The War Of The End Of The World (69 page)

“Till just a little while ago,” one of the messengers says, “it was swarming with soldiers around here.”

Taramela, who has been counting the men, informs Pajeú that there are thirty-five of them there. Should they wait for the others?

“There isn’t time,” Pajeú answers. “We’re needed.”

He leaves a messenger to tell the others which way they’ve gone, hands out the rifles and knapsacks they’ve brought, and heads straight for the ravines to meet up with Mané Quadrado, Felício, and Macambira. The rest he has had—along with having had something to eat and drink—has done him good. His muscles no longer ache; the wound burns less. He walks fast, not hiding himself, along the broken path that forces them to zigzag back and forth. Below him, the column continues to advance. The head of it is now far in the distance, perhaps climbing A Favela, but even in spots where the view is unobstructed he is unable to catch a glimpse of it. The river of soldiers, horses, cannons, wagons is endless. “It’s a rattlesnake,” Pajeú thinks. Each battalion is a ring, the uniforms the scales, the powder of its cannons the venom with which it poisons its victims. He would like to be able to tell the woman what has happened to him.

At that moment he hears rifle reports. Everything has turned out as Abbot João has planned it. They are up ahead shooting at the serpent from the rocks of As Umburanas, giving it one last push toward A Favela. On rounding a hill, they see a squad of cavalry coming up. Pajeú begins shooting, aiming at their mounts to make them roll down into the ravine. What fine horses, how easily they scale the very steep slope! The burst of fire downs two of them, but a number of them reach the top. Pajeú gives the order to clear out, knowing as he runs that the men must resent his having deprived them of an easy victory.

When they finally reach the ravines where the
jagunços
are deployed, Pajeú realizes that his comrades are in a tough spot. Old Macambira, whom it takes him some time to locate, explains to him that the soldiers are bombarding the heights, causing rockslides, and that every corps that passes by sends out fresh companies to hunt them down. “We’ve lost quite a few men,” the old man says as he energetically unfouls his rifle and carefully loads it with black powder that he extracts from a horn. “At least twenty,” he grumbles. “I don’t know if we’ll withstand the next charge. What shall we do?”

From where he is standing, Pajeú can see, very close by, the range of hills of A Favela, and beyond them, Monte Mário. Those hills, gray and ocher, have now turned bluish, reddish, greenish, and are moving, as though they were infested with larvae.

“They’ve been coming up for three or four hours now,” old Macambira says. “They’ve even gotten the cannons up. And A Matadeira, too.”

“Well then, we’ve done what we had to do,” Pajeú says. “So let’s all go now to reinforce O Riacho.”

When the Sardelinha sisters asked her if she wanted to go with them to cook for the men who were waiting for the soldiers in Trabubu and Cocorobó, Jurema said yes. She said it mechanically, the way she said and did everything. The Dwarf reproached her for it and the nearsighted man made that noise, halfway between a moan and a gargle, that came from him every time something frightened him. They had been in Canudos for more than two months now and were never apart.

She thought that the Dwarf and the nearsighted man would stay behind in the city, but when the convoy of four pack mules, twenty porters, and a dozen women was ready to leave, both of them fell in alongside her. They took the road to Jeremoabo. No one was bothered by the presence of these two intruders who were carrying neither weapons nor pickaxes and shovels for digging trenches. As they passed by the animal pens, now rebuilt and full once more of goats and kids, everyone began singing the hymns that people said had been composed by the Little Blessed One. Jurema walked along in silence, feeling the rough stones of the road through her sandals. The Dwarf sang along with the others. The nearsighted man, concentrating on seeing where he was stepping, was holding to his right eye the tortoiseshell frame of his glasses, to which he had glued little shards of the shattered lenses. This man who seemed to have more bones than other people, to stagger about in a daze, holding this artifact made of slivers up to his eye, who approached persons and things as though he were about to bump into them, at times kept Jurema from dwelling on her unlucky star. In the weeks during which she had been his eyes, his cane, his consolation, she had thought of him as her son. Thinking of this gangling beanpole of a man as “my son” was her secret game, a notion that made her laugh. God had brought strange people into her life, people she never dreamed existed, such as Galileo Gall, the circus folk, and this pitiful creature alongside her who had just tripped and fallen headlong.

Every so often they would run into armed groups of the Catholic Guard in the scrub on the mountainsides and stop to give them flour, fruit, brown sugar, jerky, and ammunition. From time to time messengers appeared, who on spying them stopped short to talk with Antônio Vilanova. Rumors spread in whispers through the convoy after they had gone on. They were always about the same thing: the war, the dogs that were on their way. She finally pieced together what had been happening. There were two armies approaching, one of them by way of Queimadas and Monte Santo and the other by way of Sergipe and Jeremoabo. Hundreds of
jagunços
had taken off in those two directions in recent days, and every afternoon, during the counsels, which Jurema had faithfully attended, the Counselor exhorted his flock to pray for them. She had seen the anxiety that the imminent threat of yet another war had aroused. Her one thought was that, because of this war, the robust, mature
caboclo
, the one with the scar and the little beady eyes that frightened her, would not be back for some time.

The convoy arrived in Trabubu as night was falling. They distributed food to the
jagunços
entrenched amid the rocks and three women stayed behind with them. Then Antônio Vilanova ordered the rest of the convoy to go on to Cocorobó. They covered the last stretch in darkness. Jurema led the nearsighted man along by the hand. Despite her help, he stumbled and fell so many times that Antônio Vilanova had him ride a pack mule, sitting on top of the sacks of maize. As they started up the steep pass to Cocorobó, Pedrão came to meet them. He was a giant of a man, nearly as stout and tall as Big João, a light-skinned mulatto well along in years, with an ancient carbine slung over his shoulder that he never removed even to sleep. He was barefoot, with pants that reached down to his ankles and a sleeveless jacket that left his huge sturdy arms bare. He had a round belly that he kept scratching as he spoke. On seeing him, Jurema felt apprehensive, because of the stories that had circulated about his life in Várzea da Ema, where he had perpetrated many a bloody deed with the band that had never left his side, men with the fearsome faces of outlaws. She had the feeling that being around people such as Pedrão, Abbot João, or Pajeú was dangerous, even though they were saints now—like living with a jaguar, a cobra, and a tarantula who, through some dark instinct, might claw, bite, or sting at any moment.

Right now, Pedrão seemed harmless enough, lost in the shadows talking with Antônio and Honório Vilanova, the latter having materialized like a ghost from behind the rocks. A number of silhouettes appeared with him, suddenly popping up out of the brambles to relieve the porters of the burdens they were carrying on their backs. Jurema helped light the braziers. The men busied themselves opening cases of ammunition and sacks of gunpowder, distributing fuses. She and the other women began preparing a meal. The
jagunços
were so hungry they seemed scarcely able to wait for the pots to come to a boil. They congregated around Assunção Sardelinha, who filled their bowls and tins with water, as other women handed out fistfuls of manioc; as things became somewhat disorderly, Pedrão ordered the men to calm down.

Jurema worked all night long, putting the pots back on the fire to warm again and again, frying pieces of meat, reheating the beans. The men showed up in groups of ten, of fifteen, and when one of them recognized his wife among the women cooking, he took her by the arm and they withdrew to talk together. Why had it never occurred to Rufino, as it had to so many other
sertanejos
, to come to Canudos? If he had done so, he would still be alive.

Suddenly they heard a clap of thunder. But the air was dry; it couldn’t be a sign of a rainstorm about to break. She realized then that it was the boom of a cannon; Pedrão and the Vilanova brothers ordered the fires put out and sent the men who were eating back to the mountaintops. Once they had left, however, the three stayed there talking. Pedrão said that the soldiers were on the outskirts of Canche; it would be some time before they arrived. They did not march by night; he had followed them from Simão Dias on and knew their habits. The moment darkness fell, they set up their portable huts and posted sentinels and stayed put till the following day. At dawn, before leaving, they fired a cannon shot in the air. That must have been what the cannon report was; they must just be leaving Canche.

“Are there many of them?” a voice from the ground that resembled the screeching of a bird interrupted him. “How many of them are there?”

Jurema saw him rise to his feet and stand, frail and spindly, in profile between her and the men, trying to see though his monocle of splinters. The Vilanovas and Pedrão burst out laughing, as did the women who were putting away the pots and the food that was left. She refrained from laughing. She felt sorry for the nearsighted man. Was there anyone more helpless and terrified than her son? Everything frightened him: the people who brushed past him, cripples, madmen, and lepers who begged for alms, a rat running across the floor of the store. Everything made him give that little scream of his, made him turn deathly pale, made him search for her hand.

“I didn’t count them.” Pedrão guffawed. “Why should I have, if we’re going to kill all of them?”

There was another wave of laughter. On the heights, it was beginning to get light.

“The women had best leave here,” Honório Vilanova said.

Like his brother, he was wearing boots and carrying a pistol as well as a rifle. In their dress, their speech, and even their physical appearance, they seemed to Jurema to be quite different from the other people in Canudos. But no one treated them as though they were any different.

Forgetting about the nearsighted man, Pedrão motioned to the women to follow him. Half the bearers had already gone up the mountainside, but the rest were still there, with their loads on their backs. A red arc was rising behind the slopes of Cocorobó. The nearsighted man stayed where he was, shaking his head, when the convoy set out to take up positions amid the rocks behind the combatants. Jurema took him by the hand: it was soaking wet with sweat. His glassy, unfocused eyes looked at her gratefully. “Let’s go,” she said, tugging at him. “They’re leaving us behind.” They had to wake the Dwarf, who was sleeping soundly.

As they reached a sheltered hillock near the crest, the advance guard of the army was entering the pass and the war had begun. The Vilanovas and Pedrão disappeared, and the women, the nearsighted man, and the Dwarf stayed behind amid the weathered rocks, listening to the gunfire. It seemed to be scattered and far off. Jurema could hear the shots on the right and on the left, and she thought to herself that the wind must be carrying the sound away from them, for from there it was very muffled. She could not see anything; a wall of mossy stones hid the sharpshooters from sight. The war, despite being so close, seemed very far away. “Are there many of them?” the nearsighted man stammered. He was still clutching her hand tightly. She answered that she didn’t know and went to help the Sardelinha sisters unload the pack mules and set out the earthen jars full of water, pots full of food, strips of cloth and rags to make bandages, and poultices and medicines that the apothecary had packed in a wooden box. She saw the Dwarf climbing up toward the crest. The nearsighted man sat down on the ground and hid his face in his hands, as though he were weeping. But when one of the women shouted to him to gather branches to make an overhead shelter, he hastily rose to his feet and Jurema saw him set to work eagerly, feeling all around for stems, leaves, grass, and stumbling back to hand them to the women. That little figure moving back and forth, tripping and falling and picking himself up again and peering at the ground with his outlandish monocle, was such a funny sight that the women finally began pointing at him and making fun of him. The Dwarf disappeared amid the rocks.

Suddenly the shots sounded louder, closer. The women stood there not moving, listening. Jurema saw that the crackle of gunfire, the continuous bursts had instantly sobered them: they had forgotten all about the nearsighted man and were thinking of their husbands, their fathers, their sons who were the targets of this fire on the slope opposite. The shooting dazed her but it did not frighten her. She felt that this war did not concern her and that the bullets would therefore respect her. She felt such drowsiness come over her that she curled up against the rocks, at the Sardelinha sisters’ side. She slept though not asleep, a lucid sleep, aware of the gunfire that was shaking the mountain slopes of Cocorobó, dreaming twice of other shots, those of that morning in Queimadas, that dawn when she had been about to be killed by the
capangas
and the stranger who spoke in some odd language had raped her. She dreamed that, since she knew what was going to happen, she begged him not to do it because that would be the ruin of her and of Rufino and of the stranger himself, but not understanding her language, he had paid no attention to her.