The War Of The End Of The World (21 page)

When, on the saint’s last visit, Alexandrinha Correa took off with him among his followers, abandoning everything she had, Father Joaquim was the only person in town who did not appear to be surprised.

He thought that he had never feared death and that he didn’t fear it now. But his hands trembled, shivers ran up and down his spine, and he kept moving closer and closer to the fire to warm his ice-cold insides. Yet he was sweating. He thought: “You’re dying of fear, Gall.” Those great beads of sweat, those shivers, that icy feeling, that trembling were the panic of one who has a premonition of death. “You don’t know yourself at all well, old pal.” Or had he changed? For he was certain that he had never felt anything like this as a young man, in the jail in Paris when he was waiting to be shot to death by a firing squad, or in Barcelona in the infirmary, while the stupid bourgeois were curing him so that he would be in good health when they executed him by tying him to a post and strangling him with an iron collar. He was about to die: your hour has come, Galileo.

Would his penis get hard at the supreme moment, as was said to happen to men who drowned or were beheaded? That belief straight out of a horror show concealed some tortuous truth, some mysterious affinity between sex and the awareness of death. If such a thing did not exist, what had happened early this morning and what had happened a little while ago would not have occurred. A little while ago? Hours, rather. Night had fallen and there were countless stars in the sky. He remembered that as he was waiting in the boarding house in Queimadas, he had planned to write a letter to
L’Etincelle de la révolte
explaining that the skyscape in this region was infinitely more varied than the landscape, and that this no doubt had a determining influence on the inhabitants’ religious bent. He could hear Jurema’s breathing, mingled with the crackling of the dying fire. Yes, it had been sniffing death close at hand that had made him fall upon this woman and take her with his stiff penis, twice in the same day. “A strange relationship based on fear and semen and nothing else,” he thought. Why had she saved his life, by interceding just as Caifás was about to give him the
coup de grâce?
Why had she helped him onto the mule, gone with him, cured him, brought him here? Why was she behaving like this toward someone she must hate?

Fascinated, he recalled that sudden, pressing, uncontrollable urgency, when the animal fell as it was trotting along at full clip, throwing both of them to the ground. “Its heart must have burst open like a ripe fruit,” he thought. How far were they from Queimadas? Was the little stream where he’d washed and bandaged himself the Rio do Peixe? Had they detoured round Riacho da Onça, leaving it behind, or had they not yet reached it? A host of questions were running riot in his head, but his fear had vanished. Had he been badly frightened when the mule collapsed and he realized that he was falling off, that he was rolling on the ground? Yes. That was the explanation: fear. The instant suspicion that the animal had died not of exhaustion but of a shot through the heart fired by the hired assassins who were following him to turn him into an English cadaver. And it must have been because he was instinctively seeking protection that he had leapt on top of the woman, who had fallen off and was rolling on the ground with him. Had Jurema thought him a madman, or the Devil perhaps? Taking her in such circumstances, at that moment, in that state. Ah, the dismay in the woman’s eyes, her trepidation when she realized, from the way that Gall’s hands were pawing at her clothes, what he wanted from her. She had not put up any resistance this time, but neither had she hidden her disgust, or, rather, her indifference. Ah, that quiet resignation of her body, which had remained impressed on Gall’s mind as he lay on the ground, confused, stunned, overwhelmed with something that might be desire, fear, anxiety, uncertainty, or a blind denial of the trap in which he found himself. Through a mist of sweat, with the wounds in his shoulder and neck hurting as though they had reopened and his life were draining away through them, he saw Jurema in the gathering darkness, examining the mule, opening its eyes and mouth. Still lying on the ground, he then saw her collect branches and leaves and light a fire. And without her saying a word to him, he saw her take out the knife tucked in her belt, slice off strips of flesh from the animal’s flanks, thread them on a stick, and put them over the fire to roast. She gave the impression that she was merely performing a routine domestic task, as though nothing out of the way had happened, as though the events of that day had not completely changed her life. He thought: “They’re the most enigmatic people on this planet.” He thought: “Fatalists, brought up to accept whatever life brings them, whether good, bad, or horrendous.” He thought: “For her you’re the horrendous.”

After a while he had been able to sit up, to drink a few swallows of water, and, with a great effort because of the burning pain in his throat, to chew. The pieces of meat seemed like an exquisite delicacy. As they ate, presuming that Jurema was no doubt bewildered by everything that had happened, he had tried to explain everything to her: who Epaminondas Gonçalves was, his proposal regarding the arms, how Gonçalves had been the one who had planned the attack at Rufino’s house so as to steal the rifles he himself had bought and have him, Galileo, killed because he needed a corpse with light skin and red hair. But he realized that she wasn’t at all interested in what he was telling her. As she listened, she nibbled the meat with her tiny, even teeth and chased the flies away, without nodding to show she understood or asking a single question, meeting his gaze every so often with eyes that were gradually being swallowed up by the darkness and that were making him feel stupid. He thought: “I
am
stupid.” That was true; he had amply proved that fact. He had the moral and political obligation to be mistrustful, to suspect that an ambitious bourgeois, capable of mounting a conspiracy against his enemies such as the one involving the arms, was equally capable of mounting another one against him. An English corpse! In other words, what Gonçalves had said about the rifles had not been a mistake, a slip of the tongue: he had told him that they were French, knowing full well that they were English. Galileo had discovered this on arriving at Rufino’s cabin, as he was loading the cases in the wagon. The factory mark on the butt leapt to his eye: “Liverpool, 1891.” The discovery had made him joke to himself: “France hasn’t yet invaded England, as far as I know. These are English rifles, not French ones.” English rifles, an English corpse. What was Gonçalves up to? He could well imagine: his idea was a cold, cruel, daring one, and mayhap even a brilliant one. His chest tightened with anxiety once again and he thought: “He’ll kill me.” This was unknown territory to him, he was wounded, he was an outsider whose trail could easily be pointed out by anyone and everyone in the region. Where was he going to be able to hide out? “In Canudos.” Yes, of course. He would be safe there, or at least he would not die there with the rueful feeling that he had been stupid. The thought came to him: “Canudos will justify you, comrade.”

He was shivering from the cold, and his shoulder, his neck, his head hurt. To take his mind off his wounds, he tried to turn his thoughts to the troops under the command of Major Febrônio de Brito. Had they already left Queimadas and headed for Monte Santo? Would they wipe out that hypothetical refuge before he reached it? He thought: “The bullet isn’t lodged in my body, it didn’t break the skin, its red-hot fire barely grazed it. The bullet, moreover, must have been very small caliber, like the revolver, meant for killing sparrows.” The serious wound was not the one from the bullet but from the knife thrust: it had penetrated deeply, severing veins, nerves, and that was the source of the burning, stabbing pains mounting to his ear, his eyes, the nape of his neck. Hot and cold shivers were making him shake from head to foot. Are you about to die, Gall? All of a sudden he remembered the snowfalls in Europe, its landscape so thoroughly domesticated by comparison with this untamed nature. He thought: “Is there geography anywhere in Europe as hostile as this?” In the south of Spain, in Turkey surely, in Russia. He remembered Bakunin’s escape, after being chained to the wall of a prison for eleven months. His father had sat him on his lap and told him the story of it: the epic journey across Siberia, the Amur River, California, then back to Europe, and on his arrival in London, the burning question: “Are there oysters in this country?” He remembered the inns scattered along the roadsides of Europe, where there was always a fire smoking on the hearth, hot soup, and other travelers to smoke a pipe with and share the events of the day’s journey. He thought: “Nostalgia is an act of cowardice, Gall.”

He was allowing himself to be overcome by self-pity and melancholy. Shame on you, Gall! Haven’t you even learned yet to die with dignity? What did it matter if it was in Europe, Brazil, or any other bit of ground on this earth! Wouldn’t the result be precisely the same? He thought: “Disintegration, decomposition, the rotting place, the worm brood, and if hungry scavengers don’t play their role, a frail frame of yellowish bones covered with a dried-out skin.” He thought: “You’re burning up and dying of cold and that is what is known as fever.” It was not fear, nor the pellet for killing birds, nor the knife wound: it was a sickness. Because he had begun to feel that something was wrong with him even before the attack by the man dressed in leather, when he was on that hacienda with Epaminondas Gonçalves; whatever it was had been secretly eating away at some organ and spreading through the rest of his body. He was ill, not badly wounded. Something else new in your life, old pal. He thought: “Fate wants to complete your education before you die by subjecting you to experiences you’ve never had before.” First a rapist and then sick! Because he could not recall ever having been ill, even in earliest childhood. Wounded, yes, a number of times, seriously so that time in Barcelona. But sick: never. He had the feeling that he was about to fall into a faint at any moment. Why this senseless effort to go on thinking? Why this intuition that as long as he kept thinking he would remain alive? He was suddenly aware that Jurema had gone. He listened, terrified: he could still hear the sound of her breathing, to his right. He could no longer see her because the fire had gone out altogether.

He tried to raise his spirits, knowing that it was useless, murmuring that adverse circumstances spurred the true revolutionary on, telling himself that he would write a letter to
L’Etincelle de la révolte
pointing out the analogy between what was happening in Canudos and Bakunin’s address to the watchmakers and craftsmen of La Chaux-de-Fonds and the valley of Saint-Imier, in which he maintained that it was not in the most highly industrialized societies that great uprisings would take place, as Marx had prophesied, but in backward, agrarian countries, whose miserable peasant masses had nothing to lose—Spain, for instance, Russia, and, why not? Brazil, and he roused himself to reprove Epaminondas Gonçalves in his mind: “Your hopes are going to be thwarted, you bourgeois. You should have killed me when I was at your mercy, on the terrace of the hacienda. I’ll get well. I’ll escape.” He would get well, he would escape, the young woman would guide him, he would steal a mount and would fight in Canudos against what you represented, you bourgeois: selfishness, cynicism, greed, and…

The heat has not let up as the evening shadows have fallen, and unlike other summer nights, there is not so much as the breath of a breeze. Salvador is burning up with the heat in the darkness. It is now pitch black, since at midnight, by municipal ordinance, the gaslights on the street corners go out, and the lamps in the houses of night owls have also gone out some time ago. Only the windows of the
Jornal de Notícias
, up there on the heights of the old city, are still lit, and their brightness makes the fancy Gothic lettering of the name of the newspaper on the windowpanes of the front office even more indecipherable.

Outside the door is a calash, and horse and coachman are both dozing. But Epaminondas Gonçalves’s henchmen are awake, smoking, as they lean their elbows on the wall above the escarpment next to the newspaper office. They are talking together in a half whisper, pointing to something down below, there where the massive bulk of the Church of Nossa Senhora de Conceição da Praia and the fringe of foam along the reef are just barely visible in the darkness. The mounted police patrol has passed by on its rounds a while before and will not be back that way till dawn.

Inside, all by himself in the combination copy room and office, is that young, thin, ungainly journalist whose thickened eyeglasses to correct his nearsightedness, his frequent fits of sneezing, and his insistence on writing with a goose-quill pen instead of a metal one make him the laughingstock of the office staff. Leaning over his desk, his ugly head bathed in the halo of light from the little lamp, in a posture that makes him hunch over the desk at an awkward angle, he is writing rapidly, stopping only to dip his pen in the inkwell or to consult a small notebook, which he raises up so close to his eyeglasses that it almost touches them. The scratching of his pen is the only sound in the night. The sea is inaudible tonight and the office of the owner and editor-in-chief, which is also lighted up, is silent, as though Epaminondas Gonçalves had fallen asleep at his desk. But when the nearsighted journalist has set down the last word of his article and swiftly crosses the large outer office and enters the office of the head of the Progressivist Republican Party, he finds him waiting for him with his eyes wide open. His elbows are resting on the desk and his hands are crossed. As he sees the journalist enter, his dark, angular face, whose features and bones are underscored by that inner energy that enables him to spend entire nights without a wink of sleep at political meetings and then work all the following day without the least sign of fatigue, relaxes, as if to say: “Well, at last.”

“Is it finished?” he murmurs.

“Finished.” The nearsighted journalist holds the sheaf of pages out to him. But Epaminondas Gonçalves does not take them.

“I’d rather you read them aloud to me,” he says. “If I hear them, I’ll have a better idea of how they turned out. Have a seat there, next to the light.”

As the journalist is about to begin to read, he is overcome by a sneeze, and then another, and finally a fit of them that forces him to remove his eyeglasses and cover his mouth and nose with an enormous handkerchief that he pulls out of his sleeve, like a sleight-of-hand artist.

“It’s this summer dampness,” he says apologetically, wiping his congested face.

“I know,” Epaminondas Gonçalves cuts him short. “Please read.”