The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “That if he suffers eternal damnation, I want to, too.”

  Antônio spent the rest of the night setting up infirmaries in two dwellings on the road to Jeremoabo, after having moved their inhabitants to neighbors’ houses. As he and his aides cleared each place out and had wooden stands, cots, blankets, buckets of water, medicines, bandages brought, he was overcome with sadness once again. It had been such hard work to make this land productive again, to lay out and dig irrigation ditches, to break and fertilize this stony ground so that maize and beans, broad beans and sugarcane, melons and watermelons would grow in it, and it had been such hard work bringing goats and kids, raising them, breeding them. It had taken so much work, so much faith, so much dedication on the part of so many people to make these fields and pens what they were. And now the cannon fire was destroying them and soldiers were about to enter Canudos to destroy people who had gathered together there to live in the love of God and help each other since no one else had ever helped them. He forced himself to banish from his mind these thoughts that provoked in him that wrath against which the Counselor had so often preached. An aide came to tell him that the dogs were coming down the hillside.

  It was dawn; there was a blare of bugles; the slopes swarmed with red-and-blue forms. Taking his revolver from its holster, Antônio Vilanova headed on the run to the store on Campo Grande. Just as he arrived he saw, fifty yards farther on, that ranks of soldiers had already crossed the river and were overrunning old Joaquim Macambira’s trench, firing in all directions.

  Honório and half a dozen aides had barricaded themselves inside the store, behind barrels, counters, cots, crates, and sacks of dirt, over which Antônio and his men clambered on all fours, with those inside pulling them in. Panting, he found himself a place that gave him a clear aim outside. The gunfire was so heavy that he could not hear his brother, even though they were elbow to elbow. He peered through the barricade of various objects: clouds of dust coming from the direction of the river were advancing along Campo Grande and the slopes of São José and Santa Ana. He saw smoke, flames. They were setting the houses on fire, trying to fry all of them to a crisp. The thought crossed his mind that his wife and sister-in-law were down there, in Santa Ana, being asphyxiated and burned to death along with the wounded in the Health House, and once again he was overcome with rage. Several soldiers emerged from the clouds of smoke and dirt, looking wildly to right and left. The bayonets of their long rifles gleamed; they were dressed in blue tunics and red trousers. One of them tossed a torch over the barricade. “Put it out,” Antônio roared to the lad at his side as he aimed his revolver at the chest of the closest soldier. He fired away, almost blindly because of the dense cloud of dust, his eardrums nearly bursting, till there were no bullets left in his revolver. As he reloaded it, with his back against a barrel, he saw that Pedrim, the boy he had ordered to smother the torch, was lying on top of the end of wood smeared with tar, with blood on his back. But he was unable to go to him, for the barricade gave way on his left and two soldiers squeezed through the breach, getting in each other’s way. “Watch out, watch out!” he shouted to the others, firing at the soldiers till once again he heard the click of the hammer on the empty chamber of his revolver. The two soldiers had fallen to the floor and by the time he reached them, knife in hand, three aides were finishing them off with theirs, each thrust accompanied by an insult. He looked around and was overjoyed to see Honório unharmed and smiling. “Everything all right, compadre?” he asked him, and his brother nodded. He went to have a look at Pedrim. He was not dead, but in addition to the wound in his back he had burned his hands. He carried him to the next room and laid him down on some blankets. His face was wet with tears. He was an orphan whom he and Antônia had taken in shortly after settling in Canudos. Hearing the fusillade begin again outside, he covered him and left his side, telling him: “I’ll be back to take care of you, Pedrim.”

  At the barricade, his brother was shooting with a rifle that had belonged to one of the soldiers, and the aides had plugged up the breach. Antônio reloaded his revolver and installed himself next to Honório, who said to him: “About twenty of them just went by.” The deafening fusillade seemed to be coming from all sides. He looked to see what was happening on the Santa Ana slope and heard Honório’s voice saying: “Do you think Antônia and Assunção are still alive, compadre?” At that moment he spied, lying in the mud in front of the barricade, a soldier with a rifle lightly cradled in one arm and a saber in his other hand. “We need those weapons,” he said. They made an opening in the barricade for him and he dashed into the street. As he leaned over to pick up the rifle, the soldier tried to raise his saber. Without a moment’s hesitation, he sank his knife into the man’s belly and flung himself on top of him with all his weight. The soldier’s body beneath his gave a sort of belch, grunted something, went limp, and stopped moving. As he pulled his knife out of him and grabbed the man’s saber, rifle, and knapsack, he examined the ashen face with a yellowish tinge, the sort of face that he had often seen among the peasants and cowhands, and for the space of an instant he felt bitter regret. Honório and the aides were outside on the street, stripping another soldier of his weapons. And at that moment he recognized Abbot João’s voice. The Street Commander had arrived as though driven by the wind, followed by two men. All three were covered with bloodstains.

  “How many of you are there?” he asked, gesturing to them at the same time to hug the façade of the building.

  “Nine,” Antônio answered. “And Pedrim’s inside, wounded.”

  “Come on,” Abbot João said, turning around. “Be careful, there are soldiers inside lots of the houses.”

  But the cangaceiro himself was not at all cautious, for, holding himself erect, he strode rapidly down the middle of the street, as he went on to explain that they were attacking the churches and the cemetery from the direction of the river and that the soldiers must be prevented from approaching from this way as well, since that would leave the Counselor isolated. He wanted to close Campo Grande off with a barrier at Mártires, almost at the corner of the Chapel of Santo Antônio.

  Some three hundred yards separated them from there, and Antônio was surprised to see how much damage had been done: houses demolished, torn from their foundations, riddled with holes, rubble, heaps of debris, broken roof tiles, charred planks with scattered corpses lying in the middle of them, and clouds of smoke and dust that blurred, effaced, dissolved everything. Here and there, like markers of the soldiers’ advance, were tongues of fire from burning buildings. Striding up to Mártires at Abbot João’s side, he repeated Catarina’s message to him. The cangaceiro nodded without turning his head. Suddenly they came upon a patrol of soldiers at the entrance to the Rua Maria Madalena, and Antônio saw João take a running jump and send his knife flying through the air, as in marksmanship contests. He, too, broke into a run, shooting. The bullets whined all around him and a moment later he stumbled and fell to the ground. But he was able to get to his feet and dodge the bayonet that he saw coming at him and drag the soldier down into the mud with him. He traded blows with the man, not knowing whether he had his knife in his hand or not. All of a sudden he felt the soldier double over and go limp. Abbot João helped Antônio to his feet.

  “Gather up the dogs’ weapons,” he ordered at the same time. “The bayonets, the bullets, the knapsacks.”

  Honôrio and two aides were bending over Anastáció, another aide, trying to lift him.

  Abbot João stopped them. “Don’t bother. He’s dead. Drag the bodies along with you. We can use them to block the street.”

  And setting the example, he grabbed the nearest corpse by one foot and started walking in the direction of Mártires. At the entrance to the street were many jagunços, already busy erecting the barricade with everything they could find at hand. Antônio Vilanova set to work along with them. They could hear shots, bursts of gunfire, and a few moments later a youngster from the Catholic Guard appeared to tell Abbot João, who
was helping Antônio bring up the wheels of a cart, that the heretics were again advancing on the Temple of the Blessed Jesus. “Everybody back there,” Abbot João shouted, and the jagunços followed along behind him on the run. They entered the square just as several soldiers, led by a fair-haired young man brandishing a saber and discharging a revolver, came out onto it from the cemetery. A heavy fusillade from the chapel and the towers and rooftop of the Temple under construction kept the soldiers from advancing. “Follow them, follow them,” Antônio heard Abbot João roar. Dozens of men poured out of the churches to join in the pursuit. He saw Big João, immense, barefoot, catch up with the Street Commander and talk to him as he ran. The soldiers had entrenched themselves behind the cemetery, and on entering São Cipriano the jagunços were met with a hail of bullets. “He’s going to get killed,” Antônio, who had flung himself headlong onto the ground, thought as he saw Abbot João standing in the middle of the street gesturing to those following him to take cover in the houses or hit the dirt.

  Then he walked over to Antônio, squatted down alongside him, and said in his ear: “Go back to the barricade and secure it. We have to dislodge those troops from here and push them back to where Pajeú is going to pounce on them. Go back and see that they don’t sneak in from the other side.”

  Antônio nodded and a moment later ran back, followed by Honório, the aides, and ten other men, to the intersection of Mártires and Campo Grande. He seemed to be coming to at last, to be coming out of his stupor. “You know how to organize things,” he said to himself. “And that’s what’s needed now, precisely that.” He ordered the men to take the dead bodies and the rubble on the square back to the barricade and helped them till, amid all the hurrying back and forth, he heard shouts inside one of the buildings. He was the first one in, kicking a hole in the wall and shooting at the soldier squatting on his heels. To his stupefaction, he realized that the soldier he had killed had been eating: in his hand was a piece of jerked beef that he had doubtless just grabbed off the stove. The owner of the house, an old man, lay dying alongside him, a bayonet thrust into his belly, and three little children were screaming in terror. “How hungry he must have been,” he thought, “to have forgotten everything and gotten himself killed for a mouthful of jerked beef.” He and five men searched all the houses between the end of the street and the square. All of them looked like a battlefield: disorder, roofs with gaping holes, walls ripped apart, objects smashed to bits. Women, oldsters, children armed with shovels and pitchforks greeted them with looks of relief on their faces, or began to chatter frantically. In one house he found two buckets of water, and after he and the men had had a drink, he toted them back to the barricade. He could see how joyfully Honório and the others drank the water down.

  Climbing up onto the barricade, he peeked out between various objects and dead bodies. The only straight street in all of Canudos, Campo Grande, was deserted. To his right there was heavy gunfire amid the burning buildings. “Things are rough in O Mocambo, compadre,” Honório said. His face was crimson and dripping with sweat. Antônio smiled at him. “The dogs aren’t going to be able to get us out of here, right?” he said. “Of course they’re not, compadre,” Honório replied. Antônio sat down on a cart and as he was reloading his revolver—there were almost no bullets left in the cartridge belts wound around his middle—he noticed that most of the jagunços were now armed with rifles taken from soldiers. They were winning the war.

  He suddenly remembered the Sardelinha sisters, down below, on the lower slope of Santa Ana. “Stay here, and tell João that I’ve gone to the Health House to see how things are going there,” he said to his brother.

  He climbed to the top of the barricade, stepping on corpses swarming with flies, and leapt down on the other side. Four jagunços followed him. “Who ordered you to come with me?” he shouted at them. “Abbot João,” one of them answered. He didn’t have time to argue, for at São Pedro they found themselves caught in a fusillade: there was fighting in the doorways, on the rooftops, and inside the houses along the street. They turned back to Campo Grande and were able to make their way down to Santa Ana from that direction, without encountering soldiers. But there was shooting in Santa Ana. They crouched down behind a house going up in smoke and the storekeeper took a look around. Up by the Health House there was another cloud of smoke; the shooting was coming from there. “I’m going to go closer. Wait here,” he said, but as he crawled off, he saw that the four jagunços were crawling along at his side. A few yards farther on he finally spied half a dozen soldiers, directing their fire not at them but at the houses. He stood up and ran toward them as fast as his legs could carry him, his finger on the trigger of his revolver, but he did not shoot until one of the soldiers turned. He fired all six bullets at him and threw his knife at another one who came at him. He fell to the ground and grabbed his attacker’s legs, or those of another soldier, and somehow found himself strangling him, with all his strength. “You’ve killed two dogs, Antônio,” one of the jagunços said. “Their rifles, their bullets—take all of them” was his answer. The doors of the houses opened and people came pouring out, coughing, smiling, waving. Antônia, his wife, was there, and Assunção, and behind them Catarina, Abbot João’s wife.

  “Look at them,” one of the jagunços said, giving him a shake. “Look at them jumping into the river.”

  Above the jumble of rooftops on the slope of Santa Ana, to the right, to the left, were other uniformed figures, clambering frantically up the hillside; others were leaping into the river, a number of them having first thrown away their rifles. But what drew his attention even more was the gathering darkness. Night would soon be upon them. “We’re going to take their arms away from them,” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Come on, boys, we can’t leave the job half finished.” Several of the jagunços ran toward the river with him, and one of them began to shout: “Down with the Republic and the Antichrist! Long live the Counselor and the Blessed Jesus!”

  In that dreaming that is and is not, a dozing that blurs the borderline between waking and sleeping and that reminds him of certain opium nights in his disorderly little house in Salvador, the nearsighted correspondent from the Jornal de Notícias has the sensation that he has not slept but has spoken and listened, told those faceless presences that are sharing the caatinga, hunger, and uncertainty with him that for him the worst part is not being lost, with no idea of what will happen when day breaks, but having lost his big leather pouch and the rolls of paper covered with his scribbling that he has wrapped up in his few clean clothes. He is certain that he has also told them things that he is ashamed of: that two days before, when his ink was all gone and his last goose-quill pen broken, he had a fit of weeping, as though a member of his family had died. And he is certain—certain in the uncertain, disjointed, cottony way in which everything happens, is said, or is received in the world of opium—that all night long he has chewed, without repulsion, the handfuls of grasses, leaves, little twigs, insects perhaps, the unidentifiable bits of matter, dry or moist, viscous or solid, that he and his companions have passed from hand to hand. And he is certain that he has listened to as many intimate confessions as he believes that he himself has made. “Except for her, all of us are immensely afraid,” he thinks. Father Joaquim, whom he has served as a pillow and who in turn has served as his, has acknowledged as much: that he discovered what real fear was only the day before, tied to that tree over there, waiting for a soldier to come slit his throat, hearing the shooting, watching the goings and comings, the arrival of the wounded, a fear infinitely greater than he had ever felt before, of anything or anybody, including the Devil and hell. Did the curé say those things, moaning and every so often begging God’s forgiveness for having said them? But the one who is more frightened still is the one she has said is a dwarf. Because, in a shrill little voice as deformed as his body must be, he has not stopped whimpering and rambling on about bearded women, gypsies, strong men, and a boneless man who could tie himself i
n knots. What can the Dwarf look like? Can she be his mother? What are the two of them doing here? How can she possibly not be afraid? What is she feeling that’s worse than fear? For the nearsighted journalist has noted something even more destructive, disastrous, distressing in the woman’s soft-spoken voice, in the sporadic murmur in which she has never once spoken of the one thing that has any meaning, the fear of dying, but only of the stubbornness of someone who is dead, left unburied, getting soaked, freezing, being devoured by all sorts of creatures. Can she be a madwoman, someone who is no longer afraid because she was once so afraid that she went mad?

  He feels someone shaking him. He thinks: “My glasses.” He sees a faint greenish light, moving shadows. And as he pats his body, feels all about him, he hears Father Joaquim: “Wake up, it’s already light, let’s try to find the road to Cumbe.” He finally locates them, between his legs, unbroken. He cleans them, stands up, stammers “All right, all right,” and as he puts his glasses on and the world comes into focus he sees the Dwarf: a real one, as small as a ten-year-old boy but with a face furrowed with wrinkles. He is holding the hand of a woman of indeterminate age, with her hair falling round her shoulders, so thin she seems nothing but skin and bones. Both of them are covered with mud, their clothes are in tatters, and the nearsighted journalist wonders whether he too, like the two of them and the robust little curé who has begun walking determinedly in the direction of the rising sun, gives the same impression of disarray, forlornness, vulnerability. “We’re on the other side of A Favela,” Father Joaquim says. “If we go this way we should come out onto the trail to Bendengó. God grant there won’t be any soldiers…”