Rufino paused a second before answering. “A foreigner who came to Queimadas,” he said. He paused once again, and then added, speaking very slowly: “They sent him to my house. He was trying to get to Canudos, to bring the jagunços arms.”
The glass fell from Adalberto de Gumúcio’s hand and smashed to pieces at his feet, but neither the sound of the glass breaking nor the spattering punch nor the shower of shards distracted the three men as they stared at the guide in wide-eyed amazement. The latter stood there motionless, his head hanging down, saying not a word, seemingly unaware of the effect the words he had just uttered had produced.
The baron was the first to recover from the shock. “A foreigner was trying to bring arms to Canudos?” The effort he was making to speak in a normal tone of voice made him sound even more surprised.
“That’s what he was trying to do, but he didn’t get there.” The mop of dirty hair nodded. Still with his head bowed respectfully, Rufino continued to gaze at the floor. “Colonel Epaminondas Gonçalves ordered him killed. And he thinks he’s dead. But he isn’t. Jurema saved him. And now he and Jurema are together.”
Gumúcio and the baron looked at each other dumfounded, and José Bernardo Murau struggled to get up out of his rocking chair, muttering something. The baron was pale and his hands were trembling. Even now the guide did not appear to be aware of how badly he had upset the three men by the story he had recounted.
“In other words, Galileo Gall is still alive,” Gumúcio finally managed to say, striking the palm of one hand with the fist of the other. “In other words, the corpse burned to a cinder, the severed head, and all the other acts of violence…”
“They didn’t cut his head off, sir,” Rufino interrupted him, and again an electric silence reigned in the untidy little sitting room. “They only cut off his long hair. The dead body was a madman who’d murdered his children. The foreigner is still alive.”
He fell silent, and though Adalberto de Gumúcio and José Bernardo Murau asked him several questions at once and pressed him for details and demanded that he answer, Rufino remained stubbornly silent. The baron knew the people from his land well enough to know that the guide had said what he had to say and that there was not anybody or anything that could get another word out of him.
“Is there anything else that you can tell us, godson?” He had put one hand on Rufino’s shoulder and was making no effort to conceal his emotion.
Rufino shook his head.
“I thank you for coming,” the baron said. “You’ve done me a great service, my son. You’ve done us all one. And the country, too, even though you don’t know it.”
Rufino spoke out once again, his voice more insistent than ever: “I want to break the promise I made you, godfather.”
The baron nodded, feeling greatly distressed. The thought crossed his mind that he was about to pronounce a death sentence upon someone who was perhaps innocent, or who had acted for compelling reasons, out of estimable motives, and that he was going to feel remorse, repugnance even, for what he was about to say, and yet he could not do otherwise.
“Do what your conscience bids you,” he murmured. “May God be with you and forgive you.”
Rufino raised his head, sighed. The baron saw that his little eyes were bloodshot and brimming with tears, and that the expression on his face was that of a man who had survived a terrible test. Rufino knelt, and the baron made the sign of the cross on his forehead and extended his hand for him to kiss again. The guide rose to his feet and left the room without so much as a glance at the other two persons in it.
Adalberto was the first to speak. “I bow to you in due apology,” he said, gazing at the shards of glass scattered all about at his feet. “Epaminondas is a man of great resources. I willingly concede that we are mistaken about him.”
“Too bad he’s not on our side,” the baron added. But despite the extraordinary discovery he had made, he was not thinking about Epaminondas Gonçalves, but about Jurema, the young woman whom Rufino was going to kill, and about how sorrow-stricken Estela would be if she learned of this.
[III]
“The order has been posted since yesterday,” Moreira César says, pointing with his whip to the official announcement ordering the civilian population to register all firearms in their possession with the Seventh Regiment. “And this morning, when the column arrived, it was read aloud publicly before the search. So you knew what you were risking, senhores.”
The prisoners are tied back to back, and there are no torture marks either on their faces or on their torsos. Barefoot and bareheaded, they could be father and son, uncle and nephew, or two brothers, since the younger one’s features are exactly like the older one’s, and both have a similar look in their eyes as they gaze at the little camp table at which the tribunal that has just tried them has sat. Of the three army officers who acted as judges, two are now walking off, with the same haste with which they came and passed sentence on them, toward the companies that are continuing to arrive in Cansanção, in addition to those already camped in the town. Only Moreira César is still there, standing next to the incriminating evidence: two carbines, a box of bullets, a little pouch full of gunpowder. Besides concealing arms, the prisoners have attacked and wounded one of the soldiers who arrested them. The entire population of Cansanção—a few dozen peasants—is in the clearing, behind soldiers with fixed bayonets who are keeping them from coming any closer.
“It wasn’t worth the while for this junk.” The colonel’s boot brushes the carbines. There is not the slightest animosity in his voice. He turns to a sergeant standing next to him and, as though asking him the time, says to him: “Give them a swallow of brandy.”
Right next to the prisoners, bunched together in a little group, not saying a word, with a look of fear and stupefaction on their faces, are the correspondents. Those not wearing hats have covered their heads with their handkerchiefs to shield them from the blazing sun. Beyond the clearing, the usual sounds can be heard: the clump of heavy shoes and boots against the earth, the pawing and whinnying of horses, voices shouting orders, creaking noises, bursts of laughter. It would appear that the soldiers who are arriving or who are already there resting couldn’t care less about what is about to happen. The sergeant has uncorked a bottle and holds it up to the mouth of each of the prisoners in turn. Both take a long swallow.
“I want to be shot to death, Colonel,” the younger one suddenly pleads.
Moreira César shakes his head. “I don’t waste ammunition on traitors to the Republic,” he says. “Courage. Die like men.”
He gives a signal and two soldiers unsheathe the knives at their waist and step forward. They move briskly and precisely, their gestures identical: each of them grabs the hair of a prisoner with his left hand, thrusts his head abruptly backward, and slits his throat with a deep slash that cuts short the animal moan of the younger one and the cry of the older one: “Long live Blessed Jesus the Counselor! Long live Belo…”
The soldiers close ranks, as though to block the villagers’ path, though they haven’t budged. Some of the correspondents have averted their eyes, one of them looks on in utter dejection, and the nearsighted reporter from the Jornal de Notícias grimaces. Moreira César gazes at the bloodstained bodies lying on the ground.
“Leave them in plain sight at the foot of the posted order,” he says in a soft voice.
He then appears to put the execution entirely out of his mind. With nervous, rapid strides, he starts off across the clearing toward the hut where a hammock has been put up for him. The group of correspondents takes off after him and catches up. He walks on in their midst, grave, calm, not sweating a drop, unlike the reporters, whose faces are flushed from the heat and the shock of what they have just witnessed. They have not yet recovered from the sight of those throats being slit just a few steps away from them: the meaning of certain words—war, cruelty, suffering, fate—has left the abstract domain in which it dwelt and taken on a measurable, tangible, carnal ma
teriality that has left them speechless. They reach the door of the hut. An orderly hands the colonel a washbasin, a towel. The commanding officer of the Seventh Regiment rinses his hands and pats his face with cool water.
The correspondent who always goes about all bundled up stammers: “May we send dispatches about this execution, sir?”
Moreira César does not hear or does not deign to answer. “In the last analysis, the one thing man fears is death,” he says as he dries his hands and face. The words are spoken in a natural tone of voice, without grandiloquence, as in the conversations he has been heard to have at night with certain of his officers. “Hence it is the only effective punishment. Provided that it is justly administered. It edifies the civilian population and demoralizes the enemy. That sounds cruel, I know. But that is the way wars are won. You have had your baptism of fire today. You now know what to expect, gentlemen.”
He dismisses them with the swift, icy nod that they have learned to recognize as the incontrovertible sign that an interview has ended. He turns his back to them and enters the hut, in which they manage to glimpse uniforms bustling about, a map spread out, and a handful of aides clicking their heels. Troubled, deeply distressed, taken aback, they go back across the clearing to the mess tent, where at each rest halt they receive their rations, identical to those of the officers. But it is certain that none of them will eat a bite today.
The five of them are worn out from the swift pace at which the column advances. They have aching backsides, stiff legs, skin badly burned by the sun of this sandy desert, bristling with cactus and thorn-bush, that lies between Queimadas and Monte Santo. They wonder how those who march on foot, the vast majority of the regiment, can hold up. But many of them do not hold up: they have seen them collapse and be dumped onto the medics’ carts like so many sacks. They know now that these exhausted men, once they have come to, are severely reprimanded. “Is this what war is?” the nearsighted journalist thinks. For, before this execution, they have seen nothing resembling a war. Hence they do not understand why the commanding officer of the Seventh Regiment is driving his men on so heartlessly. Is this a race toward a mirage? There were admittedly all sorts of rumors about the violent deeds of the jagunços in the interior. But where are these rebels? They have come upon nothing but half-deserted villages, whose wretched inhabitants watch them pass with indifferent eyes and who, when questioned, always offer only evasive answers. The column has not been attacked; they have not once heard the sound of gunfire. Is it true that the cattle that have disappeared were stolen by the enemy, as Moreira César assures them? They do not find this intense little man a likable sort, but they are impressed by his self-assurance, his ability to go without eating or sleeping, his inexhaustible energy. As they wrap their blankets around themselves for a bad night’s sleep, they see him still up and about, his uniform not yet unbuttoned, the sleeves of it not yet rolled up, going up and down the ranks of soldiers, stopping to exchange a few words with the sentinels, or conversing with his staff officers. And at dawn, when the bugle sounds and they open their eyes, still drunk with sleep, he is there, washed and shaved, interrogating the messengers from the vanguard or inspecting the artillery pieces, as though he hadn’t gone to bed at all. Until the execution a moment ago war, for them, was this man. He was the only one to talk constantly of it, with such conviction that he managed to convince them, to make them see themselves surrounded by it, besieged by it. He has persuaded them that many of those undaunted, starving creatures—exactly like the two men executed—who come out of their huts to watch them pass by, are the enemy’s accomplices, and that behind those impassive eyes are intelligences that count, measure, calculate, register, and that this information, it too on its way to Canudos, always precedes the column. The nearsighted journalist recalls that the old man shouted “Long live the Counselor!” before dying and thinks: “Perhaps it’s true. Perhaps all of them are the enemy.”
This time, unlike previous halts, none of the correspondents stretches out to catch a few winks of sleep. Keeping each other company in their confusion and anguish, they linger by the mess tent, smoking, reflecting, and the reporter from the Jornal de Notícias is unable to keep his eyes off the dead bodies of the two men stretched out at the foot of the tree trunk on which the order that they have disobeyed flutters in the wind. An hour later the correspondents are again at the head of the column, immediately behind the standard-bearers and Colonel Moreira César, heading toward the war which for them has now really begun.
Another surprise awaits them before they reach Monte Santo, at the crossroads where a small blurred sign indicates the turnoff to the hacienda of Calumbi; the column arrives there six hours after having resumed its march. Of the five correspondents, only the gaunt scarecrow from the Jornal de Notícias will witness the incident at close hand. A curious relationship has sprung up between him and the commanding officer of the Seventh Regiment, which it would be inexact to call friendship or even congeniality. It is a question, rather, of a curiosity born of a mutual repulsion, of the attraction exerted by diametrical opposites. In any event, the man who appears to be a caricature of himself, not only when he sits writing at the outlandish portable writing table that he places on his knees or his saddle and dips his pen in the inkwell that looks more like the sort of horn in which the caboclos carry about the poison for the arrows of the crossbows when they are out hunting, but also when he walks or rides, continually giving the impression that he is about to collapse, appears to be fascinated, bewitched, obsessed by the little colonel. He keeps watching him every minute, never missing a chance to approach him, and in his conversations with his colleagues, Moreira César is very nearly the only subject that interests him, one that to all appearances matters more to him than Canudos and the war. And what is it about this young journalist that can have aroused the colonel’s interest? His eccentric dress and his odd physique perhaps, his resemblance to a walking skeleton, those gangling limbs, that proliferation of hair and fuzz, those long fingernails now black with dirt, that spineless manner, that whole in which there is not the least sign of anything that the colonel would call virile, martial. But the truth remains that there is something about this grotesque figure with the unpleasant voice that, perhaps despite himself, the little officer with fixed ideas and forceful eyes finds attractive. He is the only one whom the colonel is in the habit of addressing when he holds press conferences, and sometimes he converses with him alone after the evening mess. During the marches, the reporter from the Jornal de Notícias, as though through his mount’s initiative, habitually rides on ahead and joins the colonel. This is what has happened this time, after the column has left Cansanção. The nearsighted journalist, bouncing up and down like a puppet, is lost from sight amid the officers and aides surrounding Moreira César’s white horse, when the colonel, on arriving at the turnoff to Calumbi, raises his right hand: the signal to halt.
The escorts gallop off with orders, and the bugler sounds the call that will bring all the companies of the regiment to a halt. Moreira César, Olímpio de Castro, Cunha Matos, and Tamarindo dismount; the journalist slides to the ground. To the rear, the correspondents and a great many soldiers go to dip their faces, arms, and feet in a pool of stagnant water. The major and Tamarindo examine a map and Moreira César scans the horizon with his field glasses. The sun is disappearing behind a lone peak in the distance—Monte Santo—to which it has imparted a spectral form. As he puts away his glasses, the colonel’s face has paled. He is visibly tense.
“What is it that’s worrying you, sir?” Captain Olímpio de Castro asks.
“Time.” Moreira César speaks as though he had a foreign object in his mouth. “The possibility that they may take to their heels before we get there.”
“They won’t run away,” the nearsighted journalist pipes up. “They believe that God is on their side. People in these parts like a good fight.”
“As the old saying goes: ‘Smooth the way for an enemy on the run,’” the captain says
jokingly.
“Not in this case.” The colonel has difficulty articulating the words. “We must teach them a lesson that will put an end to monarchist illusions. And avenge the affront to the army as well.”
He speaks with mysterious pauses between one syllable and another, in a quavering voice. He opens his mouth again to say something, but not a word comes out. He is deathly pale, and his eyes are an angry red. He sits down on a fallen tree trunk and slowly removes his kepi. The reporter from the Jornal de Notícias goes over and sits down, too, when he sees Moreira César raise his hands to his face. The colonel’s kepi falls to the ground and he leaps to his feet, staggering, his face beet-red, as he frantically rips off the buttons of his blouse, as though suffocating. Moaning and frothing at the mouth, writhing uncontrollably, he rolls about at the feet of Captain Olímpio de Castro and the reporter, who have no idea what has come over him. As they bend over him Tamarindo, Cunha Matos, and several aides rush up.
“Don’t touch him,” Colonel Tamarindo shouts with an imperious gesture. “Quick, a blanket. Call Dr. Souza Ferreiro. Don’t anybody come near him! Get back, get back!”
Major Cunha Matos pulls the reporter away and goes with the aides to confront the press. They rudely force the correspondents to keep their distance, as meanwhile a blanket is thrown over Moreira César, and Olímpio de Castro and Tamarindo fold their tunics to serve as a pillow under his head.
“Open his mouth and get hold of his tongue,” the old colonel instructs them, knowing exactly what must be done. He turns around to the two escorts and orders them to put up a tent.
The captain forces Moreira César’s mouth open. His convulsions continue for some time. Dr. Souza Ferreiro finally arrives, in a medical corps wagon. They have set up the tent and Moreira César is lying in it on a camp cot. Tamarindo and Olímpio de Castro remain at his side, taking turns keeping his mouth open and seeing that he stays covered. His face drenched with sweat, his eyes closed, tossing and turning, emitting broken moans, from time to time the colonel foams at the mouth. The doctor and Colonel Tamarindo wordlessly exchange glances. The captain explains how the fit came over him, and how long ago, as Souza Ferreiro meanwhile goes on removing his uniform jacket and gestures to an aide to bring his medical kit to the cot. The officers leave the tent so that the doctor may give the patient a thorough examination.