FIESTA OF DEATH

Books

James Wolcott

Iramping through the dust holes of Brazil is a man in a purple tunic, his arrival announced to the tinkle of shepherd’s bells. He is not a bringer of glad tidings, this visitor— doom and prophecy have fixed their talons on his determined shoulders. In open-air meetings he tells his listeners (cowhands, freedmen, slaves, peons) that Armageddon is on the horizon, ready to unleash its dogs. In 1898, heads will shrink and hats will grow larger; in 1899, rivers will run red and a new planet will orbit the heavens. By 1900, the heavens will be black as a slate board, wiped clean of stars. The man making these dire pronouncements comes to be known as the Counselor, and like everyone else in Mario Vargas Llosa’s scorched-earth epic, The War of the End of the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), he’s proud, fierce, steadfast—and completely nuts.

The War of the End of the World is a novel in which reason cracks like a crust, and through the fissures leap followers of every stripe of fanaticism, wearing sombreros three sizes too big for their shrinking heads. The book might have been a comedy of disaster, a south-of-the-border Candide, but Vargas Llosa never forgets that every catastrophe leaves behind a chorus of weeping children and a scatter of uncared-for animals. Satire loses its clout at the sight of starving ribs.

When the Counselor sets up a renegade religious commune at Canudos, in Bahia, he triggers a war in which government troops, true believers, bandits, and wronged villagers clash like ignorant armies by night, swarming blindly over the lumps of dead. His disciples are a ragtag army of the mad, sainted, brutal, and infirm, some of whom are as savage in their service of the Lord as they were in the old days of freelance plundering. Now when they string up mutilated bodies for buzzards to gobble, they can feel they’re striking a blow against the Antichrist. And they do feel it—Vargas Llosa shows how even the most dirt-simple sadist can take on an aura of holiness when he feels his murdering hands are being guided by the Almighty. To Marxists and anarchists, the Counselor’s flock is the vanguard thrust of the dispossessed rising in rebellion. Their commune is “a libertarian citadel, without money, without masters, without politics, without priests, without bankers, without landowners, a world built with the faith and the blood of the poorest of the poor.” Blood aplenty, it turns out; this laboratory for liberation theology is primed to explode. Tumultuous and exacting, The War of the End of the World is one of the bloodiest, crudest books I’ve ever read, and one of the most enthralling. It seats the reader in the upper balcony of hell and puts on quite a show.

It’s not a novel to be admired for delicate flecks of description, or richness of characterization. In one sentence alone we meet a man with “piercing” eyes and “flaring” nostrils, and elsewhere two characters ride off in “a cloud of dust.” (Hi-yo, Silver!) No, this is a book stripped of all flowers and plumage; it might have been carved out of the side of a mountain. Emphasizing action and scope over fine detail and introspection, The War of the End of the World moves cinematically up and down those rocky slopes, every frame bustling with horses, glinting steel, and carnage. The man who seems to occupy the director’s chair for most of War’s running time is Sam Peckinpah, a legendary pro when it comes to refereeing massacres. Vargas Llosa’s novel echoes Peckinpah not only in those scenes of violence where blood spurts like ale from an uncorked keg but in its images of death coolly collecting its spoils: severed heads salted down like jerky and carried off as trophies; vultures “clearing their throats like hoarse old men.’’ At one point in the book the Counselor says, “Death is a fiesta for the just man,” and that’s what death is in Peckinpah’s work, in Vargas Llosa’s novel—a mad, streaming fiesta. Yet Vargas Llosa’s head is sober and clear; he hasn’t become so intoxicated with violence that he treats it as mere spectacle, in flying splatters of red. His vision of suffering and innocence in War is “a young albino girl, slightly deformed, barefoot, with bruises showing through the tears in her garments.” She’s bruised because she’s been gang-raped by soldiers, and rape is the great neverending horror of this book. The future is itself being raped, ripped untimely from its womb.

One of the bloodiest, cruelest books I’ve ever read, and one of the most enthralling.

Although the action in War parallels much of the strife in Latin America today (the vultures now roost at garbage dumps like El Salvador’s El Play on, where victims of the country’s death squads are disfigured and heaped), the novel isn’t a useful guide to the roots of today’s slaughter—indeed, doesn’t try to be. The message of Vargas Llosa’s novel is that the civil violence that curses Latin America is beyond rational inquiry, beyond comprehension; the machismo of the soldier and outlaw is a fever that has driven out all thought and sense of proportion. Perhaps the perfect emblem of this brute ignorance is two rivals’ fighting over a woman in a mud heap, “tattered wrecks” whose wrestling so coats them with muck that they can no longer be told apart. Victor and victim become one damp, wedded ruin. (It recalls the great scene in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight where soldiers, caked with mud, sink like sculptures into the trampled earth.) Despairing as War is, it has the exhilaration of a climbing, confident narrative, its camera-eye panning across a field of buming crosses. Vargas Llosa’s previous novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter had boundless energy and cheek, but it was a trifle too cute. The War of the End of the World is as far from cute as you can get. A lot of readers will find this book rough going, but those who stick with it to the end will feel as if they’d walked barefoot over vales of powdered bone. And the crazed, inspired fillip that ends the novel will make them feel that every step was worth it.