The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “He was from my village,” a woman who was working alongside Jurema said to her, pointing to the tower. “Chorrochó. He was a carpenter there, when the angel’s wings brushed him.”

  She went back to her work, putting the bell ringer out of her mind, and forgetting about herself as well, she toiled away all afternoon, going every so often to where the journalist was. As the sun was setting she saw the Vilanova brothers running off toward the Sanctuary and heard that Pajeú, Big João, and Abbot João had also come by, running that way from different directions. Something was about to happen.

  A little while later, she was leaning over talking to the nearsighted journalist when an invisible force compelled her to kneel, to fall silent, to lean against him. “What’s the matter, what’s the matter?” he said, taking her by the shoulder and feeling her all over. And she heard him shout at her: “Have you been wounded, are you wounded?” No bullet had struck her. It was just that all the strength had suddenly been drained from her body. She felt empty, without the energy to open her mouth or lift a finger, and though she saw leaning over her the face of the man who had taught her what happiness was, his liquid eyes opening wide and blinking, trying to see her better, and realized that he was frightened and knew that she ought to reassure him, she was unable to. Everything was far away, strange, make-believe, and the Dwarf was there, touching her, caressing her, rubbing her hands, her forehead, stroking her hair, and it even seemed to her that, like the nearsighted journalist, he was kissing her on the hands, the cheeks. She was not about to close her eyes, because if she did she would die, but there came a moment when she could no longer keep them open.

  When she opened them again, she no longer felt so freezing cold. It was night; the sky was full of stars, there was a full moon, and she was sitting leaning against the nearsighted journalist’s body—whose odor, thinness, heartbeat she recognized at once—and the Dwarf was there too, still rubbing her hands. In a daze, she noted how happy the two men were on seeing her awake once again, and felt herself being embraced and kissed by them so affectionately that tears came to her eyes. Was she wounded, ill? No, it had been exhaustion: she had worked so hard for such a long time. She was no longer in the same place as before. While she was lying in a faint, the gunfire had suddenly grown heavier and the jagunços had come running from the trenches in the cemetery; the Dwarf and the journalist had had to carry her to this street corner so that the men would not trample her underfoot. But the soldiers had not been able to get past the barricade erected along São João. The jagunços from the cemetery trenches who had escaped with their lives and many who had come from the churches had stopped them there. She heard the journalist telling her that he loved her, and at that very moment the world blew up. Dust filled her nose and eyes and she found herself knocked flat on the ground, for the journalist and the Dwarf had been thrown on top of her by the force of the shock wave. But she was not afraid; she huddled beneath the two bodies lying on top of her, struggling to utter the necessary sounds to find out if they were all right. Yes, just bruised from the chunks of stone, wood, and other debris that had rained down on them from the explosion. A confused, frantic, many-voiced, dissonant, incomprehensible outcry roiled the darkness. The nearsighted man and the Dwarf sat up, helped her to a sitting position, and the three of them stayed there where they were, hugging the only wall still standing on that corner. What had happened, what was happening?

  Shadows were running in all directions, terrifying screams rent the air, but the strange thing to Jurema, who had drawn her legs up and was leaning her head on the nearsighted journalist’s shoulder, was that along with the cries, the shrieks, the weeping and wailing, she could also hear loud bursts of laughter, cheers, songs, and now a single vibrant, martial song, being roared out by hundreds of voices.

  “The Church of Santo Antônio,” the Dwarf said. “They’ve hit it, they’ve brought it tumbling down.”

  She looked, and in the dim moonlight, up above, where the smoke that had been hiding it was slowly being blown away by a breeze from the river, she saw the looming, imposing outlines of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus, but not those of the bell tower and roof of Santo Antônio. That was what the tremendous din had been. The screams and cries had come from those who had fallen with the church, from those crushed beneath its stones as it caved in, but not yet dead. With his arms about her, the nearsighted journalist kept shouting at the top of his lungs asking what was happening, what the laughing and singing were, and the Dwarf answered that it was the soldiers, beside themselves with joy. The soldiers! The soldiers shouting, singing! How could they be this close? The triumphant cheers were mingled in her ears with the moans, and sounded as though they were coming from even nearer at hand. On the other side of this barricade that she had helped to erect, a crowd of soldiers was milling about, singing, about to cross the space of just a few feet separating them from the three of them. “Father, may the three of us die together,” she prayed.

  But curiously enough, instead of fanning the flames of war, the fall of Santo Antônio appeared to bring a lull in the fighting. Still not moving from their corner, they heard the cries of pain and of victory gradually grow fainter, and then, after that, there came a calm such as had not reigned for many a night. There was not a single cannon or rifle report to be heard, only sounds of weeping and moaning here and there, as though the combatants had agreed on a truce so as to rest. It seemed to her at times that she fell asleep, and when she awoke she had no idea whether a second or an hour had gone by. Each time she was still in the same place, sheltered between the nearsighted journalist and the Dwarf.

  At one of these times, she spied a jagunço from the Catholic Guard walking away from them. What had he wanted? Father Joaquim was asking for them. “I told him you weren’t able to move,” the nearsighted man murmured. A moment later the curé of Cumbe came trotting along in the dark. “Why didn’t you come?” she heard him say, in an odd tone of voice, and she thought: “Pajeú.”

  “Jurema is exhausted,” she heard the nearsighted journalist answer. “She’s fainted away several times.”

  “She’ll have to stay here, then,” Father Joaquim answered, in the same strange voice, not angry, but broken, disheartened, sad. “You two come with me.”

  “Stay here?” she heard the nearsighted journalist murmur, feeling him straighten up, his whole body tense.

  “Be still,” the curé ordered. “Weren’t you the one who was so desperate to get away? Well, you’re going to have your chance now. But not a word out of you. Come along, you two.”

  Father Joaquim began to walk off. Jurema was the first one on her feet, gathering her strength together and thus putting an end to the journalist’s stammering—“Jurema can’t…I…I…”—and demonstrating to him that indeed she could, that she was already on her feet, following along behind the curé’s shadow. Seconds later, she was running, the nearsighted man holding her by one hand and the Dwarf by the other, amid the ruins and the dead and injured of the Church of Santo Antônio, still not able to believe what she had heard.

  She realized that the curé was leading them to the Sanctuary, through a labyrinth of galleries and parapets with armed men. A door opened and by the light of a lamp she spied Pajeú. She doubtless uttered his name, thereby alerting the nearsighted journalist, for he immediately burst into sneezes that doubled him over. But it was not by order of the caboclo that Father Joaquim had brought them here, for Pajeú was paying no attention to them at all. He was not even looking their way. They were in the women disciples’ little room, the Counselor’s antechamber, and through the cracks in the stake wall Jurema could see in the inner chamber the Sacred Choir and Mother Maria Quadrado kneeling and the profiles of the Little Blessed One and the Lion of Natuba. In the narrow confines of the antechamber, besides Pajeú, there were Antônio and Honório Vilanova and the Sardelinha sisters, and in the faces of all of them, as in Father Joaquim’s voice, there was something unusual, irremediable, fateful, desperate, feral
. As though they had not entered the room, as though they were not there, Pajeú went on talking to Antônio Vilanova: he would hear shots, disorder, confusion, but they were not to move yet. Not until the whistles sounded. Then yes: that was the moment to run, fly, slip away like vixens. The caboclo paused and Antônio Vilanova nodded gloomily. Pajeú spoke again: “Don’t stop running for any reason. Not to pick up anybody who falls, not to retrace your steps. Everything depends on that and on the Father. If you reach the river before the dogs notice, you’ll get through. At least you have a chance to.”

  “But you have no chance at all of getting out—neither you nor anyone else who goes with you to the dogs’ camp,” Antônio Vilanova moaned. He was weeping. He grabbed the caboclo by the arms and begged him: “I don’t want to leave Belo Monte, much less if it means your sacrificing yourself. You’re needed here more than I am. Pajeú! Pajeú!”

  The caboclo slipped out of his grasp with a sort of annoyance. “It has to be before it gets light,” he said curtly. “After that, you won’t be able to make it.”

  He turned to Jurema, the nearsighted man, and the Dwarf, who were standing there petrified. “You’re to go too, because that’s what the Counselor wishes,” he said, as though talking past the three of them to someone they couldn’t see. “First to Fazenda Velha, in Indian file, crouching down. And there where the youngsters tell you, you’re to wait for the whistles to blow. Then you’re to dash through the camp and down to the river. You’ll get through, if it be the Father’s will.”

  He fell silent and looked at the nearsighted man, standing with his arms around Jurema and trembling like a leaf. “Sneeze now,” Pajeú said to him, in the same tone of voice. “Not then. Not when you’re waiting for the whistles to blow. If you sneeze then, they’ll plunge a knife in your heart. It wouldn’t be right if they captured everyone on account of your sneezes. Praised be Blessed Jesus the Counselor.”

  When he hears them, Private Queluz is dreaming of Captain Oliveira’s orderly, a pale young private whom he has been prowling around for some time and saw shitting this morning, crouched behind a little pile of rocks near the wells down by the Vaza-Barris. He has kept intact the image of those hairless legs and those white buttocks that he glimpsed, bared to the dawn air like an invitation. The image is so clear, steady, and vivid that Private Queluz’s cock gets hard, swelling against his uniform and awakening him. His desire is so overpowering that even though he can hear voices nearby, and even though he is forced to recognize that they are the voices of traitors and not of patriots, his immediate reaction is not to grab his rifle but to raise his hands to his trousers fly to stroke his cock inflamed by the memory of the round buttocks of Captain Oliveira’s orderly. Suddenly the thought is borne in upon him that he is alone, in open country, with the enemy close at hand, and instantly he is wide awake, every muscle tense, his heart in his mouth. What has happened to Leopoldinho? Have they killed Leopoldinho? They’ve killed him: he sees quite clearly now that the sentry didn’t even have time to shout a warning or even realize that they were killing him. Leopoldinho is the soldier with whom he shares the guard in this empty stretch of land that separates A Favela from the Vaza-Barris, where the Fifth Infantry Regiment is encamped, the good buddy with whom he takes turns sleeping, thereby making the nights on guard duty more tolerable.

  “Lots and lots of noise, so they’ll think there are more of us,” their leader says. “And above all, get them all confused, so they don’t know whether they’re coming or going, so they don’t have the time or the inclination to look toward the river.”

  “In other words, Pajeú, you mean really whoop it up,” another voice says.

  “Pajeú!” Queluz thinks. Pajeú’s there. Lying there in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by jagunços who will finish him off in short order if they discover him, on realizing that in the shadows, within reach of his hand, is one of the fiercest bandits in all Canudos, a choice prize, Queluz has an impulse which very nearly brings him bounding to his feet, to grab his rifle and blow the monster to bits. This would win him the admiration of one and all, of Colonel Medeiros, of General Oscar. They would give him the corporal’s stripes he has coming to him. Because even though his length of service and his behavior under fire should have long since earned him a promotion, they keep turning him down for one on the stupid pretext that he’s been caned too often for inducing recruits to commit with him what Father Lizzardo calls “the abominable sin.” He turns his head, and in the light of the clear night he sees the silhouettes: twenty, thirty of them. How have they happened not to step on him? By what miracle have they failed to see him? Moving just his eyes, he tries to make out the famous scar on one of those faces that are a mere blur. It is Pajeú who is speaking, he is certain, reminding the others that they should set off dynamite sticks rather than shoot their rifles because that way they’ll make a bigger racket, and warning all of them again that nobody is to blow his whistle before he does. He hears him bid them goodbye in a way that makes him laugh: Praised be Blessed Jesus the Counselor. The group breaks up into shadows that disappear in the direction of the regiment’s camp.

  He hesitates no longer. He scrambles to his feet, grabs his rifle, cocks it, aims it in the direction in which the jagunços are disappearing, and fires. But the trigger doesn’t budge, though he squeezes it with all his might. He curses, spits, trembles with rage at the death of his buddy, and as he murmurs “Leopoldinho, are you there?” he cocks his piece again and tries once more to fire a shot to alert the regiment. He is shaking the rifle to make it behave, to get across to it that it can’t jam now, when he hears several explosions. Damn: they’ve gotten into the camp. It’s his fault. They’re setting off dynamite sticks to blow up his sleeping buddies. Damn: the sons of bitches, the fiends, they’re butchering his buddies. And it’s his fault.

  Confused, infuriated, he doesn’t know what to do. How have they managed to get this far without being discovered? Because—there’s no doubt about it, since Pajeú is with them—these are jagunços who have come out of Canudos and made their way through the patriots’ trenches so as to attack the camp from the rear. What in the world can have made Pajeú attack a camp of five hundred soldiers with just twenty or thirty men? All over the sector occupied by the Fifth Infantry Regiment there are people running this way and that, shots, a tremendous uproar. He is desperate. What is going to become of him? What explanation is he going to give when they ask him why he didn’t give the alert, why he didn’t shoot, shout, or do anything at all when they killed Leopoldinho? Who is there to deliver him from a new round of canings?

  He grips the rifle hard, in a blind rage, and it goes off. The bullet brushes past his nose, giving him a red-hot whiff of gunpowder. It cheers him that his piece works, it restores his optimism, which, unlike others, he has never lost in all these months, not even when so many of the men were dying and they were all so hungry. Not knowing what he is going to do, he runs across the open stretch of ground in the direction of this bloody fiesta that the jagunços are having themselves, just as they said they would, and fires his four remaining bullets in the air, telling himself that the red-hot barrel of his rifle will be proof that he hasn’t been sleeping, that he’s been fighting. He trips and falls headlong. “Leopoldinho?” he says. “Leopoldinho?” He feels the ground in front of him, behind him, alongside him.

  Yes, it’s Leopoldinho. He touches him, shakes him. The fiends. He spits out the taste of vomit in his mouth, keeps himself from throwing up. They have sunk a knife in his neck, they have slit his throat the way they would a lamb’s, his head dangles like a doll’s when he lifts him up by the armpits. “The fiends, the fiends,” he says, and without the thought distracting him from his grief and wrath at the death of his buddy, it occurs to him that going back to the camp with the dead body will convince Captain Oliveira that he wasn’t asleep at his post when the bandits came, that he put up a fight. He advances slowly, stumbling along with Leopoldinho’s body slung over his back, and hears, ami
d the shots and the fracas in the camp, the high-pitched, piercing screech of a strange bird, followed by others. The whistles. What are they up to? Why are the fanatical traitors entering the camp, setting off dynamite, and then beginning to blow whistles like mad? He staggers beneath the weight of Leopoldinho’s body and wonders if it wouldn’t be better to stop and rest.

  As he approaches the huts he is struck by the chaos that reigns inside the camp: the soldiers, brutally awakened by the explosions, are shooting helter-skelter in all directions, disregarding the shouts and roars of the officers trying to impose order. At that moment, Leopoldinho shudders. Queluz is so stunned at this that he lets go of him and falls to the ground alongside him. No, he is not alive. What a stupid idiot he is! It was the impact of a bullet that shook the body like that. “That’s the second time tonight that you’ve saved my life, Leopoldinho,” he thinks. That knife thrust might have been meant for him, that bullet might have had his name on it. “Thanks, Leopoldinho!” He lies there flat on the ground, thinking that it would be the last straw if he got shot by the soldiers of his own regiment, in a fury again, his mind going round and round again, not knowing whether to stay there where he is till the shooting dies down or whether to try at all costs to reach the huts.

  He is still lying there, agonizing as to what he should do, when in the shadows on the mountainside that are beginning to dissolve into a shimmer of blue he spies two silhouettes running toward him. He is about to shout: “Help! Come give me a hand!” when a sudden suspicion freezes the cry in his throat. He strains to see, till his eyes burn, whether or not they are wearing uniforms, but there is not enough light. He has unslung his rifle from his shoulder, grabbed a cartridge pouch from his knapsack, and is loading and cocking his gun by the time the men are almost upon him: none of them is a soldier. He fires point-blank at the one who offers the best target, and along with the report of his rifle, he hears the man’s animal snort and the thud of his body as it hits the ground. And then his rifle jams again: his finger squeezes a trigger that refuses to budge even a fraction of an inch.