The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  It seems to her that she is waking up, that she is coming back from a very long journey, that no more than a few minutes have gone by since the soldiers fell upon her. What has become of Rufino, Gall, the Dwarf? As though it were a dream, she remembers the two men fighting, remembers the soldiers shooting at them. A few paces away, the soldier who had been on top of her is being interrogated by a short, sturdy caboclo well along in years, whose dull yellowish-gray features are cruelly mutilated by a scar running from his mouth to his eyes. She thinks: Pajeú. For the first time that day she feels afraid. A look of terror has come over the soldier’s face, he is answering every question he is asked as fast as he can get the words out, and is begging, pleading, with his eyes, mouth, hands, for as Pajeú interrogates him others are stripping him naked. They remove his tattered tunic, his frayed trousers, without manhandling him, and Jurema—feeling neither happy nor sad, as though she were still dreaming—sees the jagunços, once they have stripped him naked, at a simple gesture from that caboclo people tell such terrible stories about, plunge several knives into him, in the belly, in the back, in the neck, and sees the soldier topple over dead without even having had the time to scream. She sees one of the jagunços bend down, take hold of the soldier’s penis, soft and now very small, cut it off with one stroke of his knife and in the same motion stuff it into his mouth. He then wipes his knife on the corpse and thrusts it back into his belt. She feels neither joy nor sadness nor revulsion.

  She realizes that the caboclo without a nose is speaking to her. “Are you on your way to Belo Monte alone or with other pilgrims?” He pronounces each word slowly, as though she might not understand him, hear him. “Where are you from?”

  She finds it hard to speak. In a voice that seems to be another woman’s, she stammers that she has come from Queimadas.

  “A long journey,” the caboclo says, looking her up and down, obviously curious. “And what’s more, by the same route the soldiers were following.”

  Jurema nods. She ought to thank him, say something nice to him for having rescued her, but she is too terrified of this famous outlaw. All the other jagunços are standing round about her, and with their grass cloaks, their weapons, their whistles, they impress her as being not real live men but creatures out of a fairy tale or a nightmare.

  “You can’t get to Belo Monte from this direction,” Pajeú tells her, with a grimace that must be his way of smiling. “There are Protestants all about in these hills. Go around them instead, till you get to the road from Jeremoabo. There aren’t any soldiers on that side.”

  “My husband,” Jurema murmurs, pointing to the thicket.

  Her voice catches in a sob. She hurries off, overcome with anxiety as the memory of what was happening when the soldiers arrived on the scene suddenly comes back to her and she recognizes the other one, the one who was watching as he waited for his turn: he is the naked, bloody corpse hanged by the neck from a tree, swaying back and forth alongside his uniform, which has also been hung up in the branches. Jurema knows which way to go, for she hears a noise to guide her, and indeed in just a few moments she comes upon Galileo Gall and Rufino, in the part of the caatinga decorated with uniforms. The two men have taken on the same color as the muddy earth, and must be dying, yet they are still fighting. They are tattered wrecks locked together, hitting out at each other with their heads, with their feet, biting and scratching each other, but so slowly it is as if they are playing. Jurema halts in front of them and the caboclo and the jagunços gather round in a circle to watch the fight. It is a contest that is nearing its end, two shapes covered with mud, unrecognizable, inseparable, who are barely moving and give no sign that they have noticed that they are surrounded by dozens of people who have just arrived on the scene. They lie there panting, bleeding, ripping off bits and pieces of each other’s clothes.

  “You’re Jurema, you’re the wife of the guide from Queimadas,” Pajeú says at her side, in an excited voice. “He found you, then. And found that poor fool who was at Calumbi.”

  “That’s the lunatic who fell into the trap last night,” someone on the other side of the circle says. “The one who was so terrified of the soldiers.”

  Jurema feels a hand in hers, a tiny chubby one, squeezing tightly. It is the Dwarf. He looks at her with eyes full of hope and joy, as though she were about to save his life. Covered with mud, he clings to her.

  “Stop them, stop them, Pajeú,” Jurema says. “Save my husband, save…”

  “Do you want me to save both of them?” Pajeú says mockingly. “Do you want to stay with both of them?”

  Jurema hears other jagunços laugh at these words from the caboclo without a nose.

  “This is men’s business, Jurema,” Pajeú calmly explains to her. “You got them into this. Leave them in the mess you got them into, and let them settle the matter between them the way two men should. If your husband gets out of it alive, he’ll kill you, and if he dies you’ll be to blame for his death and you’ll have to account for yourself to the Father. In Belo Monte the Counselor will tell you what you must do to redeem yourself. So be off with you now, because war is coming this way. Praised be Blessed Jesus the Counselor!”

  The caatinga stirs, and in seconds the jagunços disappear in the scrub. The Dwarf continues to squeeze her hand as he stands there watching with her. Jurema sees that there is a knife plunged halfway into Gall’s ribs. She can still hear bugles, bells, whistles. Suddenly the struggle ends, for with a roar Gall rolls a few yards away from Rufino. Jurema sees him grab hold of the knife and pull it out of his side with another roar. She looks at Rufino, who looks back at her as he lies there in the mud, his mouth open, his eyes lifeless.

  “You still haven’t slapped my face,” she hears Galileo say, urging Rufino on with the hand that is clutching the knife.

  Jurema sees Rufino nod and thinks: “They understand each other.” She doesn’t know what the thought means and yet she feels that it is altogether true. Rufino drags himself toward Gall, very slowly. Will he reach him? He pushes himself along with his elbows, with his knees, rubs his face in the mud, like an earthworm, and Gall urges him on, waving the knife. “Men’s business,” Jurema thinks. She thinks: “The blame will fall on me.” Rufino reaches Gall, who tries to plunge the knife into him, as the guide strikes him in the face. But the slap has no momentum behind it by the time it lands, for Rufino has no energy left or has entirely lost heart. The hand lingers on Gall’s face, like a sort of caress. Gall strikes too, once, twice, and then his hand rests quietly on the guide’s head. They lie dying in each other’s arms, gazing into each other’s eyes. Jurema has the impression that the two faces, a fraction of an inch apart, are smiling at each other. The bugle calls and the whistles have been succeeded now by heavy gunfire. The Dwarf says something that she does not understand.

  “You struck him in the face, Rufino,” Jurema thinks. “What did you gain by that, Rufino? What use was there in getting your revenge if you’ve died, if you’ve left me all alone in the world, Rufino?” She does not weep, she does not move, she does not take her eyes from the two motionless men. That hand on Rufino’s head reminds her that in Queimadas, when to the misfortune of all of them God willed that the stranger should come to offer her husband work, he had once felt Rufino’s head and read its secrets for him, just as Porffrio the sorcerer read them in coffee grounds and Dona Cacilda in a basin of water.

  “Did I tell you who turned up in Calumbi among the people accompanying Moreira César?” the Baron de Canabrava said. “That reporter who once worked for me and was lured away by Epaminondas to the Jornal de Notícias. That disaster on two feet with glasses like the goggles of a diving suit who stumbled about scribbling and wore some sort of clown costume. Do you remember him, Adalberto? He wrote poetry and smoked opium.”

  But neither Colonel José Bernardo Murau nor Adalberto de Gumúcio was listening. The latter was rereading the papers that the baron had just translated for them, bringing them up close to the candelabrum lighting
the dining-room table, from which their empty coffee cups had not yet been removed. Old Murau, swaying back and forth in his high-backed chair at the table as though he were still in his rocking chair in the little sitting room, appeared to have fallen asleep. But the baron knew that he was thinking about what his guest had read to the two of them.

  “I’m going to see Estela,” the baron said, rising to his feet.

  As he walked through the ramshackle manor house, plunged in shadow, to the bedroom where they had put the baroness to bed shortly before dinner, he calculated the impression that that sort of testament left with him by the Scottish adventurer had made on his friends. As he stumbled on a broken tile in the hallway onto which bedrooms on either side opened, he thought: “There will be more questions in Salvador. And each time I explain why I let him go, I’ll have the same feeling that I’m lying.” Why exactly had he let Galileo Gall go? Out of stupidity? Out of weariness? Out of disgust at everything that had happened? Out of sympathy? “I have a weak spot in my heart for odd specimens, for what’s abnormal,” he thought, remembering Gall and the nearsighted journalist.

  From the doorway, in the feeble reddish glow of the night lamp on the bedside table, he saw Sebastiana’s profile. She was sitting at the foot of the bed, in an armchair with cushions, and though she had never been a cheerful, smiling woman, her expression now was so grave that the baron was alarmed. She had risen to her feet on seeing him enter the room.

  “Has she gone on sleeping quietly?” the baron asked, raising the mosquito netting and bending over to look at his wife. Her eyes were closed and in the semidarkness her face, though very pale, looked serene. The sheets rose and fell gently with her breathing.

  “Sleeping, yes, but not all that quietly,” Sebastiana said in a low voice, accompanying him to the door of the bedroom. She lowered her voice even more, and the baron noted the concern lurking deep in her black eyes. “She’s dreaming. She keeps talking in her sleep—always about the same thing.”

  “Sebastiana doesn’t dare mention the words ‘burning down,’ ‘fire,’ ‘flames,’” the baron thought with a heavy heart. Would they become taboo, would he be obliged to give orders that any words that Estela might associate with the holocaust at Calumbi never be uttered in their home? He had taken her by the arm, trying to calm her, but could find nothing to say to her. He felt the maidservant’s smooth, warm skin beneath his fingers.

  “My mistress cannot stay here,” she muttered. “Take her to Salvador. Doctors must see her, give her something, free her mind of those memories. She can’t go on suffering such anguish night and day.”

  “I know, Sebastiana,” the baron assured her. “But it’s such a long, hard journey. It strikes me as too great a risk to expose her to more traveling in the state she’s in. Though I grant that it may be even more dangerous to keep her from getting medical treatment. We’ll see tomorrow. You must go get some rest now. You haven’t slept a wink either for several days now.”

  “I’m going to spend the night here with my mistress,” Sebastian answered in a defiant tone of voice.

  As he saw her settle herself in the armchair at Estela’s bedside, the thought ran through the baron’s mind that she was still a woman with a firm, beautiful, admirably preserved figure. “Just like Estela,” he said to himself. And in a wave of nostalgia he remembered that in the first years of their marriage he had come to feel such intense jealousy that it kept him awake nights on seeing the camaraderie, the inviolable intimacy that existed between the two women. He went back to the dining room, and saw through a window that the night sky was covered with clouds that hid the stars. He remembered, smiling, that because of his feelings of jealousy he had one day asked Estela to dismiss Sebastiana; the argument that had ensued had been the most serious one of their entire married life. He entered the dining room with the vivid, painful image, still intact, of the baroness, her cheeks on fire, defending her maidservant and repeating over and over that if Sebastiana left, she was leaving, too. This memory, which had long remained a spark setting his desire aflame, moved him to the depths now. He felt like weeping. He found his friends absorbed in conjectures as to whether what he had read to them could possibly be true.

  “A braggart, a dreamer, a rascal with a lively imagination, a first-rate confidence man,” Colonel Murau was saying. “Even heroes in novels don’t have that many adventures. The only part I believe is where he tells about the agreement with Epaminondas to take arms to Canudos. A smuggler who invented that story about anarchism as a pretext and a justification.”

  “A pretext and a justification?” Adalberto de Gumúcio bounced up and down in his chair. “An aggravating circumstance, rather.”

  The baron sat down next to him and tried to take an interest in the discussion.

  “Does attempting to do away with property, religion, marriage, morality impress you as being a mitigating circumstance?” Gumúcio said, pressing his point. “That’s far more serious than trafficking in arms.”

  “Marriage, morality,” the baron thought. And he wondered if Adalberto would have permitted in his home as intimate a relationship as that between Estela and Sebastiana. His heart sank again as he thought about his wife. He decided to leave the following morning. He poured himself a glass of port and took a long sip of it.

  “I’m inclined to believe that the story is true,” Gumúcio said. “Because of the natural way in which he tells of all those extraordinary things—the escapes, the murders, his voyages as a freebooter, his sexual abstinence. He doesn’t realize that there is anything out of the ordinary about them. This makes me think that he really experienced them and that he believes the horrendous things he says against God, the family, and society.”

  “There’s no doubt that he believes them,” the baron said, savoring the sweetish afterglow left by the port. “I heard him tell them many times, at Calumbi.”

  Old Murau filled their glasses again. They had not drunk during dinner, but after the coffee their host had brought out this decanter full of port that was now nearly half empty. Was drinking till he fell into a stupor what he needed to keep his mind off Estela’s health? the baron wondered.

  “He confuses reality and illusion, he has no idea where the one ends and the other begins,” he said. “It may be that he recounts those things in all sincerity and believes every word. It doesn’t matter. Because he doesn’t see them with his eyes but through the filter of his ideas, his beliefs. Don’t you recall what he says about Canudos, about the jagunços? It must be the same with all the rest. It’s quite possible that to him a street fight among ruffians in Barcelona or a raid on smugglers by the police in Marseilles is a battle waged by the oppressed against the oppressors in the war to shatter the chains binding humanity.”

  “And what about sex?” José Bernardo Murau said: his face was congested, his little eyes gleaming, his tongue thick. “Do you two swallow that story about his ten years of chastity? Ten years of chastity to store up energy to be released in revolution?”

  His tone of voice was such that the baron suspected that at any moment he would begin to tell off-color stories.

  “What about priests?” he asked. “Don’t they live in chastity out of love of God? Gall is a sort of priest.”

  “José Bernardo judges men by his own example,” Gumúcio joked, turning to their host. “You couldn’t have remained chaste for ten years for anything in the world.”

  “Not for anything in the world.” Murau laughed. “Isn’t it stupid to give up one of the few compensations life has to offer?”

  One of the tapers in the candelabrum began to sputter and give off a little cloud of smoke, and Murau rose to his feet to blow it out. While he was up, he poured all of them another glass of port, leaving the decanter completely empty.

  “During all those years of abstinence he must have accumulated enough energy to cover a she-donkey and leave her pregnant,” he said, his eyes aglow. He gave a vulgar laugh and staggered over to a buffet to get out another bottle
of port. The remaining tapers in the candelabrum were going out and the room had grown dark. “What does the guide’s wife, the woman who caused him to renounce chastity, look like?”

  “I haven’t seen her for some time,” the baron said. “She was a little bit of a thing, docile and timid.”

  “A good behind?” Colonel Murau said thickly, raising his glass to his lips with a trembling hand. “In these parts, that’s the best thing they’ve got. They’re weak little things and they age fast. But they all have first-class asses.”

  Adalberto de Gumúcio hurriedly changed the subject. “It’s going to be hard to make a peace pact with the Jacobins as you suggest,” he remarked to the baron. “Our friends won’t want to work with those who have been attacking us for so many years.”

  “Of course it’s going to be hard,” the baron answered, grateful to Adalberto for bringing up another subject. “Above all, persuading Epaminondas, who thinks he’s won. But in the end they’ll all realize that there’s no other way. It’s a question of survival…”

  He was interrupted by the sound of hoofbeats and whinnies very close by and, a moment later, by loud knocking at the door. José Bernardo Murau frowned in irritation. “What the devil is going on?” he grumbled, struggling to his feet. He shuffled out of the dining room, and the baron filled their glasses again.

  “You drinking: that’s something new, I must say,” Gumúcio commented. “Is it because Calumbi was burned down? That’s not the end of the world, you know. Just a temporary setback.”

  “It’s on account of Estela,” the baron said. “I’ll never forgive myself. It was my fault, Adalberto. I asked too much of her. I shouldn’t have taken her to Calumbi, just as you and Viana warned me. It was selfish, stupid of me.”