The War Of The End Of The World (17 page)

At that moment the saint arrived. He must have set foot in Natuba the night before, or at dawn that morning, and someone must have informed him of what was about to happen. But this explanation was too logical for the townspeople, for whom the supernatural was more believable than the natural. They were later to say that his ability to foresee the future, or the Blessed Jesus, had brought him and his followers to this remote spot in the backlands of Bahia at this precise moment to correct a mistake, to prevent a crime, or simply to offer a proof of his power. He had not come alone, as he had the first time he preached in Natuba, years before, nor had he come accompanied by only two or three pilgrims, as on his second visit, when in addition to giving counsel he had rebuilt the chapel of the abandoned Jesuit convent on the town square. This time he was accompanied by some thirty people, as gaunt and poor as he was, but with eyes filled with happiness. As they followed after him, he made his way through the crowd to the grave just as the last shovelfuls of earth to fill it were raining down.

The man dressed in dark purple turned to Zózimo, standing with downcast eyes gazing at the freshly turned earth. “Have you buried her in her best dress, in a sturdy coffin?” he asked in an amiable though not affectionate tone of voice. Zózimo nodded, barely moving his head. “We will pray to the Father, so that He will receive her with rejoicing in the Kingdom of Heaven,” the Counselor said. And he and the penitents thereupon recited litanies and sang hymns at the graveside. Only then did the saint point to the stake to which the Lion had been tied. “What are you about to do with this boy, my brother?” he asked. “Burn him to death,” Zózimo replied. And he explained why, amid a silence that seemed to echo. The saint nodded, not blinking an eye. Then he turned to the Lion and gestured to the crowd to step back a bit. Everyone withdrew a few paces. The saint leaned down and spoke in the ear of the youngster tied to the stake and then brought his ear close to the Lion’s mouth to hear what he was saying. And thus, as the Counselor bent his head down toward the ear and the mouth of the other, the two of them held a secret conversation. No one moved, awaiting some extraordinary event.

And, in fact, what happened was as amazing as seeing a man frying to death on a funeral pyre. For when the two of them fell silent, the saint, with the serenity that never abandoned him, not moving from the spot, said: “Come, untie him!” The tinsmith raised his eyes and looked at him in amazement. “You must loosen his bonds yourself,” the man dressed in dark purple said, in a voice so deep it made people tremble. “Do you want your daughter to go to hell? Are the flames down there not hotter, more everlasting than the ones that you are seeking to ignite?” his voice roared once more, as though amazed at such stupidity. “You are filled with superstition, ungodly, a sinner,” he went on. “Repent of your intentions, come and loosen his bonds, seek his forgiveness, and pray to the Father not to send your daughter to the realm of the Dog because of your cowardice and wickedness, because of your lack of faith in God.” And he stood there, reviling him, urging him, terrifying him at the thought that through his grievous fault Almudia would go to hell, till finally the townspeople saw Zózimo obey him, rather than shoot him or plunge his knife into him or burn him to death along with the monster, and fall to his knees, sobbing, begging the Father, the Blessed Jesus, the Divine One, the Virgin to keep Almudia’s innocent soul from descending to hell.

When the Counselor, after remaining for two weeks in the town, praying, preaching, comforting the sick and offering his counsel to the healthy, took off in the direction of Mocambo, Natuba had a cemetery enclosed within a brick wall and new crosses on all the graves. And the ranks of the Counselor’s followers had been increased by one, a small figure half animal and half human who, as the little band of pilgrims marched off into the countryside covered with
mandacarus
, seemed to be trotting off alongside the handful of the faithful in rags and tatters like a horse, a goat, a pack mule…

Was he thinking, was he dreaming? I am on the outskirts of Queimadas, it is daytime, this is Rufino’s hammock. Everything else was confused in his mind: above all, the concatenation of circumstances which, at dawn this morning, had once again turned his life upside down. The amazement that had overcome him as he fell asleep after making love lingered on as he lay there half asleep and half awake.

Yes, for someone who believed that fate was in large part innate and written in the brain case, where skillful hands could palpate it and perspicacious eyes could read it, it was a harrowing experience to confront the existence of that unpredictable margin that other beings could manipulate with a horrifying disregard of one’s own will, of one’s personal aptitudes. How long had he been resting? His fatigue had disappeared, at any rate. Had the young woman disappeared, too? Had she gone to get help, to fetch people to come take him prisoner? He thought or dreamed: “My plans went up in smoke as they were about to materialize.” He thought or dreamed: “Troubles never come singly.” He realized that he was lying to himself; it was not true that this anxiety and this feeling of stunned amazement were due to his having missed meeting Rufino, to his having narrowly escaped death, to his having killed those two men, to the theft of the arms that he was going to take to Canudos. It was that sudden, incomprehensible, irrepressible impulse that had made him rape Jurema after ten years of not touching a woman that was troubling his half sleep.

He had loved a number of women in his youth, he had had comrades—women fighting for the same ideals as he—with whom he had shared short stretches of his life’s journey; in his days in Barcelona he had lived with a working-class woman who was pregnant at the time of the attack on the military barracks and who, he learned later after he had fled Spain, had eventually married a banker. But, unlike science or revolution, women had never occupied a prominent place in his life. Like food, sex to him had been something that satisfied a basic need and soon left him surfeited. The most secret decision of his life had been made ten years before. Or was it eleven? Or twelve? Dates danced about in his head, but not the place: Rome. He had hidden out there after escaping from Barcelona, in the house of a pharmacist, a comrade who wrote for the underground anarchist press and had been in prison more than once. There the vivid images were in Gall’s memory. He had had certain suspicions first, and then proof: this comrade picked up whores who solicited around the Colosseum, brought them home when Gall was gone, and paid them to let him whip them. Ah, the poor devil’s tears the night that Galileo had rebuked him, and then his confession that he could take his pleasure with a woman only by inflicting punishment on her, that he could make love only when he saw a battered, bruised body. He thought or dreamed he heard the pharmacist’s voice, once again, asking him for help, and in his half sleep, as on that night, he palpated him, felt the round bulge in the zone of the inferior emotions, the abnormal temperature of the crown, where Spurzheim had located the organ of sexuality, and the deformation, in the lower occipital curve, just above the nape of his neck, of the cavities that represent the destructive instincts. (And at that moment he was suddenly surrounded once again by the warm atmosphere of Mariano Cubí’s study, and heard once more the example that Cubí used to cite, that of Jobard le Joly, the Geneva arsonist, whose head he had examined after the decapitation: “In him this region of cruelty was so enlarged that it looked like an enormous tumor, a pregnant cranium.”) Then he heard his own voice, telling the pharmacist-anarchist the remedy again: “The thing you must rid your life of, comrade, is not vice but sex,” and explaining to him that when he had done so, the sexual path would be blocked and the destructive power of his nature would be channeled toward ethical and social goals, thus multiplying his energy for the fight for freedom and the eradication from this earth of every form of oppression. And without a tremor in his voice, looking him straight in the eye, he again made him the fraternal proposal: “Let’s do it together. I’ll make the same decision and abide by it, to prove to you that it’s possible. Let us both swear never to touch a woman again, brother.” Had the pharmacist kept his vow? He remembered his look of consternation, his voice that night, and thought or dreamed: “He was a weak man.” The sun’s rays penetrated his closed eyelids, burned his pupils.

He, on the other hand, was not a weak man. He had been able to keep the vow—until this morning—because the power of reason and knowledge served as a firm support, a source of strength for what in the beginning had been merely an impulse, a comradely gesture. Weren’t the search for sexual pleasure, the enslavement to instinct a danger to someone engaged in a war without quarter? Weren’t sexual urges liable to distract him from the ideal? What tormented Gall in those years was not banishing women from his life, but the thought that his arch-foes, Catholic priests, were doing precisely the same thing that he was, though admittedly in his case the reasons were not obscurantist ones, rooted in sheer prejudice, as in their case, but the desire, rather, to make himself stronger, freer of impediments, more available for this fight to reconcile, to conjoin what they, more than anyone else, had helped to turn into permanent enemies: heaven and earth, matter and spirit. He had never been tempted to break his vow—“till today,” Galileo Gall dreamed or thought. On the contrary, he firmly believed that this absence of women in his life had been transformed into a greater intellectual appetite, into an ever-increasing ability to act. No: he was lying to himself again. The power of reason had been able to get the better of sex when he was awake, but not when he was asleep. On many nights during these years, tempting female forms slipped into his bed as he slept, clung to his body, stole caresses. He dreamed or thought that these phantasms had been harder to resist than women of flesh and blood, and he remembered that, like adolescents or comrades locked up in jails the world over, he had often made love with these impalpable silhouettes fashioned by his desire.

In anguish, he thought or dreamed: “How could I have done that?” Why had he flung himself on that young woman? She had been fighting him off and he had struck her. Overcome with anxiety, he asked himself if he had also hit her when she had stopped fighting him off and was allowing him to strip her naked. What had happened, comrade? He dreamed or thought: “You don’t know yourself, Gall.” No, his own head told him nothing. But others had palpated it and found in him highly developed impulsive tendencies and curiosity, inaptitude for the contemplative, for the aesthetic, and in general for everything having no direct bearing on practical action and physical tasks, and no one had ever perceived the slightest sexual anomaly in the receptacle housing his soul. He dreamed or thought something that he had already thought before: “Science is still only a candle faintly glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.”

In what way would what had happened alter his life? Did his decision made in Rome still hold good now? Ought he to renew or alter his vow after this accident? Was it an accident? How to explain scientifically what had occurred as dawn was breaking this morning? Without his being aware of it, during all these years he had been storing up in his soul—no, in his mind; the word “soul” was contaminated with religious filth—all the appetites he thought he had rooted out, all the energies he had presumed were directed toward better ends than pleasure. And that secret accumulation had exploded this morning, ignited by circumstances, that is to say, nervousness, tension, fear, the surprise of the attack, the theft, the shooting, the deaths. Was that the correct explanation? Ah, if only he could have examined all this as though it were a problem concerning someone else, objectively, with someone like old Cubí. And he remembered those conversations that the phrenologist called Socratic, as they walked about the port area of Barcelona and through the labyrinth of the Barrio Gótico, and felt pangs of nostalgia in his heart. No, it would be imprudent, dimwitted, stupid to hold to the decision made in Rome; it would be paving the way for a repetition in the future of what had happened this morning, or something even worse. He thought or dreamed, with bitter sarcasm: “You must resign yourself to fornicating, Galileo.”

He thought of Jurema. Was she a thinking being? A little domestic animal, rather. Diligent, submissive, capable of believing that statues of St. Anthony escape from churches and return to the grottoes where they were carved; trained like the baron’s other female servants to care for chickens and sheep, to prepare her husband’s food, to wash his clothes, and to open her legs only for him. He thought: “Perhaps she’ll be roused from her lethargy now and discover injustice.” He thought: “I’m your injustice.” He thought: “Perhaps you’ve done her a service.”

He thought of the men who had attacked him and made off with the wagon and of the two that he had killed. Were they the Counselor’s men? Was their leader the man he’d met at the tannery in Queimadas, the one called Pajeú? Wasn’t it more likely that it had been Pajeú, that he’d taken him to be an army spy or a merchant eager to swindle his people and had had him watched, and then, on discovering that he had arms in his possession, had made off with them so as to supply Canudos? He hoped that that was what had happened, that at that very moment the wagon with those rifles was heading up to Canudos at a fast gallop to reinforce the
jagunços
as they prepared to face what would soon be upon them. Why would Pajeú have trusted him? How could he have trusted a stranger who pronounced his language badly and had obscure ideas? “You’ve killed two comrades, Gall,” he thought. He was awake: that heat is the morning sun, those sounds the tinkling of the sheep bells. And what if the rifles were in the hands of mere outlaws? They might have followed him and the guide in leather the night before, as they carried the arms off from the hacienda where Epaminondas had handed them over to him. Didn’t everyone say that the region was teeming with
cangaceiros
? Had he gone about things in too much of a hurry, been imprudent? He thought: “I should have unloaded the arms and brought them inside here.” He thought: “Then you’d be dead now and they’d have made off with them anyway.” He was consumed with doubts. Would he go back to Bahia? Would he still go on to Canudos? Would he open his eyes? Would he get up out of his hammock? Would he finally face reality? He could still hear the sheep bells tinkling, he could hear barking, and now he also heard footsteps and a voice.