The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [43]
They plunged back into their daily round of violence, without thinking too much about their lucky stars or about the unlucky stars of the others. Once more they walked, stole, fought, hid out, their lives continually hanging by a thread. Satan João still had an indefinable feeling in his breast, the certainty that at any moment now something was going to happen that he had been waiting for ever since he could remember.
They came upon the hermitage, half fallen to ruins, along a turnoff of the trail leading to Cansanção. Standing before half a hundred people in rags and tatters, a tall, strikingly thin man, enveloped in a dark purple tunic, was speaking. He did not interrupt his peroration or even cast a glance at the newcomers. João had the dizzying feeling that something was boiling in his brain as he listened to what the saint was saying. He was telling the story of a sinner who, after having committed every evil deed under the sun, repented, lived a dog’s life, won God’s pardon, and went to heaven. When the man ended his story, he looked at the strangers. Without hesitating, he addressed João, who was standing there with his eyes lowered. “What is your name?” he asked him. “Satan João,” the cangaceiro murmured. “You had best call yourself Abbot João, that is to say, an apostle of the Blessed Jesus,” the hoarse voice said.
Three days after having sent off the letter describing his visit to Brother João Evangelista de Monte Marciano to L’Etincelle de la révolte, Galileo Gall heard a knock on the door of the garret above the Livraria Catilina. The moment he set eyes on them, he knew the individuals were police underlings. They asked to see his papers, looked through his belongings, questioned him about his activities in Salvador. The following day the order expelling him from the country as an undesirable alien arrived. Old Jan van Rijsted pulled strings and Dr. José Batista de Sá Oliveira wrote to Governor Luiz Viana offering to be responsible for him, but the authorities obdurately notified Gall that he was to leave Brazil on the Marseillaise when it sailed for Europe a week later. He would be given, free of charge, a one-way ticket in third class. Gall told his friends that being driven out of a country—or thrown in jail or killed—is one of the vicissitudes endured by every revolutionary and that he had been living the life of one almost since the day he’d been born. He was certain that the British consul, or the French or the Spanish one, was behind the expulsion order, but, he assured them, none of the police of these three countries would get their hands on him, since he would make himself scarce if the Marseillaise made calls in African ports or in Lisbon. He did not appear to be alarmed.
Both Jan van Rijsted and Dr. Oliveira had heard him speak with enthusiasm of his visit to the Monastery of Our Lady of Mercy, but both of them were thunderstruck when he announced to them that since he was being thrown out of Brazil, he intended to make “a gesture on behalf of the brothers of Canudos” before departing, inviting people to attend a public demonstration of solidarity with them. He would call upon all freedom lovers in Bahia to gather together and explain to them why he had done so: “In Canudos a revolution is coming into being, by spontaneous germination, and it is the duty of progressive-minded men to support it.” Jan van Rijsted and Dr. Oliveira did their best to dissuade him, telling him again and again that such a step was utter folly, but Gall nonetheless tried to get notice of the meeting published in the one opposition paper. His failure at the office of the Jornal de Notícias did not dishearten him. He was pondering the possibility of having leaflets printed that he himself would hand out in the streets, when something happened that made him write: “At last! I was living too peaceful