The War Of The End Of The World (62 page)

He could hear his voice quavering and fell silent. He looked out the window, searching for help. And he found it: the creature was still there, perfectly still, beautiful, prehistoric, eternal, halfway between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, serene in the radiant morning light.

“But those terms were preferable. They at least kept people thinking about Canudos,” the journalist said, as though he had not heard him. “And now, not a word. Is there talk of Canudos in the cafés on the Rua Chile, in the marketplaces, in the taverns? No, people are talking instead of the orphan girls deflowered by the director of the Santa Rita de Cássia hospice. Or of Dr. Silva Lima’s anti-syphilis pill or of the latest shipment of Russian soap and English shoes just arrived at Clark’s Department Store.” He looked the baron straight in the eye and the latter saw that there was fury and panic in those myopic orbs. “The last news item about Canudos appeared in the papers two days ago. Do you know what it was about?”

“I don’t read the papers now that I’ve left politics,” the baron said. “Not even my own.”

“The return to Rio de Janeiro of the commission sent by the Spiritualist Center of the capital to aid the forces of law and order, through the use of its mediumistic powers, to wipe out the
jagunços
. Well, the commission has now come back to Rio, on the steamer
Rio Vermelho
, with its ouija boards and its crystal balls and what have you. Since then, not a single line. And it hasn’t even been three months yet.”

“I don’t want to hear any more,” the baron said. “I’ve already told you that Canudos is a painful subject to me.”

“I need to know what you know,” the journalist interrupted him in a hurried, conspiratorial voice. “You know many things. You sent them flour and also cattle. You had contacts with them. You talked with Pajeú.”

Blackmail? Had he come to threaten him, to get money out of him? The baron was disappointed that the explanation of all that enigmatic, empty talk had turned out to be something so vulgar.

“Did you really give Antônio Vilanova that message for me?” Abbot João asks, rousing himself from the warm drowsiness he feels as Catarina’s long slender fingers bury themselves in his mane, searching for nits.

“I don’t know what message he gave you,” Catarina answers, her fingers continuing to explore his head.

“She’s happy,” Abbot João thinks. He knows her well enough to sense, from furtive inflections of her voice or sparks in her dark eyes, when she is feeling unhappy. He is aware that people talk of Catarina’s mortal sadness, since no one has ever seen her laugh and very few have ever heard her say a word. But why try to show them that they’re wrong? He knows: he has seen her smile and laugh, though always as if in secret.

“That if I’m condemned to eternal damnation, you want to be, too,” he murmurs.

His wife’s fingers stop moving, just as they do each time they come across a louse nesting in his hair, whereupon she crushes it between her fingernails. After a moment, they go on with their task and João again immerses himself in the welcome peace of simply being where he is, without his shoes on, his torso bare, lying on the rush pallet of the tiny dwelling made of boards held together with mud, on the Rua do Menino Jesus, with his wife kneeling at his back, removing the lice from his hair. He feels pity for the blindness of others. Feeling no need to speak to each other, he and Catarina tell each other more things than the worst chatterboxes in Canudos. It is mid-morning and the sunlight filtering in through the cracks between the planks of the door and the tiny holes in the length of blue cloth covering the only window brightens the one room of the cabin. Outside, voices can be heard, the sound of children running about, the hustle and bustle of people going about their business, as though this were a world at peace, as though there had not been so many people killed that it took Canudos an entire week to bury its dead and carry off to the outskirts of town all the soldiers’ corpses so the vultures would devour them.

“It’s true,” Catarina says in his ear, her breath tickling it. “If you go to hell, I want to go there with you.”

João reaches out his arm, takes Catarina by the waist, and sits her on his knees. He does so with the greatest possible gentleness, as always when he touches her, for, because she is so thin or because he feels such remorse, he always has the distressing feeling that he is going to hurt her, and because the thought always crosses his mind that he must let go of her immediately since he will encounter that resistance that always is evident the moment he even tries to take her by the arm. He knows that she finds physical contact unbearable and he has learned to respect her feelings, fighting his own impulses, because he loves her. Although they have lived together for many years, they have very seldom made love together, or at least given themselves to each other completely, Abbot João thinks, without those interruptions on her part that leave him panting, bathed in sweat, his heart pounding. But this morning, to his surprise, Catarina does not push him away. On the contrary, she curls up on his lap and he feels her frail body, with its protruding ribs, its nearly nonexistent breasts, pressing against his.

“There in the Health House, I was afraid for you,” Catarina says. “As we were caring for the wounded, as we saw the soldiers passing by, shooting and throwing torches. I was afraid. For you.”

She does not say this in a fervent, passionate tone of voice, but rather in a cold, impersonal one, as though she were speaking of other people’s reactions. But Abbot João feels deeply moved, and then a sudden desire for her. He thrusts his hand beneath Catarina’s wrapper and caresses her back, her sides, her tiny nipples, as his mouth with all its front teeth missing brushes her neck, her cheek, seeking her lips. Catarina allows him to kiss her, but she does not open her mouth, and when João tries to lay her down on the pallet, her body stiffens. He immediately frees her from his embrace, breathing deeply, closing his eyes. Catarina rises to her feet, pulls her wrapper about her, picks up the blue cloth that has fallen to the floor, and covers her head with it once again. The roof of the cabin is so low that she is obliged to bend over in the corner of the room where provisions are stored (when there are any): beef jerky, manioc flour, beans, raw brown sugar. João watches her preparing the meal and calculates how many days—or weeks?—it has been since he has had the opportunity to be alone with her like this, with no thought in either of their minds of the war and of the Antichrist.

Shortly thereafter, Catarina comes over and sits down beside him on the pallet, with a wooden bowl full of beans sprinkled with manioc and a wooden spoon in her hands. They eat, handing the spoon to each other, with him taking two or three mouthfuls to her one.

“Is it true that Belo Monte was saved from the Throat-Slitter by the Indians from Mirandela?” Catarina murmurs. “That’s what Joaquim Macambira says.”

“And also by the blacks from the Mocambo and the others,” Abbot João answers. “But it’s quite true, the Indians from Mirandela were really brave. They had neither carbines nor rifles.”

They had not wanted to have them, out of caprice, superstition, mistrust, or some other unfathomable reason. He himself, the Vilanova brothers, Pedrão, Big João, the Macambiras had tried several times to give them firearms, petards, explosives. The chief shook his head emphatically, thrusting his hands out before him with something like disgust. Shortly before the arrival of Throat-Slitter, he himself had offered to show them how to load, clean, and shoot muskets, shotguns, rifles. The answer had been no. Abbot João concluded that the Cariri Indians would not fight this time either. They had not gone to confront the dogs at Uauá, and when the expedition had come by way of O Cambaio they had not even left their huts, as though that battle had been no business of theirs either. “Belo Monte is not defended on that flank,” Abbot João had said. “Let’s pray to the Blessed Jesus that they don’t come from that direction.” But they had also come from that way. “The only side where they were unable to break through,” Abbot João thinks. It had been those surly, distant, incomprehensible creatures, fighting with only bows and arrows, lances, and knives, who had stopped them. A miracle perhaps?

His eyes seeking his wife’s, João asks: “Do you remember when we entered Mirandela for the first time, with the Counselor?”

She nods. They have finished eating and Catarina takes the bowl and the spoon to the corner of the stove. Then João sees her come back toward him—very thin, grave, barefoot, her head brushing the ceiling covered with soot—and lie down beside him on the pallet. He places his arm underneath her back and carefully makes room for her to settle down comfortably. They lie there quietly, listening to the sounds of Canudos, near and far. They can lie that way for hours and these are perhaps the most profound moments of the life they share.

“At that time I hated you as much as you used to hate Custódia,” Catarina murmurs.

Mirandela, a village of Indians herded together there in the eighteenth century by the Capuchin missionaries of the Massacará mission, was a strange enclave in the backlands of Canudos, separated from Pombal by four leagues of sandy ground, dense and thorny scrub impenetrable in places, and air so burning hot that it chapped people’s lips and turned their skin to parchment. Since time immemorial the village of Cariri Indians, perched on top of a mountain, in rugged country, had been the scene of bloody fights—sometimes turning into veritable massacres—between the Indians and the whites of the region for the possession of the best pieces of land. The Indians lived grouped together in the village, in scattered cabins around the Church of the Ascension of Our Lord, a stone building two centuries old, with a straw roof and a blue door and windows, and the bare stretch of ground that was the village square, in which there was nothing but a handful of coconut palms and a wooden cross. The whites stayed on their haciendas round about the village and this proximity was not coexistence but rather a permanent state of undeclared war that periodically took the form of reciprocal incursions, violent incidents, sackings, and murders. The few hundred Indians of Mirandela went around half naked, speaking a local dialect seasoned with little spurts of spit, and hunting with bows and poisoned arrows. They were surly, wretched specimens of humanity, who kept entirely to themselves within their circle of huts thatched with
icó
leaves, with their maize fields between, and so poor that neither the bandits nor the flying brigades of Rural Police entered Mirandela to sack it. They had become heathens again. It had been years since the Capuchin and Lazarist Fathers had been able to preach a Holy Mission in the village, for the moment the missionaries appeared in the vicinity, the Indians and their wives and children vanished into the
caatinga
, till the Fathers finally gave up and resigned themselves to preaching the mission only for the whites. Abbot João doesn’t remember when it was that the Counselor decided to go to Mirandela. For him the disciples’ time of wandering is not linear, with a
before
and an
after
, but circular, a repetition of interchangeable days and events. He does remember, on the other hand, how it came about. After having restored the chapel of Pombal, the Counselor took off toward the North one morning, heading across a succession of razor-backed hills that led directly to the Indian redoubt, where a family of whites had just been massacred. No one said a word to him, for no one, ever, questioned the Counselor’s decisions. But during the long day’s journey, with the blazing sun seemingly trepanning their skulls, many of the disciples, Abbot João among them, thought that they would be greeted by a deserted village or by a shower of arrows.

Neither thing happened. The Counselor and his followers climbed up the mountainside at dusk and entered the village in procession, singing hymns in praise of Mary. The Indians received them without taking fright, without hostility, in an attitude of apparent indifference. They saw the pilgrims install themselves on the open space in front of their huts, light a bonfire, and throng round it. Then they saw them enter the Church of the Ascension of Our Lord and pray at the stations of the cross, and then later, from their cabins and little animal pens and fields, those men whose faces were covered with ritual scars and green-and-white stripes listened to the Counselor give his evening counsel. They heard him speak of the Holy Spirit, which is freedom, and of Mary’s sorrow, extol the virtues of frugality, poverty, and sacrifice, explain that every suffering offered to God becomes a reward in the life to come. They then heard the pilgrims of the Blessed Jesus recite a Rosary to the Mother of Christ. And the next morning, still without having approached them, still without giving them so much as a smile or making a single friendly gesture, the Indians saw them leave by the path to the cemetery, where they stopped to tidy the graves and cut the grass.

“The Counselor was inspired by the Father to go to Mirandela that time,” Abbot João says. “He sowed a seed and it finally flowered.”

Catarina doesn’t say anything, but João knows that she is remembering, as he is, how one day some hundred Indians suddenly turned up in Belo Monte, bringing with them, along the road from Bendengó, their belongings, their old people, some of them on stretchers, their wives and their children. Years had gone by, but no one doubted that the surprising appearance of these half-naked people daubed with paint meant that they were returning the Counselor’s visit. The Cariris entered Canudos, accompanied by a white from Mirandela, Antônio the Pyrotechnist, as though they were entering their own house, and installed themselves in the open country adjoining the Mocambo that Antônio Vilanova assigned them. They built huts there and planted their crops between them. They went to hear the counsels and spoke just enough broken Portuguese to make themselves understood by the others, but they remained a world apart. The Counselor often used to go to see them—they would receive him by stamping their feet on the ground, that strange way of theirs of dancing—as did the Vilanova brothers, through whom they traded their produce for other provisions. Abbot João had always thought of them as strangers. But not any more. Because the day of the invasion by Throat-Slitter had seen them withstand three infantry charges launched directly on their quarter, two from the Vaza-Barris side and the other via the road from Jeremoabo. When he and some twenty men from the Catholic Guard went to reinforce this sector, he had been astonished at the number of attackers circulating among the huts and at the Indians’ stubborn resistance, riddling them with arrows from the rooftops, shooting rocks at them with their slings, flinging themselves upon them with their stone axes and wooden pikes. The Cariris fought hand-to-hand with the invaders, and their women leapt upon them too, biting them and scratching them and trying to snatch their rifles and bayonets out of their hands, forthrightly shouting insults and curses at them the while. At least a third of the infantrymen had been killed or wounded by the end of the encounter.