The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [194]
After the bugler has blown taps, Moreira César points with his sword at the mountainside before them and delivers a very short speech. “The murderers have not fled, men. They are there, awaiting punishment. I say no more now, in order that bayonets and rifles may speak.”
He hears the roar of the cannon again, closer this time, and gives a start, wide awake now. He remembers that in the last few days he has hardly sneezed once, not even in this rainy dampness, and he tells himself that the expedition will have been worthwhile to him for one reason at least: the nightmare of his life, the fits of sneezing that drove his fellow workers at the newspaper mad and often kept him awake all night long, have become less frequent, have perhaps disappeared altogether. He remembers that he began to smoke opium, not so much because he wanted to have the dreams it brings as because he wanted to sleep without sneezing, and he says to himself: “What a dull clod I am.” He turns over on his side and looks up at the sky: a black expanse without a spark of light. It is so dark he cannot make out the faces of the soldiers lying next to him, to his right and to his left. But he can hear their heavy breathing, the words that escape their lips. Every so often, some of them get up and others lie down as the former climb up to the top of the mountain to take their places. He thinks: “It’s going to be terrible.” Something that can never be faithfully reproduced in writing. He thinks: “They are filled with hatred, intoxicated by their desire for vengeance, the desire to make someone pay for their exhaustion, hunger, thirst, the horses and animals lost, and above all for the mutilated, outraged dead bodies of the comrades they saw leave a few short hours before to take Caracatá.” He thinks: “It was what they needed to reach a fever pitch. That hatred is what has enabled them to scale the rocky mountainsides at a frenetic pace, clenching their teeth, and what must be causing them to lie there unable to sleep now, clutching their weapons, looking down obsessively from the crest at the shadows below where their prey awaits them, hated in the beginning out of duty but hated intimately and personally now, like enemies from whom it is their duty to collect a debt of honor owed them.”
Because of the mad cadence at which the Seventh Regiment stormed up the hillsides, he was unable to remain at the head of the column with the colonel, his staff officers, and his escort. He was prevented from doing so by the fading light, his constant stumbling and falling, his swollen feet, his heart that seemed to be about to burst, his pounding temples. What made him hold out, struggle back to his feet again and again, go on climbing? He thinks: fear of being left all by myself, curiosity as to what is going to happen. In one of his many falls he lost track of his portable writing desk, but a soldier with a bare scalp—they shave all the hair off those infested with lice—hands it to him a few minutes later. He has no use for it any more; his ink is all gone and his last goose-quill got broken the evening before. Now that the rain has stopped, he hears various sounds, a rattling of stones, and wonders if the companies are continuing to deploy in all directions during the night, if the cannons and machine guns are being hauled to a new emplacement, or if the vanguard has dashed down the mountainside without waiting for daybreak.