The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “You never liked him,” Antônio Vilanova muttered bitterly, and the Dwarf knew then which of the two sisters was speaking: Antônia.

  “Never,” she admitted, making no effort to hide her enmity. “And even less now. Now that I know that he ended up not as Abbot João but as Satan João. The one who killed to be killing, robbed to be robbing, and took pleasure in making people suffer.”

  There was a deep silence and the Dwarf could feel that the nearsighted man was frightened. He waited, every nerve tense.

  “I don’t ever want to hear you say that again,” Antônio Vilanova said slowly. “You’ve been my wife for years, forever. We’ve gone through everything together. But if I ever hear you say that again, it’s all over between us. And it will be the end of you, too.”

  Trembling, sweating, counting the seconds, the Dwarf waited.

  “I swear by the Blessed Jesus that I will never say that again,” Antônia Sardelinha stammered.

  “I saw Abbot João weep once,” the Dwarf said then. His teeth were chattering and his words came out in spurts, well chewed. He spoke with his face pressed against Jurema’s bosom. “Don’t you remember, didn’t I tell you? When he heard the Terrible and Exemplary Story of Robert the Devil.”

  “He was the son of a king and his mother’s hair was already white when he was born,” Abbot João remembered. “He was born through a miracle, if the work of the Devil can also be called a miracle. She had made a pact so as to give birth to Robert. Isn’t that how it begins?”

  “No,” the Dwarf said, with a certainty that came from having told this story all his life, one he had known for so long he couldn’t remember where or when he had learned it, one he had taken about from village to village, told hundreds, thousands of times, making it longer, making it shorter, making it sadder or happier or more dramatic to fit the mood of his ever-changing audience. Not even Abbot João could tell him how it really began. His mother was old and barren and had to make a pact so as to give birth to Robert, yes. But he wasn’t the son of a king. He was the son of a duke.

  “Of the Duke of Normandy,” Abbot João agreed. “Go ahead—tell it the way it really was.”

  “He wept?” he heard a voice say as though from the next world, that voice he knew so well, always frightened, yet at the same time curious, prying, meddlesome. “Listening to the story of Robert the Devil?”

  Yes, he had wept. At one point or another, perhaps at the moment when he was committing his worst massacres, his worst iniquities, when, possessed, impelled, overpowered by the spirit of destruction, an invisible force that he was unable to resist, Robert plunged his knife into the bellies of pregnant women or slit the throats of newborn babes (“Which means that he was from the South, not the Northeast,” the Dwarf explained) and impaled peasants and set fire to huts where families were sleeping, he had noticed that the Street Commander’s eyes were gleaming, his cheeks glistening, his chin trembling, his chest heaving. Disconcerted, terrified, the Dwarf fell silent—what mistake had he made, what had he left out?—and looked anxiously at Catarina, that little figure so thin that she seemed to occupy no space at all in the redoubt on Menino Jesus, where Abbot João had taken him. Catarina motioned to him to go on.

  But Abbot João didn’t let him. “Was what he did his fault?” he said, transfixed. “Was it his fault that he committed countless cruelties? Could he do otherwise? Wasn’t he paying his mother’s debt? From whom should the Father have sought retribution for those wicked deeds? From him or from the duchess?” His eyes were riveted on the Dwarf, in terrible anguish. “Answer me, answer me.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” the Dwarf said, trembling. “It’s not in the story. It’s not my fault, don’t do anything to me, I’m only the one who’s telling the story.”

  “He’s not going to do anything to you,” the woman who seemed to be a wraith said softly. “Go on with the story, go on.”

  He had gone on with the story, as Catarina dried Abbot João’s eyes with the hem of her skirt, squatted at his feet and clasped his legs with her hands and leaned her head against his knees so as to make him feel that he wasn’t alone. He had not wept again, or moved, or interrupted him till the end, which sometimes came with the death of Robert the Saint become a hermit, and sometimes with Robert placing on his head the crown that had become rightfully his on discovering that he was the son of Richard of Normandy, one of the Twelve Peers of France. He remembered that when he had finished the story that afternoon—or that night?—Abbot João had thanked him for telling it. But when, at what moment exactly had that been? Before the soldiers came, when life was peaceful and Belo Monte seemed the ideal place to live in? Or when life became death, hunger, holocaust, fear?

  “When was it, Jurema?” he asked anxiously, not knowing why it was so urgent to situate it exactly in time. Then, turning to the nearsighted man: “Was it at the beginning or the end of the performance?”

  “What’s the matter with him?” he heard one of the Sardelinha sisters say.

  “Fever,” Jurema answered, putting her arms around him.

  “When was it?” the Dwarf asked. “When was it?”

  “He’s delirious,” he heard the nearsighted man say and felt him touch his forehead, stroke his hair and his back.

  He heard him sneeze, twice, three times, as he always did when something surprised him, amused him, or frightened him. He could sneeze if he wanted to now. But he had not done so the night they had escaped, that night when one sneeze would have cost him his life. He imagined him at a circus performance in a village somewhere, sneezing twenty, fifty, a hundred times, as the Bearded Lady farted in the clown number, in every imaginable register and cadence, high, low, long, short, and it made him feel like laughing too, like the audience attending the performance. But he didn’t have the strength.

  “He’s dropped off to sleep,” he heard Jurema say, cradling his head in her lap. “He’ll be all right tomorrow.”

  He was not asleep. From the depths of that ambiguous reality of fire and ice, his body hunched over in the darkness of the cave, he went on listening to Antônio the Pyrotechnist’s story, reproducing, seeing that end of the world that he had already anticipated, known, without any need to hear this man brought back to life from amid burning coals and corpses tell of it. And yet, despite how sick he felt, how badly he was shivering, how far away those who were speaking there beside him, in the dark of the night in the backlands of Bahia, in that world where there was no Canudos any more and no jagunços, where soon there would be no soldiers either, when those who had accomplished their mission left at last and the sertão returned to its eternal proud and miserable solitude, the Dwarf had been interested, impressed, and amazed to hear what Antônio the Pyrotechnist was relating.

  “You might say that you’ve been restored to life,” he heard Honôrio say—the Vilanova who spoke so rarely that, when he did, it seemed to be his brother.

  “Perhaps so,” the Pyrotechnist answered. “But I wasn’t dead. Not even wounded. I don’t know. I don’t know that, either. There was no blood on my body. Maybe a stone fell on my head. But I didn’t hurt anywhere, either.”

  “You fell into a faint,” Antônio Vilanova said. “The way people did in Belo Monte. They thought you were dead and that saved you.”

  “That saved me,” the Pyrotechnist repeated. “But that wasn’t all. Because when I came to and found myself in the midst of all those dead, I also saw that the atheists were finishing off with their bayonets those who had fallen, or shooting them if they moved. Lots of them went right by me, and not one of them bent over me to see if I was dead.”

  “In other words, you spent an entire day playing dead,” Antônio Vilanova said.

  “Hearing them pass by, killing off those who were still alive, knifing the prisoners to death, dynamiting the walls,” the Pyrotechnist said. “But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the dogs, the rats, the black vultures. They were devouring the dead. I could hear them pawing, biting,
pecking. Animals don’t make mistakes. They know who’s dead and who isn’t. Vultures, rats don’t devour people who are still alive. My fear was the dogs. That was the miracle: they, too, left me alone.”

  “You were lucky,” Antônio Vilanova said. “And what are you going to do now?”

  “Go back to Mirandela,” the Pyrotechnist said. “I was born there, I grew up there, I learned how to make skyrockets there. Maybe. I don’t know. What about you?”

  “We’ll go far away from here,” the former storekeeper said. “To Assaré, maybe. We came from there, we began this life there, fleeing from the plague, as we’re doing now. From another plague. Maybe we’ll end up where it all began. What else can we do?”

  “Nothing, I’m certain of that,” Antônio the Pyrotechnist said.

  Not even when they tell him to hasten to General Artur Oscar’s command post if he wants to have a look at the Counselor’s head before First Lieutenant Pinto Souza takes it to Bahia does Colonel Geraldo Macedo, commanding officer of the Bahia Police Volunteer Battalion, stop thinking about what has obsessed him ever since the end of the war: “Has anyone seen him? Where is he?” But like all the brigade, regimental, and battalion commanders (officers of lesser rank are not accorded this privilege), he goes to have a look at the remains of the man who has been the death of so many people and yet, according to all witnesses, was never once seen to take up a rifle or a knife in his own hands. He doesn’t see very much, however, because they have put the head in a sackful of lime inasmuch as it is very badly decomposed: just a few shocks of grayish hair. He merely puts in an appearance at General Oscar’s hut for form’s sake, unlike other officers, who stay on and on, congratulating each other on the end of the war and making plans for the future now that they will be going back to their home bases and their families. Colonel Macedo’s eyes rest for a brief moment on the tangle of hair, then he leaves without a single comment and returns to the smoking heap of ruins and corpses.

  He thinks no more about the Counselor or the exultant officers that he has left in the command post, officers whom, moreover, he has never considered to be his equals, and whose disdain for him he has reciprocated ever since he arrived on the slopes of Canudos with the battalion of Bahia police. He knows what his nickname is, what they call him behind his back: Bandit-Chaser. It doesn’t bother him. He is proud of having spent thirty years of his life repeatedly cleaning out bands of cangaceiros from the backlands of Bahia, of having won all the gold braid he has and reached the rank of colonel—he, a humble mestizo born in Mulungo do Morro, a tiny village that none of these officers could even locate on the map—for having risked his neck hunting down the scum of the earth.

  But it bothers his men. The Bahia police who four months ago agreed, out of personal loyalty to him, to come here to fight the Counselor—he had told them that the Governor of Bahia had asked him to take on this mission, that it was indispensable that Bahia state police should volunteer to go to Canudos so as to put an end to the perfidious talk going the rounds in the rest of the country to the effect that Bahians were soft toward, indifferent to, and even sympathetic secret allies of the jagunços, so as to demonstrate to the federal government and all of Brazil that Bahians were as ready as anyone else to make any and every sacrifice in the defense of the Republic—are naturally offended and hurt by the snubs and affronts that they have had to put up with ever since they joined the column. Unlike him, they are unable to contain themselves: they answer insults with insults, nicknames with nicknames, and in these four months they have been involved in countless incidents with the soldiers from other regiments. What exasperates them most is that the High Command also discriminates against them. In all the attacks, the Bahia Police Volunteer Battalion has been kept on the sidelines, in the rear guard, as though even the General Staff gave credence to the infamy that in their heart of hearts Bahians are restorationists, crypto-Conselheirists.

  The stench is so overpowering that he is obliged to get out his handkerchief and cover his nose. Although many of the fires have burned out, the air is still full of soot, cinders, and ashes, and the colonel’s eyes are irritated as he explores, searches about, kicks the bodies of the dead jagunços to separate them and have a look at their faces. The majority of them are charred or so disfigured by the flames that even if he came across him he would not be able to identify him. Moreover, even if his corpse is intact, how is he going to recognize it? After all, he has never seen him, and the descriptions he has had of him are not sufficiently detailed. What he is doing is stupid, of course. “Of course,” he thinks. Though it is contrary to all reason, he can’t help himself: it’s that odd instinct that has served him so well in the past, that sudden flash of intuition that in the old days used to make him hurry his flying brigade along for two or three days on an inexplicable forced march to reach a village where, it would turn out, they surprised bandits that they had been searching for with no luck at all for weeks and months. It’s the same now. Colonel Geraldo Macedo keeps poking about amid the stinking corpses, his one hand holding the handkerchief over his nose and mouth and the other chasing away the swarms of flies, kicking away the rats that climb up his legs, because, in the face of all logic, something tells him that when he comes across the face, the body, even the mere bones of Abbot João, he will know that they are his.

  “Sir, sir!” It is his adjutant, Lieutenant Soares, running toward him with his face, too, covered with his handkerchief.

  “Have the men found him?” Colonel Macedo says excitedly.

  “Not yet, sir. General Oscar says you must get out of here because the demolition squad is about to begin work.”

  “Demolition squad?” Colonel Macedo looks glumly about him. “Is there anything left to demolish?”

  “The general promised that not a single stone would be left standing,” Lieutenant Soares says. “He’s ordered the sappers to dynamite the walls that haven’t fallen in yet.”

  “What a waste of effort,” the colonel murmurs. His mouth is partway open beneath the handkerchief, and as always when he is deep in thought, he is licking at his gold tooth. He regretfully contemplates the vast expanse of rubble, stench, and carrion. Finally he shrugs. “Well, we’ll leave without ever knowing if he died or got away.”

  Still holding his nose, he and his adjutant begin making their way back to the cantonment. Shortly thereafter, the dynamiting begins.

  “Might I ask you a question, sir?” Lieutenant Soares twangs from beneath his handkerchief. Colonel Macedo nods his head. “Why is Abbot João’s corpse so important to you?”

  “It’s a story that goes back a long way,” the colonel growls. His voice sounds twangy, too. His dark little eyes take a quick glance all about. “A story that I began, apparently. That’s what people say, anyway. Because I killed Abbot João’s father, some thirty years ago, at least. He was a coiteiro of Antônio Silvino’s in Custódia. They say that Abbot João became a cangaceiro to avenge his father. And afterward, well…” He looks at his adjutant and suddenly feels old. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two, sir.”

  “So you wouldn’t know who Abbot João was,” Colonel Macedo growls.

  “The military leader of Canudos, a heartless monster,” Lieutenant Soares says immediately.

  “A heartless monster, all right,” Colonel Macedo agrees. “The fiercest outlaw in all Bahia. The one that always got away from me. I hunted him for ten years. I very nearly got my hands on him several times, but he always slipped through my fingers. They said he’d made a pact. He was known as Satan in those days.”

  “I understand now why you want to find him.” Lieutenant Soares smiles. “To see with your own eyes that he didn’t get away from you this time.”

  “I don’t really know why, to tell you the truth,” Colonel Macedo growls, shrugging his shoulders. “Because it brings back the days of my youth, maybe. Chasing bandits was better than this tedium.”

  There is a series of explosions and Colonel Macedo can see thous
ands of people on the slopes and brows of the hills, standing watching as the last walls of Canudos are blown sky high. It is not a spectacle that interests him and he does not even bother to watch; he continues on toward the cantonment of the Bahia Volunteer Battalion at the foot of A Favela, immediately behind the trenches along the Vaza-Barris.

  “I don’t mind telling you that there are certain things that would never enter a normal person’s head, no matter how big it might be,” he says, spitting out the bad taste left in his mouth by his aborted exploration. “First off, ordering a house count when there aren’t any houses left, only ruins. And now, ordering stones and bricks dynamited. Do you understand why that commission under the command of Colonel Dantas Barreto was out counting the houses?”

  They had spent all morning amid the stinking, smoking ruins and determined that there were five thousand two hundred dwellings in Canudos.

  “They had a terrible time. None of their figures came out right,” Lieutenant Soares scoffs. “They calculated that there were at least five inhabitants per dwelling. In other words, some thirty thousand jagunços. But Colonel Dantas Barreto’s commission was able to find only six hundred forty-seven corpses, no matter how hard they searched.”

  “Because they only counted corpses that were intact,” Colonel Macedo growls. “They overlooked the hunks of flesh, the scattered bones, which is what most of the people of Canudos ended up as. To every madman his own cherished mania.”

  Back in the camp, a drama awaits Colonel Geraldo Macedo, one of the many that have marked the presence of the Bahia police at the siege of Canudos. The officers are trying to calm the men, ordering them to disperse and to stop talking among themselves about what has happened. They have posted guards all around the perimeter of the cantonment, fearing that the Bahia volunteers will rush out en masse to give those who have provoked them what is coming to them. By the smoldering anger in his men’s eyes and the sinister expressions on their faces, Colonel Macedo realizes immediately that the incident has been an extremely grave one.