The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [239]
“He’s someone who’s terrified at the thought of dying,” the nearsighted journalist murmured, putting his glasses back on. “It’s not out of a love of life, you understand. He’s had a miserable existence. He was sold as a child to a gypsy for whom he was a circus attraction, a freak to be put on exhibition. But he has such a great, such a fabulous fear of death that it has enabled him to survive. And me as well, incidentally.”
The baron suddenly regretted having given him work, for in some indefinable way this established a bond between him and this individual. And he did not want to feel any sort of tie to anyone so closely linked to the memory of Canudos. But, instead of intimating to his caller that their conversation had ended, he blurted out: “You must have seen terrible things.” He cleared his throat, feeling uncomfortable at having yielded to his curiosity, but added nonetheless: “When you were up there in Canudos.”
“As a matter of fact, I didn’t see anything at all,” the emaciated little figure replied immediately, doubling over and then straightening up. “I broke my glasses the day they destroyed the Seventh Regiment. I stayed up there for four months, seeing nothing but shadows, vague shapes, phantoms.”
His voice was so ironic that the baron wondered whether he was saying this to irritate him, or whether it was his rude, unfriendly way of letting him know that he didn’t want to talk about it.
“I don’t know why you haven’t laughed at me,” he heard him say in an even more aggressive tone of voice. “Everybody laughs when I tell them that I didn’t see what happened in Canudos because I broke my glasses. It’s quite comical, I’m sure.”
“Yes, it is,” the baron said, rising to his feet. “But it’s something that doesn’t interest me. Hence…”
“But even though I didn’t see them, I felt, heard, smelled the things that happened,” the journalist said, his eyes following him from behind his glasses. “And I intuitively sensed the rest.”
The baron heard him laugh once more, with a sort of impishness now, fearlessly looking him straight in the eye. He sat down again. “Did you really come here to ask me for work and talk to me about that dwarf?” he said. “Does that dwarf dying of tuberculosis exist?”
“He’s spitting up blood and I want to help him,” the visitor said. “But I came for another reason as well.”
He bowed his head, and as the baron’s gaze fell upon his disheveled salt-and-pepper locks flecked with dandruff, he visualized in his mind his watery eyes fixed on the floor. He had the inexplicable intuition that his visitor was bringing him a message from Galileo Gall.
“People are forgetting Canudos,” the nearsighted journalist said, in a voice that sounded like an echo. “The last lingering memories of what happened there will fade in the air and mingle with the music of the next carnival ball in the Politeama Theater.”
“Canudos?” the baron murmured. “Epaminondas is right not to want people to talk about what happened there. It’s better to forget it. It’s an unfortunate, unclear episode. It’s not good for anything. History must be instructive, exemplary. In this war, nobody has covered himself with glory. And nobody has understood what happened. People have decided to ring down a curtain on it. And that’s a sensible, healthy reaction.”
“I shall not allow them to forget,” the journalist said, his dim eyes gazing steadily up at him. “That’s a promise I’ve made myself.”
The baron smiled. Not because of his visitor’s sudden solemnity but because the chameleon had just materialized, beyond the desk and the curtains, in the bright green of the plants in the garden, beneath the gnarled branches of the