The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Pajeú has already put his gun to his shoulder and is aiming at the elderly cavalryman who must be the leader when a shot rings out, then another, then several bursts of fire. As he observes the disorder on the slope, the Protestants piling up on top of each other, and begins shooting in his turn, he tells himself that he will have to find out who started the fusillade before he had fired the first shot. He empties his magazine slowly, taking careful aim, thinking that through the fault of the man who started shooting the dogs have had time to withdraw and take refuge at the summit.

  The gunfire ceases once the slope is empty. At the summit red-and-blue caps, the gleam of bayonets can be seen. The troops, under cover behind the rocks, try to spot them. He hears the sound of arms, men, animals, occasional curses. All of a sudden a cavalry squad, headed by an officer pointing to the caatinga with his saber, dashes down the slope. Pajeú sees that he is digging his spurs mercilessly into the flanks of his nervous, pawing bay. None of the cavalrymen falls on the slope, all of them arrive at the foot of it despite the heavy fire. But they all fall, riddled with bullets, the moment they enter the caatinga. The officer with the saber, hit several times, roars: “Show your faces, you cowards!”

  “Show our faces so you can kill us?” Pajeú thinks. “Is that what atheists call courage?” A strange way of looking at things; the Devil is not only evil but stupid. He reloads his overheated rifle. The slope is swarming with soldiers now, and more are pouring down onto the rock face. As he takes aim, still calm and unhurried, Pajeú calculates that there are at least a hundred, perhaps a hundred fifty, of them.

  He sees, out of the corner of his eye, that one of the jagunços is fighting hand to hand with a soldier, and he wonders how the dog got there. He puts his knife between his teeth; that is how he has always gone into the fray, ever since the days of the cangaço. The scar makes itself felt and he hears, very close by, very loud and clear, shouts of “Long live the Republic!”

  “Long live Marshal Floriano!”

  “Death to the English!” The jagunços answer: “Death to the Antichrist!”

  “Long live the Counselor!”

  “Long live Belo Monte!”

  “We can’t stay here, Pajeú,” Taramela says to him. A compact mass is descending the slope now: soldiers, bullock carts, a cannon, cavalrymen, protected by two companies of infantrymen that charge into the caatinga. They fling themselves into the scrub and sink their bayonets in the bushes in the hope of running their invisible enemy through. “Either we get out now or we won’t get out, Pajeú,” Taramela insists, but there is no panic in his voice. Pajeú wants to make sure that the soldiers are really heading toward Pitombas. Yes, there is no question of it, the river of uniforms is definitely flowing northward; nobody except the men who are combing the brush veers off toward the west. He keeps shooting till all his bullets are gone before taking the knife out of his mouth and blowing the cane whistle with all his might. Jagunços instantly appear here and there, crouching over, crawling on all fours, turning tail, leaping from one refuge to another, some of them even slipping right through a soldier’s legs, all of them decamping as fast as they can. He blows his whistle again and, followed by Taramela, beats a hasty retreat, too. Has he waited too long? He does not run in a straight line but in a ragged tracery of curves, back and forth, so as to make himself a difficult target to aim at; he glimpses, to his right and his left, soldiers shouldering their rifles or running with fixed bayonets after jagunços. As he heads into the caatinga, as fast as his legs can carry him, he thinks of the woman again, of the two men who killed each other because of her; is she one of those women who bring bad luck?

  He feels exhausted, his heart about to burst. Taramela is panting, too. It is good to have this loyal comrade here with him, his friend for so many years now, with whom he has never had the slightest argument. And at that moment four uniforms, four rifles suddenly confront him. “Hit the dirt, hit the dirt,” he shouts to Taramela. He throws himself to the ground and rolls, hearing at least two of them shoot. By the time he manages to get himself in a squatting position he has his rifle already aimed at the infantryman coming toward him. The Mannlicher has jammed: the pin hits the head of the cartridge but does not fire. He hears a shot and one of the Protestants falls to the ground, clutching his belly. “Yes, Taramela, you’re my good luck,” he thinks as he flings himself upon the three soldiers who have been thrown into confusion for a moment on seeing their comrade wounded, using his rifle as a bludgeon. He strikes one of them and sends him staggering, but the others leap on top of him. He feels a burning, shooting pain. Suddenly blood spurts all over the face of one of the soldiers and he hears him howl with pain. Taramela is there, landing in their midst like a meteor. The enemy that it falls to Pajeú’s lot to deal with is not a real adversary to Pajeú’s way of thinking: very young, he is dripping with sweat, and the uniform he is bundled up in barely allows him to move. He struggles till Pajeú gets his rifle away from him and then takes to his heels. Taramela and the other soldier are fighting it out on the ground, panting. Pajeú goes over to them and with a single thrust buries his knife in the soldier’s neck up to the handle; he gurgles, trembles, and stops moving. Taramela has a few bruises and Pajeú’s shoulder is bleeding. Taramela rubs egg poultice on it and bandages it with the shirt of one of the dead soldiers. “You’re my good luck, Taramela,” Pajeú says. “That I am,” Taramela agrees. They are unable to run now, for each of them is now carrying not only his own knapsack and rifle but also those of one of the soldiers.

  Shortly thereafter they hear gunfire. It is scattered at first, but soon grows heavier. The vanguard is already in Pitombas, being fired on by Felício and his men. He imagines the rage the soldiers must feel on finding, hanging from the trees, the uniforms, the boots, the caps, the leather chest belts of the Throat-Slitter’s troops, the skeletons picked clean by the vultures. During nearly all of their trek to Pitombas, the fusillade continues and Taramela comments: “Anybody who’s got all the bullets in the world, the way those soldiers do, can shoot just to be shooting.” The fusillade suddenly ceases. Felício must have started falling back, so as to lure the column into following them along the road to As Umburanas, where old Macambira and Mané Quadrado will greet them with another hail of bullets.

  When Pajeú and Taramela—they must rest awhile, for the weight of the soldiers’ rifles and knapsacks plus their own is twice as tiring—finally reach the scrubland of Pitombas, there are still scattered jagunços there. They are firing sporadically at the column, which pays no attention to them and continues to advance, amid a cloud of yellow dust, toward the deep depression, once a riverbed, that the sertanejos call the road to As Umburanas.

  “It must not hurt you very much when you laugh, Pajeú,” Taramela says.

  Pajeú is blowing his cane whistle to let the jagunços know he’s arrived, and thinks to himself that he has the right to smile. Aren’t the dogs taking off down the ravine, battalion after battalion of them, on the road to As Umburanas? Won’t that road take them, inevitably, to A Favela?

  He and Taramela are on a wooded promontory overlooking the bare ravines; there is no need to hide themselves, for they are not only standing at a dead angle but are shielded by the sun’s rays, which blind the soldiers if they look in this direction. They can see the column below them turn the gray earth red, blue. They can still hear occasional shots. The jagunços appear, climbing on all fours, emerging from caves, letting themselves down from lookout platforms hidden in the trees. They crowd around Pajeú, to whom someone hands a leather flask full of milk, which he drinks in little sips and which leaves a little white trickle at the corners of his mouth. No one questions him about his wound, and in fact they avert their eyes from it, as though it were something indecent. Pajeú then eats a handful of fruit they give him: quixabas, quarters of umbu, pinhas. At the same time, he listens to the report of two men whom Felício left there when he went off to reinforce Joaquim Macambira and Mané Quadrado in As Umburanas. Const
antly breaking in on each other, they tell how the dogs did not react immediately to being fired upon from the promontory, because it seemed risky to climb up the slope and present a target to the jagunço sharpshooters or because they guessed that the latter were such small groups as to be insignificant. Nonetheless, when Felício and his men advanced to the edge of the ravine and the atheists saw that they were beginning to suffer casualties, they sent several companies to hunt them down. That’s how it had gone for some time, with the companies trying to climb the slope and the jagunços withstanding their fire, until finally the soldiers slipped away through one opening or another in the brush and disappeared. Felício had left shortly thereafter.

  “Till just a little while ago,” one of the messengers says, “it was swarming with soldiers around here.”

  Taramela, who has been counting the men, informs Pajeú that there are thirty-five of them there. Should they wait for the others?

  “There isn’t time,” Pajeú answers. “We’re needed.”

  He leaves a messenger to tell the others which way they’ve gone, hands out the rifles and knapsacks they’ve brought, and heads straight for the ravines to meet up with Mané Quadrado, Felício, and Macambira. The rest he has had—along with having had something to eat and drink—has done him good. His muscles no longer ache; the wound burns less. He walks fast, not hiding himself, along the broken path that forces them to zigzag back and forth. Below him, the column continues to advance. The head of it is now far in the distance, perhaps climbing A Favela, but even in spots where the view is unobstructed he is unable to catch a glimpse of it. The river of soldiers, horses, cannons, wagons is endless. “It’s a rattlesnake,” Pajeú thinks. Each battalion is a ring, the uniforms the scales, the powder of its cannons the venom with which it poisons its victims. He would like to be able to tell the woman what has happened to him.

  At that moment he hears rifle reports. Everything has turned out as Abbot João has planned it. They are up ahead shooting at the serpent from the rocks of As Umburanas, giving it one last push toward A Favela. On rounding a hill, they see a squad of cavalry coming up. Pajeú begins shooting, aiming at their mounts to make them roll down into the ravine. What fine horses, how easily they scale the very steep slope! The burst of fire downs two of them, but a number of them reach the top. Pajeú gives the order to clear out, knowing as he runs that the men must resent his having deprived them of an easy victory.

  When they finally reach the ravines where the jagunços are deployed, Pajeú realizes that his comrades are in a tough spot. Old Macambira, whom it takes him some time to locate, explains to him that the soldiers are bombarding the heights, causing rockslides, and that every corps that passes by sends out fresh companies to hunt them down. “We’ve lost quite a few men,” the old man says as he energetically unfouls his rifle and carefully loads it with black powder that he extracts from a horn. “At least twenty,” he grumbles. “I don’t know if we’ll withstand the next charge. What shall we do?”

  From where he is standing, Pajeú can see, very close by, the range of hills of A Favela, and beyond them, Monte Mário. Those hills, gray and ocher, have now turned bluish, reddish, greenish, and are moving, as though they were infested with larvae.

  “They’ve been coming up for three or four hours now,” old Macambira says. “They’ve even gotten the cannons up. And A Matadeira, too.”

  “Well then, we’ve done what we had to do,” Pajeú says. “So let’s all go now to reinforce O Riacho.”

  When the Sardelinha sisters asked her if she wanted to go with them to cook for the men who were waiting for the soldiers in Trabubu and Cocorobó, Jurema said yes. She said it mechanically, the way she said and did everything. The Dwarf reproached her for it and the nearsighted man made that noise, halfway between a moan and a gargle, that came from him every time something frightened him. They had been in Canudos for more than two months now and were never apart.

  She thought that the Dwarf and the nearsighted man would stay behind in the city, but when the convoy of four pack mules, twenty porters, and a dozen women was ready to leave, both of them fell in alongside her. They took the road to Jeremoabo. No one was bothered by the presence of these two intruders who were carrying neither weapons nor pickaxes and shovels for digging trenches. As they passed by the animal pens, now rebuilt and full once more of goats and kids, everyone began singing the hymns that people said had been composed by the Little Blessed One. Jurema walked along in silence, feeling the rough stones of the road through her sandals. The Dwarf sang along with the others. The nearsighted man, concentrating on seeing where he was stepping, was holding to his right eye the tortoiseshell frame of his glasses, to which he had glued little shards of the shattered lenses. This man who seemed to have more bones than other people, to stagger about in a daze, holding this artifact made of slivers up to his eye, who approached persons and things as though he were about to bump into them, at times kept Jurema from dwelling on her unlucky star. In the weeks during which she had been his eyes, his cane, his consolation, she had thought of him as her son. Thinking of this gangling beanpole of a man as “my son” was her secret game, a notion that made her laugh. God had brought strange people into her life, people she never dreamed existed, such as Galileo Gall, the circus folk, and this pitiful creature alongside her who had just tripped and fallen headlong.

  Every so often they would run into armed groups of the Catholic Guard in the scrub on the mountainsides and stop to give them flour, fruit, brown sugar, jerky, and ammunition. From time to time messengers appeared, who on spying them stopped short to talk with Antônio Vilanova. Rumors spread in whispers through the convoy after they had gone on. They were always about the same thing: the war, the dogs that were on their way. She finally pieced together what had been happening. There were two armies approaching, one of them by way of Queimadas and Monte Santo and the other by way of Sergipe and Jeremoabo. Hundreds of jagunços had taken off in those two directions in recent days, and every afternoon, during the counsels, which Jurema had faithfully attended, the Counselor exhorted his flock to pray for them. She had seen the anxiety that the imminent threat of yet another war had aroused. Her one thought was that, because of this war, the robust, mature caboclo, the one with the scar and the little beady eyes that frightened her, would not be back for some time.

  The convoy arrived in Trabubu as night was falling. They distributed food to the jagunços entrenched amid the rocks and three women stayed behind with them. Then Antônio Vilanova ordered the rest of the convoy to go on to Cocorobó. They covered the last stretch in darkness. Jurema led the nearsighted man along by the hand. Despite her help, he stumbled and fell so many times that Antônio Vilanova had him ride a pack mule, sitting on top of the sacks of maize. As they started up the steep pass to Cocorobó, Pedrão came to meet them. He was a giant of a man, nearly as stout and tall as Big João, a light-skinned mulatto well along in years, with an ancient carbine slung over his shoulder that he never removed even to sleep. He was barefoot, with pants that reached down to his ankles and a sleeveless jacket that left his huge sturdy arms bare. He had a round belly that he kept scratching as he spoke. On seeing him, Jurema felt apprehensive, because of the stories that had circulated about his life in Várzea da Ema, where he had perpetrated many a bloody deed with the band that had never left his side, men with the fearsome faces of outlaws. She had the feeling that being around people such as Pedrão, Abbot João, or Pajeú was dangerous, even though they were saints now—like living with a jaguar, a cobra, and a tarantula who, through some dark instinct, might claw, bite, or sting at any moment.

  Right now, Pedrão seemed harmless enough, lost in the shadows talking with Antônio and Honório Vilanova, the latter having materialized like a ghost from behind the rocks. A number of silhouettes appeared with him, suddenly popping up out of the brambles to relieve the porters of the burdens they were carrying on their backs. Jurema helped light the braziers. The men busied themselves opening cases of a
mmunition and sacks of gunpowder, distributing fuses. She and the other women began preparing a meal. The jagunços were so hungry they seemed scarcely able to wait for the pots to come to a boil. They congregated around Assunção Sardelinha, who filled their bowls and tins with water, as other women handed out fistfuls of manioc; as things became somewhat disorderly, Pedrão ordered the men to calm down.

  Jurema worked all night long, putting the pots back on the fire to warm again and again, frying pieces of meat, reheating the beans. The men showed up in groups of ten, of fifteen, and when one of them recognized his wife among the women cooking, he took her by the arm and they withdrew to talk together. Why had it never occurred to Rufino, as it had to so many other sertanejos, to come to Canudos? If he had done so, he would still be alive.

  Suddenly they heard a clap of thunder. But the air was dry; it couldn’t be a sign of a rainstorm about to break. She realized then that it was the boom of a cannon; Pedrão and the Vilanova brothers ordered the fires put out and sent the men who were eating back to the mountaintops. Once they had left, however, the three stayed there talking. Pedrão said that the soldiers were on the outskirts of Canche; it would be some time before they arrived. They did not march by night; he had followed them from Simão Dias on and knew their habits. The moment darkness fell, they set up their portable huts and posted sentinels and stayed put till the following day. At dawn, before leaving, they fired a cannon shot in the air. That must have been what the cannon report was; they must just be leaving Canche.

  “Are there many of them?” a voice from the ground that resembled the screeching of a bird interrupted him. “How many of them are there?”