The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  He curses and leaps aside as at the same time he raises his rifle in his two hands and lashes out at the other jagunço, who, after a second’s hesitation, has flung himself on top of him. Queluz is good at fighting hand to hand, he has always shown up well in the tests of strength organized by Captain Oliveira. He feels the man’s hot panting breath in his face and his head butting him as he concentrates on the most important thing, searching out his adversary’s arms, his hands, knowing that the danger does not lie in these blows of his head that are like a battering ram but in the knife blade protruding like an extension of one of his hands. And, in fact, as his hands find and grip the man’s wrists he hears his pants ripping and feels a sharp knife blade run down his thigh. As he, too, butts with his head, bites, and hurls insults, Queluz fights with all his strength to hold back, to push away, to twist this hand where the danger is. He has no idea how many seconds or minutes or hours it takes, but all of a sudden he realizes that the traitor is attacking him less fiercely, is losing heart, that the arm that he is clutching is beginning to go limp in his grip. “You’re fucked,” Queluz spits at him. “You’re already dead, traitor.” Yes, though he is still biting, kicking, butting, the jagunço is wearing out, giving up. Queluz feels his hands free at last. He leaps to his feet, grabs his rifle, raises it in the air, and is about to plunge the bayonet into the traitor’s belly and fling himself on top of him when he sees—it is no longer dark but first light—the swollen face with a hideous scar all the way across it. With his rifle poised in the air, he thinks: “Pajeú.” Blinking, panting for breath, his chest about to burst with excitement, he cries: “Pajeú? Are you Pajeú?” He is not dead, his eyes are open, he is looking at him. “Pajeú?” he shouts, beside himself with joy. “Does this mean you’re my prisoner, Pajeú?” Though he continues to look at him, the jagunço pays no attention to what he is saying. He is trying to raise his knife. “Do you still want to fight?” Queluz says mockingly, stamping on his chest. No, he is paying no attention to him, as he tries to…“Or maybe you want to kill yourself, Pajeú,” Queluz laughs, kicking the knife out of the limp hand. “That’s not up to you, traitor—it’s up to us.”

  Capturing Pajeú alive is an even more heroic deed than having killed him. Queluz contemplates the caboclo’s face: swollen, scratched, bitten. But he also has a bullet wound in the leg, for his trousers are completely blood-soaked. Queluz can’t believe that he is lying there at his feet. He looks around for the other jagunço, and just as he spies him, sprawled on the ground clutching his belly, perhaps not dead yet, he notices several soldiers approaching. He gestures frantically to them: “It’s Pajeú! Pajeú! I’ve caught Pajeú!”

  When, after having touched him, sniffed him, looked him over from head to foot, touched him again—and having given him a couple of kicks, but not many, since all of them agree that it’s best to bring him in alive to Colonel Medeiros—the soldiers drag Pajeú to the camp, Queluz receives a welcome that is an apotheosis. The news that he has killed one of the bandits who have attacked them and has captured Pajeú soon makes the rounds, and everyone comes out to have a look at him, to congratulate him, to pat him on the back and embrace him. They box his ears affectionately, hand him canteens, and a lieutenant lights his cigarette. He mumbles that he feels sad about Leopoldinho, but he’s really weeping with emotion at this moment of glory.

  Colonel Medeiros wants to see him. As he walks to the command post, as if in a trance, Queluz does not remember the raging fury that Colonel Medeiros had been in the day before—a fury that took the form of punishments, threats, and reprimands that did not spare even the majors and captains—because of his frustration at the fact that the First Brigade had not participated in the attack at dawn, which everyone thought would be the final push that would enable the patriots to capture all the positions still occupied by the traitors. The rumor had even gone round that Colonel Medeiros had had a run-in with General Oscar because the latter had not allowed the First Brigade to charge, and that when he learned that Colonel Gouveia’s Second Brigade had taken the fanatics’ trenches in the cemetery, Colonel Medeiros had thrown his cup of coffee onto the ground and smashed it to bits. Rumor also had it that, at nightfall, when the General Staff halted the attack in view of the heavy casualties and the traitors’ fierce resistance, Colonel Medeiros had drunk brandy, as though he were celebrating, as though there were anything to celebrate.

  But, on entering Colonel Medeiros’s hut, Queluz immediately remembers all that. The face of the commanding officer of the First Brigade is about to explode with rage. He is not waiting at the doorway to congratulate him, as Queluz imagined he would be. He is sitting on a folding camp stool, heaping abuse on someone. Who is it he’s shouting at? At Pajeú. Peeking between the backs and profiles of the crowd of officers in the hut, Queluz spies the sallow face with the garnet-colored scar cutting all the way across it, lying on the ground at the colonel’s feet. He is not dead; his eyes are half open, and Queluz, to whom no one is paying the slightest attention, who has no notion why they have brought him here and who feels like leaving, tells himself that the colonel’s fit of temper is doubtless due to the distant, disdainful look in Pajeú’s eyes as he gazes up at him. It is not that, however, but the attack on the camp: eighteen men have been killed.

  “Eighteen! Eighteen!” Colonel Medeiros rages, clenching and unclenching his teeth as though champing at a bit. “Thirty-some wounded! Those of us in the First Brigade spend the whole damned day up here scratching our balls while the Second Brigade fights, and then you come along with your band of degenerates and inflict more casualties on us than on them.”

  “He’s going to burst into tears,” Queluz thinks. In a panic, he imagines that the colonel is going to find out somehow that he went to sleep at his post and let the bandits get past him without giving the alarm. The commanding officer of the First Brigade leaps up from his camp stool and begins to kick and stamp his feet. The officers’ backs and profiles block Queluz’s view of what’s happening on the ground. But seconds later he sees the jagunço again: the crimson scar has grown much larger, covering the bandit’s entire face, a featureless, shapeless mass of dirt and mud. But his eyes are still open, and in them that indifference that is so strange and so offensive. A thread of bloody spittle trickles from his lips.

  Queluz sees a saber in Colonel Medeiros’s hands and he is certain that he is about to give Pajeú the coup de grâce. But he merely rests the tip of it on the jagunço’s neck. Total silence reigns in the hut, and Queluz finds himself in the grip of the same hieratic solemnity as the officers.

  Finally Colonel Medeiros calms down. He sits back down on the camp stool and flings his saber on the cot. “Killing you would be doing you a favor,” he mutters in bitter rage. “You have betrayed your country, murdered your compatriots, sacked, plundered, committed every imaginable crime. There is no punishment terrible enough for what you have done.”

  “He’s laughing,” Queluz thinks to himself in amazement. Yes, the caboclo is laughing. His forehead and the little crest of flesh that is all that is left of his nose are puckered up, his lips are parted, and his little slits of eyes gleam as he utters a sound that is undoubtedly a laugh.

  “Do you find what I’m saying amusing?” Colonel Medeiros says, slowly and deliberately. But the next moment his tone of voice changes, for Pajeú’s face has turned rigid. “Examine him, Doctor…”

  Captain Bernardo da Ponte Sanhueza kneels down, puts his ear to the bandit’s chest, observes his eyes, takes his pulse.

  “He’s dead, sir,” Queluz hears him say.

  Colonel Medeiros’s face blanches.

  “His body’s a sieve,” the doctor adds. “It’s a miracle that he’s lasted this long with all that lead in him.”

  “It’s my turn now,” Queluz thinks. Colonel Medeiros’s piercing little blue-green eyes are about to seek him out among the officers, find him, and he will hear the question he is so afraid of: “Why didn’t you give the alert?” He’ll lie, he
’ll swear in the name of God and his mother that he did give it, that he fired warning shots and yelled out. But the seconds pass and Colonel Medeiros continues to sit there on the camp stool, contemplating the corpse of the bandit who died laughing at him.

  “Here’s Queluz, sir,” he hears Captain Oliveira say.

  Now, now. The officers step aside to allow him to present himself before the commanding officer of the First Brigade. Colonel Medeiros looks at him, rises to his feet. Queluz sees—his heart is pounding in his chest—the colonel’s face relax, notes that he is trying his best to smile at him. Queluz smiles back at him, gratefully.

  “So you’re the one who captured him?” the colonel asks.

  “Yes, sir,” Queluz answers, standing at attention.

  “Finish the job,” Medeiros says to him, holding his sword out to him with an energetic gesture. “Put his eyes out and cut his tongue off. Then lop his head off and throw it over the barricade, so those bandits who are still alive will know what awaits them.”

  [VI]

  When the nearsighted journalist finally left, the Baron de Canabrava, who had accompanied him to the street, discovered that it was pitch-dark outside. On coming back into the house, he stood leaning against the massive front door with his eyes closed, trying to banish a seething mass of violent, confused images from his mind. A manservant came running with an oil lamp in his hand: would he like his dinner reheated? He answered no, and before sending the servant to bed he asked him whether Estela had eaten dinner. Yes, some time ago, and then she had retired to her room.

  Instead of going upstairs to her bedroom, the baron returned to his study like a sleepwalker, listening to the echo of his footsteps. He could smell, he could see, floating like fluff in the stuffy air of the room, the words of that long conversation which, it now seemed to him, had been not so much a dialogue as two monologues running side by side without ever meeting. He would not see the nearsighted journalist again, he would not have another talk with him. He would not allow him to bring to life yet again that monstrous story whose unfolding had involved the destruction of his property, his political power, his wife. “Only she matters,” he murmured to himself. Yes, he could have resigned himself to all the other losses. For the time he had left to live—ten, fifteen years?—he possessed the means to do so in the manner to which he was accustomed. It did not matter that this style of life would end with his death: he had, after all, no heirs whose fortunes he should be concerned about. And as for political power, in the final analysis he was happy to have rid himself of that heavy load on his shoulders. Politics had been a burden that he had taken upon himself because there was no one else to do so, because of the vast stupidity, irresponsibility, or corruption of others, not out of some heartfelt vocation: politics had always bored him, wearied him, impressed him as being an inane, depressing occupation, since it revealed human wretchedness more clearly than any other. Moreover, he harbored a secret resentment against politics, an absorbing occupation for which he had sacrificed the scientific leanings that he had felt ever since he was a youngster collecting butterflies and making herbariums. The tragedy to which he would never be able to resign himself was Estela. It had been Canudos, he thought, that stupid, incomprehensible story of blind, stubborn people, of diametrically opposed fanaticisms, that had been to blame for what had happened to Estela. He had severed his ties to the world and would not reestablish them. He would allow nothing, no one to remind him of this episode. “I will have them give him work on the paper,” he thought. “As a proofreader, a court reporter, some mediocre job that’s tailor-made for a mediocrity like him. But I won’t receive him or listen to him again. And if he writes that book about Canudos—though naturally he won’t—I shall not read it.”

  He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a glass of cognac. As he warmed the drink in the palm of his hand, sitting in the leather easy chair from which he had set the course of politics in the state of Bahia for a quarter of a century, the Baron de Canabrava listened to the harmonious symphony of the crickets in the garden, with a chorus of frogs joining in from time to time in dissonant counterpoint. What was making him so anxious? What was responsible for this feeling of impatience, this prickling sensation all over, as though he were forgetting something extremely urgent, as though in the next few seconds something decisive, something irrevocable were about to happen in his life? Canudos still?

  He had not banished it from his mind: it was there again. But the image that had loomed up, vivid and threatening, before his eyes was not something that he had heard from the lips of his visitor. It had happened when neither that nearsighted man nor the little servant girl from Canudos who was now his woman, nor the Dwarf, nor any of the survivors of Canudos, was any longer about. It was old Colonel Murau who had told him about it, over a glass of port, the last time they had seen each other here in Salvador, something that Murau had heard in turn from the owner of the Formosa hacienda, one of the many burned to the ground by the jagunços. The owner had stayed on at the hacienda, despite everything, out of love for his land, or because he didn’t know where else to go. And he had stayed on there all through the war, eking out a living thanks to the commercial deals he arranged with the soldiers. When he learned that the war was all over, that Canudos had fallen, he hurriedly made his way up there with a bunch of peons to lend a hand. When they sighted the hillsides of the former jagunço citadel, the army had gone. While still a fair distance away—Colonel Murau recounted, as the baron sat there listening—they had been dumfounded by a strange, indefinable, unfathomable sound, so loud it shook the air. And the air was filled, as well, with a terrible stench that turned their stomachs. But it was only when they made their way down the drab, stony slope of O Poço Trabubu and discovered at their feet what had ceased to be Canudos and become the sight that greeted their eyes, that they realized that the sound was that of the flapping wings and pecking beaks of thousands upon thousands of vultures, of that endless sea of grayish, blackish shapes covering everything, devouring everything, gorging themselves, finishing off, as they sated themselves, what neither dynamite nor bullets nor fires had been able to reduce to dust: those limbs, extremities, heads, vertebras, viscera, skin that the conflagration had spared or only half charred and that these rapacious creatures were now crushing to bits, tearing apart, swallowing, gulping down. “Thousands upon thousands of vultures,” Colonel Murau had said. And also that, stricken with terror in the face of what seemed like a nightmare come true, the owner of the hacienda of Formosa and his peons, realizing that there was nobody left to bury, since the carrion birds were doing their work, had left the place on the run, covering their mouths and holding their noses. The intrusive, loathsome image had taken root in his mind and refused to go away. “The end that Canudos deserved,” he had answered before forcing old Murau to change the subject.

  Was this what was troubling him, making him anxious, setting his every nerve on edge? That swarm of countless carrion birds devouring the human rot that was all that was left of Canudos? “Twenty-five years of dirty, sordid politics to save Bahia from imbeciles and helpless idiots faced with a responsibility that they were incapable of assuming, the end result of which was a feast of vultures,” he thought to himself. And at that moment, superimposed on the image of the hecatomb, there reappeared the tragicomic face, the laughingstock with the watery crossed eyes, the scarecrow frame, the overprominent chin, the absurdly drooping ears, speaking to him of love, of pleasure in a fervent voice: “The greatest thing in all this world, Baron, the one and only thing whereby man can discover a measure of happiness, can learn what the word happiness means.” That was it. That was what was troubling him, upsetting him, causing him such anguish. He took a swallow of cognac, held the fiery liquid in his mouth for a moment, swallowed it, and felt its warmth trickle down his throat.

  He rose to his feet: he had no idea as yet what he was going to do, what he wanted to do, but he was aware of a stirring deep within him, and it seemed to him th
at he had arrived at a crucial moment in which he was obliged to come to a decision that would have incalculable consequences. What was he going to do, what was it he wanted to do? He set the glass of cognac down on top of the liquor cabinet, and feeling his heart, his temples pounding, his blood coursing through the geography of his body, he crossed the study, the enormous living room, the vast entry hall—with not a soul around at this hour, and everything in shadow, though there was a faint glow from the street lamps outside—to the foot of the staircase. There was a single lamp lighting the way up the stairs. He hurried up, on tiptoe, so softly that even he was unable to hear his own footfalls. Once at the top, without hesitating, instead of heading for his own apartments, he made his way toward the room in which the baroness was sleeping, separated only by a screen from the alcove where Sebastiana had installed herself so as to be close at hand if Estela needed her in the night.

  As his hand reached out toward the latch, the thought occurred to him that the door might be locked. He had never entered the room without knocking. No, the door was not barred. He entered, closed the door behind him, searched for the bolt, and slid it home. From the doorway he spied the yellow light of the night lamp—a candlewick floating in a little bowl of oil—whose dim light illuminated part of the baroness’s bed, the blue counterpane, the canopy overhead, and the thin gauze curtains. Standing there in the doorway, without making the slightest sound; without his hands trembling, the baron slowly removed all his clothes. Once he was naked, he crossed the room on tiptoe to Sebastiana’s little alcove.