The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “People’s credulity, their hunger for fantasy, for illusion,” the baron said. “There had to be some explanation for the inconceivable fact that bands of peasants and vagabonds routed three army expeditions, that they resisted the armed forces of this country for months on end. The conspiracy had to exist: that’s why they invented it and why they believed it.”

  “You should read the dispatches my replacement sent back to the Jornal de Notícias,” the nearsighted journalist said. “The one sent up there as a correspondent when Epaminondas Gonçalves thought I was dead. A good man. Honest, with no imagination, no passionate biases, no convictions. The ideal man to provide an impassive, objective version of what happened up there.”

  “They were dying and killing on both sides,” the baron murmured, gazing at him with pity. “Are impassivity and objectivity possible in a war?”

  “In his first dispatch, the officers of General Oscar’s column come upon four fair-haired observers in well-cut suits mingled with the jagunços,” the journalist said slowly. “In the second, General Savaget’s column finds among the dead jagunços an individual with white skin, blond hair, an officer’s leather shoulder belt, and a hand-knitted cap. No one can identify his uniform, which has never been worn by any of this country’s military units.”

  “One of Her Gracious Majesty’s officers, no doubt?” The baron smiled.

  “And in the third dispatch he quotes the text of a letter, found in the pocket of a jagunço taken prisoner, which is unsigned but written in an unmistakably aristocratic hand,” the journalist went on, not even hearing his question. “Addressed to the Counselor, explaining to him why it is necessary to reestablish a conservative, God-fearing monarchy. Everything points to the fact that the person who wrote that letter was you.”

  “Were you really so naïve as to believe everything you read in the papers?” the baron asked him. “You, a journalist?”

  “And there is also the dispatch of his about signaling with lights,” the nearsighted journalist went on, without answering him. “Thanks to such signals, the jagunços were able to communicate with each other at night over great distances. The mysterious lights blinked on and off, transmitting a code so clever that army signal corps technicians were never able to decipher the messages.”

  Yes, there was no doubt about it, despite his bohemian pranks, despite the opium, the ether, the candomblés, there was something ingenuous and angelic about him. This was not strange; it was often the case with intellectuals and artists. Canudos had changed him, naturally. What had it made of him? An embittered man? A skeptic? A fanatic, perhaps? The myopic eyes stared at him intently from behind the thick lenses.

  “The important thing in these dispatches are the intimations,” the metallic, incisive, high-pitched voice said. “Not what they say but what they suggest, what’s left to the reader’s imagination. They went to Canudos to see English officers. And they saw them. I talked with my replacement for an entire afternoon. He never once lied deliberately, he just didn’t realize he was lying. The simple fact is that he didn’t write what he saw but what he felt and believed, what those all around him felt and believed. That’s how that whole tangled web of false stories and humbug got woven, becoming so intricate that there is now no way to disentangle it. How is anybody ever going to know the story of Canudos?”

  “As you yourself see, the best thing to do is forget it,” the baron said. “It isn’t worth wasting your time over it.”

  “Cynicism is no solution, either,” the nearsighted journalist said. “Moreover, I can scarcely believe that this attitude of yours, this proud disdain for what really happened, is sincere.”

  “It is indifference, not disdain,” the baron corrected him. The thought of Estela had been far from his mind for some time, but it was there again now and with it the pain, as mordant as acid, that turned him into a completely crushed, cowed being. “I’ve already told you that what happened at Canudos doesn’t matter to me in the slightest.”

  “It does matter to you, Baron,” the vibrant voice of the nearsighted journalist interjected. “For the same reason it matters to me: because Canudos changed your life. Because of Canudos your wife lost her mind, because of Canudos you lost a large part of your fortune and your power. Of course it matters to you. It’s for that reason that you haven’t thrown me out, for that reason that we’ve been talking together for so many hours now…”

  Yes, perhaps he was right. The Baron de Canabrava was suddenly aware of a bitter taste in his mouth; although he had had more than enough of the man and there was no reason to prolong the conversation, he found himself unable to dismiss him. What was keeping him from it? He finally admitted the truth to himself: it was the idea of being left all alone, alone with Estela, alone with that terrible tragedy.

  “But they didn’t merely see what didn’t exist,” the nearsighted journalist went on. “Besides that, none of them saw what was really there.”

  “Phrenologists?” the baron murmured. “Scottish anarchists?”

  “Priests,” the nearsighted journalist said. “Nobody mentions them. And there they were, spying for the jagunços or fighting shoulder to shoulder with them. Relaying information or bringing medicine, smuggling in saltpeter and sulfur to make explosives. Isn’t that surprising? Wasn’t that of any importance?”

  “Are you certain of that?” the baron said, pricking up his ears.

  “I knew one of those priests. I might even go so far as to say that we became friends,” the nearsighted journalist said, nodding his head. “Father Joaquim, the parish priest of Cumbe.”

  The baron looked closely at his caller. “That little curé who’s fathered a whole pack of kids? That toper who regularly commits all the seven capital sins was in Canudos?”

  “It’s an excellent index of the Counselor’s powers of persuasion,” the journalist asserted, nodding again. “He not only turned thieves and murderers into saints; he also catechized the corrupt and simoniacal priests of the sertão. A disquieting man, wouldn’t you say?”

  That episode from years back seemed to leap to the baron’s mind from the depths of time. He and Estela, escorted by a small band of armed capangas, had just entered Cumbe and had headed immediately for the church on hearing the bells ring summoning people to Sunday Mass. Try as he might, the notorious Father Joaquim was unable to hide the traces of what must have been a night of debauchery—guitars, cane brandy, womanizing—without a wink of sleep. The baron remembered how vexed the baroness had been on seeing the priest stumble over the liturgy and make mistakes, begin to retch violently right in the middle of Mass, and dash from the altar to go vomit outside. He could even see vividly once again in his mind’s eye the face of the curé’s concubine: wasn’t it the young woman whom people called “the water divineress” because she knew how to detect unsuspected underground wells? So that rake of a curé had also become one of the Counselor’s faithful followers, had he?

  “Yes, one of his faithful followers, and also something of a hero.” The journalist broke into one of those bursts of laughter that sounded like light stones sliding down his throat; as usually happened, this time, too, his laughter turned into a fit of sneezing.

  “He was a sinful curé but he wasn’t an idiot,” the baron reflected. “When he was sober, one could have a decent conversation with him. A man with a lively mind and one who was even fairly well read. I find it difficult to believe that he, too, would fall under the spell of a charlatan, like the unlettered people of the backlands…”

  “Culture, intelligence, books have nothing to do with the story of the Counselor,” the nearsighted journalist said. “But that’s the least of it. The surprising thing is not that Father Joaquim became a jagunço. It’s that the Counselor made a brave man of him, when before he’d been a coward.” He blinked in stupefaction. “That’s the most difficult, the most miraculous conversion of all. I can personally testify to that, for I know what fear is. And the little curé of Cumbe was a man with enough imagination
to know what it’s like to be seized with panic, to live in terror. And yet…”

  His voice grew hollow, emptied of substance, and the expression on his face became a grimace. What had happened to him all of a sudden? The baron saw that his caller was doing his utmost to calm down, to break through something that was holding him back. He tried to help him go on. “And yet…?” he said encouragingly.

  “And yet he spent months, years perhaps, going all about the villages, the haciendas, the mines, buying gunpowder, dynamite, fuses. Making up elaborate lies to justify these purchases that must have attracted a great deal of attention. And when the sertão began to swarm with soldiers, do you know how he risked his neck? By hiding powder kegs in his coffer containing the sacred objects of worship, the tabernacle, the ciborium with the consecrated Hosts, the crucifix, the chasuble, the vestments that he carried about to say Mass. And smuggling them into Canudos right under the noses of the National Guard, of the army. Can you have any idea of what that means when you’re a coward, trembling from head to foot, bathed in cold sweat? Can you have any idea of how strong a conviction that takes?”

  “The catechism is full of stories like that, my friend,” the baron murmured. “Martyrs pierced with arrows, devoured by lions, crucified…But, I grant you, it is difficult for me to imagine Father Joaquim doing things like that for the Counselor.”

  “It requires total conviction,” the journalist repeated. “Profound, complete certainty, a faith that doubtless you have never felt. Nor I…”

  He shook his head once more like a restless hen and hoisted himself into the armchair with his long, bony arms. He played with his hands for a few seconds, focusing all his attention on them, and then went on. “The Church has formally condemned the Counselor as a heretic, a believer in superstition, a disseminator of unrest, and a disturber of the conscience of the faithful. The Archbishop of Bahia has forbidden parish priests to allow him to preach in their pulpits. If one is a priest, it takes absolute faith in the Counselor to disobey the Church and one’s own archbishop and run the risk of being condemned for helping him.”

  “What is it you find so distressing?” the baron asked. “The suspicion that the Counselor was really another Christ, come for the second time to redeem men?”

  He said this without thinking, and the minute the words were out of his mouth he felt uncomfortable. Had he been trying to make a joke? Neither he nor the nearsighted journalist smiled, however. He saw the latter shake his head, which might have been a reply in the negative or a gesture to chase a fly away.

  “I’ve thought about that, too,” the nearsighted journalist said. “If it was God, if God sent him, if God existed…I don’t know. In any event, this time there were no disciples left to spread the myth and bring the good news to the pagans. There was only one left, as far as I know; I doubt that that’s sufficient…”

  He burst out laughing again and the ensuing sneezes occupied him for some time. When he had finished, his nose and eyes were badly irritated.

  “But more than of his possible divinity, I thought of the spirit of solidarity, of fraternity, of the unbreakable bond that he was able to forge among those people,” the nearsighted journalist said in a pathetic tone of voice. “Amazing. Moving. After July 18, the only trails left open were the ones to Chorrochó and Riacho Seco. What would have been the logical thing to do? For people to try to get away, to escape along those trails, isn’t that true? But exactly the opposite happened. People tried to come to Canudos, they kept flocking in from all over, in a desperate hurry to get inside the rat trap, the hell, before the soldiers completely encircled Canudos. Do you see? Nothing was normal there…”

  “You spoke of priests in the plural,” the baron interrupted him. This subject, the jagunços’ solidarity and their collective will to sacrifice themselves, was disturbing to him. It had turned up several times in the conversation, and each time he had skirted it, as he did again now.

  “I didn’t know the other ones,” the journalist replied, as though he, too, were relieved at having been obliged to change the subject. “But they existed. Father Joaquim received information and help from them. And at the end they, too, may very well have been there, scattered about, lost among the multitudes of jagunços. Someone told me of a certain Father Martinez. Do you know who it was? Someone you knew, a long time ago, many years ago. The filicide of Salvador—does that mean anything to you?”

  “The filicide of Salvador?” the baron said.

  “I was present at her trial, when I was still in short pants. My father was a public defender, a lawyer for the poor, and it was he who was her defense attorney. I recognized her even though I couldn’t see her, even though twenty or twenty-five years had gone by. You read the papers in those days, didn’t you? The entire Northeast was passionately interested in the case of Maria Quadrado, the filicide of Salvador. The Emperor commuted her death sentence to life imprisonment. Don’t you remember her? She, too, was in Canudos. Do you see how the whole thing is a story that never ends?”

  “I already knew that,” the baron said. “All those who had accounts to settle with the law, with their conscience, with God, found a refuge thanks to Canudos. It was only natural.”

  “That they should take refuge there, yes, I grant you that, but not that they should become different people altogether.” As though he didn’t know what to do with his body, the journalist flexed his long legs and slid back down onto the floor. “She was the saint, the Mother of Men, the Superior of the devout women who cared for the Counselor’s needs. People attributed miracles to her, and she was said to have wandered everywhere with him.”

  The story gradually came back to the baron. A celebrated case, the subject of endless gossip. She was the maidservant of a notary and had suffocated her newborn baby to death by stuffing a ball of yarn in his mouth, because he cried a great deal and she was afraid that she would be thrown out in the street without a job on account of him. She kept the dead body underneath her bed for several days, till the mistress of the house discovered it because of the stench. The young woman confessed everything immediately. Throughout the trial, her manner was meek and gentle, and she answered all the questions asked her willingly and truthfully. The baron remembered the heated controversy that had arisen regarding the personality of the filicide, with one side arguing that she was “catatonic and therefore not responsible” and the other maintaining that she was possessed of a “perverse instinct.” Had she escaped from prison, then?

  The journalist had changed the subject once more. “Before July 18 a great many things had been hideous, but in all truth it was not until that day that I touched and smelled and swallowed the horror till I could feel it in my guts.” The baron saw the journalist pound his fist on his stomach. “I met her that day, I talked with her, and found out that she was the filicide that I had dreamed about so many times as a child. She helped me, for at that point I had been left all alone.”

  “On July 18 I was in London,” the baron said. “I’m not acquainted with all the details of the war. What happened that day?”

  “They’re going to attack tomorrow,” Abbot João said, panting for breath because he’d come on the run. Then he remembered something important: “Praised be the Blessed Jesus.”

  The soldiers had been on the mountainsides of A Favela going on a month, and the war was dragging on and on: scattered rifle shots and cannon fire, generally at the hours when the bells rang. At dawn, noon, and dusk, people walked about only in certain places. Men gradually grow accustomed to almost anything, and establish routines to deal with it, is that not true? People died every day and every night there were burials. The blind bombardments destroyed countless houses, ripped open the bellies of oldsters and of toddlers, that is to say, the ones who didn’t go down into the trenches. It seemed as though everything would go on like that indefinitely. No, it was going to get even worse, the Street Commander had just told them. The nearsighted journalist was all alone, for Jurema and the Dwarf had gone off
to take food to Pajeú, when the war leaders—Honório Vilanova, Big João, Pedrão, Pajeú himself—met in the store. They were worried; you could smell it; the atmosphere in the place was tense. And yet no one was surprised when Abbot João announced that the dogs were going to attack the next day. He knew everything. They were going to shell Canudos all night long, to soften up its defenses, and at 5 a.m. the assault would begin. He knew exactly which places they would charge. The jagunço leaders were talking quietly, deciding the best posts for each of them to take, you wait for them here, the street has to be blockaded there: we’ll raise barriers here, I’d better move from over there in case they send dogs this way. Could the baron imagine what he felt like, hearing that? At that point the matter of the paper came up. What paper? One that one of Pajeú’s “youngsters” had brought, running as fast as his legs could carry him. They all put their heads together and then asked him if he could read it. He did his best, peering through his monocle of shards, in the light of a candle, to decipher what it said. But he was unable to. Then Abbot João sent someone to fetch the Lion of Natuba.

  “Didn’t any of the Counselor’s lieutenants know how to read?” the baron asked.

  “Antônio Vilanova did, but he wasn’t in Canudos just then,” the journalist answered. “And the person they sent for also knew how to read. The Lion of Natuba. Another intimate, another apostle of the Counselor’s. He could read and write; he was Canudos’s man of learning.”

  He fell silent, interrupted by a great gust of sneezes that made him double over, clutching his stomach.

  “I was unable to see in detail what he looked like,” he said afterward, gasping for breath. “Just the vague outline, the shape of him, or, rather, the lack of shape. But that was enough for me to get a rough idea of the rest. He walked about on all fours, and had an enormous head and a hump on his back. Someone went to fetch him and he came with Maria Quadrado. He read them the paper. It was the instructions from the High Command for the assault at dawn.”