The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Had it been my hacienda, I’d be there now: dead,” José Bernardo Murau suddenly said. “They would have had to burn me, too.”

  Sebastiana left the room, murmuring, “Please excuse me.” The baron thought to himself that the old man’s fits of rage must have been terrible, worse than Adalberto’s, and that before emancipation, he had undoubtedly tortured disobedient and runaway slaves.

  “Not that Pedra Vermelha is worth all that much any more,” he grumbled, looking at the peeling walls of his living room. “I’ve sometimes thought of burning it down myself, seeing all the grief it’s causing me. A person has the right to destroy his own property if he feels like it. But I’d never have allowed a band of infamous, demented thieves to tell me that they were going to burn my land so it could have a rest, because it had worked hard. They would have had to kill me.”

  “They wouldn’t have given you any choice in the matter. They’d have burned you to death before they set fire to the hacienda,” the baron said, trying to make a joke of it.

  “They’re like scorpions,” he thought. “Burning down haciendas is like stinging themselves with their own tails to cheat death. But to whom are they offering this sacrifice of themselves, of all of us?” He was pleased to note that the baroness was yawning. Ah, if only she could sleep, it would be the best possible thing to quiet her nerves. Estela hadn’t slept a wink in these last few days. When they had stopped over in Monte Santo, she had refused even to stretch out on the bed in the parish house and had sat weeping in Sebastiana’s arms all night long. That was when the baron began to be alarmed, for Estela was not a woman given to weeping.

  “It’s curious,” Murau said, exchanging a look of relief with the baron and Gumúcio, for the baroness had closed her eyes. “When you came by here on your way to Calumbi, my hatred was principally directed against Moreira César. But now I almost feel sorry for him. I have a more violent hatred of the jagunços than I ever had of Epaminondas and the Jacobins.” When he was very upset, he moved his hands in a circle and scratched his chin: the baron was waiting for him to do so. But the old man just sat there with his arms crossed in a hieratic posture. “What they’ve done to Calumbi, to Poço da Pedra, to Suçurana, to Juá and Curral Novo, to Penedo and Lagoa is heinous, beyond belief! Destroying the haciendas that provide them with food, the centers of civilization of the entire region! God will not forgive such a thing. It’s the work of details, of monsters.”

  “Well, at last,” the baron thought: Murau had finally made his usual gesture. A swift circle traced in the air with his gnarled hand and his outstretched index finger, and now he was furiously scratching his goatee.

  “Don’t raise your voice like that, José Bernardo,” Gumúcio interrupted him, pointing to the baroness. “Shall we carry her to her bedroom?”

  “When she’s sleeping more soundly,” the baron answered. He had risen to his feet and was arranging the cushion so that his wife could lie back against it. He then knelt and put her feet up on a footstool.

  “I thought the best thing would be to take her back to Salvador as quickly as possible,” Adalberto de Gumúcio said in a low voice. “But I wonder if it’s not imprudent to subject her to another long journey.”

  “We’ll see how she feels when she wakes up in the morning.” The baron had sat back down and synchronized the swaying of his rocking chair with that of his host.

  “Burning down Calumbi! People who owe you so much!” Murau again traced one of his circles in the air and scratched his chin. “I hope that Moreira César makes them pay dearly for it. I’d like to be there when he starts slitting throats.”

  “Isn’t there any news of him yet?” Gumúcio interrupted him. “He should have finished off Canudos some time ago.”

  “Yes, I’ve been making calculations,” the baron said, nodding. “Even with lead in his feet, he must have reached Canudos many days ago. Unless…” He noted that his friends were looking at him, intrigued. “I mean to say, another attack, like the one that forced him to seek refuge in Calumbi. Perhaps he’s had yet another one.”

  “That’s all we need—to have Moreira César die of illness before he’s put an end to this iniquity,” José Bernardo Murau growled.

  “It’s also possible that there aren’t any telegraph lines left in the region,” Gumúcio said. “If the jagunços burn the fields so as to let them have a little nap, they doubtless destroy the telegraph wires and the poles so as to keep them from having headaches. The colonel may have no way of getting a message out.”

  The baron gave a labored smile. The last time they had been gathered together here, Moreira César’s arrival had seemed like the death announcement of the Bahia Autonomist Party.

  And now they were consumed with impatience to learn the details of the colonel’s victory against those whom he was trying his best to pass off as restorationists and agents of the English Crown. The baron reflected on all this without taking his eyes off the sleeping baroness: she was pale, but the expression on her face was calm.

  “Agents of the English Crown?” he suddenly exclaimed. “Horsemen who burn down haciendas so that the earth may have a rest! I heard it and still don’t believe it. A cangaceiro like Pajeú, a murderer, a rapist, a thief, a man who cuts off people’s ears, who sacks towns, suddenly become a religious crusader! I saw him with my own eyes. It’s hard to believe I was born in these parts, and spent a good many years of my life here. It’s a strange land to me now. These people aren’t the same ones I’ve known as long as I can remember. Maybe that Scottish anarchist understands them better than I do. Or the Counselor. It’s quite possible that only madmen understand other madmen…” He gestured in despair and left his sentence unfinished.

  “Speaking of the Scottish anarchist,” Gumúcio said. The baron felt intensely uneasy: he knew the question would be asked, and had been expecting it for two hours now. “You surely know that I have never doubted your good judgment when it comes to politics. But I fail to understand why you would let the Scotsman go like that. He was a valuable prisoner, the best weapon we had against our number-one enemy.” He looked at the baron, his eyes blinking. “Isn’t that so?”

  “Our number-one enemy is no longer Epaminondas, or any other Jacobin,” the baron murmured dispiritedly. “It’s the jagunços. The economic breakdown of Bahia. That’s what’s going to happen if there’s not a stop put to this madness. The lands will remain uncultivatable, and everything’s going to go to hell. The livestock is being eaten, the cattle are disappearing. And what’s worse still, a region where the lack of manpower has always been a problem is going to be depopulated. People are leaving in droves and we aren’t going to be able to bring them back. We must halt at any price the ruin that Canudos is bringing down upon our heads.”

  He saw Gumúcio’s and José Bernardo’s surprised and reproving looks and felt uncomfortable. “I know I haven’t answered your question about Galileo Gall,” he murmured. “By the way, that isn’t even his real name. Why did I let him go? Perhaps it’s another sign of the madness of the times, my contribution to the general folly.” Without noticing, he traced a circle like Murau’s with his hand. “I doubt that he would have been of any use to us, even if our war with Epaminondas goes on…”

  “Goes on?” Gumúcio growled. “It hasn’t let up for a second, as far as I know. With the arrival of Moreira César, the Jacobins in Salvador have become more arrogant than ever. The Jornal de Notícias is demanding that parliament try Viana and appoint a special tribunal to judge our conspiracies and shady deals.”

  “I haven’t forgotten the harm done us by the Progressivist Republicans,” the baron interrupted him. “But at the moment things have taken a different turn.”

  “You’re mistaken,” Gumúcio said. “They’re just waiting for Moreira César and the Seventh Regiment to enter Bahia with the Counselor’s head to turn Viana out of office, close down parliament, and begin the witch-hunt against us.”

  “Has Epaminondas Gonçalves lost anything at the
hands of the monarchist restorationists?” The baron smiled. “In addition to Canudos, I for my part have lost Calumbi, the oldest and most prosperous hacienda in the interior. I have more reasons than he does to welcome Moreira César as our savior.”

  “Nonetheless, none of this explains why you allowed the English corpse to escape your grasp in such cavalier fashion,” José Bernardo said. The baron realized what a great effort it was costing the old man to utter these phrases. “Wasn’t he living proof of Epaminondas’s lack of scruples? Wasn’t he a prize witness to bring forward to testify to that ambitious man’s scorn for Brazil?”

  “In theory, yes,” the baron agreed. “In the realm of hypotheses.”

  “We would have paraded him in the same places that they paraded his famous mop of red hair,” Gumúcio murmured in an equally severe, hurt tone of voice.

  “But not in practice,” the baron went on. “Gall is not a normal madman. No, don’t laugh. He’s a special type of madman: a fanatic. He would not have testified in our favor but against us. He would have confirmed Epaminondas’s accusations, and made us appear utterly ridiculous.”

  “I must contradict you again, I regret to say,” Gumúcio said. “There are any number of ways to get the truth out of both sane men and madmen.”

  “Not out of fanatics,” the baron shot back. “Not out of those whose beliefs are stronger than their fear of dying. Torture would have no effect on Gall; it would merely reinforce his convictions. The history of religion provides many examples…”

  “In that case, it would have been preferable to put a bullet through him and deliver his dead body,” Murau muttered. “But simply to let him go…”

  “I’m curious to know what happened to him,” the baron said. “To know who killed him. The guide, so as not to take him to Canudos? The jagunços, so as to rob him? Or Moreira César?”

  “The guide?” Gumúcio’s eyes opened wide in surprise. “In addition to everything else, you gave him a guide?”

  “And a horse.” The baron nodded. “I had a weak spot in my heart for him. I felt compassion, sympathy for him.”

  “Compassion? Sympathy?” José Bernardo Murau repeated, rocking furiously in his chair. “For an anarchist who dreams of setting the world on fire, of wholesale bloodshed?”

  “One who’s already left a number of dead bodies in his wake, to judge from his papers,” the baron said. “Unless they’re fake, which is also possible. The poor fellow was convinced that Canudos represents universal brotherhood, a materialist paradise. He spoke of the jagunços as though they were his political comrades, fellow believers. It was impossible not to feel affection for him.”

  He noted that his friends were staring at him in greater and greater stupefaction.

  “I have his testament,” he told them. “Difficult reading, full of all sorts of nonsense, but interesting. It includes a detailed account of the plot cooked up by Epaminondas: how the latter hired him, then tried to kill him, and so on.”

  “It would have been better if he’d told his story publicly, in person,” Adalberto de Gumúcio said indignantly.

  “Nobody would have believed him,” the baron replied. “The story dreamed up by Epaminondas Gonçalves, with its secret agents and arms smugglers, is more believable than the real one. I’ll translate a few paragraphs from it for you, after dinner. It’s in English, naturally.” He paused for a few seconds as he looked over at the baroness, who had sighed in her sleep. “Do you know why he gave me that testament? So I’d send it on to some anarchist rag in Lyons. Just think, I’m no longer conspiring with the British Crown but with French terrorists fighting for world revolution.”

  He laughed as he watched his friends’ rage mounting by the second.

  “As you see, we are unable to share your good humor,” Gumúcio said.

  “I find that amusing, too, since it’s my property that’s been burned down.”

  “Never mind your bad jokes, and explain to us once and for all what you’re up to,” Murau said reprovingly.

  “It’s no longer important to do Epaminondas any harm whatsoever. He’s a boor, a country bumpkin,” the Baron de Canabrava said. “What’s important now is to reach an accommodation with the republicans. The war between us is over; circumstances have put an end to it. It’s not possible to wage two wars at the same time. The Scotsman was of no use to us, and in the long run he would only have complicated matters.”

  “An accommodation with the Progressivist Republicans, you said?” Gumúcio stared at him in stupefaction.

  “I said accommodation, but what I was thinking of was an alliance, a pact,” the baron answered. “It’s difficult to understand, and even more difficult to bring off, but there’s no other way. Well then, I think we may carry Estela to her room now.”

  [VI]

  Drenched to the skin, curled up on a blanket indistinguishable from the mud, the nearsighted correspondent from the Jornal de Notícias hears the cannons roar. Partly because of the rain and partly because battle is imminent, no one is asleep. He pricks up his ears: are the bells of Canudos still pealing in the darkness? All he can hear is the cannons firing at intervals and bugles blowing the call to charge and slit throats. Have the jagunços also given a name to the symphony of whistles with which they have tortured the Seventh Regiment ever since Monte Santo? He is overcome with anxiety, frightened, shivering from the cold. He is soaked to his very bones from the rain. He thinks of his colleague, the elderly journalist who feels the cold so badly; on being left in the rear with the half-naked soldier boys, he said to him: “There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip, my young friend.” Is he dead? Have he and those youngsters met the same fate as the fair-haired sergeant and the soldiers of his patrol whose corpses they came upon late yesterday afternoon in the foothills of this mountain range? At that very moment the bells down below answer the bugles of the regiment, a dialogue in the dark, rainy shadows that are a prelude to the one that will take place between shotguns and rifles as soon as day breaks.

  He might well have shared the fate that befell the fair-haired sergeant and his patrol: he had been about to agree when Moreira César suggested that he accompany them. Was it his fatigue that had saved him? A presentiment? Chance? That was just yesterday, but in his memory it seems a very long time ago, because all during the day just past, Canudos seemed like somewhere they would never reach. The head of the column stops and the nearsighted journalist remembers that his ears were ringing, that his legs were trembling, that his lips were chapped. The colonel is leading his horse by the reins and the officers are indistinguishable from the soldiers and the guides, for they all look the same on foot. He notes the fatigue, the dirt, the deprivation all around him. A dozen soldiers break ranks, step swiftly forward, and stand at attention before the colonel and Major Cunha Matos. The one who is to lead the patrol is the young sergeant who brought the parish priest of Cumbe in as a prisoner.

  He hears him click his heels, repeat his orders. “Take up a commanding position at Caracatá close off the ravine with cross fire once the assault has begun.” The sergeant has the same resolute, healthy, optimistic spirit that he has noted in him at all times during the march. “Have no fear, sir, no outlaw is going to escape by way of Caracatá.”

  Was the guide who lined up alongside the sergeant the same one who accompanied the patrols that went out to search for water? It was their guide at any rate who led the sergeant and his men into the ambush, and the nearsighted journalist thinks to himself that it is only by a sheer miracle that he is here, his mind in a daze. Colonel Moreira César spies him sitting on the ground, completely worn out, stiff and aching all over, with his portable writing desk on his knees. “Do you want to go with the patrol? You’ll be safer in Caracatá than you will be with us.”

  What had made him say no, after a few seconds’ hesitation? He remembers that the young sergeant and he had talked together a number of times: he had asked him questions about the Jornal de Notícias and his work; Colonel More
ira César was the person he admired most in the world—“even more than Marshal Floriano”—and like the colonel, he believed that civilian politicians were a catastrophe for the Republic, a source of corruption and divisiveness, and that only men bearing swords and uniforms were capable of regenerating the Fatherland debased by monarchical rule.