The War Of The End Of The World (97 page)

“And nobody stopped them?” Antônio Vilanova asked.

“Nobody dared,” the Pyrotechnist said. “He was the Little Blessed One, the Little Blessed One. Not just anyone like you or me, but one who had been with the Counselor from the very beginning. He was the Little Blessed One. Would you have told him that he’d taken leave of his senses, that he didn’t know what he was doing? Big João didn’t dare to, nor I nor anyone else.”

“But Abbot João dared to,” Antônio Vilanova murmured.

“There’s no doubt of that,” Antônio the Pyrotechnist said. “Abbot João dared to.”

The Dwarf felt frozen to the bone and his forehead was burning hot. He could easily picture the scene: the tall, supple, sturdy figure of the former
cangaceiro
appearing there, his knife and machete tucked in his belt, his rifle slung over his shoulder, the bandoleers around his neck, so tired he was past feeling tired. There he was, seeing the unbelievable file of pregnant women, children, old people, invalids, all those people come back to life, walking toward the soldiers with their hands on their heads. He wasn’t imagining it: he could see it, with the clearness and the color of one of the performances of the Gypsy’s Circus, the ones back in the good old days, when it was a big, prosperous circus. He was seeing Abbot João: his stupefaction, his bewilderment, his anger.

“Stop! Stop!” he shouted, beside himself, looking all about, motioning to those who were surrendering, trying to make them come back. “Have you gone out of your minds? Stop! Stop!”

“We explained to him,” the Pyrotechnist said. “Big João, who was crying and felt responsible, explained to him. Pedrão came too, and Father Joaquim, and others. It took only a few words from them for Abbot João to understand exactly what was going on.”

“It’s not that they’re going to kill them,” he said, raising his voice, loading his rifle, trying to take aim at those who had already crossed the lines and were heading on. “They’re going to kill all of us. They’re going to humiliate them, they’re going to outrage their dignity like they did with Pajeú. We can’t let that happen, precisely because they’re innocent. We can’t let the atheists slit their throats. We can’t let them dishonor them!”

“He was already shooting,” Antônio the Pyrotechnist said. “We were all shooting. Pedrão, Big João, Father Joaquim, me.” The Dwarf noted that his voice, steady until then, was beginning to quaver. “Did we do the wrong thing? Did I do the wrong thing, Antônio Vilanova? Was it wrong of Abbot João to make us shoot?”

“You did the right thing,” Antônio Vilanova answered immediately. “They died a merciful death. The heretics would have slit their throats, done what they did to Pajeú. I would have shot, too.”

“I don’t know,” the Pyrotechnist said. “I’m tormented by it. Does the Counselor approve? I’m going to be asking myself that question for the rest of my life, trying to decide whether, after having been with the Counselor for ten years, I’ll be eternally damned for making a mistake at the last moment. Sometimes…”

He fell silent and the Dwarf realized that the Sardelinha sisters were crying—at the same time now—one of them with loud, indelicate sobs, the other softly, with little hiccups.

“Sometimes…?” Antônio Vilanova said.

“Sometimes I think that the Father, the Blessed Jesus, or Our Lady wrought the miracle of saving me from among the dead so that I may redeem myself for those shots,” Antônio the Pyrotechnist said. “I don’t know. Once again, I don’t know anything. In Belo Monte everything seemed clear to me, day was day and night night. Until that moment, until we began firing on the innocent and on the Little Blessed One. Now everything’s hard to decide again.”

He sighed and remained silent, listening, as the Dwarf and the others were, to the Sardelinha sisters weeping for those innocents whom the
jagunços
had sent to a merciful death.

“Because maybe the Father wanted them to go to heaven as martyrs,” the Pyrotechnist added.

“I’m sweating,” the Dwarf thought. Or was he bleeding? “I’m dying,” he thought. Drops were running down his forehead, sliding down into his eyebrows and eyelashes, blinding his eyes. But even though he was sweating, the cold was freezing his insides. Every so often Jurema wiped his face.

“And what happened then?” he heard the nearsighted journalist ask. “After Abbot João, after you and others…”

He fell silent and the Sardelinha sisters, who had stopped crying in their surprise at this intrusion, began weeping again.

“There wasn’t any ‘after,’” Antônio the Pyrotechnist said. “The atheists thought we were shooting at them. They were enraged at seeing us take this prey that they thought was theirs away from them.” He fell silent, then his voice echoed through the cave: “‘Traitors,’ they shouted. We’d broken the truce and were going to pay for it. They came at us from all directions. Thousands of atheists. That was a piece of luck.”

“A piece of luck?” Antônio Vilanova said.

The Dwarf had understood. A piece of luck to have that torrent of uniforms advancing with rifles and torches to shoot at again, a piece of luck not to have to go on killing innocents to save them from dishonor. He understood, and in the midst of his fever and chills, he saw it. He saw how the exhausted
jagunços
, who had been sending people to merciful deaths, rubbed their blistered, burned hands in glee, happy to have before them once again a clear, definite, flagrant, unquestionable enemy. He could see that fury advancing, killing everything not yet killed, burning everything left to burn.

“But I’m sure he didn’t weep even at that moment,” one of the Sardelinhas said, and the Dwarf could not tell whether it was Honório’s wife or Antônio’s. “I can imagine Big João, Father Joaquim weeping because they had to do that to those innocents. But him? Did he weep?”

“I’m certain of that,” Antônio the Pyrotechnist said softly. “Even though I didn’t see him.”

“I never once saw Abbot João weep,” the same Sardelinha sister said.

“You never liked him,” Antônio Vilanova muttered bitterly, and the Dwarf knew then which of the two sisters was speaking: Antônia.

“Never,” she admitted, making no effort to hide her enmity. “And even less now. Now that I know that he ended up not as Abbot João but as Satan João. The one who killed to be killing, robbed to be robbing, and took pleasure in making people suffer.”

There was a deep silence and the Dwarf could feel that the nearsighted man was frightened. He waited, every nerve tense.

“I don’t ever want to hear you say that again,” Antônio Vilanova said slowly. “You’ve been my wife for years, forever. We’ve gone through everything together. But if I ever hear you say that again, it’s all over between us. And it will be the end of you, too.”

Trembling, sweating, counting the seconds, the Dwarf waited.

“I swear by the Blessed Jesus that I will never say that again,” Antônia Sardelinha stammered.

“I saw Abbot João weep once,” the Dwarf said then. His teeth were chattering and his words came out in spurts, well chewed. He spoke with his face pressed against Jurema’s bosom. “Don’t you remember, didn’t I tell you? When he heard the Terrible and Exemplary Story of Robert the Devil.”

“He was the son of a king and his mother’s hair was already white when he was born,” Abbot João remembered. “He was born through a miracle, if the work of the Devil can also be called a miracle. She had made a pact so as to give birth to Robert. Isn’t that how it begins?”

“No,” the Dwarf said, with a certainty that came from having told this story all his life, one he had known for so long he couldn’t remember where or when he had learned it, one he had taken about from village to village, told hundreds, thousands of times, making it longer, making it shorter, making it sadder or happier or more dramatic to fit the mood of his ever-changing audience. Not even Abbot João could tell him how it really began. His mother was old and barren and had to make a pact so as to give birth to Robert, yes. But he wasn’t the son of a king. He was the son of a duke.

“Of the Duke of Normandy,” Abbot João agreed. “Go ahead—tell it the way it really was.”

“He wept?” he heard a voice say as though from the next world, that voice he knew so well, always frightened, yet at the same time curious, prying, meddlesome. “Listening to the story of Robert the Devil?”

Yes, he had wept. At one point or another, perhaps at the moment when he was committing his worst massacres, his worst iniquities, when, possessed, impelled, overpowered by the spirit of destruction, an invisible force that he was unable to resist, Robert plunged his knife into the bellies of pregnant women or slit the throats of newborn babes (“Which means that he was from the South, not the Northeast,” the Dwarf explained) and impaled peasants and set fire to huts where families were sleeping, he had noticed that the Street Commander’s eyes were gleaming, his cheeks glistening, his chin trembling, his chest heaving. Disconcerted, terrified, the Dwarf fell silent—what mistake had he made, what had he left out?—and looked anxiously at Catarina, that little figure so thin that she seemed to occupy no space at all in the redoubt on Menino Jesus, where Abbot João had taken him. Catarina motioned to him to go on.

But Abbot João didn’t let him. “Was what he did his fault?” he said, transfixed. “Was it his fault that he committed countless cruelties? Could he do otherwise? Wasn’t he paying his mother’s debt? From whom should the Father have sought retribution for those wicked deeds? From him or from the duchess?” His eyes were riveted on the Dwarf, in terrible anguish. “Answer me, answer me.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” the Dwarf said, trembling. “It’s not in the story. It’s not my fault, don’t do anything to me, I’m only the one who’s telling the story.”

“He’s not going to do anything to you,” the woman who seemed to be a wraith said softly. “Go on with the story, go on.”

He had gone on with the story, as Catarina dried Abbot João’s eyes with the hem of her skirt, squatted at his feet and clasped his legs with her hands and leaned her head against his knees so as to make him feel that he wasn’t alone. He had not wept again, or moved, or interrupted him till the end, which sometimes came with the death of Robert the Saint become a hermit, and sometimes with Robert placing on his head the crown that had become rightfully his on discovering that he was the son of Richard of Normandy, one of the Twelve Peers of France. He remembered that when he had finished the story that afternoon—or that night?—Abbot João had thanked him for telling it. But when, at what moment exactly had that been? Before the soldiers came, when life was peaceful and Belo Monte seemed the ideal place to live in? Or when life became death, hunger, holocaust, fear?

“When was it, Jurema?” he asked anxiously, not knowing why it was so urgent to situate it exactly in time. Then, turning to the nearsighted man: “Was it at the beginning or the end of the performance?”

“What’s the matter with him?” he heard one of the Sardelinha sisters say.

“Fever,” Jurema answered, putting her arms around him.

“When was it?” the Dwarf asked. “When was it?”

“He’s delirious,” he heard the nearsighted man say and felt him touch his forehead, stroke his hair and his back.

He heard him sneeze, twice, three times, as he always did when something surprised him, amused him, or frightened him. He could sneeze if he wanted to now. But he had not done so the night they had escaped, that night when one sneeze would have cost him his life. He imagined him at a circus performance in a village somewhere, sneezing twenty, fifty, a hundred times, as the Bearded Lady farted in the clown number, in every imaginable register and cadence, high, low, long, short, and it made him feel like laughing too, like the audience attending the performance. But he didn’t have the strength.

“He’s dropped off to sleep,” he heard Jurema say, cradling his head in her lap. “He’ll be all right tomorrow.”

He was not asleep. From the depths of that ambiguous reality of fire and ice, his body hunched over in the darkness of the cave, he went on listening to Antônio the Pyrotechnist’s story, reproducing, seeing that end of the world that he had already anticipated, known, without any need to hear this man brought back to life from amid burning coals and corpses tell of it. And yet, despite how sick he felt, how badly he was shivering, how far away those who were speaking there beside him, in the dark of the night in the backlands of Bahia, in that world where there was no Canudos any more and no
jagunços
, where soon there would be no soldiers either, when those who had accomplished their mission left at last and the
sertão
returned to its eternal proud and miserable solitude, the Dwarf had been interested, impressed, and amazed to hear what Antônio the Pyrotechnist was relating.

“You might say that you’ve been restored to life,” he heard Honôrio say—the Vilanova who spoke so rarely that, when he did, it seemed to be his brother.

“Perhaps so,” the Pyrotechnist answered. “But I wasn’t dead. Not even wounded. I don’t know. I don’t know that, either. There was no blood on my body. Maybe a stone fell on my head. But I didn’t hurt anywhere, either.”

“You fell into a faint,” Antônio Vilanova said. “The way people did in Belo Monte. They thought you were dead and that saved you.”

“That saved me,” the Pyrotechnist repeated. “But that wasn’t all. Because when I came to and found myself in the midst of all those dead, I also saw that the atheists were finishing off with their bayonets those who had fallen, or shooting them if they moved. Lots of them went right by me, and not one of them bent over me to see if I was dead.”

“In other words, you spent an entire day playing dead,” Antônio Vilanova said.

“Hearing them pass by, killing off those who were still alive, knifing the prisoners to death, dynamiting the walls,” the Pyrotechnist said. “But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the dogs, the rats, the black vultures. They were devouring the dead. I could hear them pawing, biting, pecking. Animals don’t make mistakes. They know who’s dead and who isn’t. Vultures, rats don’t devour people who are still alive. My fear was the dogs. That was the miracle: they, too, left me alone.”