The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [309]
“Can you imagine what those generals and colonels must have felt on seeing, at last, the corpse of the enemy of the Republic, of the insurgent who massacred three military expeditions and shook the state to its foundations, of the ally of England and the House of Bragança?”
“I met him,” the baron murmured and his visitor remained silent, his watery eyes gazing at him inquisitively. “But more or less the same thing happens with me as happened to you in Canudos, because of your glasses. I can’t picture him clearly, my image of him is blurred. It was some fifteen or twenty years ago. He turned up at Calumbi, with a little band of followers, and it seems we gave them something to eat and some old clothes, because they’d tidied up the tombs and cleaned the chapel. I remember them more as a collection of rags than as a group of men and women. Too many people passing themselves off as saints came by Calumbi. How could I have guessed that, of all of them, he was the important one, the one that would make people forget all the others, the one who would attract to him thousands upon thousands of sertanejos?”
“The land of the Bible was also full of illuminati, of heretics,” the nearsighted journalist said. “That’s why so many people were taken to be the Christ. You didn’t understand, you didn’t see…”
“Are you serious?” The baron thrust his head forward. “Do you believe that the Counselor was really sent by God?”
But the nearsighted journalist’s dull voice plodded on.
A notarized statement was drawn up describing the exhumed corpse, which was so decomposed that they were all sick to their stomachs and had to hold their hands and their handkerchiefs over their noses. The four doctors present measured him, noted down that he was 1.78 meters tall, that he had lost all his teeth, and had not died of a bullet wound since the only mark on his skeleton-thin body was a bruise on his left leg, caused by the friction of a bone splinter or a stone. After a brief consultation, it was decided that he should be decapitated, so that science might study his cranium. It was brought to the medical school of the University of Bahia in order that Dr. Nina Rodrigues might examine it. But before beginning to saw the Counselor’s head off, they slit the throat of the Little Blessed One. They did so right there in the Sanctuary, while the artist-photographer Flávio de Barros took a photograph, and then threw his body into the hole dug in the floor, along with the Counselor’s headless corpse. A happy fate for the Little Blessed One, no doubt: to be buried together with the person he so revered and so faithfully served. But there was one thing that must have terrified him at the last instant: knowing that he was about to be buried like an animal, without any sort of wood covering him. Because those were the things that preyed on people’s minds up there.
He was interrupted by another fit of sneezing. But once he recovered from it he went on talking, more and more excitedly, until at times he couldn’t even manage to get the words out and his eyes rolled in desperate agitation behind the lenses of his glasses.
There had been some argument as to which of the four doctors was to do it. It was Major Miranda Cúrio, the chief of the medical field corps, who took saw in hand, while the three others held the body down. They tried to submerge the head in a container full of alcohol, but since the remains of hair and flesh were beginning to fall apart, they placed it in a sack of lime. That is how it was transported to Salvador. The delicate mission of transporting it was entrusted to First Lieutenant Pinto Souza, the hero of the Third Infantry Battalion, one of the few surviving officers of this unit, which had been decimated by Pajeú in the first encounter. Lieutenant Pinto Souza delivered it to the Faculty of Medicine and Dr. Nina Rodrigues headed the committee of