The War of the End of the World

  When inspiration tells him that it is deep enough, all of them, beginning with himself, are exhausted, their hair and skin encrusted with dirt. The Little Blessed One has the sensation that the moments that follow are a dream, as he takes the head, Mother Maria Quadrado one of the legs, Pajeú the other, Big João one of the arms, Father Joaquim the other, and together they lift up the Counselor’s body so that the women of the Sacred Choir may place beneath it the little straw mat that will be his shroud. Once the body is in place, Maria Quadrado places on his chest the metal crucifix that was the sole object decorating the walls of the Sanctuary and the rosary with dark beads that he has never been without so long as any of them can remember. They lift up the remains, wrapped in the straw mat, once again, and hand them down to Abbot João and Pajeú, standing at the bottom of the grave. As Father Joaquim prays in Latin, they again work by turns, accompanying the shovelfuls of dirt with prayers. Amid his strange feeling that all of this is a dream, a sensation heightened by the dim light, the Little Blessed One sees that even the Lion of Natuba, hopping in and out between the legs of the others, is helping to fill the grave. As he works, he contains his grief. He tells himself that this humble vigil and this poor grave on which no inscription or cross will be placed is something that the poor and humble man the Counselor was in life would surely have asked for himself. But when it is all over and the Sanctuary is exactly as it has always been—except that the pallet is empty—the Little Blessed One bursts into tears. In the midst of his weeping, he hears the others weeping, too. Then after a while he gets hold of himself and in a subdued voice asks them all to swear, in the name of the salvation of their souls, that they will never reveal, even under the worst of tortures, whatever they might be, where the Counselor’s body reposes. He has them repeat the oath, one by one.

  She opened her eyes and continued to feel happy, as she had all that night, the day before, and the day before that, a succession of days that were all confused in her mind, till the evening when, after believing that he’d been buried beneath the rubble of the store, she found the nearsighted journalist at the door of the Sanctuary, threw herself into his arms, heard him say that he loved her, and told him that she loved him, too. It was true, or, at any rate, once she’d said it, it began to be true. And from that moment on, despite the war closing in around her and the hunger and thirst that killed more people than the enemy bullets, Jurema was happy. More than she could ever remember having been, more than when she was married to Rufino, more than in that comfortable childhood in the shadow of Baroness Estela, at Calumbi. She felt like throwing herself at the feet of the saint to thank him for what had happened to her life.

  She heard shots close by—she had heard them in her sleep all night long—but she had not noticed any of the activity in the Menino Jesus, neither the running footsteps and cries nor the frantic hustle and bustle as people lined up stones and sacks of sand, dug trenches, and tore down roofs and walls to erect parapets such as had gone up everywhere in these last weeks as Canudos shrank in size in all directions, behind successive concentric barricades and trenches, and the soldiers captured houses, streets, corners one by one, and the ring of defenses came closer and closer to the churches and the Sanctuary. But none of this mattered: she was happy.

  It was the Dwarf who discovered this abandoned house made of wooden palings, wedged in between other bigger dwellings, on Menino Jesus, the little street that joined Campo Grande, where there was now a triple barricade manned by jagunços under the command of Abbot João himself, and the zigzag street of Madre Igreja, which as the ring around Canudos tightened had now become the outer limit of the city to the north. The blacks of the Mocambo, which had been captured, and the few Cariris of Mirandela and Rodelas who had not been killed had fallen back to that sector. Indians and blacks now lived together side by side, in the trenches and behind the parapets of Madre Igreja, along with Pedrão’s jagunços, who had gradually withdrawn there in turn after stopping the soldiers in Cocorobó, in Trabubu, and at the corrals and stables on the outskirts of Canudos. When Jurema, the Dwarf, and the nearsighted journalist came to stay at this little house, they found an old man sprawled out dead on top of his blunderbuss, in the shelter that had been dug in the only room in the dwelling. But they had also found a sack of manioc flour and a pot of honey, which they had husbanded like misers. They hardly ever went out, except to carry off corpses to some dry wells that Antônio Vilanova had turned into ossuaries, and to help erect barricades and dig trenches, something that took more of everyone’s time than the fighting itself did. So many excavations had been made, both inside and outside the houses, that a person could very nearly go from any one place to another in what was left of Belo Monte—from house to house, from street to street—without ever coming up to the surface, like lizards and moles.

  The Dwarf stirred at her back. She asked him if he was awake. He did not answer, and a moment later she heard him snoring. All three of them slept, one against the other, in the dugout shelter, so narrow they barely fit into it. They slept in it not only because bullets easily pierced the walls of wooden pickets and mud but also because at night the temperature went way down and their bodies, weakened by their forced fastings, shook with cold. Jurema looked closely at the face of the nearsighted journalist, who was curled up against her breast, fast asleep. His mouth was gaping open and a little thread of saliva, as thin and transparent as a spiderweb, was hanging from his lip. She brought her mouth down to his and very delicately, so as not to awaken him, sipped the little trickle. The nearsighted journalist’s expression was calm now, an expression he never had when he was awake. “He’s not afraid now,” she thought. “Poor thing, poor thing, if I could rid him of his fear, if I could do something so that he’d never be afraid again.” For he had confessed to her that even in the moments when he was happy with her, the fear was always there, like mire in his heart, tormenting him. Even though she now loved him as a woman loves a man, even though she had been his as a husband or a lover makes a woman his, in her mind Jurema went on taking care of him, spoiling him, playing with him, like a mother with her son.

  One of the nearsighted journalist’s legs stretched out and, after pressing down a little, slid between hers. Not moving, feeling her face flush, Jurema thought to herself that he was going to want to have her then and there, that in broad daylight, as he did in the dark of night, he was going to unbutton his trousers, raise her skirts up, get her ready for him to enter her, take his pleasure, and make sure that she took hers. A tremor of excitement ran through her from head to foot. She closed her eyes and lay there quietly, trying to hear the shots, to remember the war being fought just a few steps away, thinking about the Sardelinha sisters and Catarina and the other women who were devoting what little strength they had left to caring for the sick and wounded and newborn in the very last two Health Houses left standing, and of the little old men who carried the dead off to the ossuary all day long. In this way, she contrived to make that sensation, so new in her life, go away. She had lost all shame. She not only did things that were a sin: she thought about doing them, she wanted to do them. “Am I mad?” she thought. “Possessed?” Now that she was about to die, she committed, in body and in thought, sins that she had never committed before. Because, even though she had been with two men before, it was only now that she had discovered—in the arms of this being whom chance and this war (or the Dog?) had placed in her path—that the body, too, could be happy. She knew now that love was also an exaltation of the flesh, a conflagration of the senses, a vertigo that seemed to fulfill her. She snuggled up to this man sleeping alongside her, pressed her body as close to his as she could. At her back, the Dwarf stirred again. She could feel him, a tiny little thing, all hunched over, seeking her warmth.

  Yes, she had lost all shame. If anyone had ever told her that one day she would sleep like this, squeezed in between two men, though one of them was admittedly a dwarf, she would have been horrified. If anyone had ever told her that a man to
whom she was not married would lift up her skirts and take her in plain sight of the other one who lay there at her side, sleeping or pretending to be asleep, as they took their pleasure together and told each other, mouth pressed against mouth, that they loved each other, Jurema would have been scandalized and would have covered her ears with her hands. And yet, ever since that evening, this had happened every night, and instead of making her feel ashamed and frightening her, it seemed natural to her and made her happy. The first night, on seeing that they were embracing each other and kissing each other as though they were the only two people in the world, the Dwarf had asked them if they wanted him to leave. No, no, he was as necessary to both of them, as dearly loved as ever. And it was true.

  The gunfire suddenly grew heavier, and for a few seconds it was as though the shots were landing inside the house, above their heads. Dirt and dust fell into the hole. Hunched over with her eyes closed, Jurema waited, waited for the direct hit, the explosion, the cave-in. But a moment later the shooting was farther in the distance. When she opened her eyes again, she found herself staring into blank watery eyes whose gaze seemed to glide past her. The poor thing had awakened and was half dead with fear again.

  “I thought it was a nightmare,” the Dwarf said at her back. He had stood up and was peeking over the edge of the hole. Rising up on her knees, Jurema also looked out, as the nearsighted journalist continued to lie there. Many people were running down Menino Jesus toward Campo Grande.

  “What’s happening, what’s happening?” she heard his voice say at her feet. “What do you see?”

  “Lots of jagunços,” the Dwarf said before she could answer. “They’re coming from Pedrão’s sector.”

  And just then the door opened and Jurema saw a bunch of men in the doorway. One of them was the very young jagunço she had met on the slopes of Cocorobó the day the soldiers arrived.

  “Come on, come on,” he called to them in a loud voice that carried over all the shooting. “Come and give a hand.”

  Jurema and the Dwarf helped the nearsighted journalist out of the hole and guided him out into the street. All her life she had automatically done whatever anyone with authority or power told her to do, so that it took no effort on her part, in cases such as this, to rouse herself from her passivity and work side by side with people at any sort of task, without ever asking what they were doing or why. But with this man at whose side she was running along the twists and turns of Menino Jesus, that had changed. He was forever wanting to know what was happening, to the right and to the left, in front and behind, why people were saying and doing certain things, and she was the one who was obliged to find out in order to satisfy his curiosity, as consuming as his fear. The young jagunço from Cocorobó explained that the dogs had been attacking the trenches at the cemetery since dawn that morning. They had launched two attacks, and though they had not managed to occupy the trenches, they had taken the corner of Batista, and were thus in a position to advance on the Temple of the Blessed Jesus from behind. Abbot João had decided to erect a new barricade, between the trenches at the cemetery and the churches, in case Pajeú found himself obliged to fall back yet again. That was why they were collecting people, why the ones who had been in the trenches at Madre Igreja had come. The young jagunço ran on ahead of them. Jurema could hear the nearsighted journalist panting and could see him tripping over the stones and stumbling into the holes along Campo Grande and she was sure that at this moment he was thinking, as she was, of Pajeú. Yes, they would be meeting him face to face now. She felt the nearsighted journalist squeeze her hand, and squeezed his back.

  She had not seen Pajeú again since the evening that she had discovered what happiness was. But she and the nearsighted journalist had talked a great deal about the caboclo with the slashed face whom both of them knew to be an even greater threat to their love than the soldiers. Ever since that evening, they had hidden out in refuges toward the north of Canudos, the section farthest away from Fazenda Velha, and the Dwarf would go out on forays to find out what was happening to Pajeú. The morning that the Dwarf came to report to them—they had taken shelter underneath a tin roof on Santo Elói, behind the Mocambo—that the army was attacking Fazenda Velha, Jurema had told the nearsighted journalist that the caboclo would defend his trenches to the death. But that same night they learned that Pajeú and the survivors from Fazenda Velha were in the trenches at the cemetery that were now about to fall. Thus, the hour when they would be forced to confront Pajeú had come. But even that thought could not take away the happiness that had come to be part of her body, like her skin and bones.

  Happiness kept her—as nearsightedness and fear kept the man she was holding by the hand, as faith, fatalism, or habit kept those who were also running, limping, walking down to erect the barricade—from seeing what was all about her, from reflecting and drawing the conclusion that common sense, reason, or sheer instinct would have allowed her to draw from the spectacle: the little streets, which had once been stretches of dirt and gravel and were now seesaws riddled with shell holes, strewn with the debris of objects blown to bits by the bombs or torn apart by the jagunços to build parapets; the creatures lying about on the ground, who could scarcely be called men or women any more, since they had no features left on their faces, no light left in their eyes, no strength left in their muscles, yet through some perverse absurdity were still alive. Jurema saw them and did not realize that they were there, for they were scarcely distinguishable from the corpses that the old men had not yet had time to come get, the only difference between them being the number of flies swarming over them and the intensity of the stench they were giving off. She saw and yet did not see the vultures that were hovering above them and from time to time also being killed by the bullets, and the children with the blank faces of sleepwalkers poking about in the ruins or chewing on clods of dirt. They had run a long way, and when they finally stopped, she had to close her eyes and lean against the nearsighted journalist till the world stopped going round and round.

  The journalist asked her where they were. It took Jurema some time to realize that the unrecognizable place was São João, a narrow lane between the jumble of little houses around the cemetery and the back of the Temple under construction. There were holes and rubble everywhere, and a crowd of people were frantically digging, filling sacks, drums, boxes, barrels, and casks with dirt and sand, and dragging beams, roof tiles, bricks, stones, and even carcasses of animals to the barrier that was going up there where before a picket fence had marked off the cemetery. The shooting had stopped, or else Jurema’s ears had been so deafened that they could no longer distinguish it from the rest of the din. As she was telling the nearsighted journalist that Pajeú wasn’t there, though both Antônio and Honório Vilanova were, a one-eyed man roared at them, asking what they were waiting for. The nearsighted journalist sat down on the ground and began scratching about. Jurema brought him an iron bar so he could do a better job of it. And then she plunged once again into the routine of filling gunnysacks, carrying them wherever she was told to, and taking a pickax to walls to get stones, bricks, roof tiles, and beams to reinforce the barrier, already several yards tall and wide. From time to time, she went to where the nearsighted journalist was piling up sand and gravel, to let him know that she was close at hand. She did not even notice that the shooting started again, died down, stopped, and then began yet again behind the stout barricade, nor that every so often groups of old men passed by, carrying wounded to the churches.

  At one point a group of women, among whom she recognized Catarina, Abbot João’s wife, came by and handed her some chicken bones with a little skin on them and a dipper full of water. She went to share this gift with the journalist and the Dwarf, but they, too, had been given the same rations. They ate and drank together, happy and yet disconcerted by this repast, knowing that the food supplies had long since given out and it was understood that the few remaining scraps were reserved for the men staying day and night in the trenches and the towe
rs, their hands covered with powder burns and their fingers callused from shooting so much.

  She had just gone back to work after this pause when she happened to look at the tower of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus and something caught her eye. Beneath the heads of the jagunços and the barrels of rifles and shotguns peeking out from the parapets on the rooftop and the scaffoldings, a little gnome-like figure, bigger than a child but smaller than an adult, had been left hanging suspended in an absurd posture on the little ladder that led up to the bell tower. She recognized him: it was the bell ringer, the little old man who acted as sexton, sacristan, and keeper of the keys of the churches, the one who, people said, scourged the Little Blessed One. He had continued to climb up to the bell tower just as night was falling every evening to ring the bells for the Ave Maria, after which, war or no war, all Belo Monte recited the Rosary. He had been killed the evening before, no doubt after ringing the bells, for Jurema was certain that she had heard them. A bullet must have hit him and his body been caught in the ladder, and no one had had time to get him down.