The War Of The End Of The World (85 page)

“I know what electricity is,” the Lion of Natuba said proudly. “If you like, sir, I can teach you what it is. And in return, sir, you can teach me things I don’t know. I know what the principle or the law of Archimedes is. How bodies are mummified. The distances between stars.”

But at that moment there was heavy gunfire from several directions at once, and the nearsighted journalist found himself thanking the battle that had suddenly silenced this creature whose voice, whose proximity, whose very existence caused him such profound malaise. Why was he so disconcerted by someone who simply wanted to talk, who so naïvely flaunted his talents, his virtues, merely to gain his warm fellow-feeling? “Because I’m like him,” he thought. “Because I’m part of the same chain of which he is the humblest link.”

The curé of Cumbe ran to the little door leading outside, threw it wide open, and a breath of twilight entered that revealed to the nearsighted journalist other of the Lion of Natuba’s features: his dark skin, the fine-drawn lines of his face, the tuft of down on his chin, his steely eyes. But it was his posture that left him dumfounded: the face hunched over between two bony knees, the massive hump behind the head, like a big bundle tied to his back, and the extremities appended to limbs as long and spindly as spider legs. How could a human skeleton dislocate itself, fold itself around itself like that? What absurd contortions were built into that spinal column, those ribs, those bones?

Father Joaquim and those outside were shouting back and forth: there was an attack, people were needed at a certain place. He came back into the room and the journalist could dimly make out that he was picking up his rifle.

“They’re attacking the barricades at São Cipriano and São Crispim,” he heard him stammer. “Go to the Temple of the Blessed Jesus. You’ll be safer there. Farewell, farewell, may Our Lady save us all.”

He ran out of the room and the nearsighted journalist saw Alexandrinha Correa take the lamb, which had begun to bleat in fright, in her arms. The devout disciple from the Sacred Choir asked the Lion of Natuba if he would come with her and in his harmonious voice he answered that he would stay in the Sanctuary. And what about him? What about him? Would he stay there with the monster? Would he tag along after the woman? But she had left now and deep shadow reigned once more in the little room with cane-stalk walls. The heat was stifling. The gunfire became heavier and heavier. He could see the soldiers in his mind’s eye, penetrating the barricade of stones and sandbags, trampling the corpses underfoot, sweeping like a raging torrent down on the place where he was.

“I don’t want to die,” he said slowly and distinctly, unable, he realized, to shed a single tear.

“If you like, sir, we’ll make a pact,” the Lion of Natuba said in a calm voice. “We made one with Mother Maria Quadrado. But she won’t have time to get back here. Would you like us to make a pact?”

The nearsighted journalist was trembling so badly that he was unable to open his mouth. Below the heavy gunfire he could hear, like a peaceful, quietly flowing melody, the bells and the regular counterpoint of Ave Marias.

“So as not to die by the knife,” the Lion of Natuba explained. “A knife plunged into a man’s throat, slitting it the way you cut an animal’s throat to bleed it to death, is a terrible insult to human dignity. It rends one’s soul. Would you like us to make a pact, sir?”

He waited for a moment, and since there was no answer, he explained further: “When we hear them at the door of the Sanctuary and it’s certain that they’re going to get inside, we’ll kill each other. Each of us will hold the other’s mouth and nose shut till our lungs burst. Or we can strangle each other with our hands or the laces of our sandals. Shall we make a pact?”

The fusillade drowned out the Lion of Natuba’s voice. The nearsighted journalist’s head was a dizzying vortex, and all the ideas that rose within him like sputtering sparks—contradictory, threatening, lugubrious—made his anxiety all the more acute. They sat there in silence, listening to the shots, the sound of running footsteps, the tremendous chaos. The light was dying fast and he could no longer see the scribe’s features; all he could make out was the dim outline of his hulking, hunchbacked body. He would not make that pact with him, he would not be able to carry it out; the moment he heard the soldiers he would start shouting I’m a prisoner of the
jagunços
, help, save me, he would yell out Long live the Republic, Long live Marshal Floriano, he would fling himself on the quadrumane, he would overpower him and turn him over to the soldiers as proof that he wasn’t a
jagunço
.

“I don’t understand, I don’t understand. What sort of creatures are you all anyway?” he heard himself say as he clutched his head in his hands. “What are you doing here, why didn’t all of you flee before they had you surrounded? What madness to wait in a rat trap like this for them to come kill you all!”

“There isn’t anywhere to flee to,” the Lion of Natuba answered. “That’s what we kept doing before. That’s why we came here. This was the place we fled to. There’s nowhere else now—they’ve come to Belo Monte, too.”

The gunfire drowned out his voice. It was almost dark now, and the nearsighted journalist thought to himself that for him night would fall sooner than for the others. He would rather die than spend another night like the last one. He had a tremendous, painful, biological need to be near his two comrades.

In a fit of madness, he decided to go look for them, and as he stumbled to the door he shouted: “I’m going to look for my friends. I want to die with my friends.”

As he pushed the little door open, fresh, cool air hit his face and he sensed—mere blurred shapes in the cloud of dust—the figures of the men defending the Sanctuary sprawled out on the parapet.

“Can I leave? Can I please leave?” he begged. “I want to find my friends.”

“Come ahead,” a voice answered. “There’s no shooting just now.”

He took a few steps, leaning against the barricade, and almost immediately he stumbled over something soft. As he rose to his feet, he found himself in the arms of a thin, female form clutching him to her. From the warm odor of her, from the happiness that flooded over him, he knew who it was before he heard her voice. His terror turned to joy as he embraced this woman as desperately as she was embracing him. A pair of lips met his, clung to his, returned his kisses. “I love you,” he stammered, “I love you, I love you. I don’t care now if I die.” And as he said again and again that he loved her, he asked her for news of the Dwarf.

“We’ve been looking for you all day long,” the Dwarf said, his arms encircling the journalist’s legs. “All day long. What a blessing that you’re alive!”

“I don’t care now if I die either,” Jurema’s lips said beneath his. “This is the house of the Pyrotechnist,” General Artur Oscar suddenly exclaims. The officials who are reporting on the number of dead and wounded in the attack that he was given orders to halt look at him in bewilderment. The general points to some half-finished skyrockets, made of reeds and pegs held together with pita fiber, scattered about the dwelling. “He’s the one who prepares their fireworks displays for them.”

Of the eight blocks—if the jumbled piles of rubble can be called “blocks”—that the troops have taken in nearly twelve hours of fighting, this one-room hut, with a partition of wooden slats dividing it in two, is the only one that has been left standing, more or less. This is the reason why it has been chosen as general headquarters. The orderlies and officers surrounding the commandant of the expeditionary corps cannot understand why he is speaking of rockets just as the list of casualties after the hard day’s battle is being read off to him. They do not know that fireworks are a secret weakness of General Oscar’s, a powerful holdover from his childhood, and that in O Piauí he would seize on any sort of patriotic celebration as an excuse to order a fireworks display to be set off in the courtyard of the barracks. In the month and a half that he has been here, he has watched with envy, from the heights of A Favela, the cascades of lights in the sky above Canudos on certain nights when processions have been held. The man who prepares such displays is a master; he could earn himself a good living in any city in Brazil. Can the Pyrotechnist have died in today’s battle? As the general ponders that question, he also pays close attention to the figures being read off by the colonels, majors, captains who enter and leave or remain in the tiny room already enveloped in darkness. An oil lamp is lit, and a detail of soldiers piles sandbags along the wall facing the enemy.

The general completes his calculations. “It’s worse than I had supposed, gentlemen,” he says to the fan of silhouettes. He has a tight feeling in his chest, and can sense how anxiously the officers are waiting. “One thousand twenty-seven casualties! A third of our forces! Twenty-three officers dead, among them Colonel Carlos Telles and Colonel Serra Martins. Do you realize what that means?”

No one answers, but the general knows that all of them are perfectly aware that such a large number of casualties is tantamount to a defeat. He sees how frustrated, angry, astonished his subordinates are; the eyes of a number of them glisten with tears.

“Going on with the attack would have meant being completely wiped out. Do you understand that now?”

Because when, alarmed by the
jagunços
’ resistance and his intuition that casualties among the patriots were already heavy—along with the tremendous shock to him of the death of Telles and of Serra Martins—General Oscar ordered the troops to confine themselves to defending the positions they had already taken, the order was greeted with indignation by many of these officers, and the general feared that some of them might even disobey it. His own adjutant, First Lieutenant Pinto Souza, of the Third Infantry Corps, protested: “But victory is within our reach, sir!” It was not. A third of the troops
hors de combat
. An extremely high percentage, catastrophic, despite the eight blocks captured and the damage inflicted on the fanatics.

He puts the Pyrotechnist out of his mind and sets to work with his general staff. He dismisses the field officers, aides, or representatives of the assault corps, repeating the order to hold the positions already taken and not fall back a single step, and to strengthen the barricade, opposite the one that stopped them, which the troops had started to erect a few hours before when it became evident that the city was not going to fall. He decides that the Seventh Brigade, which has remained behind to protect the wounded on A Favela, will move forward to reinforce the “black line,” the new front, already well established in the heart of the rebellious city. In the cone of light from the oil lamp, he bends over the map drawn by Captain Teotônio Coriolano, his staff cartographer, on the basis of reports that he has received and his own observations of the situation. A fifth of Canudos has been taken, a triangle which extends from the line of trench works at Fazenda Velha, still in the hands of the
jagunços
, to the cemetery, which has been captured, thus allowing the patriot troops to occupy a position within less than eighty paces of the Church of Santo Antônio.

“The front is no more than fifteen hundred meters long at most,” Captain Guimarães says, making no attempt to conceal his disappointment. “We’re far from having them surrounded. We haven’t occupied even a quarter of the circumference. They can come and go and receive supplies.”

“We can’t extend the front until the reinforcements arrive,” Major Carrenho complains. “Why are they leaving us stranded like this, sir?”

General Oscar shrugs. Ever since the ambush, on the day they arrived in Canudos, as he has seen the death toll among his men mount, he has kept sending urgent, justified pleas for more troops, and has even gone so far as to exaggerate the seriousness of the situation. Why don’t his superiors send them?

“If there had been five thousand of us instead of three thousand, Canudos would be ours by now,” an officer says, thinking aloud.

The general forces them to change the subject by informing them that he is going to inspect the front and the new field hospital set up that morning along the ravines of the Vaza-Barris once the
jagunços
had been dislodged from there. Before leaving the Pyrotechnist’s shack, he drinks a cup of coffee, listening to the bells and the Ave Marias of the fanatics, so close by he can’t believe it.

Even at the age of fifty-three, he is a man of great energy, who rarely feels fatigue. He has followed the development of the attack in detail, watching through his field glasses since five this morning, when the corps began to leave A Favela, and he has marched with them, immediately behind the battalions of the vanguard, without halting to rest and without eating a single mouthful, contenting himself with a few sips from his canteen. Early in the afternoon, a stray bullet wounded a soldier who was marching directly alongside him. He leaves the shack. Night has fallen; there is not a star in the sky. The sound of the prayers is everywhere, like a magic spell, and drowns out the last bursts of rifle fire. He gives orders that no fires be lighted in the trench. Nonetheless, in the course of his slow tour of inspection via an itinerary full of twists and turns, escorted by four officers, at many points along the winding, labyrinthine barricade hastily thrown up by the soldiers, behind which they are lined up, their backs against the inner brick facing of the wall of debris, earth, stones, oil drums, and all manner of implements and objects, sleeping one against the other, some with enough high spirits still to be singing or poking their heads over the wall to insult the bandits—who must be crouching listening behind their own barricade, a mere five yards distant in some sections, ten in others, and in still others the two practically touching—General Oscar finds braziers around which knots of soldiers are making soup with scraps of meat, heating up chunks of jerky, or warming wounded men trembling with fever who are in such bad shape that they cannot be evacuated to the field hospital.

He exchanges a few words with the leaders of companies, of battalions. They are exhausted, and he discovers in them the same desolation, mingled with stupefaction, that he feels in the face of the incomprehensible things that have happened in this accursed war. As he congratulates a young second lieutenant for his heroic conduct during the attack, he repeats to himself something that he has told himself many times before: “I curse the day I accepted this command.”