The War Of The End Of The World (31 page)

An hour later he was with Big João, telling him the latest news as he drank cool water and ate a plateful of maize. The two of them were by themselves, since after announcing to the rest of the men that a regiment was coming—none of them could tell him how many soldiers that was—he had asked to be alone with Big João. The former slave was barefoot as usual, and wearing a pair of faded pants held up at the waist by a length of rope from which there hung a knife and a machete, and a shirt with all the buttons missing that bared his hairy chest. He had a carbine slung over his shoulder and two bandoleers draped round his neck like necklaces. When Big João heard that a Catholic Guard was to be formed to protect the Counselor and that he was to be the leader of it, he shook his head emphatically.

“Why not?” Abbot João asked.

“I’m not worthy of such an honor,” the black murmured.

“The Counselor says you are,” Abbot João replied. “He’s a better judge than you.”

“I don’t know how to give orders,” the black protested. “And what’s more, I don’t want to learn how. Let somebody else be the leader.”

“You’re the one who’s going to be the leader,” the Street Commander said. “There’s no time to argue, Big João.”

Lost in thought, the black stood watching the groups of men scattered about amid the rocks and boulders on the mountainside, beneath a sky that had turned a leaden color.

“Watching over the Counselor is a heavy load on my shoulders,” he finally said.

“Choose the best men, the ones who’ve been here the longest, the ones you saw fight well at Uauá and here in O Cambaio,” Abbot João said. “When that army gets here, the Catholic Guard must already exist and serve as a shield for Canudos.”

Big João remained silent, chewing slowly even though his mouth was empty. He stood there gazing at the mountain peaks round about him as though he were seeing the shining warriors of King Dom Sebastião suddenly appear on them: awed, overwhelmed, taken completely by surprise.

“It’s you who’ve chosen me, not the Little Blessed One or the Counselor,” he said dully. “And you haven’t done me any favor.”

“No, I haven’t,” Abbot João conceded. “I didn’t choose you so as to do you one, or to do you any harm either. I chose you because you’re the best man. Go to Belo Monte and get to work.”

“Praised be Blessed Jesus the Counselor,” the black said. He got up from the rock he was sitting on and started off across the stony ground.

“Praised be He,” Abbot João said. A few seconds later he saw the ex-slave break into a run.

“In other words, you were untrue to your duty, twice,” Rufino says. “You didn’t kill him the way Epaminondas wanted you to. And you lied to Epaminondas, leading him to believe he was dead. Two times.”

“Only the first time is really serious,” Caifás says. “I handed his hair and a corpse over to him. It was somebody else’s dead body, but neither he nor anybody else could tell that it was. And the foreigner will be a corpse soon, if he isn’t one already. So that’s a minor fault.”

On the reddish bank of the Itapicuru, opposite the one the Queimadas tanneries are on, that Saturday, like every other Saturday, stalls and stands have been set up where vendors from all over the region are hawking their wares. Discussions between buyers and sellers rise above the sea of heads, bare or topped with black sombreros, that dot the marketplace, and mingle with the din of whinnying horses, barking dogs, screaming children, and roistering drunkards. Beggars appeal to people’s generosity by exaggerating the contortions of their maimed and crippled limbs, and minstrels accompanying themselves on guitars stand in front of little knots of people, reciting love stories and tales of the wars between Christian crusaders and unbelievers. Shaking their skirts, their arms covered with bracelets, gypsy women, young and old, tell fortunes.

“Anyway, I’m grateful to you,” Rufino says. “You’re a man of honor, Caifás. That’s why I’ve always respected you. That’s why everybody respects you.”

“What’s a person’s greatest duty?” Caifás says. “Toward his boss or toward his friend? A blind man could have seen that I was obliged to do what I did.”

They walk on side by side, very gravely, indifferent to the colorful, motley throng, the chaotic atmosphere round about them. They rudely push their way through the crowd, forcing people aside with one glaring look or a shove of their shoulders. Every so often someone standing behind a counter or inside a canvas-covered stall greets them, and both of them return the greeting so curtly that no one approaches them. As if by tacit agreement, they head for a place where drinks are being sold—wooden benches, plank tables, an arbor—with fewer customers in it than in the others.

“If I’d finished him off there in Ipupiará I’d have offended you,” Caifás says, as though putting into words something he has long been mulling over in his mind. “By keeping you from avenging the blot on your honor.”

“Why did you go there to kill him in the first place?” Rufino interrupts him. “Why at my house?”

“Epaminondas wanted him to die there,” Caifás answered. “Neither you nor Jurema was to be killed. My men died so as to keep her from getting hurt.” He spits in the air past an eyetooth, and stands there thinking things over in his mind. “Maybe it was my fault they died. It didn’t occur to me that he might defend himself, that he knew how to fight. He didn’t look the type.”

“No,” Rufino agrees. “He didn’t.”

They sit down and pull their chairs closer together so as to talk without being overheard. The woman waiting on them hands them two glasses and asks if they’ll have cane brandy. Yes. She brings a half-full bottle, the guide pours the two of them a drink, and they down it without offering a toast. Then Caifás takes a turn filling the glasses. He is older than Rufino, and his eyes, with their fixed stare, are dull and lifeless. He is dressed all in leather, as always, from head to foot.

“She was the one who saved him?” Rufino finally says, lowering his eyes. “She was the one who grabbed your arm?”

“That’s how I realized she’d become his woman.” Caifás nods. There are still traces of the surprise on his face. “When she leapt on me and deflected my aim, when she attacked me at the same moment he did.” He shrugs his shoulders and spits. “She was already his woman, so what else could she do but defend him?”

“True,” Rufino says.

“I don’t understand why the two of them didn’t kill me,” Caifás says. “I asked Jurema why, in Ipupiará, and she couldn’t tell me. That foreigner is a strange one.”

“That he is,” Rufino agrees.

Among the people at the market are a number of soldiers. They are what is left of Major Febrônio de Brito’s expedition, troops who have stayed in town waiting, they say, for an army that is to arrive. Their uniforms are in rags, they wander about like lost souls; they sleep in the main square, in the train station, in the gorges of the river. They are here too now, roaming aimlessly about amid the stalls, by twos, by fours, looking longingly at the women, the food, the drinks all round them. The townspeople make it a point not to speak to them, not to listen to them, not to take any note of them.

“Promises tie your hands, don’t they?” Rufino says timidly, a deep frown furrowing his forehead.

“That they do,” Caifás concedes. “How can a person go back on a promise made to the Blessed Jesus or the Virgin?”

“Or to the baron?” Rufino says, thrusting his head forward.

“The baron can release you from one made to him,” Caifás says. He fills their glasses again and they drink. Amid all the hubbub of the market, a violent argument breaks out somewhere in the distance and ends in a chorus of laughter. The sky has clouded over, as though it is about to rain.

“I know how you feel,” Caifás suddenly says. “I know that you can’t sleep, that everything in life is over for you. That even when you’re with other people, the way you’re with me right now, you’re wreaking your vengeance. That’s how it is, Rufino. That’s how it is when a man values his honor.”

A line of ants heads across the table, detouring around the bottle of
cachaça
that is now empty. Rufino watches them advance and disappear. His hand, still holding the glass, clenches it tightly.

“There’s something you ought to keep in mind,” Caifás adds. “Death isn’t enough. It doesn’t remove the stain. But a slap, a whiplash, square in the face, does. Because a man’s face is as sacred as his mother or his wife.”

Rufino stands up. The woman who owns the place hurries over and Caifás reaches toward his pocket, but the tracker stops him and pays the bill himself. They wait for her to bring the change, neither of them saying a word, each lost in his own thoughts.

“Is it true your mother’s gone to Canudos?” Caifás asks. And, as Rufino nods: “Lots of people are going there. Epaminondas is enlisting more men in the Rural Police. An army’s coming and he wants to give it a hand. I have kinfolk who are with the saint, too. It’s hard to wage war against a person’s own family, isn’t that so, Rufino?”

“I’ve another war to wage,” Rufino murmurs, pocketing the coins the woman hands him.

“I hope you find him, that he hasn’t died of illness,” Caifás says.

Their silhouettes disappear amid the tumult of the Queimadas market.

“There’s something I don’t understand, Baron,” Colonel José Bernardo Murau repeated, relaxing in the rocking chair in which he was swaying slowly back and forth, pushing it with his foot. “Colonel Moreira César hates us and we hate him. His coming to Bahia is a great victory for Epaminondas and a defeat for the principle we’ve always upheld: that Rio is not to interfere in our affairs. Yet the Autonomist Party gives him a hero’s welcome in Salvador, and now we’re competing with Epaminondas to see which party will help Throat-Slitter the most.”

The cool, whitewashed sitting room of the old manor house looked untidy and run-down: the bouquet of flowers in a large copper vase was faded, there were cracks in the wall, and the floor was chipped. Through the windows the cane field could be seen, burning-hot in the sun, and just outside the house a group of servants were hitching up a team of horses.

“The times are out of joint, my dear José Bernardo.” The Baron de Canabrava smiled. “Even the most intelligent people are unable to make their way through the jungle we’re living in.”

“I never was intelligent. That’s not a virtue characteristic of landowners,” Colonel Murau growled. He made a vague gesture toward the outdoors. “I’ve spent half a century here, only to see everything beginning to fall apart in my old age. My one consolation is that I’m going to die one day soon and won’t live to see the total ruin of this country.”

He was indeed a very elderly man, mere skin and bones, with deeply tanned skin and gnarled hands that frequently scratched at his ill-shaven face. He was dressed like a peon, in a pair of faded pants and an open shirt topped by a rawhide vest that had lost all its buttons.

“These bad times will end soon,” Adalberto de Gumúcio said.

“Not for me.” The landowner cracked his knuckles. “Do you know how many people have left this part of the country in the last few years? Hundreds of families. The drought of ’77, the mirage of the coffee plantations in the South, of rubber in the Amazon, and now that accursed Canudos. Do you have any idea how many people are going off to Canudos? Leaving everything behind: houses, animals, work? To go up there to wait for the Apocalypse and the coming of King Dom Sebastião.” He looked at them, overwhelmed by human stupidity. “I’m not intelligent, but I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Moreira César will set Epaminondas up as governor of Bahia and he and his men will give us so much trouble that we’ll be forced to sell our haciendas at a sacrifice price, or give them away free, and go off too.”

There was a little table with cool drinks and a basket of sweet biscuits, which no one had touched, in front of the baron and Gumúcio. The baron opened a little box of snuff, offered some to his friends, and inhaled with delectation. He sat there for a moment with his eyes closed.

“We’re not going to hand Brazil over to the Jacobins on a platter, José Bernardo,” he said, opening his eyes. “Despite the fact that they’ve laid the groundwork very cleverly, they’re not going to be able to pull their maneuver off.”