The War Of The End Of The World (38 page)

When the flogging is over, two of the soldiers being punished have fainted, but the third one, the arrogant one, makes a show of coming to attention to listen to the colonel’s words.

“May this serve as a lesson to you men,” he shouts. “The army is and must be the most incorruptible institution of the Republic. All of us, from the highest-ranking officer to the humblest private in the ranks, are obliged to act at all times in such a way that civilians will respect the uniform we wear. You know the tradition of this regiment: misdeeds are punished with the greatest severity. We are here to protect the civilian population, not to rival bandits. The next man guilty of rape will meet with the death penalty.”

There is not a murmur, not a movement in response to his words. The bodies of the two men who have fainted lie in ridiculous, comic postures. The albino girl has stopped weeping. She has a mad look in her eyes and every so often breaks into a smile.

“Give this unfortunate creature something to eat,” Moreira César says, pointing to her. And adds, addressing the journalists who have approached him: “She’s a little touched in the head. Would you say that raping her was setting a good example in the eyes of a populace that is already prejudiced against us? Isn’t a thing like this the best way to prove that those who call us the Antichrist are right?”

An orderly saddles the colonel’s horse and the clearing resounds with orders, the sound of troops on the move. The companies take off, in different directions.

“The important accomplices are beginning to turn up,” Moreira César says, the rape suddenly forgotten. “Yes indeed, gentlemen. Do you know who the supplier of Canudos is? The curé of Cumbe, a certain Father Joaquim. The cassock: an ideal safe-conduct pass, an open sesame, an immunity! A Catholic priest, gentlemen!”

The expression on his face is more one of self-satisfaction than of wrath.

The circus people proceeded, amid
macambiras
and across stony ground, taking turns pulling the wagon. The landscape round about was parched now and sometimes they made long days’ journeys without a thing to eat. After Sítio das Flores they began to meet pilgrims on their way to Canudos, people more wretched than they, carrying all their possessions on their backs and often dragging the disabled along with them as best they could. Wherever circumstances permitted, the Bearded Lady, the Idiot, and the Dwarf told their fortunes, recited romances, and performed clown acts, but these people on the road had very little to give in return. As rumors were going about that the Bahia Rural Guard in Monte Santo had blocked off the road to Canudos and was conscripting every man of fighting age, they took the longest way round to Cumbe. Every once in a while they spied clouds of smoke; according to what people told them, it was the work of the
jagunços
, who were laying waste to the land so that the armies of the Can would die of hunger. They, too, might be victims of this desolation. The Idiot, grown very feeble, had already lost his laugh and his voice.

They pulled the wagon along two by two; the five of them were a pitiful sight to behold, as though they had endured tremendous sufferings.

Every time it came his turn to be a draft animal, the Dwarf grumbled to the Bearded Lady: “You know it’s madness to go to Canudos and yet we’re going. There’s nothing to eat and people there are dying of hunger.” He pointed to Gall, his face contorted with anger. “Why are you listening to him?”

The Dwarf was sweating, and since he was bending over and leaning forward to speak he looked even shorter. How old might he be? He himself didn’t know. His face was already beginning to wrinkle; the little humps on his back and chest had become more pronounced now that he was so much thinner.

The Bearded Lady looked at Gall. “Because he’s a real man!” she exclaimed. “I’m tired of being surrounded by monsters.”

The Dwarf was overcome by a fit of the giggles. “And what about you? What are you?” he said, doubling over with laughter. “Oh, I know the answer to that one. You’re a slave. You enjoy obeying a man—him now and the Gypsy before him.”

The Bearded Lady, who had burst out laughing too, tried to slap him, but the Dwarf dodged her. “You like being a slave,” he shouted. “He bought you the day he felt your head and told you that you’d have been a perfect mother. You believed it, and your eyes filled with tears.”

He was laughing fit to kill and had to take off at a run so the Bearded Lady wouldn’t catch him. She threw stones after him for a while. A few minutes later the Dwarf was back walking at her side again. Their quarrels were always like that, more a game or an unusual way of communicating.

They walked along in silence, with no set system for taking turns pulling the wagon or stopping to rest. They halted when one or another of them was too tired to walk another step, or when they came upon a little stream, a spring, or a shady place where they could spend the hottest hour of the day. As they walked along, they kept a sharp eye out at all times, scanning the environs in search of food, and hence from time to time they had been able to catch game. But this was a rare occurrence, and they had to content themselves with chewing on anything that was green. They looked for
imbuzeiros
in particular, a tree that Galileo Gall had taught them to appreciate: the sweetish, refreshing taste of its juicy roots made it seem like real food.

That afternoon, after Algodões, they met a group of pilgrims who had stopped to rest. They left their wagon and joined them. Most of them were people from the village who had decided to go off to Canudos. They were being led by an apostle, an elderly man dressed in a tunic over trousers and shod in rope sandals. He was wearing an enormous scapular, and the people following him looked at him with timid veneration in their eyes, as though he were someone from another world. Squatting at the man’s side, Galileo Gall asked him questions. But the apostle looked at him with a distant gaze, not understanding him, and went on talking with his people. Later on, however, the old man spoke of Canudos, of the Holy Books, and of the prophecies of the Counselor, whom he called a messenger of Jesus. His followers would be restored to life in three months and a day, exactly. The Can’s followers, however, would die forever. That was the difference: the difference between life and death, heaven and hell, damnation and salvation. The Antichrist could send soldiers to Canudos: but to what avail? They would rot away, they would disappear forever. Believers too might die, but three months and a day later, they would be back, their bodies whole and their souls purified by the brush of angels’ wings and the breath of the Blessed Jesus. Gall gazed at him intently, his eyes gleaming, trying his best not to miss a syllable. As the old man paused for a moment, he said that not only faith, but arms as well, were needed to win wars. Was Canudos able to defend itself against the rich people’s army? The pilgrims’ heads turned round to see who was speaking and then turned back toward the apostle. Though he had not looked at Gall, the latter had listened. When the war was ended, there would no longer be any rich people, or rather, no one would take any notice of them, because everybody would be rich. These stones would become rivers, these hillsides fertile fields, and the sandy ground of Algodões a garden of orchids like the ones that grow on Monte Santo. Snakes, tarantulas, cougars would be friends of man, as it would be now if Adam had not been driven out of Paradise. The Counselor was in this world to remind people of these truths.

Someone began to weep in the semidarkness, with quiet, heartfelt sobs that continued for a long time. The old man began to speak again, with a sort of tenderness. The spirit was stronger than matter. The spirit was the Blessed Jesus and matter was the Dog. The miracles so long awaited would take place: poverty, sickness, ugliness would disappear. His hands touched the Dwarf, lying curled up next to Galileo. He, too, would be tall and beautiful, like all the others. Now other people could be heard weeping, caught up by the contagious sobs of the first person. The apostle leaned his head against the body of the disciple closest to him and dropped off to sleep. Little by little, the pilgrims quieted down, and one after the other, they, too, fell asleep. The circus people returned to their wagon. Very soon afterward they heard the Dwarf, who often talked in his sleep, snoring away.

Galileo and Jurema slept apart from the others, on top of the canvas tent that they had not set up since Ipupiará. The moon, full and bright, presided over a cortege of countless stars. The night was cool, clear, without a sound, peopled with the shadows of
mandacarus
and
cajueiros
. Jurema closed her eyes and her breathing grew slow and regular, as Gall, lying alongside her, face up with his hands behind his head, contemplated the sky. It would be stupid to end up in this wasteland without having seen Canudos. It might well be something primitive, naïve, contaminated by superstition, but there was no doubt of it: it was also something unusual. A libertarian citadel, without money, without masters, without politics, without priests, without bankers, without landowners, a world built with the faith and the blood of the poorest of the poor. If it endured, the rest would come by itself: religious prejudices, the mirage of the beyond, being obsolete and useless, would fade away. The example would spread, there would be other Canudoses, and who could tell…He had begun to smile. He scratched his head. His hair was growing out, long enough now for him to grasp with his fingertips. Going around with a shaved head had left him a prey to anxiety, to sudden rushes of fear. Why? It went back to that time in Barcelona when they were taking care of him so as to garrote him. The sick ward, the madmen of the prison. They had had their heads shaved and been put in straitjackets. The guards were common prisoners; they ate the patients’ rations, beat them mercilessly, and delighted in hosing them down with ice-cold water. That was the vision that came to life again each time he caught a glimpse of his head reflected in a mirror, a stream, a well: the vision of those madmen tortured by prison guards and doctors alike. Back then he had written an article that he was proud of: “Against the Oppression of Illness.” The revolution would not only free man of the yoke of capital and religion, but also of the prejudices that surrounded illnesses in a class society: the patient—above all, the mental patient—was a social victim no less long-suffering and scorned than the worker, the peasant, the prostitute, the servant girl. Hadn’t that revered old man said, just tonight, thinking that he was speaking of God when in reality he was speaking of freedom, that in Canudos poverty, sickness, ugliness would disappear? Wasn’t that the revolutionary ideal? Jurema’s eyes were open and she was watching him. Had he been thinking aloud?

“I would have given anything to be with them when they routed Febrônio de Brito,” he said in a whisper, as though uttering words of love. “I’ve spent my life fighting and all I’ve seen in our camp is betrayals, dissensions, and defeats. I would have liked to see a victory, if only just once. To know what it feels like, what it’s really like, what a victory for our side tastes like.”

He saw that Jurema was looking at him as she had at other times, at once aloof and intrigued. They lay there, just a fraction of an inch apart, their bodies not touching. The Dwarf had begun to babble deliriously, in a soft voice.

“You don’t understand me and I don’t understand you,” Gall said. “Why didn’t you kill me when I was unconscious? Why didn’t you convince the
capangas
to take my head away with them instead of just my hair? Why are you with me? You don’t believe in the things that I believe in.”

“The person who must kill you is Rufino,” Jurema whispered, with no hatred in her voice, as though she were explaining something very simple. “By killing you, I would have done a worse thing to him than you did.”

“That’s what I don’t understand,” Gall thought. They had talked about the same thing before and each time he had ended up as much in the dark as ever. Honor, vengeance, that rigorous religion, those punctilious codes of conduct—how to explain their existence here at the end of the world, among people who possessed nothing but the rags and lice they had on them? Honor, a vow, a man’s word, those luxuries and games of the rich, of idlers and parasites—how to understand their existence here? He remembered how, from the window in his room at the boarding house of Our Lady of Grace in Queimadas, he had listened one market day to a wandering minstrel recite a story that, though distorted, was a medieval legend he had read as a child and as a young man seen transformed into a light romantic comedy for the stage: Robert the Devil. How had it gotten here? The world was more unpredictable than it appeared to be.

“I don’t understand those
capangas
’ reasons for carrying off my hair either,” he murmured. “That Caifás, I mean. Was he sparing my life so as not to deprive his friend of the pleasure of taking his revenge? That’s not the behavior of a peasant. It’s the behavior of an aristocrat.”

At other times, Jurema had tried to explain, but tonight she remained silent. Perhaps she was now convinced that this stranger would never understand these things.