The War Of The End Of The World (88 page)

“Tell me about Pajeú, if you will,” the baron said. “What became of him?”

The nearsighted journalist suddenly slid down onto the floor. He had done so several times in the course of the conversation, and the baron wondered whether these changes of position were due to inner turmoil or to numbness in his limbs.

“Did I hear you say that he was in love with Jurema?” the baron pressed him. He suddenly had the absurd feeling that the former maidservant of Calumbi was the only woman in the
sertão
, a female under whose fateful spell all the men with any sort of connection to Canudos unconsciously fell sooner or later. “Why didn’t he carry her off with him?”

“Because of the war, perhaps,” the nearsighted journalist answered. “He was one of the leaders. As the enemy began to close the ring, he had less time. And less inclination, I imagine.”

He burst into such painful laughter that the baron deduced that this time it would end in a fit not of sneezing but of weeping. But neither sneezes nor tears were forthcoming.

“As a result, I found myself wishing at times that the war would go on and even that the fighting would get worse so that it would keep Pajeú occupied.” He took a deep breath. “Wishing that he’d get killed in the war or some other way.”

“What became of him?” the baron said insistently. The journalist paid no attention.

“But despite the war, he might very well have carried her off with him and taken her for his woman,” he said, lost in thought or in fantasy, his eyes fixed on the floor. “Didn’t other
jagunços
do that? Didn’t I hear them, in the midst of all the shooting, day or night, mounting their women in hammocks, or pallets, or on the floors of their houses?”

The baron felt his face turn beet-red. He had never allowed certain subjects, which so often come up among men when they are alone together, to be discussed in his presence, not even when he was with his closest friends. If his visitor went any further, he would shut him up.

“So the war wasn’t the explanation.” The journalist looked up at him, as though remembering that he was there. “He’d become a saint, don’t you see? That’s how people in Canudos put it: he became a saint, the angel kissed him, the angel brushed him with its wings, the angel touched him.” He nodded his head several times. “Perhaps that’s it. He didn’t want to take her by force. That’s the other explanation. More farfetched, doubtless, but perhaps. So that everything would be done in accordance with God’s will. According to the dictates of religion. Marrying her. I heard him ask her. Perhaps.”

“What became of him?” the baron repeated slowly, emphasizing each word.

The nearsighted journalist looked at him intently. And the baron noted how surprised he looked.

“He burned Calumbi down,” he explained slowly. “He was the one who…Did he die? How did he die?”

“I suppose he’s dead,” the nearsighted journalist said. “Why wouldn’t he be? Why wouldn’t he and Abbot João and Big João—all of them—be dead?”

“You didn’t die, and according to what you’ve told me, Vilanova didn’t die either. Was he able to escape?”

“They didn’t want to escape,” the journalist said sadly. “They wanted to get in, to stay there, to die there. What happened to Vilanova was exceptional. He didn’t want to leave either. They ordered him to.”

So he wasn’t absolutely certain that Pajeú was dead. The baron imagined him, taking up his old life again, free again, at the head of a
cangaço
he’d gotten together again, with malefactors from all over, adding endless terrible misdeeds to his legend, in Ceará, in Pernambuco, in regions more distant still. He felt his head go round and round.

“Antônio Vilanova,” the Counselor murmurs, producing a sort of electrical discharge in the Sanctuary. “He’s spoken, he’s spoken,” the Little Blessed One thinks, so awestruck he has gooseflesh all over. “Praised be the Father, praised be the Blessed Jesus.” He steps toward the rush pallet at the same time as Maria Quadrado, the Lion of Natuba, Father Joaquim, and the women of the Sacred Choir; in the gloomy light of dusk, all eyes are riveted on the long, dark, motionless face with eyelids still tightly closed. It is not a hallucination: he has spoken.

The Little Blessed One sees that beloved mouth, grown so emaciated that the lips have disappeared, open to repeat: “Antônio Vilanova.” They react, say “Yes, yes, Father,” rush to the door of the Sanctuary to tell the Catholic Guard to go fetch Antônio Vilanova. Several men leave on the run, hurriedly making their way between the stones and sandbags of the parapet. At that moment, there is no shooting. The Little Blessed One goes back to the Counselor’s bedside; he is again lying there silent, his bones protruding from the dark purple tunic whose folds betray here and there how frightfully thin he is. “He is more spirit than flesh now,” the Little Blessed One thinks. The Superior of the Sacred Choir, encouraged at hearing the Counselor speak, comes toward him with a bowl containing a little milk. He hears her say softly, in a voice full of devotion and hope: “Would you like a little something to drink, Father?” He has heard her ask the same question many times in these last days. But this time, unlike the others, when the Counselor lay there without answering, the skeleton-like head with long disheveled gray hair drooping down from it shakes from one side to the other: no. A wave of happiness mounts within the Little Blessed One. He is alive, he is going to live. Because in these recent days, even though Father Joaquim came to the Counselor’s bedside every so often to take his pulse and listen to his heart to assure them that he was breathing, and even though that little trickle of water kept constantly flowing out of him, the Little Blessed One could not help thinking, as he saw him lying there, so silent and so still, that the Counselor’s soul had gone up to heaven.

A hand tugs at him from the floor. He looks down and sees the Lion of Natuba’s huge, anxious, bright eyes gazing up at him from amid a jungle of long, tangled locks. “Is he going to live, Little Blessed One?” There is so much anguish in the voice of the scribe of Belo Monte that the Little Blessed One feels like crying.

“Yes, yes, Lion, he’s going to live for us, he’s going to live a long time still.”

But he knows that this is not true; something deep inside him tells him that these are the last days, perhaps the last hours, of the man who changed his life and those of all who are in the Sanctuary, of all who are giving their lives there outside, fighting and dying in the maze of caves and trenches that Belo Monte has now turned into. He knows this is the end. He has known it ever since he learned, simultaneously, that Fazenda Velha had fallen and that the Counselor had fainted dead away in the Sanctuary. The Little Blessed One knows how to decipher the symbols, to interpret the secret message of the coincidences, accidents, apparent happenstances that pass unnoticed by the others; he has powers of intuition that enable him to recognize instantly, beneath the innocent and the trivial, the deeply hidden presence of the beyond. On that day he had been in the Church of Santo Antônio, turned since the beginning of the war into a clinic, leading the sick, the wounded, the women in labor, the orphans there in the recitation of the Rosary, raising his voice so that this suffering, bleeding, purulent, half-dead humanity could hear his Ave Marias and Pater Nosters amid the din of the rifle volleys and the cannon salvos. And just then he had seen a “youngster” and Alexandrinha Correa come running in at the same time, leaping over the bodies lying one atop the other.

The young boy spoke first. “The dogs have entered Fazenda Velha, Little Blessed One. Abbot João says that a wall has to be erected on the corner of Mártires, because the atheists can now pass that way freely.”

And the “youngster” had barely turned around to leave when the former water divineress, in a voice even more upset than the expression on her face, whispered another piece of news in his ear which he immediately sensed was far more serious still: “The Counselor has been taken ill.”

His legs tremble, his mouth goes dry, his heart sinks, just as on that morning—how long ago now? Six, seven, ten days? He had to struggle to make his feet obey him and run after Alexandrinha Correa. When he arrived at the Sanctuary, the Counselor had been lifted up onto his pallet and had opened his eyes again and gazed reassuringly at the distraught women of the Choir and the Lion of Natuba. It had happened when he rose to his feet after praying for several hours, lying face down on the floor with his arms outstretched, as always. The women, the Lion of Natuba, Mother Maria Quadrado noted how difficult it was for him to get up, first putting one knee on the floor and helping himself with one hand and then the other, and how pale he turned from the effort or the pain of remaining on his feet. Then suddenly he sank to the floor once again, like a sack of bones. At that moment—was it six, seven, ten days ago?—the Little Blessed One had a revelation: the eleventh hour had come for the Counselor.

Why was he so selfish? How could he fail to rejoice that the Counselor would be going to his rest, would ascend to heaven to receive his reward for what he had done on this earth? Shouldn’t he be singing hosannas? Of course he should be. But he is unable to; his soul is transfixed with grief. “We’ll be left orphans,” he thinks once again. At that moment, he is distracted by a little sound coming from the pallet, escaping from underneath the Counselor. It is a little sound that does not make the saint’s body stir even slightly, but already Mother Maria Quadrado and the devout women hurriedly surround the pallet, raise his habit, clean him, humbly collect what—the Little Blessed One thinks to himself—is not excrement, since excrement is dirty and impure and nothing that comes from his body can be that. How could that little watery trickle that has flowed continually from that poor body—for six, seven, ten days—be dirty, impure? Has the Counselor eaten a single mouthful in these days that would make his system have any impurities to evacuate? “It is his essence that is flowing out down there, it is part of his soul, something that he is leaving us.” He sensed this immediately, from the very first moment. There was something mysterious and sacred about that sudden, soft, prolonged breaking of wind, about those attacks that seemed never to end, always accompanied by the emission of that little trickle of water. He divined the secret meaning: “They are gifts, not excrement.” He understood very clearly that the Father, or the Divine Holy Spirit, or the Blessed Jesus, or Our Lady, or the Counselor himself wanted to put them to the test. In a sudden happy inspiration, he came forward, stretched his hand out between the women, wet his fingers in the trickle and raised them to his mouth, intoning: “Is this how you wish your slave to take Communion, Father? Is this not dew to me?” All the women of the Sacred Choir also took Communion, in the same way.

Why was the Father subjecting the saint to such agony? Why did He want him to spend his last moment defecating, defecating, even though what flowed from his body was manna? The Lion of Natuba, Mother Maria Quadrado, and the women of the Choir do not understand this. The Little Blessed One has tried to explain it and prepare them: “The Father does not want him to fall into the hands of the dogs. If He takes him to Him, it is so that he will not be humiliated. But at the same time He does not want us to believe that He is freeing him from pain, from doing penance. That is why He is making him suffer, before giving him his recompense.” Father Joaquim has told him that he did well to prepare them; he, too, fears that the Counselor’s death will upset them, will wrest impious protests from their lips, reactions that are harmful to their souls. The Dog is lying in wait and would not miss an opportunity to seize upon this prey.

He realizes that the shooting has begun again—a heavy, steady, circular fusillade—when the door of the Sanctuary is opened. Antônio Vilanova is standing there. With him are Abbot João, Pajeú, Big João, exhausted, sweaty, reeking of gunpowder, but with radiant faces: they have learned the news that he has spoken, that he is alive.

“Here is Antônio Vilanova, Father,” the Lion of Natuba says, rising up on his hind limbs toward the Counselor.

The Little Blessed One holds his breath. The men and women crowded into the room—they are so cramped for space that none of them can raise his or her arms without hitting a neighbor—are gazing in rapt suspense at that mouth without lips or teeth, that face that resembles a death mask. Is he going to speak, is he going to speak? Despite the noisy chatter of the guns outside, the Little Blessed One hears once again the unmistakable little trickling sound. Neither Maria Quadrado nor the women make a move to clean him. They all remain motionless, bending over the pallet, waiting.

The Superior of the Sacred Choir brings her mouth down next to the ear covered with grizzled locks of hair and repeats: “Here is Antônio Vilanova, Father.”

The Counselor’s eyelids flutter slightly and his mouth opens just a bit. The Little Blessed One realizes that he is trying to speak, that his weakness and his pain do not allow him to utter a single sound, and he begs the Father to grant the Counselor that grace, offering in return to suffer any torment himself, when he hears the beloved voice, so feeble now that every head in the room leans forward to listen: “Are you there, Antônio? Can you hear me?”