The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [116]
When Jurema asked whether she could come with them, the Bearded Lady consented, perhaps out of compassion, perhaps out of simple inertia. Between the four of them they hoisted the stranger into the wagon alongside the cobra’s basket and started off again. Their new companions brought them luck, for as darkness fell they were invited to stay for supper in the farm settlement of Quererá. A little old woman blew smoke over Galileo Gall, placed herbs on his wounds, made him a decoction, and said that he’d get well. That night the Bearded Lady did a turn with the cobra to entertain the cowhands, the Idiot performed his clown act, and the Dwarf told them his stories of knights and chivalry. They went on, and as it turned out, the stranger did begin to swallow the mouthfuls of food they gave him. The Bearded Lady asked Jurema if she was his wife. No, she wasn’t: while her husband was away, he had dishonored her, and what else could she do after that except tag along after him? “Now I understand why you’re sad,” the Dwarf said sympathetically.
They went steadily northward, guided by a lucky star, for they found something to eat every single day. On the third day, they gave a show at a village fair. What the villagers liked best was the Bearded Lady: they paid money to prove to themselves that her beard wasn’t false and gently felt her tits to make sure she was really a woman. Meanwhile, the Dwarf told them her life story, since the days when she’d been a normal little girl, back in Ceará, who one day became the shame of her family when hair started growing on her back, her arms, her legs, and her face. People began to whisper that there was sin involved somewhere, that she was the daughter of a sacristan or of the Can. The little girl swallowed some ground glass of the sort used to kill rabid dogs. But she didn’t die and lived the life of the town laughingstock till the King of the Circus, the Gypsy, appeared one day, took her off with him, and made a circus performer out of her. Jurema thought the Dwarf was making the whole story up, but he assured her that every word of it was true. They would sit down to talk together sometimes, and as the Dwarf was nice to her and she trusted him, she told him about her childhood on the hacienda at Calumbi as a servant of the wife of the Baron de Canabrava, a very beautiful and kind woman. It was sad that, instead of staying with the baron, Rufino, her husband, had gone off to Queimadas and become a guide, a horrid occupation that kept him away from home a great deal of the time. And what was sadder still, he’d not been able to make her a baby. Why should God have punished her by keeping her from having a baby? “Who knows?” the Dwarf murmured. God’s will was sometimes difficult to understand.
A few days later, they camped at Ipupiará, a hamlet at a crossroads. A tragedy had just happened. In a fit of madness, a villager had hacked his children and then himself to death with a machete. Since the villagers were holding a funeral for the child martyrs, the circus people did not give a performance, though they announced that there would be one the following evening. The settlement was a tiny one, but it had a general store, where people from all over the region came to buy their provisions.
The following morning the capangas arrived. They came galloping into the village, and the pawing and stamping of their mounts awakened the Bearded Lady, who crawled out from under the tent to see who it was. Villagers appeared at the doors