The War Of The End Of The World (83 page)

Since all the rifles, cases of ammunition, and explosives had been taken away, the general store seemed to have tripled in size. The huge empty space made the nearsighted journalist feel even more lonely. The shelling made him lose all sense of time. How long had he been shut up here in the storeroom with the Mother of Men and the Lion of Natuba? He had listened to the Lion read the paper about the plans for attacking the city with a gnashing of teeth that still hadn’t stopped. Since then, the night must have gone by, day must be dawning. It wasn’t possible that the cannonading had been going on for less than eight, ten hours. But his fear made each second longer, made the minutes stop dead. Perhaps not even an hour had gone by since Abbot João, Pedrão, Pajeú, Honório Vilanova, and Big João had left on the run, on hearing the first explosions of what the paper had called “the softening-up.” He remembered their hasty departure, the argument between the men and the woman who wanted to go back to the Sanctuary, how they’d obliged her to stay behind.

Nonetheless, all that was encouraging. If they’d left these two intimates of the Counselor’s in the store, it meant that they were better protected here than elsewhere. But wasn’t it ridiculous to think of safe places at a time like this? The “softening-up” was not a matter of shooting at specific targets; it involved, rather, blind cannon salvos whose purpose was to cause fires, destroy dwellings, leave corpses and rubble strewn all over the streets, thereby so badly demoralizing the townspeople that they would not have the courage to stand up to the soldiers when they invaded Canudos.

“Colonel Moreira César’s philosophy,” he thought to himself. What idiots, what idiots, what idiots. They hadn’t the slightest notion of what was happening here, they hadn’t the least idea of what these people were like. The only one who was being softened up by the interminable barrage of the pitch-dark city was himself. He thought: “Half of Canudos must have disappeared, three-quarters of Canudos.” But thus far not a single shell had hit the store. Dozens of times, closing his eyes, clenching his teeth, he thought: “This is the one, this is the one.” His body bounced up and down as the roof tiles, the sheets of galvanized tin, the wooden planks shook, as that cloud of dust rose amid which everything appeared to shatter, to tear apart, to fall to pieces over him, under him, around him. But the store remained standing, holding up despite being rocked to its foundations by the explosions.

The woman and the Lion of Natuba were talking together. All he could hear was the murmur of their voices, not what they were saying. He pricked up his ears. They had not said one word since the beginning of the shelling, and at one point he thought that they’d been hit by the bullets and that he was keeping vigil over their dead bodies. The cannonade had deafened him; he could hear a loud bubbling sound, tiny internal explosions. And what about Jurema? And the Dwarf? They had gone in vain to Fazenda Velha to take food to Pajeú, since as they were going out there he was coming back to the meeting in the store. Were they still alive? A sudden wave of affection, aching loneliness, passionate concern washed over him as he imagined them in Pajeú’s trench, cringing beneath the shells, surely missing him as much as he missed them. They were part of him and he was part of them. How was it possible for him to feel such a great affinity, such boundless love for those two beings with whom he had nothing in common, whose social background, education, sensibility, experience, culture were in fact altogether different from his? What they had been through together for all these months had forged this bond between them, the fact that without ever imagining such a thing, without deliberately seeking it, without knowing how or why, through the sort of strange, fantastic concatenation of cause and effect, of chance, accident, and coincidence that constitute history, the three of them had been catapulted together into the midst of these extraordinary events, into this life at the brink of death. That was what had created this tie between them. “I’m never going to be separated from them again,” he thought. “I’ll go with them to take food to Pajeú, I’ll go with them to…”

But he had the feeling that he was being ridiculous. After this night, would their daily routine be exactly the same as in the past? If they lived through this bombardment, safe and sound, would they survive the second part of the program that the Lion of Natuba had read aloud? He could already see in his mind the dense, solid lines of thousands and thousands of soldiers coming down from the mountaintops with bayonets fixed, pouring down all the streets of Canudos, and felt a cold blade in the thin flesh of his back. He would shout to them to tell them who he was and they wouldn’t hear him, he would shout to them “I’m one of you, a civilized person, an intellectual, a journalist,” and they wouldn’t believe him or understand him, he would shout to them “I have nothing to do with these madmen, with these barbarians,” but it would be useless. They wouldn’t give him time to open his mouth. Dying as a
jagunço
, amid the anonymous mass of
jagunços
: wasn’t that the height of the absurd, the flagrant proof of the innate stupidity of the world? He missed Jurema and the Dwarf with all his heart, he felt an urgent need to have them close at hand, to talk to them and listen to them.

As though both his ears had suddenly become unstopped, he heard, very clearly, the voice of the Mother of Men: there were faults that could not be expiated, sins that could not be redeemed. In that hard, resigned, tormented voice full of conviction was a suffering that seemed to come from the depths of time itself. “There’s a place in the fire waiting for me,” he heard her repeat. “I can’t close my eyes to that, my child.”

“There is no crime that the Father cannot pardon,” the Lion of Natuba answered promptly. “Our Lady has interceded in your behalf and the Father has forgiven you. Don’t torture yourself, Mother.”

That was a voice with a good timbre, steady, fluent, full of the music of the heart. The journalist thought to himself that that normal, lilting voice always seemed to belong to a strong, handsome man, standing straight and tall, not to the man who was speaking.

“He was tiny, defenseless, a tender little newborn lamb,” the woman chanted. “His mother’s milk had dried up; she was a wicked woman who’d sold her soul to the Devil. Then, on the pretext that she couldn’t bear to see him suffer, she stuffed a skein of wool in his mouth. It’s not a sin like the others, my child. It is the unpardonable sin. You’ll see me burning in hell forever.”

“Don’t you believe the Counselor?” the scribe of Canudos said consolingly. “Doesn’t he speak to the Father? Hasn’t he said that…?”

A deafening explosion drowned out his words. The journalist’s body went rigid and he closed his eyes and trembled as the whole building shook, but the sound of the woman’s voice lingered on as he associated what he had heard with a dim memory of long ago which, beneath the spell of her words, was rising to the surface from the depths where it lay buried. Was it she? Once again he heard the voice that he had heard in the courtroom, twenty years before: soft, sorrowful, detached, impersonal.

“You’re the filicide of Salvador,” he said.

He did not have time to feel alarmed at having said that, for suddenly there were two explosions, one after the other, and the store creaked violently, as though it were about to fall in. A cloud of windblown dust blew in, all of which seemed to settle in his nostrils. He began sneezing, a crescendo of ever more violent, ever more desperate sneezes, closer and closer together, that made him writhe on the floor. His chest was about to burst for lack of air and he pounded it with both hands as he sneezed, and at the same time, as in a dream, he caught a glimpse of blue between the cracks: day had dawned at last. With his temples stretched to the bursting point, the thought came to him that this was the end, he was going to die of asphyxiation, of a sneezing fit, a stupid way to die but preferable to being bayoneted by soldiers. He collapsed on the floor and lay on his back, still sneezing. A second later his head was resting on a warm, affectionate, protecting lap. The woman sat him on her knees, wiped the sweat from his forehead, cradled him in her arms as mothers do to rock their children to sleep.

The sneezes, his discomfort, his near-suffocation, his weakness had the virtue of freeing him from fear. The roar of the cannons sounded as though it had nothing to do with him, and the idea of dying seemed a matter of complete indifference to him. The woman’s hands, her voice softly murmuring, her breath, her fingers stroking the top of his head, his forehead, his eyes, filled him with peace, took him back to a dim childhood. He had stopped sneezing but the tickling sensation in his nostrils—two open wounds—told him that he might have another attack at any moment. In that fuzzy, drunken state, he remembered other attacks when he had also been certain that it was the end, those bohemian nights in Bahia which the sneezing fits brutally interrupted, like a censorious conscience, to the hilarious amusement of his friends, those poets, musicians, painters, journalists, parasites, actors, and night owls of Salvador among whom he had wasted his life. He remembered how he had begun to inhale ether because it brought him relief after these attacks that left him exhausted, humiliated, his every nerve on edge, and how, later, opium saved him from sneezing fits by bringing on a lucid, transitory death. The caresses, the soft whispering, the consolation, the warm odor of this woman who had killed her baby, back in the days when he was a cub reporter still in his teens, and who was now the priestess of Canudos, were like opium and ether: something gentle that brought on drowsiness, a pleasing absence, and he wondered whether when he was little that mother whom he did not remember had caressed him like this, making him feel invulnerable and indifferent to the world’s dangers. There passed before his mind the classrooms and courtyards of the school of the Salesian Fathers where, thanks to his sneezes, he had been—like the Dwarf no doubt, like the monstrous creature here in the room who had read the paper—a laughingstock and a victim, the butt of cruel jokes. Because of his fits of sneezing and his poor eyesight, he had been treated like an invalid, kept from sports, violent games, outings. That was why he had become such a timid person; on account of that accursed, uncontrollable nose of his, he had had to use handkerchiefs as big as bedsheets, and because of it and his squint eyes he had never had a sweetheart, a fiancée, or a wife, and had lived with the permanent feeling of being an object of ridicule and hence unable to declare his love for the girls he loved or to send them the verses he composed for them and then like a coward tore up. On account of that nose, that myopia of his, he had never held any woman save the whores of Bahia in his arms, known only love for sale, hasty, filthy encounters that he paid for twice over, the second time with purges and treatments with catheters that made him howl with pain. He, too, was a monster, maimed, disabled, abnormal. It was no accident that he had ended up where the cripples, the unfortunate, the abnormal, the long-suffering of this world had congregated. It was inevitable: he was one of them.

He wailed at the top of his lungs, curled up in a ball, clutching the Mother of Men with both his hands, stammering, bemoaning his wretched fate and his misfortunes, pouring out in a torrent, slavering and sobbing, his bitterness and his desperation, present and past, the disillusionments of his lost youth, his emotional and intellectual frustration, speaking to her with a sincerity he had never before been capable of, not even with himself, telling her how miserable and unhappy he felt because he had not shared a great love, not been the successful dramatist, the inspired poet that he would have liked to be, and because he knew now that he was about to die even more stupidly than he had lived. He heard himself say, between one panting breath and another: “It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair.” He realized that she was kissing him on the forehead, on the cheeks, on the eyelids as she whispered sweet, tender, incoherent words to him, as one does to newborn babies to enchant them and make them happy just by the sound of them…And in fact he felt great comfort, wondrous gratitude toward those magic words: “My little one, my little son, little baby, little dove, little lamb…”

But they were abruptly brought back to the present, to violence, to the war. The earsplitting explosion that tore the roof away suddenly left them with the sky overhead, the beaming sun, clouds, the bright morning air. Splinters, bricks, broken roof tiles, twisted wire were flying in all directions, and the nearsighted journalist felt pebbles, clods of dirt, stones hit a thousand places on his body, face, hands. But neither he nor the woman nor the Lion of Natuba was knocked down as the building collapsed. They stood there clutching each other, clinging to each other, and he searched frantically through his pockets for his monocle painstakingly assembled from bits of glass, thinking that it had been reduced to shards again, that from now on he would not be able to count on even this scant aid. But there it was, intact, and still holding tight to the Superior of the Sacred Choir and the Lion of Natuba, he managed little by little to see, in distorted images, the havoc caused by the explosion. In addition to the roof, the front wall had also caved in, and except for the corner that they were in, the store was a mountain of rubble. Beyond the fallen wall he could vaguely make out piles of debris, smoke, silhouettes running.

And at that moment the place was suddenly filled with armed men, with armbands and blue headcloths; among them he could make out the massive bulk of Big João, naked to the waist. As the nearsighted journalist, his eye glued to the monocle, stood watching the men embrace Maria Quadrado, the Lion of Natuba, he trembled: they were going to take them away with them and he would be left all by himself in these ruins. He clung to the woman and the scribe, and past all sense of shame, all scruples lost, he began to whine to them not to leave him, to implore them, and the Mother of Men dragged him off by the hand after the two of them when the huge black ordered everyone out of there.