The War Of The End Of The World (41 page)

Rufino reaches Cumbe at the same time as two army patrols, who behave as though the townspeople were the enemy. They search the houses, strike with their rifle butts anyone who protests, post an order promising death to anyone who conceals firearms, and proclaim it with a rolling of drums. They are looking for the parish priest. Rufino is told that they finally located him, that they had no scruples about entering the church and dragging him out by brute force. After going all about Cumbe asking after the circus people, Rufino finds lodgings for the night in the house of a brick maker. The family comments on the searches, the mistreatment, but they are even more deeply shocked by the sacrilege: invading the church and striking a minister of God! What people are saying must be true then: those wicked men are the Can’s servants.

Rufino leaves the town convinced that the stranger has not passed by way of Cumbe. Can he perhaps be in Canudos? Or in the hands of the soldiers? He is about to be taken prisoner at a barricade set up by the Rural Police to block off the road to Canudos. Several of them recognize him and intercede with the others on his behalf: after a time they let him continue on his way. He heads north via a shortcut, and after walking only a little way, he hears a rifle report. He realizes from the dust suddenly raised at his feet that they are shooting at him. He throws himself on the ground, crawls along, locates his attackers: two guards crouching on a rise. They shout to him to throw down his carbine and knife. He leaps up and runs as fast as he can in a zigzag line toward a dead angle. He arrives at this safe spot unhurt, and from there manages to put distance between himself and the guards by darting from rock to rock. But he loses his bearings, and when he is certain that he is no longer being followed, he lies down to rest. He is so exhausted that he sleeps like a log. The sun puts him on the right track to Canudos. Groups of pilgrims flowing in from all directions flock down the muddy trail that a few years before was used only by droves of cattle and poverty-stricken traders. At nightfall, camping among pilgrims, he hears a little old man covered with boils who has come from Santo Antônio tell about a circus show he has seen there. Rufino’s heart pounds madly. He lets the old man talk without interrupting him and a moment later he knows that he has picked up the trail.

He arrives in Santo Antônio in the dark and sits down alongside one of the pools along the banks of the Massacará to wait for daylight. He is so impatient he is unable to think. With the sun’s first rays, he begins to go from one little house to the next, all of them identical. Most of them are empty. The first villager he comes across shows him where to go. He enters a dark, foul-smelling interior and halts till his eyes adjust to the dim light. He begins to make out the walls, with lines and scrawls and a Sacred Heart of Jesus scratched on them. There are no pictures or furniture, not even an oil lamp, but there is something like a lingering memory of these things that the occupants have carried away with them.

The woman is lying on the floor and sits up on seeing him enter. Round about her are bits of colored cloth, a wicker basket, and a brazier. In her lap is something that he has difficulty recognizing. Yes, it’s the head of a snake. The tracker now notices the fuzz that darkens the woman’s face and arms. Between her and the wall is someone lying stretched out; he can see half the person’s body and his or her feet. He catches a glimpse of the grief that fills the eyes of the Bearded Lady. He bends down and respectfully asks her about the circus. She continues to look at him without seeing him, and finally, dejectedly, she hands him the cobra: he can have it to eat if he likes. Squatting on his heels, Rufino explains to her that he hasn’t come to take food away from her but to find out something. The Bearded Lady talks to him about the dead one. He’d been dying by inches and the night before he breathed his last. He listens to her, nodding. She reproaches herself, she is filled with remorse, perhaps she should have killed Idílica before and given her to him to eat. If she’d done that, would it have saved him? She herself says no. The cobra and the dead man had shared her life ever since the beginnings of the circus. Memory brings back to Rufino images of the Gypsy, of Pedrim the Giant, and other performers he saw as a child in Calumbi. The woman has heard that if dead people aren’t buried in a coffin they go to hell; this fills her with anguish. Rufino offers to make a coffin and dig a grave for her friend. She asks him point-blank what he wants. His voice trembling, Rufino tells her. The stranger? the Bearded Lady repeats. Galileo Gall? Yes, him. Some men on horseback took him away as they were leaving the village. And she speaks again of the dead man, she couldn’t drag him any farther, it was too hard, she’d decided she’d rather stay behind and care for him. Were they soldiers? Rural Police? Bandits? She doesn’t know. The ones who cut off his hair in Ipupiará? No, it wasn’t the same ones. Were they looking for him? Yes, they didn’t bother the circus people. Did they go off in the direction of Canudos? She doesn’t know that, either.

Rufino uses the boards over the window to prepare the deceased for burial, tying them around with the bright-colored bits of cloth. He hoists the dubious coffin onto his shoulder and goes outside, followed by the woman. Some villagers show him the way to the cemetery and lend him a shovel. He digs a grave, places the coffin in it and fills it up again, and remains there while the Bearded Lady prays. On returning to the little settlement, she thanks him effusively. Rufino, who has been standing staring into the distance, asks her: Did they also take the woman with them? The Bearded Lady blinks. You’re Rufino, she says. He nods. She tells him that Jurema knew he’d be coming. Did they take her away with them, too? No, she went off with the Dwarf, heading for Canudos. A group of sick people and healthy townspeople overhear the conversation and are amused. Rufino is so exhausted he begins to stagger. He is offered hospitality and agrees to go rest in the house that the Bearded Lady is occupying. He sleeps till nightfall. When he wakes up, a man and wife bring him a bowl with a thick substance in it. He has a conversation with them about the war and the upheavals all over the world. When the man and woman leave, he asks the Bearded Lady about Galileo and Jurema. She tells him what she knows and informs him that she, too, is going to Canudos. Isn’t she afraid she’s entering the lion’s den? She is more afraid of being all by herself; up there she’ll perhaps meet up with the Dwarf again and they can go on keeping each other company.

The following morning, they bid each other goodbye. The tracker takes off toward the west, since the villagers assure him that that was the way the
capangas
were headed. He makes his way amid bushes, thorns, and thickets and in the middle of the morning he dodges a patrol of scouts who are combing the scrub. He halts often to examine the animal tracks on the ground. He captures no game that day and is obliged to chew on bits of greenery. He spends the night in Riacho de Varginha. Shortly after resuming his journey the next morning, he spies the army of Throat-Slitter, the name that is on everyone’s lips. He sees the troops’ bayonets gleaming in the dust, hears the creaking of gun carriages rolling along the trail. He breaks into his little trot again but does not enter Zélia till after dark. The villagers tell him that not only have the soldiers passed that way but Pajeú’s
jagunços
as well. Nobody, however, remembers having seen a party of
capangas
who have anybody who looks like Gall with them. Rufino hears the cane whistles keening in the distance; they hoot intermittently all night long.

Between Zélia and Monte Santo the terrain is flat, dry, strewn with sharp stones, and without trails. Rufino makes his way cautiously, fearing that he may meet up with a patrol at any moment. He finds water and food at mid-morning. Shortly thereafter, he has the feeling that he is not alone. He looks about, inspects the scrub, walks back and forth: nothing. A while later, however, there is no doubting the fact: he is being watched, by several men. He tries to shake them, changes direction, hides, runs. Useless: they are trackers who know their business and they are still there, invisible and very close by. He walks on resignedly, taking no precautions now, hoping that they’ll kill him. A few minutes later, he hears a herd of goats bleating. He finally comes upon a clearing. Before he spies the armed men, he sees the young girl: an albino, deformed, with a mad look in her eyes. Dark bruises show through her ripped garments. She is playing with a handful of animal bells and a cane whistle of the sort that shepherds use to guide their flocks. The men, some twenty of them, allow him to approach them, not saying a word to him. They look more like peasants than
cangaceiros
, but they have machetes, carbines, bandoleers, knives, powder horns. When Rufino reaches them, one of them walks toward the girl, smiling so as not to frighten her. Her eyes open wide and she sits there stock-still. Making gestures the while to reassure her, he takes the little bells and the whistle from her and joins his comrades again. Rufino sees that all of them are wearing little bells and whistles around their necks.

They are sitting more or less in a circle eating. They do not appear to be at all surprised by his arrival, as though they were expecting him. The tracker raises his hand to his straw sombrero: “Good afternoon.” Some of the men go on eating, others nod, and one of them murmurs with his mouth full: “Praised be the Blessed Jesus.” He is a husky Indian half-breed with an olive complexion and a scar that has left him with almost no nose at all. “That’s Pajeú,” Rufino thinks. “He’s going to kill me.” This makes him feel sad, for he’ll die without having struck in the face the man who dishonored him. Pajeú begins to question him. Without animosity, without even asking him to hand over his weapons: where he’s from, who he is working for, where he’s going, whom he’s seen. Rufino answers without hesitation, falling silent only when he is interrupted by another question. The other men go on eating; only when Rufino explains what it is he’s looking for and why, do they turn their heads and scrutinize him from head to foot. Pajeú makes him say again how many times he has guided the flying brigades that hunt down
cangaceiros
, to see if he’ll contradict himself. But since Rufino has decided from the beginning to tell the truth, he doesn’t give any wrong answers. Did he know that one of those flying brigades was hunting for Pajeú? Yes, he knew that. The former outlaw then says that he remembers that brigade led by Captain Geraldo Macedo, Bandit-Chaser, because he had a hard time shaking it. “You were a good tracker,” he says. “I still am,” Rufino answers. “But your trackers are better. I couldn’t get rid of them.” From time to time a silent figure emerges from the brush, comes over to Pajeú to tell him something, and then melts back into the brush like a ghost. Without becoming impatient, without asking what his fate is to be, Rufino watches them finish eating. The
jagunços
rise to their feet, bury the coals of their fire, rub out the traces of their presence with
icó
branches. Pajeú looks at him. “Don’t you want to save your soul?” he asks him. “I must save my honor first,” Rufino answers. No one laughs. Pajeú hesitates for a few seconds. “The stranger you’re looking for has been taken to Calumbi, to the Baron de Canabrava’s,” he mutters. The next moment he rides off with his men. Rufino sees the albino girl, still sitting on the ground, and two black vultures at the top of an
imbuzeiro
, clearing their throats like hoarse old men.

He leaves the clearing immediately and walks on, but before half an hour has gone by, a paralysis overtakes his body, an utter exhaustion that causes him to collapse on the spot. When he awakens, his face, neck, and arms are full of insect bites. For the first time since leaving Queimadas, he feels bitterly discouraged, convinced that what he is doing is all in vain. He sets out again, in the opposite direction. But now, despite the fact that he is passing through an area that he has been back and forth across countless times since the day when he first learned to walk, in which he knows where all the shortcuts are and where to look for water and which are the best places to set traps, the day’s journey seems interminable and at each and every moment he must fight off his feeling of dejection. Very often, something that he has dreamed that afternoon comes back to him again: the earth is a thin crust that may split open and swallow him up at any moment. He cautiously fords the river just before Monte Santo, and from there it takes him less than ten hours to reach Calumbi. All through the night, he has not stopped to rest, and at times he has broken into a run. As he crosses the hacienda on which he was born and spent his childhood, he does not notice how overgrown with weeds the fields are, how few people are about, the general state of deterioration. He meets a few peons who greet him, but he does not return their greetings or answer their questions. None of them bars his way and a few of them follow him at a distance.

On the terrace surrounding the manor house, beneath the imperial palms and the tamarinds, in addition to peons going back and forth to the stables, storehouses, and servants’ quarters, there are armed men. The blinds at the window are lowered. Rufino walks slowly toward the
capangas
, watching them carefully. Without any sort of order, without a word to each other, they step forward to meet him. There are no shouts, no threats, not even an exchange of questions and answers between them and Rufino. When the tracker reaches them, they take hold of him and pin his arms down. They do not hit him or take his carbine or his machete or his knife away from him, and try not to be brutal with him. They simply block his way. At the same time, they clap him on the back, say hello to him, tell him not to be pigheaded and to listen to reason. The tracker’s face is drenched with sweat. He does not hit them either, but he tries to get away. When he gets loose from two of them and takes a step forward, two others immediately force him to step back. This sort of game goes on for quite some time. Rufino finally gives up and hangs his head. The men let go of him. He looks at the two-story building, the round roof tiles, the window of the baron’s study. He takes a step forward and immediately the men bar his way again.