The War Of The End Of The World (29 page)

His voice trembles and his eyes flash. In an impetuous gesture, he draws his sword from its scabbard and raises it to his face, as though he were about to kiss it. Craning their necks, the press correspondents then see the commanding officer of the Seventh Regiment give, before riding off again, that ceremonial sword salute reserved at parades for the national flag and the highest authority, here addressed to the three miserable inhabitants of Pau Seco.

The incomprehensible words had been pouring out in great bursts ever since they came upon him lying near the sad-faced woman and the dead body of the mule being pecked at by
urubus—
black vultures. Sporadic, vehement, thunderous, or hushed, murmured, furtive, they poured out day and night, at times frightening the Idiot, who began to tremble. After sniffing the redheaded man, the Bearded Lady said to Jurema: “He has delirious fever, like the one that killed Dádiva. He’ll die before the day is out.” But he hadn’t died, although at times he turned up the whites of his eyes and appeared to be about to go into the death rattle. After lying for a long time not moving a muscle, he would start tossing and turning again, grimacing and uttering words that were meaningless sounds to them. Now and again, he would open his eyes and look at them in bewilderment. The Dwarf swore that he was talking in gypsy cant and the Bearded Lady insisted it sounded like the Latin of the Mass.

When Jurema asked whether she could come with them, the Bearded Lady consented, perhaps out of compassion, perhaps out of simple inertia. Between the four of them they hoisted the stranger into the wagon alongside the cobra’s basket and started off again. Their new companions brought them luck, for as darkness fell they were invited to stay for supper in the farm settlement of Quererá. A little old woman blew smoke over Galileo Gall, placed herbs on his wounds, made him a decoction, and said that he’d get well. That night the Bearded Lady did a turn with the cobra to entertain the cowhands, the Idiot performed his clown act, and the Dwarf told them his stories of knights and chivalry. They went on, and as it turned out, the stranger did begin to swallow the mouthfuls of food they gave him. The Bearded Lady asked Jurema if she was his wife. No, she wasn’t: while her husband was away, he had dishonored her, and what else could she do after that except tag along after him? “Now I understand why you’re sad,” the Dwarf said sympathetically.

They went steadily northward, guided by a lucky star, for they found something to eat every single day. On the third day, they gave a show at a village fair. What the villagers liked best was the Bearded Lady: they paid money to prove to themselves that her beard wasn’t false and gently felt her tits to make sure she was really a woman. Meanwhile, the Dwarf told them her life story, since the days when she’d been a normal little girl, back in Ceará, who one day became the shame of her family when hair started growing on her back, her arms, her legs, and her face. People began to whisper that there was sin involved somewhere, that she was the daughter of a sacristan or of the Can. The little girl swallowed some ground glass of the sort used to kill rabid dogs. But she didn’t die and lived the life of the town laughingstock till the King of the Circus, the Gypsy, appeared one day, took her off with him, and made a circus performer out of her. Jurema thought the Dwarf was making the whole story up, but he assured her that every word of it was true. They would sit down to talk together sometimes, and as the Dwarf was nice to her and she trusted him, she told him about her childhood on the hacienda at Calumbi as a servant of the wife of the Baron de Canabrava, a very beautiful and kind woman. It was sad that, instead of staying with the baron, Rufino, her husband, had gone off to Queimadas and become a guide, a horrid occupation that kept him away from home a great deal of the time. And what was sadder still, he’d not been able to make her a baby. Why should God have punished her by keeping her from having a baby? “Who knows?” the Dwarf murmured. God’s will was sometimes difficult to understand.

A few days later, they camped at Ipupiará, a hamlet at a crossroads. A tragedy had just happened. In a fit of madness, a villager had hacked his children and then himself to death with a machete. Since the villagers were holding a funeral for the child martyrs, the circus people did not give a performance, though they announced that there would be one the following evening. The settlement was a tiny one, but it had a general store, where people from all over the region came to buy their provisions.

The following morning the
capangas
arrived. They came galloping into the village, and the pawing and stamping of their mounts awakened the Bearded Lady, who crawled out from under the tent to see who it was. Villagers appeared at the doors of all the huts in Ipupiará, as surprised by this apparition as she was. She saw six armed riders: she could tell, by the way they were dressed and by the clearly visible brand of the same hacienda on the flanks of all their horses, that they were
capangas
and not
cangaceiros
or Rural Police. The one riding in front—a man dressed in leather—dismounted and the Bearded Lady saw him head her way. Jurema had just sat up on her blanket. The Bearded Lady saw her face turn deathly pale and her mouth gape open. “Is that your husband?” she asked Jurema. “It’s Caifás,” the young woman said. “Has he come to kill you?” the Bearded Lady asked insistently. But instead of answering her, Jurema crawled out from under the tent on all fours, stood up, and walked over to the
capanga
, who stopped dead in his tracks. The Bearded Lady felt her heart begin to pound, thinking that the man dressed in leather—a swarthy, bonyfaced man with cold eyes—was about to strike her, kick her, and maybe plunge his knife into her, and then walk over and plunge it into the back of the redheaded man, whom she could hear tossing about in the wagon. But the man didn’t hit her. Quite the contrary: he removed his sombrero and greeted her in an obviously polite and respectful manner. From astride their horses, the five men watched this dialogue that for them, as for the Bearded Lady, was merely lips moving. What were the two of them saying to each other? The Dwarf and the Idiot had awakened and were also watching. After a moment, Jurema turned around and pointed to the wagon where the wounded stranger was sleeping.

With the young woman following after him, the man in leather walked over to the wagon and poked his head underneath the canvas. The Bearded Lady then saw him gaze indifferently at the man, who, asleep or awake, was still talking with his ghosts. The leader of the
capangas
had the dead-calm eyes of those who are used to killing, the same look that the Bearded Lady had seen in the eyes of the bandit Pedrão that time that he’d beaten the Gypsy in the fight and killed him. Her face deathly pale, Jurema waited for the
capanga
to finish his inspection. He finally turned to her, said something to her. Jurema nodded and the man then signaled to his men to dismount. Jurema came over to the Bearded Lady and asked her for the shears. As she searched about for them, the Bearded Lady whispered: “Is he going to kill you?”

“No,” Jurema answered. And with the pair of shears that had belonged to Dádiva in her hand, she climbed into the wagon. Leading their horses by the reins, the
capangas
headed for the Ipupiará store, whereupon the Bearded Lady, followed by the Dwarf and the Idiot, went to see what Jurema was up to.

Kneeling alongside the stranger—there was barely room for the two of them in the small space—Jurema was shearing him down to his very scalp, holding his bright-red locks in one hand and the squeaking scissors in the other. There were dried bloodstains, tears, dust, bird droppings on Galileo Gall’s black frock coat. He was lying on his back, amid multicolored pieces of cloth and boxes, hoops, lampblack, pointed hats with half-moons and stars. His eyes were closed, he had a growth of beard on which there was also dried blood, his boots had been removed and his long toes with dirty nails were poking out of the holes in his socks. The wound in his neck disappeared from sight beneath a bandage and the healer’s herbs. The Idiot burst out laughing, and though the Bearded Lady dug her elbows into his ribs, he went on whooping. Beardless, skinny as a rail, his eyes blank, his mouth open and a thread of spittle hanging from his lips, he writhed with laughter. Jurema paid no attention to him, but the stranger opened his eyes. His face contorted in surprise, pain, or terror at what was being done to him, but he was so weak he was unable to sit up and simply lay there tossing about and uttering one of those sounds that the circus people found incomprehensible.

It took Jurema a long while to finish her task—so long that, before she was done, the
capangas
had had time to go to the store, hear the story of the children murdered by the madman, and go to the cemetery to commit a sacrilege that left the villagers of Ipupiará stupefied: namely, disinterring the corpse of the filicide, loading it, coffin and all, on the back of one of their horses, and carrying it off. Now they were back, standing a few yards away from the circus people, waiting. When Gall’s hair was all sheared off, and his skull covered with an uneven iridescence like red shot silk, the Idiot burst out laughing once again. Jurema gathered up the locks of hair that she had carefully laid in her lap, tied them in a bundle with the bit of string with which her own hair was fastened back, and then the Bearded Lady saw her search through the stranger’s pockets and take out a little pouch that he had told them contained money, in case they wanted to use it. With the shock of hair in one hand and the pouch in the other, she climbed down out of the wagon and headed past the circus people.

The leader of the
capangas
stepped forward. The Bearded Lady saw him take the stranger’s locks that Jurema handed him and, almost without looking at them, put them in his saddlebag. His motionless pupils were threatening, despite the fact that he addressed Jurema in a studiedly courteous, formal manner, picking at his teeth the while with his index finger. This time the Bearded Lady could hear what they said.

“He had this in his pocket,” Jurema said, holding out the pouch. But Caifás did not take it.

“I mustn’t,” he said, as though repelled by something invisible. “That belongs to Rufino, too.”

Not making the slightest objection, Jurema tucked the pouch in her skirts. The Bearded Lady thought that she was about to walk off, but looking Caifás straight in the eye, she asked him softly: “And what if Rufino’s dead?”

Caifás thought for a moment, without changing expression, without blinking. “If he’s dead, there will always be someone to avenge the dishonor done him,” the Bearded Lady heard him say, and she seemed to be hearing the Dwarf and his tales of knights and princes. “A kinsman, a friend. I myself, if necessary.”

“And what if your boss finds out what you’ve done?” she asked then.

“He’s only my boss,” Caifás replied self-assuredly. “Rufino’s more than that. He wants the stranger dead and the stranger’s going to die. Maybe from his wounds, maybe at Rufino’s hand. The lie is soon going to become the truth, and this hair is going to be that of a dead man.”

He turned his back on Jurema to mount his horse. Anxiously, she put one hand on the saddle. “Will he kill me, too?”

The Bearded Lady saw the man dressed in leather gaze down at her without pity and perhaps with a certain contempt. “If I were Rufino I’d kill you, because it’s your fault, too—perhaps more than his,” Caifás said from the back of his mount. “But since I’m not Rufino, I don’t know. He’ll know, though.”

He spurred his horse and the
capangas
rode off with their strange, stinking booty, in the same direction from which they had come.

As soon as the Mass celebrated by Father Joaquim in the Chapel of Santo Antônio was over, Abbot João went to the Sanctuary to get the crate full of things that he had asked the priest to bring. There was a question preying on his mind: How many soldiers are there in a regiment? He hoisted the crate onto his shoulder and strode rapidly across the uneven ground of Belo Monte, dodging the people who hurried over to ask if it was true that another army was coming. He answered yes, without stopping, leaping over the chickens, goats, dogs, and children in his way so as not to step on them. He reached the former hacienda steward’s house, now turned into a store, with his shoulder aching from the weight of the crate.