The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [310]
“All that reminds me of Galileo Gall,” the baron said, glancing hopefully at the garden. “He, too, had a mad faith in craniums as indexes of character.”
But Dr. Nina Rodrigues’s opinion was not shared by all his colleagues in Salvador. Dr. Honorato de Albuquerque, for instance, was about to publish a study disagreeing with the conclusion reached in the report of the committee of scientists. He maintained that, according to the classification of the Swedish naturalist Retzius, the cranium was typically brachycephalic, with tendencies toward mental rigidity and linearity (fanaticism, for example). Moreover, the cranial curvature was precisely the same as that pointed out by Benedikt as typical of those epileptics who, as Samt wrote, had the missal in their hands, the name of God on their lips, and the stigmata of crime and brigandage in their hearts.
“Don’t you see?” the nearsighted journalist said, breathing as though he were exhausted from some tremendous physical effort. “Canudos isn’t a story; it’s a tree of stories.”
“Do you feel ill?” the baron inquired coldly. “I see that it’s not good for you either to speak of these things. Have you been going around visiting all those doctors?”
The nearsighted journalist was bent double like an inchworm, all hunched over and looking as though he were freezing to death. Once the medical examination was over, a problem had arisen. What to do with the bones? Someone proposed that the skull be sent to the National Museum, as a historic curiosity. But there had been violent opposition. On the part of whom? The Freemasons. People already had Our Lord of Bonfim, they said, and that was quite enough; there was no need for another orthodox place of pilgrimage. If that skull was exposed in a glass case in the National Museum, it would become a second Church of Bonfim, a heterodox shrine. The army agreed: it was necessary to keep the skull from becoming a relic, a seed of future uprisings. It had to be made to disappear. How? How?
“Not by burying it, obviously,” the baron murmured.
Obviously, since the fanaticized people would sooner or later discover where it had been buried. What safer and more remote place than the bottom of the sea? The skull was placed in a gunnysack weighted with rocks, sewed up, and spirited away, by night in a boat, by an army officer, to a place in the Atlantic equidistant from the Fort of São Marcelo and the island of Itaparica, and sent to the muddy sea bottom for coral to build on. The officer entrusted with this secret operation was none other than Lieutenant Pinto Souza: and that’s the end of the story.
He was sweating so hard and had turned so pale that the baron thought to himself: “He’s about to faint.” What did this ridiculous jumping jack feel for the Counselor? A morbid fascination? The simple curiosity of the gossipmongering journalist? Had he really come to believe him to be a messenger from heaven? Why was he suffering and torturing himself so over Canudos? Why didn’t he do what everyone else had done—try to forget?
“Did you say Galileo Gall?” he heard him say.
“Yes.” The baron nodded, seeing those mad eyes, that shaved head, hearing his apocalyptic speeches. “Gall would have understood that story. He thought that the secret of character lay in the bones of people’s heads. Did he ever get to Canudos, I wonder. If he did, it would have been terrible for him to discover that that wasn’t the revolution he’d been dreaming of.”
“It wasn’t, and yet it was,” the nearsighted journalist said. “It was the realm of obscurantism, and at the same time