“Thus far, nobody has ever won a war against the Father,” the Counselor said joyfully.
Crouching over his bench, the Lion of Natuba was writing swiftly.
Having finished the job in Itiúba that he had hired on for with the people from the railroad company in Jacobina, Rufino is now guiding a group of cowhands along the rugged back trails of the Serra de Bendengó, that mountain fastness where a stone from heaven once fell to earth. They are tracking cattle rustlers who have stolen half a hundred head from the Pedra Vermelha hacienda belonging to a “colonel” named José Bernardo Murau, but before they locate the cattle they learn of the defeat of Major Febrônio de Brito’s expedition at Monte Cambaio and decide to stop searching so as not to run into jagunços or retreating soldiers. Just after parting company with the cowhands, Rufino falls into the hands of a band of deserters, led by a sergeant from Pernambuco, in the spurs of the Serra Grande. They relieve him of his shotgun, his machete, his provisions, and the sack containing the reis that he has earned as a guide for the railway people. But they do not otherwise harm him and even warn him not to go by way of Monte Santo, since Major Brito’s defeated troops are regrouping there and might well enlist his services.
The region is in a state of profound unrest because of the war. The following night, near the Rio Cariacá, the guide hears the sound of gunfire and early the next morning discovers that men who have come from Canudos have sacked and razed the Santa Rosa hacienda, which he knows very well. The house, vast and cool, with a wooden balustrade and surrounded by palm trees, has been reduced to a pile of smoking ashes. He catches sight of the empty stables, the former slave quarters, and the peasants’ huts, which have also been set on fire, and an old man living nearby tells him that everyone has gone off to Belo Monte, taking with them the animals and everything else that did not go up in flames.
Rufino takes a roundabout way so as to skirt Monte Santo, and the following day a family of pilgrims headed for Canudos warns him to be on his guard, for there are patrols from the Rural Guard scouring the countryside in search of young men to press into army service. At midday he arrives at a chapel half hidden amid the yellowish slopes of the Serra da Engorda, where, by long-standing tradition, men with blood on their hands come to repent of their crimes, and others come to make offerings. It is a very small building, standing all by itself, with no doors and with white walls teeming with lizards slithering up and down. The inside walls are completely covered with ex-votos: bowls containing petrified food, little wooden figurines, arms, legs, heads made of wax, weapons, articles of clothing, all manner of miniature objects. Rufino carefully examines knives, machetes, shotguns, and chooses a long, curved, sharp-honed knife recently left there. Then he goes to kneel before the altar, on which there is nothing but a cross, and explains to the Blessed Jesus that he is merely borrowing this knife. He tells Him how he has been robbed of everything he had on him, so that he needs the knife in order to get back home. He assures Him that it is not at all his intention to take something that belongs to Him, and promises to return it to Him, along with a brand-new knife that will be his offering to Him. He reminds Him that he is not a thief, that he has always kept his promises. He crosses himself and says: “I thank you, Blessed Jesus.”
He then goes on his way at a steady pace that does not tire him, climbing up slopes or down ravines, traversing scrubland caatinga or stony ground. That afternoon he catches an armadillo that he roasts over a fire. The meat from it lasts him two days. The third day finds him not far from Nordestina. He heads for the hut of a farmer he knows, where he has often spent the night. The family receives him even more cordially than in the past, and the wife prepares a meal for him. He tells them how the deserters robbed him, and they talk about what is going to happen after the battle on O Cambaio, in which, so people are saying, a great many men lost their lives. As they talk, Rufino notes that the man and his wife exchange glances, as though there is something they want to tell him though they don’t dare come out with it. Then the farmer, coughing nervously, asks him how long it has been since he has had news of his family. Nearly a month. Has his mother died? No. Jurema, then? The couple sit there looking at him. Finally the man speaks up: the news is going round that there has been a shootout and men killed at his house and that his wife has taken off with a redheaded stranger. Rufino thanks them for their hospitality and leaves immediately.
At dawn the following morning the silhouette of the guide stands out against the light on a hill from which his cabin can be seen. He walks through the little copse dotted with boulders and bushes where he first met Galileo Gall and makes his way toward the rise on which his dwelling stands, at his usual pace, a quick trot halfway between walking and running. His face bears the traces of his long journey, of the troubles he has come up against, of the bad news he has had the night before: tense and rigid, the features stand out more sharply, the lines and hollows more deeply etched. The only thing he has with him is the knife that he has borrowed from the Blessed Jesus. Approaching within a few yards of his cabin, he gazes warily about. The gate of the animal pen is open, and it is empty. But what Rufino stands staring at with eyes at once grave, curious, and dumfounded is not the animal pen but the open space in front of the house, where there are now two crosses that were not there before, propped up by two piles of little stones. On entering the cabin, he spies the oil lamp, the casks and jars, the pallet, the hammock, the trunk, the print of the Virgin of Lapa, the cooking pots and the bowls, and the pile of firewood. There doesn’t seem to be anything missing, and what is more, the cabin appears to have been carefully tidied up, each thing in its proper place. Rufino looks around again, slowly, as though trying to wrench from these objects the secret of what has happened in his absence. He can hear the silence: no dog barking, no cackling hens, no sheep bells tinkling, no voice of his wife. He finally begins walking about the room, closely examining everything. By the time he finishes, his eyes are red. He leaves the cabin, closing the door gently behind him.
He heads toward Queimadas, gleaming brightly in the distance beneath a sun that is now directly overhead. Rufino’s silhouette disappears around a bend of the promontory, then reappears, trotting amid the lead-colored stones, cacti, yellowish brush, the sharp-pointed palisade fence round a corral. Half an hour later he enters the town by way of Avenida Itapicuru and walks up along it to the main square. The sun reflects like quicksilver off the little whitewashed houses with blue or green doors. The soldiers who have beaten a retreat after the defeat at O Cambaio have begun to straggle into town, ragged strangers who can be seen standing about on the street corners, sleeping underneath the trees, or bathing in the river. The guide walks past them without looking at them, perhaps without even seeing them, thinking only of the townspeople: cowhands with tanned, weather-beaten faces, women nursing their babies, horsemen riding off, oldsters sunning themselves, children running about. They bid him good day or call out to him by name, and he knows that after he has passed by, they turn round and stare at him, point a finger at him, and begin to whisper among themselves. He returns their greetings with a nod of his head, looking straight ahead without smiling so as to discourage anyone from trying to have a word with him. He crosses the main square—a dense mass of sunlight, dogs, hustle and bustle—bowing to left and right, aware of the murmurs, the stares, the gestures, the thoughts he arouses. He does not stop till he reaches a little shop with candles and religious images hanging outside, opposite the little Chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary. He removes his sombrero, takes a deep breath as though he were about to dive into water, and goes inside. On catching sight of him, the tiny old woman who is handing a package to a customer opens her eyes wide and her face lights up. But she waits until the buyer has left before she says a word to him.
The shop is a cube with holes through which tongues of sunlight enter. Candles and tapers hang from nails and lie lined up on the counter. The walls are covered with ex-votos and with saints, Christs, Virgins, and devotional prints. Ru
fino kneels to kiss the old woman’s hand: “Good day, Mother.” She traces the sign of the cross on his forehead with her gnarled fingers with dirty nails. She is a gaunt, grim-faced old woman with hard eyes, all bundled up in a shawl despite the stifling heat. She is holding a rosary with large beads in one hand.
“Caifás wants to see you, to explain to you,” she says. She has difficulty getting the words out, either because she finds the subject painful or because she has no teeth. “He’ll be coming to the Saturday market. He’s come every Saturday to see if you’re back yet. It’s a long journey, but he’s come anyway. He’s your friend—he wants to explain to you.”
“Meanwhile, Mother, tell me what you know,” the guide mutters.
“They didn’t come to kill you,” the little old woman answers straightaway. “Or her either. They were only out to kill the stranger. But he put up a fight and killed two of them. Did you see the crosses there in front of your house?” Rufino nods. “Nobody claimed the bodies and they buried them there.” She crosses herself. “May they be received in Thy holy glory, Lord. Did you find your house in order? I’ve been going out there every so often. So you wouldn’t find it all dirty.”
“You shouldn’t have gone,” Rufino says. He stands there with his head bowed dejectedly, his sombrero in his hand. “You can hardly walk. And besides, that house is dirty forever now.”
“So you already know,” the old woman murmurs, her gaze seeking his, but he avoids her eyes and continues to stare down at the floor. The woman sighs. After a moment’s silence, she adds: “I’ve sold your sheep so they wouldn’t be stolen, the way the chickens were. Your money’s in that drawer.” She pauses once more, trying to postpone the inevitable, to avoid talking about the only subject that interests her, the only one that interests Rufino. “People are malicious. They said you weren’t going to come back. That they’d conscripted you in the army perhaps, that you’d died in the battle perhaps. Have you seen how many soldiers there are in Queimadas? There were lots of them that died back there, it seems. Major Febrônio de Brito’s here, too.”
But Rufino interrupts her. “The ones who came to kill him—do you know who their leader was?”
“Caifás,” the old woman answers. “He brought them there. He’ll explain to you. He explained to me. He’s your friend. They weren’t out to kill you. Or her. Just the redhead, the stranger.”
She falls silent, as does Rufino, and in the burning-hot, dark redoubt the buzzing of bluebottles, of the swarms of flies circling about among the images, can be heard.
Finally the old woman makes up her mind to speak again. “Lots of people saw them,” she exclaims in a trembling voice, her eyes suddenly blazing. “Caifás saw them. When he told me, I thought: I’ve sinned, and God is punishing me. I brought my son misfortune. Yes, Rufino: Jurema, Jurema. She saved his life, she grabbed Caifás’s hands. She went off with him, with her arm around him, leaning on him.” She stretches out a hand and points in the direction of the street. “Everybody knows. We can’t live here any longer, son.”
There is not a twitch of a muscle, the blink of an eye in the angular, beardless face darkened by the deep shadow in the room.
The little old woman shakes her tiny gnarled fist and spits scornfully in the direction of the street. “They came to commiserate with me, to talk to me about you. Their every word was a knife in my heart. They’re vipers, my son!” She passes the black shawl across her eyes, as though she were wiping away tears, but her eyes are dry. “You’ll clear your name of the filth they’ve heaped upon it, won’t you? It’s worse than if they’d plucked out your eyes, worse than if they’d killed me. Talk with Caifás. He knows the insult to your name, he knows what honor is. He’ll explain to you.”
She sighs once again, then kisses the beads of her rosary with fervent devotion. She looks at Rufino, who hasn’t moved or raised his head. “Many people have gone off to Canudos,” she says in a gentler tone of voice. “Apostles have come. I would have gone, too. But I stayed because I knew you’d come back. The world’s going to end, my son. That’s why we’re seeing what we’re seeing. That’s why what’s happened has happened. Now I can leave. Will my legs hold up for such a long journey? The Father will decide. It is He who decides everything.”
She falls silent, and after a moment Rufino leans over and kisses her hand again. “It’s a very long journey and I advise you not to make it, Mother,” he says. “There’s fighting, fires, nothing to eat on the way. But if that’s your wish, go ahead. Whatever you do will always be the right thing to do. And forget what Caifás told you. Don’t grieve or feel ashamed on that account.”
When the Baron de Canabrava and his wife disembarked at the Navy Yard of Salvador, after an absence of several months, they could judge from the reception they received how greatly the strength of the once-all-powerful Bahia Autonomist Party and of its leader and founder had declined. In bygone days, when he was a minister of the Empire or the plenipotentiary in London, and even in the early years of the Republic, the baron’s returns to Bahia were always the occasion for great celebrations. All the notables of the city and any number of landowners hastened to the port, accompanied by servants and relatives carrying welcome banners. The city officials always came, and there was a band and children from parochial schools with bouquets of flowers for Baroness Estela. The banquet was held in the Palace of Victory, with the governor as master of ceremonies, and dozens of guests applauded the toasts, the speeches, and the inevitable sonnet that a local bard recited in honor of the returning couple.
But this time there were no more than two hundred people at the Navy Yard to applaud the baron and baroness when they landed, and there was not a single municipal or military or ecclesiastical dignitary among them. As Sir Adalberto de Gumúcio and the deputies Eduardo Glicério, Rocha Seabra, Lélis Piedades, and João Seixas de Pondé—the committee appointed by the Autonomist Party to receive their leader—stepped up to shake the baron’s hand and kiss the baroness’s, from the expressions on their faces one would have thought they were attending a funeral.
The baron and baroness, however, gave no sign that they noticed what a different reception they were receiving this time. They behaved exactly as always. As the baroness smilingly showed the bouquets to her inseparable personal maid Sebastiana, as though she were amazed at having been given them, the baron bestowed backslaps and embraces on his fellow party members, relatives, and friends who filed past to welcome him. He greeted them by name, inquired after their wives, thanked them for having taken the trouble to come meet him. And every so often, as though impelled by some intimate necessity, he repeated that it was always a joy to return to Bahia, to be back with this sun, this clean air, these people. Before climbing into the carriage that awaited them at the pier, driven by a coachman in livery who bowed repeatedly on catching sight of them, the baron bade everyone farewell with both arms upraised. Then he seated himself opposite the baroness and Sebastiana, whose skirts were full of flowers. Adalberto de Gumúcio sat down next to him and the carriage started up the Ladeira da Conceição da Praia, blanketed in luxuriant greenery. Soon the travelers could see the sailboats in the bay, the Fort of São Marcelo, the market, and any number of blacks and mulattoes in the water catching crabs.
“Europe is always an elixir of youth,” Gumúcio congratulated them. “You look ten years younger than when you left.”
“I owe that more to the ship crossing than to Europe,” the baroness said. “The three most restful weeks of my life!”
“You, on the other hand, look ten years older.” The baron looked out the little window at the majestic panorama of the sea and the island spread out wider and wider as the carriage climbed higher, ascending the Ladeira de São Bento now, heading for the upper town. “Are things as bad as all that?”
“Worse than you can possibly imagine.” He pointed to the port. “We wanted to have a big turnout, to stage a great public demonstration. Everybody promised to bring people, even from the interior. We were
counting on thousands. And you saw how many there were.”
The baron waved to some fish peddlers who had removed their straw hats on seeing the carriage pass by the seminary.
“It’s not polite to talk politics in the presence of ladies. Or don’t you consider Estela a lady?” the baron chided his friend in a mock-serious tone of voice.
The baroness laughed, a tinkling, carefree laugh that made her seem younger. She had chestnut hair and very white skin, and hands with slender fingers that fluttered like birds. She and her maidservant, an amply curved brunette, gazed in rapture at the dark blue sea, the phosphorescent green of the shoreline, the blood-red rooftops.
“The only person whose absence is justified is the governor,” Gumúcio said, as though he hadn’t heard. “We were the ones responsible for that. He wanted to come, along with the Municipal Council. But the situation being what it is, it’s better that he remain au-dessus de la mêlée. Luiz Viana is still a loyal supporter.”
“I brought you an album of horse engravings,” the baron said, to raise his friend’s spirits. “I presume that political troubles haven’t caused you to lose your passion for equines, Adalberto.”
On entering the upper town, on their way to the Nazareth district, the recently arrived couple put on their best smiles and devoted their attention to returning the greetings of people passing by. Several carriages and a fair number of horsemen, some of them having come up from the port and others who had been waiting at the top of the cliff, escorted the baron through the narrow cobblestone streets, amid curious onlookers standing crowded together on the sidewalks or coming out onto the balconies or poking their heads out of the donkey-drawn streetcars to watch them pass. The Canabravas lived in a town house faced with tiles imported from Portugal, a roof of round red Spanish-style tiles, wrought-iron balconies supported by strong-breasted caryatids, and a façade topped by four ornaments in gleaming yellow porcelain: two bushy-maned lions and two pineapples. The lions appeared to be keeping an eye on the boats arriving in the bay and the pineapples to be proclaiming the splendor of the city to seafarers. The luxuriant garden surrounding the mansion was full of coral trees, mangoes, crotons, and ficus sighing in the breeze. The house had been disinfected with vinegar, perfumed with aromatic herbs, and decorated with large vases of flowers to receive its owners. In the doorway, servants in white balloon pants and little black girls in red aprons and kerchiefs stood clapping their hands to greet them. The baroness began to say a few words to them as the baron, taking his place in the entryway, bade those escorting him goodbye. Only Gumúcio and the deputies Eduardo Glicério, Rocha Seabra, Lélis Piedades, and João Seixas de Pondé came inside the house with him. As the baroness went upstairs, followed by her personal maid, the men crossed the foyer, an anteroom with pieces of furniture in wood, and the baron opened the doors of a room lined with shelves full of books, overlooking the garden. Some twenty men fell silent as they saw him enter the room. Those who were seated rose to their feet and all of them applauded.
The War of the End of the World Page 23