The War Of The End Of The World (24 page)

Moreira César begins slowly pacing back and forth in front of the five journalists, his hands clasped behind his back.

“Captured in the backlands of Bahia, gentlemen,” he goes on to say in a sarcastic tone of voice, as though he were making mock of someone. “These rifles, at least, failed to reach Canudos. And where are they from? They didn’t even bother to remove the manufacturer’s label. Liverpool, no less! Rifles of this type have never turned up in Brazil before. Moreover, they’re equipped with a special device for shooting expanding bullets. That explains the gaping bullet holes that so surprised the army surgeons: wounds ten, twelve centimeters in diameter. They looked more like shrapnel wounds than bullet wounds. Is it likely that simple
jagunços
, mere cattle rustlers, would know about such European refinements as expanding bullets? And furthermore, what is the meaning behind the sudden appearance of so many people whose origins are a mystery? The corpse discovered in Ipupiará. The individual who turns up in Capim Grosso with a pocket full of pounds sterling who confesses to having guided a party of English-speaking horsemen. Foreigners trying to take shipments of provisions and gunpowder to Canudos have even been discovered in Belo Horizonte. Too many apparent coincidences not to point to a plot against the Republic as the source behind them. The enemies of the Republic refuse to give up. But their machinations are of no avail. They failed in Rio, they failed in Rio Grande do Sul, and they will also fail in Bahia, gentlemen.”

He has paced back and forth in front of the five journalists two, three times, taking short, rapid, nervous steps. He has now returned to the same place as before, alongside the table with the maps. As he addresses them once again, his tone of voice becomes imperious, threatening.

“I have agreed to allow you to accompany the Seventh Regiment, but you will be obliged to obey certain rules. The dispatches that you telegraph from here must first have been approved by Major Cunha Matos or by Colonel Tamarindo. The same is true of any reports you send via messengers during the campaign. I must warn you that if any one of you tries to send off an article that has not been approved by my aides, this will be regarded as a serious offense. I hope you understand the situation: any slip, error, imprudence risks serving the enemy’s cause. Don’t forget that we are at war. May your stay with the regiment be a pleasant one. That is all, gentlemen.”

He turns to his staff officers, who surround him forthwith, and immediately, as though a magic spell had been broken, the hustle and bustle, the din, the milling back and forth begin again in the Queimadas station. But the five journalists stand there looking at each other, disconcerted, dazed, disappointed, unable to understand why Colonel Moreira César is treating them as though they were his potential enemies, why he has not allowed them to ask a single question, why he has not shown them the slightest sign of warmth or at least politeness. The circle surrounding the colonel breaks up as each of his officers, obeying his instructions, clicks his heels and heads off in a different direction. Once he is alone, the colonel gazes all about him, and for a second the five journalists have the impression that he is about to approach them, but they are mistaken. He is looking, as though he had just become aware of them, at the dark, miserable, famished faces pressing against the doors and windows. He observes them with an expression impossible to define, scowling, his lower lip thrust forward. Suddenly he strides resolutely to the nearest door. He flings it wide open and opens his arms to welcome the swarm of men, women, children, oldsters dressed in almost nothing but rags, many of them barefoot, who gaze at him with respect, fear, or admiration. With imperious gestures, he motions to them to come inside, pulls them, drags them in, encourages them, pointing out to them the long table where, beneath clouds of greedy insects, the drinks and viands that the Municipal Council of Queimadas has set out to honor him are sitting untouched.

“Come on in, come on in,” he says, leading them to the table, pushing them, removing with his own hand the pieces of cheesecloth covering the viands. “You’re the guests of the Seventh Regiment. Come on, don’t be afraid. All this is for you. You need it more than we do. Drink, eat, and may you enjoy it.”

And now there is no need to urge them on; they have fallen ecstatically, greedily, incredulously, on the plates, glasses, platters, pitchers, and are elbowing each other aside, crowding round, pushing and shoving, fighting with each other for the food and drink, before the colonel’s saddened gaze. The journalists stand there, openmouthed. A little old woman, holding a morsel of food that she has grabbed and already bitten into, backs away from the table and stops alongside Moreira César, her face beaming with gratitude.

“May the Blessed Lady protect you, Colonel,” she murmurs, making the sign of the cross in the air.

“This is the lady that protects me,” the journalists hear him answer as he touches his sword.

In its better days, the Gypsy’s Circus had included twenty persons, if one could call persons creatures such as the Bearded Lady, the Dwarf, the Spider Man, Pedrim the Giant, and Julião, swallower of live toads. In those days the circus went about in a wagon painted red, with posters of trapeze artists on the side, drawn by the four horses on which the French Brothers did acrobatic tricks. It also had a small menagerie, a counterpart of the collection of human curiosities that the Gypsy had collected in his wanderings: a five-legged sheep, a little two-headed monkey, a cobra (a normal one) which had to be fed small birds, and a goat with three rows of teeth, which Pedrim displayed to the public by opening its mouth with his huge hands. They never had a tent. Performances were given in the main squares of towns, on holidays or the local patron saint’s day.

There were feats of strength and balancing acts, magic tricks and mind reading, Solimão the Black swallowed swords, in nothing flat the Spider Man glided up to the top of the greased pole and then offered a fabulous milreis piece to anyone who could do the same, Pedrim the Giant broke chains, the Bearded Lady danced with the cobra and kissed it on the mouth, and all of them, made up as clowns with burnt cork and rice powder, bent the Idiot, who seemed to have no bones, in two, in four, in six. But the star performer was the Dwarf, who recounted tales, with great sensitivity, vehemence, tender feeling, and imagination: the story of Princess Maguelone, the daughter of the King of Naples, who is abducted by Sir Pierre the knight and whose jewels are found by a sailor in the belly of a fish; the story of the Beautiful Silvaninha, whose own father, no less, wished to marry her; the story of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France; the story of the barren duchess with whom the Devil fornicated, who then gave birth to Robert the Devil; the story of Olivier and Fierabras. His turn was last because it put the audience in a generous mood.

The Gypsy must have been in trouble with the police on the coast, for even in periods of drought he never went down there. He was a violent man; on the slightest pretext, his fists would shoot out and he would mercilessly beat up any creature who annoyed him, be it man, woman, or animal. Despite his mistreatment of them, however, none of the circus people would have dreamed of leaving him. He was the soul of the circus, he was the one who had created it, collecting from all over those beings who, in their towns and their families, were objects of derision, freaks whom others looked upon as punishments from God and mistakes of the species. All of them, the Dwarf, the Bearded Lady, the Giant, the Spider Man, even the Idiot (who could feel these things even though he wasn’t able to understand them), had found in the traveling circus a more hospitable home than the one they had come from. In the caravan that went up and down and around the burning-hot backlands, they ceased to live a life filled with fear and shame and shared an abnormality that made them feel that they were normal.

Hence, none of them could understand the behavior of the youngster from Natuba with long tangled locks, lively dark eyes, and practically no legs at all, who trotted around on all fours. When they gave their show in his town, they noticed that he’d caught the Gypsy’s eye, that he watched the boy all during the performance. Because there was no getting around the fact that freaks of nature—human or animal—fascinated him for some more profound reason than the money he could make by exhibiting them. Perhaps he felt more normal, more complete, more perfect in the society of misfits and oddities. In any event, when the show was over, he asked people where the youngster lived, found the house, introduced himself to his parents, and persuaded them to give the boy to him so as to make a circus performer of him. The thing the others found incomprehensible was that, a week later, this creature who got about on all fours escaped from the circus, just as the Gypsy had started teaching him a turn as an animal tamer.

Their bad luck began with the great drought, on account of the Gypsy’s obdurate refusal to go down to the coast as the circus people begged him to do. They found deserted towns and haciendas that had turned into charnel houses; they realized that they might die of thirst. But the Gypsy was as stubborn as a mule, and one night he said to them: “I’m giving you your freedom. Clear out if you want to. But if you don’t go, I don’t want anybody ever to tell me again where the circus should head next.” Nobody took off, no doubt because all of them feared other people more than they feared catastrophe. In Caatinga do Moura, Dádiva, the Gypsy’s wife, took sick with fevers that made her delirious, and they had to bury her in Taquarandi. They were forced to begin eating the circus animals. When the rains came again, a year and a half later, Julião and his wife Sabina, Solimão the Black, Pedrim the Giant, the Spider Man, and the Little Star had died. They had lost the wagon with the posters of trapeze artists on the sides and were now hauling their belongings about in two carts that they pulled themselves, until people, water, life returned to the backlands and the Gypsy was able to buy two draft mules.

They began to put on shows again and once more they earned enough to put food in their mouths. But things weren’t the same as before. The Gypsy, crazed with grief at the loss of his children, took no interest in the performances now. He had left the three children in the care of a family in Caldeirão Grande, and when he came back to get them after the drought, nobody in the town could tell him anything about the Campinas family or his children. He never gave up hope of finding them, and years later he was still questioning people in the towns as to whether they’d seen them or heard anything about them. The disappearance of his children—everyone else was sure they were dead—turned him from a man who had once been energy and high spirits personified into a creature filled with bitterness, who drank too much and flew into a fury over anything and everything. One afternoon they were putting on a show in the village of Santa Rosa and the Gypsy was doing the turn that Pedrim the Giant used to do in the old days: challenging any spectator to make his shoulders touch the ground. A robust man presented himself and knocked him clean over at the first shove. The Gypsy picked himself up, saying that he’d slipped and that the man would have to try again. The brawny man again sent him sprawling. Getting to his feet once more, the Gypsy, his eyes flashing, asked him if he’d be willing to repeat his feat with a knife in his hand. The man didn’t really want to fight it out with him, but the Gypsy, having taken leave of his reason, egged him on in such an insulting way that finally there was nothing else the husky fellow could do but accept the challenge. As effortlessly as he’d knocked him down before, he left the Gypsy lying on the ground, with his throat slit and his eyes turning glassy. They learned later that the Gypsy had had the temerity to challenge Pedrão, the famous bandit.

Despite everything, surviving through simple inertia, as if to prove that nothing dies unless it’s meant to (the phrase had come from the Bearded Lady), the circus did not disappear. It was admittedly a mere shadow of the old circus now, huddling round a wagon with a patched canvas top, drawn by a lone burro; folded up inside it was a much-mended tent, which the last remaining performers—the Bearded Lady, the Dwarf, the Idiot, and the cobra—set up and slept under each night. They still gave shows and the Dwarf’s stories of love and adventure were still as great a success as in the old days. In order not to tire the burro, they traveled on foot and the only one of them to enjoy the use of the wagon was the cobra, which lived in a wicker basket. In their wanderings hither and yon, the last members of the Gypsy’s Circus had met up with saints, bandits, pilgrims, migrants, people with the most startling faces dressed in the most improbable attire. But never, before that morning, had they come across a flaming-red mane of hair such as that of the man stretched out full-length on the ground that they caught sight of as they rounded a bend of the trail that leads to Riacho da Onça. He was lying there motionless, dressed in a black garment covered with patches of white dust. A few yards farther on were the rotting carcass of a mule being devoured by black vultures and a fire that had gone out. And sitting alongside the ashes was a young woman, watching them approach with an expression on her face that did not seem to be a sad one. The burro, as though it had been given an order to do so, stopped in its tracks. The Bearded Lady, the Dwarf, the Idiot, took a close look at the man and spied the purplish wound in his shoulder half hidden by the fiery-red locks, and the dried blood on his beard, ear, and shirtfront.