The War Of The End Of The World (80 page)

“Whether there were contacts between the Counselor and the monarchists,” he answered, watching the baron’s reaction closely. “I don’t mean the little group who missed the Empire and were naïve enough to proclaim that fact in public, people such as Gentil de Castro. I’m talking about people like you and your party, the Autonomists, the monarchists through and through who nonetheless hid that fact. Did they have contacts with the Counselor? Did they encourage him?”

The baron, who had listened with a look of cynical amusement on his face, burst out laughing. “Didn’t you find out the answer to that in all those months in Canudos? Did you see any politicians from Bahia, São Paulo, Rio among the
jagunços?
”

“I’ve already told you that I didn’t see much of anything,” the unpleasant voice answered. “But I did find out that you had sent maize, sugar, livestock from Calumbi.”

“Well then, you doubtless also know that I did so against my will, that I was forced to do so,” the baron said. “All of us landowners in the region had to, so that they wouldn’t burn our haciendas down. Isn’t that how we deal with bandits in the
sertão?
If you can’t kill them, you buy them off. If I’d had the least influence on them, they wouldn’t have destroyed Calumbi and my wife would be of sound mind. The fanatics weren’t monarchists and they didn’t even know what the Empire was. It’s beyond belief that you didn’t see that, despite…”

The nearsighted journalist didn’t allow him to go on this time either. “They didn’t know what it was, but they were monarchists nonetheless—in their own way, which no monarchist would have understood,” he blurted, blinking. “They knew that the monarchy had abolished slavery. The Counselor praised Princess Isabel for having granted the slaves their freedom. He seemed convinced that the monarchy fell because it abolished slavery. Everyone in Canudos believed that the Republic was against abolition, that it wanted to restore slavery.”

“Do you think my friends and I planted such a notion in the Counselor’s head?” The baron smiled again. “If anyone had proposed any such thing to us we would have taken him for an imbecile.”

“That, nonetheless, explains many things,” the journalist said, his voice rising. “Such as the hatred of the census. I racked my brains, trying to understand the reason for it, and that’s the explanation. Race, color, religion. Why would the Republic want to know what race and color people are, if not to enslave blacks again? And why ask their religion if not to identify believers before the slaughter?”

“Is that the misunderstanding that explains Canudos?” the baron asked.

“One of them.” The nearsighted journalist panted. “I knew that the
jagunços
hadn’t been taken in by just any petty politician. I merely wanted to hear you say so.”

“Well, there you are,” the baron answered. What would his friends have said had they been able to foresee such a thing? The humble men and women of the
sertão
rising up in arms to attack the Republic, with the name of the Infanta Dona Isabel on their lips! No, such a thing was too farfetched for it to have occurred to any Brazilian monarchist, even in his dreams.

Abbot João’s messenger catches up with Antônio Vilanova on the outskirts of Jueté, where the former storekeeper is lying in ambush with fourteen
jagunços
, waiting for a convoy of cattle and goats. The news the messenger brings is so serious that Antônio decides to return to Canudos before he has finished the task that has brought him there: securing food supplies. It is one that he has set out to do three times now since the soldiers arrived, and been successful each time: twenty-five head of cattle and several dozen kids the first time, eight head the second, and a dozen the third, plus a wagonload of manioc flour, coffee, sugar, and salt. He has insisted on leading these raids to procure food for the
jagunços
himself, claiming that Abbot João, Pajeú, Pedrão, and Big João are indispensable in Belo Monte. For three weeks now he has been attacking the convoys that leave from Queimadas and Monte Santo to bring provisions to A Favela via Rosário.

It is a relatively easy operation, which the former storekeeper, in his methodical and scrupulous way and with his talent for organization, has perfected to the point that it has become a science. He owes his success above all to the information he receives, to the men serving as the soldiers’ guides and porters, the majority of whom are
jagunços
who have hired themselves out to the army or been conscripted in various localities, from Tucano to Itapicuru. They keep him posted on the convoy’s movements and help him decide where to provoke the stampede, the key to the whole operation. In the place that they have chosen—usually the bottom of a ravine or a section of the mountains with dense brush—and always at night, Antônio and his men suddenly descend on the herd, raising a terrible racket with their blunderbusses, setting off sticks of dynamite, and blowing their whistles so that the animals will panic and bolt off into the
caatinga
. As Antônio and his band distract the troops by sniping at them, the guides and porters round up all the animals they can and herd them along shortcuts that they’ve decided on beforehand—the shortest and safest trail, the one from Calumbi, has yet to be discovered by the soldiers—to Canudos. Antônio and the others catch up with them later.

This is what would have happened this time, too, if the messenger hadn’t brought the news he had: that the dogs will be attacking Canudos at any moment. With clenched teeth and furrowed brows, hurrying along as fast as their legs will carry them, Antônio and his fourteen men have but a single thought in their minds which spurs them on: to be back in Belo Monte with the others, surrounding the Counselor, when the atheists attack. How has the Street Commander learned that they plan to attack? The messenger, an old guide marching along at his side, tells Antônio Vilanova that two
jagunços
dressed in soldiers’ uniforms who have been prowling about A Favela have brought the news. He tells this simply and straightforwardly, as though it were quite natural for the sons of the Blessed Jesus to go about among devils disguised as devils.

“They’ve gotten used to the idea; they don’t even notice any more,” Antônio Vilanova thinks to himself. But the first time that Abbot João tried to persuade the
jagunços
to wear soldiers’ uniforms to disguise themselves he had very nearly had a rebellion on his hands. The proposal left Antônio himself with a taste of ashes in his mouth. The thought of putting on the very symbol of everything that was wicked, heartless, and hostile in this world turned his stomach, and he understood very well why the men of Canudos should violently resist dying decked out as dogs. “And yet we were wrong,” he thinks. “And, as usual, Abbot João was right.” For the information that the valiant “youngsters” who stole into the camps to let ants, snakes, scorpions loose, to throw poison in the troops’ leather canteens, could never be as accurate as that of full-grown men, especially those who had been let out of the army or had deserted. It had been Pajeú who had solved the problem, in the trenches of Rancho do Vigário one night when they were having an argument, by turning up dressed in a corporal’s uniform and announcing that he was going to slip through the enemy lines. Everyone knew that Pajeú of all people would not get through unnoticed. Abbot João asked the
jagunços
then if it seemed right to them that Pajeú should sacrifice his life so as to set them an example and rid them of their fear of a few rags with buttons. Several men from Pajeú’s old
cangaço
then offered to disguise themselves in uniforms. From that day on, the Street Commander had no difficulty sneaking
jagunços
into the camps.

After a few hours, they halt to rest and eat. It is beginning to get dark, and they can just make out O Cambaio and the jagged Serra da Canabrava standing out against the leaden sky. Sitting in a circle with their legs crossed, the
jagunços
open their sacks of woven rope and take out handfuls of hardtack and jerky. They eat in silence. Antônio Vilanova feels the tiredness in his cramped, swollen legs. Is he getting old? It’s a feeling he’s begun to have in these last months. Or is it the tension, the frantic activity brought on by the war? He has lost so much weight that he has punched new holes in his belt, and Antônia Sardelinha has had to take in his two shirts, which fitted him as loosely as nightshirts. But isn’t the same thing happening to all the men and women in Belo Monte? Haven’t Big João and Pedrão, those two sturdy giants, become as skinny as beanpoles? Isn’t Honório stoop-shouldered and gray-haired now? And don’t Abbot João and Pajeú look older, too?

He listens to the roar of the cannon, toward the north. A brief pause, and then several cannon reports in a row. Antônio and the
jagunços
leap to their feet and set off again, loping along in long strides.

They approach the city by way of O Taboleirinho, as dawn is breaking, after five hours during which the rounds of cannon fire have followed one upon the other almost without a break. At the water source, where the first houses are, they find a messenger waiting to take them to Abbot João. He is in the trenches at Fazenda Velha, now manned by twice as many
jagunços
as before, all of them with their finger on the trigger of their rifle or their long-barreled musket, keeping a close watch on the foothills of A Favela in the dim dawn light, waiting to see if the Freemasons will come pouring down from there. “Praised be Blessed Jesus the Counselor,” Antônio murmurs, and without answering him Abbot João asks if he has seen soldiers along the way. “No, not even a patrol.”

“We don’t know where the attack will come from,” Abbot João says, and the former storekeeper sees how deeply worried he is. “We know everything, except the most important thing of all.”

The Street Commander calculates that they are going to attack in this sector, the shortest way into Belo Monte, and hence he has come with three hundred
jagunços
to reinforce Pajeú in this line of trenches that stretches in a curve, a quarter of a league long, from the foot of Monte Mário to O Taboleirinho.

Abbot João explains to him that Pedrão is covering the eastern flank of Belo Monte, the area in which the corrals and the cultivated fields are located, and the wooded slopes up which the trails to Trabubu, Macambira, Cocorobó, and Jeremoabo wind their way. The city, defended by Big João’s Catholic Guard, has been further fortified by new parapets of stone and sandbags erected in the narrow alleyways and at the intersections of the main streets and the square bounded by the churches and the Sanctuary, that center on which the assault troops will converge, as will the shells of their cannons.

Although he is eager to ply him with questions, Vilanova realizes that there isn’t time. What is it that he must do? Abbot João tells him that he and Honorio will be responsible for defending the area parallel to the ravines of the Vaza-Barris, to the east of the Alto do Mario and the exit leading to Jeremoabo. Without taking time to explain in more detail, he asks him to send word immediately if soldiers appear in that sector, because what is most important is to discover from which direction they are going to try to enter the city. Vilanova and the fourteen men take off at a run.

His fatigue has disappeared as if by magic. It must be another sign of the divine presence, another manifestation of the supernatural within his person. How otherwise to explain it, if it is not the work of the Father, of the Divine, or of the Blessed Jesus? Ever since he first learned of the attack, he has done nothing but walk or run as fast as he possibly could. A little while ago, as he was crossing the Lagoa do Cipó, his legs started to give way and his heart was pounding so hard he was afraid he’d collapse in a dead faint. And here he is now, running over this rugged stony ground, up hill and down dale, at the end of a long night now filled with the blinding light and deafening thunder of the sudden intense barrages being laid down by the enemy troops. Yet he feels rested, full of energy, capable of any and every effort, and he knows that the fourteen men running at his side feel exactly the same way. Who but the Father could bring about such a change, renew their strength in this way, when circumstances so require? This is not the first time that such a thing has happened to him. Many times in these last weeks, when he has thought that he was about to collapse, he has suddenly felt a great surge of strength that seemed to lift him up, to renew him, to breathe a great gust of life into him.

In the half hour that it takes them to reach the trenches along the Vaza-Barris—running, walking, running—Antônio Vilanova sees the flames of fires flare up back in Canudos. His first concern is not whether one of the fires may be burning his house to the ground, but rather: is the system that he has thought of so that fires won’t spread working? For that purpose, hundreds of barrels and boxes of sand have been placed along the streets and at the intersections. The people who have remained in the city know that the moment a shell explodes they must run to put out the flames by throwing pailfuls of sand on them. Antônio himself has organized things so that in each block of dwellings there are women, children, and old men responsible for this task.