The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “What is it that’s impressed you so?” his colleague asks him.

  “We don’t understand what’s happening in Canudos,” he replies. “It’s more complicated, more confused than I’d thought.”

  “Well, I for one never thought there were emissaries of Her Britannic Majesty running around in the backlands, if that’s what you mean,” the old journalist growls. “But neither am I prepared to believe that little priest’s story that the only thing behind all this is love of God. Too many rifles, too many skirmishes, tactics far too well planned for all of this to be the work of illiterate Sebastianists.”

  The nearsighted journalist says nothing. They go back to their hut, and the veteran correspondent immediately bundles up and drops off to sleep. But his colleague stays up, writing by the light of a candle, with his portable desk on his knees. He collapses on his blanket when he hears taps sounded. In his mind’s eye he can see the troops who are sleeping in the open, fully dressed, with their rifles, stacked by fours, at their feet, and the horses in their corral alongside the artillery pieces. He lies awake for a long time, thinking of the sentries making their rounds at the edge of camp, who will signal to each other all night long by blowing whistles. But, at the same time, something else is preying on his mind, below the surface: the priest taken prisoner, his stammerings, the words he has spoken. Are his colleague and the colonel right? Can Canudos be explained in terms of the familiar concepts of conspiracy, rebellion, subversion, intrigues of politicians out to restore the monarchy? Listening to that terrified little priest today, he has had the certainty that all that is not the explanation. Something more diffuse, timeless, extraordinary, something that his skepticism prevents him from calling divine or diabolical or simply spiritual. What is it, then? He runs his tongue across the mouth of his empty canteen and a few moments later falls asleep.

  When first light appears on the horizon, the tinkling of little bells and bleating are heard at one end of the camp, and a little clump of bushes begins to stir. A few heads are raised, in the company covering that flank of the regiment. The sentry who has just passed by swiftly retraces his steps. Those who have been awakened by the noise strain their eyes, cup their hands behind their ears. Yes, bleating, bells tinkling. A look of joyous anticipation comes over their sleepy, hungry, thirsty faces. They rub their eyes, signal to each other not to make a sound, rise cautiously to their feet, and run toward the bushes, from which the bleating, tinkling noises are still coming. The first men to reach the thicket spy the sheep, an off-white blur in the deep shadow tinged with blue: baaa, baaa…They have just caught one of the animals when the shooting breaks out, and moans of pain are heard from those sent sprawling on the ground, hit by bullets from carbines or arrows from crossbows.

  Reveille sounds from the other end of the camp, signaling that the column is to move on.

  The casualties resulting from the ambush are not very heavy—two dead and three wounded—and though the patrols who take out after the jagunços do not catch them, they bring back a dozen sheep that are a welcome addition to their scanty rations. But perhaps because of the growing difficulties in securing food and water, perhaps because they are now so close to Canudos, the troops’ reaction to the ambush betrays a nervousness of which there has been no sign up until now. The soldiers of the company to which the victims belong ask that the prisoner be executed in reprisal. The nearsighted journalist notes the change in attitude of the men who have crowded round the white horse of the commander of the Seventh Regiment: contorted faces, eyes filled with hate. The colonel gives them permission to speak, listens to them, nods, as they all talk at once. He finally explains to them that this prisoner is not just another jagunço but someone whose knowledge will be precious to the regiment once they are in Canudos.

  “You’ll get your revenge,” he tells them. “And very soon now. Save your rage for later: don’t waste it.”

  That noon, however, the soldiers have the revenge they are so eager for. The regiment is marching past a rocky promontory, on which there can be seen—a frequent sight—the head and carcass of a cow that black vultures have stripped of everything edible. A sudden intuition causes one of the soldiers to remark that the dead animal is a blind for a lookout post. He has barely gotten the words out when several men break ranks, run over, and, shrieking with excitement, watch as a jagunço who is a little more than skin and bones crawls out from his hiding place underneath the cow. The soldiers fall on him, sink their knives, their bayonets into him. They decapitate him and carry the head back to Moreira César to show it to him. They tell him that they are going to load it into a cannon and send it flying into Canudos so the rebels will see the fate that awaits them. The colonel remarks to the nearsighted journalist that the troops are in fine fettle for combat.

  Although he had ridden all night, Galileo Gall did not feel sleepy. The mounts were old and skinny, but showed no signs of tiring till after daylight. Communication with Ulpino, the guide, a man with a roughhewn face and copper-colored skin who chewed tobacco, was not easy. They barely said a word to each other till midday, when they halted to eat. How long would it take them to get to Canudos? Spitting out the wad he was chewing on, the guide gave him a roundabout answer. If the horses held up, two or three days. But that was in normal times, not in times like this…They would not be heading for Canudos in a straight line, they’d be backtracking every so often so as to keep out of the way of both the jagunços and the soldiers, since either would make off with their horses. Gall suddenly felt very tired, and fell asleep almost immediately.

  A few hours later, they rode off again. Shortly thereafter, they were able to cool off a bit in a tiny rivulet of brackish water. As they rode on amid stony hillsides and level stretches of ground bristling with prickly pears and thistles, Gall was beside himself with impatience. He remembered that dawn in Queimadas when he might well have died and the stirrings of sex had flooded back into his life. Everything was lost now in the depths of his memory. He discovered to his astonishment that he had no idea what the date was: neither the day nor the month. Only the year: it was probably still 1897. It was as though in this region that he kept continually journeying through, bouncing back and forth, time had been abolished, or was a different time, with its own rhythm. He tried to remember how the sense of chronology had revealed itself in the heads that he had palpated here. Was there such a thing as a specific organ that revealed man’s relationship to time? Yes, of course there was. But was it a tiny bone, an imperceptible depression, a temperature? He could not remember its exact location, though he could recall the capacities or incapacities that it revealed: punctuality or the lack of it, foresight or continual improvisation, the ability to organize one’s life methodically or existences undermined by disorder, overwhelmed by confusion… “Like mine,” he thought. Yes, he was a typical case of a personality whose fate was chronic tumult, a life falling into chaos on every hand…He had had proof of that at Calumbi, when he had tried feverishly to sum up what it was he believed in and the essential facts of his life story. He had had the demoralizing feeling that it was impossible to order, to hierarchize that whole dizzying round of travels, surroundings, people, convictions, dangers, high points, and low ones. And it was more than likely that those papers that he had left in the hands of the Baron de Canabrava did not make sufficiently clear what was surely an enduring factor in his life, that loyalty that had been unfailing, something that could provide a semblance of order amid all the disorder: his revolutionary passion, his great hatred of the misery and injustice that so many people suffered from, his will to help somehow to change all that. “Nothing of what you believe in is certain, nor do your ideals have anything to do with what is happening in Canudos.” The baron’s phrase rang in his ears once more, and irritated him. How could an aristocratic landowner who lived as if the French Revolution had never taken place understand the ideals he lived by? Someone for whom “idealism” was a bad word? How could a person from whom jagunços had seized one esta
te and were about to burn down another have any understanding of Canudos? At this moment, doubtless, Calumbi was going up in flames. He, Galileo Gall, could understand that conflagration, he knew very well that it was not a product of fanaticism or madness. The jagunços were destroying the symbol of oppression. Dimly but intuitively, they had rightly concluded that centuries of the rule of private property eventually came to have such a hold on the minds of the exploited that that system would seem to them of divine origin and the landowners superior beings, demigods. Wasn’t fire the best way of proving that such myths were false, of dispelling the victims’ fears, of making the starving masses see that it was possible to destroy the power of the landowners, that the poor possessed the strength necessary to put an end to it? Despite the dregs of religion they clung to, the Counselor and his men knew where the blows must be aimed. At the very foundations of oppression: property, the army, the obscurantist moral code. Had he made a mistake by writing those autobiographical pages that he had left in the baron’s hands? No, they would not harm the cause. But wasn’t it absurd to entrust something so personal to an enemy? Because the baron was his enemy. Nonetheless, he felt no enmity toward him. Perhaps because, thanks to him, he now felt he understood everything he heard and other people understood everything he said: that was something that hadn’t happened to him since he’d left Salvador. Why had he written those pages? Why did he know that he was going to die? Had he written them in an excess of bourgeois weakness because he didn’t want to end his days without leaving a single trace of himself in the world? All of a sudden the thought occurred to him that perhaps he had left Jurema pregnant. He felt a sort of panic. The idea of his having a child had always caused him a visceral repulsion, and perhaps that had influenced his decision in Rome to abstain from sexual relations. He had always told himself that his horror of fathering a child was a consequence of his revolutionary convictions. How can a man be available at all times for action if he has an offspring that must be fed, clothed, cared for? In that respect, too, he had been single-minded: neither a wife nor children nor anything that might restrict his freedom and sap his spirit of rebellion.

  The stars were already out when they dismounted in a little thicket of velame and macambira. They ate without saying a word and Galileo fell asleep before he’d drunk his coffee. His sleep was very troubled, full of images of death. When Ulpino awakened him, it was still pitch-dark and they heard a mournful wail that might have been a fox. The guide had warmed up the coffee and saddled the horses. He tried to start up a conversation with Ulpino. How long had he worked for the baron? What did he think of the jagunços? The guide’s answers were so evasive that he gave up trying. Was it his foreign accent that immediately aroused these people’s mistrust? Or was it an even more profound lack of communication, between his entire way of feeling and thinking and theirs?

  At that moment Ulpino said something he didn’t understand. He asked him to repeat it, and this time each word was clear: Why was he going to Canudos? “Because there are things going on up there I’ve fought for all my life,” he told him. “They’re creating a world without oppressors or oppressed up there, a world where everybody is free and equal.” He explained, in the simplest terms he could, why Canudos was important for the world, how certain things that the jagunços were doing coincided with an old ideal for which many men had given their lives. Ulpino did not interrupt him or look at him as he spoke, and Gall could not help feeling that what he said slid off the guide as wind blows over rocks, without leaving the slightest trace. When he fell silent, Ulpino tilted his head a little to one side, and in what struck Gall as a very odd tone of voice murmured that he thought that Gall was going to Canudos to save his wife’s life. And as Gall stared at him in surprise, he went doggedly on: Hadn’t Rufino said he was going to kill her? Didn’t he care if Rufino killed her? Wasn’t she his wife? Why else would he have stolen her from Rufino? “I don’t have a wife. I haven’t stolen anybody,” Gall replied vehemently. Rufino had been talking about someone else; Ulpino was the victim of a misunderstanding. The guide withdrew into his stubborn silence once more.

  They did not speak again till hours later, when they met a group of pilgrims, with carts and water jugs, who offered them a drink. When they had left them behind, Gall felt dejected. It was because of Ulpino’s totally unexpected questions, and his reproachful tone of voice. So as not to let his mind dwell on Jurema and Rufino, he thought about death. He wasn’t afraid of it; that was why he had defied it so many times. If the soldiers captured him before he reached Canudos, he would put up such a fight that they would be forced to kill him; in that way he would not have to endure the humiliation of being tortured and of perhaps turning out to be a coward.

  He noted that Ulpino seemed uneasy. They had been riding through a dense stretch of caatinga, amid breaths of searing-hot air, for half an hour, when suddenly the guide began to peer intently at the foliage around them. “We’re surrounded,” he whispered. “We’d best wait till they come out.” They climbed down from their horses. Gall tried in vain to see any sign that would indicate that there were human beings close by. But, a few moments later, men armed with shotguns, crossbows, machetes, and knives stepped out from among the trees. A huge black, well along in years, naked to the waist, greeted them in words that Gall could not follow and asked where they were coming from. From Calumbi, Ulpino answered, on their way to Canudos. He then indicated the roundabout route they’d taken, so as, he said, to avoid meeting up with the soldiers. The exchange was tense, but it did not strike Gall as unfriendly. He then saw the black grab the reins of Ulpino’s horse and mount it, as one of the others mounted his. He took a step toward the black, and immediately all those who had shotguns aimed them at him. He gestured to show his peaceful intentions and asked them to listen to him. He explained that he had to get to Canudos immediately, to talk with the Counselor, to tell him something important, that he was going to help them fight the soldiers…but he fell silent, disconcerted by the men’s distant, set, scornful faces. The black waited a moment, but on seeing that Gall was not going to go on, he said something that the latter didn’t understand this time either, whereupon they all left, as silently as they had appeared.

  “What did he say?” Gall murmured.

  “That the Father, the Blessed Jesus, and the Divine are defending Belo Monte,” Ulpino answered. “They don’t need any more help.”

  And he added that they were not very far away now, so there was no need for him to worry about having lost the horses. They immediately set out again. And in fact they made their way through the tangled scrub as fast on foot as they would have on horseback. But the loss of the horses had also meant the loss of the saddlebags with their provisions, and from that moment on they ate dry fruits, shoots, and roots to appease their hunger. As Gall had noted that, since leaving Calumbi, remembering the incidents of the most recent period of his life opened the doors of his mind to pessimism, he tried—it was an old remedy—to lose himself in abstract, impersonal reflections. “Science against an uneasy conscience.” Didn’t Canudos represent an interesting exception to the historical law according to which religion had always served to lull the masses and keep them from rebelling against their masters? The Counselor had used religious superstition to incite the peasants to rise up against bourgeois order and conservative morality and to stir them up against those who traditionally had taken advantage of religious beliefs to keep them enslaved and exploited. In the very best of cases, as David Hume had written, religion was a dream of sick men; that was doubtless true, yet in certain cases, such as that of Canudos, it could serve to rouse the victims of society from their passivity and incite them to revolutionary action, in the course of which rational, scientific truths would gradually take the place of irrational myths and fetishes. Would he have a chance to send a letter on the subject to L’Etincelle de la révolte? He tried once again to start up a conversation with the guide. What did Ulpino think of Canudos? The latter chewed for a good while wit
hout answering. Finally, with serene fatalism, as though it were of no concern to him, he said: “All of them are going to get their throats slit.” Gall decided that they had nothing more to say to each other.

  On leaving the caatinga, they found themselves on a plateau covered with xiquexiques, which Ulpino split open with his knife; inside was a bittersweet pulp that quenched their thirst. That day they came upon more groups of pilgrims going to Canudos, whom they soon left behind. Meeting up with these people in the depths of whose tired eyes he could glimpse a profound enthusiasm stronger than their misery did Gall’s heart good. They restored his optimism, his euphoria. They had left their homes to go to a place where a war was about to break out. Didn’t that mean that the people’s instinct was always right? They were going there because they had intuited that Canudos embodied their hunger for justice and freedom. He asked Ulpino when they would arrive. At nightfall, if nothing untoward happened. Nothing untoward? What did he mean? They had nothing left that could be stolen from them, wasn’t that so? “We could be killed,” Ulpino answered. But Gall did not allow his spirits to flag. And, after all, he thought to himself with a smile, the stolen horses were a contribution to the cause.

  They stopped to rest in a deserted farmhouse that bore traces of having been set afire. There was no vegetation or water. Gall massaged his legs, stiff and sore after the long day’s trek on foot. Ulpino suddenly muttered that they had crossed the circle. He pointed in the direction where there had been stables, animals, cowherds and now there was only desolation. The circle? The one that separated Canudos from the rest of the world. People said that inside it the Blessed Jesus reigned, and outside it the Can. Gall said nothing. In the last analysis, names did not matter; they were wrappings, and if they helped uneducated people to identify the contents more easily, it was of little moment that instead of speaking of justice and injustice, freedom and oppression, classless society and class society, they talked in terms of God and the Devil. He thought that when he arrived in Canudos he would see something he’d seen as an adolescent in Paris: a people bubbling over with revolutionary fervor, defending their dignity tooth and nail. If he could manage to make himself heard, understood, he could indeed help them, by at least sharing with them certain things they did not know, things he had learned in his years of roaming the world.