The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [133]
At Gall’s insistence, they started out again. The circus people would rather have stayed a while longer in Ipupiará, where they could get themselves enough to eat, if nothing else, by entertaining the villagers with clown acts and stories. But the foreigner was afraid that the capangas would come back and carry off his head this time. He had recovered: he talked with such whirlwind energy that the Bearded Lady, the Dwarf, and even the Idiot listened to him dumfounded. They had to guess at part of what he said, and his irresistible urge to talk about the jagunços intrigued them. The Bearded Lady asked Jurema if he was one of those apostles of the Blessed Jesus who were wandering about all over. No, he wasn’t: he hadn’t been to Canudos, he didn’t know the Counselor, and he didn’t even believe in God. Jurema couldn’t understand this mania of his either. When Gall announced to them that he was heading north, the Dwarf and the Bearded Lady decided to follow him. They wouldn’t have been able to explain why. Perhaps it was gravity that was the cause—weak bodies magnetized by strong ones—or simply not having anything better to do, no alternative, no will to oppose that of someone who, unlike themselves, appeared to be following a definite path through life.
They left at dawn and walked all day amid stones and thorny mandacarus, not saying a word to each other, with the wagon in front, the Bearded Lady, the Dwarf, and the Idiot alongside, Jurema right next to the wheels, and Galileo Gall drawing up the end of the caravan. To shield himself from the sun, he had put on a sombrero that had once belonged to Pedrim the Giant. He had grown so thin that his pants were baggy and his shirt kept sliding off his shoulders. The red-hot bullet that had grazed him had left a purple mark behind his ear and Caifás’s knife a sinuous scar between his neck and his shoulder. His thinness and paleness somehow made his eyes look wilder still. On the fourth day of their trek, at a bend in the road known as the Sítio das Flores, they ran into a band of starving outlaws, who took their burro away from them. They were in a thicket of thistles and mandacarus, divided in two by a dry riverbed. In the distance they could see the mountainside of the Serra da Engorda. There were eight bandits, some of them dressed in leather, wearing sombreros decorated with coins, and armed with knives, carbines, and bandoleers. The leader—a short, paunchy man with the profile of a bird of prey and cruel eyes—was called Toughbeard by his men, even though he was beardless. He gave a few terse instructions, and in less time than it takes to tell, his cangaceiros killed the burro, skinned it, hacked it up, built a fire, and roasted great chunks of it, which a while later they fell upon voraciously. They must have gone without food for several days, for some of them, overjoyed at this feast, began to sing.
As he watched them, Galileo wondered how long it would take the scavengers and the elements to turn the carcass into the little mounds of polished bones that he had grown accustomed to coming across in the backlands, skeletons, remains, mementos of man or animal that were grim reminders to the traveler of the fate that awaited him in case he fainted from exhaustion or died. He was sitting in the wagon alongside the Bearded Lady, the Dwarf, the Idiot, and Jurema. Toughbeard took off his sombrero, on the brim of which, above his forehead, a sovereign gleamed, and made signs to the circus people to eat. The first to dare to do so was the Idiot, who knelt down and reached his fingers out toward the dense cloud of smoke. The Bearded Lady, the Dwarf, Jurema followed his example. Gall walked over to the fire. Life in the open air had made him as tanned and weather-beaten as a sertanejo. From the moment he saw Toughbeard take off his sombrero,