The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [130]
Another surprise awaits them before they reach Monte Santo, at the crossroads where a small blurred sign indicates the turnoff to the hacienda of Calumbi; the column arrives there six hours after having resumed its march. Of the five correspondents, only the gaunt scarecrow from the Jornal de Notícias will witness the incident at close hand. A curious relationship has sprung up between him and the commanding officer of the Seventh Regiment, which it would be inexact to call friendship or even congeniality. It is a question, rather, of a curiosity born of a mutual repulsion, of the attraction exerted by diametrical opposites. In any event, the man who appears to be a caricature of himself, not only when he sits writing at the outlandish portable writing table that he places on his knees or his saddle and dips his pen in the inkwell that looks more like the sort of horn in which the caboclos carry about the poison for the arrows of the crossbows when they are out hunting, but also when he walks or rides, continually giving the impression that he is about to collapse, appears to be fascinated, bewitched, obsessed by the little colonel. He keeps watching him every minute, never missing a chance to approach him, and in his conversations with his colleagues, Moreira César is very nearly the only subject that interests him, one that to all appearances matters more to him than Canudos and the war. And what is it about this young journalist that can have aroused the colonel’s interest? His eccentric dress and his odd physique perhaps, his resemblance to a walking skeleton, those gangling limbs, that proliferation of hair and fuzz, those long fingernails now black with dirt, that spineless manner, that whole in which there is not the least sign of anything that the colonel would call virile, martial. But the truth remains that there is something about this grotesque figure with the unpleasant voice that, perhaps despite himself, the little officer with fixed ideas and forceful eyes finds attractive. He is the only one whom the colonel is in the habit of addressing when he holds press conferences, and sometimes he converses with him alone after the evening mess. During the marches, the reporter from the Jornal de Notícias, as though through his mount’s initiative, habitually rides on ahead and joins the colonel. This is what has happened this time, after the column has left Cansanção. The nearsighted journalist, bouncing up and down like a puppet, is lost from sight amid the officers and aides surrounding Moreira César’s white horse, when the colonel, on arriving at the turnoff to Calumbi, raises his right hand: the signal to halt.
The escorts gallop off with orders, and the bugler sounds the call that will bring all the companies of the regiment to a halt. Moreira César, Olímpio de Castro, Cunha Matos, and Tamarindo dismount; the journalist slides to the ground. To the rear, the correspondents and a great many soldiers go to dip their faces, arms, and feet in a pool of stagnant water. The major and Tamarindo examine a map and Moreira César scans the horizon with his field glasses. The sun is disappearing behind a lone peak in the distance—Monte Santo—to which it has imparted a spectral form. As he puts away his glasses, the colonel’s face has paled. He is visibly tense.
“What is it that’s worrying you, sir?” Captain Olímpio de Castro asks.
“Time.” Moreira César speaks as though he had a foreign object in his mouth. “The possibility that they may take to their heels before we get there.”
“They won’t run away,” the nearsighted journalist pipes