The War Of The End Of The World (44 page)

“Yes, I suppose they get things from Calumbi, too, sir. It’s always been the custom. But that’s changed now that so many people have left. I’ve never seen a landowner or a politician or a foreigner in Canudos. Just poor people. I’m telling you everything I know. I’m not like them. I don’t want to be a martyr; don’t kill me.”

His voice breaks and he bursts into sobs, his shoulders sagging.

“There’s paper over there on that table,” Moreira César says. “I want a detailed map of Canudos. Streets, entrances into the town, how and where it’s defended.”

“Yes, yes.” Father Joaquim crawls over to the little camp table. “Everything I know. I have no reason to lie to you.”

He climbs up onto the chair and begins to draw. Moreira César, Tamarindo, and Cunha Matos stand around him. Over in his corner, the correspondent from the
Jornal de Notícias
feels relieved. He is not going to see the little priest’s head blown off. He gazes at the curé’s anxious profile as he draws the map they’ve asked him for. He hears him hasten to answer questions about trenches, traps, blocked streets. The nearsighted journalist sits down on the floor and sneezes, two, three, ten times. His head is spinning and he is beginning to feel unbearably thirsty again. The colonel and the other officers are talking with the prisoner about “nests of sharpshooters” and “outposts”—the latter does not appear to have a very good idea of what they are—and he unscrews his canteen and takes a long swallow, thinking to himself that he has failed once again to stick to his schedule. Distracted, dazed, uninterested, he hears the officers discussing the vague information that the priest is giving them, and the colonel explaining where the machine guns and the cannons will be placed, and how the regimental companies must be deployed in order to close in on the
jagunços
in a pincers movement. He hears him say, “We must leave them no avenue of escape.”

The interrogation is over. Two soldiers enter to take the prisoner away. Before he leaves, Moreira César says to him, “Since you know this region, you will help the guides. And you will help us identify the ringleaders when the time comes.”

“I thought you were going to kill him,” the nearsighted journalist pipes up from where he is sitting on the floor, once the priest has been led away.

The colonel looks at him as though he had not noticed his presence in the room until that very moment. “That priest will be useful to us in Canudos,” he answers. “Moreover, it will be worthwhile to let the word get around that the Church’s adherence to the Republic is not as sincere as some people believe.”

The nearsighted journalist leaves the tent. Night has fallen, and the camp is bathed in the light of the big yellow moon. As he walks toward the hut that he shares with the old journalist who is always chilly, the mess call is heard. The sound of the bugle echoes in the distance. Fires have been lighted here and there, and he passes among groups of soldiers heading over to them to get their meager evening rations. He finds his colleague in the hut. As usual, he has his muffler wound round his neck. As they stand in line for their food, the correspondent from the
Jornal de Notícias
tells him everything he has seen and heard in the colonel’s tent. Their rations that night are a thick substance with a vague taste of manioc, a little flour, and two lumps of sugar. They are also given coffee that tastes wonderful to them.

“What is it that’s impressed you so?” his colleague asks him.

“We don’t understand what’s happening in Canudos,” he replies. “It’s more complicated, more confused than I’d thought.”

“Well, I for one never thought there were emissaries of Her Britannic Majesty running around in the backlands, if that’s what you mean,” the old journalist growls. “But neither am I prepared to believe that little priest’s story that the only thing behind all this is love of God. Too many rifles, too many skirmishes, tactics far too well planned for all of this to be the work of illiterate Sebastianists.”

The nearsighted journalist says nothing. They go back to their hut, and the veteran correspondent immediately bundles up and drops off to sleep. But his colleague stays up, writing by the light of a candle, with his portable desk on his knees. He collapses on his blanket when he hears taps sounded. In his mind’s eye he can see the troops who are sleeping in the open, fully dressed, with their rifles, stacked by fours, at their feet, and the horses in their corral alongside the artillery pieces. He lies awake for a long time, thinking of the sentries making their rounds at the edge of camp, who will signal to each other all night long by blowing whistles. But, at the same time, something else is preying on his mind, below the surface: the priest taken prisoner, his stammerings, the words he has spoken. Are his colleague and the colonel right? Can Canudos be explained in terms of the familiar concepts of conspiracy, rebellion, subversion, intrigues of politicians out to restore the monarchy? Listening to that terrified little priest today, he has had the certainty that all that is not the explanation. Something more diffuse, timeless, extraordinary, something that his skepticism prevents him from calling divine or diabolical or simply spiritual. What is it, then? He runs his tongue across the mouth of his empty canteen and a few moments later falls asleep.

When first light appears on the horizon, the tinkling of little bells and bleating are heard at one end of the camp, and a little clump of bushes begins to stir. A few heads are raised, in the company covering that flank of the regiment. The sentry who has just passed by swiftly retraces his steps. Those who have been awakened by the noise strain their eyes, cup their hands behind their ears. Yes, bleating, bells tinkling. A look of joyous anticipation comes over their sleepy, hungry, thirsty faces. They rub their eyes, signal to each other not to make a sound, rise cautiously to their feet, and run toward the bushes, from which the bleating, tinkling noises are still coming. The first men to reach the thicket spy the sheep, an off-white blur in the deep shadow tinged with blue: baaa, baaa…They have just caught one of the animals when the shooting breaks out, and moans of pain are heard from those sent sprawling on the ground, hit by bullets from carbines or arrows from crossbows.

Reveille sounds from the other end of the camp, signaling that the column is to move on.

The casualties resulting from the ambush are not very heavy—two dead and three wounded—and though the patrols who take out after the
jagunços
do not catch them, they bring back a dozen sheep that are a welcome addition to their scanty rations. But perhaps because of the growing difficulties in securing food and water, perhaps because they are now so close to Canudos, the troops’ reaction to the ambush betrays a nervousness of which there has been no sign up until now. The soldiers of the company to which the victims belong ask that the prisoner be executed in reprisal. The nearsighted journalist notes the change in attitude of the men who have crowded round the white horse of the commander of the Seventh Regiment: contorted faces, eyes filled with hate. The colonel gives them permission to speak, listens to them, nods, as they all talk at once. He finally explains to them that this prisoner is not just another
jagunço
but someone whose knowledge will be precious to the regiment once they are in Canudos.

“You’ll get your revenge,” he tells them. “And very soon now. Save your rage for later: don’t waste it.”

That noon, however, the soldiers have the revenge they are so eager for. The regiment is marching past a rocky promontory, on which there can be seen—a frequent sight—the head and carcass of a cow that black vultures have stripped of everything edible. A sudden intuition causes one of the soldiers to remark that the dead animal is a blind for a lookout post. He has barely gotten the words out when several men break ranks, run over, and, shrieking with excitement, watch as a
jagunço
who is a little more than skin and bones crawls out from his hiding place underneath the cow. The soldiers fall on him, sink their knives, their bayonets into him. They decapitate him and carry the head back to Moreira César to show it to him. They tell him that they are going to load it into a cannon and send it flying into Canudos so the rebels will see the fate that awaits them. The colonel remarks to the nearsighted journalist that the troops are in fine fettle for combat.

Although he had ridden all night, Galileo Gall did not feel sleepy. The mounts were old and skinny, but showed no signs of tiring till after daylight. Communication with Ulpino, the guide, a man with a roughhewn face and copper-colored skin who chewed tobacco, was not easy. They barely said a word to each other till midday, when they halted to eat. How long would it take them to get to Canudos? Spitting out the wad he was chewing on, the guide gave him a roundabout answer. If the horses held up, two or three days. But that was in normal times, not in times like this…They would not be heading for Canudos in a straight line, they’d be backtracking every so often so as to keep out of the way of both the
jagunços
and the soldiers, since either would make off with their horses. Gall suddenly felt very tired, and fell asleep almost immediately.

A few hours later, they rode off again. Shortly thereafter, they were able to cool off a bit in a tiny rivulet of brackish water. As they rode on amid stony hillsides and level stretches of ground bristling with prickly pears and thistles, Gall was beside himself with impatience. He remembered that dawn in Queimadas when he might well have died and the stirrings of sex had flooded back into his life. Everything was lost now in the depths of his memory. He discovered to his astonishment that he had no idea what the date was: neither the day nor the month. Only the year: it was probably still 1897. It was as though in this region that he kept continually journeying through, bouncing back and forth, time had been abolished, or was a different time, with its own rhythm. He tried to remember how the sense of chronology had revealed itself in the heads that he had palpated here. Was there such a thing as a specific organ that revealed man’s relationship to time? Yes, of course there was. But was it a tiny bone, an imperceptible depression, a temperature? He could not remember its exact location, though he could recall the capacities or incapacities that it revealed: punctuality or the lack of it, foresight or continual improvisation, the ability to organize one’s life methodically or existences undermined by disorder, overwhelmed by confusion… “Like mine,” he thought. Yes, he was a typical case of a personality whose fate was chronic tumult, a life falling into chaos on every hand…He had had proof of that at Calumbi, when he had tried feverishly to sum up what it was he believed in and the essential facts of his life story. He had had the demoralizing feeling that it was impossible to order, to hierarchize that whole dizzying round of travels, surroundings, people, convictions, dangers, high points, and low ones. And it was more than likely that those papers that he had left in the hands of the Baron de Canabrava did not make sufficiently clear what was surely an enduring factor in his life, that loyalty that had been unfailing, something that could provide a semblance of order amid all the disorder: his revolutionary passion, his great hatred of the misery and injustice that so many people suffered from, his will to help somehow to change all that. “Nothing of what you believe in is certain, nor do your ideals have anything to do with what is happening in Canudos.” The baron’s phrase rang in his ears once more, and irritated him. How could an aristocratic landowner who lived as if the French Revolution had never taken place understand the ideals he lived by? Someone for whom “idealism” was a bad word? How could a person from whom
jagunços
had seized one estate and were about to burn down another have any understanding of Canudos? At this moment, doubtless, Calumbi was going up in flames. He, Galileo Gall, could understand that conflagration, he knew very well that it was not a product of fanaticism or madness. The
jagunços
were destroying the symbol of oppression. Dimly but intuitively, they had rightly concluded that centuries of the rule of private property eventually came to have such a hold on the minds of the exploited that that system would seem to them of divine origin and the landowners superior beings, demigods. Wasn’t fire the best way of proving that such myths were false, of dispelling the victims’ fears, of making the starving masses see that it was possible to destroy the power of the landowners, that the poor possessed the strength necessary to put an end to it? Despite the dregs of religion they clung to, the Counselor and his men knew where the blows must be aimed. At the very foundations of oppression: property, the army, the obscurantist moral code. Had he made a mistake by writing those autobiographical pages that he had left in the baron’s hands? No, they would not harm the cause. But wasn’t it absurd to entrust something so personal to an enemy? Because the baron was his enemy. Nonetheless, he felt no enmity toward him. Perhaps because, thanks to him, he now felt he understood everything he heard and other people understood everything he said: that was something that hadn’t happened to him since he’d left Salvador. Why had he written those pages? Why did he know that he was going to die? Had he written them in an excess of bourgeois weakness because he didn’t want to end his days without leaving a single trace of himself in the world? All of a sudden the thought occurred to him that perhaps he had left Jurema pregnant. He felt a sort of panic. The idea of his having a child had always caused him a visceral repulsion, and perhaps that had influenced his decision in Rome to abstain from sexual relations. He had always told himself that his horror of fathering a child was a consequence of his revolutionary convictions. How can a man be available at all times for action if he has an offspring that must be fed, clothed, cared for? In that respect, too, he had been single-minded: neither a wife nor children nor anything that might restrict his freedom and sap his spirit of rebellion.