The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 84

Worse trials still awaited them in Canudos; they must not allow fear to overcome them, the Blessed Jesus would aid those who had faith. The end of the world continued to be a subject he very often spoken of. The earth, worn out after so many centuries of giving forth plants and animals and sheltering man, would ask the Father if it might rest. God would give His consent and the acts of destruction would commence. That was what was meant by the words of the Bible: "I bring not peace, but a sword!"

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 82

I asked him if they were prepared for more attacks, since the bourgeoisie reacts like a wild beast when the sacrosanct right of private ownership of property is violated. He left me dumbfounded by murmuring that all land belongs to the Good Lord Jesus, and that the Counselor is building the largest church in the world in Canudos. I tried to explain to him that it was not becaue they were building churches that the powers that be had sent soldiers to do battle with them, but he answered that it was precisely for that reason, since the Republic is trying to wipe out religion. I then heard, comrades, a strange diatribe against the Republic, delivered with quiet self-assurance, without a trace of passion. Th Republic is bent on oppressing the Church and the faithful, doing away with all the religious orders as it has already suppressed the Society of Jesus, and the most notorious proof of its intentions is its having instituted civil marriage, a scandalous act of impiety when the sacrament of marriage created by God already exists.
I can imagine the disappointment of many of my readers, and their suspicions on reading the foregoing, the Canudos, like the Vendee uprising at the time of the French Revolution, is a reactionary movement, inspired by priests. It is not as simple as that, comrades. As you know from my last letter, the Church condemns the Counselor and Canudos, and the jaguncos have seized the lands of a baron. I asked the man with the scar on his face if the poor of Brazil were better off during the monarchy. He immediately answered yes, since it was the monarchy that had abolished slavery. And he explained to me that the Devil, using Freemasons and Protestants as his tools, overthrew the Emperor Dom PedroII, in order to restore slavery. Those were his very words: the Counselor has inculcated upon his followers the belief that the republicans are advocates of slavery.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 79

He returned a week later. The floodwaters had begun to recede. Honorio, the Sardelinha sisters, and the half-dozen laborers who no worked for them were dejected, but Antonio 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.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 78

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.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 77

Antoni's face was pale. "We have to start all over again," Honorio murmured. "Not in this city, though," his brother answered.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 71

Shortly thereafter the other soldiers fled, and as they ran for their lives some of them fell amid the nests of jaguncos that had formed in this corner or that, where they were beaten to death with spades and shovels and done in with knives in less time than it takes to tell. They died hearing themselves called dogs and devils, amid prognostications that their souls would be condemned as their corpses rotted.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 48

"The Church has lost its authority there on account of a crazy man who spends his time making the whole mob work all day long building a stone temple." I was unable to share his consternation and instead felt only happiness and sympathy for those men, thanks to whom, it would appear, there is being reborn from its ashes, in the backlands of Brazil, the Idea that the forces of reaction believe they have drowned in the blood of revolutions defeated in Europe. Till my next letter or never.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 37

The sun burns the backlands to a cinder, gleams on the greenish-black waters of Itapicuru, reflects off the houses of Queimadas lining the right edge of the river, at the foot of gullies of reddish clay. Sparse trees cast their shadow over the rocky, rolling terrain stretching south eastward, in the direction of Riacho da Onca. The rider -- boots, broad-brimmed hat, black frock coat -- escorted by his shadow and that of his mule, heads unhurriedly toward a thicket of lead-colored bushes. Behind him, already far in the distance, the rooftops of Queimadas still glow like fire. To his left, several hundred meters away, a hut at the top of a rise can be seen.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 29

They were lying underneath a tree, smoking cigars, and in a sudden fit of boldness he asked him point-blank: "Why did you kill the mistress?" "Because I've got the Dog in me," Big Joao answered immediately. "Don't talk to me about that any more." The Kid thought that his companion had told him the truth.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 25

He does not resemble the government officials or the doctor in the white smock with whom he has come here. Young, nearsighted, with thick eyeglasses. He does not take notes with a pencil but with a goose-quill pen. He is dressed in a pair of trousers coming apart at the seams, an off-white jacket, a cap with a visor, and all of his apparel seems fake, wrong, out of place on his awkward body. He is holding a clipboard with a number of sheets of paper and dips his goose-quill pen in an inkwell, with the cork of a wine bottle for a cap, that is fastened to the sleeve of his jacket. He looks more or less like a scarecrow.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 18

During the many months of drought the Counselor and his disciples worked unceasingly, burying those dead of starvation, disease, or anguish whom they came across along the sides of the roads, rotting corpses that were food for wild beasts and even humans. They made coffins and dug graves for these brothers and sisters. They were a motley group, a chaotic mixture of races, backgrounds, and occupations. Among them were whites dressed all in leather who had made their living driving the herds of the "colonels," the owners of great cattle ranches; full-blooded Indians with reddish skins whose great great-grandfathers had gone about half naked and eaten the hearts of their enemies; mestizos who had been farm overseers, tinsmiths, black smiths, cobblers, or carpenters; and mullatoes and blacks who had been runaway from the sugarcane plantations on the coast and from the rack, the stocks, the floggings with bull pizzles and the brine thrown on the raw lash marks, and other punishments invented for slaves in the sugar factories.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 10

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 hi 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.

The War Of The End OF The World - pg. 7

The man in black nods. He has a little beard as red as his hair, and piercing bright blue eyes; his broad mouth is firmly set, and his
flaring nostrils seem to be breathing in more air than his body requires.
"Provided it doesn't cost more than two milreis," he murmurs in broken
Portugese. "That's my entire capital."

The War Of The End Of The World - Opening

The man was tall and so thin he seemed to be always in profile. He was dark-skinned and rawboned, and his eyes burned with perpetual fire. He wore shepherd's sandals and the dark purple tunic draped over his body called to mind the cassocks of those missionaries who every so often visited the villages of the backlands, baptizing hordes of children and marrying men and women who were cohabiting.

To EUCLIDES DA CUNHA
in the other world;
and, in this world,
to NELDA PINON

First published in the United States of America
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. 1984
Published in Penguin Books 1997

Originally published in Spanish as La Guerra del fin del mundo
by Editorial Seix Barral, S.A., Spain

Printed in the United States of America
Set in Aldus
Designed by Cynthia Krupat