The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
[II]
At the time of the great drought of 1877, during the months of famine and epidemics that killed half the men and animals in the region, the Counselor was no longer journeying alone; he was accompanied, or, rather, followed (he scarcely appeared to be aware of the human trail tagging along after him) by men and women who had abandoned everything they had to go off with him, some of them because their souls had been touched by his counsel and others out of curiosity or mere inertia. Some of them remained in his company part of the way, and a very few seemed determined to remain at his side forever. Despite the drought, he journeyed on, even though the fields were now strewn with the carcasses of cattle that the vultures pecked at and half-empty towns greeted him.
The fact that it did not rain once all during the year 1877, that the rivers dried up and countless caravans of migrants appeared in the scrublands, carrying their few miserable belongings in canvas-covered carts or on their backs as they wandered about in search of water and food, was perhaps not the most terrible thing about that terrible year. If not, it was perhaps the brigands and the snakes that suddenly appeared everywhere in the backlands of the North. There had always been men who came onto the haciendas to steal cattle, had shootouts with the capangas—the hired thugs—of the landowners, and sacked remote villages, outlaws whom flying brigades of police periodically came to the backlands to hunt down. But with the famine the gangs of outlaws multiplied like the biblical loaves and fishes. Voracious and murderous, they fell on towns already decimated by the catastrophe to seize the inhabitants’ last remaining food, their household goods and clothing, drilling anyone full of holes who dared to cross them.
But never did they offend the Counselor, by word or by deed. They would meet up with him on the desert trails, amid the cactuses and the stones, beneath a leaden sky, or in the tangled scrub where the underbrush had withered and the tree trunks were beginning to split. The outlaws, ten, twenty cangaceiros armed with every sort of weapon capable of cutting, piercing, perforating, tearing out, would catch sight of the gaunt man in the purple tunic whose icy, obsessive eyes swept over them with their usual indifference for the space of a second before he went on doing exactly the same things as always: praying, meditating, walking, giving counsel. The pilgrims would pale on seeing the cangaço—the band of outlaws—and huddle together around the Counselor like chicks around the mother hen. The brigands, noting their extreme poverty, would go on their way, but sometimes they would halt on recognizing the saint, whose prophecies had reached their ears. They did not interrupt him if he was praying; they waited till he deigned to note their presence. He would finally speak to them, in that cavernous voice that unfailingly found the shortest path to their hearts. He told them things that they could understand, truths that they could believe in. That this calamity was no doubt the first forewarning of the arrival of the Antichrist and the devastation that would precede the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment. That if they wanted to save their souls they should ready themselves for the battles that would be waged when the demons who obeyed the Antichrist—who would be the Dog himself appearing on earth to recruit proselytes—spread out across the backlands like wildfire. Like the cowhands, the peons, the freedmen, and the slaves, the cangaceiros pondered his words. And a number of them—Pajeú with the slashed face, the enormous brute Pedrão, and even the most bloodthirsty one of all, Satan João—repented of their evil deeds, were converted to good, and followed him.
And as had happened with the brigands, he gained the respect of the rattlesnakes that as though by a miracle suddenly appeared by the thousands in the fields because of the drought. Long, slithering, writhing, their heads triangular, they abandoned their lairs and they, too, migrated, like the human folk; and in their flight they killed children, calves, goats, and had no fear of entering settlements in broad daylight in search of food. There were so many of them that there were not enough acauãs to finish them off, and in those topsy-turvy days it was not a rare sight to see serpents devouring that predatory bird rather than, as in days gone by, the acauã taking wing with its snake prey in its mouth. The people of the backlands were obliged to go about night and day armed with clubs and machetes and there were migrants who managed to kill a hundred rattlesnakes in a single day. But the Counselor nonetheless continued to sleep on the ground, wherever night overtook him. One evening, on hearing those accompanying him talking of serpents, he explained to them that this was not the first time that such a thing had happened. When the children of Israel were returning from Egypt to their homeland and were complaining of the hardships of the desert, the Father visited a plague of snakes upon them as punishment. Moses interceded on behalf of the children of Israel, and the Father ordered him to make a bronze serpent, which the children had only to gaze upon to be cured of its bite. Ought they to do the same? No, for miracles are never repeated. But surely the Father would look upon them with favor if they carried about the face of His Son as an amulet. From then on, a woman from Monte Santo, Maria Quadrado, bore in a glass case a piece of cloth with the image of the Good Lord Jesus painted by a boy from Pombal whose piety had earned him the name of the Little Blessed One. This act must have pleased the Father, since none of the pilgrims was bitten by a snake.
The Counselor was spared as well from epidemics which, as a consequence of drought and famine, fed, in the months and years that followed, on the flesh of those who had managed to survive. Women miscarried shortly after becoming pregnant, children’s teeth and hair fell out, and adults suddenly began spitting up and defecating blood, swelled up with tumors, or suffered from rashes that made them roll in the gravel like mangy dogs. The gaunt man, thin as a rail, went on his pilgrim’s way amid the pestilence and wholesale death, imperturbable, invulnerable, like a veteran ship’s pilot, skillfully skirting storms as he makes for a safe port.
What port was the Counselor heading for with this endless journeying? No one asked him, nor did he say, and probably he didn’t know. He was accompanied now by dozens of followers who had abandoned everything to devote themselves to the life of the spirit. During the many months of drought the Counselor and his disciples worked unceasingly, burying those dead of starvation, disease, or anguish whom they came across along the sides of the roads, rotting corpses that were food for wild beasts and even humans. They made coffins and dug graves for these brothers and sisters. They were a motley group, a chaotic mixture of races, backgrounds, and occupations. Among them were whites dressed all in leather who had made their living driving the herds of the “colonels,” the owners of great cattle ranches; full-blooded Indians with reddish skins whose great-great-grandfathers had gone about half naked and eaten the hearts of their enemies; mestizos who had been farm overseers, tinsmiths, blacksmiths, cobblers, or carpenters; and mulattoes and blacks who had been runaways from the sugarcane plantations on the coast and from the rack, the stocks, the floggings with bull pizzles and the brine thrown on the raw lash marks, and other punishments invented for slaves in the sugar factories. And there were the women, both old and young, sound in body or crippled, who were always the first whose hearts were moved during the nightly halt when the Counselor spoke to them of sin, of the wicked deeds of the Dog or of the goodness of the Virgin. They were the ones who mended the dark purple habit, using the thorns of thistles for needles and palm fibers for thread, and the ones who thought up a way to make him a new one when the old one got ripped on the bushes, and the ones who made him new sandals and fought for possession of the old ones, objects that had touched his body to be cherished as precious relics. And each evening after the men had lighted the bonfires, they were the ones who prepared the angu of rice or maize flour or sweet manioc boiled in broth and the few mouthfuls of squash that sustained the pilgrims. The Counselor’s followers never had to worry about food, for they were frugal and received gifts wherever they went: from the humble, who hastened to bring the Counselor a hen or a sack of maize or cheese freshly made, and also from landowners, who—after the rag
He had gone all around the backlands so many times, back and forth so many times, up and down so many mountainsides, that everyone knew him. The village priests, too. There weren’t many of them, and what few there were seemed lost in the vastness of the backlands, and in any event there were not enough of them to keep the countless churches going, so that they were visited by pastors only on the feast day of the patron saint of the town. The vicars of certain places, such as Tucano and Cumbe, allowed him to address the faithful from the pulpit and got along well with him; others, such as the ones in Entre Rios and in Itapicuru, would not permit him to do so and fought him. In other towns, in order to repay him for what he did for the churches and cemeteries, or because his spiritual influence on the people of the backlands was so great that they did not want to be on bad terms with their parishioners, the vicars grudgingly granted him permission to recite litanies and preach in the church courtyard after Mass.
When did the Counselor and his entourage of penitents learn that in 1888, far off in those cities whose very names had a foreign sound to them—São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, even Salvador, the state capital—the monarchy had abolished slavery and that the measure had wreaked havoc on the sugar plantations of Bahia, which all of a sudden were left with no labor force? It was months before the news of the decree reached the backlands, the way news always reached these remote parts of the Empire—delayed, distorted, and sometimes no longer true—and the authorities ordered that it be publicly proclaimed in the town squares and nailed to the doors of town halls.
And it is probable that, the year after, the Counselor and his followers again learned, long after the fact, that the nation to which they unwittingly belonged had ceased to be an empire and was now a republic. It never came to their attention that this event did not awaken the slightest enthusiasm among the old authorities or among the former slaveowners (who continued to be owners of sugarcane plantations and herds of cattle or sheep) or among the professional class and the petty government officials, who regarded this change as something like the coup de grâce for the already dying hegemony of the ex-capital, the center of Brazil’s political and economic life for two hundred years and now the nostalgic poor relation, watching everything that was once theirs—prosperity, power, money, manpower, history—move southward. And even if they had learned of this, they would not have understood, nor would they have cared, for the concerns of the Counselor and his followers were altogether different. Besides, what had changed for them apart from a few names? Wasn’t this landscape of parched earth and leaden skies the same one as always? And, despite having suffered several years of drought, wasn’t the region continuing to bind up its wounds, to mourn its dead, to try to bring what had been ruined back to life? What had changed in the calamity-ridden North now that there was a president instead of an emperor? Wasn’t the tiller of the land still fighting against the barrenness of the soil and the scarcity of water so that his maize, beans, potatoes, and manioc would sprout and his pigs, chickens, and goats stay alive? Weren’t the villages still full of idlers, and weren’t the roads still dangerous on account of the many bandits? Weren’t there armies of beggars everywhere as a reminder of the disasters of 1877? Weren’t the itinerant storytellers the same? Despite the Counselor’s efforts, weren’t the houses of the Blessed Jesus continuing to fall to pieces?
But in fact something had changed with the advent of the Republic. To people’s misfortune and confusion: Church and State were separated, freedom of worship was established, and cemeteries were secularized, so that it was no longer parishes but towns that would be responsible for them. Whereas the vicars in their bewilderment did not know what to say in the face of these new developments that the Church hierarchy had resigned itself to accepting, the Counselor for his part knew immediately what to say: they were impious acts that to the believer were inadmissible. And when he learned that civil marriage had been instituted—as though a sacrament created by God were not enough—he for his part had the forthrightness to say aloud, at the counsel hour, what the parishioners were whispering: that this scandal was the handiwork of Protestants and Freemasons. As were, no doubt, the other strange, suspect new provisions that the towns of the sertão—the backlands—learned of little by little: the statistical map, the census, the metric system. To the bewildered people of the hinterland, the sertanejos, who hastened to ask him what all that meant, the Counselor slowly explained: they wanted to know what color people were so as to reestablish slavery and return dark-skinned people to their masters, and their religion so as to be able to identify the Catholics when the persecution began. Without raising his voice, he exhorted them not to answer such questionnaires, and not to allow the meter and the centimeter to replace the yard and the foot.
One morning in 1893, as they entered Natuba, the Counselor and the pilgrims heard a sound like angry wasps buzzing: it was coming from the main square, where the men and women of the town had congregated to read, or to hear the town crier read, the decrees that had just been posted. They were going to collect taxes from them, the Republic wanted to collect taxes from them. And what were taxes? many townspeople asked. They’re like tithes, others explained to them. Just as, before, if an inhabitant’s hens had fifty chicks he was obliged to give five to the mission and one bushel of grain out of each ten that he harvested, the edicts decreed that a person was to give to the Republic part of everything inherited or produced. People had to go to the town hall of their community—all municipalities were now autonomous—and declare what they owned and what they earned in order to find out how much they would have to pay. The tax collectors would seize and turn over to the Republic everything that had been hidden or declared at less than its real value.
Animal instinct, common sense, and centuries of experience made the townspeople realize immediately that this would perhaps be worse than the drought, that the tax collectors would be greedier than the vultures and the bandits. Perplexed, frightened, enraged, they nudged each other and communicated to each other their feelings of apprehension and wrath, in voices that mingled and blended into one, producing that belligerent music that was rising heavenward from Natuba as the Counselor and his shabby followers entered the town by way of the road from Cipó. People surrounded the man in the dark purple habit, blocking his way to the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição (repaired and painted by him several times in the last few decades), toward which he had been heading with his usual great long strides, in order to tell him the news. Looking past them with a grave expression on his face, he scarcely seemed to have heard them.
And yet, only seconds later, just time enough for a sort of inner explosion to set his eyes afire, he began to walk, to run through the crowd that stepped aside to let him through, toward the billboards where the decrees had been posted. He reached them and without even bothering to read them tore them down, his face distorted by an indignation that seemed to sum up that of all of them. Then he asked, in a vibrant voice, that these iniquities in writing be burned. And when, before the eyes of the dumfounded municipal councillors, the people did so, and moreover began to celebrate, setting off fireworks as on a feast day, and the fire reduced to smoke the decrees and the fear that they had aroused, the Counselor, before going to pray at the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, announced to the people of that remote corner of the world the grave tidings: the Antichrist was abroad in the world; his name was Republic.
“Whistles, that’s right, Senhor Commissioner,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira repeats, surprised once again at what he has experienced and, no doubt, remembered and recounted many times. “They sounded very loud in the night—or rather, in the early dawn.”
The field hospital is a wooden shack with a palm-frond roof, hastily thrown together to house t
“It took us only twelve days from here to Uauá, which is practically at the gates of Canudos—quite a feat,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira says. “My men were dead-tired, so I decided to camp there. And in just a few hours the whistles woke us up.”
There are sixteen wounded, lying in hammocks lined up in two rows facing each other: crude bandages, bloodstained heads, arms, and legs, naked and half-naked bodies, trousers and high-buttoned tunics in tatters. A recently arrived doctor in a white smock is inspecting the wounded, followed by a male nurse carrying a medical kit. There is a sharp contrast between the doctor’s healthy, urbane appearance and the soldiers’ dejected faces and hair matted down with sweat. At the far end of the shack, an anguished voice is asking about confession.
“Didn’t you post sentinels? Didn’t it occur to you that they might surprise you, Lieutenant?”
“There were four sentinels, Senhor Commissioner,” Pires Ferreira answers, holding up four emphatic fingers. “They didn’t surprise us. When we heard the whistles, every man in the entire company rose to his feet and prepared for combat.” He lowers his voice. “But what we saw coming toward us was not the enemy but a procession.”
From one corner of the hospital shack the little camp on the shore of the river, where boats loaded with watermelon ply back and forth, can be seen: the rest of the company, lying in the shade of some trees, rifles stacked up in groups of four, field tents. A flock of screeching parrots flies by.