The War Of The End Of The World (92 page)

He turned to Jurema, the nearsighted man, and the Dwarf, who were standing there petrified. “You’re to go too, because that’s what the Counselor wishes,” he said, as though talking past the three of them to someone they couldn’t see. “First to Fazenda Velha, in Indian file, crouching down. And there where the youngsters tell you, you’re to wait for the whistles to blow. Then you’re to dash through the camp and down to the river. You’ll get through, if it be the Father’s will.”

He fell silent and looked at the nearsighted man, standing with his arms around Jurema and trembling like a leaf. “Sneeze now,” Pajeú said to him, in the same tone of voice. “Not then. Not when you’re waiting for the whistles to blow. If you sneeze then, they’ll plunge a knife in your heart. It wouldn’t be right if they captured everyone on account of your sneezes. Praised be Blessed Jesus the Counselor.”

When he hears them, Private Queluz is dreaming of Captain Oliveira’s orderly, a pale young private whom he has been prowling around for some time and saw shitting this morning, crouched behind a little pile of rocks near the wells down by the Vaza-Barris. He has kept intact the image of those hairless legs and those white buttocks that he glimpsed, bared to the dawn air like an invitation. The image is so clear, steady, and vivid that Private Queluz’s cock gets hard, swelling against his uniform and awakening him. His desire is so overpowering that even though he can hear voices nearby, and even though he is forced to recognize that they are the voices of traitors and not of patriots, his immediate reaction is not to grab his rifle but to raise his hands to his trousers fly to stroke his cock inflamed by the memory of the round buttocks of Captain Oliveira’s orderly. Suddenly the thought is borne in upon him that he is alone, in open country, with the enemy close at hand, and instantly he is wide awake, every muscle tense, his heart in his mouth. What has happened to Leopoldinho? Have they killed Leopoldinho? They’ve killed him: he sees quite clearly now that the sentry didn’t even have time to shout a warning or even realize that they were killing him. Leopoldinho is the soldier with whom he shares the guard in this empty stretch of land that separates A Favela from the Vaza-Barris, where the Fifth Infantry Regiment is encamped, the good buddy with whom he takes turns sleeping, thereby making the nights on guard duty more tolerable.

“Lots and lots of noise, so they’ll think there are more of us,” their leader says. “And above all, get them all confused, so they don’t know whether they’re coming or going, so they don’t have the time or the inclination to look toward the river.”

“In other words, Pajeú, you mean really whoop it up,” another voice says.

“Pajeú!” Queluz thinks. Pajeú’s there. Lying there in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by
jagunços
who will finish him off in short order if they discover him, on realizing that in the shadows, within reach of his hand, is one of the fiercest bandits in all Canudos, a choice prize, Queluz has an impulse which very nearly brings him bounding to his feet, to grab his rifle and blow the monster to bits. This would win him the admiration of one and all, of Colonel Medeiros, of General Oscar. They would give him the corporal’s stripes he has coming to him. Because even though his length of service and his behavior under fire should have long since earned him a promotion, they keep turning him down for one on the stupid pretext that he’s been caned too often for inducing recruits to commit with him what Father Lizzardo calls “the abominable sin.” He turns his head, and in the light of the clear night he sees the silhouettes: twenty, thirty of them. How have they happened not to step on him? By what miracle have they failed to see him? Moving just his eyes, he tries to make out the famous scar on one of those faces that are a mere blur. It is Pajeú who is speaking, he is certain, reminding the others that they should set off dynamite sticks rather than shoot their rifles because that way they’ll make a bigger racket, and warning all of them again that nobody is to blow his whistle before he does. He hears him bid them goodbye in a way that makes him laugh: Praised be Blessed Jesus the Counselor. The group breaks up into shadows that disappear in the direction of the regiment’s camp.

He hesitates no longer. He scrambles to his feet, grabs his rifle, cocks it, aims it in the direction in which the
jagunços
are disappearing, and fires. But the trigger doesn’t budge, though he squeezes it with all his might. He curses, spits, trembles with rage at the death of his buddy, and as he murmurs “Leopoldinho, are you there?” he cocks his piece again and tries once more to fire a shot to alert the regiment. He is shaking the rifle to make it behave, to get across to it that it can’t jam now, when he hears several explosions. Damn: they’ve gotten into the camp. It’s his fault. They’re setting off dynamite sticks to blow up his sleeping buddies. Damn: the sons of bitches, the fiends, they’re butchering his buddies. And it’s his fault.

Confused, infuriated, he doesn’t know what to do. How have they managed to get this far without being discovered? Because—there’s no doubt about it, since Pajeú is with them—these are
jagunços
who have come out of Canudos and made their way through the patriots’ trenches so as to attack the camp from the rear. What in the world can have made Pajeú attack a camp of five hundred soldiers with just twenty or thirty men? All over the sector occupied by the Fifth Infantry Regiment there are people running this way and that, shots, a tremendous uproar. He is desperate. What is going to become of him? What explanation is he going to give when they ask him why he didn’t give the alert, why he didn’t shoot, shout, or do anything at all when they killed Leopoldinho? Who is there to deliver him from a new round of canings?

He grips the rifle hard, in a blind rage, and it goes off. The bullet brushes past his nose, giving him a red-hot whiff of gunpowder. It cheers him that his piece works, it restores his optimism, which, unlike others, he has never lost in all these months, not even when so many of the men were dying and they were all so hungry. Not knowing what he is going to do, he runs across the open stretch of ground in the direction of this bloody fiesta that the
jagunços
are having themselves, just as they said they would, and fires his four remaining bullets in the air, telling himself that the red-hot barrel of his rifle will be proof that he hasn’t been sleeping, that he’s been fighting. He trips and falls headlong. “Leopoldinho?” he says. “Leopoldinho?” He feels the ground in front of him, behind him, alongside him.

Yes, it’s Leopoldinho. He touches him, shakes him. The fiends. He spits out the taste of vomit in his mouth, keeps himself from throwing up. They have sunk a knife in his neck, they have slit his throat the way they would a lamb’s, his head dangles like a doll’s when he lifts him up by the armpits. “The fiends, the fiends,” he says, and without the thought distracting him from his grief and wrath at the death of his buddy, it occurs to him that going back to the camp with the dead body will convince Captain Oliveira that he wasn’t asleep at his post when the bandits came, that he put up a fight. He advances slowly, stumbling along with Leopoldinho’s body slung over his back, and hears, amid the shots and the fracas in the camp, the high-pitched, piercing screech of a strange bird, followed by others. The whistles. What are they up to? Why are the fanatical traitors entering the camp, setting off dynamite, and then beginning to blow whistles like mad? He staggers beneath the weight of Leopoldinho’s body and wonders if it wouldn’t be better to stop and rest.

As he approaches the huts he is struck by the chaos that reigns inside the camp: the soldiers, brutally awakened by the explosions, are shooting helter-skelter in all directions, disregarding the shouts and roars of the officers trying to impose order. At that moment, Leopoldinho shudders. Queluz is so stunned at this that he lets go of him and falls to the ground alongside him. No, he is not alive. What a stupid idiot he is! It was the impact of a bullet that shook the body like that. “That’s the second time tonight that you’ve saved my life, Leopoldinho,” he thinks. That knife thrust might have been meant for him, that bullet might have had his name on it. “Thanks, Leopoldinho!” He lies there flat on the ground, thinking that it would be the last straw if he got shot by the soldiers of his own regiment, in a fury again, his mind going round and round again, not knowing whether to stay there where he is till the shooting dies down or whether to try at all costs to reach the huts.

He is still lying there, agonizing as to what he should do, when in the shadows on the mountainside that are beginning to dissolve into a shimmer of blue he spies two silhouettes running toward him. He is about to shout: “Help! Come give me a hand!” when a sudden suspicion freezes the cry in his throat. He strains to see, till his eyes burn, whether or not they are wearing uniforms, but there is not enough light. He has unslung his rifle from his shoulder, grabbed a cartridge pouch from his knapsack, and is loading and cocking his gun by the time the men are almost upon him: none of them is a soldier. He fires point-blank at the one who offers the best target, and along with the report of his rifle, he hears the man’s animal snort and the thud of his body as it hits the ground. And then his rifle jams again: his finger squeezes a trigger that refuses to budge even a fraction of an inch.

He curses and leaps aside as at the same time he raises his rifle in his two hands and lashes out at the other
jagunço
, who, after a second’s hesitation, has flung himself on top of him. Queluz is good at fighting hand to hand, he has always shown up well in the tests of strength organized by Captain Oliveira. He feels the man’s hot panting breath in his face and his head butting him as he concentrates on the most important thing, searching out his adversary’s arms, his hands, knowing that the danger does not lie in these blows of his head that are like a battering ram but in the knife blade protruding like an extension of one of his hands. And, in fact, as his hands find and grip the man’s wrists he hears his pants ripping and feels a sharp knife blade run down his thigh. As he, too, butts with his head, bites, and hurls insults, Queluz fights with all his strength to hold back, to push away, to twist this hand where the danger is. He has no idea how many seconds or minutes or hours it takes, but all of a sudden he realizes that the traitor is attacking him less fiercely, is losing heart, that the arm that he is clutching is beginning to go limp in his grip. “You’re fucked,” Queluz spits at him. “You’re already dead, traitor.” Yes, though he is still biting, kicking, butting, the
jagunço
is wearing out, giving up. Queluz feels his hands free at last. He leaps to his feet, grabs his rifle, raises it in the air, and is about to plunge the bayonet into the traitor’s belly and fling himself on top of him when he sees—it is no longer dark but first light—the swollen face with a hideous scar all the way across it. With his rifle poised in the air, he thinks: “Pajeú.” Blinking, panting for breath, his chest about to burst with excitement, he cries: “Pajeú? Are you Pajeú?” He is not dead, his eyes are open, he is looking at him. “Pajeú?” he shouts, beside himself with joy. “Does this mean you’re my prisoner, Pajeú?” Though he continues to look at him, the
jagunço
pays no attention to what he is saying. He is trying to raise his knife. “Do you still want to fight?” Queluz says mockingly, stamping on his chest. No, he is paying no attention to him, as he tries to…“Or maybe you want to kill yourself, Pajeú,” Queluz laughs, kicking the knife out of the limp hand. “That’s not up to you, traitor—it’s up to us.”

Capturing Pajeú alive is an even more heroic deed than having killed him. Queluz contemplates the
caboclo
’s face: swollen, scratched, bitten. But he also has a bullet wound in the leg, for his trousers are completely blood-soaked. Queluz can’t believe that he is lying there at his feet. He looks around for the other
jagunço
, and just as he spies him, sprawled on the ground clutching his belly, perhaps not dead yet, he notices several soldiers approaching. He gestures frantically to them: “It’s Pajeú! Pajeú! I’ve caught Pajeú!”

When, after having touched him, sniffed him, looked him over from head to foot, touched him again—and having given him a couple of kicks, but not many, since all of them agree that it’s best to bring him in alive to Colonel Medeiros—the soldiers drag Pajeú to the camp, Queluz receives a welcome that is an apotheosis. The news that he has killed one of the bandits who have attacked them and has captured Pajeú soon makes the rounds, and everyone comes out to have a look at him, to congratulate him, to pat him on the back and embrace him. They box his ears affectionately, hand him canteens, and a lieutenant lights his cigarette. He mumbles that he feels sad about Leopoldinho, but he’s really weeping with emotion at this moment of glory.

Colonel Medeiros wants to see him. As he walks to the command post, as if in a trance, Queluz does not remember the raging fury that Colonel Medeiros had been in the day before—a fury that took the form of punishments, threats, and reprimands that did not spare even the majors and captains—because of his frustration at the fact that the First Brigade had not participated in the attack at dawn, which everyone thought would be the final push that would enable the patriots to capture all the positions still occupied by the traitors. The rumor had even gone round that Colonel Medeiros had had a run-in with General Oscar because the latter had not allowed the First Brigade to charge, and that when he learned that Colonel Gouveia’s Second Brigade had taken the fanatics’ trenches in the cemetery, Colonel Medeiros had thrown his cup of coffee onto the ground and smashed it to bits. Rumor also had it that, at nightfall, when the General Staff halted the attack in view of the heavy casualties and the traitors’ fierce resistance, Colonel Medeiros had drunk brandy, as though he were celebrating, as though there were anything to celebrate.