The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Sitting hunched over amid barrels and sacks, peeking out first in one direction and then in another, he little by little gathers some idea of what is happening on the esplanade bounded by the churches and the Sanctuary. The barricade that was erected behind the cemetery barely two days ago, the one that protected the Church of Santo Antônio, has been taken and the dogs have entered, are entering the dwellings in Santa Inês, which is right next to the church. It is from Santa Inês that all the people who are trying to take refuge in the Temple have come: old men, old women, mothers with suckling babes in their arms, on their shoulders, cradled on their bosoms. But there are many people in the city who are still fighting. Opposite him, there are still continuous bursts of gunfire coming from the towers and scaffoldings of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus, and the Lion of Natuba can make out the sparks as the jagunços ignite the black-powder charges of their blunderbusses, can see the impacts of the balls that chip the stones, the roof tiles, the beams of everything around him. At the same time that he came to warn the disciples to run for their lives, Abbot João no doubt also came to take the men of the Catholic Guard protecting the Sanctuary off with him, and now all of them are doubtless fighting in Santa Inês, or erecting another barricade, tightening a little more that circle of which the Counselor so often—“and so rightly”—used to speak. Where are the soldiers, from which direction will he see the soldiers coming? What hour of the day or evening is it? The clouds of dirt and smoke, thicker and thicker, irritate his throat and his eyes, make him cough, make it hard to breathe.

  “And the Counselor? What about the Counselor?” he hears a voice say, almost in his ear. “Is it true that he’s gone to heaven, that the angels bore him away with them?”

  The deeply wrinkled face of the old woman lying on the ground has only one tooth in its mouth and eyelids glued shut with a gummy discharge. She does not appear to be injured, simply utterly exhausted.

  “Yes, he’s gone to heaven,” the Lion of Natuba says, nodding his head, with the clear perception that this is the very best thing he can do for her at this moment. “The angels bore him away.”

  “Will they come to take my soul with them, too, Lion?” the old woman whispers.

  The Lion nods again, several times. The little old woman smiles at him and then lies there immobile, her mouth gaping open. The shooting and the screaming coming from the direction of the fallen Church of Santo Antônio suddenly grow louder and the Lion of Natuba has the feeling that a hail of shots grazes his head and that many bullets embed themselves in the sandbags and barrels of the parapet behind which he has taken cover. He continues to lie there stretched out flat on the ground, his eyes closed, waiting.

  When the din dies down a bit, he raises his head and spies the pile of rubble left when the bell tower of Santo Antônio collapsed two nights before. The soldiers are here. His chest burns: they are here, they are here, moving about among the stones, shooting at the Temple of the Blessed Jesus, riddling with bullets the multitude that is struggling in the doorway and that at this moment, after a few seconds’ hesitation, on seeing them appear and finding itself being shot at, comes rushing out at them, hands outstretched, faces congested with wrath, indignation, the desire for vengeance. In seconds, the esplanade turns into a battlefield, with hand-to-hand fighting everywhere, and in the cloud of dust swirling all round the Lion of Natuba he sees pairs and groups grappling with each other, rolling over and over on the ground, he sees sabers, bayonets, knives, machetes, he hears bellows, insults, cries of “Long live the Republic,”

  “Down with the Republic,”

  “Long live the Counselor, the Blessed Jesus, Marshal Floriano.” In the crowd, in addition to the oldsters and the women, there are now jagunços, men of the Catholic Guard who continue to pour onto the esplanade from one side. He thinks he recognizes Abbot João and, farther in the distance, the bronze-skinned figure of Big João, or perhaps Pedr$$$o, advancing with a huge pistol in one hand and a machete in the other. The soldiers are also on the roof of the church that has caved in. They are there where the jagunços were, raking the esplanade with gunfire from the walls with their bell tower fallen in; he sees kepis, uniforms, leather cartridge belts up there. And he finally realizes what it is that one of them—suspended in empty air almost, up on the sheared-off roof above the façade of Santo Antônio—is doing. He is putting up a flag. They have raised the flag of the Republic over Belo Monte.

  He is imagining what the Counselor would have felt, said, if he had seen that flag fluttering up there, already full of bullet holes from the round after round of shots that the jagunços immediately fire at it from the rooftops, towers, and scaffoldings of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus, when he spies the soldier who is aiming his rifle at him, who is shooting at him.

  He does not crouch down, he does not run, he does not move, and the thought crosses his mind that he is one of those little birds that a snake hypnotizes in a tree before devouring it. The soldier is aiming at him and the Lion of Natuba knows by the jerk of the man’s shoulder from the recoil of his rifle that he has fired the shot. Despite the blowing dust, the smoke, he sees the man’s beady little eyes as he aims at him again, the gleam in them at the thought that he has him at his mercy, his savage joy at knowing that this time he will hit him. But someone roughly jerks him away from where he is and forces him to leap along, to run, his arm almost torn from its socket by the iron grip of the hand that is holding him up. It is Big João, naked to the waist, who shouts to him, pointing to Campo Grande: “That way, that way, to Menino Jesus, Santo Elói, São Pedro. Those barricades are still standing. Clear out, go there.”

  He lets go and disappears into the maze around the churches and the Sanctuary. Without the hand that was holding him up, the Lion of Natuba falls to the ground in a heap. But he lies there for only a few brief moments, getting back into place those bones that seem to have been dislocated in the mad dash. It is as though the yank given him by the leader of the Catholic Guard had started up a secret motor inside him, for the Lion of Natuba begins trotting along again amid the filth and debris of what was once Campo Grande, the only passage between dwellings wide enough and straight enough to merit the name of street and now, like the others, nothing but an open space strewn with shell holes, rubble, and corpses. He sees nothing of what he is leaving behind, what he is dodging around, hugging the ground, not feeling the cuts and bruises from the shards of glass and the stones, for he is entirely absorbed in the task of getting to where he has been told to go, the little alleyways of Menino Jesus, Santo Elói, and São Pedro Mártir, that slender snake that zigzags up to Madre Igreja. He will be safe there, he will stay alive, he will endure. But on turning the third corner of Campo Grande, along what was once Menino Jesus and is now a crowded tunnel, he hears bursts of rifle fire and sees reddish-yellow flames and gray spirals rising in the sky. He stops and squats down next to an overturned cart and a picket fence that is all that is left of a dwelling. He hesitates. Does it make sense to go on toward those flames, those bullets? Isn’t it better to go back the way he came? Up ahead, where Menino Jesus leads into Madre Igreja, he can make out silhouettes, knots of people walking back and forth slowly, unhurriedly. So that must be where the barricade is. It’s best to make it up there, best to die where there are other people around.

  But he is not as completely alone as he thinks he is, for as he goes up the steep incline of Menino Jesus, in little leaps, his name comes up out of the ground, shouted, cried out, to right and left: “Lion! Lion! Come here! Take cover, Lion! Hide, Lion!” Where, where? He can see no one and goes on toward the top, climbing over piles of dirt, ruins, debris, and dead bodies, some of them with their guts spilling out or gobs of flesh torn away by the shrapnel, left lying there for many hours, perhaps days now, to judge by the terrible stench all round him, which, together with the smoke blowing into his face, suffocates him and makes his eyes water. And then, all of a sudden, the soldiers are there. Six of them, three with torches that they keep dipping in
to a can, no doubt full of kerosene, which another is carrying, for after dipping them into it they light them and hurl them at the dwellings, as the others fire point-blank at these same houses. He is less than ten paces away from them, rooted to the spot where he has first caught sight of them, looking at them in a daze, half blinded, when shooting breaks out all around him. He falls flat on the ground, though he does not close those great eyes of his, which watch in fascination as the soldiers, hit by the hail of bullets, collapse, writhe in agony, roar with pain, drop their rifles. Where, where have the shots come from? One of the atheists rolls toward him, clutching his face. He sees him go suddenly limp and motionless, with his tongue hanging out of his mouth.

  Where have the shots come from, where are the jagunços? He remains on the alert, watching the fallen dogs intently, his eyes leaping from one to the other, expecting any one of the corpses to stand up and come finish him off.

  But what he sees is something crawling swiftly out of a house and wriggling along the ground like a worm, and by the time he thinks to himself: “A ‘youngster’!” there is not just one lad but three, the other two having come wriggling along the ground, too. The three of them paw and tug at the dead soldiers. They are not stripping them, as the Lion of Natuba thinks at first; they are removing their bullet pouches and their canteens. And one of the “youngsters” lingers long enough to plunge a knife as long as his arm into the soldier closest to the Lion—one he had thought was dead, though evidently there was still a little bit of life in him—struggling with all his might to lift the heavy weapon.

  “Lion, Lion!” It is another “youngster,” signaling to him to follow him. The Lion of Natuba sees him disappear through a door standing ajar in one of the dwellings, as the other two make off in opposite directions, trailing their booty along after them. Only then does his little body, frozen in panic, finally obey him, and he is able to drag himself over to the door. Energetic hands just inside the doorway reach out for him. He feels himself lifted off his feet, passed to other hands, set down again, and hears a woman’s voice say: “Pass him the canteen.” They place it in his bleeding hands, and he raises it to his lips. He takes a long swallow, closing his eyes, deeply grateful, moved by the miracle of this liquid that he can feel extinguishing what seem like red-hot coals inside him.

  As he answers questions from the six or seven armed persons who are in the open pit that has been dug inside the house—faces covered with soot, sweaty, some of them bandaged, unrecognizable—and tells them, panting for breath, what he has been able to see on the church square and on his way up here, he realizes that the pit opens downward onto a tunnel. A “youngster” suddenly pops up between his legs, saying: “More dogs setting fires, Salustiano.” Those who were listening to him go into action immediately, pushing the Lion aside, and at that moment he realizes that two of them are women. They, too, have rifles; they, too, aim them, with one eye closed, toward the street. Through the cracks between the stakes of the wall, like a recurrent image, the Lion of Natuba sees once again the silhouettes of soldiers in profile coming past with lighted torches that they are hurling inside the houses. “Shoot!” a jagunço shouts, and the room fills with gunsmoke. The Lion hears the deafening report and hears other shots from close by. When the smoke clears away a little, two “youngsters” leap out of the pit and crawl out into the street to gather up ammunition pouches and canteens.

  “We let them get good and close before we shoot. That way they don’t get away,” one of the jagunços says as he swabs out his rifle.

  “They’ve set fire to your house, Salustiano,” a woman says.

  “And Abbot João’s,” the same man adds.

  These are the houses opposite; they have caught fire together, and beneath the crackling of the flames the sound of people running back and forth, voices, shouts reach them, along with thick clouds of smoke that make them scarcely able to breathe.

  “They’re trying to fry us to death, Lion,” another of the jagunços in the pit says. “All the Freemasons come into the city with torches.”

  The smoke is so thick that the Lion of Natuba begins to cough, as at the same time that active, creative, efficient mind of his remembers something that the Counselor once said, which he wrote down and which, like everything else in the Sanctuary notebooks, is doubtless being reduced to ashes at this moment: “There will be three fires. I shall extinguish the first three and the fourth I shall offer to the Blessed Jesus.” He says in a loud voice, gasping for breath: “Is this the fourth fire, is this the last fire?” Someone asks timidly: “What about the Counselor, Lion?” He has been waiting for that; ever since he entered this house he has known that someone would dare to ask him this question. He sees, amid the tongues of smoke, seven, eight solemn, hopeful faces.

  “He went up…” The Lion of Natuba coughs. “The angels bore him away.”

  Another fit of coughing makes him close his eyes and double over. In the desperation that overcomes a person when he lacks for air, feeling his lungs expand, gasp, fail to receive what they need so badly, he thinks that this is really the end, that no doubt he will not go to heaven since even at this moment he is unable to believe that there is such a thing as heaven, and he hears, as if in a dream, the jagunços coughing, arguing, and finally deciding that they can’t stay here because the fire is going to spread to this house. “We’re leaving, Lion,” he hears, and “Keep your head down, Lion,” and unable to open his eyes, he holds out his hands and feels them grab hold of him, pull him, drag him along. How long does this blind journey last: gasping for air, bumping into walls, beams, people blocking his path, bouncing him back and forth and on through the narrow, curving tunnel through the dirt, with hands pulling him up inside a dwelling through a hole only to shove him back underground and drag him along again? Perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, but all the way along, his intelligence never ceases for a second to go over a thousand things once more, to call up a thousand images, concentrating, ordering his little body to hold out, to bear up at least to the end of the tunnel, and being amazed when his body obeys and does not fall to pieces as it seems to be about to do from one moment to the next.

  Suddenly the hand that was holding him lets go and he falls down and down. His head is going to be smashed to bits, his heart is going to burst, the blood in his veins is going to come spilling out, his bruised little body is going to fly all to pieces. But none of that happens and little by little he calms down, quiets down, as he feels a less contaminated air bring him gradually back to life. He hears voices, shots, a vast hubbub. He rubs his eyes, wipes the dirt from his eyelids, and sees that he is in a house, not in the shaft of a tunnel but on the surface, surrounded by jagunços, by women sitting on the floor with children in their laps, and he recognizes the man who makes skyrockets and set pieces: Antônio the Pyrotechnist.

  “Antônio, Antônio, what’s happening in Canudos?” the Lion of Natuba says. But not a sound comes out of his mouth. There are no flames here, only a cloud of dust that makes everything a blur. The jagunços are not talking among themselves, they are swabbing out their rifles, reloading their shotguns, and taking turns watching outside. Why isn’t he able to speak, why won’t his voice come out?

  He makes his way over to the Pyrotechnist on his elbows and knees and clutches his legs. Antônio squats down beside him as he primes his gun. “We’ve stopped them here. But they’ve gotten through at Madre Igreja, the cemetery, and Santa Inês. They’re everywhere. Abbot João wants to erect a barrier at Menino Jesus and another at Santo Elói so they don’t attack us from the rear,” he explains in a soft, completely untroubled voice.

  The Lion of Natuba can readily picture in his mind this one last circle that Belo Monte has become, bounded by the little winding alleyways of São Pedro Mártir, Santo Elói, and Menino Jesus: not a tenth of what it once was.

  “Do you mean to say they’ve taken the Temple of the Blessed Jesus?” he says, and this time his voice comes out.

  “They brought it down while y
ou were asleep,” the Pyrotechnist answers in the same calm voice, as though he were speaking of the weather. “The tower collapsed and the roof caved in. The roar must have been heard as far as Trabubu, as Bendengó. But it didn’t wake you up, Lion.”

  “Is it true that the Counselor went up to heaven?” a woman interrupts him, neither her mouth nor her eyes moving as she speaks.