The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [201]
She realized that amid the cries of “Long live the Counselor” there were voices calling her by name—“Mother Maria Quadrado! Mother of Men!”—seeking her out, pointing her out. This popularity seemed to her to be a trap set by the Devil. In the beginning, she had told herself that those who sought her intercession were pilgrims from Monte Santo who had known her there. But in the end she realized that she owed the veneration of which she was the object to the many years that she had devoted to serving the Counselor, that people believed that he had thereby imbued her with his own saintliness.
The feverish bustle, the preparations that she could see in the narrow winding paths, and the huts crowded together on Belo Monte gradually made the Superior of the Sacred Choir forget her worries. The spades and hoes, the sounds of hammering meant that Canudos was preparing for war. The village was being transformed, as though a battle were about to take place in each and every dwelling. She saw men erecting on the rooftops those little platforms that she had seen amid the treetops in the caatinga, where hunters lay in wait for jaguars. Even inside the dwellings, men, women, and children, who stopped their work to cross themselves, were digging pits or filling sacks with earth. And all of them had carbines, blunderbusses, pikes, clubs, knives, bandoleers, or were piling up pebbles, odds and ends of iron, stones.
The path leading down to As Umburanas, an open space on either side of a little stream, was unrecognizable. The Catholic Guard had to guide the women of the Choir across this terrain riddled with holes and crisscrossed with countless trenches. Because, in addition to the trench that she had seen when the last procession had passed by this way, there were now pits dug everywhere, with one or two men inside them, surrounded by parapets to protect their heads and serve as supports for their rifles.
The arrival of the Counselor caused great rejoicing. Those who were digging pits or carrying loads of earth came hurrying over to listen to his words. Standing below the cart that the saint had climbed up on, behind a double row of Catholic Guards, Maria Quadrado could see dozens of armed men in the trench, some of whom, fast asleep in ridiculous postures, did not awaken despite all the commotion. In her mind’s eye, she saw them, awake the whole night watching, working, preparing to defend Belo Monte against the Great Dog, and felt affection for all of them, the desire to wipe their foreheads, to give them water and fresh-baked bread and tell them that for their abnegation the Most Holy Mother and the Father would forgive them all their sins.
The Counselor had begun to speak, whereupon all the din ceased. He did not speak of dogs or elect, but of the waves of pain that arose in the Heart of Mary when, in obedience to the law of the Jews, she brought her son to the Temple, eight days after his birth, to shed his blood in the rite of circumcision. The Counselor was describing, in accents that touched Maria Quadrado’s soul—and she could see that all those present were equally moved—how the Christ Child, immediately after being circumcised, raised his arms toward the Holy Mother, seeking to be comforted, and how his bleatings of a little lamb pierced the soul of Our Lady and tortured her, when suddenly it began to rain. The murmur of the crowd, the people falling on their knees before this proof that even the elements were moved by what the Counselor was recounting,