The War Of The End Of The World (74 page)

At two in the morning a messenger from Joaquim Macambira awakens him. It is one of Joaquim’s sons, young and slender, with long hair, crouching patiently in the trench, waiting for Big João to rouse himself from his sleep. The boy’s father needs ammunition; his men have almost no bullets or powder left. With his tongue still thick with sleep, Big João explains that his men don’t have any left either. Have they had any news from Abbot João? None. And from Pedrão? The youngster nods: he and his men have had to fall back from Cocorobó they have no ammunition left and have had heavy losses. And they have not been able to stop the dogs in Trabubu either.

Big João feels wide awake at last. Does that mean that the army advancing by way of Jeremoabo is coming here?

“Yes,” Joaquim Macambira’s son answers. “Pedrão and all the men of his who aren’t dead are already back in Belo Monte.”

Maybe that is what the Catholic Guard should do: go back to Canudos to defend the Counselor from the attack that now seems inevitable if the other army is coming this way. What is Joaquim Macambira going to do? The youngster doesn’t know. Big João decides to go talk to the boy’s father.

It is late at night and the sky is studded with stars. After instructing his men not to budge from where they are, the former slave slips silently down the rocky slope, alongside young Macambira. Unfortunately, with so many stars out, he is able to see the dead horses with their bellies ripped open, being pecked at by the black vultures, and the body of the old woman. All the day before and part of the night he has kept coming across these officers’ mounts, the first victims of the fusillade. He is certain that he himself has killed a number of them. He had to do it, for the sake of the Father and Blessed Jesus the Counselor and Belo Monte, the most precious thing in his life. He will do it again, as many times as necessary. But something within his soul protests and suffers when he sees these animals fall with a great whinny, agonize for hour after hour, with their insides spilling out on the ground and a pestilential stench in the air. He knows where this sense of guilt, of committing a sin, that possesses him every time he fires on the officers’ horses comes from. It stems from the memory of the great care that was taken of the horses on the hacienda, where Master Adalberto de Gumúcio had instilled the veritable worship of horses in his family, his hired hands, his slaves. On seeing the shadowy bulks of the animals’ carcasses scattered about as he goes along the trail, crouching at young Macambira’s side, he wonders whether it is the Father who makes certain things that go back to the days when he was a sinner—his homesickness for the sea, his love of horses—linger so long and so vividly in his memory.

He sees the dead body of the old woman at the same time, and feels his heart pound. He has glimpsed her for only a few seconds, her face bathed in moonlight, her eyes staring in mad terror, her two remaining teeth protruding from her lips, her hair disheveled, her forehead set in a tense scowl. He has no idea what her name is, but he knows her very well; she came to settle in Belo Monte long ago, with a large family of sons, daughters, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and homeless waifs that she had taken in, in a little mud hut on the Coração de Jesus, a narrow back street. It was the first dwelling to have been blown to bits by the Throat-Slitter’s cannons. The old woman had been in the procession, and when she returned home, her hut was a heap of rubble beneath which were three of her daughters and all her nieces and nephews, a dozen young ones who slept one on top of the other on the floor and in a couple of hammocks. The woman had climbed up to the trenches at As Umburanas with the Catholic Guard when it went up on the heights there three days ago to wait for the soldiers. She had cooked and brought water to the
jagunços
from the nearby water source, along with the rest of the women, but when the shooting began, Big João and his men saw her take off amid the dust, stumble down the gravel slope, and reach the trail at the bottom where—slowly, without taking any precautions—she began wandering about among the wounded soldiers, giving them the
coup de grâce
with a little dagger. They had seen her poke about among the uniformed corpses, and before the hail of bullets blew her to pieces, she had managed to strip some of them naked, lop off their privates, and stuff them in their mouths. All during the fighting, as he saw infantrymen and cavalrymen pass by, saw them die, fire their rifles, fall over each other, trample their dead and wounded underfoot, flee from the rain of gunfire and run for their lives along the slopes of A Favela, the only way left open, Big João’s eyes kept constantly looking back toward the dead body of that old woman that he has just left behind.

As he approaches a bog dotted with thornbushes, cacti, and a few scattered
imbuzeiros
, young Macambira raises the cane whistle to his lips and blows a shrill blast that sounds like a parakeet’s screech. An identical blast comes in reply. Grabbing João by the arm, the youngster guides him through the bog, their feet sinking into it up to the ankles, and soon afterward the former slave is drinking from a leather canteen full of fresh sweet water, squatting on his heels alongside Joaquim Macambira beneath a shelter of boughs beyond which are many pairs of gleaming eyes.

The old man is consumed with anxiety, but Big João is surprised to discover that the one source of his anxiety is the big, extra-long, shining cannon drawn by forty bullocks that he has seen on the Jueté road. “If A Matadeira goes into action, the dogs will blow up the towers and the walls of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus and Belo Monte will disappear,” he mutters gloomily. Big João listens to him attentively. He reveres Joaquim Macambira; he has the air of a venerable patriarch. He is very old, his white locks fall in curls that reach down to his shoulders, his little snow-white beard sets off his dark weather-beaten face with a nose like a gnarled vine shoot. His eyes buried in deep wrinkles sparkle with uncontainable energy. He was once the owner of a large plot of land where he grew manioc and maize, between Cocorobó and Trabubu, in the region known in fact as Macambira. He worked that land with his eleven sons and had many a fight with his neighbors over boundary lines. But one day he abandoned everything and moved with his enormous family to Canudos, where they occupy half a dozen dwellings opposite the cemetery. Everyone in Belo Monte approaches the old man very warily because he has the reputation of being a fiercely proud, touchy man.

Joaquim Macambira has sent messengers to ask Abbot João whether, in view of the situation, he should continue to mount guard at As Umburanas or withdraw to Canudos. He has had no answer as yet. What does Big João think? The latter shakes his head sadly: he doesn’t know what to do. On the one hand, what seems most urgent is to hasten back to Belo Monte so as to protect the Counselor in case there is an attack from the north. But, on the other hand, hasn’t Abbot João said that it is essential that they protect his rear?

“Protect it with what?” Macambira roars. “With our hands?”

“Yes,” Big João says humbly. “If that’s all there is.”

They decide that they will stay at As Umburanas until they receive word from the Street Commander. They bid each other goodbye with a simultaneous “Praised be Blessed Jesus the Counselor.” As he starts to wade through the bog again, alone this time, Big João hears the whistles that sound like the screeching of parakeets, signaling to the
jagunços
to let him through. As he splashes through the mud and feels mosquitoes biting his face, arms, and chest, he tries to picture A Matadeira, that war machine that so alarms Macambira. It must be enormous, deadly, a thundering steel dragon that vomits fire, if it frightens as brave a man as old Macambira. The Evil One, the Dragon, the Dog is really tremendously powerful, with endless resources, since he can keep hurling more and more enemies, better and better armed, into the battle against Canudos. For how long a time would the Father continue to test the faith of the believers of Belo Monte? Hadn’t they suffered enough? Hadn’t they endured enough hunger, death, privation, sorrow? No, not yet. The Counselor has told them as much: our penance will be as great as our sins. Since João’s burden of sin is heavier than that of the others, he will doubtless have to pay more. But it is a great consolation to be fighting for the right cause, on St. George’s side, not the Dragon’s.

By the time he gets back to the trench, dawn has begun to break; the sentinels have climbed up to their posts on the rocks, but all the rest of the men, lying on the ground on the slope, are still sleeping. Big João curls up in a ball and feels himself beginning to drowse when the sound of hoofbeats causes him to leap to his feet. Enveloped in a cloud of dust, eight or ten horsemen are approaching. Scouts, the vanguard of troops come to protect the convoy? In the still-dim light a rain of arrows, stones, lances descends upon the patrol from the hillsides and he hears shots from the bog where Macambira is. The horsemen wheel their mounts around and gallop toward A Favela. Yes, he is certain now that the troops reinforcing the convoy will be appearing at any moment, countless numbers of them, too many to be held off by men whose only remaining weapons are hunting crossbows, bayonets, and knives, and Big João prays to the Father that Abbot João will have time to carry out his plan.

They appear an hour later. By this time the Catholic Guard has so thoroughly blockaded the ravine with the carcasses of horses and mules and the dead bodies of soldiers, and with flat rocks, bushes, and cacti that they roll down from the slopes, that two companies of engineers are obliged to move up to clear the trail again. It is not an easy task for them, since in addition to the curtain of fire laid down by Joaquim Macambira and his band with their very last ammunition, which forces them to fall back several times just as the engineers have started clearing the obstacles away with dynamite, Big João and some hundred men crawl over to them on their hands and knees and engage them in hand-to-hand combat. Before more soldiers appear, João and his men wound and kill a number of them and also manage to make off with several rifles and some of their precious knapsacks full of cartridges. By the time Big João gives a blast on his whistle and shouts out the order to fall back, several
jagunços
are lying on the trail, dead or dying. Once back on the slope above, protected by the stone-slab parapet against the hail of bullets from below, the former slave has time to see if he’s been wounded, and finds himself unharmed. Spattered with blood, yes, but it is not his blood; he scrubs it off with fine sand. Is it the hand of Divine Providence that in three days of fighting he has not received so much as a scratch? Lying on his belly on the ground, panting for breath, he sees that the soldiers are now marching four abreast along the trail, cleared at last, headed toward the spot where Abbot João has posted himself. They go past by the dozens, by the hundreds. They’re no doubt on their way to protect the convoy, since despite all the harassment from the Catholic Guard and from Macambira and his men, they are not even bothering to climb up the slopes or venture into the bog. They merely rake the slopes on both flanks with rifle fire from little groups of snipers who rest one knee on the ground as they shoot. Big João hesitates no longer. There is nothing more he can do here to help the Street Commander. He makes certain that the order to fall back reaches everyone, leaping from one crag and hillock to another, making his way from trench to trench, going over the crest line and down the other side to make sure that the women who came to cook for the men have left. They are no longer there. Then he, too, heads back toward Belo Monte.

He does so by following a meandering branch of the Vaza-Barris, which fills up only during big floods. Walking in the stony riverbed with only a trickle of water in it, João feels the chill morning air grow warmer. He works his way to the rear, checks how many dead there are, foreseeing how sad the Counselor, the Little Blessed One, the Mother of Men will be when they learn that those brothers’ bodies will rot in the open air. It pains him to remember those boys, many of whom he taught to shoot a rifle, to know that they will turn into food for vultures, without a burial or a prayer over their graves. But how could they have rescued their mortal remains?

All the way back they hear shots, coming from the direction of A Favela. One
jagunço
says that it seems odd that Pajeú, Mané Quadrado, and Taramela, who are firing on the dogs from that front, should be doing so much shooting. Big João reminds him that when the ammunition was divided up, most of it was given to the men posted in those trenches forming a bulwark between Belo Monte and A Favela. And that even the blacksmiths went out there with their anvils and their bellows so as to go on melting lead for bullets right alongside the combatants. However, the moment they spy Canudos beneath little clouds of smoke which must be grenades exploding—the sun is now high in the sky and the towers of the Temple and the whitewashed dwellings are giving off dazzling reflections—Big João suddenly guesses the good news. He blinks, looks, calculates, compares. Yes, they are firing continuous rounds from the Temple of the Blessed Jesus, from the Church of Santo Antônio, from the parapets at the cemetery, as well as from the ravines of the Vaza-Barris and the Fazenda Velha. Where has all that ammunition come from? Moments later, a “youngster” brings him a message from Abbot João.

“So he got back to Canudos!” the former slave exclaims.

“With more than a hundred head of cattle and loads of guns,” the lad says enthusiastically. “And cases of rifle cartridges and grenades, and big drums of gunpowder. He stole all that from the dogs, and now everyone in Belo Monte is eating meat.”

Big João places one of his huge paws on the youngster’s head and contains his emotion. Abbot João wants the Catholic Guard to go to the Fazenda Velha to reinforce Pajeú, and the former slave to meet him at the Vilanovas’. Big João guides his men past the line of shacks along the Vaza-Barris, a dead angle that will protect them from the gunfire from A Favela, to the Fazenda Velha, a maze of trenches and dugouts a kilometer long, constructed by taking advantage of the twists and turns and accidents of the terrain, that is the first line of defense of Belo Monte, barely fifty yards away from the soldiers. Since his return, the
caboclo
Pajeú has been in command on this front.