The War of the End of the World Read online

  “A religious procession, Lieutenant?” an intrusive, high-pitched, nasal voice asks in surprise.

  The officer casts a quick glance at the person who has spoken and nods. “They came from the direction of Canudos,” he explains, still addressing the commissioner. “There were five hundred, six hundred, perhaps a thousand of them.”

  The commissioner throws up his hands and his equally incredulous aide shakes his head. It is quite obvious that they are people from the city. They have arrived in Juazeiro that morning on the train from Salvador and are still dazed and battered from the jolting and jerking, uncomfortable in their jackets with wide sleeves, their baggy trousers and boots that have already gotten dirty, stifling from the heat, of a certainty annoyed at being there, surrounded by wounded flesh, by disease, and at having to investigate a defeat. As they talk with Lieutenant Pires Ferreira they proceed from hammock to hammock and the commissioner, a stern-faced man, leans over every so often to give one of the wounded a clap on the back. He is the only one who is listening to what the lieutenant is saying, but his aide takes notes, as does the other man who has just arrived, the one with the nasal voice who seems to have a head cold, the one who keeps constantly sneezing.

  “Five hundred, a thousand?” the commissioner says sarcastically. “The Baron de Canabrava’s deposition came to my office and I am acquainted with it, Lieutenant. Those who invaded Canudos numbered two hundred, including the women and children. The baron ought to know—he’s the owner of the estate.”

  “There were a thousand of them, thousands,” the wounded man in the nearest hammock murmurs, a light-skinned, kinky-haired mulatto with a bandaged shoulder. “I swear to it, sir.”

  Lieutenant Pires Ferreira shuts him up with such a brusque gesture that his arm brushes against the leg of the wounded man behind him, who bellows in pain. The lieutenant is young, on the short side, with a little clipped mustache like those of the dandies who congregate, back in Salvador, in the pastry shops of the Rua Chile at teatime. But due to fatigue, frustration, nerves, this little French mustache is now set off by dark circles under his eyes, an ashen skin, and a grimace. The lieutenant is unshaven, his hair is badly mussed, his uniform is torn, and his right arm is in a sling. At the far end of the shack, the incoherent voice babbles on about confession and holy oils.

  Pires Ferreira turns to the commissioner. “As a child, I lived on a cattle ranch and learned to size up the number of heads in a herd at a glance,” he murmurs. “I’m not exaggerating. There were more than five hundred of them, and perhaps a thousand.”

  “They were carrying a wooden cross, an enormous one, and a banner of the Divine Holy Spirit,” someone adds from one of the hammocks.

  And before the lieutenant can cut them short, others hastily join in, telling how it was: they also had saints’ statues, rosaries, they were all blowing those whistles or chanting Kyrie Eleisons and acclaiming St. John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary, the Blessed Lord Jesus, and the Counselor. They have sat up in their hammocks and are having a shouting match till the lieutenant orders them to knock it off.

  “And all of a sudden they were right on top of us,” he goes on, amid the silence. “They looked so peaceful, like a Holy Week procession—how could I have given the order to attack them? And then suddenly they began to shout, Down with this and that, and opened fire on us at point-blank range. We were one against eight, one against ten.”

  “To shout, Down with this and that, you say?” the insolent high-pitched voice interrupts him.

  “Down with the Republic,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira says. “Down with the Antichrist.” He turns to the commissioner again: “I have nothing to reproach myself for. My men fought bravely. We held out for more than four hours, sir. I did not order a retreat until we had no ammunition left. You’re familiar with the problems that we’ve had with the Mannlichers. Thanks to the troops’ disciplined behavior, we were able to get back here in only ten days.”

  “The march back took less time than the march out,” the commissioner growls.

  “Come over here and have a look at this!” the doctor in the white smock calls to them from one corner.

  The group of civilians and the lieutenant walk down the line of hammocks to him. The doctor is wearing an indigo-blue army uniform underneath his smock. He has removed the bandage of a soldier with Indian features who is writhing in pain, and is contemplating the man’s belly with intense interest. He points to it as though it were a rare, precious object: at the man’s groin is a purulent hole the size of a fist, with coagulated blood at the edges and pulsing flesh in the middle.

  “An explosive bullet!” the doctor exclaims enthusiastically, dusting the swollen wound with a fine white powder. “On penetrating the body, it explodes like shrapnel, destroys the tissue, and produces a gaping wound like this. The only time I’ve ever come across such a thing is in the British Army Manual. How is it possible that those wretched devils possess such modern weapons? Even the Brazilian Army is not equipped with them.”

  “See that, Senhor Commissioner?” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira says triumphantly. “They were armed to the teeth. They had rifles, carbines, long-barreled muskets, machetes, daggers, clubs. As for us, on the other hand, our Mannlichers jammed and…”

  But the man who has been babbling in delirium about confession and holy oils is now shouting at the top of his voice and raving about sacred images, the banner of the Divine, the whistles. He does not appear to be wounded; he is tied to a post, in a uniform with fewer signs of wear and tear than the lieutenant’s. As he sees the doctor and the civilians approaching, he implores them with tears in his eyes: “Confession, sirs! I beg you! I beg you!”

  “Is he the medical officer of your company, Dr. Antônio Alves dos Santos?” the doctor in the white smock asks. “Why have you tied him up like that?”

  “He tried to kill himself, sir,” Pires Ferreira stammers. “He attempted to put a bullet through his head and by some miracle he missed. He’s been like that since the encounter at Uauá, and I was at a loss as to how to deal with him. Instead of being a help to us, he turned into one more problem, especially during the retreat.”

  “Kindly withdraw if you will, sirs,” the doctor in the white smock says. “Leave me alone with him, and I’ll calm him down.”

  As the lieutenant and the civilians obey his wishes, the high-pitched, inquisitive, peremptory voice of the man who has interrupted the explanations several times is again heard: “How many dead and wounded were there in all, Lieutenant? In your company and among the outlaws?”

  “Ten dead and sixteen wounded among my men,” Pires Ferreira replies with an impatient gesture. “The enemy had at least a hundred casualties. All this is noted in the report that I gave you, sir.”

  “I’m not a member of the commission. I’m a reporter from the Jornal de Notícias, in Bahia,” the man says.

  He does not resemble the government officials or the doctor in the white smock with whom he has come here. Young, nearsighted, with thick eyeglasses. He does not take notes with a pencil but with a goose-quill pen. He is dressed in a pair of trousers coming apart at the seams, an off-white jacket, a cap with a visor, and all of his apparel seems fake, wrong, out of place on his awkward body. He is holding a clipboard with a number of sheets of paper and dips his goose-quill pen in an inkwell, with the cork of a wine bottle for a cap, that is fastened to the sleeve of his jacket. He looks more or less like a scarecrow.

  “I have traveled six hundred kilometers merely to ask you these questions, Lieutenant Pires Ferreira,” he says. And he sneezes.

  Big João was born near the sea, on a sugarcane plantation in Recôncavo, the owner of which, Sir Adalberto de Gumúcio, was a great lover of horses. He boasted of possessing the most spirited sorrels and the mares with the most finely turned ankles in all of Bahia and of having produced these specimens of first-rate horseflesh without any need of English studs, thanks to astute matings which he himself supervised. He prided himself less (in public)
on having achieved the same happy result with the blacks of his slave quarters, so as not to further stir the troubled waters of the quarrels that this had aroused with the Baron de Canabrava and with the Church, but the truth of the matter was that he dealt with his slaves in exactly the same way that he had dealt with his horses. His method was ruled by his eye and by his inspiration. It consisted of selecting the most lively and most shapely young black girls and giving them as concubines to the males that he regarded as the purest because of their harmonious features and even-colored skins. The best couples were given special food and work privileges so as to produce as many offspring as possible. The chaplain, the missionaries, and the hierarchy of Salvador had repeatedly reproved him for throwing blacks together in this fashion, “making them live together like animals,” but instead of putting an end to such practices, these reprimands resulted only in his engaging in them more discreetly.

  Big João was the result of one of these combinations arranged by this great landowner with the inclinations of a perfectionist. In João’s case the product born of the mating was undeniably magnificent. The boy had very bright, sparkling eyes and teeth that when he laughed filled his round blue-black face with light. He was plump, vivacious, playful, and his mother—a beautiful woman who gave birth every nine months—suspected that he would have an exceptional future. She was not mistaken. Sir Adalberto de Gumúcio became fond of him when he was still a baby crawling on all fours and took him out of the slave quarters to the manor house—a rectangular building, with a hip roof, Tuscan columns, and balconies with wooden railings that overlooked the cane fields, the neoclassic chapel, the sugar mill, the distillery, and an avenue of royal palms—thinking that he could be a servant boy for his daughters and later on a butler or a coachman. He did not want him to be ruined at an early age, as frequently happened with children sent out into the fields to clear land and harvest sugarcane.

  But the one who claimed Big João for herself was Miss Adelinha Isabel de Gumúcio, Master Adalberto’s unmarried sister, who lived with him. She was slender and small-boned, with a little turned-up nose that seemed to be continually sniffing the world’s bad odors, and she spent her time weaving coifs and shawls, embroidering tablecloths, bedspreads, blouses, or preparing desserts, tasks at which she excelled. But most of the time she did not even taste the cream puffs, the almond tortes, the meringues with chocolate filling, the almond sponge cakes that were the delight of her nieces and nephews, her sister-in-law and her brother. Miss Adelinha took a great liking to Big João from the day she saw him climbing the water tank. Terrified at seeing, some seven feet or so off the ground, a little boy scarcely old enough to toddle, she ordered him to climb down, but João went on up the little ladder. By the time Miss Adelinha called a servant, the little boy had already reached the edge of the tank and fallen into the water. They fished him out, vomiting and wide-eyed with fear. Miss Adelinha undressed him, bundled him up, and held him in her arms till he fell asleep.

  Shortly thereafter, Master Adalberto’s sister installed João in her bedroom, in one of the cradles that her nieces had slept in. She had it placed right next to her bed, and he slept all night at her side, the way other ladies have their favorite little maidservants and their little lap dogs sleep next to them. From that moment on, João enjoyed special privileges. Miss Adelinha always dressed him in one-piece romper suits, navy blue or bright red or golden yellow, which she made for him herself. He went with her every day to the promontory from which there was a panoramic view of the islands and the late-afternoon sun, setting them on fire, and accompanied her when she made visits and trips to neighboring villages to distribute alms. On Sundays he went to church with her, carrying her prie-dieu. Miss Adelinha taught him how to hold skeins of wool so that she could comb them, to change the spools of the loom, to mix colors for the dye, and to thread needles, as well as how to serve as her kitchen boy. To measure how long things should cook, they recited together the Credos and Our Fathers that the recipe called for. She personally prepared him for his First Communion, took Communion with him, and made him marvelous chocolate to celebrate the occasion.

  But, contrary to what should have happened in the case of a child who had grown up amid walls covered with wallpaper, jacaranda furniture upholstered in damask and silks, and sideboards full of crystalware, spending his days engaged in feminine pursuits in the shadow of a delicate-natured woman, Big João did not turn into a gentle, tame creature, as almost always happened to house slaves. From earliest childhood on, he was unusually strong, so that despite the fact that he was the same age as Little João, the cook’s son, he appeared to be several years older. At play he was brutal, and Miss Adelinha used to say sadly: “He’s not made for civilized life. He yearns to be out in the open.” Because the boy was constantly on the lookout for the slightest chance to go out for a ramble in the countryside. One time, as they were walking through the cane fields, on seeing him look longingly at the blacks naked to the waist hacking away with machetes amid the green leaves, the senhorita remarked to him: “You look as though you envied them.”

  “Yes, mistress, I envy them,” he replied. A little after that, Master Adalberto had him put on a black armband and sent him to the slave quarters of the plantation to attend his mother’s funeral. João did not feel any great emotion, for he had seen very little of her. He was vaguely ill at ease all during the ceremony, sitting underneath a bower of straw, and in the cortege to the cemetery, surrounded by blacks who stared at him without trying to conceal their envy or their scorn for his knickers, his striped blouse, and his shoes that were such a sharp contrast to their coarse cotton shirts and bare feet. He had never been affectionate with his mistress, thereby causing the Gumúcio family to think that perhaps he was one of those churls with no feelings, capable of spitting on the hand that fed them. But not even this portent would ever have led them to suspect that Big João would be capable of doing what he did.

  It happened during Miss Adelinha’s trip to the Convent of the Incarnation, where she went on retreat every year. Little João drove the coach drawn by two horses and Big João sat next to him on the coach box. The trip took around eight hours; they left the plantation at dawn so as to arrive at the convent by mid-afternoon. But two days later the nuns sent a messenger to ask why Senhorita Adelinha hadn’t arrived on the date that had been set. Master Adalberto directed the searches by the police from Bahia and the servants on the plantation who scoured the region for an entire month, questioning any number of people. Every inch of the road between the convent and the plantation was gone over with a fine-tooth comb, yet not the slightest trace of the coach, its occupants, or the horses was found. As in the fantastic stories recounted by the wandering cantadores, they seemed to have vanished in thin air.

  The truth began to come to light months later, when a magistrate of the Orphans’ Court in Salvador discovered the monogram of the Gumúcio family, covered over with paint, on the secondhand coach that he had bought from a dealer in the upper town. The dealer confessed that he had acquired the coach in a village inhabited by cafuzos—Negro-Indian half-breeds—knowing that it was stolen, but without the thought ever crossing his mind that the thieves might also be murderers. The Baron de Canabrava offered a very high price for the heads of Big João and Little João, while Gumúcio implored that they be captured alive. A gang of outlaws that was operating in the backlands turned Little João in to the police for the reward. The cook’s son was so dirty and disheveled that he was unrecognizable when they subjected him to torture to make him talk.

  He swore that the whole thing had not been planned by him but by the devil that had possessed his companion since childhood. He had been driving the coach, whistling through his teeth, thinking of the sweets awaiting him at the Convent of the Incarnation, when all of a sudden Big João had ordered him to rein in the horses. When Miss Adelinha asked why they were stopping, Little João saw his companion hit her in the face so hard she fainted, grab the reins from him, and spur the ho
rses on to the promontory that their mistress was in the habit of climbing up to in order to contemplate the view of the islands. There, with a determination such that Little João, terror-stricken, had not dared to cross him, Big João had subjected Miss Adelinha to a thousand evil acts. He had stripped her naked and laughed at her as she covered her breasts with one trembling hand and her privates with the other, and had made her run all about, trying to dodge the stones he threw at her as he heaped upon her the most abominable insults that the younger boy had ever heard. Then he suddenly plunged a dagger into her belly and once she was dead vent his fury on her by lopping off her breasts and her head. Then, panting, drenched with sweat, he fell asleep alongside the bloody corpse. Little João was so terrified that his legs buckled beneath him when he tried to run away.

  When Big João woke up a while later, he was calm. He gazed indifferently at the carnage all about them. Then he ordered the Kid to help him dig a grave, and they buried the pieces of Miss Adelinha in it. They had waited until it got dark to make their escape and gradually put distance between themselves and the scene of the crime; in the daytime they hid the coach in a cave or a thicket or a ravine and at night galloped on; the one clear idea in their minds was that they ought to head away from the sea. When they managed to sell the coach and the horses, they bought provisions to take with them as they went into the sertão, with the hope of joining one or another of the bands of fugitive slaves who, as many stories had it, were everywhere in the scrublands of the interior. They lived on the run, avoiding the towns and getting food to eat by begging or by petty thefts. Only once did João the Kid try to get Big João to talk about what had happened. They were lying underneath a tree, smoking cigars, and in a sudden fit of boldness he asked him point-blank: “Why did you kill the mistress?”

  “Because I’ve got the Dog in me,” Big João answered immediately. “Don’t talk to me about that any more.” The Kid thought that his companion had told him the truth.