The War Of The End Of The World (51 page)

“I want to go to Canudos,” he managed to say, grabbing the arm of the man who was speaking. “Take me with you. May I follow you?”

“That’s not possible,” one of the
jagunços
answered, pointing in the direction of the mountaintop. “The dogs are up there. They’d slit your throat. Hide somewhere. You can come to Canudos later, when they’re dead.”

With reassuring gestures, they vanished round about him, leaving him in the dark of night, bewildered, with a phrase echoing in his ears like a mocking joke: “Praised be the Blessed Jesus.” He took a few steps, trying to follow them, but all of a sudden a meteor blocked his path and knocked him to the ground. He realized it was Rufino only after he was already fighting with him, and as he hit out and was hit back, the thought came to him that the little bright spots gleaming like quicksilver that he had glimpsed behind the
jagunços
had been the tracker’s eyes. Had he been waiting until the men from Canudos left, so as to attack him? They did not exchange insults as they struck each other, panting in the mire of the
caatinga
. It was raining again and Gall heard the thunder, the splashing drops, and for some reason the animal violence of the two of them freed him of his despair and for the moment gave his life meaning. As he bit, kicked, scratched, butted, he heard a woman screaming, doubtless Jurema calling to Rufino, and mingled with her cries the Dwarf’s shrill voice, calling to Jurema. But soon all these sounds were drowned out by the repeated blare of bugles coming from the heights and a pealing of church bells in answer. It was as though those bugles and bells, whose meaning he sensed, were of help to him; he was fighting with more energy now, feeling neither pain nor fatigue. He kept falling and getting up again, not knowing whether what he felt trickling over his skin was sweat, rain, or blood. All of a sudden, Rufino slipped out of his hands, sunk from sight, and he heard the dull thud of the body hitting the bottom of the hole. Gall lay there panting, feeling with his hand the edge of the pit that had decided the fight, thinking that this was the first good thing that had happened to him in several days.

“Opinionated fool! Madman! Conceited, pigheaded bastard!” he shouted, choking with rage. “I’m not your enemy, your enemies are the men who are blowing those bugles. Can’t you hear them? That’s more important than my semen, than your wife’s cunt, where you’ve placed your honor, like a stupid bourgeois.”

He realized that, once again, he’d spoken in English. With an effort he rose to his feet. It was raining buckets and the water that fell into his open mouth felt good. Limping because he’d hurt his leg, perhaps when he fell into the pit, perhaps in the fight, he walked on through the
caatinga
, feeling his way through the branches and sharp thorns of the trees, stumbling. He tried to take his bearings from the slow, sad, funereal call of the bugles or the solemn peal of the bells, but the sounds seemed to keep shifting direction. And at that moment something grabbed his feet and sent him rolling on the ground, feeling mud between his teeth. He kicked, trying to free himself, and heard the Dwarf moan.

Clinging to him in terror, the Dwarf cried in his shrill voice: “Don’t abandon me, Gall, don’t leave me by myself. Don’t you hear those whooshing sounds? Don’t you see what they are, Gall?”

Once again he experienced that sensation that it was all a nightmare, unreal, absurd. He remembered that the Dwarf could see in the dark and that sometimes the Bearded Lady called him “cat” and “owl.” He was so exhausted that he continued to lie there, letting the Dwarf cling to him, listening to him whimper over and over that he didn’t want to die. He raised a hand to his shoulder and rubbed it as he strained his ears to hear. There was no doubt about it: they were cannon reports. He had been hearing them at intervals for some time now, thinking that they were deep drumrolls, but now he was certain that they were artillery fire. From cannons, no doubt small ones, or perhaps only mortars, but even so they were enough to blow Canudos sky-high. He was so worn out that he either fainted or fell dead asleep.

The next thing he knew, he was trembling with cold in the feeblest of first light. He heard the Dwarf’s teeth chattering and saw his big eyes rolling in terror. The little fellow must have slept propped up on Gall’s right leg, for it had gone numb. He gradually roused himself, blinked, looked around: hanging from the trees were bits and pieces of uniforms, kepis, field boots, greatcoats, canteens, knapsacks, saber and bayonet scabbards, and a few crude crosses. It was these tattered objects hanging from the trees that the Dwarf was staring at spellbound, as though he were not seeing these belongings but the ghosts of those who had worn them. “At least they defeated these men,” he thought.

He listened. Yes, more cannon fire. It had stopped raining a good many hours before, since everything around him was dry by now, but the cold gnawed his very bones. Weak and aching all over, he managed to struggle to his feet. He spied the knife in his belt and thought to himself that it had never crossed his mind to use it as he was fighting with Rufino. Why had he not tried to kill him this second time either? He heard yet another cannonade, very distinctly now, and a din of bugles, that lugubrious call that sounded like funeral taps. As though in a dream, he saw Rufino and Jurema appear from between the trees. The tracker was badly hurt, or exhausted, for he was leaning on her for support, and Gall knew intuitively that Rufino had spent the night tirelessly searching for him in the darkness of the thicket. He felt hatred for the man’s obstinacy, for his single-minded, unshakable determination to kill him.

They looked each other straight in the eye and Gall felt himself tremble. He pulled the knife out of his belt and pointed in the direction from which the bugle calls were coming. “Do you hear that?” he said in a slow, deliberate voice. “Your brothers are under artillery fire, they’re dying like flies. You kept me from going to join them and dying with them. You’ve made a stupid clown of me…”

Rufino had a sort of wooden dagger in his hand. He saw him let go of Jurema, push her away, crouch down to attack. “What a wretched bastard you are, Gall,” he heard him say. “You talk a lot about the poor, but you betray a friend and dishonor the house where you’re given hospitality.”

He shut him up by throwing himself on him, blind with rage. They began hacking each other to pieces as Jurema watched in a daze, overcome with anguish and fatigue. The Dwarf doubled over in terror.

“I won’t die for my own wretchedness, Rufino,” Gall roared. “My life is worth more than a little semen, you miserable creature.”

They were rolling over and over together on the ground when the two soldiers appeared, running hard. On catching sight of them, they stopped short. Their uniforms were half torn away, and one of them had lost his boots, but they were holding their rifles at the ready.

The Dwarf hid his head. Jurema ran to them, stepped in their line of fire, and begged: “Don’t shoot! They’re not
jagunços…
”

But the soldiers fired point blank at the two adversaries and then threw themselves upon her, grunting, and dragged her into the dry underbrush. Badly wounded, the tracker and the phrenologist went on fighting.

“I should be happy, since this means that my bodily suffering will be over, that I shall see the Father and the Blessed Virgin,” Maria Quadrado thought. But she was transfixed with fear, though she tried her best not to let the women of the Sacred Choir see that she was. If they noticed, they, too, would be paralyzed by fear and the entire structure devoted to caring for the Counselor would collapse. And in the hours to come, she was certain, the Sacred Choir would be needed more than ever. She asked God’s forgiveness for her cowardice and tried to pray as she always had, and had taught the women to do, as the Counselor met with the apostles. But she found herself unable to concentrate on the Credo. Abbot João and Big João were no longer insisting on taking the Counselor to the refuge, but the Street Commander was endeavoring to dissuade him from making the rounds of the trenches: the battle might take you by surprise, out in the open, with no protection, Father.

The Counselor never argued, and he did not do so now. He gently removed the head of the Lion of Natuba from his knees and placed it on the floor without disturbing the Lion’s sleep. He rose to his feet and Abbot João and Big João also stood up. He had become thinner still in recent days and looked even taller now. A shiver ran down Maria Quadrado’s spine as she saw how greatly troubled he was: his eyes narrowed in a deep frown, his mouth half open in a grimace that was like a terrible premonition.

She decided then and there to accompany him. She did not always do so, especially in recent weeks when, because of the press of the crowds in the narrow streets, the Catholic Guard was obliged to form such an unyielding wall around the Counselor that it had been difficult for her and the women of the Choir to stay close to him. But now she suddenly felt it absolutely necessary to go with him. She gestured and the women of the Choir flocked to her side. They followed the men out, leaving the Lion of Natuba fast asleep in the Sanctuary.

The appearance of the Counselor in the doorway of the Sanctuary took the crowd gathered there by surprise, so much so that they did not have time to block his path. At a signal from Big João, the men with blue armbands stationed in the open space between the small Chapel of Santo Antônio and the Temple under construction, to keep order among the pilgrims who had just arrived, ran to surround the saint, who was already striding down the little Street of the Martyrs toward the path leading to As Umburanas. As she trotted after the Counselor, surrounded by the women of the Choir, Maria Quadrado remembered her journey from Salvador to Monte Santo, and the young
sertanejo
who had raped her, for whom she had felt compassion. It was a bad sign: she remembered the greatest sin of her life only when she was greatly dejected. She had repented of this sin countless times, had confessed it publicly and whispered it in the ears of parish priests, and done every manner of penance for it. But her grievous fault still lay there in the depths of her memory, rising periodically to the surface to torture her.

She realized that amid the cries of “Long live the Counselor” there were voices calling her by name—“Mother Maria Quadrado! Mother of Men!”—seeking her out, pointing her out. This popularity seemed to her to be a trap set by the Devil. In the beginning, she had told herself that those who sought her intercession were pilgrims from Monte Santo who had known her there. But in the end she realized that she owed the veneration of which she was the object to the many years that she had devoted to serving the Counselor, that people believed that he had thereby imbued her with his own saintliness.

The feverish bustle, the preparations that she could see in the narrow winding paths, and the huts crowded together on Belo Monte gradually made the Superior of the Sacred Choir forget her worries. The spades and hoes, the sounds of hammering meant that Canudos was preparing for war. The village was being transformed, as though a battle were about to take place in each and every dwelling. She saw men erecting on the rooftops those little platforms that she had seen amid the treetops in the
caatinga
, where hunters lay in wait for jaguars. Even inside the dwellings, men, women, and children, who stopped their work to cross themselves, were digging pits or filling sacks with earth. And all of them had carbines, blunderbusses, pikes, clubs, knives, bandoleers, or were piling up pebbles, odds and ends of iron, stones.

The path leading down to As Umburanas, an open space on either side of a little stream, was unrecognizable. The Catholic Guard had to guide the women of the Choir across this terrain riddled with holes and crisscrossed with countless trenches. Because, in addition to the trench that she had seen when the last procession had passed by this way, there were now pits dug everywhere, with one or two men inside them, surrounded by parapets to protect their heads and serve as supports for their rifles.

The arrival of the Counselor caused great rejoicing. Those who were digging pits or carrying loads of earth came hurrying over to listen to his words. Standing below the cart that the saint had climbed up on, behind a double row of Catholic Guards, Maria Quadrado could see dozens of armed men in the trench, some of whom, fast asleep in ridiculous postures, did not awaken despite all the commotion. In her mind’s eye, she saw them, awake the whole night watching, working, preparing to defend Belo Monte against the Great Dog, and felt affection for all of them, the desire to wipe their foreheads, to give them water and fresh-baked bread and tell them that for their abnegation the Most Holy Mother and the Father would forgive them all their sins.

The Counselor had begun to speak, whereupon all the din ceased. He did not speak of dogs or elect, but of the waves of pain that arose in the Heart of Mary when, in obedience to the law of the Jews, she brought her son to the Temple, eight days after his birth, to shed his blood in the rite of circumcision. The Counselor was describing, in accents that touched Maria Quadrado’s soul—and she could see that all those present were equally moved—how the Christ Child, immediately after being circumcised, raised his arms toward the Holy Mother, seeking to be comforted, and how his bleatings of a little lamb pierced the soul of Our Lady and tortured her, when suddenly it began to rain. The murmur of the crowd, the people falling on their knees before this proof that even the elements were moved by what the Counselor was recounting, told Maria Quadrado that the brothers and sisters realized that a miracle had just taken place. “Is it a sign, Mother?” Alexandrinha Correa murmured. Maria Quadrado nodded. The Counselor said that they should hear how Mary moaned on seeing so lovely a flower baptized in blood at the dawn of His precious life, and that the tears He shed were a symbol of those Our Lady shed daily for the sins and cowardice of men who, like the priest of the Temple, made Jesus bleed. At that moment the Little Blessed One arrived, followed by a procession bearing the statues from the churches and the glass case with the countenance of the Blessed Jesus. Among those who had just arrived was the Lion of Natuba, almost lost from sight in the crowd, his back as curved as a scythe, soaking wet. The Little Blessed One and the scribe were lifted up and carried bodily to their rightful places by the Catholic Guard.