The War Of The End Of The World (91 page)

Happiness kept her—as nearsightedness and fear kept the man she was holding by the hand, as faith, fatalism, or habit kept those who were also running, limping, walking down to erect the barricade—from seeing what was all about her, from reflecting and drawing the conclusion that common sense, reason, or sheer instinct would have allowed her to draw from the spectacle: the little streets, which had once been stretches of dirt and gravel and were now seesaws riddled with shell holes, strewn with the debris of objects blown to bits by the bombs or torn apart by the
jagunços
to build parapets; the creatures lying about on the ground, who could scarcely be called men or women any more, since they had no features left on their faces, no light left in their eyes, no strength left in their muscles, yet through some perverse absurdity were still alive. Jurema saw them and did not realize that they were there, for they were scarcely distinguishable from the corpses that the old men had not yet had time to come get, the only difference between them being the number of flies swarming over them and the intensity of the stench they were giving off. She saw and yet did not see the vultures that were hovering above them and from time to time also being killed by the bullets, and the children with the blank faces of sleepwalkers poking about in the ruins or chewing on clods of dirt. They had run a long way, and when they finally stopped, she had to close her eyes and lean against the nearsighted journalist till the world stopped going round and round.

The journalist asked her where they were. It took Jurema some time to realize that the unrecognizable place was São João, a narrow lane between the jumble of little houses around the cemetery and the back of the Temple under construction. There were holes and rubble everywhere, and a crowd of people were frantically digging, filling sacks, drums, boxes, barrels, and casks with dirt and sand, and dragging beams, roof tiles, bricks, stones, and even carcasses of animals to the barrier that was going up there where before a picket fence had marked off the cemetery. The shooting had stopped, or else Jurema’s ears had been so deafened that they could no longer distinguish it from the rest of the din. As she was telling the nearsighted journalist that Pajeú wasn’t there, though both Antônio and Honório Vilanova were, a one-eyed man roared at them, asking what they were waiting for. The nearsighted journalist sat down on the ground and began scratching about. Jurema brought him an iron bar so he could do a better job of it. And then she plunged once again into the routine of filling gunnysacks, carrying them wherever she was told to, and taking a pickax to walls to get stones, bricks, roof tiles, and beams to reinforce the barrier, already several yards tall and wide. From time to time, she went to where the nearsighted journalist was piling up sand and gravel, to let him know that she was close at hand. She did not even notice that the shooting started again, died down, stopped, and then began yet again behind the stout barricade, nor that every so often groups of old men passed by, carrying wounded to the churches.

At one point a group of women, among whom she recognized Catarina, Abbot João’s wife, came by and handed her some chicken bones with a little skin on them and a dipper full of water. She went to share this gift with the journalist and the Dwarf, but they, too, had been given the same rations. They ate and drank together, happy and yet disconcerted by this repast, knowing that the food supplies had long since given out and it was understood that the few remaining scraps were reserved for the men staying day and night in the trenches and the towers, their hands covered with powder burns and their fingers callused from shooting so much.

She had just gone back to work after this pause when she happened to look at the tower of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus and something caught her eye. Beneath the heads of the
jagunços
and the barrels of rifles and shotguns peeking out from the parapets on the rooftop and the scaffoldings, a little gnome-like figure, bigger than a child but smaller than an adult, had been left hanging suspended in an absurd posture on the little ladder that led up to the bell tower. She recognized him: it was the bell ringer, the little old man who acted as sexton, sacristan, and keeper of the keys of the churches, the one who, people said, scourged the Little Blessed One. He had continued to climb up to the bell tower just as night was falling every evening to ring the bells for the Ave Maria, after which, war or no war, all Belo Monte recited the Rosary. He had been killed the evening before, no doubt after ringing the bells, for Jurema was certain that she had heard them. A bullet must have hit him and his body been caught in the ladder, and no one had had time to get him down.

“He was from my village,” a woman who was working alongside Jurema said to her, pointing to the tower. “Chorrochó. He was a carpenter there, when the angel’s wings brushed him.”

She went back to her work, putting the bell ringer out of her mind, and forgetting about herself as well, she toiled away all afternoon, going every so often to where the journalist was. As the sun was setting she saw the Vilanova brothers running off toward the Sanctuary and heard that Pajeú, Big João, and Abbot João had also come by, running that way from different directions. Something was about to happen.

A little while later, she was leaning over talking to the nearsighted journalist when an invisible force compelled her to kneel, to fall silent, to lean against him. “What’s the matter, what’s the matter?” he said, taking her by the shoulder and feeling her all over. And she heard him shout at her: “Have you been wounded, are you wounded?” No bullet had struck her. It was just that all the strength had suddenly been drained from her body. She felt empty, without the energy to open her mouth or lift a finger, and though she saw leaning over her the face of the man who had taught her what happiness was, his liquid eyes opening wide and blinking, trying to see her better, and realized that he was frightened and knew that she ought to reassure him, she was unable to. Everything was far away, strange, make-believe, and the Dwarf was there, touching her, caressing her, rubbing her hands, her forehead, stroking her hair, and it even seemed to her that, like the nearsighted journalist, he was kissing her on the hands, the cheeks. She was not about to close her eyes, because if she did she would die, but there came a moment when she could no longer keep them open.

When she opened them again, she no longer felt so freezing cold. It was night; the sky was full of stars, there was a full moon, and she was sitting leaning against the nearsighted journalist’s body—whose odor, thinness, heartbeat she recognized at once—and the Dwarf was there too, still rubbing her hands. In a daze, she noted how happy the two men were on seeing her awake once again, and felt herself being embraced and kissed by them so affectionately that tears came to her eyes. Was she wounded, ill? No, it had been exhaustion: she had worked so hard for such a long time. She was no longer in the same place as before. While she was lying in a faint, the gunfire had suddenly grown heavier and the
jagunços
had come running from the trenches in the cemetery; the Dwarf and the journalist had had to carry her to this street corner so that the men would not trample her underfoot. But the soldiers had not been able to get past the barricade erected along São João. The
jagunços
from the cemetery trenches who had escaped with their lives and many who had come from the churches had stopped them there. She heard the journalist telling her that he loved her, and at that very moment the world blew up. Dust filled her nose and eyes and she found herself knocked flat on the ground, for the journalist and the Dwarf had been thrown on top of her by the force of the shock wave. But she was not afraid; she huddled beneath the two bodies lying on top of her, struggling to utter the necessary sounds to find out if they were all right. Yes, just bruised from the chunks of stone, wood, and other debris that had rained down on them from the explosion. A confused, frantic, many-voiced, dissonant, incomprehensible outcry roiled the darkness. The nearsighted man and the Dwarf sat up, helped her to a sitting position, and the three of them stayed there where they were, hugging the only wall still standing on that corner. What had happened, what was happening?

Shadows were running in all directions, terrifying screams rent the air, but the strange thing to Jurema, who had drawn her legs up and was leaning her head on the nearsighted journalist’s shoulder, was that along with the cries, the shrieks, the weeping and wailing, she could also hear loud bursts of laughter, cheers, songs, and now a single vibrant, martial song, being roared out by hundreds of voices.

“The Church of Santo Antônio,” the Dwarf said. “They’ve hit it, they’ve brought it tumbling down.”

She looked, and in the dim moonlight, up above, where the smoke that had been hiding it was slowly being blown away by a breeze from the river, she saw the looming, imposing outlines of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus, but not those of the bell tower and roof of Santo Antônio. That was what the tremendous din had been. The screams and cries had come from those who had fallen with the church, from those crushed beneath its stones as it caved in, but not yet dead. With his arms about her, the nearsighted journalist kept shouting at the top of his lungs asking what was happening, what the laughing and singing were, and the Dwarf answered that it was the soldiers, beside themselves with joy. The soldiers! The soldiers shouting, singing! How could they be this close? The triumphant cheers were mingled in her ears with the moans, and sounded as though they were coming from even nearer at hand. On the other side of this barricade that she had helped to erect, a crowd of soldiers was milling about, singing, about to cross the space of just a few feet separating them from the three of them. “Father, may the three of us die together,” she prayed.

But curiously enough, instead of fanning the flames of war, the fall of Santo Antônio appeared to bring a lull in the fighting. Still not moving from their corner, they heard the cries of pain and of victory gradually grow fainter, and then, after that, there came a calm such as had not reigned for many a night. There was not a single cannon or rifle report to be heard, only sounds of weeping and moaning here and there, as though the combatants had agreed on a truce so as to rest. It seemed to her at times that she fell asleep, and when she awoke she had no idea whether a second or an hour had gone by. Each time she was still in the same place, sheltered between the nearsighted journalist and the Dwarf.

At one of these times, she spied a
jagunço
from the Catholic Guard walking away from them. What had he wanted? Father Joaquim was asking for them. “I told him you weren’t able to move,” the nearsighted man murmured. A moment later the curé of Cumbe came trotting along in the dark. “Why didn’t you come?” she heard him say, in an odd tone of voice, and she thought: “Pajeú.”

“Jurema is exhausted,” she heard the nearsighted journalist answer. “She’s fainted away several times.”

“She’ll have to stay here, then,” Father Joaquim answered, in the same strange voice, not angry, but broken, disheartened, sad. “You two come with me.”

“Stay here?” she heard the nearsighted journalist murmur, feeling him straighten up, his whole body tense.

“Be still,” the curé ordered. “Weren’t you the one who was so desperate to get away? Well, you’re going to have your chance now. But not a word out of you. Come along, you two.”

Father Joaquim began to walk off. Jurema was the first one on her feet, gathering her strength together and thus putting an end to the journalist’s stammering—“Jurema can’t…I…I…”—and demonstrating to him that indeed she could, that she was already on her feet, following along behind the curé’s shadow. Seconds later, she was running, the nearsighted man holding her by one hand and the Dwarf by the other, amid the ruins and the dead and injured of the Church of Santo Antônio, still not able to believe what she had heard.

She realized that the curé was leading them to the Sanctuary, through a labyrinth of galleries and parapets with armed men. A door opened and by the light of a lamp she spied Pajeú. She doubtless uttered his name, thereby alerting the nearsighted journalist, for he immediately burst into sneezes that doubled him over. But it was not by order of the
caboclo
that Father Joaquim had brought them here, for Pajeú was paying no attention to them at all. He was not even looking their way. They were in the women disciples’ little room, the Counselor’s antechamber, and through the cracks in the stake wall Jurema could see in the inner chamber the Sacred Choir and Mother Maria Quadrado kneeling and the profiles of the Little Blessed One and the Lion of Natuba. In the narrow confines of the antechamber, besides Pajeú, there were Antônio and Honório Vilanova and the Sardelinha sisters, and in the faces of all of them, as in Father Joaquim’s voice, there was something unusual, irremediable, fateful, desperate, feral. As though they had not entered the room, as though they were not there, Pajeú went on talking to Antônio Vilanova: he would hear shots, disorder, confusion, but they were not to move yet. Not until the whistles sounded. Then yes: that was the moment to run, fly, slip away like vixens. The
caboclo
paused and Antônio Vilanova nodded gloomily. Pajeú spoke again: “Don’t stop running for any reason. Not to pick up anybody who falls, not to retrace your steps. Everything depends on that and on the Father. If you reach the river before the dogs notice, you’ll get through. At least you have a chance to.”

“But you have no chance at all of getting out—neither you nor anyone else who goes with you to the dogs’ camp,” Antônio Vilanova moaned. He was weeping. He grabbed the
caboclo
by the arms and begged him: “I don’t want to leave Belo Monte, much less if it means your sacrificing yourself. You’re needed here more than I am. Pajeú! Pajeú!”

The
caboclo
slipped out of his grasp with a sort of annoyance. “It has to be before it gets light,” he said curtly. “After that, you won’t be able to make it.”