The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [48]
The victory was not soon won. There were many martyrs in these hours of deafening noise. The sound of running feet and shots would be followed by intervals of immobility and silence which, a moment later, would again be shattered. But before mid-morning the Counselor’s men knew that they had won when they saw some half-dressed figures, who, by order of their leaders or because fear had overcome them before the jagunços did, were running off pell-mell across country, abandoning firearms, tunics, leggings, boots, knapsacks. The men from Canudos shot at them knowing that they were out of range, but it did not occur to anyone to pursue them. Shortly thereafter the other soldiers fled, and as they ran for their lives some of them fell amid the nests of jagunços 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 heating themselves called dogs and devils, amid prognostications that their souls would be condemned as their corpses rotted.
The crusaders remained in Uauá for several hours after their victory. Most of them spent these hours sleeping, propped up one against the other, recovering from the exhaustion of the march and the tension of the battle. Some of them, however, urged on by Abbot Joáo, searched the huts for rifles, ammunition, bayonets, and cartridge belts left behind by the soldiers as they fled. Maria Quadrado, Alexandrinha Correa, and Gertrudes, a street vendor from Teresina who had a bullet wound in her arm but continued to bustle about nonetheless, went around placing the dead bodies of jagunços in hammock litters so that they could be carried back to Canudos to be buried. The women who were healers, the herb doctors, the midwives, the bonesetters, any number of helpful souls gathered round the wounded, wiping away the blood, bandaging them, or simply offering prayers and incantations to ward off their pain.
Carrying their dead and wounded and following the riverbed of the Vaza-Barris, at a slower pace this time, the elect walked the ten leagues back. They entered Canudos a day and a half later, acclaiming the Counselor, applauded, embraced, and greeted with smiles by those who had stayed behind to work on the Temple. The Counselor, who had neither eaten nor drunk a single thing since they had left, gave his counsel that evening from a scaffolding of the towers of the Temple. He prayed for the dead, offered thanks to the Blessed Jesus and to John the Baptist for the victory that had been won, and spoke of how evil had put down roots here on this earth. Before time began, God filled everything and space did not exist. In order to create the world, the Father had had to withdraw within Himself so as to create a vacuum, and this absence of God gave rise to space, in which there sprang up, in seven days, the stars, light, the waters, plants, animals, and man. But once the earth had been created through the withdrawal of the divine substance, there had also been created the conditions favorable for what was most opposed to the Father, namely sin, to establish its kingdom. Hence the world was born beneath the sway of a divine curse, as the Devil’s realm. But the Father took pity on men and sent His Son to reconquer for God this earthly space ruled by the Demon.
The Counselor said that one of the streets of Canudos would be named São Joáo Batista after the patron saint of Uauá.
“Governor Viana is sending another expedition to Canudos,” Epaminondas Gonçalves says. “Under the command of an officer I