The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [121]
The man whose name had been mentioned stepped forward: he was a tiny little fellow with slanted eyes, scars, wrinkles, and broad shoulders, who had been Pajeú’s lieutenant.
“I want to go with you to Monte Santo,” he said to Pajeú in a tart voice. “I’ve always looked after you. I bring you good luck.”
“Look after Canudos now. It’s worth more than I am,” Pajeú answered brusquely.
“Yes, stay and bring us good luck,” Abbot João said. “I’ll send you more men so you won’t feel lonesome. Praised be the Blessed Jesus.”
“Praised be He,” several voices answered.
Abbot João had turned his back to them and was running once more, cutting across the fields toward the looming bulk of O Cambaio, where Big João was. As he ran, he thought about his wife. He hadn’t seen her since he had decided to have hiding places and trenches dug along all the trails, an undertaking that had kept him running day and night within a circumference of which Canudos was also the center, as it was of the world. Abbot João had come to know Catarina when he had been one of that handful of men and women—whose number rose and fell like the waters of the river—who entered villages with the Counselor and stretched out on the ground at his side at night after the long, tiring day’s journey to pray with him and listen to his counsels. Among them had been a figure so thin she seemed to be a ghost, enveloped in a tunic as white as a shroud. The former cangaceiro’s eyes had often found hers fixed on him during their marches, prayers, halts to rest. They made him uncomfortable, and at times they frightened him. They were eyes ravaged by pain, eyes that seemed to threaten him with punishments that were not of this world.
One night, when the pilgrims were already asleep round a campfire, Abbot João crawled over to the woman whose eyes he could see in the firelight, riveted on him. “I want to know why you keep looking at me,” he whispered. She answered with an effort, as though struggling to overcome great exhaustion or great repugnance. “I was in Custódia when you came to wreak your vengeance,” she said in a voice that he could barely hear. “The first man you killed, the one who gave the warning shout, was my father. I saw how you plunged your knife in his belly.” Abbot João remained silent, hearing the sound of the campfire crackling, the insects buzzing, the woman breathing, trying to remember those eyes on that dawn so long ago. After a moment, his voice, too, scarcely more than a whisper, he asked: “So not all of you in Custódia died that day?”
“There were three of us who didn’t,” the woman murmured. “Dom Matias, who hid in the straw on his roof. Senhora Rosa, whose wounds healed, though her mind was gone. And me. They thought they’d killed me too, and my wound also healed.” It was as though the two of them were speaking of other people, of other happenings, of a different, poorer life. “How old were you?” the cangaceiro asked. “Ten or twelve, something like that,” she said. Abbot João looked at her: she must still be very young, then, but hunger and suffering had aged her. Continuing to speak very softly so as not to awaken the other pilgrims, the two of them gravely recalled the events of that long-ago night, still so vivid in their memories. She had been raped by three men and later someone had made her kneel in front of a pair of pants that smelled of horse dung, and callused hands had crammed down her throat a member so big it would barely fit in her mouth, and she had been forced to suck it till a gob of his seed spurted out of it and the man ordered her to swallow it. When one of the bandits slashed her with his knife, Catarina felt a great peace come over her. “Was I the one who slashed you with the knife?” Abbot João whispered. “I don’t know,” she whispered back. “Even though it was daylight by then, I couldn’t tell the faces apart and I didn’t know where I was.”
From that night onward, the former cangaceiro and the survivor of Custódia always prayed together and walked along together, recounting to each other stories of their past lives that