Teotônio thinks of how the accident happened, of how it must have happened. He was not there; they have told him about it, and since then, this and the dream about the rotting bodies have been the nightmares that have most disturbed the few short hours of sleep that he manages to snatch. In the nightmare the jolly, energetic surgeon-captain ignites the fuse of the Krupp 34 cannon. In his haste he has failed to close the breech properly, and when the fuse detonates the charge, the explosion in the half-open breech ignites a barrel of projectiles standing next to the cannon. He has heard the artillerymen tell how Dr. Alfredo Gama was catapulted several yards off the ground and fell some twenty paces away, a shapeless mass of flesh. First Lieutenant Odilon Coriolano de Azevedo, Second Lieutenant José A. do Amaral, and three artillerymen were also killed, and five artillerymen received burns in the explosion. When Teotônio arrived at Alto do Mário, the dead bodies were being cremated, in accordance with a procedure suggested by the medical corps in view of the difficulty of burying the dead: digging a grave in this ground that is living rock represents a tremendous expenditure of energy, for the shovels and pickaxes become dented and shatter on the solid rock without breaking it up. The order to burn corpses has given rise to an extremely heated argument between General Oscar and the chaplain of the first column, Father Lizzardo, a Capuchin, who calls cremation “a Masonic perversion.”
Young Teotônio has a memento of Dr. Alfredo Gama that he treasures: a miraculous ribbon of Our Lord of Bonfim, sold to them that afternoon in Bahia by the tightrope walkers in the Praça da Basílica Cathedral. He is going to take it to his chief’s widow, if he ever gets back to São Paulo. But Teotônio doubts that he will ever again set eyes on the city where he was born, went to school, and enlisted in the army in the name of a romantic ideal: serving his country and civilization.
In these past months, certain beliefs of his that seemed rock-solid have been profoundly undermined. His notion of patriotism, for instance, a sentiment which, when he volunteered, he had believed ran in the blood of all these men come from the four corners of Brazil to defend the Republic against obscurantism, a perfidious conspiracy, and barbarism. His first disillusionment came in Queimadas, in that long two months of waiting, in the chaos that had resulted when that hamlet in the backlands had been turned into the general headquarters of the first column. In the medical facilities, where he had worked with Captain Alfredo Gama and other physicians and surgeons, he discovered that many men were trying to get out of combat duty by malingering. He had seen them feign illnesses, learn the symptoms by heart and recite them with the consummate skill of professional actors so as to get themselves declared unfit for service in the front lines. The doctor and would-be artillery officer taught him to see through their stupid tricks for making themselves run fevers, vomit, suffer attacks of diarrhea. The fact that there were among them not only troops of the line—that is to say, men of no education or background—but also officers had come as a great shock to Teotônio.
Patriotism was not as widespread as he had supposed. This idea has been borne in on him in the three weeks that he has been in this rat hole. It is not that the men don’t fight; they have fought, and they are fighting now. He has seen how bravely they have withstood, ever since Angico, the attacks of that slippery, cowardly enemy that refuses to show its face, that does not know the laws and customs of warfare, that lies in ambush, that attacks from odd angles, from hiding places, and vanishes into thin air when the patriots go to meet them head-on. In these three weeks, despite the fact that one-fourth of the expeditionary troops have been killed or wounded, despite the lack of rations, despite the fact that all of them are beginning to lose hope that the convoy of reinforcements will ever arrive, the men have gone on fighting.
But how to reconcile patriotism with business deals? What kind of love for Brazil is it that leaves room for this sordid traffic between men who are defending the most noble of causes, that of their country and civilization? This is yet another reality that demoralizes Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti: the way in which everyone makes deals and speculates because everything is in such short supply. In the beginning, it was only tobacco that was sold and resold at more and more astronomical prices. Just this morning, he has seen a cavalry major pay twelve milreis for a mere handful…Twelve milreis! Ten times more than what a box of fine tobacco costs in the city! Since those first days, the price of everything has reached dizzying heights, everything has become something to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Since they are receiving almost no rations at all—the officers are being handed out ears of green maize, without salt, and the soldiers the feed for the horses—food is fetching fantastic prices: a quarter of a goat is going for thirty and forty milreis, a loaf of hard brown sugar for twenty, a cupful of manioc flour for five, an imbuzeiro root or a “monk’s head” cactus with edible pulp for one and even two milreis. The cigars known as fuzileiros are bringing a milreis, and a cup of coffee, five. And, worst of all, he, too, has succumbed to this trafficking. Driven by hunger and his craving for tobacco, he has been spending all the money he has, paying five milreis, for instance, for a spoonful of salt, a commodity he has never before realized a person could miss that badly. What disgusts him most of all is knowing that a good part of these things that are being trafficked have been come by dishonestly, either stolen from the column’s quartermaster stores or as thefts of thefts…
Isn’t it surprising that in circumstances such as these, when they are risking their lives at every second, in this hour of truth that should purify them, leaving within them only what is most lofty and most noble, they should give proof of such a base urge to make deals and accumulate money? “It is not what is most sublime, but what is most sordid and abject, the hunger for filthy lucre, greed, that is aroused in the presence of death,” Teotônio thinks. His image of humanity has abruptly darkened in these past weeks.
He is roused from his thoughts by someone weeping at his feet. Unlike the others, who are openly sobbing, this one is weeping in silence, as though ashamed of his tears. He kneels down beside him. The man is an old soldier who has found his itching unbearable.
“I’ve been scratching myself, sir,” he murmurs. “I don’t give a damn any more whether it gets infected—or whatever, Doctor.”
He is one of the victims of that diabolical weapon of those cannibals that has eaten away the epidermis of a fair number of patriots: the ants known as caçaremas. At first it appeared to be a natural phenomenon, simply a terrible misfortune that these fierce insects which perforate the skin, produce rashes and a hideous burning sensation, should leave their nests in the cool of the night to attack sleeping men. But it has been discovered that their anthills, spherical structures built of mud, are being brought up to the camp by the jagunços and smashed there so that the savage swarms thus let loose wreak their cruel havoc on sleeping patriots…And the ones the cannibals send creeping into the camp to deposit the anthills there are mere youngsters! One of them has been captured: young Teotônio has been told that the “little jagunço” struggled like a wild beast in his captors’ arms, insulting them like the most foul-mouthed ruffian imaginable…
On raising the old soldier’s shirt to examine his chest, Teotônio finds that what yesterday were black-and-blue spots are now a huge bright-red patch with pustules teeming with activity. Yes, the ants are there, reproducing, burrowing under his skin, gnawing the poor man’s innards. Teotônio has learned to dissimulate, to lie, to smile. The bites are better, he tells the soldier, he must try not to scratch himself. He gives him half a cup of water with quinine to drink, assuring him that this will lessen the itching.
He continues on his rounds, imagining the youngsters whom those degenerates send into the camp at night with the anthills. Barbarians, brutes, savages: only utterly depraved people could pervert innocent children as they have done. But young Teotônio’s ideas about Canudos have also changed. Are they really monarchists bent on restoration? Are they really working hand in glove with the House of Br
agança and former slaveowners? Is it true that those savages are merely a tool of Perfidious Albion? Although he hears them shouting “Death to the Republic,” Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti is no longer so sure of all this. Everything has become confused in his mind. He expected to find English officers here, advising the jagunços, teaching them how to handle the completely modern, up-to-date arms known to have been smuggled in by way of the shores of Bahia. But among the wounded that he is pretending to treat are victims of caçarema ants, and also of poisoned arrows and of sharp-pointed stones hurled with slings, the weapons of cavemen! So that business about a monarchist army, reinforced by English officers, now seems to him to be some sort of fantastic story invented out of whole cloth. “What we’re up against is primitive cannibals,” he thinks. “Yet we’re losing the war; we would already have lost it if the second column hadn’t arrived to reinforce us when they ambushed us in these hills.” How to explain such a paradox?
A voice interrupts his train of thought. “Teotônio?” It is a first lieutenant whose tattered tunic bears the still decipherable insignia of his rank and unit: Ninth Infantry Battalion, Salvador. He has been in the field hospital since the day the first column arrived in A Favela; he was in one of the vanguard corps of the First Brigade, the ones that Colonel Joaquim Manuel de Medeiros led in a mad charge down the mountainside of A Favela to attack Canudos. The carnage dealt them by the jagunços from their invisible trenches was frightful; the front line of soldiers can still be seen, lying frozen in death, halfway up the slope where it was mowed down. First Lieutenant Pires Ferreira was hit square in the face by a projectile; the explosion ripped off his two raised hands and left him blind. As it was the first day, Dr. Alfredo Gama was able to anesthetize him with morphine as he sutured the stumps and disinfected his face wounds. Lieutenant Pires Ferreira is fortunate: his wounds are protected by bandages from the dust and the insects. He is an exemplary patient, whom Teotônio has never heard weep or complain. Every day, when he asks him how he is feeling, his answer is: “All right.” And “Nothing” is his answer when he asks if there is anything he wants. Teotônio has fallen into the habit of coming to talk with him at night, stretching out alongside him on the stony ground, gazing up at the myriad stars that always stud the sky of Canudos. That is how he has learned that Lieutenant Pires Ferreira is a veteran of this war, one of the few who have served in the four expeditions sent by the Republic to fight against the jagunços; that is how he has found out that for this unfortunate officer this tragedy is the culmination of a series of humiliations and defeats. He has thus realized the reason for the bitterness that haunts the lieutenant’s thoughts, why he endures so stoically sufferings that destroy other men’s morale and dignity. In his case the worst wounds are not physical.
“Teotônio?” Pires Ferreira says again. The bandages cover half his face, but not his mouth or his chin.
“Yes,” the medical student says, sitting down alongside him. He motions to the two aides with the medicine kit and the canteens of water to take a rest; they go off a few paces and collapse on the gravel. “I’ll keep you company for a while, Manuel da Silva. Is there anything you need?”
“Can they hear us?” the officer in bandages says in a low voice. “This is confidential, Teotônio.”
At that moment the bells ring out on the hillside opposite. Young Leal Cavalcanti looks up at the sky: yes, it is getting dark, it is time for the bells calling the people of Canudos together for the Rosary. They peal every evening, with a magic punctuality, and without fail, a little while later, if there are no fusillades and no cannonades, the fanatics’ Ave Marias can be heard even up in the camps on A Favela and Monte Mário. A respectful cessation of all activity occurs at this hour in the field hospital; many of the sick and wounded cross themselves on hearing the bells ring and their lips move, reciting the Rosary at the same time as their enemies. Even Teotônio, who has been a lukewarm Catholic, cannot help feeling a curious, indefinable sensation each evening, what with all the prayers and ringing bells, something that, if it is not faith, is a nostalgia for faith.
“That means the bell ringer is still alive,” he murmurs, without answering First Lieutenant Pires Ferreira. “They still haven’t been able to pick him off.”
Captain Alfredo Gama used to talk a lot about the bell ringer. Several times he had caught sight of him climbing up to the belfry of the little chapel. He said that he was an insignificant, imperturbable little old man, swinging back and forth pulling on the clapper, indifferent to the fusillade from the soldiers in answer to the bells. Dr. Gama had told him that knocking down those defiant bell towers and silencing that provoking bell ringer is the obsessive ambition of all the artillerymen up there on the Alto do Mário, and that all of them shoulder their rifles to take aim at him at the hour of Angelus. Haven’t they been able to kill him yet, or is it a new bell ringer?
“What I’m going to ask you is not the product of despair,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira says. “It is not the request of a man who has lost his reason.”
His voice is firm and calm. He is lying completely motionless on the blanket separating him from the stony ground, with his head resting on a pillow of straw, and the bandaged stumps of his arms on his belly.
“You mustn’t despair,” Teotônio says. “You’ll be among the very first to be evacuated. The moment the reinforcements arrive and the convoy heads back, they’ll take you in an ambulance cart to Monte Santo, to Queimadas, to your home. General Oscar promised as much the day he visited the field hospital. Don’t despair, Manuel da Silva.”
“I beg you in the name of what you respect most in this world,” Pires Ferreira’s mouth says, in a low, firm voice. “In the name of God, your father, your vocation. Of that fiancée to whom you write verses, Teotônio.”
“What is it you want, Manuel da Silva?” the young medical student from São Paulo murmurs, turning his eyes away from the wounded man, deeply upset, absolutely certain what the words he is about to hear will be.
“A bullet in the head,” the firm, quiet voice says. “I beg you from the depths of my soul.”
He is not the first to have begged him to do such a thing and Teotônio knows that he will not be the last. But he is the first to have begged him so serenely, so undramatically.
“I can’t do it when I’ve no hands,” the man in bandages explains. “You do it for me.”
“A little courage, Manuel da Silva,” Teotônio says, noting that he is the one whose voice is charged with emotion. “Don’t ask me to do something that’s against my principles, against the oath of my profession.”
“One of your aides, then,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira says. “Offer them my wallet. There must be some fifty milreis in it. And my boots, which don’t have any holes in them.”
“Death may be worse than what has happened to you already,” Teotônio says. “You’ll be evacuated. You’ll recover, you’ll come to love life again.”
“With no eyes and no hands?” he asks quietly. Teotônio feels ashamed. The lieutenant’s mouth is half open. “That isn’t the worst part, Teotônio. It’s the flies. I’ve always hated them, I’ve always been revolted by them. And now I’m at their mercy. They walk all over my face, they get in my mouth, they crawl in under the bandages to my wounds.” He falls silent.
Teotônio sees him run his tongue over his lips. He has been so moved at hearing these words from this exemplary patient that it hasn’t even occurred to him to ask the aides for the canteen of water to quench the wounded man’s thirst.
“It has become a personal matter between the bandits and me,” Pires Ferreira says. “I don’t want them to get away with this. I won’t allow them to have turned me into this creature before you, Teotônio, I refuse to be a useless monster. Ever since Uauá, I’ve known that something tragic crossed my path. A curse, an evil spell.”
“Would you like some water?” Teotônio says gently.
“It’s not easy to kill yourself when you have no hands and no eyes,” Pires Ferr
eira goes on. “I’ve tried hitting my head against the rock. It didn’t work. Nor does licking the ground, because there aren’t any stones the right size to swallow, and…”
“Be quiet, Manuel da Silva,” Teotônio says, putting his hand on his shoulder. But he finds it absurd to be calming someone who seems to be the calmest man in the world, who never raises his voice, whose words are never hurried, who speaks of himself as though he were another person.
“Are you going to help me? I beg you in the name of our friendship. A friendship born here is something sacred. Are you going to help me?”
“Yes,” Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti whispers. “I’m going to help you, Manuel da Silva.”
[IV]
“His head?” the Baron de Canabrava repeated. He was standing at the window overlooking the garden; he had walked over to it on the pretext of opening it because the study was growing warmer and warmer, but in reality he wanted to locate the chameleon, whose absence worried him. His eyes searched the garden in all directions, looking for it. It had become invisible again, as though it were playing a game with him. “They decapitated him. There was an article in The Times about it. I read it, in London.”
The War of the End of the World Page 66