The War Of The End Of The World (18 page)

When the columns of Major Febrônio de Brito’s expeditionary force and the handful of women camp followers who were still tagging along after them converged on the settlement of Mulungu, two leagues away from Canudos, they had no bearers or guides left. The guides recruited in Queimadas and Monte Santo to orient the reconnaissance patrols had turned downright unfriendly the moment they began to come across hamlets that had been set on fire and were still smoking, and all of them had disappeared at once in the gathering dark as the soldiers, collapsing on the ground and lying propped up on each other’s shoulders, thought long thoughts about the wounds and perhaps the death that awaited them behind the mountain peaks that they could see outlined against an indigo-blue sky slowly turning black.

Some six hours later, the runaway guides arrived in Canudos, panting, to beg the Counselor’s forgiveness for having served the Can. They were taken to the Vilanovas’ store, where Abbot João questioned them in minute detail about the soldiers who were coming and then left them in the hands of the Little Blessed One, the person who always received newcomers. The guides had to swear to him that they were not republicans, that they did not accept the separation of Church and State, or the overthrow of the Emperor Dom Pedro II, or civil marriage, or municipal cemeteries, or the metric system, that they would refuse to answer the census questions, and that they would never again steal or get drunk or bet money. Then at his order they made a slight incision in their flesh with their knives as proof of their willingness to shed their blood fighting the Antichrist. Only then were they led—by armed men, through a crowd of people who had been roused from their sleep a short time before by the guides’ arrival, and who applauded them and shook their hands—to the Sanctuary. The Counselor appeared at the door. They fell to their knees, crossed themselves, tried to touch his tunic, to kiss his feet. Overcome with emotion, a number of them burst into sobs. Instead of simply giving them his blessing, the Counselor, his eyes gazing through and beyond them, as when he received the newly elect, leaned down, raised them to their feet, and looked at them one by one with his burning black eyes that none of them would ever forget. Then he asked Maria Quadrado and the eight pious women of the Sacred Choir—dressed in blue tunics with linen sashes—to light the lamps in the Temple of the Blessed Jesus, as they did each evening when he mounted to the tower to offer his counsel.

Minutes later he appeared on the scaffolding, with the Little Blessed One, the Lion of Natuba, the Mother of Men, and the women of the Sacred Choir gathered round him, and below him, packed together in a dense throng and breathless with anticipation in the dawn that was breaking, were the men and women of Canudos, aware that this was a more unusual occasion than others. As always, the Counselor came straight to the point. He spoke of transubstantiation, of the Father and the Son who were two and one, and three and one in the Divine Holy Spirit, and in order that what was obscure might be clear, he explained that Belo Monte could also be Jerusalem. With his index finger he pointed in the direction of the hillside of A Favela: the Garden of Olives, where the Son had spent the agonizing night of Judas’s betrayal, and a little farther in the distance, the Serra de Canabrava: the Mount of Calvary, where the wicked had crucified Him between two thieves. He added that the Holy Sepulcher lay a quarter of a league away, in Grajaú, amid ash-colored crags, where nameless faithful had erected a cross. He then described in detail to the silent crowd filled with wonder precisely which of the narrow little streets of Canudos were the Way of the Cross, exactly where Christ had fallen for the first time, where He had met His Mother, the spot where the redeemed woman who had sinned wiped the sweat from His face, and the stretch along which Simon of Cyrene had helped Him bear the cross. As he was explaining that the Valley of Ipueiras was the Valley of Jehoshaphat, shots were heard from the other side of the mountain peaks that separated Canudos from the rest of the world. Unhurriedly, the Counselor asked the crowd—torn between the spell of his voice and the sound of gunfire—to sing a hymn composed by the Little Blessed One: “In Praise of the Cherubim.” Only then did groups of men leave with Abbot João and Pajeú to reinforce the
jagunços
already fighting Major Febrônio de Brito’s vanguard in the foothills of Monte Cambaio.

When they arrived on the run to post themselves in the crevices and gullies and on the projecting rock slabs of the mountain that soldiers in red-and-blue and green-and-blue uniforms were trying to scale, there were already men who had died in combat. The
jagunços
posted by Abbot João in the pass that the main troops would be obliged to file through had seen them approaching while it was still dark, and while most of them stayed behind to rest in Rancho das Pedras—some eight cabins that had been razed by the arsonists—they saw a company of infantrymen, commanded by a lieutenant mounted on a piebald horse, marching toward O Cambaio. They allowed them to advance until they were almost upon them and then, at a signal from José Venâncio, rained down fire from carbines, blunderbusses, muskets, rocks, arrows shot from hunting crossbows, and insults—“dogs,”

“Freemasons,”

“Protestants”—on them. Only then did the soldiers become aware of their presence. They all turned tail and fled, except for three wounded, who were overtaken and finished off by young
jagunços
dodging bullets, and the horse, which reared and threw its rider, rolled down the mountainside amid the rough stones and broke its legs. The lieutenant managed to take refuge behind some boulders and began returning the fire as the animal lay there, neighing mournfully, for several hours as the shooting went on.

Many
jagunços
had been blown to bits by shells from the Krupps, which began to bombard the mountain shortly after the first skirmish, causing landslides and showers of rock shards. Big João, who was posted alongside José Venâncio, realized that it was suicide to stay bunched together, and leaping from one rock slab to another, waving his arms like the sails of a windmill, shouted at them to disperse so as not to offer such a compact target. They obeyed him, jumping from rock to rock or crawling along on their bellies as below them, divided into combat groups led by lieutenants, sergeants, and corporals, the infantrymen climbed up O Cambaio amid a cloud of dust and a flurry of bugle calls. By the time Abbot João and Pajeú arrived with reinforcements, they had gotten halfway up the mountain. Despite their heavy losses, the
jagunços
who were trying to drive them off had not given a foot of ground. The reinforcements who were equipped with firearms began to shoot immediately, accompanying the volleys with loud shouts. The ones who had only machetes and knives, or the sort of crossbows that men of the backlands used to hunt duck and deer, which Antônio Vilanova had had the carpenters of Canudos make dozens of, confined themselves to grouping themselves around those with firearms and handing them gunpowder or charging the muzzle-loading carbines, hoping that the Blessed Jesus would see fit to allow them to inherit a gun or get close enough to the enemy to be able to attack with their bare hands.

The Krupps kept bombarding the heights of the mountain, and the rockslides caused as many casualties as the bullets. As dusk was just beginning to fall and the figures in red-and-blue and green-and-blue uniforms were beginning to break through the lines of the elect, Abbot João convinced the others that they should fall back or they would find themselves surrounded. Several dozen
jagunços
had died and many more were wounded. Those able to hear the order and obey it began to retreat, slipping off via the plain known as O Taboleirinho toward Belo Monte; they numbered just over half as many men as had taken this route in the other direction the night before and that morning. José Venâncio, who was one of the last to fall back, leaning on a stick with his bloody leg bent, was hit in the back by a bullet that killed him before he could cross himself.

From dawn on, that morning, the Counselor never left the Temple, remaining there praying, surrounded by the women of the Sacred Choir, Maria Quadrado, the Little Blessed One, the Lion of Natuba, and a great crowd of the faithful, who also prayed, while at the same time keeping their ears trained on the din, very distinct at times, borne to Canudos on the north wind. Pedrão, the Vilanova brothers, Joaquim Macambira, and the others who had stayed behind readying the city for the attack, were deployed along the Vaza-Barris. They had brought down to its banks all the firearms, powder, and projectiles they were able to find. When old Macambira caught sight of the
jagunços
returning from Monte Cambaio, he murmured that the Blessed Jesus apparently wanted the dogs to enter Jerusalem. None of his sons noticed that he had mixed up the names of the two cities.

But they did not enter. The outcome of the battle was decided that very day, before nightfall, on the plain of O Taboleirinho, where at that moment the troops of Major Febrônio de Brito’s three columns were stretching out on the ground, dizzy with fatigue and joy, after seeing the
jagunços
flee from the last spurs of the mountain and being almost able to make out from there the heterogeneous geography of straw rooftops and the two lofty stone towers of what they already regarded as the prize that their victory had won them, less than half a league’s distance away. As the
jagunços
still left alive were entering Canudos—their arrival gave rise to anxiety, to agitated conversations, weeping and wailing, shouts, prayers recited at the top of people’s lungs—the soldiers were collapsing to the ground, opening their red-and-blue, green-and-blue tunics, removing their leggings, so exhausted that they were not even able to tell each other how overjoyed they were at having defeated the enemy. Meeting in a war council, Major Febrônio and his fourteen officers decided to camp on that bare mountain plateau, alongside a nonexistent lagoon which their maps showed under the name Cipó—Liana—and which, from that day forward, they would show as Lagoa do Sangue—Lagoon of Blood. The following morning, at first light, they would attack the fanatics’ lair.

But, before an hour was out, as lieutenants, sergeants, and corporals were still inspecting the benumbed companies and drawing up lists of the dead, wounded, and missing, and soldiers of the rear guard were still arriving, picking their way between the rocks, they were attacked. Sick and healthy, men and women, youngsters and oldsters, all the elect able to fight fell on them like an avalanche. Abbot João had convinced them that they should attack then and there, all of them together, since there wasn’t going to be any “later on” if they didn’t do so. The tumultuous mob had followed after him, crossing the plateau like a cattle stampede. They came armed with all the images of the Blessed Jesus, of the Virgin, of the Divine to be found in the city, they were clutching all the cudgels, clubs, sickles, pitchforks, knives, and machetes in Canudos, along with blunderbusses, shotguns, carbines, muskets, and the Mannlichers captured in Uauá, and as they shot off bullets, pieces of metal, spikes, arrows, stones, they let out war cries, possessed by that reckless courage that was the very air that people of the
sertão
breathed from the day they were born, multiplied in them now by the love of God and the hatred of the Prince of Darkness that the saint had contrived to instill in them. They did not give the soldiers time to recover from their stupefaction at suddenly seeing that yelling, shouting horde of men and women running across the plain toward them as though they had not already been defeated. When fear brought them to, jolted them awake, propelled them to their feet, and they finally grabbed their guns, it was too late. The
jagunços
were already upon them, among them, behind them, in front of them, shooting them, knifing them, stoning them, piercing them with spikes, biting them, tearing away their guns, their cartridge belts, tearing out their hair, their eyes, and above all reviling them with the strangest curses they had ever heard. First a few of them, then others managed to make their escape, bewildered, driven mad, petrified by this sudden insane attack that seemed beyond the human. In the shadows that were falling in the wake of the ball of fire that had just sunk behind the mountaintops, they scattered, one by one or in groups, amid those foothills of O Cambaio that they had climbed with such effort all through the long day—running in all directions, stumbling, falling, getting to their feet again, ripping off their uniforms in the hope that they would not be noticed, and praying that night would finally come and be a dark one.

They might all have died, there might not have been a single officer or infantryman left to tell the world the story of this battle already won and then suddenly lost; every last one of these half a thousand vanquished men running about aimlessly, driven hither and yon by fear and confusion, might have been pursued, tracked down, hemmed in if the victors had known that the logic of war demands the total destruction of the enemy. But the logic of the elect of the Blessed Jesus was not the logic of this earth. The war that they were waging was only apparently that of the outside world, that of men in uniform against men in rags, that of the seacoast against the interior, that of the new Brazil against traditional Brazil. All the
jagunços
were aware that they were merely puppets of a profound, timeless, eternal war, that of good and evil, which had been going on since the beginning of time. Hence they allowed their adversaries to escape, as in the light of oil lamps they recovered their dead and wounded brothers who lay on the plateau or on the slopes of O Cambaio with grimaces of pain or of love of God etched into their faces (provided the enemy’s machine guns had spared their faces). They spent the entire night transporting the wounded to the Health Houses of Belo Monte, and taking dead bodies, once they had been dressed in their best clothes and placed in coffins hastily nailed together, to the wake that was held for them in the Temple of the Blessed Jesus and the Church of Santo Antônio. The Counselor decided that they would not be buried until the parish priest from Cumbe could come say a Mass for their souls, and one of the women of the Sacred Choir, Alexandrinha Correa, went to fetch him.