The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [237]
Overcoming his surprise at this visit and the shock of this resurrection of the past, he silently guided the caller to the room in which all important conversations took place in the town house: the study. Though it was still early in the day, it was hot. In the distance, above the crotons, the branches of the mango, ficus, guava, and pitangueira trees in the garden, the sun was turning the sea as blinding white as a sheet of steel. The baron drew the curtain shut and the room fell into shadow.
“I knew that my visit would come as a surprise to you,” the caller said, and the baron recognized the little piping voice that always sounded like a comic actor speaking in falsetto. “I learned that you had returned from Europe, and had…this impulse. I’ll tell you straight out: I’ve come to ask you for work.”
“Have a seat,” the baron said.
He had heard the voice as in a dream, paying no attention to the words, entirely absorbed in studying the man’s physical appearance and comparing it with his mental image of what he had looked like the last time he had set eyes on him: the scarecrow he had watched leaving Calumbi that morning with Colonel Moreira César and his little escort. “It’s the same person and it isn’t,” he thought. Because the journalist who had worked for the Diário da Bahia and later for the Jornal de Notícias had been a youngster and this man with the thick glasses, who on sitting down appeared to collapse into four or six sections, was an old man. His face was lined with myriad wrinkles, his hair was streaked with gray, his body looked brittle. He was wearing an unbuttoned shirt, a sleeveless jacket with worn spots or grease stains, a pair of trousers with frayed cuffs, and big clumsy cowherd’s boots.
“I remember now,” the baron said. “Someone wrote me that you were still alive. I was in Europe when I received the letter. ‘A ghost has turned up.’ That’s what it said. Nonetheless, I continued to think of you as having disappeared, as having died.”
“I didn’t die, nor did I disappear,” the thin, nasal voice said, without a trace of humor. “After hearing ten times a day the same thing that you’ve just said, I realized people were disappointed that I was still in this world.”
“If I may say so frankly, I don’t give a damn whether you’re alive or dead,” the baron heard himself say, surprised at his own rudeness. “I might even prefer you to be dead. I detest everything that reminds me of Canudos.”
“I heard about your wife,” the nearsighted journalist said, and the baron sensed that an impertinent remark would inevitably follow. “That she lost her mind, that it’s a great tragedy in your life.”
The baron looked at him in such a way that he was cowed and shut his mouth. He cleared his throat, blinked, and took off his glasses to wipe them on the tail of his shirt.
The baron was glad that he had resisted the impulse to throw him out. “It’s all coming back to me now,” he said amiably. “The letter was from Epaminondas Gonçalves, two months or so ago. It was from him that I learned you’d returned to Salvador.”
“Do you correspond with that miserable wretch?” the thin nasal voice piped. “Ah, yes, it’s true that the two of you are allies now.”
“Is that any way to speak of the Governor of Bahia?” The baron smiled. “Did he refuse to take you back at the Jornal de Notícias?”
“On the contrary: he even offered to raise my salary,” the nearsighted journalist retorted. “On condition, however, that I forget all about the story of Canudos.”
He gave a little laugh, like that of an exotic bird, and the baron saw it turn into a gale of sneezes that made him bounce