The War Of The End Of The World (98 page)

“You were lucky,” Antônio Vilanova said. “And what are you going to do now?”

“Go back to Mirandela,” the Pyrotechnist said. “I was born there, I grew up there, I learned how to make skyrockets there. Maybe. I don’t know. What about you?”

“We’ll go far away from here,” the former storekeeper said. “To Assaré, maybe. We came from there, we began this life there, fleeing from the plague, as we’re doing now. From another plague. Maybe we’ll end up where it all began. What else can we do?”

“Nothing, I’m certain of that,” Antônio the Pyrotechnist said.

Not even when they tell him to hasten to General Artur Oscar’s command post if he wants to have a look at the Counselor’s head before First Lieutenant Pinto Souza takes it to Bahia does Colonel Geraldo Macedo, commanding officer of the Bahia Police Volunteer Battalion, stop thinking about what has obsessed him ever since the end of the war: “Has anyone seen him? Where is he?” But like all the brigade, regimental, and battalion commanders (officers of lesser rank are not accorded this privilege), he goes to have a look at the remains of the man who has been the death of so many people and yet, according to all witnesses, was never once seen to take up a rifle or a knife in his own hands. He doesn’t see very much, however, because they have put the head in a sackful of lime inasmuch as it is very badly decomposed: just a few shocks of grayish hair. He merely puts in an appearance at General Oscar’s hut for form’s sake, unlike other officers, who stay on and on, congratulating each other on the end of the war and making plans for the future now that they will be going back to their home bases and their families. Colonel Macedo’s eyes rest for a brief moment on the tangle of hair, then he leaves without a single comment and returns to the smoking heap of ruins and corpses.

He thinks no more about the Counselor or the exultant officers that he has left in the command post, officers whom, moreover, he has never considered to be his equals, and whose disdain for him he has reciprocated ever since he arrived on the slopes of Canudos with the battalion of Bahia police. He knows what his nickname is, what they call him behind his back: Bandit-Chaser. It doesn’t bother him. He is proud of having spent thirty years of his life repeatedly cleaning out bands of
cangaceiros
from the backlands of Bahia, of having won all the gold braid he has and reached the rank of colonel—he, a humble
mestizo
born in Mulungo do Morro, a tiny village that none of these officers could even locate on the map—for having risked his neck hunting down the scum of the earth.

But it bothers his men. The Bahia police who four months ago agreed, out of personal loyalty to him, to come here to fight the Counselor—he had told them that the Governor of Bahia had asked him to take on this mission, that it was indispensable that Bahia state police should volunteer to go to Canudos so as to put an end to the perfidious talk going the rounds in the rest of the country to the effect that Bahians were soft toward, indifferent to, and even sympathetic secret allies of the
jagunços
, so as to demonstrate to the federal government and all of Brazil that Bahians were as ready as anyone else to make any and every sacrifice in the defense of the Republic—are naturally offended and hurt by the snubs and affronts that they have had to put up with ever since they joined the column. Unlike him, they are unable to contain themselves: they answer insults with insults, nicknames with nicknames, and in these four months they have been involved in countless incidents with the soldiers from other regiments. What exasperates them most is that the High Command also discriminates against them. In all the attacks, the Bahia Police Volunteer Battalion has been kept on the sidelines, in the rear guard, as though even the General Staff gave credence to the infamy that in their heart of hearts Bahians are restorationists, crypto-Conselheirists.

The stench is so overpowering that he is obliged to get out his handkerchief and cover his nose. Although many of the fires have burned out, the air is still full of soot, cinders, and ashes, and the colonel’s eyes are irritated as he explores, searches about, kicks the bodies of the dead
jagunços
to separate them and have a look at their faces. The majority of them are charred or so disfigured by the flames that even if he came across him he would not be able to identify him. Moreover, even if his corpse is intact, how is he going to recognize it? After all, he has never seen him, and the descriptions he has had of him are not sufficiently detailed. What he is doing is stupid, of course. “Of course,” he thinks. Though it is contrary to all reason, he can’t help himself: it’s that odd instinct that has served him so well in the past, that sudden flash of intuition that in the old days used to make him hurry his flying brigade along for two or three days on an inexplicable forced march to reach a village where, it would turn out, they surprised bandits that they had been searching for with no luck at all for weeks and months. It’s the same now. Colonel Geraldo Macedo keeps poking about amid the stinking corpses, his one hand holding the handkerchief over his nose and mouth and the other chasing away the swarms of flies, kicking away the rats that climb up his legs, because, in the face of all logic, something tells him that when he comes across the face, the body, even the mere bones of Abbot João, he will know that they are his.

“Sir, sir!” It is his adjutant, Lieutenant Soares, running toward him with his face, too, covered with his handkerchief.

“Have the men found him?” Colonel Macedo says excitedly.

“Not yet, sir. General Oscar says you must get out of here because the demolition squad is about to begin work.”

“Demolition squad?” Colonel Macedo looks glumly about him. “Is there anything left to demolish?”

“The general promised that not a single stone would be left standing,” Lieutenant Soares says. “He’s ordered the sappers to dynamite the walls that haven’t fallen in yet.”

“What a waste of effort,” the colonel murmurs. His mouth is partway open beneath the handkerchief, and as always when he is deep in thought, he is licking at his gold tooth. He regretfully contemplates the vast expanse of rubble, stench, and carrion. Finally he shrugs. “Well, we’ll leave without ever knowing if he died or got away.”

Still holding his nose, he and his adjutant begin making their way back to the cantonment. Shortly thereafter, the dynamiting begins.

“Might I ask you a question, sir?” Lieutenant Soares twangs from beneath his handkerchief. Colonel Macedo nods his head. “Why is Abbot João’s corpse so important to you?”

“It’s a story that goes back a long way,” the colonel growls. His voice sounds twangy, too. His dark little eyes take a quick glance all about. “A story that I began, apparently. That’s what people say, anyway. Because I killed Abbot João’s father, some thirty years ago, at least. He was a
coiteiro
of Antônio Silvino’s in Custódia. They say that Abbot João became a
cangaceiro
to avenge his father. And afterward, well…” He looks at his adjutant and suddenly feels old. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-two, sir.”

“So you wouldn’t know who Abbot João was,” Colonel Macedo growls.

“The military leader of Canudos, a heartless monster,” Lieutenant Soares says immediately.

“A heartless monster, all right,” Colonel Macedo agrees. “The fiercest outlaw in all Bahia. The one that always got away from me. I hunted him for ten years. I very nearly got my hands on him several times, but he always slipped through my fingers. They said he’d made a pact. He was known as Satan in those days.”

“I understand now why you want to find him.” Lieutenant Soares smiles. “To see with your own eyes that he didn’t get away from you this time.”

“I don’t really know why, to tell you the truth,” Colonel Macedo growls, shrugging his shoulders. “Because it brings back the days of my youth, maybe. Chasing bandits was better than this tedium.”

There is a series of explosions and Colonel Macedo can see thousands of people on the slopes and brows of the hills, standing watching as the last walls of Canudos are blown sky high. It is not a spectacle that interests him and he does not even bother to watch; he continues on toward the cantonment of the Bahia Volunteer Battalion at the foot of A Favela, immediately behind the trenches along the Vaza-Barris.

“I don’t mind telling you that there are certain things that would never enter a normal person’s head, no matter how big it might be,” he says, spitting out the bad taste left in his mouth by his aborted exploration. “First off, ordering a house count when there aren’t any houses left, only ruins. And now, ordering stones and bricks dynamited. Do
you
understand why that commission under the command of Colonel Dantas Barreto was out counting the houses?”

They had spent all morning amid the stinking, smoking ruins and determined that there were five thousand two hundred dwellings in Canudos.

“They had a terrible time. None of their figures came out right,” Lieutenant Soares scoffs. “They calculated that there were at least five inhabitants per dwelling. In other words, some thirty thousand
jagunços
. But Colonel Dantas Barreto’s commission was able to find only six hundred forty-seven corpses, no matter how hard they searched.”

“Because they only counted corpses that were intact,” Colonel Macedo growls. “They overlooked the hunks of flesh, the scattered bones, which is what most of the people of Canudos ended up as. To every madman his own cherished mania.”

Back in the camp, a drama awaits Colonel Geraldo Macedo, one of the many that have marked the presence of the Bahia police at the siege of Canudos. The officers are trying to calm the men, ordering them to disperse and to stop talking among themselves about what has happened. They have posted guards all around the perimeter of the cantonment, fearing that the Bahia volunteers will rush out en masse to give those who have provoked them what is coming to them. By the smoldering anger in his men’s eyes and the sinister expressions on their faces, Colonel Macedo realizes immediately that the incident has been an extremely grave one.

But before allowing anyone to offer an explanation, he gives his officers a dressing down: “So then, my orders have not been obeyed! Instead of searching for the outlaw, you’ve let the men get into a fight! Didn’t I give orders that there were to be no fights?”

But his orders have been obeyed to the letter. Patrols of Bahia police had been out scouring Canudos till the general had ordered them to withdraw so that the demolition squads could get to work. The incident had involved, in fact, one of these very patrols out searching for the corpse of Abbot João, three Bahians who had followed the barricade between the cemetery and the churches down to a depression that must at one time have been the bed of a little stream or an arm of the river and is one of the places where the prisoners who have been captured are being held, a few hundred people who are now almost exclusively women and children, since the men among them have had their throats slit by the squad led by Second Lieutenant Maranhão, who is said to have volunteered for his mission because several months ago the
jagunços
ambushed his company, leaving him with only eight men alive and unharmed out of the fifty under his command. The Bahia police came down there to ask the prisoners if they knew what had become of Abbot João, and one of the men recognized, among the group of prisoners, a woman from the village of Mirangaba who was a relative of his. On seeing him embrace a
jagunça
, Lieutenant Maranhão began hurling insults at him and saying, pointing a finger at him, that this was proof that the Bandit-Chaser’s police, despite the republican uniforms they were wearing, were traitors at heart. And when the policeman tried to protest, the lieutenant, in a fit of rage, knocked him to the ground with one blow of his fist. He and his two buddies were then driven off by the gauchos in the lieutenant’s squad, who kept yelling after them from a distance: “
Jagunços!
” They had returned to camp trembling with rage and stirred up their buddies, who for an hour now have been seething and champing at the bit to go avenge these insults. This was what awaited Colonel Geraldo Macedo: an incident, exactly like twenty or thirty others, that had come about for the same reason and involved almost word for word the same insults.

But this time, unlike all the others, when he has calmed his men down and at most presented a complaint to General Barbosa, the commanding officer of the first column, to which the Bahia Police Volunteer Battalion is attached, or to the Commander of the Expeditionary Forces, General Artur Oscar, if he regards the incident as an especially serious one, Geraldo Macedo feels a curious, symptomatic tingle, one of those intuitions to which he owes his life and his gold braid.

“That Maranhão isn’t someone worthy of respect,” he comments, rapidly licking his gold tooth. “Spending his nights slitting the throats of prisoners isn’t really a job for a soldier but for a butcher, wouldn’t you say?”

His officers remain silent, standing there looking at each other, and as he speaks and licks at his gold tooth, Colonel Macedo notes the surprise, the curiosity, the satisfaction on the faces of Captain Souza, Captain Jerônimo, Captain Tejada, and First Lieutenant Soares.