The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [202]
When the procession started off again, toward the Vaza-Barris, the rain had turned the ground into a quagmire. The elect floundered in the mud, and in a few moments the statues, standards, canopies, and banners were lead-colored lumps and strips of cloth. As the rain pelted the surface of the river, the Counselor, standing atop an altar of barrels, spoke of something, the war perhaps, in a voice that those closest to him could barely hear, but what they heard they repeated to those behind them, who passed it on to those farther back, and so on, in a series of concentric circles.
Referring to God and His Church, he said that in all things the body must be united to the head, otherwise it would not be a living body nor would it live the life of the head, and Maria Quadrado, her feet buried in the warm mud, feeling the little lamb that Alexandrinha Correa was holding by its rope brush against her knees, understood that he was speaking of the indissoluble union that there must be between the elect and himself and the Father, the Son, and the Divine in the battle. And she had only to look at the faces around her to know that all of them understood, just as she did, that he was thinking of them when he said that the faithful believer had the wariness of the serpent and the innocence of the dove. Maria Quadrado trembled on hearing him psalmodize: “I pour myself out like water and all my bones are dislocated. My heart has turned to wax and is melting into my bowels.” She had heard him softly chant this same psalm—was it four, five years ago?—on the heights of Masseté, the day of the confrontation that put an end to the pilgrimages.
The multitude went along the river’s edge, following in the Counselor’s footsteps, amid plots of ground that the elect had worked, sowing them with maize and manioc, putting goats, kids, lambs, cows out to pasture. Was all this about to disappear, swept away by heresy? Maria Quadrado also saw pits that had been dug in the middle of the cultivated fields, with armed men in them. From a little rise of ground, the Counselor was now speaking explicitly of the war. Would the rifles of the Freemasons spit out water instead of bullets? She knew that the Counselor’s words were not to be taken literally, because they were often comparisons, symbols whose meaning was hard to puzzle out, whose relationship to events could be seen clearly only after the latter had taken place. It had stopped raining and torches were now lit. A smell of freshness filled the air. The Counselor explained that the fact that the Throat-Slitter had a white horse came as no surprise to the believer, for wasn’t it written in the Apocalypse that such a horse would come and that its rider would be carrying a bow and a crown so as to conquer and rule? But his conquests would end at the gates of Belo Monte through the intercession of Our Lady.
And he made his way in this fashion from the exit to Jeremoabo to the one to Uauá, from O Cambaio to the Rosário entrance, from the road to Chorrochó to O Curral dos Bois, bringing men and women the fire of his presence. He stopped at all the trenches, and in all of them he was received and sent on his way again with