The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “They decapitated his corpse,” the nearsighted journalist corrected him.

  The baron went back to his armchair. He felt distressed, but nonetheless found that what his visitor was saying had attracted his interest once again. Was he a masochist? All this brought back memories, scratched the wound and reopened it. Nevertheless, he wanted to hear it.

  “Did you ever find yourself alone with him and talk to him?” he asked, his eyes seeking the journalist’s. “Were you able to gather any impression of what sort of man he was?”

  They had found the grave only two days after the last redoubt fell. They managed to get the Little Blessed One to tell them where he was buried. Under torture, naturally. But not just any torture. The Little Blessed One was a born martyr and he would not have talked had he been subjected to such ordinary brutalities as being kicked, burned, castrated, or having his tongue cut off or his eyes put out—because they sometimes sent jagunço prisoners back that way, without eyes, a tongue, sex organs, thinking that such a spectacle would demoralize those who were still holding out. It had precisely the opposite effect, of course. But for the Little Blessed One they hit upon the one torture that he was unable to withstand: dogs.

  “I thought I knew all the leaders of that band of villains,” the baron said. “Pajeú, Abbot João, Big João, Taramela, Pedrão, Macambira. But the Little Blessed One?”

  Dogs were another matter. So much human flesh, so many dead bodies to feast on during the long months of siege, had made them as fierce as wolves and hyenas. Packs of bloodthirsty dogs made their way into Canudos, and doubtless into the camp of the besiegers as well, in search of human flesh.

  “Weren’t those packs of dogs the fulfillment of the prophecies, the infernal beasts of the Apocalypse?” the nearsighted journalist muttered, clutching his stomach. “Someone must have told them that the Little Blessed One had a particular horror of dogs, or rather of the Dog, Evil Incarnate. They no doubt confronted him with a rabid pack of the beasts, and faced with the threat of being dragged down to hell in pieces by the Can’s messengers, he guided them to the place where he’d been buried.”

  The baron forgot the chameleon and Baroness Estela. In his mind, raging packs of mad dogs pawed through heaps of corpses, buried their muzzles in bellies gnawed by worms, sank their fangs in skinny kneecaps, fought, snarling, over tibias, spines, skulls. In addition to ravaging the dead, other packs suddenly descended on villages, hurling themselves upon cowherds, shepherds, washerwomen, in search of fresh flesh and bones.

  They might have guessed that he was buried in the Sanctuary. Where else could they have buried him? They dug where the Little Blessed One told them to and at a depth of some ten feet—that deep—they found him, dressed in his dark purple tunic and rawhide sandals, with a straw mat wrapped around him. His hair had grown and was wavy: this is what is stated in the notarized certificate of exhumation. All the top army officers were there, beginning with General Artur Oscar, who ordered the artist-photographer of the first column, Senhor Flávio de Barros, to photograph the corpse. This took half an hour, during which all of them remained in the Sanctuary despite the stench.

  “Can you imagine what those generals and colonels must have felt on seeing, at last, the corpse of the enemy of the Republic, of the insurgent who massacred three military expeditions and shook the state to its foundations, of the ally of England and the House of Bragança?”

  “I met him,” the baron murmured and his visitor remained silent, his watery eyes gazing at him inquisitively. “But more or less the same thing happens with me as happened to you in Canudos, because of your glasses. I can’t picture him clearly, my image of him is blurred. It was some fifteen or twenty years ago. He turned up at Calumbi, with a little band of followers, and it seems we gave them something to eat and some old clothes, because they’d tidied up the tombs and cleaned the chapel. I remember them more as a collection of rags than as a group of men and women. Too many people passing themselves off as saints came by Calumbi. How could I have guessed that, of all of them, he was the important one, the one that would make people forget all the others, the one who would attract to him thousands upon thousands of sertanejos?”

  “The land of the Bible was also full of illuminati, of heretics,” the nearsighted journalist said. “That’s why so many people were taken to be the Christ. You didn’t understand, you didn’t see…”

  “Are you serious?” The baron thrust his head forward. “Do you believe that the Counselor was really sent by God?”

  But the nearsighted journalist’s dull voice plodded on.

  A notarized statement was drawn up describing the exhumed corpse, which was so decomposed that they were all sick to their stomachs and had to hold their hands and their handkerchiefs over their noses. The four doctors present measured him, noted down that he was 1.78 meters tall, that he had lost all his teeth, and had not died of a bullet wound since the only mark on his skeleton-thin body was a bruise on his left leg, caused by the friction of a bone splinter or a stone. After a brief consultation, it was decided that he should be decapitated, so that science might study his cranium. It was brought to the medical school of the University of Bahia in order that Dr. Nina Rodrigues might examine it. But before beginning to saw the Counselor’s head off, they slit the throat of the Little Blessed One. They did so right there in the Sanctuary, while the artist-photographer Flávio de Barros took a photograph, and then threw his body into the hole dug in the floor, along with the Counselor’s headless corpse. A happy fate for the Little Blessed One, no doubt: to be buried together with the person he so revered and so faithfully served. But there was one thing that must have terrified him at the last instant: knowing that he was about to be buried like an animal, without any sort of wood covering him. Because those were the things that preyed on people’s minds up there.

  He was interrupted by another fit of sneezing. But once he recovered from it he went on talking, more and more excitedly, until at times he couldn’t even manage to get the words out and his eyes rolled in desperate agitation behind the lenses of his glasses.

  There had been some argument as to which of the four doctors was to do it. It was Major Miranda Cúrio, the chief of the medical field corps, who took saw in hand, while the three others held the body down. They tried to submerge the head in a container full of alcohol, but since the remains of hair and flesh were beginning to fall apart, they placed it in a sack of lime. That is how it was transported to Salvador. The delicate mission of transporting it was entrusted to First Lieutenant Pinto Souza, the hero of the Third Infantry Battalion, one of the few surviving officers of this unit, which had been decimated by Pajeú in the first encounter. Lieutenant Pinto Souza delivered it to the Faculty of Medicine and Dr. Nina Rodrigues headed the committee of scientists which observed it, measured it, and weighed it. There are no reliable reports as to what was said in the dissecting room during the examination. The official announcement was irritatingly brief. The person responsible for this was apparently none other than Dr. Nina Rodrigues himself. It was he who drafted the few scant lines that so disappointed the public since the announcement merely stated that science had noted no evident abnormality in the conformation of the cranium of Antônio Conselheiro.

  “All that reminds me of Galileo Gall,” the baron said, glancing hopefully at the garden. “He, too, had a mad faith in craniums as indexes of character.”

  But Dr. Nina Rodrigues’s opinion was not shared by all his colleagues in Salvador. Dr. Honorato de Albuquerque, for instance, was about to publish a study disagreeing with the conclusion reached in the report of the committee of scientists. He maintained that, according to the classification of the Swedish naturalist Retzius, the cranium was typically brachycephalic, with tendencies toward mental rigidity and linearity (fanaticism, for example). Moreover, the cranial curvature was precisely the same as that pointed out by Benedikt as typical of those epileptics who, as Samt wrote, had the missal in their hands, the name of God on their lips, and
the stigmata of crime and brigandage in their hearts.

  “Don’t you see?” the nearsighted journalist said, breathing as though he were exhausted from some tremendous physical effort. “Canudos isn’t a story; it’s a tree of stories.”

  “Do you feel ill?” the baron inquired coldly. “I see that it’s not good for you either to speak of these things. Have you been going around visiting all those doctors?”

  The nearsighted journalist was bent double like an inchworm, all hunched over and looking as though he were freezing to death. Once the medical examination was over, a problem had arisen. What to do with the bones? Someone proposed that the skull be sent to the National Museum, as a historic curiosity. But there had been violent opposition. On the part of whom? The Freemasons. People already had Our Lord of Bonfim, they said, and that was quite enough; there was no need for another orthodox place of pilgrimage. If that skull was exposed in a glass case in the National Museum, it would become a second Church of Bonfim, a heterodox shrine. The army agreed: it was necessary to keep the skull from becoming a relic, a seed of future uprisings. It had to be made to disappear. How? How?

  “Not by burying it, obviously,” the baron murmured.

  Obviously, since the fanaticized people would sooner or later discover where it had been buried. What safer and more remote place than the bottom of the sea? The skull was placed in a gunnysack weighted with rocks, sewed up, and spirited away, by night in a boat, by an army officer, to a place in the Atlantic equidistant from the Fort of São Marcelo and the island of Itaparica, and sent to the muddy sea bottom for coral to build on. The officer entrusted with this secret operation was none other than Lieutenant Pinto Souza: and that’s the end of the story.

  He was sweating so hard and had turned so pale that the baron thought to himself: “He’s about to faint.” What did this ridiculous jumping jack feel for the Counselor? A morbid fascination? The simple curiosity of the gossipmongering journalist? Had he really come to believe him to be a messenger from heaven? Why was he suffering and torturing himself so over Canudos? Why didn’t he do what everyone else had done—try to forget?

  “Did you say Galileo Gall?” he heard him say.

  “Yes.” The baron nodded, seeing those mad eyes, that shaved head, hearing his apocalyptic speeches. “Gall would have understood that story. He thought that the secret of character lay in the bones of people’s heads. Did he ever get to Canudos, I wonder. If he did, it would have been terrible for him to discover that that wasn’t the revolution he’d been dreaming of.”

  “It wasn’t, and yet it was,” the nearsighted journalist said. “It was the realm of obscurantism, and at the same time a world of brotherhood, of a very special sort of freedom. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been all that disappointed.”

  “Did you ever find out what happened to him?”

  “He died somewhere not very far from Canudos,” the journalist answered. “I saw a lot of him, before all this. In ‘The Fort,’ a tavern in the lower town. He was a great talker, a picturesque character, a madman; he felt people’s heads, he prophesied vast upheavals. I thought he was a fraud. Nobody would have guessed that he would turn out to be a tragic figure.”

  “I have some papers of his,” the baron said. “A sort of memoir, or testament, that he wrote in my house, at Calumbi. I was to have seen that it got to some fellow revolutionaries of his. But I wasn’t able to. It’s not that I wasn’t willing to, because I even went to Lyons to do as he’d asked.”

  Why had he taken that trip, from London to Lyons, to hand Gall’s text over personally to the editors of L’Etincelle de la révolte? Not out of affection for the phrenologist, in any event; what he had felt for him in the end was curiosity, a scientific interest in this unsuspected variety of the human species. He had taken the trouble to go to Lyons to see what those revolutionary comrades of his looked like, to hear them talk, to find out whether they were like him, whether they said and believed the same things he did. But the trip had been a waste of time. The only thing he was able to find out was that L’Etincelle de la révolte, a sheet that appeared irregularly, had ceased publication altogether some time before, and that it had been put out by a small press whose owner had been sent to prison for printing counterfeit bills, some three or four years earlier. It fitted Gall’s destiny very well to have sent articles to what might well have been ghosts and to have died without anyone he’d known during his life in Europe ever finding out where, how, and why he died.

  “A story of madmen,” he muttered. “The Counselor, Moreira César, Gall. Canudos drove all those people mad. And you, too, of course.”

  But a thought made him shut his mouth and not say a word more. “No, they were mad before that. It was only Estela who lost her mind because of Canudos.” He had to keep a tight rein on himself so as not to burst into tears. He didn’t remember having cried as a child, or as a young man. But after what had happened to the baroness, he had wept many a time, in his study, on nights when he couldn’t sleep.

  “It’s not so much a story of madmen as a story of misunderstandings,” the nearsighted journalist corrected him again. “I’d like to know one thing, Baron. I beg you to tell me the truth.”

  “Ever since I left politics, I almost always tell the truth,” the baron murmured. “What is it you’d like to know?”

  “Whether there were contacts between the Counselor and the monarchists,” he answered, watching the baron’s reaction closely. “I don’t mean the little group who missed the Empire and were naïve enough to proclaim that fact in public, people such as Gentil de Castro. I’m talking about people like you and your party, the Autonomists, the monarchists through and through who nonetheless hid that fact. Did they have contacts with the Counselor? Did they encourage him?”

  The baron, who had listened with a look of cynical amusement on his face, burst out laughing. “Didn’t you find out the answer to that in all those months in Canudos? Did you see any politicians from Bahia, São Paulo, Rio among the jagunços?”

  “I’ve already told you that I didn’t see much of anything,” the unpleasant voice answered. “But I did find out that you had sent maize, sugar, livestock from Calumbi.”

  “Well then, you doubtless also know that I did so against my will, that I was forced to do so,” the baron said. “All of us landowners in the region had to, so that they wouldn’t burn our haciendas down. Isn’t that how we deal with bandits in the sertão? If you can’t kill them, you buy them off. If I’d had the least influence on them, they wouldn’t have destroyed Calumbi and my wife would be of sound mind. The fanatics weren’t monarchists and they didn’t even know what the Empire was. It’s beyond belief that you didn’t see that, despite…”

  The nearsighted journalist didn’t allow him to go on this time either. “They didn’t know what it was, but they were monarchists nonetheless—in their own way, which no monarchist would have understood,” he blurted, blinking. “They knew that the monarchy had abolished slavery. The Counselor praised Princess Isabel for having granted the slaves their freedom. He seemed convinced that the monarchy fell because it abolished slavery. Everyone in Canudos believed that the Republic was against abolition, that it wanted to restore slavery.”

  “Do you think my friends and I planted such a notion in the Counselor’s head?” The baron smiled again. “If anyone had proposed any such thing to us we would have taken him for an imbecile.”

  “That, nonetheless, explains many things,” the journalist said, his voice rising. “Such as the hatred of the census. I racked my brains, trying to understand the reason for it, and that’s the explanation. Race, color, religion. Why would the Republic want to know what race and color people are, if not to enslave blacks again? And why ask their religion if not to identify believers before the slaughter?”

  “Is that the misunderstanding that explains Canudos?” the baron asked.

  “One of them.” The nearsighted journalist panted. “I knew that the jagunços hadn’t been taken in by just
any petty politician. I merely wanted to hear you say so.”

  “Well, there you are,” the baron answered. What would his friends have said had they been able to foresee such a thing? The humble men and women of the sertão rising up in arms to attack the Republic, with the name of the Infanta Dona Isabel on their lips! No, such a thing was too farfetched for it to have occurred to any Brazilian monarchist, even in his dreams.

  Abbot João’s messenger catches up with Antônio Vilanova on the outskirts of Jueté, where the former storekeeper is lying in ambush with fourteen jagunços, waiting for a convoy of cattle and goats. The news the messenger brings is so serious that Antônio decides to return to Canudos before he has finished the task that has brought him there: securing food supplies. It is one that he has set out to do three times now since the soldiers arrived, and been successful each time: twenty-five head of cattle and several dozen kids the first time, eight head the second, and a dozen the third, plus a wagonload of manioc flour, coffee, sugar, and salt. He has insisted on leading these raids to procure food for the jagunços himself, claiming that Abbot João, Pajeú, Pedrão, and Big João are indispensable in Belo Monte. For three weeks now he has been attacking the convoys that leave from Queimadas and Monte Santo to bring provisions to A Favela via Rosário.

  It is a relatively easy operation, which the former storekeeper, in his methodical and scrupulous way and with his talent for organization, has perfected to the point that it has become a science. He owes his success above all to the information he receives, to the men serving as the soldiers’ guides and porters, the majority of whom are jagunços who have hired themselves out to the army or been conscripted in various localities, from Tucano to Itapicuru. They keep him posted on the convoy’s movements and help him decide where to provoke the stampede, the key to the whole operation. In the place that they have chosen—usually the bottom of a ravine or a section of the mountains with dense brush—and always at night, Antônio and his men suddenly descend on the herd, raising a terrible racket with their blunderbusses, setting off sticks of dynamite, and blowing their whistles so that the animals will panic and bolt off into the caatinga. As Antônio and his band distract the troops by sniping at them, the guides and porters round up all the animals they can and herd them along shortcuts that they’ve decided on beforehand—the shortest and safest trail, the one from Calumbi, has yet to be discovered by the soldiers—to Canudos. Antônio and the others catch up with them later.