64 pages • 2 hours read
Mario Vargas LlosaThe War of the End of the World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 1 Summary
Colonel Moreira César and the Seventh Regiment arrive to much fanfare at Queimadas station. Pires Ferreira and Major Brito present themselves and are tasked with caring for the sick and animals in the rear guard, punishment for the damage their defeats have done to the army’s reputation. Moreira César meets the press, explaining that he is not here to interfere in local political squabbles, but to put down the monarchist plot. He warns them to follow his rules if they wish to accompany the regiment. Instead of eating the feast laid out by the two parties, he gives it all to the public.
The Gypsy’s Circus has success travelling the backlands and putting on shows, until the 1877 drought decimates their number, with most performers either leaving or dying. Soon only the Bearded Lady, the Dwarf, and the Idiot remain. One day they come upon a man with red hair like they have never seen before: Galileo Gall. They ask Jurema if he is dead, and she says not yet.
Canudos, the Counselor predicts, “will be destroyed by fire” (151). He is in the Sanctuary with his intimate circle, including Lion of Natuba, whose job is to write down every word the Counselor speaks. Abbot João proposes a “Catholic Guard” to protect the Counselor. Big João will lead it. The Counselor worries where Father Joaquim is; he helps bring supplies to Canudos from the outside world, and right now they are low on building material for the Temple. Father Joaquim is the only priest to perform Mass at Canudos, since the Capuchin friar’s report in Part 1, Chapter 3 forbade it. At that moment, he arrives, reporting the approach of Moreira César’s troops.
Rufino has just finished guiding some cowhands through the mountains when army deserters attack and rob him. He finds another knife, one which has been left in the church as an offering, and he promises Christ he is only borrowing it. His home is deserted but tidied up. After looking around, Rufino walks to nearby Queimadas to see his mother. She says Caifás wants to meet and explain everything. The house “is dirty now” (160), Rufino says, and his mother confirms his assumption that Jurema and Gall have slept together. They can’t continue living there, because of the shame, she says. Now that she has seen him, she will leave for Canudos.
The Baron de Canabrava and his wife disembark in Salvador, returning after several months from Europe. Adalberto de Gumúcio and other members of the Autonomist Party greet them, though far fewer than normal. The rest are waiting at the baron’s house, including the state governor. They discuss the situation in Canudos, mentioning Gall’s body, which was “burnt to a cinder when they found it” (165). The opposition displayed his red hair in the state assembly. Everyone except the baron is panicked by Gonçalves linking them to the conspiracy, though he is disturbed when he hears Moreira César is on the way. However, he decides they must reverse their policy against federal intervention and welcome the army in order to show their loyalty to the Republic. The baron will go to Calumbi, his hacienda, to which he will invite the Seventh Regiment.
Part 3, Chapter 2 Summary
Moreira César and the Seventh Regiment make final preparations to leave Queimadas. The nearsighted journalist accompanies them. Progress is slow, and the colonel, worried that the rebels will slip away, decides to dump excess ammunition at Monte Santo. Major Cunha Matos says the Autonomist Party’s welcome proves they are scared for their position. Passing some starving peasants, the colonel orders them to be fed and notes that their hunger is the result of the aristocracy’s rule.
The Bearded Lady, the Dwarf, and the Idiot agree that Jurema can join them. Gall is carried on their wagon, suffering from fever. They tell one another their life stories. After performing, the group stays the night in a town. The next morning a group of capangas ride in, led by Caifás. He shears Gall’s red hair and pockets it, but refuses to kill him. He tells Jurema that is Rufino’s duty, and she wonders if he will kill her too.
Abbot João brings a box of fuses Father Joaquim has delivered to the storerooms run by Antônio Vilanova. Over the years, he has come to run Canudos, organizing supplies, building, land use and more. João then goes to see Pajéu: they discuss the news that an army regiment is on its way, though neither knows how many men are coming. Abbot João thinks about his wife—she was one of three survivors from his home village where João killed her father in front of her. They prayed every night together, and he told her the tales of chivalry he loves. One day, he asked if she felt enmity toward him; she said no, and soon after the Counselor married them. That was five years ago. Abbot João arrives to tell Big João that he is to lead the Catholic Guard. He feels unworthy of the honor but has no choice but to accept.
Caifás explains to Rufino that Galileo Gall is alive and that he lied to Gonçalves. He reveals that Jurema saved Gall’s life: “that’s how I knew she had become his woman” (185). They discuss how authorities are press-ganging people into the Rural Police and that, because so many have gone to Canudos, it will be like fighting your own family. Rufino says he has “another war to wage” and departs Queimadas.
The Baron de Canabrava and colleagues are at Calumbi, bemoaning the changes to Brazil and the decline in their power. The baron believes that nothing is settled yet. Rufino is presented and begs leave of the baron to break his promise to Jurema—the baron had “given” her to him when both were indentured laborers. Rufino explains that a “foreigner” trying to get arms to Canudos has absconded with her (190). The three aristocrats are stunned. They discover the corpse was a murderer’s and that Gall is alive. The baron grants Rufino permission to “do what your conscience bids you” (191).
Part 3, Chapter 3 Summary
Moreira César supervises the execution of several peasants who have not followed his order to register their firearms with the Seventh Regiment. “In the last analysis, the one thing man fears is death,” hence it is “the only effective punishment” (193). The nearsighted journalist rides on ahead with the colonel. They are developing a bond, “a curiosity born of a mutual repulsion” (195). Dismounting, César suddenly starts foaming at the mouth and collapses. Because the journalist knows the region, Colonel Tamarindo asks where they can take him to receive medical care; there is only one place—the Baron de Canabrava’s hacienda, Calumbi. Though César has forbidden the regiment from quartering there, Captain Olímpio de Castro offers to take him and allows the journalist to accompany them.
Gall recovers somewhat as the group stays in town for several days. He is ecstatic to learn that Brito’s expedition has been crushed and insists they continue toward Canudos. They come across a group of bandits, and Gall, a phrenologist, is allowed to palpate the leader’s head. The bandit leader asks if Gall is “a magician” and wants to know how he is going to die (201). The bandit used to be in Pajeú’s gang. They discuss Canudos, and Gall urges him to join his comrades: “They’re fighting so that heaven will descend on earth” (203).
Big João feels unworthy of leading the Catholic Guard, but the Counselor believes in him. The Little Blessed One composes an oath that the illiterate João learns by heart. With Antônio Vilanova, he compiles a list of people to serve under him. Over the next few days they undergo a ruthless selection, until he has 400 under his command. Canudos receives news that the army on its way numbers 1,200 men.
When Rufino arrives in the village Jurema, Gall and the circus performers have just left, he finds out about Gall’s fascination with Canudos. For three days, he loses their trail, until in another town he learns that Toughbeard’s bandits ran into them. He leaves to find the bandits.
At Calumbi, Estela, the baron’s wife, tends to Moreira César. She invites him to tea with her husband after his bath. They discuss the nearsighted journalist, also present, noting that he was the baron’s protégé when he worked for his paper. Estela gifts César some cognac, but he says he doesn’t drink. He begins telling them what is wrong with Brazil: The landed aristocracy has kept it from developing. The tension mounts as their opposing points of view come to a head. Moreira César excuses himself, but the baron comes to his room. He tries to explain Gonçalves’s conspiracy theory, stressing that the explosive bullets are not advanced European weapons but traditional “limonite projectiles” (216). César’s silence makes the baron realize he is part of the conspiracy. He and the baron are “mortal enemies,” the colonel explains (217). César mounts his horse and rides off.
Part 3, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Part 3 introduces Moreira César, who is the embodiment of the kind of leader Gonçalves desires to lead the Republic. As with the Counselor’s followers, he has a nickname—“throat-slitter,” which comes from the punishment he meted out to participants in an earlier rebellion. The contrast in meaning and diction between this nickname and the portentous nicknames like Mother of Men and the Little Blessed One represents a reversal of their respective social statuses. César is a renowned war hero, yet “throat-slitter” is the kind of nickname one would expect a bandit to have; the Counselor’s followers are peasants and bandits, yet their nicknames elevate them to the status of religious heroes. This disjunction is echoed in Moreira César’s fundamental misunderstanding of the rebellion and how to defeat it. He claims that “[i]n the last analysis, the one thing man fears is death,” hence it is “the only effective punishment” (193). Yet the Counselor welcomes death, in Part 3 calling it “a fiesta for the just man” (238). This view of death is at the root of The Radical Power of Religious Fanaticism. By giving his followers an overwhelming faith in the afterlife, he equips them to face those who would use the threat of death to suppress their movement.
The colonel’s military brutality and nationalist passion represent, on a larger scale, the same machismo that drives Rufino to seek revenge on Gall for “stealing” Jurema. This ideology crosses the novel’s class boundaries; whereas religion is necessary above all for the poor, and authoritarianism (either monarchist or republican) advanced by politicians, machismo is a component of the way both those at the top and bottom live their lives. To Rufino, it is irrelevant whether Gall and Jurema sleeping together was consensual; the fact they have means his house “is dirty now” (190). César is repulsed by the nearsighted journalist, yet fascinated by him, because he lacks “anything that the colonel would call virile, martial” (195). This ideology is further evidence of The Tragedy of Political Idealism—Rufino’s machismo is a politics of private life, governing relations between men and women, and his rigid adherence to it gets both him and Gall killed.
The introduction of the Baron de Canabrava in these pages paints him as a very different character to Gall and César; he is a practical politician, rather than an idealist. By showing his sense of humor, generosity, love for his wife, and cultured interests, Vargas Llosa establishes him as a more sympathetic, fuller character, with a life beyond politics. This impression accumulates gradually over the rest of the book, before its brutal puncturing in the final chapter.
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