The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  They heard the bolt of the front door slide open, and men’s voices.

  “It’s a passing crisis that she’ll soon recover from,” Gumurio said. “It’s absurd of you to blame yourself.”

  “I’ve decided to go on to Salvador tomorrow,” the baron said. “It’s more of a risk keeping her here, without medical attention.”

  José Bernardo Murau reappeared in the doorway. He seemed to have sobered up all of a sudden, and had such an odd expression on his face that Gumúcio and the baron hurried to his side.

  “News of Moreira César?” The baron took him by the arm, trying to bring him back to reality.

  “Incredible, incredible,” the old cattle breeder muttered, as though he’d just seen ghosts.

  [VII]

  The first thing the nearsighted journalist notices in the early dawn light as he shakes the crusted mud off himself is that his body aches more than it did the evening before, as though he had received a terrible beating during his sleepless night. Secondly, the feverish activity, the movement of uniforms that is taking place without any orders being given, in a silence that is a sharp contrast to the sound of cannon fire, bells, and bugles that has assailed his ears all night long. He throws his big leather pouch over his shoulder, tucks the portable writing desk under his arm, and, with pins and needles in his legs and the tickle of an imminent sneeze in his nose, begins to climb the slope toward Colonel Moreira César’s tent. “The humidity,” he thinks, overcome by a fit of sneezing that makes him forget the war and everything save those internal explosions that bring tears to his eyes, stop up his ears, dizzy his brain, and turn his nostrils into anthills. Soldiers brush by him and push him aside as they hurry past, buckling on their knapsacks, rifles in hand, and he can now hear voices shouting orders.

  Arriving at the top, he spies Moreira César, surrounded by officers, standing on something, looking down the mountainside through field glasses. Round about him, enormous confusion reigns. The white horse, saddled and ready, rears amid soldiers and buglers who bump into officers coming or going on the run, shouting phrases that the journalist, his ears buzzing from his sneezes, barely catches. He hears the colonel’s voice: “What’s happening with the artillery, Cunha Matos?” The reply is drowned out by the blare of bugle calls. Ridding himself of his pouch and writing desk, the journalist steps forward to have a look at Canudos below.

  He has not seen it the night before, and the thought crosses his mind that within minutes or hours no one will ever see it again. He hurriedly wipes the fogged lenses of his glasses on the tail of his undershirt and observes the scene that lies at his feet. The light, of a hue between dark blue and leaden, suffusing the mountain peaks, has not yet reached the hollow in which Canudos lies. He finds it hard to make out where the hillsides, the fields, and the stony ground end and the jumble of huts and shacks, huddled together one atop the other over a wide area, begins. But he immediately spies two churches, one of them small and the other very tall, with imposing towers, separated by a quadrangular open space. He is squinting, trying to make out in the half light the area bounded by a river which appears to be at high water, when a cannonade begins that makes him start and clap his hands over his ears. But he does not close his eyes, staring in fascination as flames suddenly appear below and several shacks are reduced to a shower of planks, bricks, laths, straw mats, unidentifiable objects that fly to pieces and disappear. The cannon fire grows heavier and Canudos vanishes from sight beneath a cloud of smoke that ascends the hillsides and opens up, here and there, to form craters from which there come flying out bits of rooftops and walls blown to pieces by exploding shells. The stupid thought crosses his mind that if the cloud of smoke continues to rise it will reach his nose and send him into another fit of sneezing.

  “What is the Seventh waiting for! And the Ninth! And the Sixteenth!” he hears Moreira César’s voice say, so close to him that he turns around to look, and finds the colonel and the group around him practically at his side.

  “The Seventh is charging down there, sir,” Captain Olímpio de Castro answers just a few steps away.

  “And the Ninth and the Sixteenth,” someone hastily adds from behind him.

  “You are witness to a spectacle that will make you famous.” Colonel Moreira César claps him on the back as he passes him. He is left no time to answer, for the colonel and his staff leave him standing there and proceed to station themselves a bit farther down the mountainside, on a little promontory.

  “The Seventh, the Ninth, the Sixteenth,” he thinks. “Battalions? Platoons? Companies?” But the light dawns immediately. From three directions on the mountainsides round about, regimental corps are descending—bayonets gleaming—toward the smoke-filled hollow in which Canudos lies. The cannons have ceased to roar, and in the silence the nearsighted journalist suddenly hears bells pealing. The troops are running, slipping, leaping down the hillsides, shooting. The slopes, too, begin to be covered with smoke. Moreira César’s red-and-blue kepi nods approvingly. The journalist picks up his leather pouch and his portable writing desk and walks down the few yards that separate him from the commander of the Seventh Regiment; he settles down in a cleft in the rock, between the colonel and his staff and the white horse that an orderly is holding by the bridle. He feels strange, hypnotized, and the absurd idea passes through his mind that he is not really seeing what he is seeing.

  A breeze begins to dispel the lumpy leaden-colored clouds that veil the city; he sees them grow wispier, break up, move off, driven by the wind in the direction of the open terrain where the road from Jeremoabo must be. He is now able to follow the movements of the troops. Those on his right have reached the bank of the river and are crossing it; the little red, green, blue figures are turning gray, disappearing and reappearing on the other bank, when suddenly a wall of dust rises between them and Canudos. A number of the figures fall to the ground.

  “Trenches,” someone says.

  The nearsighted journalist decides to approach the group surrounding the colonel, who has taken a few steps downhill and is observing the scene below, having exchanged his field glasses for a spyglass. The red ball of the sun has risen a few moments before and is now illuminating the theater of operations. Almost without realizing what he is doing, the correspondent from the Jornal de Notícias, who has not stopped trembling, clambers up onto a projecting rock in order to see better. He then has at least a vague idea of what is going on. The first ranks of soldiers to ford the river have been blown to bits from a series of hidden defenses, and there is now heavy gunfire down there. Another of the assault units, which is deploying almost at his feet as it attacks, is also being stopped by a heavy burst of fire from ground level. The sharpshooters are entrenched in holes dug in the earth. He sees the jagunços. They are those heads—wearing hats? headcloths?—that suddenly pop up out of the ground, emitting smoke, and although the cloud of dust blurs their features and silhouettes, he can make out men who have been hit by the rounds of fire or are sliding down into the holes where they are no doubt already engaged in hand-to-hand combat.

  He is convulsed by a fit of sneezing so prolonged that for a moment he thinks he is going to faint. Doubled over, with his eyes closed, his glasses in his hand, he sneezes, opens his mouth, gasps desperately for air. He is finally able to straighten up, to breathe, and realizes that he is being pounded on the back. He puts his glasses back on and sees the colonel.

  “We thought you’d been wounded,” Moreira César says, to all appearances in an excellent humor.

  The journalist is surrounded by officers and doesn’t know what to say, for the idea that anyone could think he was wounded amazes him, as though it never would have entered his head that he, too, is part of this war, that he, too, is under fire.

  “What’s happening? What’s happening?” he stammers.

  “The Ninth has entered Canudos and now the Seventh is going in,” the colonel says, the field glasses at his eyes.

  Panting, his temples pounding, the nears
ighted journalist has the sensation that everything has come closer, that he can reach out and touch the war. On the outskirts of Canudos there are houses in flames and two lines of soldiers are entering the town, amid puffs of cloud that must be gunsmoke. They disappear, swallowed up in a labyrinth of rooftops made of tiles, of straw, of corrugated tin, of palings, from which flames leap up from time to time. “They are pumping all those who escaped the cannon fire full of bullets,” he thinks. And he imagines the fury with which officers and men are no doubt avenging the corpses strung up in the caatinga, avenging themselves for those ambushes and whistles that have kept them awake nights all the way from Monte Santo.

  “There are nests of sharpshooters in the churches,” he hears the colonel say. “What’s Cunha Matos waiting for? Why doesn’t he take them?”

  The bells have been pealing continually and he has been hearing them all this time, like background music amid the cannonades and the fusillades. In the narrow winding streets between the dwellings he makes out figures running, uniforms scurrying every which way. “Cunha Matos is in that hell,” he thinks. “Running, stumbling, killing.” And Tamarindo and Olímpio de Castro? He looks for them and can’t see the old colonel, but the captain is among the officers with Moreira César. For some reason, he feels relieved.

  “Have the rear guard and the Bahia police attack on the other flank,” he hears the colonel order.

  Captain Olímpio de Castro and three or four escorts run up the mountainside and several buglers begin to sound calls until similar calls answer in the distance. Only now does he realize that orders are passed on by means of bugles. He would like to note this down so as not to forget it. But several officers cry out something, in unison, and he begins to watch again. In the open space between the churches, ten, twelve, fifteen red-and-blue uniforms are running behind two officers—he can make out their unsheathed sabers, and tries to identify those lieutenants or captains whom he must have seen many times now—with the obvious intention of capturing the Temple with very tall white towers surrounded by scaffolding, when they are met with heavy fire from all over the building which downs the majority of them; a handful turn and disappear in the dust.

  “They should have protected themselves with rifle charges,” he hears Moreira César say in an icy tone of voice. “There’s a redoubt there…”

  Many figures have come running out of the churches; they make for the soldiers who have fallen and throw themselves on them. “They are finishing them off, castrating them, plucking out their eyes,” he thinks, and at that instant he hears the colonel murmur: “Those demented fools, they’re undressing them.”

  “Undressing them?” he repeats mentally. And he again sees the corpses of the fair-haired sergeant and his men hanging from the trees. He is half dead from the cold. The open space is still enveloped in a cloud of dust. The journalist’s eyes peer about in different directions, trying to make out what is happening down below. The soldiers of the two corps that have entered Canudos, one on his left and the other at his feet, have disappeared in that taut web, while a third corps, on his right, continues to pour into the city, and he is able to measure their progress by the whirlwinds of dust that precede them and rise in their wake along the narrow alleyways, little streets, twists and turns, meanders in which he can imagine the clashes, the thrusts, the blows of rifle butts smashing doors, knocking down planks, palings, staving in roofs, episodes in the war which, on breaking down into encounters in a thousand huts, turns into utter confusion, hand-to-hand combat of one against one, one against two, two against three.

  He has not taken a single swallow of water this morning, nor has he eaten anything the night before, and in addition to the hollow feeling in his stomach his guts are writhing. The bright sun is at its zenith. Can it possibly be noon, can so many hours already have gone by? Moreira César and his staff officers walk a few yards farther down the mountainside, and the nearsighted journalist follows along after them, tripping and falling, till he catches up with them. He grabs Olímpio de Castro by the arm and asks him what is happening, how many hours the battle has been going on.

  “The rear guard and the Bahia police are there now,” Moreira César says, the field glasses at his eyes. “The enemy is hemmed in on that flank.”

  The nearsighted journalist makes out, on the far side of the little houses half hidden by the dust, some blue, greenish, gold-colored patches, advancing in this sector that thus far has been spared, with no smoke, no fires, no people visible. The attack now encompasses all of Canudos; there are dwellings in flames everywhere.

  “This is taking too long,” the colonel says, and the nearsighted journalist notes his impatience, his indignation. “Have the cavalry squadron come to the aid of Cunha Matos.”

  He immediately detects—from the officers’ surprised, disconcerted faces—that the colonel’s order is unexpected, risky. None of them protests, but the looks they exchange are more eloquent than words.

  “What is it?” Moreira’s eyes sweep round the circle of officers and light on Olímpio de Castro. “What is the objection?”

  “None, sir,” the captain says. “Except that…”

  “Except what?” Moreira César replies sternly. “That’s an order.”

  “The cavalry squadron is our only reserve, sir,” the captain goes on to end his sentence.

  “What do we need it up here for?” Moreira César points downhill. “Isn’t the fighting down there? When those who are still alive see our cavalrymen they’ll come pouring out in terror and we can finish them off. Let them charge immediately!”

  “I request your permission to charge with the squadron,” Olímpio de Castro stammers.

  “I need you here,” the colonel answers curtly.

  The nearsighted journalist hears more bugle calls, and minutes later the cavalrymen, in troops of ten and fifteen, appear at the summit, with an officer at the head of the squadron; as they gallop past Moreira César they salute him with upraised sabers.

  “Clear out the churches, drive the enemy north!” the colonel shouts to them.

  The journalist is thinking that those tense young faces—white, dark-skinned, black, Indian—are about to enter the whirlwind, when he is convulsed by another fit of sneezing, worse than the one before. His glasses shoot off his nose, and he thinks in terror, as he feels asphyxia set in, his chest and temples explode, his nose itch, that they have been broken, that somebody may step on them, that his remaining days will be a perpetual fog. When the attack is over, he falls on his knees, gropes all about him in anguish till he comes across them. He discovers, to his joy, that they are intact. He cleans them, puts them back on, looks through them. The hundred or so cavalrymen have reached the bottom of the slope. How can they have descended so quickly? But something is happening to them down by the river. They cannot manage to get across it. Their mounts enter the water and then appear to rear, to rebel, despite the fury with which they are urged on with whips, spurs, saber blows. It is as if the river terrified them. They turn round in midstream, and some of them throw their riders.

  “They must have set traps in the water,” one officer says.

  “They’re being fired on from that dead angle,” another one murmurs.

  “My mount!” Moreira César cries, and the nearsighted journalist sees him hand his field glasses to an orderly. As he mounts the horse, he adds in irritation: “The boys need to have an example set them. I’m leaving you in command, Olímpio.”

  His heart beats faster as he sees the colonel unsheathe his saber, put the spurs to his mount, and begin to descend the slope at a fast gallop. But he has not gone fifty yards when he sees him slouch over in the saddle, leaning on the neck of his horse, which stops dead in its tracks. He sees the colonel turn it around—to come back up to the command post?—but as though it were receiving contradictory orders from its rider, the animal wheels round twice, three times. And now he sees why officers and escorts are uttering exclamations, shouting, running downhill with their revolv
ers unholstered. Moreira César rolls to the ground and almost at the same moment he is hidden from sight by the captain and the others, who have lifted him up and are carrying him up the hill toward him, as quickly as they can. There is a deafening uproar, voices shouting, shots, all sorts of noises.

  He stands there stunned, unable to move, as he watches the group of men trotting up the mountainside, followed by the white horse, its reins dragging. He has been left all by himself. The terror that overcomes him drives him up the slope, slipping and falling, struggling to his feet, crawling on all fours. When he reaches the summit and bounds toward the tent, he vaguely notes that there are almost no soldiers in the area. Except for a group crowded around the entrance to the tent, the only ones in sight are a sentinel or two, looking in his direction with fear-stricken expressions. He hears the words “Can you help Dr. Souza Ferreiro?” and although the person speaking to him is Captain Olímpio de Castro, he does not recognize his voice and barely recognizes his face. He nods, and the captain pushes him forward with such force that he collides with a soldier. Inside the tent, he sees Dr. Souza Ferreiro’s back, bending over the camp cot and the colonel’s feet.

  “A medical corpsman?” Souza Ferreiro wheels around, and on catching sight of him a sour look comes over his face.

  “I’ve told you already—there aren’t any medical corpsmen,” Captain de Castro shouts at him, pushing the nearsighted journalist forward. “They’re all with the battalions down below. Let this fellow help you.”

  The nervousness of the two of them is contagious, and he feels like screaming, like stamping his feet.

  “The projectiles must be removed or infection will be the end of him in no time,” Dr. Souza Ferreiro whines, looking all about as though awaiting a miracle.

  “Do the impossible,” the captain says as he leaves. “I can’t abandon my post, I’m in command, I must send word to Colonel Tamarindo to take…” He goes out of the tent without finishing the sentence.