The War Of The End Of The World (35 page)

And at dawn the following morning a messenger sent by Pajeú came to tell Abbot João that the Can’s army numbered one thousand two hundred men, that it had several cannons, and that the colonel in command was known as Throat-Slitter.

With rapid, spare gestures, Rufino makes the final preparations for yet another journey, its outcome more uncertain this time. He has changed out of the pants and shirt he had worn to go see the baron at the Pedra Vermelha hacienda, into identical ones, and he is taking with him a machete, a carbine, two knives, and a knapsack. He takes a look around the cabin: the bowls, the hammock, the benches, the image of Our Lady of Lapa. His features are drawn and his eyes blink continuously. But after a moment his angular face is again set in an inscrutable expression. With precise movements, he makes a few last preparations. When he has finished, he takes the lighted wick of the oil lamp and sets fire to objects that he has set in different places about the room. The shack begins to go up in flames. He walks unhurriedly to the door, taking with him only the weapons and the knapsack. Once outside, he squats down next to the empty animal pen and from there watches a gentle breeze fan the flames that are devouring his home. The cloud of smoke drifts his way and makes him cough. He rises to his feet. He slings the carbine over his shoulder, tucks the machete into his belt next to the knives, and hoists the knapsack onto his back. He turns around and walks off, knowing that he will never return to Queimadas. As he goes past the station, he does not even notice that people are putting up banners and posters to welcome the Seventh Regiment and Colonel Moreira César.

Five days later, as night is falling, his lean, supple, dusty silhouette can be seen entering Ipupiará. He has made a detour to return the knife that he borrowed from the Blessed Jesus and has walked an average of ten hours a day, taking time out to rest during those moments when it is hottest and darkest. Except for just one day, when he paid for his food, he has trapped or shot everything that he has eaten. Sitting at the door of the general store are a handful of old men who look exactly alike, puffing on identical pipes. The tracker walks over to them, removes his sombrero, greets them. They must know him, for they ask him about Queimadas and all of them want to know if he has seen soldiers and what news he has of the war. Sitting down beside them, he tells them everything he knows, and asks about people in Ipupiará. Some of them have died, others have left for the South to make their fortune, and two families have just gone off to Canudos. When darkness has fallen, Rufino and the old men go into the store to have a little glass of
cachaça
. The stifling heat has now died down to a pleasant warmth. With the appropriate circumlocutions, Rufino now broaches the subject that they all knew the conversation would lead to sooner or later. He employs the most impersonal turns of speech to question them. The old men listen to him without feigning surprise. They all nod their heads and speak in turn. Yes, it has passed this way, more a ghost of a circus than a real one, so wretched-looking it was hard to believe that once upon a time it had been that sumptuous caravan led by the Gypsy. Rufino listens respectfully as they recall the circus shows of the old days. Finally, when there is a pause, he leads the conversation back round to where it began, and this time, as though they had decided that the proprieties had now been observed, they tell him what he has come to learn or confirm: how long it camped just outside the town, how the Bearded Lady, the Dwarf, and the Idiot earned their daily bread by telling fortunes, reciting stories, and putting on clown acts, how the stranger went around asking wild questions about the
jagunços
, how a band of
capangas
had come to cut off his red hair and steal the corpse of the father who had killed his children. He does not ask, nor do they mention the other person who was neither a circus performer nor a stranger. But this eminently present absent person haunts the conversation each time someone touches on the subject of how the wounded stranger was cared for and fed. Are they aware that this specter is Rufino’s wife? They surely know or sense this, as they know or sense what can be said and what must be left unsaid. At the end of the conversation, almost by chance, Rufino finds out which direction the circus people were headed when they left. He sleeps in the store that night, on a pallet that the owner offers him, and leaves at dawn at his steady trot.

Neither picking up nor slowing his pace, Rufino traverses a landscape where the only shadow is that of his body, following him at first and then preceding him. With a set expression on his face and half-closed eyes, he makes his way along without hesitating, despite the fact that drifting sand has covered the trail over in places. Night is falling as he arrives at a hut overlooking a sowed field. The tenant farmer, his wife and half-naked kids welcome him as though he were an old friend. He eats and drinks with them, giving them news of Queimadas, Ipupiará, and other places. They talk of the war and the fears it arouses, of the pilgrims who pass by on their way to Canudos, and speculate on the possibility that the world is coming to an end. Only then does Rufino ask them about the circus and the stranger with all his hair lopped off. Yes, they passed by there and headed on toward the Serra de Olhos D’Agua on their way to Monte Santo. The wife remembers best of all the skinny man with no hair and yellowish eyes, who moved like an animal without bones and kept bursting out laughing for no reason at all. The couple find Rufino a hammock to sleep in and the next morning they fill his knapsack, refusing to accept payment.

For a good part of the day, Rufino trots along without seeing anyone, in a landscape cooled by thickets full of flocks of jabbering parrots. That afternoon he begins to come across goatherds, with whom he stops to talk from time to time. A little beyond the Sítio das Flores—the Flower Place, a name that strikes him as a joke since there is nothing to be found there but stones and sun-baked earth—he turns off and heads for a wayside cross fashioned from tree trunks that is surrounded by ex-votos in the form of little carved wooden figurines. A legless woman is keeping vigil at the foot of the cross, lying stretched out on the ground like a snake. Rufino kneels and the woman blesses him. The tracker gives her something to eat and they talk. She hasn’t heard of them; she hasn’t seen them. Before continuing on his way, Rufino lights a candle and bows his head before the cross.

For three days he loses their trail. He questions peasants and cowherds and concludes that instead of going on to Monte Santo the circus has turned off somewhere or gone back the way it came. Looking for a market being held, perhaps, so as to take in enough to eat? He goes all about the countryside round Sítio das Flores, in ever-widening circles, asking questions about each one of the people with the circus. Has anyone seen a woman with hair on her face? A dwarf three feet tall? An idiot with a body like rubber? A stranger with reddish fuzz on his skull who speaks in a language that’s hard to understand? The answer is always no. Lying in shelters that he has chanced upon, he makes conjectures. Can they have already killed him? Could he have died of his wounds? He goes down to Tanquinho and comes up-country again, without picking up their trail. One afternoon when he has stretched out on the ground exhausted, to sleep for a while, a band of armed men creep up on him, as silent as ghosts. A rope sandal planted on his chest awakens him. He sees that, in addition to carbines, the men are equipped with machetes, cane whistles, bandoleers, and are not bandits, or at any rate no longer bandits. He has difficulty convincing them that he is not a guide who has hired on with the army, that he hasn’t seen a single soldier since leaving Queimadas. He shows such a lack of interest in the war that they think he’s lying, and at one point one of them puts his knife to his throat. Finally the interrogation turns into a friendly conversation. Rufino spends the night in their company, listening to them talk of the Antichrist, the Blessed Jesus, the Counselor, Belo Monte. He gathers that they have kidnapped, murdered, stolen, and lived on the run from the law, but that now they are saints. They explain to him that an army is advancing like a plague, confiscating people’s arms, conscripting men, and plunging knives in the throats of all those who refuse to spit on a crucifix and curse Christ. When they ask him if he wants to join them, Rufino answers no. He explains why and they understand.

The following morning, he arrives in Cansanção at almost the same time as the soldiers. Rufino goes round to see the blacksmith, whom he knows. Standing next to the forge that is throwing out red-hot sparks, drenched in sweat, the man advises him to get out of town as fast as he can because the devils are conscripting all guides. When Rufino explains to him, he, too, understands. Yes, he can help him. Toughbeard has passed that way just a short time before; he’d run into the people Rufino was asking about, and had talked about meeting up with the stranger who reads heads. Where did he run into them? The blacksmith explains and the tracker stays there in the shop chatting with him until nightfall. Then he leaves the village without the sentinels spying him, and two hours later he is back with the apostles from Belo Monte. He tells them that, sure enough, the war has reached Cansanção.

Dr. Souza Ferreiro dipped the cupping glasses in alcohol and handed them one by one to Baroness Estela, who had placed a handkerchief over her head as a coif. She set each glass aflame and skillfully applied it to the colonel’s back. The latter was lying so quietly that the sheets were scarcely wrinkled.

“I’ve had to act as doctor and midwife many a time here in Calumbi,” the baroness said in her lilting voice, addressing the doctor perhaps, or perhaps the patient. “But, to tell you the truth, it’s been years since I’ve applied cupping glasses. Am I hurting you, Colonel?”

“Not at all, Baroness.” Moreira César did his best to conceal his pain, but did not succeed. “Please accept my apologies for this invasion, and kindly convey them to your husband as well. It was not my idea.”

“We’re delighted to have you.” The baroness had finished applying the cupping glasses and straightened the pillows. “I was very eager to meet a hero in person. Though, naturally, I would rather it had not been an illness that brought you to Calumbi…”

Her voice was friendly, charming, superficial. Next to the bed was a table with pitchers and porcelain basins decorated with royal peacocks, bandages, balls of cotton, a jar full of leeches, cupping glasses, and many vials. The dawn light was filtering into the cool, clean room through the white curtains. Sebastiana, the baroness’s personal maid, was standing at the door, motionless. Dr. Souza Ferreiro examined the patient’s back, broken out with a rash of cupping glasses, with eyes that showed that he had gone without sleep all night.

“Well, we’ll wait half an hour and then it’s a bath and massages for you. You won’t deny me the fact that you’re feeling better, sir: your color has come back.”

“The bath is ready, and I’ll be here if you need me,” Sebastiana said.

“I’m at your service, too,” the baroness chimed in. “I’ll leave you two now. Oh, I almost forgot. I asked Dr. Souza’s permission for you to have tea with us, Colonel. My husband wants to pay his respects to you. You’re invited too, Doctor. And Captain de Castro, and that very odd young man, what’s his name again?”

The colonel did his best to smile at her, but the moment the wife of Baron de Canabrava, followed by Sebastiana, had left the room, he exploded: “I ought to have you shot, Doctor, for having gotten me caught in this trap.”

“If you fall into a fit of temper, I’ll bleed you and you’ll be obliged to stay in bed for another day.” Dr. Souza Ferreiro collapsed in a rocking chair, drunk with exhaustion. “And now allow me to rest too, for half an hour. Kindly don’t move.”

In precisely half an hour, he opened his eyes, rubbed them hard, and began to remove the cupping glasses. They came off easily, leaving purplish circles where they had gripped the patient’s skin. The colonel lay there face downward, with his head buried in his crossed arms, and barely opened his mouth when Captain Olímpio de Castro entered to give him news of the column. Souza Ferreiro accompanied Moreira César to the bathroom, where Sebastiana had readied everything according to his instructions. The colonel undressed—unlike his deeply tanned face and arms, his little body was very white—climbed straight into the bathtub without a word, and remained in it for a long time, clenching his teeth. Then the doctor massaged him vigorously with alcohol, applied a mustard poultice, and made him inhale the vapor from herbs boiling on a brazier. The entire treatment took place in silence, but once the inhalations were over, the colonel, attempting to relieve the tension in the air, remarked that he had the sensation that he had been subjected to practices of witchcraft. Souza Ferreiro remarked that the borderline separating science from magic was invisible. They had made their peace. Back in the bedroom, a tray with fruit, fresh milk, rolls, ham, and coffee awaited them. Moreira César ate dutifully and then dropped off to sleep. When he awoke, it was midday and the reporter from the
Jornal de Notícias
was standing at his bedside with a pack of cards in his hand, offering to teach him how to play ombre, a game that was all the rage in bohemian circles in Bahia. They played for some time without exchanging a word, until Souza Ferreiro, bathed and freshly shaved, came to tell the colonel that he could get up. When the latter entered the drawing room to have tea with his host and hostess, he found the baron and his wife, the doctor, Captain de Castro, and the journalist, the only one of their number who had not made his toilet since the night before, already gathered there.