The War Of The End Of The World (61 page)

“I suspected that you weren’t paying me a compliment,” Epaminondas Gonçalves said, going back to his chair.

The baron sat down next to him. Along with the chirping of the crickets, sounds of coaches, the legato call of a night watchman, a foghorn, barking dogs came in through the window.

“In a certain way, I admire you.” The baron looked at him with a fleeting gleam in his eye. “I’ve been able to appreciate your fearlessness, the complexity and cold-bloodedness of your political maneuvers. Yes, nobody in Bahia has your qualifications for confronting the situation we shall find ourselves in all too soon.”

“Will you tell me once and for all what it is you want of me?” the leader of the Republican Party said. There was a dramatic note in his voice.

“To replace me,” the baron stated emphatically. “Will it put an end to your distrust of me if I tell you that I feel defeated by you? Not factually speaking, since the Autonomists have more possibilities than the Bahia Jacobins of coming to an understanding with Moraes and the Paulistas in the federal government. But psychologically speaking, yes, Epaminondas.”

He took a sip of cognac and his eyes stared into space. “Things have happened that I never would have dreamed of,” he said. “The best regiment in Brazil routed by a bunch of fanatical beggars. How to explain it? A great military strategist wiped out in the first encounter…”

“It’s beyond explaining, I agree,” Epaminondas Gonçalves said. “I was with Major Cunha Matos this afternoon. It’s much worse than what’s been revealed officially. Are you aware of the figures? They’re unbelievable: between three hundred and four hundred casualties, three-quarters of the troops. Dozens of officers massacred. All the arms lost, from cannons to knives. The survivors are arriving in Monte Santo naked, in their underwear, delirious. The Seventh Regiment! You were close at hand, there in Calumbi. You saw them. Whatever is happening in Canudos, Baron?”

“I don’t know and I don’t understand,” the baron said gloomily. “It’s beyond anything I could imagine. And yet I thought I knew those parts, those people. The fanaticism of a few starving wretches is not a sufficient explanation for the rout. There has to be something else behind it.” He looked at him again, in utter bewilderment. “I’ve come to think that that fantastic lie you people spread about there being English officers and monarchist arms might have had an element of truth in it. No, we won’t even discuss the subject. It’s water under the bridge. I merely mention it to you so that you’ll see how stunned I am by what happened to Moreira César.”

“I’m not so much stunned as frightened,” Epaminondas said. “If those men can pulverize the best regiment in Brazil, they’re also capable of spreading anarchy throughout this entire state and the neighboring ones, of coming as far as Salvador…” He shrugged and made a vague, catastrophic gesture.

“The only explanation is that thousands of peasants, including ones from other regions, have joined that band of Sebastianists,” the baron said. “Impelled by ignorance, superstition, hunger. Because there are no restraints these days to keep such madness in check, as there once were. This means war, the Brazilian Army installing itself here, the ruin of Bahia.” He grabbed Epaminondas Gonçalves by the arm. “That is why you must replace me. Given the present situation, someone with your talents is needed to bring the right people together and defend the interests of Bahia amid the cataclysm. There’s resentment in the rest of Brazil against Bahia, because of what happened to Moreira César. They say that the mobs that attacked the monarchist dailies in Rio were shouting ‘Down with Bahia.’”

He paused for a long moment, nervously swirling the cognac in his glass. “There are many who have already been ruined there in the interior,” he said. “I’ve lost two haciendas. A great many more people are going to be wiped out and killed in this civil war. If your people and mine go on destroying each other, what will the result be? We’ll lose everything. The exodus toward the South and Maranhão will become vaster still. What will become of the state of Bahia then? We must make our peace, Epaminondas. Forget your shrill Jacobin rhetoric, stop attacking the poor Portuguese, stop demanding the nationalization of businesses, and be practical. Jacobinism died with Moreira César. Assume the governorship and let us defend civil order together amid this hecatomb. Let us keep our Republic from turning into what so many other Latin American republics have: a grotesque witches’ sabbath where all is chaos, military uprisings, corruption, demagogy…”

They sat in silence for some time, glasses in hand, thinking or listening. From time to time, footsteps, voices could be heard somewhere inside the house. A clock struck nine.

“I thank you for inviting me here,” Epaminondas said, rising to his feet. “I’ll keep everything you’ve told me well in mind and think it over. I can’t give you an answer now.”

“Of course not,” the baron said, getting to his feet, too. “Give it thought and we’ll talk again. I would like to see you before I leave, naturally.”

“You will have my answer day after tomorrow,” Epaminondas said as he started for the door. As they were going through the reception rooms, the black servant with the oil lamp appeared. The baron accompanied Epaminondas as far as the street.

At the front gate he asked him: “Have you had any news of your journalist, the one who was with Moreira César?”

“The freak?” Epaminondas said. “He hasn’t turned up again. I suppose he must have been killed. As you know, he wasn’t a man of action.”

They took their leave of each other with a bow.

When a servant informed him who was asking for him, the Baron de Canabrava, rather than sending him back, as was his habit, to tell the person who had appeared on the doorstep that he neither made nor received unannounced visits, rushed downstairs, walked through the spacious rooms that the morning sun was flooding with light, and went to the front door to see if he had heard correctly: it was indeed he, no mistake about it. He shook hands with him without a word and showed him in. There leapt to his mind instantly what he had been trying his best to forget for months: the fire at Calumbi, Canudos, Estela’s crisis, his withdrawal from public life.

Overcoming his surprise at this visit and the shock of this resurrection of the past, he silently guided the caller to the room in which all important conversations took place in the town house: the study. Though it was still early in the day, it was hot. In the distance, above the crotons, the branches of the mango, ficus, guava, and
pitangueira
trees in the garden, the sun was turning the sea as blinding white as a sheet of steel. The baron drew the curtain shut and the room fell into shadow.

“I knew that my visit would come as a surprise to you,” the caller said, and the baron recognized the little piping voice that always sounded like a comic actor speaking in falsetto. “I learned that you had returned from Europe, and had…this impulse. I’ll tell you straight out: I’ve come to ask you for work.”

“Have a seat,” the baron said.

He had heard the voice as in a dream, paying no attention to the words, entirely absorbed in studying the man’s physical appearance and comparing it with his mental image of what he had looked like the last time he had set eyes on him: the scarecrow he had watched leaving Calumbi that morning with Colonel Moreira César and his little escort. “It’s the same person and it isn’t,” he thought. Because the journalist who had worked for the
Diário da Bahia
and later for the
Jornal de Notícias
had been a youngster and this man with the thick glasses, who on sitting down appeared to collapse into four or six sections, was an old man. His face was lined with myriad wrinkles, his hair was streaked with gray, his body looked brittle. He was wearing an unbuttoned shirt, a sleeveless jacket with worn spots or grease stains, a pair of trousers with frayed cuffs, and big clumsy cowherd’s boots.

“I remember now,” the baron said. “Someone wrote me that you were still alive. I was in Europe when I received the letter. ‘A ghost has turned up.’ That’s what it said. Nonetheless, I continued to think of you as having disappeared, as having died.”

“I didn’t die, nor did I disappear,” the thin, nasal voice said, without a trace of humor. “After hearing ten times a day the same thing that you’ve just said, I realized people were disappointed that I was still in this world.”

“If I may say so frankly, I don’t give a damn whether you’re alive or dead,” the baron heard himself say, surprised at his own rudeness. “I might even prefer you to be dead. I detest everything that reminds me of Canudos.”

“I heard about your wife,” the nearsighted journalist said, and the baron sensed that an impertinent remark would inevitably follow. “That she lost her mind, that it’s a great tragedy in your life.”

The baron looked at him in such a way that he was cowed and shut his mouth. He cleared his throat, blinked, and took off his glasses to wipe them on the tail of his shirt.

The baron was glad that he had resisted the impulse to throw him out. “It’s all coming back to me now,” he said amiably. “The letter was from Epaminondas Gonçalves, two months or so ago. It was from him that I learned you’d returned to Salvador.”

“Do you correspond with that miserable wretch?” the thin nasal voice piped. “Ah, yes, it’s true that the two of you are allies now.”

“Is that any way to speak of the Governor of Bahia?” The baron smiled. “Did he refuse to take you back at the
Jornal de Notícias?
”

“On the contrary: he even offered to raise my salary,” the nearsighted journalist retorted. “On condition, however, that I forget all about the story of Canudos.”

He gave a little laugh, like that of an exotic bird, and the baron saw it turn into a gale of sneezes that made him bounce up and down in his chair.

“In other words, Canudos made a real journalist out of you,” the baron said mockingly. “Or else you’ve changed. Because my ally Epaminondas is the same as he’s always been. He hasn’t changed one iota.”

He waited for the journalist to blow his nose on a blue rag that he quickly pulled out of his pocket.

“In that letter, Epaminondas said that you turned up with a strange person. A dwarf or something of the sort, is that right?”

The nearsighted journalist nodded. “He’s my friend. I’m indebted to him. He saved my life. Shall I tell you how? By telling me about Charlemagne, the Twelve Peers of France, Queen Maguelone. By reciting the Terrible and Exemplary Story of Robert the Devil.”

He spoke rapidly, rubbing his hands together, twisting and turning in his chair. The baron was reminded of Professor Tales de Azevedo, a scholar friend of his who had visited him in Calumbi many years before: he would spend hour after hour listening, in rapt fascination, to the minstrels at fairs, have them dictate to him the words that he heard them sing and recite, and assured him that they were medieval romances, brought to the New World by the first Portuguese and preserved in the oral tradition of the backlands. He noticed the look of anguish on his visitor’s face.

“His life can still be saved,” he heard him say, a pleading look in his ambiguous eyes. “He has tuberculosis, but it’s operable. Dr. Magalhães, at the Portuguese Hospital, has saved many people. I want to do that for him. It’s another reason why I need work. But above all…in order to eat.”

The baron saw the look of shame that came over his face, as though he had confessed to some ignominious sin.

“I don’t know of any reason why I should help that dwarf,” the baron murmured. “Nor why I should help you.”

“There isn’t any reason, of course,” his myopic visitor said, pulling on his fingers. “I just decided to try my luck. I thought I might be able to touch your heart. In the past you were known to be a generous man.”

“A banal tactic employed by a politician,” the baron said. “I have no further need of it now that I’ve retired from politics.”

And at that moment, through the window overlooking the garden, he spied the chameleon. He very seldom caught a glimpse of it, or, better put, seldom recognized it, since it always blended so perfectly with the stones, the grass, or the bushes and branches of the garden that more than once he had nearly stepped on it. The evening before, he had taken Estela, accompanied by Sebastiana, out of doors for a breath of fresh air, beneath the mango trees and ficuses, and the chameleon had been a wonderful diversion for the baroness, who, from her wicker rocking chair, had amused herself by pointing out exactly where the creature was, recognizing it amid the plants and on the bark of trees as readily as in days gone by. The baron and Sebastiana had seen her smile when it ran off as they approached it to see if she had guessed correctly. It was there now, at the foot of one of the mangoes, an iridescent greenish-brown, barely distinguishable from the grass, its little throat palpitating. He spoke to it, in his mind: “Beloved chameleon, elusive little creature, my good friend. I thank you with all my heart for having made my wife laugh.”

“The only things I own are the clothes on my back,” the nearsighted journalist said. “When I returned from Canudos I found that the woman who owned my place had sold all my things to get the rent I owed. The
Jornal de Notícias
refused to pay for the upkeep while I was gone.” He fell silent for a moment and then added: “She also sold off my books. Sometimes I recognize one or another of them in the Santa Bárbara market.”

The thought crossed the baron’s mind that the loss of his books must have been heartbreaking for this man who ten or twelve years before had assured him that he would someday be the Oscar Wilde of Brazil.

“Very well,” he said. “You may have your old job back at the
Diário da Bahia
. All in all, you weren’t a bad writer.”

The nearsighted journalist removed his glasses and nodded several times, his face very pale, unable to express his thanks in any other way. “It’s a matter of little importance,” the baron thought. “Am I doing this for him or for that dwarf? I’m doing it for the chameleon.” He looked out the window, searching for it, and felt disappointed: it was no longer there, or else, sensing that it was being spied on, it had disguised itself perfectly by blending with the colors round it.

“He’s someone who’s terrified at the thought of dying,” the nearsighted journalist murmured, putting his glasses back on. “It’s not out of a love of life, you understand. He’s had a miserable existence. He was sold as a child to a gypsy for whom he was a circus attraction, a freak to be put on exhibition. But he has such a great, such a fabulous fear of death that it has enabled him to survive. And me as well, incidentally.”

The baron suddenly regretted having given him work, for in some indefinable way this established a bond between him and this individual. And he did not want to feel any sort of tie to anyone so closely linked to the memory of Canudos. But, instead of intimating to his caller that their conversation had ended, he blurted out: “You must have seen terrible things.” He cleared his throat, feeling uncomfortable at having yielded to his curiosity, but added nonetheless: “When you were up there in Canudos.”

“As a matter of fact, I didn’t see anything at all,” the emaciated little figure replied immediately, doubling over and then straightening up. “I broke my glasses the day they destroyed the Seventh Regiment. I stayed up there for four months, seeing nothing but shadows, vague shapes, phantoms.”

His voice was so ironic that the baron wondered whether he was saying this to irritate him, or whether it was his rude, unfriendly way of letting him know that he didn’t want to talk about it.

“I don’t know why you haven’t laughed at me,” he heard him say in an even more aggressive tone of voice. “Everybody laughs when I tell them that I didn’t see what happened in Canudos because I broke my glasses. It’s quite comical, I’m sure.”

“Yes, it is,” the baron said, rising to his feet. “But it’s something that doesn’t interest me. Hence…”

“But even though I didn’t see them, I felt, heard, smelled the things that happened,” the journalist said, his eyes following him from behind his glasses. “And I intuitively sensed the rest.”

The baron heard him laugh once more, with a sort of impishness now, fearlessly looking him straight in the eye. He sat down again. “Did you really come here to ask me for work and talk to me about that dwarf?” he said. “Does that dwarf dying of tuberculosis exist?”

“He’s spitting up blood and I want to help him,” the visitor said. “But I came for another reason as well.”

He bowed his head, and as the baron’s gaze fell upon his disheveled salt-and-pepper locks flecked with dandruff, he visualized in his mind his watery eyes fixed on the floor. He had the inexplicable intuition that his visitor was bringing him a message from Galileo Gall.

“People are forgetting Canudos,” the nearsighted journalist said, in a voice that sounded like an echo. “The last lingering memories of what happened there will fade in the air and mingle with the music of the next carnival ball in the Politeama Theater.”

“Canudos?” the baron murmured. “Epaminondas is right not to want people to talk about what happened there. It’s better to forget it. It’s an unfortunate, unclear episode. It’s not good for anything. History must be instructive, exemplary. In this war, nobody has covered himself with glory. And nobody has understood what happened. People have decided to ring down a curtain on it. And that’s a sensible, healthy reaction.”

“I shall not allow them to forget,” the journalist said, his dim eyes gazing steadily up at him. “That’s a promise I’ve made myself.”

The baron smiled. Not because of his visitor’s sudden solemnity but because the chameleon had just materialized, beyond the desk and the curtains, in the bright green of the plants in the garden, beneath the gnarled branches of the
pitangueira
tree. Long, motionless, greenish, with its profile reminiscent of the topography of sharp mountain peaks, almost transparent, it gleamed like a precious stone. “Welcome, friend,” the baron thought.

“How will you do that?” he said, for no particular reason, simply to fill the silence.

“In the only way in which things are preserved,” he heard his caller growl. “By writing of them.”

The baron nodded. “I remember that, too. You wanted to be a poet, a dramatist. And you’re going to write the story of Canudos that you didn’t see?”

“What fault of this poor devil is it that Estela is no longer that lucid, intelligent creature she once was?” the baron thought.

“As soon as I was able to get rid of the cheeky and curious strangers who besieged me, I started going to the Reading Room of the Academy of History,” the myopic journalist said. “To look through the papers, all the news items about Canudos. The
Jornal da Notícias
, the
Diário de Bahia, O Republicano
. I’ve read everything written about it, everything I wrote. It’s something…difficult to put into words. Too unreal, do you follow me? It seems like a conspiracy in which everyone played a role, a total misunderstanding on the part of all concerned, from beginning to end.”

“I don’t understand.” The baron had forgotten the chameleon and even Estela and was watching in fascination this person sitting all doubled over, his chin brushing his knee, as though he were straining to get his words out.

“Hordes of fanatics, bloodthirsty killers, cannibals of the backlands, racial mongrels, contemptible monsters, human scum, base lunatics, filicides, spiritual degenerates,” the visitor recited, lingering over each syllable. “Some of those terms were mine. I not only wrote them, I also believed them.”

“Are you going to pen an apology for Canudos?” the baron asked. “You always did strike me as being a bit crazy. But I find it hard to believe that you’re crazy enough to ask my help in such an undertaking. You’re aware of what Canudos cost me, are you not? That I lost half my possessions? That on account of Canudos the worst misfortune of all happened to me, since Estela…”