The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  What he feared, above all else, were drunks, those bands of cowhands who returned to town after a day’s work herding, branding, gelding, or cropping, dismounted, and hurried to Dona Epifânia’s tavern to quench their thirst. They would come out arm in arm, singing, staggering, happy at times, in a rage at others, and would go looking for him in the narrow back streets to amuse themselves at his expense or let off steam. He had developed an unusually acute sense of hearing and could tell from a long way away, from their boisterous laughter and their swear words, that they were coming, and then, hugging the walls and the façades of buildings so they wouldn’t catch sight of him, he would hop on home as fast as he could, or, if he was far from home, he would hide in the brush or on a rooftop till the danger was past. He didn’t always manage to escape them. Sometimes, by resorting to a trick—sending someone to tell him, for instance, that So-and-so was asking for him because he needed to draft a petition to be presented to the town magistrate—they would manage to trap him. And they would then torment him for hours, stripping him naked to see if he had other monstrosities hidden underneath his tunic in addition to the ones that were plainly visible, mounting him on a horse, or trying to mate him with a she-goat to see what sort of offspring this cross-breeding would produce.

  As a point of honor rather than out of affection, Celestino Pardinas and other members of the family would intervene if they heard about what was happening and threaten the pranksters, and one time his older brothers lashed out with knives and shovels to rescue the scribe from a band of townspeople roaring drunk on cane brandy who had poured molasses over him, rolled him over and over in a garbage heap, and were leading him through the streets at the end of a rope as though he were an animal of an unknown species. But the relatives had had more than enough of these incidents that they found themselves involved in because of this member of the family. The Lion knew this better than anyone else and hence no one ever heard him denounce his tormentors.

  The fate of Celestino Pardinas’s youngest son took a decided turn for the worse the day that the tinsmith Zózimo’s young daughter, Almudia, the only one of his six children to have survived, the others having been stillborn or died within a few days of their birth, fell sick, with a high fever and vomiting. Dom Abelardo’s remedies and spells, like her parents’ prayers, had proved to be of no avail. The healer solemnly delivered himself of the opinion that the girl was a victim of the evil eye and that any antidote would be ineffective so long as the person who had put the evil eye upon her remained unknown. In despair at the fate that threatened this daughter who was the light of their lives, Zózimo and his wife Eufrásia made the rounds of the huts of Natuba, seeking information. And thus it was that they heard, from the mouths of three persons, the rumor that the girl had been seen in the company of the Lion, in a strange meeting on the bank of the irrigation ditch leading to the Mirândola hacienda. On being questioned, the sick girl confessed, half delirious, that on that particular morning, as she passed by the irrigation ditch on her way to the house of her godfather, Dom Náutilo, the Lion had asked her if he might sing a song that he had composed for her. And he had done so, before Almudia could take to her heels. It was the one time he had ever spoken to her, although before that she had noticed that, as if by chance, she often came across the Lion as she went about the town, and something about the way he hunched over as she passed made her surmise that he wanted to talk to her.

  Zózimo grabbed up his shotgun and, accompanied by nephews, brothers-in-law, and compadres, also armed, and followed by a crowd of people, went to the Pardinases’ house, cornered the Lion, pointed the shotgun straight between his eyes, and demanded that he repeat the song so that Dom Abelardo could exorcise it. The Lion, struck dumb, stared at him wide-eyed, distraught. After repeating several times that if he did not reveal the magic spell he would blow his big ugly head off, the tinsmith cocked his gun. For the space of a second the Lion’s big intelligent eyes gleamed in utter panic. “If you kill me, you’ll never learn the magic spell and Almudia will die,” his little piping voice murmured, so terrified it was unrecognizable. A total silence ensued. Zózimo was sweating heavily. His relatives kept Celestino Pardinas and his sons at bay with their shotguns. “Will you let me go if I tell you what it was?” they heard the piping voice of the monster say. Zózimo nodded. Then, choking up, his voice breaking like an adolescent’s, the Lion began to sing. He sang—as the townspeople of Natuba who were present and those who were not but swore that they had been reported, remembered, recounted far and wide—a love song, in which Almudia’s name was mentioned. When he finished singing, the Lion’s eyes were filled with embarrassment. “Let me go now,” he roared. “I’ll let you go when my daughter is cured,” the tinsmith answered dully. “And if she is not cured, I’ll burn you to death at her graveside. I swear it on my soul.” He looked round at the Pardinases—father, mother, brothers frozen motionless by the shotguns—and added in a tone of voice that left no doubt in their minds as to his resolve: “I’ll burn you alive even if my family and yours will then be forced to kill each other for centuries on end.”

  Almudia died that same night, after vomiting up blood. The townspeople thought that Zózimo would weep, tear out his hair, curse God, or drink cane brandy till he fell into a stupor. But he did no such thing. His reckless behavior of recent days gave way to cold determination as he planned, at one and the same time, his daughter’s funeral and the death of the sorcerer who had cast his spell over her. He had never been a wicked man or a cruel or violent one, but rather a kindly, helpful neighbor. Hence, everyone pitied him, forgave him in advance for what he was about to do, and there were even those who approved of what he intended to do.

  Zózimo had a stake set up at the graveside and straw and dry branches brought to the site. The Pardinases remained prisoners in their house. The Lion was in the tinsmith’s animal pen, tied hand and foot. He spent the night there, listening to the prayers, the condolences, the litanies, the lamentations of the wake. The following morning, they hoisted him into a cart drawn by burros, and at a distance, as usual, he followed the funeral procession. When they arrived at the cemetery, as the coffin was lowered into the ground and more prayers were being said, in accordance with the tinsmith’s instructions two of the latter’s nephews tied him to the post and heaped around it the straw and branches that they were about to light to burn him to death. Nearly everyone in the town was there to witness his immolation.

  At that moment the saint arrived. He must have set foot in Natuba the night before, or at dawn that morning, and someone must have informed him of what was about to happen. But this explanation was too logical for the townspeople, for whom the supernatural was more believable than the natural. They were later to say that his ability to foresee the future, or the Blessed Jesus, had brought him and his followers to this remote spot in the backlands of Bahia at this precise moment to correct a mistake, to prevent a crime, or simply to offer a proof of his power. He had not come alone, as he had the first time he preached in Natuba, years before, nor had he come accompanied by only two or three pilgrims, as on his second visit, when in addition to giving counsel he had rebuilt the chapel of the abandoned Jesuit convent on the town square. This time he was accompanied by some thirty people, as gaunt and poor as he was, but with eyes filled with happiness. As they followed after him, he made his way through the crowd to the grave just as the last shovelfuls of earth to fill it were raining down.

  The man dressed in dark purple turned to Zózimo, standing with downcast eyes gazing at the freshly turned earth. “Have you buried her in her best dress, in a sturdy coffin?” he asked in an amiable though not affectionate tone of voice. Zózimo nodded, barely moving his head. “We will pray to the Father, so that He will receive her with rejoicing in the Kingdom of Heaven,” the Counselor said. And he and the penitents thereupon recited litanies and sang hymns at the graveside. Only then did the saint point to the stake to which the Lion had been tied. “What are you about to do with this
boy, my brother?” he asked. “Burn him to death,” Zózimo replied. And he explained why, amid a silence that seemed to echo. The saint nodded, not blinking an eye. Then he turned to the Lion and gestured to the crowd to step back a bit. Everyone withdrew a few paces. The saint leaned down and spoke in the ear of the youngster tied to the stake and then brought his ear close to the Lion’s mouth to hear what he was saying. And thus, as the Counselor bent his head down toward the ear and the mouth of the other, the two of them held a secret conversation. No one moved, awaiting some extraordinary event.

  And, in fact, what happened was as amazing as seeing a man frying to death on a funeral pyre. For when the two of them fell silent, the saint, with the serenity that never abandoned him, not moving from the spot, said: “Come, untie him!” The tinsmith raised his eyes and looked at him in amazement. “You must loosen his bonds yourself,” the man dressed in dark purple said, in a voice so deep it made people tremble. “Do you want your daughter to go to hell? Are the flames down there not hotter, more everlasting than the ones that you are seeking to ignite?” his voice roared once more, as though amazed at such stupidity. “You are filled with superstition, ungodly, a sinner,” he went on. “Repent of your intentions, come and loosen his bonds, seek his forgiveness, and pray to the Father not to send your daughter to the realm of the Dog because of your cowardice and wickedness, because of your lack of faith in God.” And he stood there, reviling him, urging him, terrifying him at the thought that through his grievous fault Almudia would go to hell, till finally the townspeople saw Zózimo obey him, rather than shoot him or plunge his knife into him or burn him to death along with the monster, and fall to his knees, sobbing, begging the Father, the Blessed Jesus, the Divine One, the Virgin to keep Almudia’s innocent soul from descending to hell.

  When the Counselor, after remaining for two weeks in the town, praying, preaching, comforting the sick and offering his counsel to the healthy, took off in the direction of Mocambo, Natuba had a cemetery enclosed within a brick wall and new crosses on all the graves. And the ranks of the Counselor’s followers had been increased by one, a small figure half animal and half human who, as the little band of pilgrims marched off into the countryside covered with mandacarus, seemed to be trotting off alongside the handful of the faithful in rags and tatters like a horse, a goat, a pack mule…

  Was he thinking, was he dreaming? I am on the outskirts of Queimadas, it is daytime, this is Rufino’s hammock. Everything else was confused in his mind: above all, the concatenation of circumstances which, at dawn this morning, had once again turned his life upside down. The amazement that had overcome him as he fell asleep after making love lingered on as he lay there half asleep and half awake.

  Yes, for someone who believed that fate was in large part innate and written in the brain case, where skillful hands could palpate it and perspicacious eyes could read it, it was a harrowing experience to confront the existence of that unpredictable margin that other beings could manipulate with a horrifying disregard of one’s own will, of one’s personal aptitudes. How long had he been resting? His fatigue had disappeared, at any rate. Had the young woman disappeared, too? Had she gone to get help, to fetch people to come take him prisoner? He thought or dreamed: “My plans went up in smoke as they were about to materialize.” He thought or dreamed: “Troubles never come singly.” He realized that he was lying to himself; it was not true that this anxiety and this feeling of stunned amazement were due to his having missed meeting Rufino, to his having narrowly escaped death, to his having killed those two men, to the theft of the arms that he was going to take to Canudos. It was that sudden, incomprehensible, irrepressible impulse that had made him rape Jurema after ten years of not touching a woman that was troubling his half sleep.

  He had loved a number of women in his youth, he had had comrades—women fighting for the same ideals as he—with whom he had shared short stretches of his life’s journey; in his days in Barcelona he had lived with a working-class woman who was pregnant at the time of the attack on the military barracks and who, he learned later after he had fled Spain, had eventually married a banker. But, unlike science or revolution, women had never occupied a prominent place in his life. Like food, sex to him had been something that satisfied a basic need and soon left him surfeited. The most secret decision of his life had been made ten years before. Or was it eleven? Or twelve? Dates danced about in his head, but not the place: Rome. He had hidden out there after escaping from Barcelona, in the house of a pharmacist, a comrade who wrote for the underground anarchist press and had been in prison more than once. There the vivid images were in Gall’s memory. He had had certain suspicions first, and then proof: this comrade picked up whores who solicited around the Colosseum, brought them home when Gall was gone, and paid them to let him whip them. Ah, the poor devil’s tears the night that Galileo had rebuked him, and then his confession that he could take his pleasure with a woman only by inflicting punishment on her, that he could make love only when he saw a battered, bruised body. He thought or dreamed he heard the pharmacist’s voice, once again, asking him for help, and in his half sleep, as on that night, he palpated him, felt the round bulge in the zone of the inferior emotions, the abnormal temperature of the crown, where Spurzheim had located the organ of sexuality, and the deformation, in the lower occipital curve, just above the nape of his neck, of the cavities that represent the destructive instincts. (And at that moment he was suddenly surrounded once again by the warm atmosphere of Mariano Cubí’s study, and heard once more the example that Cubí used to cite, that of Jobard le Joly, the Geneva arsonist, whose head he had examined after the decapitation: “In him this region of cruelty was so enlarged that it looked like an enormous tumor, a pregnant cranium.”) Then he heard his own voice, telling the pharmacist-anarchist the remedy again: “The thing you must rid your life of, comrade, is not vice but sex,” and explaining to him that when he had done so, the sexual path would be blocked and the destructive power of his nature would be channeled toward ethical and social goals, thus multiplying his energy for the fight for freedom and the eradication from this earth of every form of oppression. And without a tremor in his voice, looking him straight in the eye, he again made him the fraternal proposal: “Let’s do it together. I’ll make the same decision and abide by it, to prove to you that it’s possible. Let us both swear never to touch a woman again, brother.” Had the pharmacist kept his vow? He remembered his look of consternation, his voice that night, and thought or dreamed: “He was a weak man.” The sun’s rays penetrated his closed eyelids, burned his pupils.

  He, on the other hand, was not a weak man. He had been able to keep the vow—until this morning—because the power of reason and knowledge served as a firm support, a source of strength for what in the beginning had been merely an impulse, a comradely gesture. Weren’t the search for sexual pleasure, the enslavement to instinct a danger to someone engaged in a war without quarter? Weren’t sexual urges liable to distract him from the ideal? What tormented Gall in those years was not banishing women from his life, but the thought that his arch-foes, Catholic priests, were doing precisely the same thing that he was, though admittedly in his case the reasons were not obscurantist ones, rooted in sheer prejudice, as in their case, but the desire, rather, to make himself stronger, freer of impediments, more available for this fight to reconcile, to conjoin what they, more than anyone else, had helped to turn into permanent enemies: heaven and earth, matter and spirit. He had never been tempted to break his vow—“till today,” Galileo Gall dreamed or thought. On the contrary, he firmly believed that this absence of women in his life had been transformed into a greater intellectual appetite, into an ever-increasing ability to act. No: he was lying to himself again. The power of reason had been able to get the better of sex when he was awake, but not when he was asleep. On many nights during these years, tempting female forms slipped into his bed as he slept, clung to his body, stole caresses. He dreamed or thought that these phantasms had been harder t
o resist than women of flesh and blood, and he remembered that, like adolescents or comrades locked up in jails the world over, he had often made love with these impalpable silhouettes fashioned by his desire.