The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [205]
Finally she spied the Counselor, on the bell platform. He was on his knees, praying, inside a barrier of men who were allowing no one to climb up the little ladder leading to the platform. But they let her and the Lion come up. She threw herself on the planks and kissed the Counselor’s feet, or rather, the crust of dried mud on them, for he had long since lost his sandals. When she stood up again she noted that it was fast growing light. She walked over to the embrasure of stone and wood, and, blinking her eyes, saw on the hills a dim gray-red-blue blur, with bright glints here and there, coming down toward Canudos. She did not ask the silent, frowning men taking turns ringing the bells what the blur was, for her heart told her that it was the dogs. Filled with hatred, they were descending on Belo Monte to perpetrate another massacre of the innocents.
“They’re not going to kill me,” Jurema thinks. She allows herself to be dragged along by the soldiers who are holding her wrists in an iron grip and force her to enter the labyrinth of branches, thorns, tree trunks, and mud. She slips and scrambles to her feet again, looking apologetically at the men in ragged uniforms in whose eyes and on whose parted lips she perceives what she first came to know on that morning that changed her life, there in Queimadas, when after the shooting Galileo Gall threw himself upon her. She thinks, with a serenity that astonishes her: “As long as they have that look in their eyes, as long as that’s what they want, they won’t kill me.” She forgets Rufino and Gall and thinks only of saving her life, of holding them up for a while, of pleasing them, of pleading with them, of doing anything she has to so that they won’t kill her. She slips again, and this time one of them lets go of her and falls on top of her, on his knees with his legs open. The other one also lets go of her and steps back a pace to watch, all excited. The one who is on top of her brandishes his rifle, warning her that he’ll beat her face to a pulp if she screams. Clear-sighted, obedient, she calms down instantly, goes limp, nods gently to reassure him. It is the same look, the same ravenous, bestial expression as that other time. With her eyes half closed she sees him feel about inside his trousers, unbutton them, as he tries to lift her skirt up with the hand that has just let go of the rifle. She helps him as best she can, hunching up, stretching out one leg, but even so it gets in his way and finally he rips it away. All sorts of ideas sputter in her head and she also hears thunder, bugles, bells, behind the soldier’s panting. He is lying on top of her, hitting her with one of his elbows until she understands and moves the leg that is in his way aside, and now she feels, between her thighs, the hard, wet rod, struggling to enter her. She feels asphyxiated by the weight of the man, and each of his movements seems to break one of her bones. She makes an intense effort not to betray the repugnance that comes over her when the bearded face rubs against hers, and a mouth, green from the blades of grass that it is still chewing, flattens itself against hers and forces her to separate her lips so as to voraciously shove in a tongue that works hers over. She is concentrating so hard on not doing anything that might irritate him that she does not see the men draped in cloaks of grass arrive, nor does she notice when they put a knife to the soldier’s throat and give him a kick that rolls him off her. It is only when she feels free of the