The War Of The End Of The World (20 page)

The townspeople he met at the entrance to Cumbe took him to the church square and showed him the tumbledown parish house where the priest had lived at the time when Cumbe still had a priest. The dwelling was now a hollow shell with walls but no roof that served as a garbage dump and a refuge for stray animals. Dom Joaquim went into the little Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, and by putting the usable benches together made himself a bed and stretched out on it to sleep, just as he was.

He was a young man, short and slightly stoop-shouldered, with a little potbelly and a jovial air about him that made people take a liking to him from the very beginning. If it hadn’t been for his habit and his tonsure, no one would have taken him to be a man in active commerce with the world of the spirit, for it sufficed to be in his company just once on some social occasion to realize that he cared about the things of this world (women in particular) just as much, or perhaps more. On the very day that he arrived he showed Cumbe that he was capable of rubbing elbows with people in the town as though he were one of them and that his presence would not interfere in any substantial way with the habits and customs of the population. Nearly every family in Cumbe had gathered in the church square to welcome him when he opened his eyes after sleeping for a fair number of hours. Night had fallen, it had rained and stopped raining, and in the warm damp crickets were chirping and there were myriad stars in the sky. The introductions began, a long line of women filing past who kissed his hand and men who removed their sombreros as they came by, murmuring their names. After only a short time Father Joaquim interrupted the hand-kissing, explaining that he was dying of hunger and thirst. A ceremony then took place that was somewhat reminiscent of the stations of the cross during Holy Week, as the priest dropped in at one house after the other and was offered the choicest viands the householder could provide. Dawn found him still awake, in one of the two taverns of Cumbe, drinking brandy with sour cherries and having a ballad contest with the
caboclo
Matias de Tavares.

He began his priestly functions immediately, saying Masses, baptizing newborn babes, confessing the adults, administering the last rites to the dying, and marrying newly betrothed couples or those who were already living together and wanted to appear upright in the sight of God. As he had a vast territory to look after, he traveled about a great deal. He was active and even self-abnegating when it came to fulfilling his duties as priest of the parish. The fees he asked for many of his services were modest, he didn’t mind if people put off paying him or didn’t pay at all, for, of the capital vices, the one that he was definitely free of was avarice. Of the others, no, but at least he indulged in all of them without discrimination. He accepted the succulent roast kid offered him by the owner of a hacienda with the same warm thanks and rejoicing as the mouthful of raw sugar that a poor peasant invited him to share, and his throat made no distinction between aged brandy and the throat-scalding raw rum toned down with water that was the usual drink in times of scarcity. As far as women were concerned, nothing seemed to put him off: gummy-eyed crones, silly girls who hadn’t yet reached puberty, women punished by nature with warts, harelips, or feeblemindedness. He never tired of flattering them and flirting with them and insisting that they come round to decorate the altar of the church. He would have boisterous romps with them, his face would grow flushed, and he would paw them as though it were the most natural thing in the world. The fact that he was a man of the cloth made fathers, husbands, brothers look upon him as sexless, and they resignedly put up with these audacities on the part of the priest of the parish; had any other male made so bold, they would have had their knives out instantly. Nonetheless, they heaved a sigh of relief when Father Joaquim established a permanent relationship with Alexandrinha Correa, the girl who had remained a spinster because she was a water divineress.

Legend had it that Alexandrinha’s miraculous ability came to light when she was still a little girl, the year of the great drought, as the townspeople of Cumbe, desperate because of the lack of water, were going about digging wells everywhere. They had divided up into crews and from dawn on, each day, excavated everywhere where there had once been thick vegetation, thinking that this was an indication of water below ground. The women and children were doing their share of this exhausting work. But the earth that was brought up showed no sign of moisture, and the only thing found at the bottom of the holes was more layers of blackish sand or unbreakable rock. Until one day Alexandrinha, speaking in a vehement rush of words, as though they were being dictated to her with barely enough time for her to get them out, interrupted her father’s crew to tell them that instead of digging where they were they should do so farther up, at the beginning of the trail leading to Massacará. No one paid any attention to her. But the little girl kept insisting, drumming her feet on the ground and waving her hands as though inspired. “All right then, we’ll dig just one more hole,” her father said. They went off to put her inspiration to the test, on the flat stretch of yellowish pebbles where the trails to Carnaíba and Massacará fork off. On the second day of digging, after they had brought up nothing but dry clods of earth and stones, the subsoil began to turn a darker color, to show signs of moisture, and finally, amid everyone’s excitement, drops of water appeared. Three more wells were found close by, thanks to which Cumbe was less hard hit than other towns by those two years of misery and wholesale death.

From that day on, Alexandrinha Correa became an object of reverence and curiosity. And in the eyes of her parents something else besides: a creature whose intuition they tried to profit from, charging the settlements and the inhabitants round about a fee for divining the place where they should dig to find water. Alexandrinha’s talents, however, did not lend themselves to being bought and sold. The little girl was wrong more often than she was right, and many times, after sniffling all about her with her little turned-up nose, she would say: “I don’t know; nothing comes to me.” But neither these blanks of hers nor her mistakes, which were always effaced by the memory of her successes, dimmed the reputation that surrounded her as she grew up. Her talents as a water divineress made her famous but not happy. Once it became known that she possessed this power, a wall went up round about her that isolated her from people. The other youngsters did not feel at ease with her and adults did not treat her as though she were just an ordinary little girl. They stared at her, they asked her strange questions about the future or life after death and brought her to kneel at the bedside of sick people to try to cure them with the powers of her mind. Her efforts to be simply a woman like all the others were of no avail. Men always respectfully kept their distance. They didn’t ask her to dance at fiestas or serenade her, and none of them would ever have dreamed of taking her for a wife. It was as though falling in love with her would have been a profanation.

Until the new parish priest arrived in town. Father Joaquim was not a man to allow himself to be intimidated by an aura of sanctity or sorcery when it came to women. Alexandrinha was now past twenty. She was tall and slender, with the same curious nose and restless eyes, and still lived with her parents, unlike her four older sisters, who already had husbands and homes of their own. Because of the religious respect that she inspired and was unable to banish despite her simple, straightforward behavior, her life was a lonely one. Since this spinster daughter of the Correas seldom went out except to attend Sunday Mass, and since she was invited to very few private celebrations (people were afraid that her presence, contaminated as it was by an aura of the supernatural, would put a damper on the festivities), it was a long time before the new parish priest made her acquaintance.

A romance must have begun very gradually, beneath the bushy-topped Malay apple trees of the church square, or in the narrow streets of Cumbe, where the little priest and the water divineress must necessarily have met and then continued on their way, as his impertinent, vivacious, provocative little eyes looked her up and down while at the same time the good-natured smile on his face made this inspection seem less rude. And he must have been the one who spoke first, perhaps asking her about the town festival, on the eighth of December, or why he hadn’t seen her at Rosaries or what that story about her and the water was all about. And she must have answered him in that quick, direct, straightforward way of hers, gazing at him unblushingly. And so one casual meeting must have followed upon another, then others less casual, conversations in which, besides chitchat about local happenings, bandits and flying brigades and quarrels and love affairs and exchanges of confidences, little by little guileful and daring remarks must also have entered the picture.

The fact is that one fine day all of Cumbe began slyly commenting on the change in Alexandrinha, an indifferent parishioner who had suddenly become the most diligent one of all. She could be seen, early every morning, dusting the benches in the church, putting the altar to rights, sweeping the doorway. And she also began to be seen in the parish house, which, with the help of the townspeople, now had a roof, doors, and windows once again. That what there was between them was more than kissing and giggling became evident the day that Alexandrinha strode resolutely into the tavern where Father Joaquim had hidden out with a group of friends after a christening feast and was playing the guitar and drinking, happy as a lark. The moment she entered he fell silent. She marched over to him and said to him in a firm tone of voice: “You’re coming with me, right now, because you’ve had enough to drink.” Without a word, the little priest followed her out.

The first time the saint came to Cumbe, Alexandrinha Correa had already been living for several years in the parish house. In the beginning she had installed herself there to take care of Father Joaquim after he had been wounded in the town of Rosário, where he’d been caught in the middle of a shootout between Satan João’s
cangaço
and the police brigade of Captain Geraldo Macedo, known as Bandit-Chaser, and afterward she had stayed on there. They had had three children, whom people referred to only as “Alexandrinha’s kids,” and she was spoken of as Dom Joaquim’s “caretaker.” By her very presence she had a calming effect on the priest’s life, although he did not change his habits in the slightest. The townspeople would summon her when, having drunk more than he should have, the little priest became a problem, and once she appeared he was always docile, even when he was drunk to the gills. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why the townspeople tolerated their relationship without making too much of a fuss. When the saint came to Cumbe for the first time, Alexandrinha was so well accepted by the town that even her parents and her brothers and sisters visited her in the parish house and called her children “grandson,”

“granddaughter,”

“niece,”

“nephew,” without feeling at all uncomfortable.

Hence it was as though a bomb had gone off when, in his first sermon from the pulpit of the church in Cumbe, to which Father Joaquim, with an affable smile, had allowed him to ascend, the tall, gaunt man with flashing eyes and cascading Nazarene locks, dressed in a long flowing dark purple tunic, railed against bad shepherds. A sepulchral silence fell in the crowded nave. No one looked at Dom Joaquim, who had taken a place on the front bench. He had opened his eyes with a more or less violent start, and was sitting there not moving a muscle, staring straight ahead, at the crucifix or at his humiliation. Nor did the townspeople look at Alexandrinha Correa, who was sitting in the third row. Unlike Dom Joaquim, she was gravely contemplating the preacher, her face deathly pale. Apparently the saint had come to Cumbe after enemies of the couple had had a word with him. Solemn, unbending, with a voice that reverberated from the fragile walls and the concave ceiling, he said terrible things about those chosen by the Lord who, despite having been ordained and taken the habit, turned into Satan’s lackeys. He mercilessly vituperated all Father Joaquim’s sins: the shamefulness of pastors of the Lord’s flock who instead of setting an example of sobriety drank cane brandy to the point of delirium; the unseemliness of those who instead of fasting and being frugal stuffed themselves without stopping to think that they lived surrounded by people who had barely enough to eat; the scandal of those who forgot their vow of chastity and took their pleasure with women, whom they did not guide spiritually but instead doomed to perdition by delivering their poor souls over to the Dog of the domains of hell. When the townspeople finally dared to look at their priest out of the corner of their eyes, they saw him still sitting there, still staring straight ahead, his face beet-red.

What had happened—an event that remained the talk of the town for many days—did not prevent the Counselor from continuing to preach in the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição during his stay in Cumbe, or again when, months later, he returned accompanied by a retinue of the elect, or on other occasions in the years that followed. The difference was that Father Joaquim usually was absent when these subsequent sermons were delivered. Alexandrinha, however, was not. She was always there, in the third row, with her turned-up nose, listening to the saint’s admonishments against worldly wealth and excesses, his defense of austere habits, and his exhortations to prepare the soul for death through sacrifice and prayer. The former water divineress began to show signs of growing religious fervor. She lighted candles in the vaulted niches along the streets, she spent a great deal of time on her knees before the altar in an attitude of profound concentration, she organized acts of thanksgiving, public prayers, Rosaries, novenas. One day she appeared with her head covered with a black kerchief and an amulet with the image of the Blessed Jesus on her breast. Rumor had it that, though they continued to live under the same roof, nothing that would offend God happened now between Father Joaquim and her. When the townspeople dared to ask Dom Joaquim about Alexandrinha, he would change the subject. He seemed bewildered. Although he continued to lead a happy life, his relations with the woman who shared his house and was the mother of his children changed. In public at least, they were as perfectly polite to each other as two people who scarcely knew each other. The Counselor aroused indefinable feelings in the parish priest. Did he fear, respect, envy, pity him? The fact was that every time the saint came to town Father Joaquim opened the church to him, confessed him, gave him Communion, and during his stay in Cumbe was a model of temperance and devotion.