The War of the End of the World

I have an ongoing project to work through the books listed on The New York Time's annual best books of the year lists.  These lists, I've found are hit or miss - sometimes I like the book and sometimes I don't - but I have certainly encounter gems I wouldn't have otherwise come across.  One of the books selected on the 1984 list was The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa, which I read earlier this year.  The novel is a fictionalized account of the real-life War of Canudos which took place at the end of the 19th century in back-county Bahia state, Brazil (I have a Brazilian connection now through Roberta by I was perhaps more inclined to select this book to read sooner among the other possibilities).

The 40th Infantry Battalion, Sent to Canudos in 1897

I absolutely loved the story, and I now consider it one of the best books I've ever read.  Llosa's novel is both epic and contained.  It deals with large themes on a grand scale yet through small interactions of individuals.  The story is also deeply tragic.  The beginning of the book follows with sympathy the development of Canudos as a refuge for the poor, the rejected, the marginalized, disenfranchised, and the wretched, yet deeply religious spiritual who find a meaning in following the preacher, Antônio Conselheiro ("The Counselor").  The book's climax swells with the romance of a lost cause - a Brazilian Alamo story.  I found myself with a deep emotional connection for the underdog Canudos community during the assault by the Brazilian army sent to crush them.  The injustice of asymmetry of a state against a struggling people who just want to be left alone which resounds with the irony that they don't even fully understand the motivations of the state which is seeking to subdue them.  My feelings were intensified all the more as, in this case, the story is true.  I highly recommend this book.

The Canudos Siege Survivors

Excerpt [...V...]

Antônio was not yet thirty.  But the ravages of overwork, his exhausting travels, the obsessive way in which he ran his business, made him look older.  He had lost a lot of hair, and his broad forehead, his little chin beard, and his mustache gave him the air of an intellectual.  He was a strong man, somewhat stoop-shouldered, with a bowlegged walk like a cowhand's.  He never showed any interest in anything but business.  While Honório went to fiestas and was not unwilling to down a little glass of anisette as he listed to a cantador or chatter with friends plying the São Francisco at the helm of the boats on which bright-colored figureheads were beginning to appear, Antônio had no social life.  When he wasn't off somewhere on his travels, he stayed behind the counter of the store, checking the account books, or thinking up new lines of business to go into.  He had many customers but few friends, and though he turned up on Sundays at the Church of Our Lady of the Grottoes and occasionally was present at the processions in which the flagellants of the Brotherhood mortified their flesh in order to aid souls in purgatory, he was not thought of as someone possessed of extraordinary religious fervor.  He was a serious, serene, stubborn man, well equipped to confront adversity.

This time the Vilanova family's peregrination through a region brought low by hunger and thirst was longer that the one they had undertaken a decade before as they fled from the smallpox epidemic.  They soon were left without animals.  After an encounter with a band of migrants that the two brothers had to drive off with their rifles, Antônio decided that their five pack mules were too great a temptation for the starving human hordes wandering about the backlands.  He therefore sold four of them in Barro Vermelho for a handful of precious stones.  They butchered the last remaining one, had themselves a banquet, and salted down the meat left over, which kept them alive for a number of days.  One of Honório's sons died of dysentery and they buried him in Borracha, where they had set up a shelter, in which the Sardelinha sisters offered soup man from Spanish plus, rock cavy, and yellow lupine.  But they were unable to hold out very long there either, and wandered off again toward Patamuté and Mato Verde, where Honório was stung by a scorpion.  When he was better, they continued on south, a harrowing journey of weeks and weeks during which the only things they came upon were ghost towns, deserted haciendas, caravans of skeletons drifting aimlessly, as though hallucinated.

In Pedra Grande, another of Honório and Assuncao's sons died of nothing more serious than a head cold.  They were in the midst of burying him, wrapped in a blanket, when, enveloped in a cloud of red-colored dust, some twenty men and women entered the village - among them a creature with a face of a man who crawled about on all fours and a half-naked black - most of them nothing but skin and bones, wearing threadbare tunics and sandals that looked as through they had trod all the paths of the world.  Their leader was a tall, dark man with hair that fell down to his shoulders and quicksilver eyes.  He strode straight over to the Vilanova family, and with a gesture of his hand stopped the brothers, who were already lowering the corpse into the grade.  "Your son?" he asked Honório in a grave voice.   The latter nodded.  "You can't bury him like that," the dark-skinned, dark-haired man said in an authoritative tone of voice.  "He must be properly interred and sent upon his way so that he will be received at heaven's eternal feast of rejoicing."  And before Honório could answer, he turned to those accompanying him: "Let us give him a decent burial, so that the father will receive him in exaltation."  The Vilanovas then saw the pilgrims come to life, run to the trees, cut them down, nail them together, fashion a coffin and a cross with a skill that was proof of long practice.  The dark man took the child in his arms and laid him in the coffin.  As the Vilanovas filled the grave with earth, the man prayed aloud and the others sang hymns of blessing and recited litanies, kneeling round about the cross.  Later, as the pilgrims were about to leave after resting beneath the trees, Antônio Vilanova took out a coin and offered it to the saint.  "As a token of our thanks," he insisted, on seeing that the man was refusing to accept it and contemplating him with a mocking look in his eyes.  "You have nothing to thank me for," he said finally.  "But you would be unable to pay the Father what you own him even with a thousand coins such as this one."  He paused, and then added gently: "You haven't learned to count, my son."

For a long time after the pilgrims had departed, the Vilanovas remained there, sitting lost in thought around a campfire they had built to drive away the insects.  "Was he a madman, compadre?" Honório asked.  "I've seen many a madman on my travels and that man seemed like something more than that," Antônio answered.

When the rains came again, after two years of drought and disasters, the Vilanovas had settled in Caatinga do Moura, a hamlet near which there was a salt pit that Antônio began to work.  All the rest of the family - the Sardelinha sisters and the two children - had survived, but Antônio and Antônia's little boy, after suffering from gummy, secretions round his eyes that made him rub them for days on end, had gradually lots his sight and though he could still distinguish light from dark he was unable to make out people's faces or tell what things around him looked like.  The salt pit turned out to be a good business.  Honório, the women, and the children spent their days drying the salt and preparing sacks of it, which Antônio then went out to sell.  He had made himself a cart, and went about armed with a double-barreled shotgun to defend himself in case he was attacked by bandits.

They stayed in Caatinga do Moura about three years.  With the return of the rains, the villagers came back to work the land and the cowhands to take care of the decimated herds.  For Antônio  all this meant the return of prosperity.  In addition to the salt pit, he soon had a tore and began to deal in riding animals, which he bought and sold with a good profit margin.  When the torrential rains of that December - a decisive moment in his life - turned the little stream that ran through the settlement into a river in flood that carried off the huts of the village and drowned poultry and goats and inundated the salt pit and buried it beneath a sea of mud in a single night, Antônio was at the Nordestina fair, to which he had gone with a load of salt and the intention of buying some mules.

He returned a week later.  The floodwaters had begun to recede Honório  the Sardelinha sisters, and the half-dozen laborers who now worked for them were dejected, but Antônio took this latest catastrophe calmly.  He inventoried what had been salvaged, made calculations in a little notebook, and raised their spirits by telling them that he still had many debts to collect and that like a cat he had too many lives to live to feel defeated by one flood.

But he didn't sleep a wink that night.  They had been given shelter by a villager who was a friend of his, on the hill where all the people who lived on lower ground had taken refuge.  His wife could feel him tossing and turning in the hammock and see by the light of the moon falling on her husband's face that he was consumed by anxiety.  The next morning Antônio informed them that they must make ready for a journey, for they were leaving Caatinga do Moura for good.  His tone was so peremptory that neither his brother nor the womenfolk dared ask him why.  After selling off everything that they were not able to take with them, they took to the road once more, in the cart loaded down with bundles, and plunged yet again into the unknown.  One day they heard Antônio say something that bewildered them.  "That was the third warning," he murmured, with a shadow in the depths of his bright blue eyes.  "We were sent that flood so we'd do something, but I don't know what."  As though embarrassed to ask, Honório said to him: A warning from God, compadre?"  "Could be from the Devil," Antônio replied.

They continued to knock about from place to place, a week here, a month there, and every time the family thought that they were about to settle down, Antônio would impulsively decide to leave.  This vague search for something or someone disturbed them, but none of them protested against this constant moving about.

Finally, after nearly eight months of wandering up and down the backlands, they ended up settling on a hacienda belonging to the Baron de Canabrava that had been abandoned ever since the drought.  The baron had taken all his cattle away and only a few families had stayed on, living here and there in the surrounding countryside, cultivating little plots of land on the banks of the Vaza-Barris and taking their goats up to graze in the Serra de Canabrava, green the year round.  In view of its sparse population and the fact that it was surrounded by mountains, Canudos seemed like the worst possible place for a merchant to set up in business.  Nonetheless, the moment they had taken over what had once been the steward's house, now in ruins, Antônio acted as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.  He immediately began to think up new lines of business that he could go into and set about organizing the family's life with the same high spirits as in days gone by.  And a year later, thanks to his perseverance and determination, the Vilanovas' general store was buying up and selling merchandise for ten leagues around.  Again, Antônio was constantly on the road.

But the day that the pilgrims appeared on the hillside of O Cambaio and entered Canudos by its one and only street, singing hymns of praise to the Blessed Jesus at the top of their lungs, he happened to be home.  From the veranda of the former steward's quarters, now converted into a combination house and store, he watched as these fervent creatures drew closer and closer.  His brother, his wife, his sister-in-law saw him turn pale when the man in dark purple who was heading the procession came over to him.  They recognized those burning eyes, that deep voice, that gaunt body.  "Have you learned to count yet?" the saint asked with a smile, holding out his hand to the merchant.