The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
The baron saw the look of shame that came over his face, as though he had confessed to some ignominious sin.
“I don’t know of any reason why I should help that dwarf,” the baron murmured. “Nor why I should help you.”
“There isn’t any reason, of course,” his myopic visitor said, pulling on his fingers. “I just decided to try my luck. I thought I might be able to touch your heart. In the past you were known to be a generous man.”
“A banal tactic employed by a politician,” the baron said. “I have no further need of it now that I’ve retired from politics.”
And at that moment, through the window overlooking the garden, he spied the chameleon. He very seldom caught a glimpse of it, or, better put, seldom recognized it, since it always blended so perfectly with the stones, the grass, or the bushes and branches of the garden that more than once he had nearly stepped on it. The evening before, he had taken Estela, accompanied by Sebastiana, out of doors for a breath of fresh air, beneath the mango trees and ficuses, and the chameleon had been a wonderful diversion for the baroness, who, from her wicker rocking chair, had amused herself by pointing out exactly where the creature was, recognizing it amid the plants and on the bark of trees as readily as in days gone by. The baron and Sebastiana had seen her smile when it ran off as they approached it to see if she had guessed correctly. It was there now, at the foot of one of the mangoes, an iridescent greenish-brown, barely distinguishable from the grass, its little throat palpitating. He spoke to it, in his mind: “Beloved chameleon, elusive little creature, my good friend. I thank you with all my heart for having made my wife laugh.”
“The only things I own are the clothes on my back,” the nearsighted journalist said. “When I returned from Canudos I found that the woman who owned my place had sold all my things to get the rent I owed. The Jornal de Notícias refused to pay for the upkeep while I was gone.” He fell silent for a moment and then added: “She also sold off my books. Sometimes I recognize one or another of them in the Santa Bárbara market.”
The thought crossed the baron’s mind that the loss of his books must have been heartbreaking for this man who ten or twelve years before had assured him that he would someday be the Oscar Wilde of Brazil.
“Very well,” he said. “You may have your old job back at the Diário da Bahia. All in all, you weren’t a bad writer.”
The nearsighted journalist removed his glasses and nodded several times, his face very pale, unable to express his thanks in any other way. “It’s a matter of little importance,” the baron thought. “Am I doing this for him or for that dwarf? I’m doing it for the chameleon.” He looked out the window, searching for it, and felt disappointed: it was no longer there, or else, sensing that it was being spied on, it had disguised itself perfectly by blending with the colors round it.
“He’s someone who’s terrified at the thought of dying,” the nearsighted journalist murmured, putting his glasses back on. “It’s not out of a love of life, you understand. He’s had a miserable existence. He was sold as a child to a gypsy for whom he was a circus attraction, a freak to be put on exhibition. But he has such a great, such a fabulous fear of death that it has enabled him to survive. And me as well, incidentally.”
The baron suddenly regretted having given him work, for in some indefinable way this established a bond between him and this individual. And he did not want to feel any sort of tie to anyone so closely linked to the memory of Canudos. But, instead of intimating to his caller that their conversation had ended, he blurted out: “You must have seen terrible things.” He cleared his throat, feeling uncomfortable at having yielded to his curiosity, but added nonetheless: “When you were up there in Canudos.”
“As a matter of fact, I didn’t see anything at all,” the emaciated little figure replied immediately, doubling over and then straightening up. “I broke my glasses the day they destroyed the Seventh Regiment. I stayed up there for four months, seeing nothing but shadows, vague shapes, phantoms.”
His voice was so ironic that the baron wondered whether he was saying this to irritate him, or whether it was his rude, unfriendly way of letting him know that he didn’t want to talk about it.
“I don’t know why you haven’t laughed at me,” he heard him say in an even more aggressive tone of voice. “Everybody laughs when I tell them that I didn’t see what happened in Canudos because I broke my glasses. It’s quite comical, I’m sure.”
“Yes, it is,” the baron said, rising to his feet. “But it’s something that doesn’t interest me. Hence…”
“But even though I didn’t see them, I felt, heard, smelled the things that happened,” the journalist said, his eyes following him from behind his glasses. “And I intuitively sensed the rest.”
The baron heard him laugh once more, with a sort of impishness now, fearlessly looking him straight in the eye. He sat down again. “Did you really come here to ask me for work and talk to me about that dwarf?” he said. “Does that dwarf dying of tuberculosis exist?”
“He’s spitting up blood and I want to help him,” the visitor said. “But I came for another reason as well.”
He bowed his head, and as the baron’s gaze fell upon his disheveled salt-and-pepper locks flecked with dandruff, he visualized in his mind his watery eyes fixed on the floor. He had the inexplicable intuition that his visitor was bringing him a message from Galileo Gall.
“People are forgetting Canudos,” the nearsighted journalist said, in a voice that sounded like an echo. “The last lingering memories of what happened there will fade in the air and mingle with the music of the next carnival ball in the Politeama Theater.”
“Canudos?” the baron murmured. “Epaminondas is right not to want people to talk about what happened there. It’s better to forget it. It’s an unfortunate, unclear episode. It’s not good for anything. History must be instructive, exemplary. In this war, nobody has covered himself with glory. And nobody has understood what happened. People have decided to ring down a curtain on it. And that’s a sensible, healthy reaction.”
“I shall not allow them to forget,” the journalist said, his dim eyes gazing steadily up at him. “That’s a promise I’ve made myself.”
The baron smiled. Not because of his visitor’s sudden solemnity but because the chameleon had just materialized, beyond the desk and the curtains, in the bright green of the plants in the garden, beneath the gnarled branches of the pitangueira tree. Long, motionless, greenish, with its profile reminiscent of the topography of sharp mountain peaks, almost transparent, it gleamed like a precious stone. “Welcome, friend,” the baron thought.
“How will you do that?” he said, for no particular reason, simply to fill the silence.
“In the only way in which things are preserved,” he heard his caller growl. “By writing of them.”
The baron nodded. “I remember that, too. You wanted to be a poet, a dramatist. And you’re going to write the story of Canudos that you didn’t see?”
“What fault of this poor devil is it that Estela is no longer that lucid, intelligent creature she once was?” the baron thought.
“As soon as I was able to get rid of the cheeky and curious strangers who besieged me, I started going to the Reading Room of the Academy of History,” the myopic journalist said. “To look through the papers, all the news items about Canudos. The Jornal da Notícias, the Diário de Bahia, O Republicano. I’ve read everything written about it, everything I wrote. It’s something…difficult to put into words. Too unreal, do you follow me? It seems like a conspiracy in which everyone played a role, a total misunderstanding on the part of all concerned, from beginning to end.”
“I don’t understand.” The baron had forgotten the chameleon and even Estela and was watching in fascination this person sitting all doubled over, his chin brushing his knee, as though he were straining to get his words out.
“Hordes of fanatics, bloodthirsty killers, cannibals of the backlands, racial mongrels, contemptible monsters, h
“Are you going to pen an apology for Canudos?” the baron asked. “You always did strike me as being a bit crazy. But I find it hard to believe that you’re crazy enough to ask my help in such an undertaking. You’re aware of what Canudos cost me, are you not? That I lost half my possessions? That on account of Canudos the worst misfortune of all happened to me, since Estela…”
He could hear his voice quavering and fell silent. He looked out the window, searching for help. And he found it: the creature was still there, perfectly still, beautiful, prehistoric, eternal, halfway between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, serene in the radiant morning light.
“But those terms were preferable. They at least kept people thinking about Canudos,” the journalist said, as though he had not heard him. “And now, not a word. Is there talk of Canudos in the cafés on the Rua Chile, in the marketplaces, in the taverns? No, people are talking instead of the orphan girls deflowered by the director of the Santa Rita de Cássia hospice. Or of Dr. Silva Lima’s anti-syphilis pill or of the latest shipment of Russian soap and English shoes just arrived at Clark’s Department Store.” He looked the baron straight in the eye and the latter saw that there was fury and panic in those myopic orbs. “The last news item about Canudos appeared in the papers two days ago. Do you know what it was about?”
“I don’t read the papers now that I’ve left politics,” the baron said. “Not even my own.”
“The return to Rio de Janeiro of the commission sent by the Spiritualist Center of the capital to aid the forces of law and order, through the use of its mediumistic powers, to wipe out the jagunços. Well, the commission has now come back to Rio, on the steamer Rio Vermelho, with its ouija boards and its crystal balls and what have you. Since then, not a single line. And it hasn’t even been three months yet.”
“I don’t want to hear any more,” the baron said. “I’ve already told you that Canudos is a painful subject to me.”
“I need to know what you know,” the journalist interrupted him in a hurried, conspiratorial voice. “You know many things. You sent them flour and also cattle. You had contacts with them. You talked with Pajeú.”
Blackmail? Had he come to threaten him, to get money out of him? The baron was disappointed that the explanation of all that enigmatic, empty talk had turned out to be something so vulgar.
“Did you really give Antônio Vilanova that message for me?” Abbot João asks, rousing himself from the warm drowsiness he feels as Catarina’s long slender fingers bury themselves in his mane, searching for nits.
“I don’t know what message he gave you,” Catarina answers, her fingers continuing to explore his head.
“She’s happy,” Abbot João thinks. He knows her well enough to sense, from furtive inflections of her voice or sparks in her dark eyes, when she is feeling unhappy. He is aware that people talk of Catarina’s mortal sadness, since no one has ever seen her laugh and very few have ever heard her say a word. But why try to show them that they’re wrong? He knows: he has seen her smile and laugh, though always as if in secret.
“That if I’m condemned to eternal damnation, you want to be, too,” he murmurs.
His wife’s fingers stop moving, just as they do each time they come across a louse nesting in his hair, whereupon she crushes it between her fingernails. After a moment, they go on with their task and João again immerses himself in the welcome peace of simply being where he is, without his shoes on, his torso bare, lying on the rush pallet of the tiny dwelling made of boards held together with mud, on the Rua do Menino Jesus, with his wife kneeling at his back, removing the lice from his hair. He feels pity for the blindness of others. Feeling no need to speak to each other, he and Catarina tell each other more things than the worst chatterboxes in Canudos. It is mid-morning and the sunlight filtering in through the cracks between the planks of the door and the tiny holes in the length of blue cloth covering the only window brightens the one room of the cabin. Outside, voices can be heard, the sound of children running about, the hustle and bustle of people going about their business, as though this were a world at peace, as though there had not been so many people killed that it took Canudos an entire week to bury its dead and carry off to the outskirts of town all the soldiers’ corpses so the vultures would devour them.
“It’s true,” Catarina says in his ear, her breath tickling it. “If you go to hell, I want to go there with you.”
João reaches out his arm, takes Catarina by the waist, and sits her on his knees. He does so with the greatest possible gentleness, as always when he touches her, for, because she is so thin or because he feels such remorse, he always has the distressing feeling that he is going to hurt her, and because the thought always crosses his mind that he must let go of her immediately since he will encounter that resistance that always is evident the moment he even tries to take her by the arm. He knows that she finds physical contact unbearable and he has learned to respect her feelings, fighting his own impulses, because he loves her. Although they have lived together for many years, they have very seldom made love together, or at least given themselves to each other completely, Abbot João thinks, without those interruptions on her part that leave him panting, bathed in sweat, his heart pounding. But this morning, to his surprise, Catarina does not push him away. On the contrary, she curls up on his lap and he feels her frail body, with its protruding ribs, its nearly nonexistent breasts, pressing against his.
“There in the Health House, I was afraid for you,” Catarina says. “As we were caring for the wounded, as we saw the soldiers passing by, shooting and throwing torches. I was afraid. For you.”
She does not say this in a fervent, passionate tone of voice, but rather in a cold, impersonal one, as though she were speaking of other people’s reactions. But Abbot João feels deeply moved, and then a sudden desire for her. He thrusts his hand beneath Catarina’s wrapper and caresses her back, her sides, her tiny nipples, as his mouth with all its front teeth missing brushes her neck, her cheek, seeking her lips. Catarina allows him to kiss her, but she does not open her mouth, and when João tries to lay her down on the pallet, her body stiffens. He immediately frees her from his embrace, breathing deeply, closing his eyes. Catarina rises to her feet, pulls her wrapper about her, picks up the blue cloth that has fallen to the floor, and covers her head with it once again. The roof of the cabin is so low that she is obliged to bend over in the corner of the room where provisions are stored (when there are any): beef jerky, manioc flour, beans, raw brown sugar. João watches her preparing the meal and calculates how many days—or weeks?—it has been since he has had the opportunity to be alone with her like this, with no thought in either of their minds of the war and of the Antichrist.
Shortly thereafter, Catarina comes over and sits down beside him on the pallet, with a wooden bowl full of beans sprinkled with manioc and a wooden spoon in her hands. They eat, handing the spoon to each other, with him taking two or three mouthfuls to her one.
“Is it true that Belo Monte was saved from the Throat-Slitter by the Indians from Mirandela?” Catarina murmurs. “That’s what Joaquim Macambira says.”
“And also by the blacks from the Mocambo and the others,” Abbot João answers. “But it’s quite true, the Indians from Mirandela were really brave. They had neither carbines nor rifles.”
They had not wanted to have them, out of caprice, superstition, mistrust, or some other unfathomable reason. He himself, the Vilanova brothers, Pedrão, Big João, the Macambiras had tried several times to give them firearms, petards, explosives. The chief shook his head emphatically, thrusting his hands out before him with something like disgust. Shortly before the arrival of Throat-Slitter, he himself had offered to show them how to load, clean, and shoot muskets, shotguns, rifles. The answer had been no. Abbot João concluded that the Cariri Indians
His eyes seeking his wife’s, João asks: “Do you remember when we entered Mirandela for the first time, with the Counselor?”
She nods. They have finished eating and Catarina takes the bowl and the spoon to the corner of the stove. Then João sees her come back toward him—very thin, grave, barefoot, her head brushing the ceiling covered with soot—and lie down beside him on the pallet. He places his arm underneath her back and carefully makes room for her to settle down comfortably. They lie there quietly, listening to the sounds of Canudos, near and far. They can lie that way for hours and these are perhaps the most profound moments of the life they share.
“At that time I hated you as much as you used to hate Custódia,” Catarina murmurs.
Mirandela, a village of Indians herded together there in the eighteenth century by the Capuchin missionaries of the Massacará mission, was a strange enclave in the backlands of Canudos, separated from Pombal by four leagues of sandy ground, dense and thorny scrub impenetrable in places, and air so burning hot that it chapped people’s lips and turned their skin to parchment. Since time immemorial the village of Cariri Indians, perched on top of a mountain, in rugged country, had been the scene of bloody fights—sometimes turning into veritable massacres—between the Indians and the whites of the region for the possession of the best pieces of land. The Indians lived grouped together in the village, in scattered cabins around the Church of the Ascension of Our Lord, a stone building two centuries old, with a straw roof and a blue door and windows, and the bare stretch of ground that was the village square, in which there was nothing but a handful of coconut palms and a wooden cross. The whites stayed on their haciendas round about the village and this proximity was not coexistence but rather a permanent state of undeclared war that periodically took the form of reciprocal incursions, violent incidents, sackings, and murders. The few hundred Indians of Mirandela went around half naked, speaking a local dialect seasoned with little spurts of spit, and hunting with bows and poisoned arrows. They were surly, wretched specimens of humanity, who kept entirely to themselves within their circle of huts thatched with icó leaves, with their maize fields between, and so poor that neither the bandits nor the flying brigades of Rural Police entered Mirandela to sack it. They had become heathens again. It had been years since the Capuchin and Lazarist Fathers had been able to preach a Holy Mission in the village, for the moment the missionaries appeared in the vicinity, the Indians and their wives and children vanished into the caatinga, till the Fathers finally gave up and resigned themselves to preaching the mission only for the whites. Abbot João doesn’t remember when it was that the Counselor decided to go to Mirandela. For him the disciples’ time of wandering is not linear, with a before and an after, but circular, a repetition of interchangeable days and events. He does remember, on the other hand, how it came about. After having restored the chapel of Pombal, the Counselor took off toward the North one morning, heading across a succession of razor-backed hills that led directly to the Indian redoubt, where a family of whites had just been massacred. No one said a word to him, for no one, ever, questioned the Counselor’s decisions. But during the long day’s journey, with the blazing sun seemingly trepanning their skulls, many of the disciples, Abbot João among them, thought that they would be greeted by a deserted village or by a shower of arrows.