The War Of The End Of The World Read Free Page A

his crippled mother and had stood at her side gossiping at innumerable baptisms, confirmations, wakes, weddings—went to One-Eye’s cobbler shop to force him to send Antônio to catechism classes so as to ready him for his First Communion. They threw such a scare into him by telling him that God would hold him responsible if the boy died without having made it that the shoemaker grudgingly agreed to allow him to attend the lessons at the mission, every afternoon, before vespers.
    Something out of the ordinary occurred then in the boy’s life; shortly thereafter, as a result of the changes that took place in him because of the sermons of the Lazarists, people began to call him the Little Blessed One. He would come out of the sessions where they preached with his eyes no longer fixed on his surroundings and as though purified of dross. One-Eye spread the word about that he often found him kneeling in the darkness at night, weeping for Christ’s sufferings, so caught up in them that he was able to bring him back to this world only by cradling him in his arms and rocking him. On other nights he heard him talking in his sleep, in agitation, of Judas’s betrayal, of Mary Magdalene’s repentance, of the crown of thorns, and one night he heard him make a vow of perpetual chastity, like St. Francis de Sales at the age of eight.
    Antônio had found a vocation to which to devote his entire life. He continued to fulfill, most obediently, all the orders given him by One-Eye, but he did so with his eyes half closed and moving his lips in such a way that everyone knew that, even though he was sweeping or hurrying about the shoemaker’s shop or holding the shoe sole that One-Eye was nailing, he was really praying. The boy’s conduct disturbed and terrified his foster father. In the corner where he slept, the Little Blessed One gradually built an altar, with printed images they gave him at the mission and a cross of xiquexique wood that he himself carved and painted. He would light a candle before it to pray on arising in the morning and on going to bed at night, and all his free time was spent before it, on his knees, with his hands joined and a contrite expression, rather than hanging around the ranches, riding unbroken horses bareback, hunting doves, or going to see bulls castrated, the way the other youngsters of Pombal did.
    After making his First Communion, he was an altar boy for Dom Casimiro, and when the latter died he continued to serve Mass for the Lazarist Fathers of the mission, even though in order to do so he was obliged to walk a league a day to get there and back. He swung the censer in processions and helped decorate the portable platforms and the altars on the street corners where the Virgin and the Blessed Jesus halted to rest. His religious devotion was as great as his goodness. It was a familiar sight to the inhabitants of Pombal to see him serving as a guide for blind Adolfo, whom he sometimes took out to the pasture grounds for Colonel Ferreira’s colts, where he had worked till he got cataracts and which he now sorely missed every day of his life. The Little Blessed One would take him by the arm and lead him across the fields, with a stick in his hand to poke about in the dirt on the lookout for snakes, patiently listening to his stories. And Antônio also collected food and clothing for Simeão the leper, who had been living like a wild animal ever since the villagers had forbidden him to come anywhere near Pombal. Once a week the Little Blessed One took him a bundleful of bits of bread and jerky and different sorts of grain that he had begged for him, and the villagers would spy him in the distance, guiding the old man with long locks and bare feet and covered with nothing but a yellow animal pelt as he made his way along amid the rocky stretches on the hill where his cave was.
    The first time he saw the Counselor, the Little Blessed One was fourteen years old and had had a terrible disappointment just a few