The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Jurema saw him rise to his feet and stand, frail and spindly, in profile between her and the men, trying to see though his monocle of splinters. The Vilanovas and Pedrão burst out laughing, as did the women who were putting away the pots and the food that was left. She refrained from laughing. She felt sorry for the nearsighted man. Was there anyone more helpless and terrified than her son? Everything frightened him: the people who brushed past him, cripples, madmen, and lepers who begged for alms, a rat running across the floor of the store. Everything made him give that little scream of his, made him turn deathly pale, made him search for her hand.

  “I didn’t count them.” Pedrão guffawed. “Why should I have, if we’re going to kill all of them?”

  There was another wave of laughter. On the heights, it was beginning to get light.

  “The women had best leave here,” Honório Vilanova said.

  Like his brother, he was wearing boots and carrying a pistol as well as a rifle. In their dress, their speech, and even their physical appearance, they seemed to Jurema to be quite different from the other people in Canudos. But no one treated them as though they were any different.

  Forgetting about the nearsighted man, Pedrão motioned to the women to follow him. Half the bearers had already gone up the mountainside, but the rest were still there, with their loads on their backs. A red arc was rising behind the slopes of Cocorobó. The nearsighted man stayed where he was, shaking his head, when the convoy set out to take up positions amid the rocks behind the combatants. Jurema took him by the hand: it was soaking wet with sweat. His glassy, unfocused eyes looked at her gratefully. “Let’s go,” she said, tugging at him. “They’re leaving us behind.” They had to wake the Dwarf, who was sleeping soundly.

  As they reached a sheltered hillock near the crest, the advance guard of the army was entering the pass and the war had begun. The Vilanovas and Pedrão disappeared, and the women, the nearsighted man, and the Dwarf stayed behind amid the weathered rocks, listening to the gunfire. It seemed to be scattered and far off. Jurema could hear the shots on the right and on the left, and she thought to herself that the wind must be carrying the sound away from them, for from there it was very muffled. She could not see anything; a wall of mossy stones hid the sharpshooters from sight. The war, despite being so close, seemed very far away. “Are there many of them?” the nearsighted man stammered. He was still clutching her hand tightly. She answered that she didn’t know and went to help the Sardelinha sisters unload the pack mules and set out the earthen jars full of water, pots full of food, strips of cloth and rags to make bandages, and poultices and medicines that the apothecary had packed in a wooden box. She saw the Dwarf climbing up toward the crest. The nearsighted man sat down on the ground and hid his face in his hands, as though he were weeping. But when one of the women shouted to him to gather branches to make an overhead shelter, he hastily rose to his feet and Jurema saw him set to work eagerly, feeling all around for stems, leaves, grass, and stumbling back to hand them to the women. That little figure moving back and forth, tripping and falling and picking himself up again and peering at the ground with his outlandish monocle, was such a funny sight that the women finally began pointing at him and making fun of him. The Dwarf disappeared amid the rocks.

  Suddenly the shots sounded louder, closer. The women stood there not moving, listening. Jurema saw that the crackle of gunfire, the continuous bursts had instantly sobered them: they had forgotten all about the nearsighted man and were thinking of their husbands, their fathers, their sons who were the targets of this fire on the slope opposite. The shooting dazed her but it did not frighten her. She felt that this war did not concern her and that the bullets would therefore respect her. She felt such drowsiness come over her that she curled up against the rocks, at the Sardelinha sisters’ side. She slept though not asleep, a lucid sleep, aware of the gunfire that was shaking the mountain slopes of Cocorobó, dreaming twice of other shots, those of that morning in Queimadas, that dawn when she had been about to be killed by the capangas and the stranger who spoke in some odd language had raped her. She dreamed that, since she knew what was going to happen, she begged him not to do it because that would be the ruin of her and of Rufino and of the stranger himself, but not understanding her language, he had paid no attention to her.

  When she awoke, the nearsighted man, at her feet, looked at her the way the Idiot from the circus had. Two jagunços were drinking from one of the earthen jugs, surrounded by the women. She rose to her feet and went to see what was happening. The Dwarf had not come back, and the gunfire was deafening. The jagunços had come to get more ammunition; they were so tense and exhausted they could barely speak: the pass was crawling with atheists, who were dropping like flies every time they tried to take the mountainside. They had charged twice, and each time they had been pushed back before they were even halfway up the slope. The man speaking, a short little man with a sparse beard sprinkled with white, shrugged: the only thing was, there were so many of them that there was no way to force them to withdraw. What was more, the jagunços were beginning to run out of ammunition.

  “And what will happen if they take the slopes?” Jurema heard the nearsighted man stammer.

  “They won’t be able to stop them in Trabubu,” the other jagunço said in a hoarse voice. “There are almost no men left there. They’ve all come here to give us a hand.”

  As though that had reminded them of the need to leave immediately, the two men murmured. “Praised be the Blessed Jesus,” and Jurema saw them scale the rocks and disappear. The Sardelinha sisters said that the food should be reheated, since more jagunços would be turning up at any moment. As she helped them, Jurema felt the nearsighted man tremble as he clung to her skirts. She sensed how terrified, how panicked he was at the thought that all of a sudden uniformed men might spring out from amid the rocks, shooting and bayoneting anyone who got in their way. In addition to the rifle fire, there was cannonading; each time a shell landed, it was followed by an avalanche of stones that roared down the mountainside. Jurema remembered her poor son’s indecision all these many weeks, not knowing what to do with himself, whether to stay or try to get away. He wanted to leave, that was what he yearned to do, and as they lay on the floor of the store at night, listening to the Vilanova family snore, he told her so, trembling all over: he wanted to get out of there, to escape to Salvador, to Cumbe, to Monte Santo, to Jeremoabo, to a place where he could find help, where he could get word to people who were his friends that he was still alive. But how to get away if they had forbidden him to leave? How far could he get all by himself and half blind? They would catch up with him and kill him. In these whispered dialogues in the dark of the night, he sometimes tried to persuade her to lead him to some hamlet where he could hire guides. He would offer her every reward conceivable if she helped him, but then a moment later he would correct himself and say that it was madness to try to escape since they would find them and kill them. As he had once trembled with fear of the jagunços, he now trembled with fear of the soldiers. “My poor son,” she thought. She felt sad and disheartened. Would the soldiers kill her? It didn’t matter. Was it true that when any man or woman of Belo Monte died, angels would come to carry off their soul? True or not, death in any event would be a repose, a sleep with no sad dreams, something not as bad as the life that she had been leading after what had happened in Queimadas.

  All the women suddenly looked up. Her eyes followed to see what they were watching: ten or twelve jagunços leaping down the slope from the crest. The cannonade was so heavy that it seemed to Jurema that shells were bursting inside her head. Like the other women, she ran to meet the men and heard them say that they needed ammunition: they had none left to shoot back with and were in a desperate rage. When the Sardelinha sisters answered, “What ammunition?” since the last case of it had been carried off by the two jagunços a while before, the men looked at each other and one of them spat and stamped his feet in fury. The women offered them something to eat, b
ut they took time only to have a drink of water, passing a dipper from hand to hand: the moment they had all had a drink, they ran back up the mountainside. The women watched them drink and take off again, dripping with sweat, frowning, the veins at their temples standing out, their eyes bloodshot, and did not ask them a single question.

  The last one to leave turned to the Sardelinha sisters and said: “You’d best go back to Belo Monte. We can’t hold out much longer. There are too many of them, and we’ve no bullets left.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, instead of heading for the pack mules, the women also began scrambling up the mountainside. Jurema scarcely knew what to make of it. They were not going to war because they were madwomen; their men were up there, and they wanted to know if they were still alive. Without another thought, she ran after them, shouting to the nearsighted man—standing there petrified, his mouth gaping open—to wait for her.

  As she clambered up the slope she scratched her hands and twice she slipped and fell. It was a steep climb; her heart began to pound and she found herself short of breath. Up above, she saw great ocher, lead-colored, orange-tinted clouds that the wind drove together, drove apart, drove together again, and along with scattered gunfire, close at hand, she could hear unintelligible shouts. She crawled down a slope without stones, trying to see. She came upon two big rocks leaning against each other and peered out from behind them at the clouds of dust. Little by little she was able to see, intuit, guess. The jagunços were not far off, but it was hard to make them out because they blended in with the slope. She gradually located them, curled up behind boulders or clumps of cacti, or hiding in hollows with only their heads peeking out. On the slopes opposite, whose broad outlines she managed to make out in the dust, there were also many jagunços, spread out, buried in the dirt, shooting. She had the impression that she was about to go deaf, that the earsplitting gunfire was the last thing she would ever hear.

  And at that moment she realized that the dark spot, like a thicket, that the slope turned into fifty yards down was soldiers. Yes, there they were: a splotch climbing farther and farther up the mountainside, in which there were glints, bright spots, reflections, little red stars that must be rifle shots, bayonets, swords, and glimpsed faces that appeared and disappeared. She looked to both sides, and on the right the splotch had now climbed as high as the place where she was. She felt her stomach writhe, retched, and vomited across her arm. She was alone in the middle of the slope and that tide of uniforms was about to flood over her. Without thinking, she let herself slide, sitting down, to the nearest nest of jagunços: three sombreros, two leather ones and one straw one, in a hollow. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” she shouted as she slid. But not one of them turned around to look at her as she leapt into the hole protected by a parapet of stones. She then saw that two of the three men inside were dead. One of them had been hit by a projectile that had turned his face into a vermilion blob. He was lying in the arms of the other one who was dead, his eyes and mouth full of flies. They were holding each other up like the two big rocks behind which she had hidden herself. After a moment, the jagunço who was still alive looked at her out of the corner of one eye. He was aiming with his other eye closed, calculating before shooting, and with each shot the rifle recoiled and hit him in the shoulder. Without halting his fire, he mumbled something. Jurema did not understand what he said. She crawled toward him, to no avail. The buzzing in her ears was still the only thing she could hear. The jagunço motioned to her, and she finally realized that he wanted the pouch that was lying next to the dead body without a face. She handed it to him and saw the jagunço, sitting with his legs crossed, clean the barrel of his rifle and calmly reload it, as though he had all the time in the world.

  “The soldiers are right on top of us,” Jurema screamed. “Heaven help us, what’s going to become of us?”

  He shrugged and took up his position behind the parapet again. Should she leave this trench, go back to the other side of the slope, flee to Canudos? Her body would not obey her, her legs had gone as limp as rags, if she stood up she would fall down. Why didn’t the soldiers appear with their bayonets, what were they waiting for if they’d spied them only a few yards away? The jagunço moved his lips again, but all she could hear was that buzzing in her ears and now, too, metallic sounds: bugles?

  “I can’t hear a thing, not a thing,” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “I’ve gone deaf.”

  The jagunço nodded and motioned to her, as though indicating that someone was moving off. He was a young man, with long kinky hair tumbling out from under the brim of his leather sombrero with a greenish tinge, and wearing the armband of the Catholic Guard. “What?” Jurema shouted. He gestured to her to look over the parapet. Pushing the two dead bodies aside, she peeked out of one of the openings between the stones. The soldiers were now lower down on the slope. It was they who were moving off. “Why are they going off if they’ve won?” she wondered, watching them being swallowed up by the swirls of dust. Why were they moving off downhill instead of climbing up the hill to kill off the survivors?

  When Sergeant Frutuoso Medrado—First Company, Twelfth Battalion—hears the bugle command to retreat, he thinks he is going mad. His squad of chasseurs is at the head of the company and the company at the head of the battalion as they launch a bayonet charge, the fifth one of the day, on the western slopes of Cocorobó. The fact that this time—when they have taken three-quarters of the mountainside, flushing out, with bayonet and saber, the English from the hiding places from which they were sniping at the patriots—they are being given orders to retreat is simply beyond all understanding as Sergeant Frutuoso sees it, even though he has a good head for such things. But there is no doubt about it: there are now many bugles ordering them to withdraw. His eleven men are crouching down looking at him, and in the windblown dust enveloping them Sergeant Medrado sees that they are as taken aback as he is. Has the field commander lost his mind, robbing them of victory when only the heights remained to be cleared of the enemy? The English are few in number and have almost no ammunition; glancing up toward the crest, Sergeant Frutuoso Medrado spies those of them who have managed to escape from the waves of soldiers breaking over them, and sees that they are not shooting: they are simply brandishing their knives and machetes, throwing stones. “I haven’t gotten myself my Englishman yet,” Frutuoso thinks.

  “What are your men waiting for? Why aren’t they obeying the order?” the commanding officer of the company, Captain Almeida, who suddenly materializes at his side, shouts in his ear.

  “First squad of chasseurs! Retreat!” the sergeant immediately yells, and his eleven men dash down the slope.

  But he is in no hurry; he starts back down at the same pace as Captain Almeida. “The order took me by surprise, sir,” he murmurs, placing himself on the officer’s right. “What sense is there in retreating at this point?”

  “It is not our duty to understand but to obey,” Captain Almeida growls, sliding downhill on his heels, leaning on his saber as though it were a cane. But a moment later he adds, without trying to hide his anger: “I don’t understand it either. All we had to do was to kill them off—mere child’s play.”

  Frutuoso Medrado thinks to himself that one of the few disadvantages of this military life that he relishes so is the mysterious nature of certain command decisions. He has taken part in the five charges on the heights of Cocorobó, and yet he is not tired. He has been fighting for six hours, ever since his battalion, marching in the vanguard of the column, suddenly found itself caught in a cross fire early this morning at the entrance to the pass. In the first charge, the sergeant was behind the Third Company and saw how Second Lieutenant Sepúlveda’s chasseurs were mowed down by bursts of rifle fire whose source no one was able to pin down. In the second, the death toll was also so heavy that they were obliged to fall back. The third charge was made by two battalions of the Sixth Brigade, the Twenty-sixth and the Thirty-second, but Colonel Carlos Maria da Silva Telles ordered Captain A
lmeida’s company to carry out an enveloping movement. It was not successful, for after scaling the spurs of the mountainside they discovered that they were being slashed to ribbons by the thorny brush along the razorback crest. As he was coming back down, the sergeant felt a burning sensation in his left hand: a bullet had just blown off the tip of his little finger. It didn’t hurt him, and once back in the rear guard, as the battalion doctor was applying a disinfectant, he cracked jokes so as to raise the morale of the wounded being brought in by the stretcher-bearers. He took part in the fourth charge as a volunteer, arguing that he wanted to wreak his vengeance for that bit of finger he had lost and kill himself an Englishman. They had managed to get halfway up the slope, but with such heavy losses that once again they were forced to fall back. But in this last charge they had defeated the enemy all along the line: so why withdraw? Perhaps so that the Fifth Brigade could finish them off and thus allow Colonel Donaciano de Araújo Pantoja, General Savaget’s favorite subordinate, to reap all the glory? “That might be why,” Captain Almeida mutters.

  At the foot of the slope, where there are infantrymen from companies trying to regroup, pushing and shoving each other about, troops trying to yoke the draft animals to cannons, carts, and ambulance wagons, contradictory bugle commands, wounded screaming, Sergeant Frutuoso Medrado discovers the reason for the sudden retreat: the column coming from Queimadas and Monte Santo has fallen into a trap, and the second column, instead of invading Canudos from the north, must now make a forced march and get them out of the trap they are caught in.

  The sergeant, who entered the army at the age of fourteen, fought in the war against Paraguay, and in the campaigns to put down the uprisings that broke out in the South following the fall of the monarchy, does not blanch at the idea of withdrawing through unknown territory after having spent the entire day fighting. And what a battle! The bandits are courageous, he must admit. They have withstood several heavy cannonades without budging an inch, forcing the troops to rout them out with bayonets and fight it out in fierce hand-to-hand combat: the bastards are as tough as the Paraguayans. Unlike himself—he feels refreshed and ready for action again after a few swallows of water and a couple of pieces of hardtack—his men look exhausted. They are raw troops, recruited in Bagé in the last six months; this has been their baptism of fire. They have behaved well; he has not seen a single one panic. Can they be more afraid of him than of the English? He is a strict disciplinarian; at their first breach of conduct, his men have him personally to deal with. Instead of the regulation punishments—loss of leave, the stockade, floggings—the sergeant is partial to clouts on the head, ear-pulling, kicks in the behind, or a flying trip into a muddy pigpen. They are well trained, as they have proved today. All of them are safe and sound, with the exception of Private Coríntio, who has tripped over some rocks and is limping. A skinny little runt, he is walking bent over double beneath the weight of his knapsack. A good sort, Coríntio, timid, obliging, an early bird, and Frutuoso Medrado shows certain favoritism toward him because he is Florisa’s husband. The sergeant feels a sudden itch and laughs to himself. “What a hot bitch you are, Florisa—here I am, miles away in the middle of a war, and still you’ve made me get a hard-on,” he thinks. He feels like bursting out laughing at the silly things that pop into his head. He looks at Coríntio, limping along all hunched over, and remembers the day he first presented himself, as cool as you please, at the laundress’s hut: “Either you sleep with me, Florisa, or Coríntio will be confined to barracks every weekend, without visitors’ rights.” Florisa held out for a month; she gave in at first so as to be able to see Coríntio, but now, Frutuoso believes, she continues to sleep with him because she likes it. They do it right there in the hut or at the bend in the river where she goes to do her washing. It is a relationship that makes him feel as proud as a peacock when he’s drunk. Does Coríntio suspect anything? No, not a thing. Or does he simply let it pass, for what can he do when he’s up against a man like the sergeant, who, on top of everything else, is his superior?