The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [21]
Although they sought out his company and perhaps respected him, neither Van Rijsted nor Dr. Oliveira had the impression that they really knew this man with the red hair and beard, shabbily dressed in black, who, despite his ideas, appeared to live a tranquil life: sleeping late, giving language lessons at his pupils’ homes, tirelessly walking about the city, or spending entire days in his garret reading and writing. Sometimes he disappeared for several weeks without telling them beforehand, and when he reappeared they discovered that he had been off on one of the long trips that took him throughout Brazil, in the most precarious circumstances. He never spoke to them of his past or of his plans, and since he gave them the vaguest of answers when they questioned him regarding them, the two of them resigned themselves to accepting him for what he was or what he appeared to be: an exotic, enigmatic, eccentric loner, whose words and ideas were incendiary but whose behavior was innocuous.
After two years, Galileo Gall spoke Portuguese fluently and had sent off several additional letters to L’Etincelle de la révolte. The eighth, on the corporal punishments that he had witnessed being administered to bond servants in the streets and the public squares of the city, and the ninth, on the instruments of torture employed in the days of slavery: the rack, the stocks, the neck chain or gargalheira, metal balls attached to the ankles, and infantes, rings to crush the thumbs. The tenth, on O Pelourinho, the municipal whipping post where lawbreakers (Gall called them “brothers”) were still flogged with rawhide whips, which were for sale in stores under the marine nickname of o bacalhau—codfish.
He spent so many hours, by day and by night, wandering about the labyrinthine streets of Salvador that he might well have been taken for someone in love with the city. But what Galileo Gall was interested in was not the beauties of Bahia; it was, rather, the spectacle that had never ceased to rouse him to rebellion: injustice. Here, unlike Europe, he explained in his letters to Lyons, there were no segregated residential districts. “The mean huts of the wretched lie side by side with the tiled palaces of the owners of sugar plantations and mills, and ever since the drought of fifteen years ago that drove thousands of refugees here from the highlands, the streets teem with children who look like oldsters and oldsters who look like children, and women who are broomsticks, and among this multitude the scientist can easily identify all manner of physical afflictions, from those that are relatively harmless to those that are terrifyingly severe: bilious fever, beriberi, dropsy, dysentery, smallpox.”
“Any revolutionary whose convictions as to the necessity of a major revolution are wavering”—he wrote in one of his letters—“ought to take a look at what I am seeing in Salvador: it would put an end to all his doubts.”
[III]
When, weeks afterward, it became known in Salvador that in a remote town called Natuba the brand-new Republic’s tax decrees had been burned, the government decided to send a squad of Bahia State Police to arrest the troublemakers. Thirty police officers, in blue-and-green uniforms and kepis still bearing the insignia of the monarchy that the Republic had not yet had time to change, set out, first by train and then on foot, on the arduous journey to this place that for all of them was no more than a name on a map. The Counselor was not in Natuba. The sweating police officers questioned the municipal councillors and the inhabitants of the town before taking off in search of this rebel whose name, popular name, and legend they would bring back to the coast and spread in the streets of Bahia. Guided by a tracker from the region, their blue-and-green uniforms standing out in the radiant morning light, they disappeared into the wilds on the road to Cumbe.
For another week they followed the Counselor