The War Of The End Of The World (39 page)

The following morning, they took to the road again before the Algodões pilgrims. It took them an entire day to cross the Serra da França, and that night they were so tired and hungry they collapsed. The Idiot fainted twice during the day’s journey, and the second time he lay there so pale and still they thought he was dead. At dusk they were rewarded for their hard day by the discovery of a pool of greenish water. Parting the water plants, they drank from it, and the Bearded Lady brought the Idiot a drink in her cupped hands and cooled the cobra by sprinkling it with drops of water. The animal did not suffer from hunger, for they could always find little leaves or a worm or two to feed it. Once they had quenched their thirst, they gathered roots, stems, leaves to eat, and the Dwarf laid traps. The breeze that was blowing was balm after the terrible heat they had endured all day long. The Bearded Lady sat down next to the Idiot and took his head in her lap. The fate of the Idiot, the cobra, and the wagon was as great a concern to her as her own; she seemed to believe that her survival depended on her ability to protect that person, animal, and thing that constituted her world.

Gall, Jurema, and the Dwarf chewed slowly, without gusto, spitting out the little twigs and roots once they had extracted the juice from them. At the feet of the revolutionary was something hard, lying half buried. Yes, it was a skull, yellowed and broken. Ever since he had been in the backlands, he had seen human bones along the roads. Someone had told him that some men in these parts dug up their enemies’ dead bodies and left them lying in the open as food for scavengers, because they believed that by so doing they were sending their souls to hell. He examined the skull, turning it this way and that in his hands.

“To my father, heads were books, mirrors,” he said nostalgically. “What would he think if he knew that I was here in this place, in the state that I’m in? The last time I saw him, I was seventeen years old. I disappointed him by telling him that action was more important than science. He was a rebel, too, though in his own way. Doctors made fun of him, and called him a sorcerer.”

The Dwarf looked at him, trying to understand, as did Jurema. Gall went on chewing and spitting, his face pensive.

“Why did you come here?” the Dwarf murmured. “Aren’t you afraid of dying so far from your homeland? You have no family here, no friends. Nobody will remember you.”

“You’re my family,” Gall answered. “And the
jagunços
, too.”

“You’re not a saint, you don’t pray, you don’t talk about God,” the Dwarf said. “Why are you so set on getting to Canudos?”

“I couldn’t live among foreigners,” Jurema said. “If you don’t have a fatherland, you’re an orphan.”

“Someday the word ‘fatherland’ is going to disappear,” Galileo immediately replied. “People will look back on us, shut up within frontiers, killing each other over lines on a map, and they’ll say: How stupid they were.”

The Dwarf and Jurema looked at each other and Gall had the feeling that they were thinking he was the one who was stupid. They chewed and spat, grimacing in disgust every so often.

“Do you believe what the apostle from Algodões said?” the Dwarf asked. “That one day there’ll be a world without evil, without sicknesses…”

“And without ugliness,” Gall added. He nodded his head several times. “I believe in that the way other people believe in God. For a long time now, a lot of people have given their lives so that that might be possible. That’s why I’m so doggedly determined to get to Canudos. Up there, in the very worst of cases, I’ll die for something that’s worth dying for.”

“You’re going to get killed by Rufino,” Jurema muttered, staring at the ground. Her voice rose: “Do you think he’s forgotten the affront to his honor? He’s searching for us and sooner or later he’ll take his revenge.”

Gall seized her by the arm. “You’re staying with me so as to see that revenge, isn’t that true?” he asked her. He shrugged. “Rufino couldn’t understand either. It wasn’t my intention to offend him. Desire sweeps everything before it: force of will, friendship. We’ve no control over it, it’s in our bones, in what other people call our souls.” He brought his face close to Jurema’s again. “I have no regrets, it was…instructive. What I believed was false. Carnal pleasure is not at odds with the ideal. We mustn’t be ashamed of the body, do you understand? No, you don’t understand.”

“In other words, it might be true?” the Dwarf interrupted, his voice breaking and an imploring look in his eyes. “People say that he’s made the blind see and the deaf hear, closed the wounds of lepers. If I say to him: ‘I’ve come because I know you’ll work the miracle,’ will he touch me and make me grow?”

Gall looked at him, disconcerted, and found no truth or lie to offer him in reply. At that moment the Bearded Lady burst into tears, out of pity for the Idiot. “He hasn’t an ounce of strength left,” she said. “He’s not smiling any more, or complaining, he’s just dying little by little, second by second.” They heard her weeping like that for a long time before falling asleep. At dawn, they were awakened by a family from Carnaíba, who passed some bad news on to them. Rural Police patrols and
capangas
in the hire of hacienda owners in the region were blocking the entrances and exits of Cumbe, waiting for the arrival of the army. The only way to reach Canudos now was to turn north and make a long detour by way of Massacará, Angico, and Rosário.

A day and a half later they arrived in Santo Antônio, a tiny spa on the banks of the greenish Massacará. The circus people had been in the town, years before, and remembered how many people came to cure their skin diseases in the bubbling, fetid mineral springs. Santo Antônio had also been the constant victim of attacks by bandits, who came to rob the sick people. Today it appeared to be deserted. They did not come across a single washerwoman down by the river, and in the narrow cobblestone streets lined with coconut palms, ficus, and cactus there was not a living creature—human, dog, or bird—to be seen. Despite this, the Dwarf’s mood had suddenly brightened. He grabbed a cornet, put it to his lips and produced a comic blare, and began his spiel about the performance they would give. The Bearded Lady burst out laughing, and even the Idiot, weak as he was, tried to push the wagon along faster, with his shoulders, his hands, his head; his mouth was gaping open and long trickles of saliva were dribbling out of it. They finally spied an ugly, misshapen little old man who was fastening an eyebolt to a door. He looked at them as though he didn’t see them, but when the Bearded Lady threw him a kiss he smiled.

The circus people parked the wagon in a little square with climbing vines; doors and windows started flying open and faces of the townspeople, attracted by the blaring of the cornet, began peeking out of them. The Dwarf, the Bearded Lady, and the Idiot rummaged through their bits of cloth and odds and ends, and a moment later they were busily daubing paint on their faces, blackening them, decking themselves out in bright costumes, and in their hands there appeared the last few remains of a set of props: the cobra cage, hoops, magic wands, a paper concertina. The Dwarf blew furiously into his cornet and shouted: “The show is about to begin!” Gradually, an audience straight out of a nightmare began to crowd round them. Human skeletons, of indefinable age and sex, most of them with faces, arms, and legs pitted with gangrene sores, abscesses, rashes, pockmarks, came out of the dwellings, and overcoming their initial apprehension, leaning on each other, crawling on all fours, or dragging themselves along, came to swell the circle. “They don’t look like people who are dying,” Gall thought. “They look like people who’ve been dead for some time.” All of them, the children in particular, seemed very old. Some of them smiled at the Bearded Lady, who was coiling the cobra round her, kissing it on the mouth, and making it writhe in and out of her arms. The Dwarf grabbed the Idiot and mimicked the number that the Bearded Lady was performing with the snake: he made him dance, contort himself, tie himself in knots. The townspeople and the sick of Santo Antônio watched, grave-faced or smiling, nodding their heads in approval and bursting into applause now and again. Some of them turned around to look at Gall and Jurema, as though wondering when they would put on their act. The revolutionary watched them, fascinated, as Jurema’s face contorted in a grimace of repulsion. She did her best to contain her feelings, but soon she whispered that she couldn’t bear the sight of them and wanted to leave. Galileo did not calm her down. His eyes had begun to redden and he was deeply shaken. Health, like love, like wealth and power, was selfish: it shut one up within oneself, it abolished all thought of others. Yes, it was better not to have anything, not to love, but how to give up one’s health in order to be as one with those brothers who were ill? There were so many problems, the hydra had so many heads, iniquity raised its head everywhere one looked.

He noticed then how repelled and frightened Jurema was, and took her by the arm. “Look at them, look at them,” he said feverishly, indignantly. “Look at the women. They were young, strong, pretty once. Who turned them into what they are today? God? No: scoundrels, evildoers, the rich, the healthy, the selfish, the powerful.”

With a look of feverish excitement on his face, he let go of Jurema’s arm and strode to the center of the circle, not even noticing that the Dwarf had begun to tell the strange story of Princess Maguelone, the daughter of the King of Naples. The spectators saw the man with reddish fuzz on his scalp and a red beard, a scar on his neck, and ragged pants begin to wave his arms wildly.

“Don’t lose your courage, my brothers, don’t give in to despair! You are not rotting away here in this life because a ghost hidden behind the clouds has so decided, but because society is evil. You are in the state you are because you have nothing to eat, because you don’t have doctors or medicine, because no one takes care of you, because you are poor. Your sickness is called injustice, abuse, exploitation. Do not resign yourselves, my brothers. From the depths of your misery, rebel, as your brothers in Canudos have done. Occupy the lands, the houses, take possession of the goods of those who have stolen your youth, who have stolen your health, your humanity…”

The Bearded Lady did not allow him to go on. Her face congested with rage, she shook him and screamed at him: “You stupid fool! You stupid fool! Nobody’s listening to you! You’re making them sad, you’re boring them, they won’t give us money to eat on! Feel their heads, predict their future—do something that’ll make them happy!”

His eyes still closed, the Little Blessed One heard the cock crow and thought: “Praised be the Blessed Jesus.” Without moving, he prayed and asked the Father for strength for the day. The intense activity was almost too much for his frail body: in recent days, what with the ever-increasing numbers of pilgrims pouring in, he sometimes had attacks of vertigo. At night when he collapsed on his straw mattress behind the altar of the Chapel of Santo Antônio, his bones and muscles ached so badly that the pain made rest impossible; he would sometimes lie there for hours, with his teeth clenched, before sleep freed him from this secret torture.

Because, despite being frail, the Little Blessed One had so strong a spirit that nobody noticed the weakness of his body, in this city in which, after the Counselor, he exercised the highest spiritual functions.

He opened his eyes. The cock had crowed again, and the light of dawn appeared through the skylight. He slept in the tunic that Maria Quadrado and the women of the Sacred Choir had mended countless times. He put on his rope sandals, kissed the scapular and the emblem of the Sacred Heart that he wore on his breast, and girded tightly about his waist the length of wire, long since rusted, that the Counselor had given him when he was still a child, back in Pombal. He rolled up the straw mattress and went to awaken the sacristan and sexton who slept at the entrance to the church. He was an old man from Chorrochó on opening his eyes, he murmured: “Praised be Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“Praised be He,” the Little Blessed One replied, and handed him the whip with which each morning he offered the sacrifice of his pain to the Father. The old man took the whip—the Little Blessed One had knelt—and gave him ten lashes, on the back and the buttocks, with all his strength. The Little Blessed One received them without a single moan. The two of them crossed themselves again. Thus the day’s tasks began.

As the sacristan went to tidy the altar, the Little Blessed One headed for the door. On drawing near it, he sensed the presence of the pilgrims who had arrived in Belo Monte during the night. The men of the Catholic Guard had undoubtedly been keeping close watch on them until he could decide whether they might stay or were unworthy of so doing. The fear that he might make a mistake, refusing a good Christian or admitting someone whose presence might cause harm to the Counselor, sorely troubled his heart; it was one of those things for which he implored the Father’s help with the most anguish. He opened the door and heard a murmur of voices and saw the dozens of creatures camped in front of the portal. Circulating among them were members of the Catholic Guard, with rifles and blue armbands or kerchiefs, who on catching sight of him said in chorus: “Praised be the Blessed Jesus.”