The War Of The End Of The World Read Online Free PDF

ship’s pilot, skillfully skirting storms as he makes for a safe port.
    What port was the Counselor heading for with this endless journeying? No one asked him, nor did he say, and probably he didn’t know. He was accompanied now by dozens of followers who had abandoned everything to devote themselves to the life of the spirit. 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, blacksmiths, cobblers, or carpenters; and mulattoes and blacks who had been runaways 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. And there were the women, both old and young, sound in body or crippled, who were always the first whose hearts were moved during the nightly halt when the Counselor spoke to them of sin, of the wicked deeds of the Dog or of the goodness of the Virgin. They were the ones who mended the dark purple habit, using the thorns of thistles for needles and palm fibers for thread, and the ones who thought up a way to make him a new one when the old one got ripped on the bushes, and the ones who made him new sandals and fought for possession of the old ones, objects that had touched his body to be cherished as precious relics. And each evening after the men had lighted the bonfires, they were the ones who prepared the angu of rice or maize flour or sweet manioc boiled in broth and the few mouthfuls of squash that sustained the pilgrims. The Counselor’s followers never had to worry about food, for they were frugal and received gifts wherever they went: from the humble, who hastened to bring the Counselor a hen or a sack of maize or cheese freshly made, and also from landowners, who—after the ragged entourage had spent the night in the outbuildings and next morning, on their own initiative and without charging a cent, cleaned and swept the chapel of the hacienda—would send servants to bring them fresh milk, food, and sometimes a young she-goat or a kid.
    He had gone all around the backlands so many times, back and forth so many times, up and down so many mountainsides, that everyone knew him. The village priests, too. There weren’t many of them, and what few there were seemed lost in the vastness of the backlands, and in any event there were not enough of them to keep the countless churches going, so that they were visited by pastors only on the feast day of the patron saint of the town. The vicars of certain places, such as Tucano and Cumbe, allowed him to address the faithful from the pulpit and got along well with him; others, such as the ones in Entre Rios and in Itapicuru, would not permit him to do so and fought him. In other towns, in order to repay him for what he did for the churches and cemeteries, or because his spiritual influence on the people of the backlands was so great that they did not want to be on bad terms with their parishioners, the vicars grudgingly granted him permission to recite litanies and preach in the church courtyard after Mass.
    When did the Counselor and his entourage of penitents learn that in 1888, far off in those cities whose very names had a foreign sound to them—São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, even Salvador, the state capital—the monarchy had