The War Of The End Of The World Read Free

of the editor-in-chief, where Epaminondas Gonçalves is sitting, still watching the stranger’s every move as he departs.
    “By order of the Governor of the State of Bahia, His Excellency Senhor Luiz Viana, a company of the Ninth Infantry Battalion, under the command of Lieutenant Pires Ferreira, left Salvador today, charged with the mission of wresting control of Canudos from the bandits who have occupied the estate and of capturing their leader, the Sebastianist Antônio Conselheiro,” he reads aloud as he stands in the doorway. “Page one or inside, sir?”
    “Have it set out below the announcements of funerals and Masses,” the editor-in-chief says. He points toward the street, down which the man dressed in black has disappeared. “Do you know who that fellow is?”
    “Galileo Gall,” the nearsighted journalist answers. “A Scotsman who’s been going around asking people in Bahia if he could feel their heads.”

    He was born in Pombal, the son of a shoemaker and his mistress, the latter a cripple who, despite her handicap, had brought three boys into the world before him and gave birth after him to a little girl who survived the drought. They named him Antônio, and if there had been such a thing as logic in this world, he should never have gone on living, for when he was still a baby crawling on all fours the catastrophe occurred that devastated the region, killing crops, men, and animals. Because of the drought, almost everyone in Pombal emigrated to the coast, but Tibúrcio da Mota, who in his half century of life had never journeyed more than a league away from that village in which there was not one pair of feet that did not wear shoes made by his hands, announced that he would not leave his house. And he remained faithful to his resolve, staying there in Pombal with no more than a couple dozen other people at most, for even the Lazarist Fathers’ mission cleared out entirely.
    When, a year later, the émigrés from Pombal began to return, encouraged by the news that the low-lying ground had been flooded once more and cereal crops could again be planted, Tibúrcio da Mota was dead and buried, along with his crippled concubine and their three oldest children. They had eaten everything that was edible, and when all that was gone, everything that was green, and at the end, everything that teeth could chew. The parish priest, Dom Casimiro, who buried them one after the other, asserted that they had not died of hunger but of stupidity, by eating the leather in the cobbler’s shop and drinking the waters of the Lagoa do Boi, a breeding ground for mosquitoes and pestilence that even young goats shunned. Dom Casimiro took Antônio and his little sister in, kept them alive on a diet of air and prayers, and, when the houses of the village were full of people once again, sought a home for them.
    The little girl was taken in by her godmother, who brought her along with her when she went to work at one of the estates belonging to the Baron de Canabrava. Antônio, then five years old, was adopted by the other shoemaker in Pombal, known as One-Eye—he had lost the other in a street fight—who had learned his trade in Tibúrcio da Mota’s cobbler shop and on returning to Pombal had inherited his clientele. He was a bad-tempered man who often drank too much, so that dawn found him lying in a stupor in the street, reeking of raw sugarcane brandy. He did not have a wife, and made Antônio work like a beast of burden, sweeping, cleaning, handing him nails, shears, saddles, boots, and bringing him hides from the tannery. He made him sleep on animal skins, next to the worktable where One-Eye spent all his time when he was not drinking with his pals.
    The orphan was emaciated, docile, mere skin and bones, with shy eyes that aroused the compassion of the women of Pombal, who, whenever they could, gave him something to eat or the clothes that their sons had outgrown. One day a group of them—half a dozen women who had known