The War Of The End Of The World (84 page)

He found himself trotting along in a world turned topsy-turvy, a chaos of clouds of smoke, noise, mountains of debris. He had stopped weeping, all his senses focused now on the perilous task of skirting obstacles, of keeping from tripping, stumbling, falling, letting go of the woman. He had gone up Campo Grande dozens of times, heading for the square between the churches, and yet he recognized nothing: walls caved in, holes, stones, all manner of things scattered about everywhere, people scurrying in all directions, shooting, fleeing, screaming. Instead of cannon reports, he now heard rifle shots and children crying. He didn’t know exactly when it was that he let go of the woman, but all of a sudden he realized that he was no longer clinging to her but to a quite different shape trotting along, the sound of its anxious panting breath mingling with his own. He was holding on to it by the thick locks of its abundant mane. The two of them were straggling; they were being left behind. He clutched his fistful of the Lion of Natuba’s hair in an iron grip; if he let go of it, all would be lost. And as he ran, leapt, dodged, he heard himself begging him not to get too far ahead, to have pity on a poor soul who could not make his way along by himself.

He collided with something that he took to be a wall but turned out to be men’s bodies. He felt himself being pushed back, turned away, when he heard the woman’s voice asking to be let through. The wall opened, he caught a glimpse of barrels and sacks and men shooting and shouting to each other, and, with the Mother of Men on one side of him and the Lion of Natuba on the other, passed through a little door made of wooden pickets and entered a dark, closed space. Touching his face, the woman said to him: “Stay here. Don’t be afraid. Pray.” Straining his eyes, he managed to see her and the Lion of Natuba disappear through a second little door.

He sank to the floor. He was worn out, hungry, thirsty, sleepy, overcome by a desperate need to forget the whole nightmare. “I’m in the Sanctuary,” he thought. “The Counselor is here,” he thought. He was amazed at having ended up here, aware of how privileged he was: he was about to see and hear, from close at hand, the eye of the storm that had shaken all of Brazil, the most famous, the most hated man in the country. What good would it do him? Would he have the chance to tell people about it? He tried to overhear what they were saying there inside the Sanctuary, but the uproar outside kept him from catching a single word. The light filtering through the cane-stalk walls was a dazzling white and the heat stifling. The soldiers must be in Canudos, there must be fighting in the streets. He nonetheless felt a deep peace steal over him in this solitary, shadowy redoubt.

The picket door creaked and he glimpsed the dim silhouette of a woman with a kerchief on her head. She placed a bowl of food in his hands and a tin full of a liquid, which, when he took a sip of it, proved to be milk.

“Mother Maria Quadrado is praying for you,” he heard a voice say. “Praised be Blessed Jesus the Counselor.”

“Praised be He,” he answered, continuing to chew and swallow. Every time he ate in Canudos his jaws ached, as though they had become stiff from disuse: it was an agreeable pain that his body rejoiced in. Once he had finished, he lay down on the floor, cradled his head in the crook of his arm, and fell asleep. Eating, sleeping: this was now the only happiness possible. The rifle shots were closer, then farther away again, then seemed to be coming from all around him, and there was the sound of hurrying footsteps. Colonel Moreira César’s thin, ascetic, nervous face was there, just as he had seen it so many times as he rode alongside him, or at night when they camped, talking together after chow. He recognized his voice without a moment’s hesitation, its peremptory, steely edge: the softening-up operation must be carried out before the final charge so as to save lives for the Republic; an abscess must be lanced immediately and without sentimentality, otherwise the infection would rot the entire organism. At the same time, he knew that the gunfire was growing heavier and heavier, the casualties, the cave-ins following one upon the other faster and faster, and he had the feeling that armed men were coming and going above him, trying their best not to trample him underfoot, bringing news of the war that he preferred to turn a deaf ear to because it was bad.

He was certain that he was no longer dreaming when he discovered that the bleating that he was hearing was coming from a little white lamb that was licking his hand. He stroked the creature’s woolly head and it allowed him to do so without bolting in fear. The other sound was the voices of two people talking together alongside him. He raised to his eye his monocle of glass shards, which he had clutched tightly in his fist as he slept. In the dim light he recognized the vague silhouette of Father Joaquim and that of a barefoot woman dressed in a white tunic with a blue kerchief on her head. The curé of Cumbe was holding a rifle between his legs and was wearing a bandoleer of bullets around his neck. As well as he could make out, Father Joaquim had the look of a man who had been fighting: his spare locks were disheveled and matted with dirt, his cassock in tatters, one sandal was tied round his foot with a length of twine rather than a leather thong, and he was obviously completely exhausted. He was speaking of someone named Joaquinzinho.

“He went out with Antônio Vilanova to get food,” he heard him saying dejectedly. “I heard from Abbot João that the whole group that was out in the trenches along the Vaza-Barris got back safely.” His voice choked up and he cleared his throat. “The ones who survived the attack.”

“What about Joaquinzinho?” the woman said again.

It was Alexandrinha Correa, the woman people told so many stories about: that she knew how to find underground water sources, that she had been Father Joaquim’s concubine. He was unable to make out her face. She and the curé were sitting on the floor. The inner door of the Sanctuary was open and there did not appear to be anyone inside.

“He didn’t make it back,” the little priest said softly. “Antônio did, and Honório, and many of the others who were at Vaza-Barris. But he didn’t. Nobody could tell me what happened to him, nobody’s seen him since.”

“I’d at least like to be able to bury him,” the woman said. “Not just leave him lying there in the open, like an animal with no master.”

“He may not be dead,” the curé of Cumbe answered. “If the Vilanova brothers and others got back, why shouldn’t Joaquinzinho? Maybe he’s on the towers now, or on the barricade at São Pedro, or with his brother at Fazenda Velha. The soldiers haven’t been able to take the trenches there either.”

The nearsighted journalist suddenly felt overjoyed and wanted to ask about Jurema and the Dwarf, but he contained himself: he sensed that he ought not to intrude upon the couple’s privacy at this intimate moment. The voices of the curé and the devout disciple were those of calm acceptance of fate, not at all dramatic. The little lamb was nibbling at his hand. He raised himself to a sitting position, but neither Father Joaquim nor the woman seemed to mind that he was there awake, listening.

“If Joaquinzinho is dead, it’s better if Atanásio dies, too,” the woman said. “So they can keep each other company in death.”

He suddenly had gooseflesh across the nape of his neck. Was it because of what the woman had said, or the pealing of the bells? He could hear them ringing, very close by, and heard Ave Marias chorused by countless voices. It was dusk, then. The battle had already gone on for almost an entire day. He listened. It was not over yet: mingled with the sound of prayers and bells were salvos of artillery fire. Some of the shells were bursting just above their heads. Death was more important to these people than life. They had lived in utter dereliction and their one ambition was to be given a decent burial. How to understand them? Perhaps, however, if a person were living the sort of life that he was at this moment, death would be his only hope of a reward, a “fiesta,” as the Counselor always called it.

The curé of Cumbe was looking his way. “It’s sad that children must kill and die fighting,” he heard him murmur. “Atanásio is fourteen, and Joaquinzinho isn’t yet thirteen. They’ve been killing and risking being killed for a year now. Isn’t that sad?”

“Yes, it is,” the nearsighted journalist stammered. “Indeed it is. I fell asleep. How’s the battle going, Father?”

“They’ve been stopped at São Pedro,” the parish priest of Cumbe answered. “At the barricade that Antônio Vilanova erected this morning.”

“Do you mean here inside the city?” the nearsighted man asked.

“Just thirty paces from here.”

São Pedro. The street that cut through Canudos from the river to the cemetery, the one parallel to Campo Grande, one of the few that deserved to be called a street. Now it was a barricade and the soldiers were there. Just thirty paces away. A chill ran up his spine. The sound of prayers grew louder, softer, disappeared, mounted again, and it seemed to the nearsighted journalist that in the intervals between explosions he could hear the Counselor’s hoarse voice or the tiny piping voice of the Little Blessed One there outside, and that the women, the wounded, the oldsters, the dying, the
jagunço
sharpshooters were all reciting the Ave Maria in chorus. What must the soldiers think of these prayers?

“It’s also sad that a priest should be obliged to take rifle in hand,” Father Joaquim said, patting the weapon that he was holding across his knees, just as the
jagunços
did. “I didn’t know how to shoot. Father Martinez had never shot a rifle either, not even to go deer-hunting.”

Was this the same elderly little man the nearsighted journalist had seen whimpering and sniveling before Colonel Moreira César, half dead with panic?

“Father Martinez?” he asked.

He sensed Father Joaquim’s sudden wariness. So there were other priests in Canudos with them. He imagined them loading their guns, aiming, shooting. But wasn’t the Church on the side of the Republic? Hadn’t the Counselor been excommunicated by the archbishop? Hadn’t edicts condemning the mad, fanatical heretic of Canudos been read aloud in all the parishes? How, then, could there be curés killing for the Counselor?

“Do you hear them? Listen, listen: ‘Fanatics, Sebastianists! Cannibals! Englishmen! Murderers!’ Who was it who came here to kill women and children, to slit people’s throats? Who was it who forced youngsters of thirteen and fourteen to become combatants? You’re here and you’re still alive, isn’t that true?”

He shook with terror from head to foot. Father Joaquim was going to hand him over to the
jagunços
to be made a victim of their vengeance, their hatred.

“Because the fact is you came with the Throat-Slitter, isn’t that true?” the curé went on. “And yet you’ve been given a roof over your head, food, hospitality. Would the soldiers do as much for one of Pedrão’s or Pajeú’s or Abbot João’s men?”

In a choked voice, he stammered in answer: “Yes, yes, you’re right. I’m most grateful to you for having helped me so much, Father Joaquim. I swear it, I swear it.”

“They’re being killed by the dozens, by the hundreds.” The curé of Cumbe pointed in the direction of the street. “And what for? For believing in God, for living their lives in accordance with God’s law. It’s the Massacre of the Innocents, all over again.”

Was the priest about to burst into tears, to stamp his feet in rage, to roll about on the floor in despair? But then the nearsighted journalist saw that the priest, controlling himself with an effort, was beginning to calm down, standing there dejectedly listening to the shots, the prayers, the church bells. The journalist thought he heard bugle commands as well. Still not recovered from the scare that he had had, he timidly asked the priest if by chance he had seen Jurema and the Dwarf. The curé shook his head.

At that moment he heard a melodious baritone voice from close by say: “They’ve been at São Pedro, helping to erect the barricade.”

The monocle of glass shards allowed him to make out, just barely, the Lion of Natuba alongside the little open door of the Sanctuary, either sitting or kneeling, but in any event hunched down inside his dirt-covered tunic, looking at him with his great gleaming eyes. Had he been there for some time or had he just come in? This strange being, half human and half animal, so disconcerted him that he was unable to thank him or utter a single word. He could hardly see him, for the light had grown dimmer, though a beam of waning light was coming in through the cracks between the pickets of the door and dying away in the unkempt mane of the scribe of Canudos.

“I wrote down the Counselor’s every word,” he heard him say in his beautiful lilting voice. The words were addressed to him, an effort on the hunchback’s part to be friendly. “His thoughts, his evening counsels, his prayers, his prophecies, his dreams. For posterity. So as to add another Gospel to the Bible.”

“I see,” the nearsighted journalist murmured, at a loss for words.

“But there’s no more paper or ink left in Belo Monte and my last quill pen broke. What he says can no longer be preserved for all eternity,” the Lion of Natuba went on, without bitterness, with that calm acceptance with which the journalist had seen the people of Canudos face the world, as though misfortunes, like rainstorms, twilights, the ebb and flow of the tide, were natural phenomena against which it would be stupid to rebel.

“The Lion of Natuba is an extremely intelligent person,” the curé of Cumbe murmured. “What God took away from him in the way of legs, a back, shoulders, He made up for by way of the intelligence He gave him. Isn’t that so, Lion?”

“Yes.” The scribe of Canudos nodded, his eyes never leaving the nearsighted journalist. And the latter was certain that this was true. “I’ve read the Abbreviated Missal and the Marian Hours many times. And all the magazines and periodicals that people used to bring me in the old days. Over and over. Have you read a great deal too, sir?”

The nearsighted journalist felt so ill at ease that he would have liked to run from the room, even if it meant running right into the midst of the battle. “I’ve read a few books,” he answered, feeling ashamed. And he thought: “And I got nothing out of them.” That was something that he had discovered in these long months: culture, knowledge were lies, dead weight, blindfolds. All that reading—and it had been of no use whatsoever in helping him to escape, to free himself from this trap.