The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [177]
“What did he say?” Gall murmured.
“That the Father, the Blessed Jesus, and the Divine are defending Belo Monte,” Ulpino answered. “They don’t need any more help.”
And he added that they were not very far away now, so there was no need for him to worry about having lost the horses. They immediately set out again. And in fact they made their way through the tangled scrub as fast on foot as they would have on horseback. But the loss of the horses had also meant the loss of the saddlebags with their provisions, and from that moment on they ate dry fruits, shoots, and roots to appease their hunger. As Gall had noted that, since leaving Calumbi, remembering the incidents of the most recent period of his life opened the doors of his mind to pessimism, he tried—it was an old remedy—to lose himself in abstract, impersonal reflections. “Science against an uneasy conscience.” Didn’t Canudos represent an interesting exception to the historical law according to which religion had always served to lull the masses and keep them from rebelling against their masters? The Counselor had used religious superstition to incite the peasants to rise up against bourgeois order and conservative morality and to stir them up against those who traditionally had taken advantage of religious beliefs to keep them enslaved and exploited. In the very best of cases, as David Hume had written, religion was a dream of sick men; that was doubtless true, yet in certain cases, such as that of Canudos, it could serve to rouse the victims of society from their passivity and incite them to revolutionary action, in the course of which rational, scientific truths would gradually take the place of irrational myths and fetishes. Would he have a chance to send a letter on the subject to L’Etincelle de la révolte? He tried once again to start up a conversation with the guide. What did Ulpino think of Canudos? The latter chewed for a good while without answering. Finally, with serene fatalism, as though it were of no concern to him, he said: “All of them are going to get their throats slit.” Gall decided that they had nothing more to say to each other.
On leaving the caatinga, they found themselves on a plateau covered with xiquexiques, which Ulpino split open with his knife; inside was a bittersweet pulp that quenched their thirst. That day they came upon more groups of pilgrims going to Canudos, whom they soon left behind. Meeting up with these people in the depths of whose tired eyes he could glimpse a profound enthusiasm stronger than their misery did Gall’s heart good. They restored his optimism, his euphoria. They had left their homes to go to a place where a war was about to break out. Didn’t that mean that the people’s instinct was always right? They were going there because they had intuited that Canudos embodied their hunger for justice and freedom. He asked Ulpino when they would arrive. At nightfall, if nothing untoward happened. Nothing untoward? What did he mean? They had nothing left that could be stolen from them, wasn’t that so? “We could be killed,” Ulpino answered. But Gall did not allow his spirits to flag. And, after all, he thought to himself with a smile, the stolen horses were a contribution to the cause.
They stopped to rest in a deserted farmhouse that bore traces of having been set afire. There was no vegetation or water. Gall massaged his legs, stiff and sore after the long day’s trek on foot. Ulpino suddenly muttered that they had crossed the circle. He pointed in the direction where there had been stables, animals, cowherds and now there was only desolation. The circle? The one that separated Canudos from the rest of