The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  That deep, melodious, normal voice read out the battle plan, the disposition of the regiments, the distances between companies, between men, the signals, the bugle commands, and meanwhile he for his part grew more and more panic-stricken, more and more anxious for Jurema and the Dwarf to return. Before the Lion of Natuba had finished reading, the first part of the battle plan was already being carried out: the bombardment to soften them up.

  “I now know that at that moment only nine cannons were bombarding Canudos and that they never shot more than sixteen rounds at a time,” the nearsighted journalist said. “But it seemed as if there were a thousand of them that night, as if all the stars in the sky had begun bombarding us.”

  The din made the sheets of corrugated tin on the roof of the store rattle, the shelves and the counter shake, and they could hear buildings caving in, falling down, screams, feet running, and in the pauses, the inevitable howling of little children. “It’s begun,” one of the jagunços said. They went outdoors to see, came back in, told Maria Quadrado and the Lion of Natuba that they wouldn’t be able to get back to the Sanctuary because the only way there was being swept with cannon fire, and the journalist heard the woman insist on going back. Big João finally dissuaded her by swearing that the moment the barrage let up he would come and take them back to the Sanctuary himself. The jagunços left, and he realized that Jurema and the Dwarf—if they were still alive—were not going to be able to get back from Rancho do Vigário to where he was either. He realized, in his boundless fear, that he would have to go through the coming attack with no one for company except the saint and the quadrumanous monster of Canudos.

  “What are you laughing at now?” the Baron de Canabrava asked.

  “Something I’d be ashamed to own up to,” the nearsighted journalist stammered. He sat there lost in thought and then suddenly raised his head and exclaimed: “Canudos changed my ideas about history, about Brazil, about men. But above all else about myself.”

  “To judge from your tone of voice, it hasn’t been a change for the better,” the baron murmured.

  “You’re right there,” the journalist said, lower skill. “Thanks to Canudos, I have a very poor opinion of myself.”

  Wasn’t that also his own case, to a certain degree? Hadn’t Canudos turned his life, his ideas, his habits topsy-turvy, like a hostile whirlwind? Hadn’t his convictions and illusions fallen to pieces? The image of Estela, in her rooms upstairs, with Sebastiana at her side in her rocking chair, perhaps reading aloud to her passages from the novels that she had been fond of, perhaps combing her hair, or getting her to listen to the Austrian music boxes, and the blank, withdrawn, unreachable face of the woman who had been the great love of his life—the woman who to him had always been the very symbol of the joy of living, beauty, enthusiasm, elegance—again filled his heart with bitterness.

  With an effort, he seized on the first thing that passed through his mind. “You mentioned Antônio Vilanova,” he said hurriedly. “The trader, isn’t that right? A moneygrubber and a man as calculating as they come. I used to see a lot of him and his brother. They were the suppliers for Calumbi. Did he become a saint, too?”

  “He wasn’t there to do business.” The nearsighted journalist had recovered his sarcastic laugh. “It was difficult to do business in Canudos. The coin of the Republic was not allowed to circulate there. It was the money of the Dog, of the Devil, of atheists, Protestants, Freemasons, don’t you see? Why do you think the jagunços made off with the soldiers’ weapons but never with their wallets?”

  “So the phrenologist wasn’t all that crazy, after all,” the baron thought. “In a word, thanks to his own madness Gall was able to intuit something of the madness that Canudos represented.”

  “Antônio Vilanova wasn’t someone who went around continually crossing himself and beating his breast in remorse for his sins,” the nearsighted journalist went on. “He was a practical man, eager to achieve concrete results. He was constantly bustling about organizing things—he reminded you of a perpetual-motion machine. All during those five endless months he took it upon himself to ensure that Canudos had enough to eat. Why would he have done that, amid all the bullets and dead bodies? There’s no other explanation: the Counselor had struck some secret chord within him.”

  “As he did you,” the baron said. “He barely missed making you a saint, too.”

  “He went out to bring food back till the very end,” the nearsighted journalist went on, paying no attention to what the baron had said. “He would steal off, taking just a few men with him. They would make their way through the enemy lines, attack the supply trains. I know how they did that. They would set up an infernal racket with their blunderbusses so as to make the animals stampede. In the chaos that ensued, they would drive ten, fifteen of the bullocks to Canudos. So that those who were about to give their lives for the Blessed Jesus could fight on for a little while more.”

  “Do you know where those animals came from?” the baron interrupted him.

  “From the convoys that the army was sending out from Monte Santo to A Favela,” the nearsighted journalist said. “The same place the jagunços’ arms and ammunition came from. That was one of the oddities of this war: the army provided the supplies both for its own forces and for the enemy.”

  “What the jagunços stole was stolen property,” the baron sighed. “Many of those cattle and goats were once mine. Very few of them had been bought from me. Almost always they’d been cut out of my herds by gaucho rustlers hired on by the army. I have a friend who owns a hacienda, old Murau, who has filed suit against the state for the cows and sheep that the army troops ate. He’s asking for seventy contos in compensation, no less.”

  In his half sleep, Big João smells the sea. A warm sensation steals over him, something that feels to him like happiness. In these years in which, thanks to the Counselor, he has found relief for that painful boiling in his soul from the days when he served the Devil, there is only one thing he sometimes misses. How many years is it now that he has not seen, smelled, heard the sea in his body? He has no idea, but he knows that it has been a long, long time since he last saw it, on that high promontory amid cane fields where Mistress Adelinha Isabel de Gumúcio used to come to see sunsets. Scattered shots remind him that the battle is not yet over, but he is not troubled: his consciousness tells him that even if he were wide awake it would make no difference, since neither he nor any of the men in the Catholic Guard huddled in the trenches round about him have a single Mannlicher bullet left, not one load of shotgun pellets, not one grain of powder to set off the explosive devices manufactured by the blacksmiths of Canudos whom necessity has turned into armorers.

  So why are they staying, then, in these caves on the heights, in the ravine at the foot of A Favela where the dogs are waiting, crowded one atop the other? They are following Abbot João’s orders. After making sure that all the units of the first column have arrived at A Favela and are now pinned down by the fire from the jagunço sharpshooters who are all around on the mountainsides and are raining bullets down on them from their parapets, their trenches, their hiding places, Abbot João has gone off to try to capture the soldiers’ convoy of ammunition, supplies, cattle and goats which, thanks to the topography and the harassment from Pajeú and his men, has fallen far behind. Hoping to take the convoy by surprise at As Umburanas and divert it to Canudos, Abbot João has asked Big João to see to it that the Catholic Guard, at whatever cost, keeps the regiments at A Favela from retreating. In his half sleep, the former slave tells himself that the dogs must be stupid or must have lost many men, since thus far not a single patrol has tried to make its way back to As Umburanas to see what has happened to the convoy. The Catholic Guards know that if the soldiers make the slightest move to abandon A Favela, they must fling themselves upon them and bar their way, with knives, machetes, bayonets, tooth and nail. Old Joaquim Macambira and his men, hiding in ambush on the other side of the trail cleared for the infantry and the wagons and cannons to a
dvance on A Favela, will do likewise. The soldiers won’t try to retreat; they are too intent on answering the fire in front of them and on their flanks, too busy bombarding Canudos to tumble to what is happening at their backs. “Abbot João is more intelligent than they are,” he thinks in his sleep. Wasn’t it his brilliant idea to lure the dogs to A Favela? Wasn’t he the one who thought of sending Pedrão and the Vilanova brothers to wait for the other devils in the narrow pass at Cocorobó? There, too, the jagunços must have wiped them out. As he breathes in the smell of the sea it intoxicates him, takes him far away from the war, and he sees waves and feels the caress of the foamy water on his skin. This is the first time he has had any sleep, after forty-eight hours of fighting.

  At two in the morning a messenger from Joaquim Macambira awakens him. It is one of Joaquim’s sons, young and slender, with long hair, crouching patiently in the trench, waiting for Big João to rouse himself from his sleep. The boy’s father needs ammunition; his men have almost no bullets or powder left. With his tongue still thick with sleep, Big João explains that his men don’t have any left either. Have they had any news from Abbot João? None. And from Pedrão? The youngster nods: he and his men have had to fall back from Cocorobó they have no ammunition left and have had heavy losses. And they have not been able to stop the dogs in Trabubu either.

  Big João feels wide awake at last. Does that mean that the army advancing by way of Jeremoabo is coming here?

  “Yes,” Joaquim Macambira’s son answers. “Pedrão and all the men of his who aren’t dead are already back in Belo Monte.”

  Maybe that is what the Catholic Guard should do: go back to Canudos to defend the Counselor from the attack that now seems inevitable if the other army is coming this way. What is Joaquim Macambira going to do? The youngster doesn’t know. Big João decides to go talk to the boy’s father.

  It is late at night and the sky is studded with stars. After instructing his men not to budge from where they are, the former slave slips silently down the rocky slope, alongside young Macambira. Unfortunately, with so many stars out, he is able to see the dead horses with their bellies ripped open, being pecked at by the black vultures, and the body of the old woman. All the day before and part of the night he has kept coming across these officers’ mounts, the first victims of the fusillade. He is certain that he himself has killed a number of them. He had to do it, for the sake of the Father and Blessed Jesus the Counselor and Belo Monte, the most precious thing in his life. He will do it again, as many times as necessary. But something within his soul protests and suffers when he sees these animals fall with a great whinny, agonize for hour after hour, with their insides spilling out on the ground and a pestilential stench in the air. He knows where this sense of guilt, of committing a sin, that possesses him every time he fires on the officers’ horses comes from. It stems from the memory of the great care that was taken of the horses on the hacienda, where Master Adalberto de Gumúcio had instilled the veritable worship of horses in his family, his hired hands, his slaves. On seeing the shadowy bulks of the animals’ carcasses scattered about as he goes along the trail, crouching at young Macambira’s side, he wonders whether it is the Father who makes certain things that go back to the days when he was a sinner—his homesickness for the sea, his love of horses—linger so long and so vividly in his memory.

  He sees the dead body of the old woman at the same time, and feels his heart pound. He has glimpsed her for only a few seconds, her face bathed in moonlight, her eyes staring in mad terror, her two remaining teeth protruding from her lips, her hair disheveled, her forehead set in a tense scowl. He has no idea what her name is, but he knows her very well; she came to settle in Belo Monte long ago, with a large family of sons, daughters, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and homeless waifs that she had taken in, in a little mud hut on the Coração de Jesus, a narrow back street. It was the first dwelling to have been blown to bits by the Throat-Slitter’s cannons. The old woman had been in the procession, and when she returned home, her hut was a heap of rubble beneath which were three of her daughters and all her nieces and nephews, a dozen young ones who slept one on top of the other on the floor and in a couple of hammocks. The woman had climbed up to the trenches at As Umburanas with the Catholic Guard when it went up on the heights there three days ago to wait for the soldiers. She had cooked and brought water to the jagunços from the nearby water source, along with the rest of the women, but when the shooting began, Big João and his men saw her take off amid the dust, stumble down the gravel slope, and reach the trail at the bottom where—slowly, without taking any precautions—she began wandering about among the wounded soldiers, giving them the coup de grâce with a little dagger. They had seen her poke about among the uniformed corpses, and before the hail of bullets blew her to pieces, she had managed to strip some of them naked, lop off their privates, and stuff them in their mouths. All during the fighting, as he saw infantrymen and cavalrymen pass by, saw them die, fire their rifles, fall over each other, trample their dead and wounded underfoot, flee from the rain of gunfire and run for their lives along the slopes of A Favela, the only way left open, Big João’s eyes kept constantly looking back toward the dead body of that old woman that he has just left behind.

  As he approaches a bog dotted with thornbushes, cacti, and a few scattered imbuzeiros, young Macambira raises the cane whistle to his lips and blows a shrill blast that sounds like a parakeet’s screech. An identical blast comes in reply. Grabbing João by the arm, the youngster guides him through the bog, their feet sinking into it up to the ankles, and soon afterward the former slave is drinking from a leather canteen full of fresh sweet water, squatting on his heels alongside Joaquim Macambira beneath a shelter of boughs beyond which are many pairs of gleaming eyes.

  The old man is consumed with anxiety, but Big João is surprised to discover that the one source of his anxiety is the big, extra-long, shining cannon drawn by forty bullocks that he has seen on the Jueté road. “If A Matadeira goes into action, the dogs will blow up the towers and the walls of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus and Belo Monte will disappear,” he mutters gloomily. Big João listens to him attentively. He reveres Joaquim Macambira; he has the air of a venerable patriarch. He is very old, his white locks fall in curls that reach down to his shoulders, his little snow-white beard sets off his dark weather-beaten face with a nose like a gnarled vine shoot. His eyes buried in deep wrinkles sparkle with uncontainable energy. He was once the owner of a large plot of land where he grew manioc and maize, between Cocorobó and Trabubu, in the region known in fact as Macambira. He worked that land with his eleven sons and had many a fight with his neighbors over boundary lines. But one day he abandoned everything and moved with his enormous family to Canudos, where they occupy half a dozen dwellings opposite the cemetery. Everyone in Belo Monte approaches the old man very warily because he has the reputation of being a fiercely proud, touchy man.

  Joaquim Macambira has sent messengers to ask Abbot João whether, in view of the situation, he should continue to mount guard at As Umburanas or withdraw to Canudos. He has had no answer as yet. What does Big João think? The latter shakes his head sadly: he doesn’t know what to do. On the one hand, what seems most urgent is to hasten back to Belo Monte so as to protect the Counselor in case there is an attack from the north. But, on the other hand, hasn’t Abbot João said that it is essential that they protect his rear?

  “Protect it with what?” Macambira roars. “With our hands?”

  “Yes,” Big João says humbly. “If that’s all there is.”

  They decide that they will stay at As Umburanas until they receive word from the Street Commander. They bid each other goodbye with a simultaneous “Praised be Blessed Jesus the Counselor.” As he starts to wade through the bog again, alone this time, Big João hears the whistles that sound like the screeching of parakeets, signaling to the jagunços to let him through. As he splashes through the mud and feels mosquitoes biting his face, arms, and chest, he tries to pictur
e A Matadeira, that war machine that so alarms Macambira. It must be enormous, deadly, a thundering steel dragon that vomits fire, if it frightens as brave a man as old Macambira. The Evil One, the Dragon, the Dog is really tremendously powerful, with endless resources, since he can keep hurling more and more enemies, better and better armed, into the battle against Canudos. For how long a time would the Father continue to test the faith of the believers of Belo Monte? Hadn’t they suffered enough? Hadn’t they endured enough hunger, death, privation, sorrow? No, not yet. The Counselor has told them as much: our penance will be as great as our sins. Since João’s burden of sin is heavier than that of the others, he will doubtless have to pay more. But it is a great consolation to be fighting for the right cause, on St. George’s side, not the Dragon’s.

  By the time he gets back to the trench, dawn has begun to break; the sentinels have climbed up to their posts on the rocks, but all the rest of the men, lying on the ground on the slope, are still sleeping. Big João curls up in a ball and feels himself beginning to drowse when the sound of hoofbeats causes him to leap to his feet. Enveloped in a cloud of dust, eight or ten horsemen are approaching. Scouts, the vanguard of troops come to protect the convoy? In the still-dim light a rain of arrows, stones, lances descends upon the patrol from the hillsides and he hears shots from the bog where Macambira is. The horsemen wheel their mounts around and gallop toward A Favela. Yes, he is certain now that the troops reinforcing the convoy will be appearing at any moment, countless numbers of them, too many to be held off by men whose only remaining weapons are hunting crossbows, bayonets, and knives, and Big João prays to the Father that Abbot João will have time to carry out his plan.