazing about. He slowly walks back toward the cabin. He stops in front of the bodies lying on the ground: they are corpses now. He scrutinizes their tanned, unknown faces, fixed in a rigid grimace. Suddenly his expression turns to one of bitter, uncontrollable rage. He begins to kick the inert forms, viciously, muttering insults. His fury is contagious: the dog begins to bark, leap about, nibble at the two men’s sandals. Finally Galileo calms down. Dragging his feet, he goes back into the cabin. He is met by a flurry of hens that makes him raise his hands in front of his face to protect it. Jurema is standing in the middle of the room: a figure trembling all over, her tunic ripped, her mouth half open, her eyes full of tears, her hair disheveled. She is staring in bewilderment at the disorder that reigns all about her, as though unable to fathom what is happening in her house, and, on spying Gall, runs to him and throws her arms about his chest, stammering words he does not understand. He stands there rigid, his mind a blank. He feels the woman huddling against his chest; he looks, in consternation, in fear, at this body clinging to his, this neck palpitating beneath his eyes. He smells the odor of her, and the thought dimly crosses his mind: “It’s the smell of a woman.” His temples pound. With an effort he raises one arm, puts it around Jurema’s shoulders. He lets go of the revolver that he is still holding and his fingers awkwardly smooth her ruffled hair. “They were trying to kill me,” he whispers in Jurema’s ear. “There’s no more danger now. They’ve carried off what they were after.” Little by little the woman calms down. Her sobs die away, her body stops trembling, her hands let go of Gall. But he is still holding her close, still stroking her hair, and when Jurema tries to step away, he will not let her go. “Don’t be afraid,” he says to her slowly, in English, blinking rapidly. “They’re gone. They…” Something new, ambiguous, urgent, intense, has appeared in his face, something that grows by the moment, something that he is barely aware of. His lips are very close to Jurema’s neck. She steps back, vehemently, covering her bosom as she does so. She begins struggling now to free herself from Gall’s grasp, but he will not let her go, and as he holds her fast, he whispers over and over the same phrase that she is unable to understand: “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid.” Jurema lashes out at him with both fists, scratches his face, manages to free herself and makes her escape. But Galileo runs across the room after her, catches up with her, grabs her, stumbles over the old trunk, and falls to the floor with her. Jurema kicks at him, fights him off with all her strength, but does not scream. The only sounds to be heard are the jagged panting of the two of them, their murmuring voices as they struggle, the cackling of the chickens, the barking of the dog, the tinkling of the sheep bells. Amid leaden clouds, the sun is rising.

  He was born with very short legs and an enormous head, so the inhabitants of Natuba thought it would be better for him and for his parents if the Blessed Jesus took him right away, since if he survived he would be crippled and a cretin. Only the first turned out to be so. Because, even though the youngest son of Celestino Pardinas, the horsebreaker, was never able to walk like other people, he had a keen intelligence, a mind eager to know everything and capable, once a piece of knowledge had gone into that massive head that made people laugh, of retaining it forever. Everything about him was unusual: the fact that he had been born deformed in a family as normal as the Pardinases; that despite being a feeble, ridiculous-looking child he did not die or suffer illnesses; that instead of going about on two feet like humans he went about on all fours; and that his head became so monstrously large that it seemed like a miracle that his frail little body could hold it up. But what caused the townspeople of Natuba to begin to murmur among themselves that he had not been fathered by the horsebreaker but by the Devil was the fact that he had learned to read and write without anyone having taught him.

  Neither Celestino nor Dona Gaudência had taken the trouble—thinking, probably, that it would be useless—to take him to Dom Asênio, who, besides making bricks, taught Portuguese, a bit of Latin, and a smattering of religion. But it so happened that the post rider came one day and nailed up on the official announcement board in the main square a decree that he did not bother to read aloud, claiming that he still had to post it in ten other localities before the sun went down. The townspeople were trying to decipher the hieroglyphics when from underfoot they heard the Lion’s little piping voice: “It says that there’s an animal epidemic going round, that stables must be disinfected with creosote, all garbage burned, and water and milk boiled before drinking.” Dom Asênio confirmed that that was what it said. Pestered by the villagers to tell them who had taught him to read, the Lion gave an explanation that many of them found suspect: that he had learned by watching those who knew how, men such as Dom Asênio, Felisbelo the overseer, Dom Abelardo the healer, and Zózimo the tinsmith. None of them had given him lessons, but the four of them remembered having often seen the Lion’s huge head with its thick mane and his inquisitive eyes appear alongside the stool where they were reading aloud to someone in the town a letter that the person had received or writing one for him at his dictation. The fact is that the Lion had learned and from that time on he could be seen at any hour of the day hunched over in the shade of the blue jasmine trees of Natuba reading and rereading newspapers, prayer books, missals, edicts, and anything printed that he could lay his hands on. He became the person who wrote, with a goose quill he had
sharpened himself and a tincture of cochineal and various plants, in large, flowing letters, the birthday greetings, announcements of births, deaths, weddings, news of sickness, or simple gossip that the townspeople of Natuba wanted to send to people in other towns and that the post rider came to collect once a week. The Lion also read aloud to the villagers the letters that were sent them. He served as scribe and reader for the others as a pastime, without charging them a cent, but sometimes he received presents for performing these services.

  His real name was Felício, but as frequently happened in those parts, once the nickname took hold, it replaced his Christian name. They called him the Lion as a joke perhaps, a nickname undoubtedly brought to mind by his enormous head, but in time, as if to prove that the jokers hadn’t been far from the truth, it in fact came to be covered with a thick mane that hid his ears and tossed about as he moved. Or perhaps the name came from his way of walking, which was unquestionably animal-like, for he used both his feet and his hands to get about (protecting them with leather soles that served as hoofs, so to speak, or horseshoes), although his gait, what with his little short legs and his long arms that touched the ground every so often as he went along, was more like that of a simian than that of a feline predator. He was not doubled over like that all the time: he could stand erect for brief periods and take a few human steps on his ridiculous legs, but both these things were very tiring for him. Because of his peculiar manner of locomotion, he never wore pants, only long robes, like women, missionaries, or the penitents of the Blessed Jesus.

  Despite the fact that he took care of their correspondence, the townspeople never completely accepted the Lion. If his own father and mother could scarcely hide their shame at being his procreators and at one time tried to give him away, how could the men and women of Natuba have been expected to look upon this creature as belonging to the same species as they? The dozen Pardinas offspring who were his brothers and sisters wanted nothing to do with him, and it was common knowledge that he did not eat with them at the same table but at a wooden crate by himself. Hence, he knew neither paternal nor fraternal love (although he apparently had glimpses of another sort of love) nor friendship, for youngsters his age were afraid of him at first and later on repelled by him. They threw stones at him, spat on him, insulted him if he dared come near them to watch them play. He, for his part, moreover, rarely attempted to do so. From a very early age, his intuition or his unfailing intelligence told him that others would always be creatures who shunned him or were disagreeable to him, and would often even be his torturers, so that he had best remain apart from everyone. And that was what he did, at least until what happened at the irrigation ditch, and people saw him always warily keeping his distance, even at festivals and market fairs. When a Holy Mission came to Natuba, the Lion listened to the sermons from the rooftop of the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, like a cat. But even this strategy of withdrawal did not suffice to lay his fears to rest. The Gypsy’s Circus was the cause of one of his worst scares. It passed through Natuba twice a year with its caravan of monsters: acrobats, fortune-tellers, cantadores, clowns. On one of its visits, the Gypsy asked the horsebreaker and Dona Gaudência to let him take the Lion away with him as a circus hand. “My circus is the only place where he won’t attract attention, and he can make himself useful,” he told them. They agreed. The Gypsy took him off with him, but a week later the Lion had escaped and was back in Natuba. From that time on, every time the Gypsy’s Circus came to town, he was nowhere to be found.