The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  They pulled the wagon along two by two; the five of them were a pitiful sight to behold, as though they had endured tremendous sufferings.

  Every time it came his turn to be a draft animal, the Dwarf grumbled to the Bearded Lady: “You know it’s madness to go to Canudos and yet we’re going. There’s nothing to eat and people there are dying of hunger.” He pointed to Gall, his face contorted with anger. “Why are you listening to him?”

  The Dwarf was sweating, and since he was bending over and leaning forward to speak he looked even shorter. How old might he be? He himself didn’t know. His face was already beginning to wrinkle; the little humps on his back and chest had become more pronounced now that he was so much thinner.

  The Bearded Lady looked at Gall. “Because he’s a real man!” she exclaimed. “I’m tired of being surrounded by monsters.”

  The Dwarf was overcome by a fit of the giggles. “And what about you? What are you?” he said, doubling over with laughter. “Oh, I know the answer to that one. You’re a slave. You enjoy obeying a man—him now and the Gypsy before him.”

  The Bearded Lady, who had burst out laughing too, tried to slap him, but the Dwarf dodged her. “You like being a slave,” he shouted. “He bought you the day he felt your head and told you that you’d have been a perfect mother. You believed it, and your eyes filled with tears.”

  He was laughing fit to kill and had to take off at a run so the Bearded Lady wouldn’t catch him. She threw stones after him for a while. A few minutes later the Dwarf was back walking at her side again. Their quarrels were always like that, more a game or an unusual way of communicating.

  They walked along in silence, with no set system for taking turns pulling the wagon or stopping to rest. They halted when one or another of them was too tired to walk another step, or when they came upon a little stream, a spring, or a shady place where they could spend the hottest hour of the day. As they walked along, they kept a sharp eye out at all times, scanning the environs in search of food, and hence from time to time they had been able to catch game. But this was a rare occurrence, and they had to content themselves with chewing on anything that was green. They looked for imbuzeiros in particular, a tree that Galileo Gall had taught them to appreciate: the sweetish, refreshing taste of its juicy roots made it seem like real food.

  That afternoon, after Algodões, they met a group of pilgrims who had stopped to rest. They left their wagon and joined them. Most of them were people from the village who had decided to go off to Canudos. They were being led by an apostle, an elderly man dressed in a tunic over trousers and shod in rope sandals. He was wearing an enormous scapular, and the people following him looked at him with timid veneration in their eyes, as though he were someone from another world. Squatting at the man’s side, Galileo Gall asked him questions. But the apostle looked at him with a distant gaze, not understanding him, and went on talking with his people. Later on, however, the old man spoke of Canudos, of the Holy Books, and of the prophecies of the Counselor, whom he called a messenger of Jesus. His followers would be restored to life in three months and a day, exactly. The Can’s followers, however, would die forever. That was the difference: the difference between life and death, heaven and hell, damnation and salvation. The Antichrist could send soldiers to Canudos: but to what avail? They would rot away, they would disappear forever. Believers too might die, but three months and a day later, they would be back, their bodies whole and their souls purified by the brush of angels’ wings and the breath of the Blessed Jesus. Gall gazed at him intently, his eyes gleaming, trying his best not to miss a syllable. As the old man paused for a moment, he said that not only faith, but arms as well, were needed to win wars. Was Canudos able to defend itself against the rich people’s army? The pilgrims’ heads turned round to see who was speaking and then turned back toward the apostle. Though he had not looked at Gall, the latter had listened. When the war was ended, there would no longer be any rich people, or rather, no one would take any notice of them, because everybody would be rich. These stones would become rivers, these hillsides fertile fields, and the sandy ground of Algodões a garden of orchids like the ones that grow on Monte Santo. Snakes, tarantulas, cougars would be friends of man, as it would be now if Adam had not been driven out of Paradise. The Counselor was in this world to remind people of these truths.

  Someone began to weep in the semidarkness, with quiet, heartfelt sobs that continued for a long time. The old man began to speak again, with a sort of tenderness. The spirit was stronger than matter. The spirit was the Blessed Jesus and matter was the Dog. The miracles so long awaited would take place: poverty, sickness, ugliness would disappear. His hands touched the Dwarf, lying curled up next to Galileo. He, too, would be tall and beautiful, like all the others. Now other people could be heard weeping, caught up by the contagious sobs of the first person. The apostle leaned his head against the body of the disciple closest to him and dropped off to sleep. Little by little, the pilgrims quieted down, and one after the other, they, too, fell asleep. The circus people returned to their wagon. Very soon afterward they heard the Dwarf, who often talked in his sleep, snoring away.

  Galileo and Jurema slept apart from the others, on top of the canvas tent that they had not set up since Ipupiará. The moon, full and bright, presided over a cortege of countless stars. The night was cool, clear, without a sound, peopled with the shadows of mandacarus and cajueiros. Jurema closed her eyes and her breathing grew slow and regular, as Gall, lying alongside her, face up with his hands behind his head, contemplated the sky. It would be stupid to end up in this wasteland without having seen Canudos. It might well be something primitive, naïve, contaminated by superstition, but there was no doubt of it: it was also something unusual. A libertarian citadel, without money, without masters, without politics, without priests, without bankers, without landowners, a world built with the faith and the blood of the poorest of the poor. If it endured, the rest would come by itself: religious prejudices, the mirage of the beyond, being obsolete and useless, would fade away. The example would spread, there would be other Canudoses, and who could tell…He had begun to smile. He scratched his head. His hair was growing out, long enough now for him to grasp with his fingertips. Going around with a shaved head had left him a prey to anxiety, to sudden rushes of fear. Why? It went back to that time in Barcelona when they were taking care of him so as to garrote him. The sick ward, the madmen of the prison. They had had their heads shaved and been put in straitjackets. The guards were common prisoners; they ate the patients’ rations, beat them mercilessly, and delighted in hosing them down with ice-cold water. That was the vision that came to life again each time he caught a glimpse of his head reflected in a mirror, a stream, a well: the vision of those madmen tortured by prison guards and doctors alike. Back then he had written an article that he was proud of: “Against the Oppression of Illness.” The revolution would not only free man of the yoke of capital and religion, but also of the prejudices that surrounded illnesses in a class society: the patient—above all, the mental patient—was a social victim no less long-suffering and scorned than the worker, the peasant, the prostitute, the servant girl. Hadn’t that revered old man said, just tonight, thinking that he was speaking of God when in reality he was speaking of freedom, that in Canudos poverty, sickness, ugliness would disappear? Wasn’t that the revolutionary ideal? Jurema’s eyes were open and she was watching him. Had he been thinking aloud?

  “I would have given anything to be with them when they routed Febrônio de Brito,” he said in a whisper, as though uttering words of love. “I’ve spent my life fighting and all I’ve seen in our camp is betrayals, dissensions, and defeats. I would have liked to see a victory, if only just once. To know what it feels like, what it’s really like, what a victory for our side tastes like.”

  He saw that Jurema was looking at him as she had at other times, at once aloof and intrigued. They lay there, just a fraction of an inch apart, their bodies not touching. The Dwarf had begun to bab
ble deliriously, in a soft voice.

  “You don’t understand me and I don’t understand you,” Gall said. “Why didn’t you kill me when I was unconscious? Why didn’t you convince the capangas to take my head away with them instead of just my hair? Why are you with me? You don’t believe in the things that I believe in.”

  “The person who must kill you is Rufino,” Jurema whispered, with no hatred in her voice, as though she were explaining something very simple. “By killing you, I would have done a worse thing to him than you did.”

  “That’s what I don’t understand,” Gall thought. They had talked about the same thing before and each time he had ended up as much in the dark as ever. Honor, vengeance, that rigorous religion, those punctilious codes of conduct—how to explain their existence here at the end of the world, among people who possessed nothing but the rags and lice they had on them? Honor, a vow, a man’s word, those luxuries and games of the rich, of idlers and parasites—how to understand their existence here? He remembered how, from the window in his room at the boarding house of Our Lady of Grace in Queimadas, he had listened one market day to a wandering minstrel recite a story that, though distorted, was a medieval legend he had read as a child and as a young man seen transformed into a light romantic comedy for the stage: Robert the Devil. How had it gotten here? The world was more unpredictable than it appeared to be.

  “I don’t understand those capangas’ reasons for carrying off my hair either,” he murmured. “That Caifás, I mean. Was he sparing my life so as not to deprive his friend of the pleasure of taking his revenge? That’s not the behavior of a peasant. It’s the behavior of an aristocrat.”

  At other times, Jurema had tried to explain, but tonight she remained silent. Perhaps she was now convinced that this stranger would never understand these things.

  The following morning, they took to the road again before the Algodões pilgrims. It took them an entire day to cross the Serra da França, and that night they were so tired and hungry they collapsed. The Idiot fainted twice during the day’s journey, and the second time he lay there so pale and still they thought he was dead. At dusk they were rewarded for their hard day by the discovery of a pool of greenish water. Parting the water plants, they drank from it, and the Bearded Lady brought the Idiot a drink in her cupped hands and cooled the cobra by sprinkling it with drops of water. The animal did not suffer from hunger, for they could always find little leaves or a worm or two to feed it. Once they had quenched their thirst, they gathered roots, stems, leaves to eat, and the Dwarf laid traps. The breeze that was blowing was balm after the terrible heat they had endured all day long. The Bearded Lady sat down next to the Idiot and took his head in her lap. The fate of the Idiot, the cobra, and the wagon was as great a concern to her as her own; she seemed to believe that her survival depended on her ability to protect that person, animal, and thing that constituted her world.

  Gall, Jurema, and the Dwarf chewed slowly, without gusto, spitting out the little twigs and roots once they had extracted the juice from them. At the feet of the revolutionary was something hard, lying half buried. Yes, it was a skull, yellowed and broken. Ever since he had been in the backlands, he had seen human bones along the roads. Someone had told him that some men in these parts dug up their enemies’ dead bodies and left them lying in the open as food for scavengers, because they believed that by so doing they were sending their souls to hell. He examined the skull, turning it this way and that in his hands.

  “To my father, heads were books, mirrors,” he said nostalgically. “What would he think if he knew that I was here in this place, in the state that I’m in? The last time I saw him, I was seventeen years old. I disappointed him by telling him that action was more important than science. He was a rebel, too, though in his own way. Doctors made fun of him, and called him a sorcerer.”

  The Dwarf looked at him, trying to understand, as did Jurema. Gall went on chewing and spitting, his face pensive.

  “Why did you come here?” the Dwarf murmured. “Aren’t you afraid of dying so far from your homeland? You have no family here, no friends. Nobody will remember you.”

  “You’re my family,” Gall answered. “And the jagunços, too.”

  “You’re not a saint, you don’t pray, you don’t talk about God,” the Dwarf said. “Why are you so set on getting to Canudos?”

  “I couldn’t live among foreigners,” Jurema said. “If you don’t have a fatherland, you’re an orphan.”

  “Someday the word ‘fatherland’ is going to disappear,” Galileo immediately replied. “People will look back on us, shut up within frontiers, killing each other over lines on a map, and they’ll say: How stupid they were.”

  The Dwarf and Jurema looked at each other and Gall had the feeling that they were thinking he was the one who was stupid. They chewed and spat, grimacing in disgust every so often.

  “Do you believe what the apostle from Algodões said?” the Dwarf asked. “That one day there’ll be a world without evil, without sicknesses…”

  “And without ugliness,” Gall added. He nodded his head several times. “I believe in that the way other people believe in God. For a long time now, a lot of people have given their lives so that that might be possible. That’s why I’m so doggedly determined to get to Canudos. Up there, in the very worst of cases, I’ll die for something that’s worth dying for.”

  “You’re going to get killed by Rufino,” Jurema muttered, staring at the ground. Her voice rose: “Do you think he’s forgotten the affront to his honor? He’s searching for us and sooner or later he’ll take his revenge.”

  Gall seized her by the arm. “You’re staying with me so as to see that revenge, isn’t that true?” he asked her. He shrugged. “Rufino couldn’t understand either. It wasn’t my intention to offend him. Desire sweeps everything before it: force of will, friendship. We’ve no control over it, it’s in our bones, in what other people call our souls.” He brought his face close to Jurema’s again. “I have no regrets, it was…instructive. What I believed was false. Carnal pleasure is not at odds with the ideal. We mustn’t be ashamed of the body, do you understand? No, you don’t understand.”

  “In other words, it might be true?” the Dwarf interrupted, his voice breaking and an imploring look in his eyes. “People say that he’s made the blind see and the deaf hear, closed the wounds of lepers. If I say to him: ‘I’ve come because I know you’ll work the miracle,’ will he touch me and make me grow?”

  Gall looked at him, disconcerted, and found no truth or lie to offer him in reply. At that moment the Bearded Lady burst into tears, out of pity for the Idiot. “He hasn’t an ounce of strength left,” she said. “He’s not smiling any more, or complaining, he’s just dying little by little, second by second.” They heard her weeping like that for a long time before falling asleep. At dawn, they were awakened by a family from Carnaíba, who passed some bad news on to them. Rural Police patrols and capangas in the hire of hacienda owners in the region were blocking the entrances and exits of Cumbe, waiting for the arrival of the army. The only way to reach Canudos now was to turn north and make a long detour by way of Massacará, Angico, and Rosário.

  A day and a half later they arrived in Santo Antônio, a tiny spa on the banks of the greenish Massacará. The circus people had been in the town, years before, and remembered how many people came to cure their skin diseases in the bubbling, fetid mineral springs. Santo Antônio had also been the constant victim of attacks by bandits, who came to rob the sick people. Today it appeared to be deserted. They did not come across a single washerwoman down by the river, and in the narrow cobblestone streets lined with coconut palms, ficus, and cactus there was not a living creature—human, dog, or bird—to be seen. Despite this, the Dwarf’s mood had suddenly brightened. He grabbed a cornet, put it to his lips and produced a comic blare, and began his spiel about the performance they would give. The Bearded Lady burst out laughing, and even the Idiot, weak as he was, tried to push the wagon along faster, with
his shoulders, his hands, his head; his mouth was gaping open and long trickles of saliva were dribbling out of it. They finally spied an ugly, misshapen little old man who was fastening an eyebolt to a door. He looked at them as though he didn’t see them, but when the Bearded Lady threw him a kiss he smiled.

  The circus people parked the wagon in a little square with climbing vines; doors and windows started flying open and faces of the townspeople, attracted by the blaring of the cornet, began peeking out of them. The Dwarf, the Bearded Lady, and the Idiot rummaged through their bits of cloth and odds and ends, and a moment later they were busily daubing paint on their faces, blackening them, decking themselves out in bright costumes, and in their hands there appeared the last few remains of a set of props: the cobra cage, hoops, magic wands, a paper concertina. The Dwarf blew furiously into his cornet and shouted: “The show is about to begin!” Gradually, an audience straight out of a nightmare began to crowd round them. Human skeletons, of indefinable age and sex, most of them with faces, arms, and legs pitted with gangrene sores, abscesses, rashes, pockmarks, came out of the dwellings, and overcoming their initial apprehension, leaning on each other, crawling on all fours, or dragging themselves along, came to swell the circle. “They don’t look like people who are dying,” Gall thought. “They look like people who’ve been dead for some time.” All of them, the children in particular, seemed very old. Some of them smiled at the Bearded Lady, who was coiling the cobra round her, kissing it on the mouth, and making it writhe in and out of her arms. The Dwarf grabbed the Idiot and mimicked the number that the Bearded Lady was performing with the snake: he made him dance, contort himself, tie himself in knots. The townspeople and the sick of Santo Antônio watched, grave-faced or smiling, nodding their heads in approval and bursting into applause now and again. Some of them turned around to look at Gall and Jurema, as though wondering when they would put on their act. The revolutionary watched them, fascinated, as Jurema’s face contorted in a grimace of repulsion. She did her best to contain her feelings, but soon she whispered that she couldn’t bear the sight of them and wanted to leave. Galileo did not calm her down. His eyes had begun to redden and he was deeply shaken. Health, like love, like wealth and power, was selfish: it shut one up within oneself, it abolished all thought of others. Yes, it was better not to have anything, not to love, but how to give up one’s health in order to be as one with those brothers who were ill? There were so many problems, the hydra had so many heads, iniquity raised its head everywhere one looked.