The War Of The End Of The World (73 page)

“The filicide of Salvador?” the baron said.

“I was present at her trial, when I was still in short pants. My father was a public defender, a lawyer for the poor, and it was he who was her defense attorney. I recognized her even though I couldn’t see her, even though twenty or twenty-five years had gone by. You read the papers in those days, didn’t you? The entire Northeast was passionately interested in the case of Maria Quadrado, the filicide of Salvador. The Emperor commuted her death sentence to life imprisonment. Don’t you remember her? She, too, was in Canudos. Do you see how the whole thing is a story that never ends?”

“I already knew that,” the baron said. “All those who had accounts to settle with the law, with their conscience, with God, found a refuge thanks to Canudos. It was only natural.”

“That they should take refuge there, yes, I grant you that, but not that they should become different people altogether.” As though he didn’t know what to do with his body, the journalist flexed his long legs and slid back down onto the floor. “She was the saint, the Mother of Men, the Superior of the devout women who cared for the Counselor’s needs. People attributed miracles to her, and she was said to have wandered everywhere with him.”

The story gradually came back to the baron. A celebrated case, the subject of endless gossip. She was the maidservant of a notary and had suffocated her newborn baby to death by stuffing a ball of yarn in his mouth, because he cried a great deal and she was afraid that she would be thrown out in the street without a job on account of him. She kept the dead body underneath her bed for several days, till the mistress of the house discovered it because of the stench. The young woman confessed everything immediately. Throughout the trial, her manner was meek and gentle, and she answered all the questions asked her willingly and truthfully. The baron remembered the heated controversy that had arisen regarding the personality of the filicide, with one side arguing that she was “catatonic and therefore not responsible” and the other maintaining that she was possessed of a “perverse instinct.” Had she escaped from prison, then?

The journalist had changed the subject once more. “Before July 18 a great many things had been hideous, but in all truth it was not until that day that I touched and smelled and swallowed the horror till I could feel it in my guts.” The baron saw the journalist pound his fist on his stomach. “I met her that day, I talked with her, and found out that she was the filicide that I had dreamed about so many times as a child. She helped me, for at that point I had been left all alone.”

“On July 18 I was in London,” the baron said. “I’m not acquainted with all the details of the war. What happened that day?”

“They’re going to attack tomorrow,” Abbot João said, panting for breath because he’d come on the run. Then he remembered something important: “Praised be the Blessed Jesus.”

The soldiers had been on the mountainsides of A Favela going on a month, and the war was dragging on and on: scattered rifle shots and cannon fire, generally at the hours when the bells rang. At dawn, noon, and dusk, people walked about only in certain places. Men gradually grow accustomed to almost anything, and establish routines to deal with it, is that not true? People died every day and every night there were burials. The blind bombardments destroyed countless houses, ripped open the bellies of oldsters and of toddlers, that is to say, the ones who didn’t go down into the trenches. It seemed as though everything would go on like that indefinitely. No, it was going to get even worse, the Street Commander had just told them. The nearsighted journalist was all alone, for Jurema and the Dwarf had gone off to take food to Pajeú, when the war leaders—Honório Vilanova, Big João, Pedrão, Pajeú himself—met in the store. They were worried; you could smell it; the atmosphere in the place was tense. And yet no one was surprised when Abbot João announced that the dogs were going to attack the next day. He knew everything. They were going to shell Canudos all night long, to soften up its defenses, and at 5 a.m. the assault would begin. He knew exactly which places they would charge. The
jagunço
leaders were talking quietly, deciding the best posts for each of them to take, you wait for them here, the street has to be blockaded there: we’ll raise barriers here, I’d better move from over there in case they send dogs this way. Could the baron imagine what he felt like, hearing that? At that point the matter of the paper came up. What paper? One that one of Pajeú’s “youngsters” had brought, running as fast as his legs could carry him. They all put their heads together and then asked him if he could read it. He did his best, peering through his monocle of shards, in the light of a candle, to decipher what it said. But he was unable to. Then Abbot João sent someone to fetch the Lion of Natuba.

“Didn’t any of the Counselor’s lieutenants know how to read?” the baron asked.

“Antônio Vilanova did, but he wasn’t in Canudos just then,” the journalist answered. “And the person they sent for also knew how to read. The Lion of Natuba. Another intimate, another apostle of the Counselor’s. He could read and write; he was Canudos’s man of learning.”

He fell silent, interrupted by a great gust of sneezes that made him double over, clutching his stomach.

“I was unable to see in detail what he looked like,” he said afterward, gasping for breath. “Just the vague outline, the shape of him, or, rather, the lack of shape. But that was enough for me to get a rough idea of the rest. He walked about on all fours, and had an enormous head and a hump on his back. Someone went to fetch him and he came with Maria Quadrado. He read them the paper. It was the instructions from the High Command for the assault at dawn.”

That deep, melodious, normal voice read out the battle plan, the disposition of the regiments, the distances between companies, between men, the signals, the bugle commands, and meanwhile he for his part grew more and more panic-stricken, more and more anxious for Jurema and the Dwarf to return. Before the Lion of Natuba had finished reading, the first part of the battle plan was already being carried out: the bombardment to soften them up.

“I now know that at that moment only nine cannons were bombarding Canudos and that they never shot more than sixteen rounds at a time,” the nearsighted journalist said. “But it seemed as if there were a thousand of them that night, as if all the stars in the sky had begun bombarding us.”

The din made the sheets of corrugated tin on the roof of the store rattle, the shelves and the counter shake, and they could hear buildings caving in, falling down, screams, feet running, and in the pauses, the inevitable howling of little children. “It’s begun,” one of the
jagunços
said. They went outdoors to see, came back in, told Maria Quadrado and the Lion of Natuba that they wouldn’t be able to get back to the Sanctuary because the only way there was being swept with cannon fire, and the journalist heard the woman insist on going back. Big João finally dissuaded her by swearing that the moment the barrage let up he would come and take them back to the Sanctuary himself. The
jagunços
left, and he realized that Jurema and the Dwarf—if they were still alive—were not going to be able to get back from Rancho do Vigário to where he was either. He realized, in his boundless fear, that he would have to go through the coming attack with no one for company except the saint and the quadrumanous monster of Canudos.

“What are you laughing at now?” the Baron de Canabrava asked.

“Something I’d be ashamed to own up to,” the nearsighted journalist stammered. He sat there lost in thought and then suddenly raised his head and exclaimed: “Canudos changed my ideas about history, about Brazil, about men. But above all else about myself.”

“To judge from your tone of voice, it hasn’t been a change for the better,” the baron murmured.

“You’re right there,” the journalist said, lower skill. “Thanks to Canudos, I have a very poor opinion of myself.”

Wasn’t that also his own case, to a certain degree? Hadn’t Canudos turned his life, his ideas, his habits topsy-turvy, like a hostile whirlwind? Hadn’t his convictions and illusions fallen to pieces? The image of Estela, in her rooms upstairs, with Sebastiana at her side in her rocking chair, perhaps reading aloud to her passages from the novels that she had been fond of, perhaps combing her hair, or getting her to listen to the Austrian music boxes, and the blank, withdrawn, unreachable face of the woman who had been the great love of his life—the woman who to him had always been the very symbol of the joy of living, beauty, enthusiasm, elegance—again filled his heart with bitterness.

With an effort, he seized on the first thing that passed through his mind. “You mentioned Antônio Vilanova,” he said hurriedly. “The trader, isn’t that right? A moneygrubber and a man as calculating as they come. I used to see a lot of him and his brother. They were the suppliers for Calumbi. Did he become a saint, too?”

“He wasn’t there to do business.” The nearsighted journalist had recovered his sarcastic laugh. “It was difficult to do business in Canudos. The coin of the Republic was not allowed to circulate there. It was the money of the Dog, of the Devil, of atheists, Protestants, Freemasons, don’t you see? Why do you think the
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made off with the soldiers’ weapons but never with their wallets?”

“So the phrenologist wasn’t all that crazy, after all,” the baron thought. “In a word, thanks to his own madness Gall was able to intuit something of the madness that Canudos represented.”

“Antônio Vilanova wasn’t someone who went around continually crossing himself and beating his breast in remorse for his sins,” the nearsighted journalist went on. “He was a practical man, eager to achieve concrete results. He was constantly bustling about organizing things—he reminded you of a perpetual-motion machine. All during those five endless months he took it upon himself to ensure that Canudos had enough to eat. Why would he have done that, amid all the bullets and dead bodies? There’s no other explanation: the Counselor had struck some secret chord within him.”

“As he did you,” the baron said. “He barely missed making you a saint, too.”

“He went out to bring food back till the very end,” the nearsighted journalist went on, paying no attention to what the baron had said. “He would steal off, taking just a few men with him. They would make their way through the enemy lines, attack the supply trains. I know how they did that. They would set up an infernal racket with their blunderbusses so as to make the animals stampede. In the chaos that ensued, they would drive ten, fifteen of the bullocks to Canudos. So that those who were about to give their lives for the Blessed Jesus could fight on for a little while more.”

“Do you know where those animals came from?” the baron interrupted him.

“From the convoys that the army was sending out from Monte Santo to A Favela,” the nearsighted journalist said. “The same place the
jagunços
’ arms and ammunition came from. That was one of the oddities of this war: the army provided the supplies both for its own forces and for the enemy.”

“What the
jagunços
stole was stolen property,” the baron sighed. “Many of those cattle and goats were once mine. Very few of them had been bought from me. Almost always they’d been cut out of my herds by gaucho rustlers hired on by the army. I have a friend who owns a hacienda, old Murau, who has filed suit against the state for the cows and sheep that the army troops ate. He’s asking for seventy contos in compensation, no less.”

In his half sleep, Big João smells the sea. A warm sensation steals over him, something that feels to him like happiness. In these years in which, thanks to the Counselor, he has found relief for that painful boiling in his soul from the days when he served the Devil, there is only one thing he sometimes misses. How many years is it now that he has not seen, smelled, heard the sea in his body? He has no idea, but he knows that it has been a long, long time since he last saw it, on that high promontory amid cane fields where Mistress Adelinha Isabel de Gumúcio used to come to see sunsets. Scattered shots remind him that the battle is not yet over, but he is not troubled: his consciousness tells him that even if he were wide awake it would make no difference, since neither he nor any of the men in the Catholic Guard huddled in the trenches round about him have a single Mannlicher bullet left, not one load of shotgun pellets, not one grain of powder to set off the explosive devices manufactured by the blacksmiths of Canudos whom necessity has turned into armorers.

So why are they staying, then, in these caves on the heights, in the ravine at the foot of A Favela where the dogs are waiting, crowded one atop the other? They are following Abbot João’s orders. After making sure that all the units of the first column have arrived at A Favela and are now pinned down by the fire from the
jagunço
sharpshooters who are all around on the mountainsides and are raining bullets down on them from their parapets, their trenches, their hiding places, Abbot João has gone off to try to capture the soldiers’ convoy of ammunition, supplies, cattle and goats which, thanks to the topography and the harassment from Pajeú and his men, has fallen far behind. Hoping to take the convoy by surprise at As Umburanas and divert it to Canudos, Abbot João has asked Big João to see to it that the Catholic Guard, at whatever cost, keeps the regiments at A Favela from retreating. In his half sleep, the former slave tells himself that the dogs must be stupid or must have lost many men, since thus far not a single patrol has tried to make its way back to As Umburanas to see what has happened to the convoy. The Catholic Guards know that if the soldiers make the slightest move to abandon A Favela, they must fling themselves upon them and bar their way, with knives, machetes, bayonets, tooth and nail. Old Joaquim Macambira and his men, hiding in ambush on the other side of the trail cleared for the infantry and the wagons and cannons to advance on A Favela, will do likewise. The soldiers won’t try to retreat; they are too intent on answering the fire in front of them and on their flanks, too busy bombarding Canudos to tumble to what is happening at their backs. “Abbot João is more intelligent than they are,” he thinks in his sleep. Wasn’t it his brilliant idea to lure the dogs to A Favela? Wasn’t he the one who thought of sending Pedrão and the Vilanova brothers to wait for the other devils in the narrow pass at Cocorobó? There, too, the
jagunços
must have wiped them out. As he breathes in the smell of the sea it intoxicates him, takes him far away from the war, and he sees waves and feels the caress of the foamy water on his skin. This is the first time he has had any sleep, after forty-eight hours of fighting.