The War of the End of the World

Mario Vargas Llosa

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.'

Nostalgia is an act of cowardice, Gall.

Gall looked at him, disconcerted, and found no truth or lie to offer him in reply.

But the soldiers fired point blank at the two adversaries and then threw themselves upon her, grunting, and dragged her into the dry underbrush. Badly wounded, the tracker and the phrenologist went on fighting.

You struck him in the face, Rufino, Jurema thinks. What did you gain by that, Rufino? What use was there in getting your revenge if you've died, if you've left me all alone in the world, Rufino? She does not weep, she does not move, she does not take her eyes from the two motionless men. That hand on Rufino's head reminds her that in Queimadas, when to the misfortune of all of them God willed that the stranger should come to offer her husband work, he had once felt Rufino's head and read its secrets for him, just as Porfirio the sorcerer read them in coffee grounds and Dona Cacilda in a basin of water.

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.

The important thing in these dispatches are the intimations, the metallic, incisive, high-pitched voice said. Not what they say but what they suggest, what's left to the reader's imagination. They went to Canudos to see English officers. And they saw them. I talked with my replacement for an entire afternoon. He never once lied deliberately, he just didn't realize he was lying. The simple fact is that he didn't write what he saw but what he felt and believed, what those all around him felt and believed. That's how the whole tangled web of false stories and humbug got woven, becoming so intricate that there is now no way to disentangle it. How is anybody ever going to know the story of Canudos?

With all due respect, he murmured, I would like you to be my wife.

During the regiment's brief stay in Salvador, Dr Gama showed Teotonio around the medical school at the University of Bahia, in the Praca da Basilica Cathedral, and opposite the yellow facade with tall blue ogival windows, beneath the coral trees, the coconut palms, and the crotons, the doctor and the student had sat drinking sweetish brandy in front of the kiosks set up on the black-and-white mosiac pavement, amid the vendors hawking trinkets and women selling hot foods from braziers. They went on drinking till dawn, which found them, besides themselves with happiness, in a brothel of mulattas. As they climbed onto the train to Queimadas, Dr Gama had his disciple down an emetic potion, to ward off African syphilis, he explained to him.

Don't you see? the nearsighted journalist said, breathing as though he were exhausted from some tremendous physical effort. Canudos isn't a story; it's a tree of stories.

But Abbot Joao didn't let him. Was what he did his fault? he said, transfixed. Was it his fault that he committed countless cruelties? Could he do otherwise? Wasn't he paying his mother's debt? From whom should the Father have sought retribution for those wicked deeds? From him or from the duchess? His eyes were riveted on the Dwarf, in terrible anguish. Answer me, answer me.

I had never heard of Canudos before I read The War of the End of the World. Such is my ignorance. The very idea of a rebellion that doesn't seek to invade or expand or attack but denies the authority of the state in whose confines it finds itself, should have been familiar to me. After all, such was the founding of my own country. Perhaps. Except there are differences. Is it a rebellion if a group of people begin living in an abandon places far off in the backlands of a country and refuse to acknowledge the authority of the government? I guess. But not a terribly visible one. Yet Canudos itched.

Does it threaten a government if some group of people under the sway of that government deny it? It would be a threat to several governments (city, county, state, federal) for me to form a group of people and saw that we deny the government's authority here. But that is because I survive by the authority of the government. This life would not be possible without government. In Canudos however, they had isolated themselves from the rest of Brazil. They did not partake of the resources of the government, so perhaps they had the right to deny it's authority.

Whatever you think, the reality is, governments are not in the business of shrinking. For the same reason that the US Civil War was fought, the same reason Puerto Rico can never leave the US, the same reason that the UK's prominence and power began to wain with the relinquishment of the colonies, governments fail if ever they shrink. Or at least so firmly believe this that never will they shrink of their own accord. It's not their nature.

There's a lot going on out there.