The War Of The End Of The World (78 page)

“They rot before they die,” young Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti says aloud, believing that he’s merely thinking to himself, not speaking out loud. But there is no danger of his being overheard by the wounded. Even though the field hospital of the first column, which has been set up in a cleft between the peaks of A Favela and Monte Mário, is well protected from gunfire, the din of the fusillades and, above all, of the artillery fire echoes and reechoes down here, amplified by the semivault formed by the mountainsides, and it is one torture more for the wounded, who must shout to make themselves heard. No, no one has heard him.

The idea of rotting torments Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti. He was a student in his last year of medical school at the University of São Paulo when, out of fervor for the republican cause, he enrolled as a volunteer in the army that was leaving to defend the Fatherland up in Canudos; so this, naturally, is not the first time that he has seen people injured, dying, dead. But those anatomy classes, those autopsies in the dissecting room at the School of Medicine, the injured in the hospitals where he was learning to do surgery—how could they be compared to the inferno that this rat trap of A Favela has turned into? What stupefies him is how quickly wounds become infected, how in just a few hours a sudden restless activity can be seen in them, the writhing of worms, and how a fetid suppuration immediately begins.

“It will be of help in your career,” his father said to him at the São Paulo railroad station as he was seeing him off. “You will have intensive practice in administering first aid.” What it has been, however, is intensive practice in carpentry. He has learned one thing at any rate in these three weeks: more men die of gangrene than of the wounds they have received, and those who have the best chance of pulling through are those with a bullet or bayonet wound in an arm or a leg—parts of the body that a man can do without—so long as the limb is amputated and cauterized in time. There was enough chloroform to perform amputations humanely only for the first three days; on those days it was Teotônio who broke the ampoules open, soaked a wad of cotton in the liquid that made him light-headed, and held it against the nostrils of the wounded man as the chief field surgeon, Alfredo Gama, a doctor with the rank of captain, sawed away, panting. When their supply of chloroform ran out, the anesthetic was a glass of cane brandy, and now that the brandy has run out, they operate cold, hoping that the victim will faint dead away immediately, so the surgeon can operate without the distraction of hearing the man scream. It is Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti who is now sawing and lopping off feet, legs, hands, and arms in which gangrene has set in, as two medical aides keep the victim pinned down till he has lost consciousness. And it is he who, after having finished amputating, cauterizes the stumps by sprinkling a little gunpowder on them and setting it afire, or pouring boiling-hot grease on them, the way Captain Alfredo Gama taught him before that stupid accident.

Stupid, yes, that’s the right word. Because Captain Gama knew there are plenty of artillerymen but there aren’t anywhere near enough doctors. Above all, doctors like himself, with a great deal of experience in the sort of medicine practiced in the field, which he learned in the jungles of Paraguay, where he served as a volunteer when he was in medical school, just as young Teotônio has come to serve in Canudos. But in the war against Paraguay, Dr. Alfredo Gama unfortunately caught, as he himself confessed, “the artillery bug.” It was a bug that killed him a week ago, leaving his young assistant saddled with the crushing responsibility of caring for two hundred sick, wounded, and dying who are lying one on top of the other, half naked, stinking, gnawed by worms, on the bare rock—only a few of them have so much as a blanket or a straw mat—in the field hospital. The medical corps of the first column has been divided into five teams, and the one to which Captain Alfredo Gama and Teotônio were assigned is in charge of the north zone of the hospital.

Dr. Alfredo Gama’s “artillery bug” kept him from concentrating exclusively on his patients. Often he would abruptly break off a treatment to go feverishly clambering up to the Alto do Mário, the area on the very crest line to which all the cannons of the first column had been hauled up hand over hand. The artillerymen would let him fire the Krupps, even A Matadeira. Teotônio remembers his mentor prophesying: “It is a surgeon who will make the towers of Canudos come tumbling down.” The captain returned to the cleft in the mountainsides below with his spirits refreshed. He was a stout, ruddy, jovial man, devoted to his calling, who took a great liking to Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti from the first day he saw him enter the barracks. His outgoing personality, his cheery good spirits, his adventurous life, his picturesque anecdotes so charmed the student that on the way to Canudos he thought seriously of staying in the army once he received his medical degree, as his idol had. During the regiment’s brief stay in Salvador, Dr. Gama showed Teotônio around the medical school at the University of Bahia, in the Praça da Basílica Cathedral, and opposite the yellow façade with tall blue ogival windows, beneath the coral trees, the coconut palms, and the crotons, the doctor and the student had sat drinking sweetish brandy in front of the kiosks set up on the black-and-white mosaic pavement, amid the vendors hawking trinkets and women selling hot foods from braziers. They went on drinking till dawn, which found them, beside themselves with happiness, in a brothel of mulattas. As they climbed onto the train to Queimadas, Dr. Gama had his disciple down an emetic potion, “to ward off African syphilis,” he explained to him.

Teotônio mops the sweat from his brow as he gives quinine mixed with water to a patient with smallpox who is delirious from fever. To one side of him is a soldier with his elbow joint exposed to the air, and on the other a soldier with a bullet wound in his lower belly and his sphincter shot away so that his feces are leaking out. The smell of excrement mingles with that of the scorching flesh of the corpses being burned in the distance. Quinine and carbolic acid are the only things left in the pharmacopoeia of the field hospital. The iodoform ran out at the same time as the chloroform, and for lack of antiseptics the doctors have been making do with subnitrate of bismuth and calomel. But now these are gone, too. Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti now cleanses wounds with a solution of water and carbolic acid. He squats down to do so, dipping the solution out of the basin in his cupped hands. He gives others a bit of quinine in half a glass of water. They have a large supply of quinine on hand, since many cases of malaria were expected. “The great killer of the war against Paraguay,” Dr. Gama used to say. It had decimated the army there. But malaria is nonexistent in this extremely dry climate, where mosquitoes do not breed except around the very few places where there is standing water. Teotônio knows that quinine will do the wounded no good, but it at least gives them the illusion that they are being treated. It was on the day of the accident, in fact, that Captain Gama had begun giving out quinine, for lack of any other medicines.

Teotônio thinks of how the accident happened, of how it must have happened. He was not there; they have told him about it, and since then, this and the dream about the rotting bodies have been the nightmares that have most disturbed the few short hours of sleep that he manages to snatch. In the nightmare the jolly, energetic surgeon-captain ignites the fuse of the Krupp 34 cannon. In his haste he has failed to close the breech properly, and when the fuse detonates the charge, the explosion in the half-open breech ignites a barrel of projectiles standing next to the cannon. He has heard the artillerymen tell how Dr. Alfredo Gama was catapulted several yards off the ground and fell some twenty paces away, a shapeless mass of flesh. First Lieutenant Odilon Coriolano de Azevedo, Second Lieutenant José A. do Amaral, and three artillerymen were also killed, and five artillerymen received burns in the explosion. When Teotônio arrived at Alto do Mário, the dead bodies were being cremated, in accordance with a procedure suggested by the medical corps in view of the difficulty of burying the dead: digging a grave in this ground that is living rock represents a tremendous expenditure of energy, for the shovels and pickaxes become dented and shatter on the solid rock without breaking it up. The order to burn corpses has given rise to an extremely heated argument between General Oscar and the chaplain of the first column, Father Lizzardo, a Capuchin, who calls cremation “a Masonic perversion.”

Young Teotônio has a memento of Dr. Alfredo Gama that he treasures: a miraculous ribbon of Our Lord of Bonfim, sold to them that afternoon in Bahia by the tightrope walkers in the Praça da Basílica Cathedral. He is going to take it to his chief’s widow, if he ever gets back to São Paulo. But Teotônio doubts that he will ever again set eyes on the city where he was born, went to school, and enlisted in the army in the name of a romantic ideal: serving his country and civilization.

In these past months, certain beliefs of his that seemed rock-solid have been profoundly undermined. His notion of patriotism, for instance, a sentiment which, when he volunteered, he had believed ran in the blood of all these men come from the four corners of Brazil to defend the Republic against obscurantism, a perfidious conspiracy, and barbarism. His first disillusionment came in Queimadas, in that long two months of waiting, in the chaos that had resulted when that hamlet in the backlands had been turned into the general headquarters of the first column. In the medical facilities, where he had worked with Captain Alfredo Gama and other physicians and surgeons, he discovered that many men were trying to get out of combat duty by malingering. He had seen them feign illnesses, learn the symptoms by heart and recite them with the consummate skill of professional actors so as to get themselves declared unfit for service in the front lines. The doctor and would-be artillery officer taught him to see through their stupid tricks for making themselves run fevers, vomit, suffer attacks of diarrhea. The fact that there were among them not only troops of the line—that is to say, men of no education or background—but also officers had come as a great shock to Teotônio.

Patriotism was not as widespread as he had supposed. This idea has been borne in on him in the three weeks that he has been in this rat hole. It is not that the men don’t fight; they have fought, and they are fighting now. He has seen how bravely they have withstood, ever since Angico, the attacks of that slippery, cowardly enemy that refuses to show its face, that does not know the laws and customs of warfare, that lies in ambush, that attacks from odd angles, from hiding places, and vanishes into thin air when the patriots go to meet them head-on. In these three weeks, despite the fact that one-fourth of the expeditionary troops have been killed or wounded, despite the lack of rations, despite the fact that all of them are beginning to lose hope that the convoy of reinforcements will ever arrive, the men have gone on fighting.

But how to reconcile patriotism with business deals? What kind of love for Brazil is it that leaves room for this sordid traffic between men who are defending the most noble of causes, that of their country and civilization? This is yet another reality that demoralizes Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti: the way in which everyone makes deals and speculates because everything is in such short supply. In the beginning, it was only tobacco that was sold and resold at more and more astronomical prices. Just this morning, he has seen a cavalry major pay twelve milreis for a mere handful…Twelve milreis! Ten times more than what a box of fine tobacco costs in the city! Since those first days, the price of everything has reached dizzying heights, everything has become something to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Since they are receiving almost no rations at all—the officers are being handed out ears of green maize, without salt, and the soldiers the feed for the horses—food is fetching fantastic prices: a quarter of a goat is going for thirty and forty milreis, a loaf of hard brown sugar for twenty, a cupful of manioc flour for five, an
imbuzeiro
root or a “monk’s head” cactus with edible pulp for one and even two milreis. The cigars known as
fuzileiros
are bringing a milreis, and a cup of coffee, five. And, worst of all, he, too, has succumbed to this trafficking. Driven by hunger and his craving for tobacco, he has been spending all the money he has, paying five milreis, for instance, for a spoonful of salt, a commodity he has never before realized a person could miss that badly. What disgusts him most of all is knowing that a good part of these things that are being trafficked have been come by dishonestly, either stolen from the column’s quartermaster stores or as thefts of thefts…

Isn’t it surprising that in circumstances such as these, when they are risking their lives at every second, in this hour of truth that should purify them, leaving within them only what is most lofty and most noble, they should give proof of such a base urge to make deals and accumulate money? “It is not what is most sublime, but what is most sordid and abject, the hunger for filthy lucre, greed, that is aroused in the presence of death,” Teotônio thinks. His image of humanity has abruptly darkened in these past weeks.

He is roused from his thoughts by someone weeping at his feet. Unlike the others, who are openly sobbing, this one is weeping in silence, as though ashamed of his tears. He kneels down beside him. The man is an old soldier who has found his itching unbearable.

“I’ve been scratching myself, sir,” he murmurs. “I don’t give a damn any more whether it gets infected—or whatever, Doctor.”

He is one of the victims of that diabolical weapon of those cannibals that has eaten away the epidermis of a fair number of patriots: the ants known as
caçaremas
. At first it appeared to be a natural phenomenon, simply a terrible misfortune that these fierce insects which perforate the skin, produce rashes and a hideous burning sensation, should leave their nests in the cool of the night to attack sleeping men. But it has been discovered that their anthills, spherical structures built of mud, are being brought up to the camp by the
jagunços
and smashed there so that the savage swarms thus let loose wreak their cruel havoc on sleeping patriots…And the ones the cannibals send creeping into the camp to deposit the anthills there are mere youngsters! One of them has been captured: young Teotônio has been told that the “little
jagunço
” struggled like a wild beast in his captors’ arms, insulting them like the most foul-mouthed ruffian imaginable…