The War Of The End Of The World (93 page)

But, on entering Colonel Medeiros’s hut, Queluz immediately remembers all that. The face of the commanding officer of the First Brigade is about to explode with rage. He is not waiting at the doorway to congratulate him, as Queluz imagined he would be. He is sitting on a folding camp stool, heaping abuse on someone. Who is it he’s shouting at? At Pajeú. Peeking between the backs and profiles of the crowd of officers in the hut, Queluz spies the sallow face with the garnet-colored scar cutting all the way across it, lying on the ground at the colonel’s feet. He is not dead; his eyes are half open, and Queluz, to whom no one is paying the slightest attention, who has no notion why they have brought him here and who feels like leaving, tells himself that the colonel’s fit of temper is doubtless due to the distant, disdainful look in Pajeú’s eyes as he gazes up at him. It is not that, however, but the attack on the camp: eighteen men have been killed.

“Eighteen! Eighteen!” Colonel Medeiros rages, clenching and unclenching his teeth as though champing at a bit. “Thirty-some wounded! Those of us in the First Brigade spend the whole damned day up here scratching our balls while the Second Brigade fights, and then you come along with your band of degenerates and inflict more casualties on us than on them.”

“He’s going to burst into tears,” Queluz thinks. In a panic, he imagines that the colonel is going to find out somehow that he went to sleep at his post and let the bandits get past him without giving the alarm. The commanding officer of the First Brigade leaps up from his camp stool and begins to kick and stamp his feet. The officers’ backs and profiles block Queluz’s view of what’s happening on the ground. But seconds later he sees the
jagunço
again: the crimson scar has grown much larger, covering the bandit’s entire face, a featureless, shapeless mass of dirt and mud. But his eyes are still open, and in them that indifference that is so strange and so offensive. A thread of bloody spittle trickles from his lips.

Queluz sees a saber in Colonel Medeiros’s hands and he is certain that he is about to give Pajeú the
coup de grâce
. But he merely rests the tip of it on the
jagunço
’s neck. Total silence reigns in the hut, and Queluz finds himself in the grip of the same hieratic solemnity as the officers.

Finally Colonel Medeiros calms down. He sits back down on the camp stool and flings his saber on the cot. “Killing you would be doing you a favor,” he mutters in bitter rage. “You have betrayed your country, murdered your compatriots, sacked, plundered, committed every imaginable crime. There is no punishment terrible enough for what you have done.”

“He’s laughing,” Queluz thinks to himself in amazement. Yes, the
caboclo
is laughing. His forehead and the little crest of flesh that is all that is left of his nose are puckered up, his lips are parted, and his little slits of eyes gleam as he utters a sound that is undoubtedly a laugh.

“Do you find what I’m saying amusing?” Colonel Medeiros says, slowly and deliberately. But the next moment his tone of voice changes, for Pajeú’s face has turned rigid. “Examine him, Doctor…”

Captain Bernardo da Ponte Sanhueza kneels down, puts his ear to the bandit’s chest, observes his eyes, takes his pulse.

“He’s dead, sir,” Queluz hears him say.

Colonel Medeiros’s face blanches.

“His body’s a sieve,” the doctor adds. “It’s a miracle that he’s lasted this long with all that lead in him.”

“It’s my turn now,” Queluz thinks. Colonel Medeiros’s piercing little blue-green eyes are about to seek him out among the officers, find him, and he will hear the question he is so afraid of: “Why didn’t you give the alert?” He’ll lie, he’ll swear in the name of God and his mother that he did give it, that he fired warning shots and yelled out. But the seconds pass and Colonel Medeiros continues to sit there on the camp stool, contemplating the corpse of the bandit who died laughing at him.

“Here’s Queluz, sir,” he hears Captain Oliveira say.

Now, now. The officers step aside to allow him to present himself before the commanding officer of the First Brigade. Colonel Medeiros looks at him, rises to his feet. Queluz sees—his heart is pounding in his chest—the colonel’s face relax, notes that he is trying his best to smile at him. Queluz smiles back at him, gratefully.

“So you’re the one who captured him?” the colonel asks.

“Yes, sir,” Queluz answers, standing at attention.

“Finish the job,” Medeiros says to him, holding his sword out to him with an energetic gesture. “Put his eyes out and cut his tongue off. Then lop his head off and throw it over the barricade, so those bandits who are still alive will know what awaits them.”

When the nearsighted journalist finally left, the Baron de Canabrava, who had accompanied him to the street, discovered that it was pitch-dark outside. On coming back into the house, he stood leaning against the massive front door with his eyes closed, trying to banish a seething mass of violent, confused images from his mind. A manservant came running with an oil lamp in his hand: would he like his dinner reheated? He answered no, and before sending the servant to bed he asked him whether Estela had eaten dinner. Yes, some time ago, and then she had retired to her room.

Instead of going upstairs to her bedroom, the baron returned to his study like a sleepwalker, listening to the echo of his footsteps. He could smell, he could see, floating like fluff in the stuffy air of the room, the words of that long conversation which, it now seemed to him, had been not so much a dialogue as two monologues running side by side without ever meeting. He would not see the nearsighted journalist again, he would not have another talk with him. He would not allow him to bring to life yet again that monstrous story whose unfolding had involved the destruction of his property, his political power, his wife. “Only she matters,” he murmured to himself. Yes, he could have resigned himself to all the other losses. For the time he had left to live—ten, fifteen years?—he possessed the means to do so in the manner to which he was accustomed. It did not matter that this style of life would end with his death: he had, after all, no heirs whose fortunes he should be concerned about. And as for political power, in the final analysis he was happy to have rid himself of that heavy load on his shoulders. Politics had been a burden that he had taken upon himself because there was no one else to do so, because of the vast stupidity, irresponsibility, or corruption of others, not out of some heartfelt vocation: politics had always bored him, wearied him, impressed him as being an inane, depressing occupation, since it revealed human wretchedness more clearly than any other. Moreover, he harbored a secret resentment against politics, an absorbing occupation for which he had sacrificed the scientific leanings that he had felt ever since he was a youngster collecting butterflies and making herbariums. The tragedy to which he would never be able to resign himself was Estela. It had been Canudos, he thought, that stupid, incomprehensible story of blind, stubborn people, of diametrically opposed fanaticisms, that had been to blame for what had happened to Estela. He had severed his ties to the world and would not reestablish them. He would allow nothing, no one to remind him of this episode. “I will have them give him work on the paper,” he thought. “As a proofreader, a court reporter, some mediocre job that’s tailor-made for a mediocrity like him. But I won’t receive him or listen to him again. And if he writes that book about Canudos—though naturally he won’t—I shall not read it.”

He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a glass of cognac. As he warmed the drink in the palm of his hand, sitting in the leather easy chair from which he had set the course of politics in the state of Bahia for a quarter of a century, the Baron de Canabrava listened to the harmonious symphony of the crickets in the garden, with a chorus of frogs joining in from time to time in dissonant counterpoint. What was making him so anxious? What was responsible for this feeling of impatience, this prickling sensation all over, as though he were forgetting something extremely urgent, as though in the next few seconds something decisive, something irrevocable were about to happen in his life? Canudos still?

He had not banished it from his mind: it was there again. But the image that had loomed up, vivid and threatening, before his eyes was not something that he had heard from the lips of his visitor. It had happened when neither that nearsighted man nor the little servant girl from Canudos who was now his woman, nor the Dwarf, nor any of the survivors of Canudos, was any longer about. It was old Colonel Murau who had told him about it, over a glass of port, the last time they had seen each other here in Salvador, something that Murau had heard in turn from the owner of the Formosa hacienda, one of the many burned to the ground by the
jagunços
. The owner had stayed on at the hacienda, despite everything, out of love for his land, or because he didn’t know where else to go. And he had stayed on there all through the war, eking out a living thanks to the commercial deals he arranged with the soldiers. When he learned that the war was all over, that Canudos had fallen, he hurriedly made his way up there with a bunch of peons to lend a hand. When they sighted the hillsides of the former
jagunço
citadel, the army had gone. While still a fair distance away—Colonel Murau recounted, as the baron sat there listening—they had been dumfounded by a strange, indefinable, unfathomable sound, so loud it shook the air. And the air was filled, as well, with a terrible stench that turned their stomachs. But it was only when they made their way down the drab, stony slope of O Poço Trabubu and discovered at their feet what had ceased to be Canudos and become the sight that greeted their eyes, that they realized that the sound was that of the flapping wings and pecking beaks of thousands upon thousands of vultures, of that endless sea of grayish, blackish shapes covering everything, devouring everything, gorging themselves, finishing off, as they sated themselves, what neither dynamite nor bullets nor fires had been able to reduce to dust: those limbs, extremities, heads, vertebras, viscera, skin that the conflagration had spared or only half charred and that these rapacious creatures were now crushing to bits, tearing apart, swallowing, gulping down. “Thousands upon thousands of vultures,” Colonel Murau had said. And also that, stricken with terror in the face of what seemed like a nightmare come true, the owner of the hacienda of Formosa and his peons, realizing that there was nobody left to bury, since the carrion birds were doing their work, had left the place on the run, covering their mouths and holding their noses. The intrusive, loathsome image had taken root in his mind and refused to go away. “The end that Canudos deserved,” he had answered before forcing old Murau to change the subject.

Was this what was troubling him, making him anxious, setting his every nerve on edge? That swarm of countless carrion birds devouring the human rot that was all that was left of Canudos? “Twenty-five years of dirty, sordid politics to save Bahia from imbeciles and helpless idiots faced with a responsibility that they were incapable of assuming, the end result of which was a feast of vultures,” he thought to himself. And at that moment, superimposed on the image of the hecatomb, there reappeared the tragicomic face, the laughingstock with the watery crossed eyes, the scarecrow frame, the overprominent chin, the absurdly drooping ears, speaking to him of love, of pleasure in a fervent voice: “The greatest thing in all this world, Baron, the one and only thing whereby man can discover a measure of happiness, can learn what the word happiness means.” That was it. That was what was troubling him, upsetting him, causing him such anguish. He took a swallow of cognac, held the fiery liquid in his mouth for a moment, swallowed it, and felt its warmth trickle down his throat.

He rose to his feet: he had no idea as yet what he was going to do, what he wanted to do, but he was aware of a stirring deep within him, and it seemed to him that he had arrived at a crucial moment in which he was obliged to come to a decision that would have incalculable consequences. What was he going to do, what was it he wanted to do? He set the glass of cognac down on top of the liquor cabinet, and feeling his heart, his temples pounding, his blood coursing through the geography of his body, he crossed the study, the enormous living room, the vast entry hall—with not a soul around at this hour, and everything in shadow, though there was a faint glow from the street lamps outside—to the foot of the staircase. There was a single lamp lighting the way up the stairs. He hurried up, on tiptoe, so softly that even he was unable to hear his own footfalls. Once at the top, without hesitating, instead of heading for his own apartments, he made his way toward the room in which the baroness was sleeping, separated only by a screen from the alcove where Sebastiana had installed herself so as to be close at hand if Estela needed her in the night.

As his hand reached out toward the latch, the thought occurred to him that the door might be locked. He had never entered the room without knocking. No, the door was not barred. He entered, closed the door behind him, searched for the bolt, and slid it home. From the doorway he spied the yellow light of the night lamp—a candlewick floating in a little bowl of oil—whose dim light illuminated part of the baroness’s bed, the blue counterpane, the canopy overhead, and the thin gauze curtains. Standing there in the doorway, without making the slightest sound; without his hands trembling, the baron slowly removed all his clothes. Once he was naked, he crossed the room on tiptoe to Sebastiana’s little alcove.

He reached the edge of her bed without awakening her. There was a dim light in the room—the glow from the gas lamp out in the street, which took on a blue tinge as it filtered through the curtains—and the baron could make out the woman’s sleeping form, lying on her side, the sheets rising and falling with her breathing, her head resting on a little round pillow. Her long loose black hair fanned out across the bed and over the side, touching the floor. The thought came to him that he had never seen Sebastiana standing up with her hair undone, that it must no doubt reach to her heels, and that at one time or another, before a mirror or before Estela, she must surely have played at enveloping herself in this long hair as though in a silken mantle, and the image began to arouse a dormant instinct in him. He raised his hands to his belly and felt his member: it was flaccid, but in its warmth, its complaisance, the swiftness and the feeling close to joy with which he unsheathed the glans from the prepuce, he sensed a profound life, yearning to be called forth, reawakened, poured out. The things he had been afraid of as he approached—what would the servant’s reaction be? what would Estela’s be if Sebastiana woke up screaming?—disappeared instantly and, as startling as a hallucination, the face of Galileo Gall flashed before his mind and he remembered the vow of chastity that the revolutionary had sworn to himself in order to concentrate his energies on things he believed to be of a higher order—action, science. “I have been as stupid as he was,” he thought. Without ever having sworn to do so, he had kept a similar vow for a very long time, renouncing pleasure, happiness, in favor of that base occupation that had brought misfortune to the person he loved most dearly in this world.

Without thinking, automatically, he bent over and sat down on the edge of the bed, at the same time moving his two hands, one downward to pull back the sheets covering Sebastiana, and the other toward her mouth to stifle her cry. The woman shrank away, lay there rigid, and opened her eyes, and a wave of warmth, the intimate aura of Sebastiana’s body reached his nostrils; he had never been this close to her before, and immediately he felt his member come to life, and it was as though he were also suddenly aware that his testicles existed, that they, too, were there, coming back to life between his legs. Sebastiana had been unable to cry out, to sit up: only to utter a muffled exclamation that brought the warm air of her breath against the palm of the hand that he was holding a fraction of an inch away from her mouth.

“Don’t scream; it’s best if you don’t scream,” he murmured. He could hear that his voice was not firm, but what was making it tremble was not hesitation but desire. “I beg you not to scream.”

With the hand that had pulled the sheets back, through her nightdress buttoned all the way up to the neck, he now fondled Sebastiana’s breasts: they were large, well proportioned, extraordinarily firm for a woman who must be close to forty years old; he felt the nipples grow hard, shiver from the cold beneath his fingertips. He ran his fingers along the ridge of her nose, her lips, her eyebrows, with the most delicate touch of which he was capable, and finally sank them in the tangle of hair and gently wound her locks round them. Meanwhile, he tried to exorcise with a smile the tremendous fear he saw in the woman’s stunned, incredulous gaze.

“I should have done this a long time ago, Sebastiana,” he said, brushing her cheeks with his lips. “I should have done it the very first day I desired you. I would have been happier, Estela would have been happier, and perhaps you would have been, too.”

He brought his face down, his lips seeking the woman’s, but struggling to break the hold of fear and surprise that had paralyzed her, she moved away, and as he read the plea in her eyes he heard her stammer: “I beg you, in the name of what you love most, I implore you…The senhora, the senhora.”

“The senhora is there and I love her more than you,” he heard himself say, but had the sensation that it was someone else who was speaking, and still trying to think; he for his part was merely that body in heat, that member, completely roused now, that he felt bounding against his belly, erect and hard and wet. “I’m also doing this for her, although you may not be able to understand that.”

Fondling her breasts, he had found the buttons of her nightdress and was popping them out of their little buttonholes, one after the other, as with his other hand he took Sebastiana by the nape of the neck and forced her to turn her head and offer him her lips. He could feel that they were ice-cold and tightly pressed together, and noted that the servant’s teeth were chattering, that she was trembling all over, and that in the space of a few seconds she had become drenched with sweat.

“Open your mouth,” he ordered her, in a tone of voice that he had very seldom used in his life when speaking to servants, or to slaves when he had had them. “If I must force you to be docile, I shall do so.”

He felt the servant—conditioned, doubtless by a habit, a fear, or an instinct of self-preservation that had come down to her from the depths of time, along with a centuries-old tradition that his tone of voice had succeeded in reminding her of—obey him, as at the same time her face, in the blue shadow of the alcove, contorted in a grimace in which fear was mingled now with infinite repulsion. But this did not matter to him as he forced his tongue inside her mouth, met hers violently, pushed it back and forth from one side to the other, explored her gums, her palate, tried his best to introduce a little of his saliva into her mouth and then suck it back and swallow it. Meanwhile, he had gone on ripping the buttons from her nightdress and trying to remove it. But though Sebastiana’s spirit and her mouth had yielded to his will, her entire body continued to resist, despite her fear, or perhaps because an even greater fear than the one that had taught her to bow to the will of any person who had power over her made her defend what he was trying to take from her. Her body was still hunched over, rigid, and the baron, who had lain down in the bed and was trying to embrace her, felt himself stopped by Sebastiana’s arms, held like a shield in front of her body. He heard her say something in a pleading, muffled whisper and he was sure that she had begun to cry. But he was concentrating his entire attention now on trying to remove her nightdress, which he was having difficulty pulling down past her shoulders. He had been able to put one arm around her waist and draw her to him, forcing her to press her body against his, as with his other hand he went on tugging the nightdress off. After a struggle—he could not have said how long it lasted—during which, as he pushed and pulled, his energy and his desire grew greater and greater by the moment, he finally managed to climb on top of Sebastiana. As he forced her legs, pressed as tightly together as though they were brazed, apart with one of his, he avidly kissed her neck, her shoulders, her bosom, and, lingeringly, her breasts. He felt himself about to ejaculate against her belly—an ample, warm, soft form against which his rod was rubbing—and closed his eyes and made a great effort to hold back. He managed to, and then slid all over Sebastiana’s body, caressing her, sniffing her, kissing her haunches, her groin, her belly, the hairs of her pubis, afterward discovering them in his mouth, thick and curly. With his hands, his chin, he pressed down with all his strength, hearing her sobs, until he had made her part her thighs enough for his mouth to reach her vulva. As he was kissing it, sucking gently, burying his tongue in it, sucking its juices, overcome by an intoxication that, at long last, freed him of everything that was making him sad and bitter, of those images that were eating his life away, he felt the gentle pressure of fingers on his back. He turned his head and looked, knowing what he would see: Estela standing there looking at him.