The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “All those stories are true, or, rather, they fall short of the truth,” he added, in a dispirited tone of voice. “The violent crimes, the murders, the thefts, the sackings, the blood vengeances, the gratuitous acts of cruelty, such as cutting off people’s ears, their noses. That whole life of hell and madness. And yet here he is, he too, like Abbot João, like Taramela, Pedrão, and the others…The Counselor brought about that miracle, he turned the wolf into the lamb, he brought him into the fold. And because he turned wolves into lambs, because he gave people who knew only fear and hatred, hunger, crime, and pillaging reasons to change their lives, because he brought spirituality where there had been cruelty, they are sending army after army to these lands to exterminate these people. How has Brazil, how has the world been overcome with such confusion as to commit such an abominable deed? Isn’t that sufficient proof that the Counselor is right, that Satan has indeed taken possession of Brazil, that the Republic is the Antichrist?”

  His words were not tumbling out in a rush, he had not raised his voice, he was neither furious nor sad. Simply overwhelmed.

  “It’s not that I’m stubborn or that I hate him,” the Dwarf heard Jurema say in the same firm tone of voice. “Even if it were someone else besides Pajeú, I wouldn’t say yes. I don’t want to marry again, Father.”

  “Very well, I understand,” the curé of Cumbe sighed. “We’ll see that things turn out all right. You don’t have to marry him if you don’t want to, and you don’t have to kill yourself. I’m the one who marries people in Belo Monte; there’s no such thing as civil marriage here.” A faint smile crossed his lips and there was an impish little gleam in his eyes. “But we can’t break the news to him all at once. We mustn’t hurt his feelings. People like Pajeú are so sensitive that it’s like a terrible malady. Another thing that’s always amazed me about people like him is their touchy sense of honor. It’s as though they were one great open wound. They don’t have a thing to their names, but they possess a surpassing sense of honor. It’s their form of wealth. So then, we’ll start by telling him that you’ve been left a widow too recently to enter into another marriage just yet. We’ll make him wait. But there is one thing you can do. It’s important to him. Take him his food at Fazenda Velha. He’s talked to me about that. He needs to feel that a woman is taking care of him. It’s not much. Give him that pleasure. As for the rest, we’ll discourage him, little by little.”

  The morning had been quiet; now they began to hear shots, scattered gunfire far in the distance.

  “You’ve aroused a passion,” Father Joaquim added. “A great passion. He came to the Sanctuary last night to ask the Counselor’s permission to marry you. He also said that he would take in these two, since they’re your family, that he would take them to live with him…” He rose to his feet abruptly.

  The nearsighted man went into a sneezing fit that made him shake all over and the Dwarf burst into joyous laughter, delighted at the idea of becoming Pajeú’s foster son: he would never lack for food again.

  “I wouldn’t marry him for that reason or for any other,” Jurema said, as unyielding as ever. She added, however, lowering her eyes: “But if you think I should, I’ll bring his food to him.”

  Father Joaquim nodded and had turned to leave when suddenly the nearsighted man leapt to his feet and grabbed his arm. On seeing the anxious expression on his face, the Dwarf guessed what he was about to say.

  “You can help me,” he whispered, peering all about fearfully. “Do it because of what you believe in, Father. I have nothing at all to do with what is happening here. It’s by accident that I’m in Canudos; you know that I’m not a soldier or a spy, that I’m a nobody. Help me, I implore you.”

  The curé of Cumbe looked at him with commiseration. “To get out of here?” he murmured.

  “Yes, yes,” the nearsighted man stammered, nodding his head. “They’ve forbidden me to leave. It isn’t right…”

  “You should have made your escape,” Father Joaquim whispered. “While it was still possible; when there weren’t soldiers all over everywhere.”

  “Can’t you see the state I’m in?” the nearsighted man whined, pointing to his bulging, watery, unfocused red eyes. “Can’t you see that without my glasses I’m totally blind? Could I have escaped by myself, fumbling my way through the backlands?” His little voice rose to a screech: “I don’t want to die like a rat in a trap!”

  The curé of Cumbe blinked several times and the Dwarf felt a chill down his spine, as he always did whenever the nearsighted man predicted the imminent death of all of them.

  “I don’t want to die like a rat in a trap either,” the little priest said, lingering over each syllable and grimacing. “I, too, have nothing to do with this war. And yet…” He shook his head, as though to banish an image from his mind. “I can’t help you, even though I’d like to. The only ones to leave Canudos are armed bands, to fight. I trust you don’t think I could join one of them?” He gave a bitter little wave of his hand. “If you believe in God, put yourself in His hands. He is the only one who can save us now. And if you don’t believe in Him, I’m afraid that there’s no one who can help you, my friend.”

  He went off, his feet dragging, stoop-shouldered and sad. They did not have time to discuss his visit since at that moment the Vilanova brothers came into the store, followed by several men. From their conversation, the Dwarf gathered that the jagunços were digging a new line of trenches to the west of Fazenda Velha, following the curve of the Vaza-Barris opposite O Taboleirinho, for part of the troops had pulled out of A Favela and were gradually encircling O Cambaio, probably to take up positions in that sector. When the Vilanovas left, taking arms with them, the Dwarf and Jurema consoled the nearsighted man, who was so upset by his conversation with Father Joaquim that tears were running down his cheeks and his teeth were chattering.

  That same evening the Dwarf accompanied Jurema as she went to take food to Pajeú at Fazenda Velha. She had asked the nearsighted man to come with her too, but he was so terrified by the caboclo and the thought of the risk he’d be running by going all the way across Canudos that he refused. The food for the jagunços was prepared in the little street of São Cipriano, where they slaughtered the cattle still left from Abbot João’s raid. They stood in a long line till they reached Catarina, Abbot João’s gaunt wife, who, along with the other women, was handing out chunks of meat and manioc flour and water from leather canteens that “youngsters” went to the water source of São Pedro to fill. The Street Commander’s wife gave them a basket full of food and they joined the line of people going out to the trenches. They had to go along the little narrow street of São Crispim and then hunch over or crawl on all fours along the ravines of the Vaza-Barris, whose dips and hollows served them as cover from the bullets. From the river on, the women could no longer make their way in groups, but instead went on one by one, running in a zigzag line, or—the most prudent of them—crawling on their hands and knees. It was about three hundred yards from the ravines to the trenches, and as he ran along, clinging to Jurema’s skirts, the Dwarf could see the towers of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus, crawling with sharpshooters, on his right, and on his left the mountainsides of A Favela, where he was certain there were thousands of rifles aimed at them. Drenched with sweat, he reached the edge of the trench, and two arms lifted him down into it. He caught sight of Pajeú’s disfigured face.

  The former cangaceiro did not seem surprised to see him there. He helped Jurema down into the trench, picking her up as though she were as light as a feather and greeting her with a nod of his head, without smiling, his manner so natural that anyone would have thought she had been coming there for many days now. He took the basket and motioned to them to move to one side, since they were in the way of the women who were working. The Dwarf walked about amid jagunços who were squatting on their heels eating, talking with the women who had just arrived, or peeking out through lengths of pipe or hollowed-out tree trunks that allowed them to shoot without
being seen. The redoubt finally widened out into a semicircular space. There was room for more people there, and Pajeú sat down in one corner. He motioned to Jurema to come sit down alongside him. Seeing the Dwarf hesitate, not knowing whether to join them, Pajeú pointed to the basket. So the Dwarf sat down next to them and shared the water and food in it with Jurema and Pajeú.

  For some time, the caboclo didn’t say a word, sitting there eating and drinking without even looking at the two beside him. Jurema did not look at him either, and the Dwarf thought to himself that it was stupid of her to refuse to marry this man who could solve all her problems. Why should she care if he was ugly-looking? Every so often, he looked at Pajeú. He found it hard to believe that this man who was sitting there coldly and doggedly chewing, with an indifferent expression on his face—he had leaned his rifle against the side of the trench but did not remove the knife and the machete tucked into his belt or the cartridge belts across his chest—was the same man who had said all those things about love to Jurema in a trembling, desperate voice. There was no steady gunfire at the moment, only occasional shots, something the Dwarf’s ears had grown accustomed to. What he couldn’t get used to was the shelling. The deafening explosions always left in their wake clouds of dirt and dust, falling debris, great gaping craters in the ground, the terrified wails of children and, often, dismembered corpses. When a cannon roared, he was the first to fling himself headlong and lie there with his eyes closed, drenched with cold sweat, clinging to Jurema and the nearsighted man if they were close by, and trying to pray.

  To break this silence, he timidly asked whether it was true that Joaquim Macambira and his sons had destroyed A Matadeira before they were killed. Pajeú answered no. But A Matadeira blew up on the Freemasons a few days later, and apparently three or four of the gun crew were blown up with it. Maybe the Father had done this to reward the Macambiras for their martyrdom. The caboclo’s eyes avoided Jurema’s, and she did not seem to hear what he said. Still addressing him, Pajeú added that the situation of the atheists on A Favela was becoming worse and worse; they were dying of hunger and thirst and desperate at suffering so many casualties at the hands of the Catholics. Even here, they could be heard moaning and weeping at night. Did that mean, then, that they’d be going away soon?

  Pajeú looked dubious. “The problem lies back there,” he murmured, pointing toward the south with his chin. “In Queimadas and Monte Santo. More Freemasons, more rifles, more cannons, more livestock, more grain shipments keep arriving. There’s another convoy on the way with reinforcements and food. And we’re running out of everything.”

  The scar puckered slightly in his pale yellow face. “I’m the one who’s going to stop the convoy this time,” he said, turning to Jurema. The Dwarf suddenly felt as though he’d dismissed him, sent him many leagues away. “It’s a pity I must leave just at this time.”

  Jurema gazed back at the former cangaceiro with a docile, absent expression on her face, and said nothing.

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be away. We’re going to take them by surprise up around Jueté. Three or four days, at least.”

  Jurema’s lips parted but she did not say anything. She had not spoken a word since she arrived.

  At that moment there was a commotion in the trench, and the Dwarf saw a whole crowd of jagunços coming their way, with much yelling and shouting. Pajeú leapt to his feet and grabbed his rifle. In a rush, knocking over others sitting down or squatting on their heels, several of the jagunços reached their side. They surrounded Pajeú and stood there for a moment looking at him, none of them saying a word.

  Finally an old man with a hairy mole on the nape of his neck spoke up. “Taramela’s dead,” he said. “He got a bullet through the ear as he was eating.” He spat, and looking down at the ground he growled: “You’ve lost your good luck, Pajeú.”

  “They rot before they die,” young Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti says aloud, believing that he’s merely thinking to himself, not speaking out loud. But there is no danger of his being overheard by the wounded. Even though the field hospital of the first column, which has been set up in a cleft between the peaks of A Favela and Monte Mário, is well protected from gunfire, the din of the fusillades and, above all, of the artillery fire echoes and reechoes down here, amplified by the semivault formed by the mountainsides, and it is one torture more for the wounded, who must shout to make themselves heard. No, no one has heard him.

  The idea of rotting torments Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti. He was a student in his last year of medical school at the University of São Paulo when, out of fervor for the republican cause, he enrolled as a volunteer in the army that was leaving to defend the Fatherland up in Canudos; so this, naturally, is not the first time that he has seen people injured, dying, dead. But those anatomy classes, those autopsies in the dissecting room at the School of Medicine, the injured in the hospitals where he was learning to do surgery—how could they be compared to the inferno that this rat trap of A Favela has turned into? What stupefies him is how quickly wounds become infected, how in just a few hours a sudden restless activity can be seen in them, the writhing of worms, and how a fetid suppuration immediately begins.

  “It will be of help in your career,” his father said to him at the São Paulo railroad station as he was seeing him off. “You will have intensive practice in administering first aid.” What it has been, however, is intensive practice in carpentry. He has learned one thing at any rate in these three weeks: more men die of gangrene than of the wounds they have received, and those who have the best chance of pulling through are those with a bullet or bayonet wound in an arm or a leg—parts of the body that a man can do without—so long as the limb is amputated and cauterized in time. There was enough chloroform to perform amputations humanely only for the first three days; on those days it was Teotônio who broke the ampoules open, soaked a wad of cotton in the liquid that made him light-headed, and held it against the nostrils of the wounded man as the chief field surgeon, Alfredo Gama, a doctor with the rank of captain, sawed away, panting. When their supply of chloroform ran out, the anesthetic was a glass of cane brandy, and now that the brandy has run out, they operate cold, hoping that the victim will faint dead away immediately, so the surgeon can operate without the distraction of hearing the man scream. It is Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti who is now sawing and lopping off feet, legs, hands, and arms in which gangrene has set in, as two medical aides keep the victim pinned down till he has lost consciousness. And it is he who, after having finished amputating, cauterizes the stumps by sprinkling a little gunpowder on them and setting it afire, or pouring boiling-hot grease on them, the way Captain Alfredo Gama taught him before that stupid accident.

  Stupid, yes, that’s the right word. Because Captain Gama knew there are plenty of artillerymen but there aren’t anywhere near enough doctors. Above all, doctors like himself, with a great deal of experience in the sort of medicine practiced in the field, which he learned in the jungles of Paraguay, where he served as a volunteer when he was in medical school, just as young Teotônio has come to serve in Canudos. But in the war against Paraguay, Dr. Alfredo Gama unfortunately caught, as he himself confessed, “the artillery bug.” It was a bug that killed him a week ago, leaving his young assistant saddled with the crushing responsibility of caring for two hundred sick, wounded, and dying who are lying one on top of the other, half naked, stinking, gnawed by worms, on the bare rock—only a few of them have so much as a blanket or a straw mat—in the field hospital. The medical corps of the first column has been divided into five teams, and the one to which Captain Alfredo Gama and Teotônio were assigned is in charge of the north zone of the hospital.

  Dr. Alfredo Gama’s “artillery bug” kept him from concentrating exclusively on his patients. Often he would abruptly break off a treatment to go feverishly clambering up to the Alto do Mário, the area on the very crest line to which all the cannons of the first column had been hauled up hand over hand. The artillerymen would let him fire the Krupp
s, even A Matadeira. Teotônio remembers his mentor prophesying: “It is a surgeon who will make the towers of Canudos come tumbling down.” The captain returned to the cleft in the mountainsides below with his spirits refreshed. He was a stout, ruddy, jovial man, devoted to his calling, who took a great liking to Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti from the first day he saw him enter the barracks. His outgoing personality, his cheery good spirits, his adventurous life, his picturesque anecdotes so charmed the student that on the way to Canudos he thought seriously of staying in the army once he received his medical degree, as his idol had. During the regiment’s brief stay in Salvador, Dr. Gama showed Teotônio around the medical school at the University of Bahia, in the Praça da Basílica Cathedral, and opposite the yellow façade with tall blue ogival windows, beneath the coral trees, the coconut palms, and the crotons, the doctor and the student had sat drinking sweetish brandy in front of the kiosks set up on the black-and-white mosaic pavement, amid the vendors hawking trinkets and women selling hot foods from braziers. They went on drinking till dawn, which found them, beside themselves with happiness, in a brothel of mulattas. As they climbed onto the train to Queimadas, Dr. Gama had his disciple down an emetic potion, “to ward off African syphilis,” he explained to him.

  Teotônio mops the sweat from his brow as he gives quinine mixed with water to a patient with smallpox who is delirious from fever. To one side of him is a soldier with his elbow joint exposed to the air, and on the other a soldier with a bullet wound in his lower belly and his sphincter shot away so that his feces are leaking out. The smell of excrement mingles with that of the scorching flesh of the corpses being burned in the distance. Quinine and carbolic acid are the only things left in the pharmacopoeia of the field hospital. The iodoform ran out at the same time as the chloroform, and for lack of antiseptics the doctors have been making do with subnitrate of bismuth and calomel. But now these are gone, too. Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti now cleanses wounds with a solution of water and carbolic acid. He squats down to do so, dipping the solution out of the basin in his cupped hands. He gives others a bit of quinine in half a glass of water. They have a large supply of quinine on hand, since many cases of malaria were expected. “The great killer of the war against Paraguay,” Dr. Gama used to say. It had decimated the army there. But malaria is nonexistent in this extremely dry climate, where mosquitoes do not breed except around the very few places where there is standing water. Teotônio knows that quinine will do the wounded no good, but it at least gives them the illusion that they are being treated. It was on the day of the accident, in fact, that Captain Gama had begun giving out quinine, for lack of any other medicines.