The War Of The End Of The World (79 page)

On raising the old soldier’s shirt to examine his chest, Teotônio finds that what yesterday were black-and-blue spots are now a huge bright-red patch with pustules teeming with activity. Yes, the ants are there, reproducing, burrowing under his skin, gnawing the poor man’s innards. Teotônio has learned to dissimulate, to lie, to smile. The bites are better, he tells the soldier, he must try not to scratch himself. He gives him half a cup of water with quinine to drink, assuring him that this will lessen the itching.

He continues on his rounds, imagining the youngsters whom those degenerates send into the camp at night with the anthills. Barbarians, brutes, savages: only utterly depraved people could pervert innocent children as they have done. But young Teotônio’s ideas about Canudos have also changed. Are they really monarchists bent on restoration? Are they really working hand in glove with the House of Bragança and former slaveowners? Is it true that those savages are merely a tool of Perfidious Albion? Although he hears them shouting “Death to the Republic,” Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti is no longer so sure of all this. Everything has become confused in his mind. He expected to find English officers here, advising the
jagunços
, teaching them how to handle the completely modern, up-to-date arms known to have been smuggled in by way of the shores of Bahia. But among the wounded that he is pretending to treat are victims of
caçarema
ants, and also of poisoned arrows and of sharp-pointed stones hurled with slings, the weapons of cavemen! So that business about a monarchist army, reinforced by English officers, now seems to him to be some sort of fantastic story invented out of whole cloth. “What we’re up against is primitive cannibals,” he thinks. “Yet we’re losing the war; we would already have lost it if the second column hadn’t arrived to reinforce us when they ambushed us in these hills.” How to explain such a paradox?

A voice interrupts his train of thought. “Teotônio?” It is a first lieutenant whose tattered tunic bears the still decipherable insignia of his rank and unit: Ninth Infantry Battalion, Salvador. He has been in the field hospital since the day the first column arrived in A Favela; he was in one of the vanguard corps of the First Brigade, the ones that Colonel Joaquim Manuel de Medeiros led in a mad charge down the mountainside of A Favela to attack Canudos. The carnage dealt them by the
jagunços
from their invisible trenches was frightful; the front line of soldiers can still be seen, lying frozen in death, halfway up the slope where it was mowed down. First Lieutenant Pires Ferreira was hit square in the face by a projectile; the explosion ripped off his two raised hands and left him blind. As it was the first day, Dr. Alfredo Gama was able to anesthetize him with morphine as he sutured the stumps and disinfected his face wounds. Lieutenant Pires Ferreira is fortunate: his wounds are protected by bandages from the dust and the insects. He is an exemplary patient, whom Teotônio has never heard weep or complain. Every day, when he asks him how he is feeling, his answer is: “All right.” And “Nothing” is his answer when he asks if there is anything he wants. Teotônio has fallen into the habit of coming to talk with him at night, stretching out alongside him on the stony ground, gazing up at the myriad stars that always stud the sky of Canudos. That is how he has learned that Lieutenant Pires Ferreira is a veteran of this war, one of the few who have served in the four expeditions sent by the Republic to fight against the
jagunços
; that is how he has found out that for this unfortunate officer this tragedy is the culmination of a series of humiliations and defeats. He has thus realized the reason for the bitterness that haunts the lieutenant’s thoughts, why he endures so stoically sufferings that destroy other men’s morale and dignity. In his case the worst wounds are not physical.

“Teotônio?” Pires Ferreira says again. The bandages cover half his face, but not his mouth or his chin.

“Yes,” the medical student says, sitting down alongside him. He motions to the two aides with the medicine kit and the canteens of water to take a rest; they go off a few paces and collapse on the gravel. “I’ll keep you company for a while, Manuel da Silva. Is there anything you need?”

“Can they hear us?” the officer in bandages says in a low voice. “This is confidential, Teotônio.”

At that moment the bells ring out on the hillside opposite. Young Leal Cavalcanti looks up at the sky: yes, it is getting dark, it is time for the bells calling the people of Canudos together for the Rosary. They peal every evening, with a magic punctuality, and without fail, a little while later, if there are no fusillades and no cannonades, the fanatics’ Ave Marias can be heard even up in the camps on A Favela and Monte Mário. A respectful cessation of all activity occurs at this hour in the field hospital; many of the sick and wounded cross themselves on hearing the bells ring and their lips move, reciting the Rosary at the same time as their enemies. Even Teotônio, who has been a lukewarm Catholic, cannot help feeling a curious, indefinable sensation each evening, what with all the prayers and ringing bells, something that, if it is not faith, is a nostalgia for faith.

“That means the bell ringer is still alive,” he murmurs, without answering First Lieutenant Pires Ferreira. “They still haven’t been able to pick him off.”

Captain Alfredo Gama used to talk a lot about the bell ringer. Several times he had caught sight of him climbing up to the belfry of the little chapel. He said that he was an insignificant, imperturbable little old man, swinging back and forth pulling on the clapper, indifferent to the fusillade from the soldiers in answer to the bells. Dr. Gama had told him that knocking down those defiant bell towers and silencing that provoking bell ringer is the obsessive ambition of all the artillerymen up there on the Alto do Mário, and that all of them shoulder their rifles to take aim at him at the hour of Angelus. Haven’t they been able to kill him yet, or is it a new bell ringer?

“What I’m going to ask you is not the product of despair,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira says. “It is not the request of a man who has lost his reason.”

His voice is firm and calm. He is lying completely motionless on the blanket separating him from the stony ground, with his head resting on a pillow of straw, and the bandaged stumps of his arms on his belly.

“You mustn’t despair,” Teotônio says. “You’ll be among the very first to be evacuated. The moment the reinforcements arrive and the convoy heads back, they’ll take you in an ambulance cart to Monte Santo, to Queimadas, to your home. General Oscar promised as much the day he visited the field hospital. Don’t despair, Manuel da Silva.”

“I beg you in the name of what you respect most in this world,” Pires Ferreira’s mouth says, in a low, firm voice. “In the name of God, your father, your vocation. Of that fiancée to whom you write verses, Teotônio.”

“What is it you want, Manuel da Silva?” the young medical student from São Paulo murmurs, turning his eyes away from the wounded man, deeply upset, absolutely certain what the words he is about to hear will be.

“A bullet in the head,” the firm, quiet voice says. “I beg you from the depths of my soul.”

He is not the first to have begged him to do such a thing and Teotônio knows that he will not be the last. But he is the first to have begged him so serenely, so undramatically.

“I can’t do it when I’ve no hands,” the man in bandages explains. “You do it for me.”

“A little courage, Manuel da Silva,” Teotônio says, noting that he is the one whose voice is charged with emotion. “Don’t ask me to do something that’s against my principles, against the oath of my profession.”

“One of your aides, then,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira says. “Offer them my wallet. There must be some fifty milreis in it. And my boots, which don’t have any holes in them.”

“Death may be worse than what has happened to you already,” Teotônio says. “You’ll be evacuated. You’ll recover, you’ll come to love life again.”

“With no eyes and no hands?” he asks quietly. Teotônio feels ashamed. The lieutenant’s mouth is half open. “That isn’t the worst part, Teotônio. It’s the flies. I’ve always hated them, I’ve always been revolted by them. And now I’m at their mercy. They walk all over my face, they get in my mouth, they crawl in under the bandages to my wounds.” He falls silent.

Teotônio sees him run his tongue over his lips. He has been so moved at hearing these words from this exemplary patient that it hasn’t even occurred to him to ask the aides for the canteen of water to quench the wounded man’s thirst.

“It has become a personal matter between the bandits and me,” Pires Ferreira says. “I don’t want them to get away with this. I won’t allow them to have turned me into this creature before you, Teotônio, I refuse to be a useless monster. Ever since Uauá, I’ve known that something tragic crossed my path. A curse, an evil spell.”

“Would you like some water?” Teotônio says gently.

“It’s not easy to kill yourself when you have no hands and no eyes,” Pires Ferreira goes on. “I’ve tried hitting my head against the rock. It didn’t work. Nor does licking the ground, because there aren’t any stones the right size to swallow, and…”

“Be quiet, Manuel da Silva,” Teotônio says, putting his hand on his shoulder. But he finds it absurd to be calming someone who seems to be the calmest man in the world, who never raises his voice, whose words are never hurried, who speaks of himself as though he were another person.

“Are you going to help me? I beg you in the name of our friendship. A friendship born here is something sacred. Are you going to help me?”

“Yes,” Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti whispers. “I’m going to help you, Manuel da Silva.”

“His head?” the Baron de Canabrava repeated. He was standing at the window overlooking the garden; he had walked over to it on the pretext of opening it because the study was growing warmer and warmer, but in reality he wanted to locate the chameleon, whose absence worried him. His eyes searched the garden in all directions, looking for it. It had become invisible again, as though it were playing a game with him. “They decapitated him. There was an article in
The Times
about it. I read it, in London.”

“They decapitated his corpse,” the nearsighted journalist corrected him.

The baron went back to his armchair. He felt distressed, but nonetheless found that what his visitor was saying had attracted his interest once again. Was he a masochist? All this brought back memories, scratched the wound and reopened it. Nevertheless, he wanted to hear it.

“Did you ever find yourself alone with him and talk to him?” he asked, his eyes seeking the journalist’s. “Were you able to gather any impression of what sort of man he was?”

They had found the grave only two days after the last redoubt fell. They managed to get the Little Blessed One to tell them where he was buried. Under torture, naturally. But not just any torture. The Little Blessed One was a born martyr and he would not have talked had he been subjected to such ordinary brutalities as being kicked, burned, castrated, or having his tongue cut off or his eyes put out—because they sometimes sent
jagunço
prisoners back that way, without eyes, a tongue, sex organs, thinking that such a spectacle would demoralize those who were still holding out. It had precisely the opposite effect, of course. But for the Little Blessed One they hit upon the one torture that he was unable to withstand: dogs.

“I thought I knew all the leaders of that band of villains,” the baron said. “Pajeú, Abbot João, Big João, Taramela, Pedrão, Macambira. But the Little Blessed One?”

Dogs were another matter. So much human flesh, so many dead bodies to feast on during the long months of siege, had made them as fierce as wolves and hyenas. Packs of bloodthirsty dogs made their way into Canudos, and doubtless into the camp of the besiegers as well, in search of human flesh.

“Weren’t those packs of dogs the fulfillment of the prophecies, the infernal beasts of the Apocalypse?” the nearsighted journalist muttered, clutching his stomach. “Someone must have told them that the Little Blessed One had a particular horror of dogs, or rather of the Dog, Evil Incarnate. They no doubt confronted him with a rabid pack of the beasts, and faced with the threat of being dragged down to hell in pieces by the Can’s messengers, he guided them to the place where he’d been buried.”

The baron forgot the chameleon and Baroness Estela. In his mind, raging packs of mad dogs pawed through heaps of corpses, buried their muzzles in bellies gnawed by worms, sank their fangs in skinny kneecaps, fought, snarling, over tibias, spines, skulls. In addition to ravaging the dead, other packs suddenly descended on villages, hurling themselves upon cowherds, shepherds, washerwomen, in search of fresh flesh and bones.

They might have guessed that he was buried in the Sanctuary. Where else could they have buried him? They dug where the Little Blessed One told them to and at a depth of some ten feet—that deep—they found him, dressed in his dark purple tunic and rawhide sandals, with a straw mat wrapped around him. His hair had grown and was wavy: this is what is stated in the notarized certificate of exhumation. All the top army officers were there, beginning with General Artur Oscar, who ordered the artist-photographer of the first column, Senhor Flávio de Barros, to photograph the corpse. This took half an hour, during which all of them remained in the Sanctuary despite the stench.

“Can you imagine what those generals and colonels must have felt on seeing, at last, the corpse of the enemy of the Republic, of the insurgent who massacred three military expeditions and shook the state to its foundations, of the ally of England and the House of Bragança?”

“I met him,” the baron murmured and his visitor remained silent, his watery eyes gazing at him inquisitively. “But more or less the same thing happens with me as happened to you in Canudos, because of your glasses. I can’t picture him clearly, my image of him is blurred. It was some fifteen or twenty years ago. He turned up at Calumbi, with a little band of followers, and it seems we gave them something to eat and some old clothes, because they’d tidied up the tombs and cleaned the chapel. I remember them more as a collection of rags than as a group of men and women. Too many people passing themselves off as saints came by Calumbi. How could I have guessed that, of all of them, he was the important one, the one that would make people forget all the others, the one who would attract to him thousands upon thousands of
sertanejos?
”

“The land of the Bible was also full of illuminati, of heretics,” the nearsighted journalist said. “That’s why so many people were taken to be the Christ. You didn’t understand, you didn’t see…”

“Are you serious?” The baron thrust his head forward. “Do you believe that the Counselor was really sent by God?”

But the nearsighted journalist’s dull voice plodded on.

A notarized statement was drawn up describing the exhumed corpse, which was so decomposed that they were all sick to their stomachs and had to hold their hands and their handkerchiefs over their noses. The four doctors present measured him, noted down that he was 1.78 meters tall, that he had lost all his teeth, and had not died of a bullet wound since the only mark on his skeleton-thin body was a bruise on his left leg, caused by the friction of a bone splinter or a stone. After a brief consultation, it was decided that he should be decapitated, so that science might study his cranium. It was brought to the medical school of the University of Bahia in order that Dr. Nina Rodrigues might examine it. But before beginning to saw the Counselor’s head off, they slit the throat of the Little Blessed One. They did so right there in the Sanctuary, while the artist-photographer Flávio de Barros took a photograph, and then threw his body into the hole dug in the floor, along with the Counselor’s headless corpse. A happy fate for the Little Blessed One, no doubt: to be buried together with the person he so revered and so faithfully served. But there was one thing that must have terrified him at the last instant: knowing that he was about to be buried like an animal, without any sort of wood covering him. Because those were the things that preyed on people’s minds up there.

He was interrupted by another fit of sneezing. But once he recovered from it he went on talking, more and more excitedly, until at times he couldn’t even manage to get the words out and his eyes rolled in desperate agitation behind the lenses of his glasses.

There had been some argument as to which of the four doctors was to do it. It was Major Miranda Cúrio, the chief of the medical field corps, who took saw in hand, while the three others held the body down. They tried to submerge the head in a container full of alcohol, but since the remains of hair and flesh were beginning to fall apart, they placed it in a sack of lime. That is how it was transported to Salvador. The delicate mission of transporting it was entrusted to First Lieutenant Pinto Souza, the hero of the Third Infantry Battalion, one of the few surviving officers of this unit, which had been decimated by Pajeú in the first encounter. Lieutenant Pinto Souza delivered it to the Faculty of Medicine and Dr. Nina Rodrigues headed the committee of scientists which observed it, measured it, and weighed it. There are no reliable reports as to what was said in the dissecting room during the examination. The official announcement was irritatingly brief. The person responsible for this was apparently none other than Dr. Nina Rodrigues himself. It was he who drafted the few scant lines that so disappointed the public since the announcement merely stated that science had noted no evident abnormality in the conformation of the cranium of Antônio Conselheiro.

“All that reminds me of Galileo Gall,” the baron said, glancing hopefully at the garden. “He, too, had a mad faith in craniums as indexes of character.”

But Dr. Nina Rodrigues’s opinion was not shared by all his colleagues in Salvador. Dr. Honorato de Albuquerque, for instance, was about to publish a study disagreeing with the conclusion reached in the report of the committee of scientists. He maintained that, according to the classification of the Swedish naturalist Retzius, the cranium was typically brachycephalic, with tendencies toward mental rigidity and linearity (fanaticism, for example). Moreover, the cranial curvature was precisely the same as that pointed out by Benedikt as typical of those epileptics who, as Samt wrote, had the missal in their hands, the name of God on their lips, and the stigmata of crime and brigandage in their hearts.

“Don’t you see?” the nearsighted journalist said, breathing as though he were exhausted from some tremendous physical effort. “Canudos isn’t a story; it’s a tree of stories.”

“Do you feel ill?” the baron inquired coldly. “I see that it’s not good for you either to speak of these things. Have you been going around visiting all those doctors?”

The nearsighted journalist was bent double like an inchworm, all hunched over and looking as though he were freezing to death. Once the medical examination was over, a problem had arisen. What to do with the bones? Someone proposed that the skull be sent to the National Museum, as a historic curiosity. But there had been violent opposition. On the part of whom? The Freemasons. People already had Our Lord of Bonfim, they said, and that was quite enough; there was no need for another orthodox place of pilgrimage. If that skull was exposed in a glass case in the National Museum, it would become a second Church of Bonfim, a heterodox shrine. The army agreed: it was necessary to keep the skull from becoming a relic, a seed of future uprisings. It had to be made to disappear. How? How?

“Not by burying it, obviously,” the baron murmured.

Obviously, since the fanaticized people would sooner or later discover where it had been buried. What safer and more remote place than the bottom of the sea? The skull was placed in a gunnysack weighted with rocks, sewed up, and spirited away, by night in a boat, by an army officer, to a place in the Atlantic equidistant from the Fort of São Marcelo and the island of Itaparica, and sent to the muddy sea bottom for coral to build on. The officer entrusted with this secret operation was none other than Lieutenant Pinto Souza: and that’s the end of the story.

He was sweating so hard and had turned so pale that the baron thought to himself: “He’s about to faint.” What did this ridiculous jumping jack feel for the Counselor? A morbid fascination? The simple curiosity of the gossipmongering journalist? Had he really come to believe him to be a messenger from heaven? Why was he suffering and torturing himself so over Canudos? Why didn’t he do what everyone else had done—try to forget?

“Did you say Galileo Gall?” he heard him say.

“Yes.” The baron nodded, seeing those mad eyes, that shaved head, hearing his apocalyptic speeches. “Gall would have understood that story. He thought that the secret of character lay in the bones of people’s heads. Did he ever get to Canudos, I wonder. If he did, it would have been terrible for him to discover that that wasn’t the revolution he’d been dreaming of.”

“It wasn’t, and yet it was,” the nearsighted journalist said. “It was the realm of obscurantism, and at the same time a world of brotherhood, of a very special sort of freedom. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been all that disappointed.”

“Did you ever find out what happened to him?”

“He died somewhere not very far from Canudos,” the journalist answered. “I saw a lot of him, before all this. In ‘The Fort,’ a tavern in the lower town. He was a great talker, a picturesque character, a madman; he felt people’s heads, he prophesied vast upheavals. I thought he was a fraud. Nobody would have guessed that he would turn out to be a tragic figure.”

“I have some papers of his,” the baron said. “A sort of memoir, or testament, that he wrote in my house, at Calumbi. I was to have seen that it got to some fellow revolutionaries of his. But I wasn’t able to. It’s not that I wasn’t willing to, because I even went to Lyons to do as he’d asked.”

Why had he taken that trip, from London to Lyons, to hand Gall’s text over personally to the editors of
L’Etincelle de la révolte?
Not out of affection for the phrenologist, in any event; what he had felt for him in the end was curiosity, a scientific interest in this unsuspected variety of the human species. He had taken the trouble to go to Lyons to see what those revolutionary comrades of his looked like, to hear them talk, to find out whether they were like him, whether they said and believed the same things he did. But the trip had been a waste of time. The only thing he was able to find out was that
L’Etincelle de la révolte
, a sheet that appeared irregularly, had ceased publication altogether some time before, and that it had been put out by a small press whose owner had been sent to prison for printing counterfeit bills, some three or four years earlier. It fitted Gall’s destiny very well to have sent articles to what might well have been ghosts and to have died without anyone he’d known during his life in Europe ever finding out where, how, and why he died.

“A story of madmen,” he muttered. “The Counselor, Moreira César, Gall. Canudos drove all those people mad. And you, too, of course.”

But a thought made him shut his mouth and not say a word more. “No, they were mad before that. It was only Estela who lost her mind because of Canudos.” He had to keep a tight rein on himself so as not to burst into tears. He didn’t remember having cried as a child, or as a young man. But after what had happened to the baroness, he had wept many a time, in his study, on nights when he couldn’t sleep.

“It’s not so much a story of madmen as a story of misunderstandings,” the nearsighted journalist corrected him again. “I’d like to know one thing, Baron. I beg you to tell me the truth.”

“Ever since I left politics, I almost always tell the truth,” the baron murmured. “What is it you’d like to know?”