The War Of The End Of The World (45 page)

The stars were already out when they dismounted in a little thicket of
velame
and
macambira
. They ate without saying a word and Galileo fell asleep before he’d drunk his coffee. His sleep was very troubled, full of images of death. When Ulpino awakened him, it was still pitch-dark and they heard a mournful wail that might have been a fox. The guide had warmed up the coffee and saddled the horses. He tried to start up a conversation with Ulpino. How long had he worked for the baron? What did he think of the
jagunços
? The guide’s answers were so evasive that he gave up trying. Was it his foreign accent that immediately aroused these people’s mistrust? Or was it an even more profound lack of communication, between his entire way of feeling and thinking and theirs?

At that moment Ulpino said something he didn’t understand. He asked him to repeat it, and this time each word was clear: Why was he going to Canudos? “Because there are things going on up there I’ve fought for all my life,” he told him. “They’re creating a world without oppressors or oppressed up there, a world where everybody is free and equal.” He explained, in the simplest terms he could, why Canudos was important for the world, how certain things that the
jagunços
were doing coincided with an old ideal for which many men had given their lives. Ulpino did not interrupt him or look at him as he spoke, and Gall could not help feeling that what he said slid off the guide as wind blows over rocks, without leaving the slightest trace. When he fell silent, Ulpino tilted his head a little to one side, and in what struck Gall as a very odd tone of voice murmured that he thought that Gall was going to Canudos to save his wife’s life. And as Gall stared at him in surprise, he went doggedly on: Hadn’t Rufino said he was going to kill her? Didn’t he care if Rufino killed her? Wasn’t she his wife? Why else would he have stolen her from Rufino? “I don’t have a wife. I haven’t stolen anybody,” Gall replied vehemently. Rufino had been talking about someone else; Ulpino was the victim of a misunderstanding. The guide withdrew into his stubborn silence once more.

They did not speak again till hours later, when they met a group of pilgrims, with carts and water jugs, who offered them a drink. When they had left them behind, Gall felt dejected. It was because of Ulpino’s totally unexpected questions, and his reproachful tone of voice. So as not to let his mind dwell on Jurema and Rufino, he thought about death. He wasn’t afraid of it; that was why he had defied it so many times. If the soldiers captured him before he reached Canudos, he would put up such a fight that they would be forced to kill him; in that way he would not have to endure the humiliation of being tortured and of perhaps turning out to be a coward.

He noted that Ulpino seemed uneasy. They had been riding through a dense stretch of
caatinga
, amid breaths of searing-hot air, for half an hour, when suddenly the guide began to peer intently at the foliage around them. “We’re surrounded,” he whispered. “We’d best wait till they come out.” They climbed down from their horses. Gall tried in vain to see any sign that would indicate that there were human beings close by. But, a few moments later, men armed with shotguns, crossbows, machetes, and knives stepped out from among the trees. A huge black, well along in years, naked to the waist, greeted them in words that Gall could not follow and asked where they were coming from. From Calumbi, Ulpino answered, on their way to Canudos. He then indicated the roundabout route they’d taken, so as, he said, to avoid meeting up with the soldiers. The exchange was tense, but it did not strike Gall as unfriendly. He then saw the black grab the reins of Ulpino’s horse and mount it, as one of the others mounted his. He took a step toward the black, and immediately all those who had shotguns aimed them at him. He gestured to show his peaceful intentions and asked them to listen to him. He explained that he had to get to Canudos immediately, to talk with the Counselor, to tell him something important, that he was going to help them fight the soldiers…but he fell silent, disconcerted by the men’s distant, set, scornful faces. The black waited a moment, but on seeing that Gall was not going to go on, he said something that the latter didn’t understand this time either, whereupon they all left, as silently as they had appeared.

“What did he say?” Gall murmured.

“That the Father, the Blessed Jesus, and the Divine are defending Belo Monte,” Ulpino answered. “They don’t need any more help.”

And he added that they were not very far away now, so there was no need for him to worry about having lost the horses. They immediately set out again. And in fact they made their way through the tangled scrub as fast on foot as they would have on horseback. But the loss of the horses had also meant the loss of the saddlebags with their provisions, and from that moment on they ate dry fruits, shoots, and roots to appease their hunger. As Gall had noted that, since leaving Calumbi, remembering the incidents of the most recent period of his life opened the doors of his mind to pessimism, he tried—it was an old remedy—to lose himself in abstract, impersonal reflections. “Science against an uneasy conscience.” Didn’t Canudos represent an interesting exception to the historical law according to which religion had always served to lull the masses and keep them from rebelling against their masters? The Counselor had used religious superstition to incite the peasants to rise up against bourgeois order and conservative morality and to stir them up against those who traditionally had taken advantage of religious beliefs to keep them enslaved and exploited. In the very best of cases, as David Hume had written, religion was a dream of sick men; that was doubtless true, yet in certain cases, such as that of Canudos, it could serve to rouse the victims of society from their passivity and incite them to revolutionary action, in the course of which rational, scientific truths would gradually take the place of irrational myths and fetishes. Would he have a chance to send a letter on the subject to
L’Etincelle de la révolte
? He tried once again to start up a conversation with the guide. What did Ulpino think of Canudos? The latter chewed for a good while without answering. Finally, with serene fatalism, as though it were of no concern to him, he said: “All of them are going to get their throats slit.” Gall decided that they had nothing more to say to each other.

On leaving the
caatinga
, they found themselves on a plateau covered with
xiquexiques
, which Ulpino split open with his knife; inside was a bittersweet pulp that quenched their thirst. That day they came upon more groups of pilgrims going to Canudos, whom they soon left behind. Meeting up with these people in the depths of whose tired eyes he could glimpse a profound enthusiasm stronger than their misery did Gall’s heart good. They restored his optimism, his euphoria. They had left their homes to go to a place where a war was about to break out. Didn’t that mean that the people’s instinct was always right? They were going there because they had intuited that Canudos embodied their hunger for justice and freedom. He asked Ulpino when they would arrive. At nightfall, if nothing untoward happened. Nothing untoward? What did he mean? They had nothing left that could be stolen from them, wasn’t that so? “We could be killed,” Ulpino answered. But Gall did not allow his spirits to flag. And, after all, he thought to himself with a smile, the stolen horses were a contribution to the cause.

They stopped to rest in a deserted farmhouse that bore traces of having been set afire. There was no vegetation or water. Gall massaged his legs, stiff and sore after the long day’s trek on foot. Ulpino suddenly muttered that they had crossed the circle. He pointed in the direction where there had been stables, animals, cowherds and now there was only desolation. The circle? The one that separated Canudos from the rest of the world. People said that inside it the Blessed Jesus reigned, and outside it the Can. Gall said nothing. In the last analysis, names did not matter; they were wrappings, and if they helped uneducated people to identify the contents more easily, it was of little moment that instead of speaking of justice and injustice, freedom and oppression, classless society and class society, they talked in terms of God and the Devil. He thought that when he arrived in Canudos he would see something he’d seen as an adolescent in Paris: a people bubbling over with revolutionary fervor, defending their dignity tooth and nail. If he could manage to make himself heard, understood, he could indeed help them, by at least sharing with them certain things they did not know, things he had learned in his years of roaming the world.

“Doesn’t it really matter to you at all whether Rufino kills your wife or not?” he heard Ulpino ask him. “Why did you steal her from him, then?”

He felt himself choke with anger. Stumbling over his words, he roared that he didn’t have a wife: how dare he ask him something that he’d already answered? He felt hatred of him mounting, and a desire to insult him.

“It’s beyond all understanding,” he heard Ulpino mutter.

His legs ached so and his feet were so swollen that shortly after they started walking again, he said he needed to rest a while more. As he sank to the ground, he thought: “I’m not the man I was.” He had also grown much thinner; as he looked at the bony forearm on which his head was resting, it seemed to be someone else’s.

“I’m going to see if I can find something to eat,” Ulpino said. “Get a little sleep.”

Gall saw him disappear behind some leafless trees. As he closed his eyes he caught sight of a wooden board mounted on a tree trunk, with half the nails fallen out and a faint inscription: Caracatá. The name kept going round and round in his head as he dropped off to sleep.

Pricking up his ears, the Lion of Natuba thought: “He’s going to speak to me.” His little body trembled with joy. The Counselor lay on his pallet, absolutely silent, but the scribe of Canudos could tell from the way he was breathing whether he was awake or asleep. He began to listen again in the darkness. Yes, he was still awake. His deep eyes must be closed, and beneath his eyelids he must be seeing one of those apparitions that descended to speak to him or that he ascended to visit above the tall clouds: the saints, the Virgin, the Blessed Jesus, the Father. Or else he must be thinking of the wise things that he would say the following day, things that the Lion would note down on the paper that Father Joaquim brought him and that believers of the future would read as believers today read the Gospels.

The thought came to him that since Father Joaquim wouldn’t be coming to Canudos any more, his stock of writing paper would run out soon and he would then have to write on those big sheets of wrapping paper from the Vilanovas’ store that made the ink run. Father Joaquim had rarely spoken to him, and ever since the day he first saw him—the morning he entered Cumbe, scooting along at the Counselor’s heels—he had noted in the priest’s eyes, too, many times, that surprise, uneasiness, repugnance that his person always aroused, and that rapid movement of his head to avert his eyes and put the sight of him out of his mind. But the priest’s capture by the Throat-Slitter’s soldiers and his probable death had saddened him because of the effect that the news had had on the Counselor. “Let us rejoice, my sons,” he had said that evening as he gave his counsel from the tower of the new Temple. “Belo Monte has its first saint.” But later, in the Sanctuary, the Lion of Natuba had been aware of the sadness that had come over him. He refused the food that Maria Quadrado brought him, and as the women of the Choir made his toilet he did not stroke, as he usually did, the little lamb that Alexandrinha Correa (her eyes swollen from weeping) held within his reach. On resting his head on the Counselor’s knees, the Lion did not feel his hand on his hair, and later he heard him sigh: “There won’t be any more Masses; we are orphans now.” The Lion had a foreboding of catastrophe.

Hence he, too, was having difficulty falling asleep. What was going to happen? War was close at hand once again, and this time it would be worse than when the elect and the dogs had clashed at O Taboleirinho. There would be fighting in the streets, there would be more dead and wounded, and he would be one of the first to die. No one would come to his rescue, as the Counselor had rescued him in Natuba. He had gone off with him out of gratitude, and out of gratitude he had followed the saint everywhere, despite the superhuman effort those long journeys meant for him, since he was obliged to hop about on all fours. The Lion understood why many followers missed those bygone days of wandering. There were only a handful of them then, and they had the Counselor all to themselves. How things had changed! He thought of the thousands who envied him for being able to be at the saint’s side night and day. Even he, however, no longer had a chance to be by himself with the Counselor and speak alone with the only man who had always treated him as though he were like everyone else. For the Lion had never noticed the slightest sign that the Counselor saw him as that creature with a crooked back and a giant head who looked like a strange animal born by mistake among human beings.