The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  But late that afternoon General Oscar receives a surprising piece of news: a family of jagunços, numbering fourteen people, voluntarily surrenders at the camp on A Favela. This is the first time since the beginning of the campaign that such a thing has happened. The news raises his spirits tremendously. Despair and privation must be undermining the cannibals’ morale. He himself interrogates these jagunços at the camp on A Favela. The family consists of three decrepit elders, an adult couple, and rachitic children with swollen bellies. They are from Ipueiras and according to them—their teeth chatter with fear as they answer his questions—they have been in Canudos only a month and a half; they took refuge there not out of devotion to the Counselor but out of panic on learning that a huge army was heading their way. They have made their escape from Canudos by leading the bandits to believe that they were going out to help dig trenches at the Cocorobó exit, which they in fact did do until evening, when, taking advantage of a moment when Pedrão wasn’t watching, they slipped away. It has taken them a day to make their roundabout way to A Favela. They tell General Oscar everything they know about the situation in the bandits’ lair and offer a somber picture of what is happening there, even worse than he had supposed—near-starvation, dead and wounded lying everywhere, widespread panic—and assure him that people would surrender if it weren’t for cangaceiros like Big João, Abbot João, Pajeú, and Pedrão, who have sworn to kill every last relative of anyone who deserts. The general nonetheless takes what they tell him with a grain of salt: they are so obviously frightened nearly to death that they would come up with any sort of lie to gain his sympathy. He gives orders for them to be shut up in the cattle pen. The lives of all those who, following this family’s example, voluntarily give themselves up are to be spared. His officers are as optimistic as he is: some of them predict that the enemy redoubt will collapse from within before the army reinforcements arrive.

  But the following day the troops suffer a cruel reverse. A hundred and fifty head of cattle coming from Monte Santo fall into the hands of the jagunços in the most stupid way imaginable. Being overly cautious, in order to keep from falling into the trap of guides who have been conscripted into the army against their will in the sertão and who almost always prove to be on the side of the enemy when the troops are ambushed, the company of lancers herding the cattle along have relied solely on the maps drawn up by the army engineers. Luck has not been with them. Instead of taking the road via Rosário and As Umburanas, which leads to A Favela, they have veered off down the trail via O Cambaio and O Taboleirinho and suddenly landed up in the middle of the jagunços’ trenches. The lancers fight valiantly, keeping themselves from being wiped out, but they lose all the cattle, which the fanatics hasten to drive to Canudos with a heavy whip hand. From A Favela, General Oscar sees a surprising spectacle through his field glasses: the dust and the din raised by the little band of rustlers as they dash into Canudos amid the loud rejoicing of the degenerates. In an excess of fury that is not at all like him, he publicly dresses down the officers of the company that lost the cattle. This humiliating disaster will be a black mark on their service records! To punish the jagunços for the stroke of good luck that has brought them a hundred fifty head of cattle, the gunfire today is twice as heavy.

  As the problem of provisions takes on critical proportions, General Oscar and his staff send out the gaucho lancers—who have never belied their fame as great cowboys—and the Twenty-seventh Infantry Battalion to get food “wherever and however you can,” for hunger is both sapping the troops’ strength and undermining their morale. The lancers return at nightfall with twenty head of cattle, and the general forbears to ask them where they got them; they are immediately butchered and the meat is distributed among the men at A Favela and in the “black line.” The general and his adjutants order steps to be taken to improve communications between the two camps and the front. Safe routes are laid out with sentry posts all along them and the barricade is further reinforced. With his customary energy, the general also prepares to evacuate the wounded. Stretchers and crutches are made, the ambulance wagons are repaired, and a list of those who are to be evacuated is drawn up.

  He sleeps that night in his hut on A Favela. The following morning, as he is taking his breakfast coffee and cornmeal biscuits, he realizes that it is raining. Dumfounded, he observes the miracle. It is a torrential rain, accompanied by a howling wind that drives the swirling downpour of muddy water this way and that. When he goes out with heartfelt rejoicing to get himself soaked to the skin, he sees that the entire camp is out splashing about in the rain and the mud, in wild excitement. It is the first rain in many months, a real blessing after these weeks of infernal heat and thirst. All the corps are storing the precious liquid in every container they can lay their hands on. He tries to see through his field glasses what is happening in Canudos, but there is a heavy fog and he is unable to make out even the towers. The downpour doesn’t last long; a few minutes later a dust-filled wind is blowing once more. He has thought many times that, when this is all over, he will always have an indelible memory of these continuous, depressing winds that constrict one’s temples. As he removes his boots so that his orderly can scrape the mud off them, he compares the dreariness of this landscape, without a bit of green, without a single flowering bush or shrub, with the luxuriant vegetation that surrounded him in O Piauí.

  “Who would ever have thought that I’d miss my garden?” he confesses to Lieutenant Pinto Souza, who is drawing up the order of the day. “I never understood my wife’s passion for flowers. She would cut them back and water them all day long. It struck me as a form of sickness to be that fond of a garden. But now, in the face of this desolation, I understand.”

  All the rest of the morning, as he hears reports from various subordinates and assigns them their duties, his mind is constantly on the blinding, suffocating dust. It is impossible to escape this torture even inside the barracks. “When you don’t eat dust with your barbecued meat, you eat your barbecued meat with dust. And always seasoned with flies,” he thinks.

  A fusillade at dusk rouses him from his philosophical reverie. A band of jagunços—popping up out of the ground as though they had tunneled under the “black line”—suddenly rushes a crossarm of the barricade, intending to cut it off. The attack takes the soldiers by surprise and they abandon their position, but an hour later the jagunços are driven out, with heavy losses. General Oscar and the officers conclude that the object of this attack was to protect the trenches at Fazenda Velha. All the officers therefore propose that they be occupied, by any possible means: this will hasten the surrender of this jagunço redoubt. General Oscar has three machine guns brought down from A Favela to the “black line.”

  That day the gaucho lancers return to camp with thirty head of cattle. The troops have a great feast, which puts everyone in a better humor. General Oscar inspects the two field hospitals, where final preparations are being made to evacuate the sick and wounded. In order to avoid long, heartrending farewell scenes, he has decided not to announce the names of those who will be making the journey till the very last moment, just as they are about to depart.

  That afternoon, the artillerymen show him, in jubilation, four boxes full of shells for the Krupp 7.5s that a patrol has found along the road from As Umburanas. The projectiles are in perfect condition, and General Oscar authorizes what First Lieutenant Macedo Soares, the officer in charge of the cannons at A Favela, calls a “fireworks display.” Sitting right next to the cannon, with his ears stopped up with cotton, like the servers of the pieces, the general witnesses the firing of sixty shells, all of them aimed at the heart of the traitors’ resistance. Amid the great cloud of dust that the explosions raise, he anxiously observes the tall, massive towers that he knows are swarming with fanatics. Though they are chipped and full of gaping holes, they have not given way. How can the bell tower of the Church of Santo Antônio, which looks like a sieve and is leaning worse than the famous Tower of Pisa, still be standing? All
during the bombardment, he eagerly hopes to see that tower reduced to ruins. God ought to grant him this favor, so as to help raise his spirits a bit. But the tower does not fall.

  The next morning, he is up at dawn to see the wounded off. Sixty officers and four hundred eighty men are going back to Monte Santo, all those the doctors believe strong enough to survive the journey. Among them is the commander of the second column, General Savaget, whose wound in the abdomen has kept him out of action ever since his arrival at A Favela. General Oscar is happy to see him leave, for though their relations are cordial, he feels uncomfortable in the presence of this general without whose aid, he is certain, the first column would have been wiped out. The fact that the bandits were capable of luring him into this sort of abattoir through the use of extremely clever tactics has left General Oscar still convinced, despite the lack of any further proof, that the jagunços may have monarchist officers, or even English ones, advising them. This possibility is no longer mentioned, however, at staff meetings.

  The farewell between the wounded who are leaving and those who are remaining behind is not a heartrending scene, with tears and protests, as he had feared, but a sober, solemn one. Those departing and those staying embrace each other in silence, exchange messages, and the ones who are weeping try to hide their tears. He had planned to give those leaving enough rations for four days, but the lack of supplies forces him to reduce this to one day’s rations. The battalion of gaucho lancers, who will scour up food for the wounded on the journey, leaves with them. They are also escorted by the Thirty-third Infantry Battalion. As he sees them move slowly off in the early dawn light, miserable, half starved, their uniforms in tatters, many of them barefoot, he tells himself that when they arrive in Monte Santo—those who do not succumb along the way—they will be in an even worse state than they are now: perhaps his superiors will then understand how critical the situation is and send the reinforcements.

  The departure of the expedition leaves behind an atmosphere of gloom and sadness among the men on A Favela and in the “black line.” The morale of the troops has deteriorated because of the lack of food. The men are now eating the snakes and dogs they catch and are even toasting ants and swallowing them down to appease their hunger.

  The war is now a matter of a few scattered shots from one side or the other of the two barricades. The combatants limit themselves to spying on each other from their respective positions; when they glimpse a profile, a head, an arm, there is a sudden burst of fire that lasts only a few seconds. Then silence sets in once again; it, too, brings on a numbing, hypnotic torpor, disturbed only by random shots from the towers and the Sanctuary, aimed at no precise target, but rather in the general direction of the dwelling in ruins occupied by the soldiers: the bullets pierce the thin walls of wooden pickets and mud and often wound or kill soldiers inside who are sleeping or dressing.

  That evening, in the Pyrotechnist’s shack, General Oscar plays cards with Lieutenant Pinto Souza, Colonel Neri (who is recovering from his wound), and two captains on his staff. They play on crates, by the light of an oil lamp. Suddenly they find themselves in the midst of a lively argument about Antônio Conselheiro and the bandits. One of the captains, who is from Rio, maintains that the explanation for Canudos is mixed blood, the mingling of Negro, Indian, and Portuguese stock that has slowly caused the race to degenerate to the point that it has now produced an inferior mentality, given to superstition and fanaticism. This view is vehemently countered by Colonel Neri. Haven’t there been racial mixtures in other parts of Brazil which have produced no similar phenomena in those regions? Like Colonel Moreira César, whom he admires and practically idolizes, he is persuaded that Canudos is the work of the enemies of the Republic, the monarchists out to restore the Empire, the former rich slaveowners and the privileged elite who have incited these poor uneducated wretches to rebel and confused them by instilling in them a hatred of progress. “The explanation of Canudos does not lie in race but in ignorance,” he declares.

  General Oscar, who has followed this exchange with interest, is still perplexed and hesitates when they ask him his opinion. Yes, he finally says, ignorance allows aristocrats to turn these miserable wretches into fanatics and spur them on to attack what threatens the interests of the rich and powerful, for the Republic guarantees the equality of all men, thereby doing away with the privileges that are a right by birth under an aristocratic regime. But inwardly he is not at all convinced of what he is saying. When the others leave, he lies in his hammock thinking. What is the explanation of Canudos? Hereditary defects of people of mixed blood? Lack of education? A predisposition toward barbarism on the part of men who are accustomed to violence and who resist civilization out of atavism? Something to do with religion, with God? He finds none of these explanations satisfactory.

  The next day, as he is shaving, without soap or a mirror, with a barber’s razor that he himself sharpens on a whetstone, he hears galloping hoofbeats. He has given orders that all movements back and forth between A Favela and the “black line” are to be made on foot, since men on horseback are too easy a target for the sharpshooters in the towers, and he therefore goes out to reprehend the disobedient riders. He hears cheers and hurrahs. The newcomers, three cavalrymen, cross the open terrain unharmed. The first lieutenant who dismounts at his side and clicks his heels identifies himself as the officer in charge of the platoon of advance scouts from General Girard’s brigade of reinforcements, the vanguard of which will be arriving within the next two hours. The lieutenant adds that the four thousand five hundred soldiers and officers of General Girard’s twelve battalions are impatient to place themselves at his command in order to annihilate the enemies of the Republic. At last, at long last, the nightmare of Canudos is about to end for him and for Brazil.

  [V]

  “Jurema?” the baron said in surprise. “Jurema from Calumbi?”

  “It happened during the terrible month of August,” the nearsighted journalist said, looking away. “In July, the jagunços had stopped the soldiers, right there inside the city. But in August the Girard Brigade arrived. Five thousand more men, twelve more battalions, thousands of additional weapons, dozens of additional cannons. And food in abundance. What hope was there for the jagunços then?”

  But the baron didn’t hear him.

  “Jurema?” he said again. He could see the visitor’s glee, the delight he took in avoiding answering him. And he also noted that his joy, his happiness was due to the fact that he had mentioned her name, thereby attracting the baron’s interest, so that now the baron would be the one who would oblige his visitor to speak of her. “The wife of Rufino, the guide from Queimadas?”

  The nearsighted journalist didn’t answer him this time either. “In August, moreover, the Minister of War, Marshal Carlos Machado Bittencourt, came in person from Rio to put an end to the campaign,” he went on, amused at the baron’s impatience. “We didn’t know that in Canudos. That Marshal Bittencourt had installed himself in Monte Santo, organizing the transport, the provisioning, the hospitals. We didn’t know that army volunteer doctors, volunteer medical aides, were pouring into Queimadas and Monte Santo. That it was the marshal himself who had sent the Girard Brigade. All that, in August. It was as though the heavens had opened to send a cataclysm down on Canudos.”

  “And in the middle of this cataclysm you were happy,” the baron murmured, for those were the words his nearsighted visitor had used. “Is that the Jurema you mean?”

  “Yes.” The baron noted that his visitor was making no secret of his happiness now; his voice was filled with it, and it was making his words come pouring out. “It’s only right that you should remember her. Because she often remembers you and your wife. With admiration, with affection.”

  So it was the same one, that slender, olive-skinned girl who had grown up in Calumbi, in Estela’s service, whom the two of them had married to the honest, persevering worker that Rufino had been at that time. He couldn’t get over it. That little half-tamed
creature, that simple country girl who could only have changed for the worse since leaving Estela’s service, had also played a role in the destiny of the man before him. Because the journalist’s literal words, inconceivably enough, had been: “But, in fact, it was when the world began to fall apart and the horror had reached its height that, incredible as it may seem, I began to be happy.” Once again the baron was overcome by the feeling that it was all unreal, a dream, a fiction, which always took possession of him at the very thought of Canudos. All these happenstances, coincidences, fortuitous encounters, made him feel as though he were on tenterhooks. Did the journalist know that Galileo Gall had raped Jurema? He didn’t ask him, staggered as he was at the thought of the strange geography of chance, the secret order, the unfathomable law of the history of peoples and individuals that capriciously brought them together, separated them, made them enemies or allies. And he told himself that it was impossible for that poor little creature of the backlands of Bahia even to suspect that she had been the instrument of so many upheavals in the lives of such dissimilar people: Rufino, Galileo Gall, this scarecrow who was now smiling blissfully at the memory of her. The baron felt a desire to see Jurema again; perhaps it would do the baroness good to see this girl toward whom she had shown such affection in bygone days. He remembered that Sebastiana had felt a veiled resentment toward her for that very reason, and recalled how relieved she had been to see her go off to Queimadas with Rufino.

  “To tell the truth, I didn’t expect to hear you speak of love and happiness at this point,” the baron murmured, stirring restlessly in his chair. “Certainly not with regard to Jurema.”

  The journalist had begun talking about the war again. “Isn’t it curious that it should be called the Girard Brigade? Because, as I now learn, General Girard never set foot in Canudos. One more curious thing in this most curious of wars. August began with the appearance of those twelve fresh battalions. More new people still kept arriving in Canudos, in great haste, because they knew that now, with the new army on the way, the city was certain to be encircled. And that they would no longer be able to get in!” The baron heard him give one of his absurd, exotic, forced cackles, and heard him repeat: “Not that they wouldn’t be able to get out, mind you, but that they wouldn’t be able to get in. That was their problem. They didn’t care if they died, so long as they died inside Canudos.”