The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [175]
as a specific organ that revealed man’s relationship to time? Yes, of course there was. But was it a tiny bone, an imperceptible depression, a temperature? He could not remember its exact location, though he could recall the capacities or incapacities that it revealed: punctuality or the lack of it, foresight or continual improvisation, the ability to organize one’s life methodically or existences undermined by disorder, overwhelmed by confusion… “Like mine,” he thought. Yes, he was a typical case of a personality whose fate was chronic tumult, a life falling into chaos on every hand…He had had proof of that at Calumbi, when he had tried feverishly to sum up what it was he believed in and the essential facts of his life story. He had had the demoralizing feeling that it was impossible to order, to hierarchize that whole dizzying round of travels, surroundings, people, convictions, dangers, high points, and low ones. And it was more than likely that those papers that he had left in the hands of the Baron de Canabrava did not make sufficiently clear what was surely an enduring factor in his life, that loyalty that had been unfailing, something that could provide a semblance of order amid all the disorder: his revolutionary passion, his great hatred of the misery and injustice that so many people suffered from, his will to help somehow to change all that. “Nothing of what you believe in is certain, nor do your ideals have anything to do with what is happening in Canudos.” The baron’s phrase rang in his ears once more, and irritated him. How could an aristocratic landowner who lived as if the French Revolution had never taken place understand the ideals he lived by? Someone for whom “idealism” was a bad word? How could a person from whom jagunços had seized one estate and were about to burn down another have any understanding of Canudos? At this moment, doubtless, Calumbi was going up in flames. He, Galileo Gall, could understand that conflagration, he knew very well that it was not a product of fanaticism or madness. The jagunços were destroying the symbol of oppression. Dimly but intuitively, they had rightly concluded that centuries of the rule of private property eventually came to have such a hold on the minds of the exploited that that system would seem to them of divine origin and the landowners superior beings, demigods. Wasn’t fire the best way of proving that such myths were false, of dispelling the victims’ fears, of making the starving masses see that it was possible to destroy the power of the landowners, that the poor possessed the strength necessary to put an end to it? Despite the dregs of religion they clung to, the Counselor and his men knew where the blows must be aimed. At the very foundations of oppression: property, the army, the obscurantist moral code. Had he made a mistake by writing those autobiographical pages that he had left in the baron’s hands? No, they would not harm the cause. But wasn’t it absurd to entrust something so personal to an enemy? Because the baron was his enemy. Nonetheless, he felt no enmity toward him. Perhaps because, thanks to him, he now felt he understood everything he heard and other people understood everything he said: that was something that hadn’t happened to him since he’d left Salvador. Why had he written those pages? Why did he know that he was going to die? Had he written them in an excess of bourgeois weakness because he didn’t want to end his days without leaving a single trace of himself in the world? All of a sudden the thought occurred to him that perhaps he had left Jurema pregnant. He felt a sort of panic. The idea of his having a child had always caused him a visceral repulsion, and perhaps that had influenced his decision in Rome to abstain from sexual relations. He had always told himself that his horror of fathering a child was a consequence of his revolutionary convictions. How can a man be available at all times for action if he has an offspring that must be fed, clothed, cared for? In that respect, too, he had been single-minded: neither a wife nor children