The steep, nearly vertical face of the mountain suddenly looms up before them. João wonders if old Macambira will be able to scale it. Pajeú points to the line of dead sharpshooters, clearly visible in the moonlight. There are many of them; they were the vanguard and they all fell at the same height on the mountainside, mowed down by the jagunços’ fusillade. Big João can see the studs on their chest belts, the gilt emblems on their caps gleaming in the half light. Pajeú takes his leave of the others with an almost imperceptible nod and the two “youngsters” begin to clamber up the slope on all fours. Big João and Joaquim Macambira follow after them, also on all fours, and after them the Catholic Guards. They climb so cautiously that even João can’t hear them. What little noise they make, the clatter of the pebbles they send rolling down the mountainside, seems to be the work of the wind. At his back, down below, he can hear a constant murmur rising from Belo Monte. Are they reciting the Rosary in the church square? Is it the hymns that Canudos sings as it buries the day’s dead each night? He can now see figures, lights, and hear voices up ahead of him, and tenses all his muscles, ready for whatever may happen.
The “youngsters” signal to them to halt. They are near a sentry post; four soldiers standing, and behind them many soldiers silhouetted against the glow of a campfire. Old Macambira crawls over to him and Big João hears his labored breathing and the words: “When you hear the whistle, fire away.” He nods. “May the Blessed Jesus be with you all, Dom Joaquim.” He sees the shadows swallow up the twelve Macambiras, bent under the crushing weight of their hammers, crowbars, and axes, and the “youngster” who is guiding them. The other “youngster” stays behind with Big João and his men.
His every nerve taut, he waits there among them for the whistle signaling that the Macambiras have reached A Matadeira. It is a long time coming, so long that it seems to Big João that he is never going to hear it. When—a sudden long wail—it drowns out all the other sounds, he and his men all fire at once at the sentries. An earsplitting fusillade begins all round him. Chaos ensues, and the soldiers put out their campfire. They shoot back from above, but they have not spotted them, for the shots are not aimed in their direction.
Big João orders his men to advance, and a moment later they are shooting and setting off petards in the dark against the camp, where they hear feet running, voices, confused orders. Once he has emptied his rifle, João crouches down and listens. There also seems to be shooting up above, in the direction of Monte Mário. Are the Macambiras having a skirmish with the artillerymen? In any event, it’s no use going up there; his men, too, have used up all their ammunition. With his whistle, he gives the order to withdraw.
Halfway down the mountainside, a slight little figure catches up with them, running hard. Big João puts his hand on the long, tangled locks.
“Did you take them to A Matadeira?” he asks the boy.
“Yes, I did,” he answers.
There is loud rifle fire behind them, as though the war was raging all over A Favela. The boy says no more and Big João thinks, yet again, of the strange habits of sertanejos, who would rather keep still than talk.
“And what happened to the Macambiras?” he finally asks.
“They were killed,” the boy says softly.
“All of them?”
“I think so.”
They have already reached no-man’s-land, halfway back to the trenches.
The Dwarf found the nearsighted man hunched over in a fold in the terrain of Cocorobó weeping as Pedrão’s men were withdrawing. He took him by the hand and guided him along among the jagunços hurrying back to Belo Monte as fast as they could, convinced that the soldiers of the second column, once they had broken through the Trabubu barrier, would attack the city. The following morning, as they were going along a trench in front of the goat pens, they came upon Jurema in the midst of a great throng: she was walking along between the Sardelinha sisters, prodding an ass loaded with panniers. Filled with emotion, the three of them embraced each other, and the Dwarf felt the touch of Jurema’s lips on his cheek. That night, as they lay on the floor of the store behind the barrels and boxes, listening to the gunfire raking Canudos without letup, the Dwarf told them that, as far as he could recall, that kiss was the very first one anyone had ever given him.
How many days was it that the cannons roared, rifles cracked, grenades exploded, blackening the air and chipping the towers of the Temple? Three, four, five? They wandered around the store, saw the Vilanova brothers and the others come in by day and by night, heard them talking together and giving orders, and didn’t have the least idea what was going on. One afternoon, as the Dwarf was filling little pouches and horns with gunpowder for the blunderbusses and flintlock muskets, he heard one of the jagunços say, pointing to the explosives: “I hope your walls are solid, Antônio Vilanova. Just one bullet could set all this off and blow the whole neighborhood to bits.” The Dwarf did not pass that on to his companions. Why make the nearsighted man more terrified than he already was? The things they had lived through together up here had made him feel an affection for the two of them that he had never felt even for the circus people with whom he got along best.
During the bombardment he went out twice, in search of food. Hugging the walls, like everyone else out in the streets, he went begging from door to door, blinded by the dust in the air, deafened by the gunfire. On the Rua da Madre Igreja he saw a child die. The little boy had come chasing after a hen that was running down the street flapping its wings, and after just a few steps his eyes opened wide and his feet suddenly left the ground, as though he had been yanked up by the hair. The bullet hit him in the belly, killing him instantly. He carried the dead body into the house that he had seen the boy run out of, and since there was no one there he left it in the hammock. He was unable to catch the hen. The morale of the three of them, despite the uncertainty and the death toll, improved once they had food again, thanks to the animals that Abbot João had brought back to Belo Monte.
Night had fallen, there was a letup in the barrage, the sound of prayers in the church square had died away, and they were lying awake on the floor of the store, talking together. All of a sudden, a silent figure appeared in the doorway, with a little clay lamp in its hands. The Dwarf recognized by the scar and the steely eyes that it was Pajeú. He had a shotgun over his shoulder, a machete and a dagger in his belt, and two cartridge belts across his shirt.
“With all due respect,” he murmured, “I would like you to be my wife.”
The Dwarf heard the nearsighted man moan. It struck him as an extraordinary thing for that man—so reserved, so gloomy, so glacial—to have said. He sensed a great anxiety behind that face pulled taut by the scar. No shooting, barking of dogs, reciting of litanies could be heard, only the buzzing of a bumblebee bumping against the wall. The Dwarf’s heart was pounding; it was not fear but a feeling of warmth and compassion toward that man with the disfigured face who was staring intently at Jurema by the light of the little lamp, waiting. He could hear the nearsighted man’s anxious breathing. Jurema did not say a word. Pajeú began to speak again, uttering each word slowly and distinctly. He had not been married before, not in the way the Church, the Father, the Counselor demanded. His eyes never left Jurema, they didn’t even blink, and the Dwarf thought that it was stupid of him to feel pity for a man so greatly feared. But at that moment Pajeú seemed like a terribly lonely man. He had had passing love affairs, of the sort that leave no trace, but no family, no children. His way of life had not permitted such a thing: always moving about, fleeing, fighting. Hence he understood the Counselor very well when he explained that the weary earth, exhausted from being made to bring forth the same thing again and again, one day asks to rest in peace. That was what Belo Monte had been for Pajeú, something like the earth’s repose. His life had been empty of love. But now…The Dwarf noticed that he was swallowing hard and the thought crossed his mind that the Sardelinha sisters had awakened and were lying in the dark listening to Pajeú. It was
a worry of his, something that woke him up in the night: had his heart hardened forever for lack of love? He stammered and the Dwarf thought: “Neither the blind man nor I exist for him.” No, it had not hardened: he had seen Jurema in the caatinga and suddenly realized that. Something strange happened to his scar: it was the flame of the little lamp, which as it flickered made his face look even more disfigured. “His hand is trembling,” the Dwarf thought in amazement. That day his heart, his feelings, his soul began to speak. Thanks to Jurema he had discovered that he was not hard inside. Her face, her body, her voice were always present here and here. With a brusque gesture, he touched his head and his breast, and the little flame went up and down. Again he fell silent, waiting, and the bee could again be heard buzzing and thudding against the wall. Jurema still said nothing. The Dwarf looked at her out of the corner of his eye: sitting there all hunched up as though to protect herself, she was gravely meeting the caboclo’s gaze.
“We can’t get married right now. Right now I have another obligation,” Pajeú added, as though in apology. “When the dogs have gone away.”
The Dwarf heard the nearsighted man moan. This time, too, the caboclo’s eyes never left Jurema to look at her neighbor. But there was one thing…Something he’d thought a lot about, these days, as he tracked the atheists and shot them down. Something that would gladden his heart. He fell silent, was overcome with embarrassment, struggled to get the words out: would Jurema bring food, water, to him at Fazenda Velha? It was something he envied the others for, something that he, too, would like to have. Would she do that?
“Yes, yes, she’ll do it, she’ll bring them to you,” the Dwarf, to his stupefaction, heard the nearsighted man say. “She’ll do it, she’ll do it.”
But even this time the caboclo’s eyes did not turn his way. “What is he to you?” the Dwarf heard him ask Jurema, his voice as cutting as a knife now. “He’s not your husband, is he?”
“No,” she answered very softly. “He’s…like my son.”
The night rang with shots. First one volley, then another, extremely heavy fire. They heard shouts, feet running, an explosion.
“I’m happy to have come, to have talked to you,” the caboclo said. “I must go now. Praised be the Blessed Jesus.”
A moment later the store was plunged into total darkness again and instead of the bumblebee they heard scattered shots, far off, then closer. The Vilanova brothers were in the trenches and appeared only for the meetings with Abbot João; the Sardelinha sisters spent most of the day working in the Health Houses and taking food to the combatants. The Dwarf, Jurema, and the nearsighted man were the only ones who stayed in the store all the time. It was again full of ammunition and explosives from the convoy that Abbot João had brought in, and sandbags and stones were piled against the façade to protect it.
“Why didn’t you answer him?” the Dwarf heard the blind man say in an agitated voice. “He was terribly nervous, and was forcing himself to tell you all those things. Why didn’t you answer him? In the state he was in, his love might have turned to hatred, he might have beaten you, killed you, and us, too—didn’t you see that?”
He suddenly fell silent so as to sneeze, once, twice, ten times. By the time his sneezing fit had ended, the shooting had ended, too, and the nocturnal bumblebee was hovering round above their heads.
“I don’t want to be Pajeú’s wife,” Jurema said, as though it were not the two of them she was speaking to. “If he forces me to be, I’ll kill myself. The way a woman at Calumbi killed herself, with a xiquexique thorn. I’ll never be his wife.”
The nearsighted man had another sneezing fit, and the Dwarf felt panic-stricken: if Jurema died, what would become of him?
“We should have made our escape while we still had a chance to,” he heard the blind man moan. “We’ll never get out of here now. We’ll die a horrible death.”
“Pajeú said the soldiers would go away,” the Dwarf said softly. “From his tone of voice, he was convinced of that. He knows what he’s talking about, he’s fighting, he can see how the war is going.”
At other times in the past, the blind man argued with him: had he gone mad like all these poor deluded dreamers, did he, too, imagine that they could win a war against the Brazilian Army? Did he believe, as they did, that King Dom Sebastião would appear to fight on their side? But he said nothing now. The Dwarf was not as certain as the nearsighted man was that the soldiers were invincible. Hadn’t they been able to enter Canudos? Hadn’t Abbot João managed to steal their arms and their cattle? People said that they were dying like flies on A Favela, being shot at from all directions, without food, and using up the last of their ammunition.
Nonetheless, the Dwarf, whose nomad existence in the past made it impossible for him to stay cooped up and drove him out of doors despite the shooting, could see, in the days that followed, that Canudos did not have the air of a victorious city. He frequently came across someone lying dead or wounded in the streets; if there was heavy gunfire, hours would go by before they could be brought to the clinics, which were all located on Santa Inês now, near the Mocambo. Except for the times when he helped the medical aides transport them to these new Health Houses, the Dwarf avoided that section of town, for during the day the dead bodies piled up along Santa Inês—they could only be buried at night because the cemetery was in the line of fire—and the stench was overpowering, not to mention the moans and groans of the wounded in the Health Houses and the sad spectacle of the little old men, the disabled and infirm unfit for combat who had been assigned the task of keeping off the black vultures and the dogs from devouring the corpses swarming with flies. The burials took place after the Rosary and the counsels, which were held regularly each evening at the same hour once the bell of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus had called the faithful together. But they took place in the dark now, without the sputtering candles of the time before the war. Jurema and the nearsighted man always went with him to the counsels. But unlike the Dwarf, who then went out with the funeral processions to the cemetery, the two of them returned to the store once the Counselor had delivered his last words of the evening. The Dwarf was fascinated by these burials, by the curious concern of the families of the dead that their loved one be buried with some bit of wood above the mortal remains. Since there was no longer anyone available to make coffins because everyone’s time was taken up by the war, the bodies were buried in hammocks, sometimes two or three in a single one. The relatives placed a little end of board, a tree branch, any and every sort of wooden object in the hammock to show the Father their sincere desire to give their departed a proper burial, in a coffin, though the adverse circumstances of the moment prevented them from doing so.
On his return to the store from one of his trips outside, the Dwarf found Jurema and the blind man talking with Father Joaquim. Since their arrival, months before, they had never once been alone with him. They would often see him standing at the Counselor’s right in the tower of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus reciting Mass, leading the multitude in reciting the Rosary in the church square, in processions, surrounded by a ring of Catholic Guards, and at graveside services, chanting the prayers for the dead in Latin. They had heard that his disappearance meant that he was off on travels that took him all over the backlands, doing errands for the jagunços and bringing them the things they needed. After war broke out again, he could often be seen in the streets of Canudos, in the Santa Inês quarter in particular, on his way to confess and give the last sacraments to those on their deathbeds in the Health Houses. Although he had run into him several times, the Dwarf had never had a conversation with him; but on seeing the Dwarf come into the store, the little priest had held out his hand and spoken a few kindly words to him. The curé was now perched on a milking stool, and sitting cross-legged in front of him were Jurema and the nearsighted man.
“Nothing is easy, not even what seems to be the easiest thing in the world,” Father Joaquim said to Jurema, in a discouraged tone of voice, clucking his
cracked lips. “I thought I’d be bringing you great joy. That this time I would be received in people’s houses as a bearer of glad tidings.” He paused and wet his lips with his tongue. “And all I do is visit houses with the holy oils, close the eyes of the dead, watch people suffer.”
The Dwarf thought to himself that the curé had aged a great deal in the last few months and was now a little old man. He had almost no hair left and his tanned, freckled scalp now showed through the tufts of white fuzz above his ears. He was terribly thin; the neck opening of his frayed cassock faded to a dark blue bared his protruding collarbones; the skin of his face hung down in yellow folds covered with a milky-white stubble of beard. His eyes betrayed not only hunger and old age but also immense fatigue.
“I won’t marry him, Father,” Jurema said. “If he forces me to, I’ll kill myself.”
She spoke in a calm voice, with the same quiet determination as on that night when she had talked with them, and the Dwarf realized that the curé of Cumbe must have already heard her say the same thing, for he did not look surprised.
“He’s not trying to force you,” he mumbled. “It’s never once entered his mind that you would refuse him. Like everyone else, he knows that any woman in Canudos would be happy to have been chosen by Pajeú to form a home and family. You know who Pajeú is, don’t you, my girl? You’ve surely heard the stories people tell about him?”
He sat there staring down at the dirt floor with a regretful look on his face. A little centipede crawled between his sandals, through which his thin yellowish toes, with long black nails, peeked out. Instead of stepping on it, he allowed it to wander off and disappear among the rows of rifles lined up one next to the other.
The War of the End of the World Page 64
