The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [212]
“Trenches,” someone says.
The nearsighted journalist decides to approach the group surrounding the colonel, who has taken a few steps downhill and is observing the scene below, having exchanged his field glasses for a spyglass. The red ball of the sun has risen a few moments before and is now illuminating the theater of operations. Almost without realizing what he is doing, the correspondent from the Jornal de Notícias, who has not stopped trembling, clambers up onto a projecting rock in order to see better. He then has at least a vague idea of what is going on. The first ranks of soldiers to ford the river have been blown to bits from a series of hidden defenses, and there is now heavy gunfire down there. Another of the assault units, which is deploying almost at his feet as it attacks, is also being stopped by a heavy burst of fire from ground level. The sharpshooters are entrenched in holes dug in the earth. He sees the jagunços. They are those heads—wearing hats? headcloths?—that suddenly pop up out of the ground, emitting smoke, and although the cloud of dust blurs their features and silhouettes, he can make out men who have been hit by the rounds of fire or are sliding down into the holes where they are no doubt already engaged in hand-to-hand combat.
He is convulsed by a fit of sneezing so prolonged that for a moment he thinks he is going to faint. Doubled over, with his eyes closed, his glasses in his hand, he sneezes, opens his mouth, gasps desperately for air. He is finally able to straighten up, to breathe, and realizes that he is being pounded on the back. He puts his glasses back on and sees the colonel.
“We thought you’d been wounded,” Moreira César says, to all appearances in an excellent humor.
The journalist is surrounded by officers and doesn’t know what to say, for the idea that anyone could think he was wounded amazes him, as though it never would have entered his head that he, too, is part of this war, that he, too, is under fire.
“What’s happening? What’s happening?” he stammers.
“The Ninth has entered Canudos and now the Seventh is going in,” the colonel says, the field glasses at his eyes.
Panting, his temples pounding, the nearsighted journalist has the sensation that everything has come closer, that he can reach out and touch the war. On the outskirts of Canudos there are houses in flames and two lines of soldiers are entering the town, amid puffs of cloud that must be gunsmoke. They disappear, swallowed up in a labyrinth of rooftops made of tiles, of straw, of corrugated tin, of palings, from which flames leap up from time to time. “They are pumping all those who escaped the cannon fire full of bullets,” he thinks. And he imagines the fury with which officers and men are no doubt avenging the corpses strung up in the caatinga, avenging themselves for those ambushes and whistles that have kept them awake nights all the way from Monte Santo.
“There are nests of sharpshooters in the churches,” he hears the colonel say. “What’s Cunha Matos waiting for? Why doesn’t he take them?”
The bells have been pealing continually and he has been hearing them all this time, like background music amid the cannonades and the fusillades. In the narrow winding streets between the dwellings he makes out figures running, uniforms scurrying every which way. “Cunha Matos is in that hell,” he thinks. “Running, stumbling, killing.” And Tamarindo and Olímpio de Castro? He looks for them and can’t see the old colonel, but the captain is among the officers with Moreira César. For some reason, he feels relieved.
“Have the rear guard and the