The War Of The End Of The World (30 page)

The crowd of people standing in the doorway moved aside to let him by, and inside Antônio Vilanova broke off whatever it was he was telling his wife Antônia and his sister-in-law Assunção and hurried across the room to join him. From its swing, a parrot kept frantically repeating: “Felicity! Felicity!”

“A regiment’s coming,” Abbot João said, setting his load down on the floor.

“How many men is that?”

“He brought the fuses!” Antônio Vilanova exclaimed, squatting on his heels, eagerly examining the contents of the crate. He beamed with satisfaction as he discovered, in addition to the packets of fuses, tablets for diarrhea, disinfectants, bandages, calomel, oil, and alcohol.

“There’s no way to repay Father Joaquim for what he does for us,” he said, lifting the crate onto the counter. The shelves were full of canned goods and bottles, lengths of material and all manner of wearing apparel, from sandals to sombreros, and sacks and cartons were sitting about everywhere on the floor, with the Sardelinha sisters and other people walking about among them. Lying on top of the counter, a long plank resting on barrels, were several black ledgers, of the sort used by hacienda bookkeepers.

“Father Joaquim also brought news,” Abbot João said. “Could a regiment be a thousand men?”

“Yes, so I’ve heard, an army’s coming.” Antônio Vilanova nodded, setting the things the priest had brought out on the counter. “A regiment? More than a thousand men. Two thousand maybe.”

Abbot João realized that Antônio’s mind was not on how many soldiers the Can was sending against Canudos this time. He watched the fat, slightly bald, bushy-bearded storekeeper putting packages and bottles away in his usual brisk, efficient way. There was not the slightest trace of anxiety, or even interest, in his voice. “He has too many other things to do,” Abbot João thought, as he explained that it was necessary to send someone to Monte Santo right away. “He’s right; it’s better for him not to have to worry about the war along with everything else.” Because Antônio was perhaps the person who, for years now, had slept the least and worked the most of anyone in Canudos. In the early days, just after the Counselor arrived, he had gone on with his work of buying and selling merchandise, but gradually, with the tacit agreement of everyone, he had taken on in addition the task of organizing the society that was aborning, a responsibility that now occupied most of his time. Without him it would have been hard to eat, sleep, survive as the waves of pilgrims began pouring into Canudos from all over. He was the one who had parceled out the land so that they could build their dwellings and put in their crops, advised them what to grow and what livestock to raise, and it was he who took charge of bartering in the villages round about, exchanging the things Canudos produced for the things it needed, and when donations began to come in, it was he who decided how much would be set aside for the Temple of the Blessed Jesus and how much would go for the purchase of arms and supplies. Once the Little Blessed One gave them permission to stay permanently, the newcomers then went to Antônio Vilanova for help in getting settled. The Health Houses for the old, the sick, and the disabled were his idea, and at the time of the engagements at Uauá and O Cambaio, he was the one who took charge of storing the captured weapons and distributing them, after consulting with Abbot João. He met with the Counselor almost every day to give him an account of everything and learn of his wishes. He had not gone back to traveling all about, and Abbot João had heard Antônia Sardelinha say that this was the most amazing sign of the change that had taken place in her husband, that man once so possessed by the demonic urge to be forever on the move. It was Honório who traveled all over on community business now, and no one could have said whether the elder brother’s stay-at-home habits were due to his many important duties in Belo Monte or to the fact that he was thus able to be in the Counselor’s company almost every day, if only for a few minutes. He came away from these meetings with renewed energies and a profound peace of heart.

“The Counselor has agreed that there should be a corps of guards to protect him,” Abbot João said. “He also agreed that Big João should be the head of it.”

This time Antônio was interested in what he had to say and looked at him in relief. “Felicity!” the parrot screamed again.

“Have Big João come round to see me. I can help him choose his men—I know all of them. If you think I ought to, that is.”

Antônia Sardelinha had approached. “Catarina came around this morning asking for you,” she said to Abbot João. “Do you have the time right now to go see her?”

João shook his head: no, he didn’t. Tonight, perhaps. He felt abashed, though the Vilanovas understood that with him God came first and his family second: wasn’t it the same with them? But in his heart of hearts it distressed him deeply that through force of circumstance, or the will of the Blessed Jesus, he saw less and less of his wife these days.

“I’ll go tell Catarina,” Antônia said to him with a smile.

Abbot João left the store thinking how strange things had turned out in his life, as they did in everyone’s perhaps. “Like in the minstrels’ stories,” he thought. On meeting up with the Counselor, he had believed that blood would vanish from his path, and here he was involved in a battle that was worse than any he had ever fought. Was that why the Father had made him repent of his sins? So as to go on killing and seeing people die? Yes, that was no doubt why. He sent two kids he ran into on the street to tell Pedrão and old Joaquim Macambira to meet him at the exit from town leading to Jeremoabo, and before going to where Big João was he went to look for Pajeú, who was out digging trenches on the road to Rosário. He found him a few hundred yards past the last huts, covering a trench across the trails with boughs of buckthorn to hide it. A group of men, some of them with shotguns, were bringing tree branches and putting them in place, as women distributed plates of food to other men sitting on the ground who appeared to have just finished their work shift. On seeing him coming, everyone flocked round him, and he found himself in the center of a circle of inquisitive faces. Without a word, one of the women placed in his hands a bowlful of goat meat sprinkled with maize meal; another handed him a jug of water. He was so tired—he had come all the way on the run—that he had to take a deep breath and drink a long swallow of water before he was able to speak. He did so as he ate, without the thought ever occurring to him that a few years before—at the time when his gang and Pajeú’s were trying to wipe each other out—the people listening to him would have given anything to have him at their mercy like this so as to subject him to the worst tortures imaginable before killing him. Luckily, those chaotic days were a thing of the past.

Pajeú didn’t turn a hair on hearing of Father Joaquim’s news about a second army coming. He did not ask a single question. Did Pajeú know how many men there were in a regiment? No, he didn’t know, and neither did any of the others. Abbot João then asked him what he had come to ask him to do: go south to spy on these troops that were coming and harass them. His band of outlaws had marauded in that region for years; he knew it better than anybody else: so wasn’t he the best man to patrol the route the soldiers took, to hunt up guides and bearers to infiltrate their ranks, to set up ambushes to delay them and give Belo Monte time to ready its defenses?

Pajeú nodded, still without having opened his mouth. Seeing his yellowish-gray pallor, the enormous scar across his face, and his strong, solid body, Abbot João wondered yet again how old he was, whether he wasn’t a man far along in years whose age didn’t show.

“All right,” he heard him say. “I’ll send you reports every day. How many of these men am I to take with me?”

“However many you want,” Abbot João answered. “They’re your men.”

“They
were
my men,” Pajeú growled, glancing quickly around at the men surrounding him, a sudden warm gleam in his expressionless, deep-set little eyes. “They’re the Blessed Jesus’ men now.”

“We’re all His men,” Abbot João replied. And with sudden urgency in his voice: “Before you leave, have Antônio Vilanova give you ammunition and explosives. We have fuses now. Can Taramela stay here?”

The man whose name had been mentioned stepped forward: he was a tiny little fellow with slanted eyes, scars, wrinkles, and broad shoulders, who had been Pajeú’s lieutenant.

“I want to go with you to Monte Santo,” he said to Pajeú in a tart voice. “I’ve always looked after you. I bring you good luck.”

“Look after Canudos now. It’s worth more than I am,” Pajeú answered brusquely.

“Yes, stay and bring us good luck,” Abbot João said. “I’ll send you more men so you won’t feel lonesome. Praised be the Blessed Jesus.”

“Praised be He,” several voices answered.

Abbot João had turned his back to them and was running once more, cutting across the fields toward the looming bulk of O Cambaio, where Big João was. As he ran, he thought about his wife. He hadn’t seen her since he had decided to have hiding places and trenches dug along all the trails, an undertaking that had kept him running day and night within a circumference of which Canudos was also the center, as it was of the world. Abbot João had come to know Catarina when he had been one of that handful of men and women—whose number rose and fell like the waters of the river—who entered villages with the Counselor and stretched out on the ground at his side at night after the long, tiring day’s journey to pray with him and listen to his counsels. Among them had been a figure so thin she seemed to be a ghost, enveloped in a tunic as white as a shroud. The former
cangaceiro
’s eyes had often found hers fixed on him during their marches, prayers, halts to rest. They made him uncomfortable, and at times they frightened him. They were eyes ravaged by pain, eyes that seemed to threaten him with punishments that were not of this world.

One night, when the pilgrims were already asleep round a campfire, Abbot João crawled over to the woman whose eyes he could see in the firelight, riveted on him. “I want to know why you keep looking at me,” he whispered. She answered with an effort, as though struggling to overcome great exhaustion or great repugnance. “I was in Custódia when you came to wreak your vengeance,” she said in a voice that he could barely hear. “The first man you killed, the one who gave the warning shout, was my father. I saw how you plunged your knife in his belly.” Abbot João remained silent, hearing the sound of the campfire crackling, the insects buzzing, the woman breathing, trying to remember those eyes on that dawn so long ago. After a moment, his voice, too, scarcely more than a whisper, he asked: “So not all of you in Custódia died that day?”

“There were three of us who didn’t,” the woman murmured. “Dom Matias, who hid in the straw on his roof. Senhora Rosa, whose wounds healed, though her mind was gone. And me. They thought they’d killed me too, and my wound also healed.” It was as though the two of them were speaking of other people, of other happenings, of a different, poorer life. “How old were you?” the
cangaceiro
asked. “Ten or twelve, something like that,” she said. Abbot João looked at her: she must still be very young, then, but hunger and suffering had aged her. Continuing to speak very softly so as not to awaken the other pilgrims, the two of them gravely recalled the events of that long-ago night, still so vivid in their memories. She had been raped by three men and later someone had made her kneel in front of a pair of pants that smelled of horse dung, and callused hands had crammed down her throat a member so big it would barely fit in her mouth, and she had been forced to suck it till a gob of his seed spurted out of it and the man ordered her to swallow it. When one of the bandits slashed her with his knife, Catarina felt a great peace come over her. “Was I the one who slashed you with the knife?” Abbot João whispered. “I don’t know,” she whispered back. “Even though it was daylight by then, I couldn’t tell the faces apart and I didn’t know where I was.”

From that night onward, the former
cangaceiro
and the survivor of Custódia always prayed together and walked along together, recounting to each other stories of their past lives that now seemed incomprehensible to them. She had joined the saint in a village in Sergipe, where she had been living on the charity of others. After the Counselor, she was the frailest of the band, and there came a day when she fell into a dead faint as they marched along. Abbot João lifted her up and carried her in his arms till nightfall. He carried her for several days and also took it upon himself to bring her little bits of food soaked in liquid that she could keep down. Then at night, again as he would have done with a child, after they had listened to the Counselor together he told her the tales of chivalry he had heard the
cantadores
recite when he was little, which now—perhaps because his soul had regained its childhood innocence—came back to him with a wealth of detail. She listened to him without interrupting him, and days later, in her voice so faint it was almost inaudible, she asked him questions about the Saracens, Fierabras, and Robert the Devil, whereupon he realized that those phantoms had become as intimate a part of Catarina’s life as they had once been of his.

She had recovered and was walking on her own two feet again when one night Abbot João, trembling with embarrassment, confessed before all the pilgrims that he had often felt the desire to possess her. The Counselor called Catarina to him and asked her if she was offended by what she had just heard. She shook her head. Before the silent circle of pilgrims, the Counselor asked her if she still felt bitterness in her heart because of what had happened in Custódia. She shook her head once more. “You are purified,” the Counselor said. He had both of them join hands and asked all the disciples to pray to the Father for them. One week later the parish priest of Xiquexique married them. How long ago had that been? Four or five years? Feeling that his heart was about to burst, João at last caught sight of the shadows of the
jagunços
on the lower slopes of O Cambaio. He stopped running and went on in that quick, short stride that had taken him so many miles in his endless journeys.