The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [242]
Shortly thereafter, Catarina comes over and sits down beside him on the pallet, with a wooden bowl full of beans sprinkled with manioc and a wooden spoon in her hands. They eat, handing the spoon to each other, with him taking two or three mouthfuls to her one.
“Is it true that Belo Monte was saved from the Throat-Slitter by the Indians from Mirandela?” Catarina murmurs. “That’s what Joaquim Macambira says.”
“And also by the blacks from the Mocambo and the others,” Abbot João answers. “But it’s quite true, the Indians from Mirandela were really brave. They had neither carbines nor rifles.”
They had not wanted to have them, out of caprice, superstition, mistrust, or some other unfathomable reason. He himself, the Vilanova brothers, Pedrão, Big João, the Macambiras had tried several times to give them firearms, petards, explosives. The chief shook his head emphatically, thrusting his hands out before him with something like disgust. Shortly before the arrival of Throat-Slitter, he himself had offered to show them how to load, clean, and shoot muskets, shotguns, rifles. The answer had been no. Abbot João concluded that the Cariri Indians would not fight this time either. They had not gone to confront the dogs at Uauá, and when the expedition had come by way of O Cambaio they had not even left their huts, as though that battle had been no business of theirs either. “Belo Monte is not defended on that flank,” Abbot João had said. “Let’s pray to the Blessed Jesus that they don’t come from that direction.” But they had also come from that way. “The only side where they were unable to break through,” Abbot João thinks. It had been those surly, distant, incomprehensible creatures, fighting with only bows and arrows, lances, and knives, who had stopped them. A miracle perhaps?
His eyes seeking his wife’s, João asks: “Do you remember when we entered Mirandela for the first time, with the Counselor?”
She nods. They have finished eating and Catarina takes the bowl and the spoon to the corner of the stove. Then João sees her come back toward him—very thin, grave, barefoot, her head brushing the ceiling covered with soot—and lie down beside him on the pallet. He places his arm underneath her back and carefully makes room for her to settle down comfortably. They lie there quietly, listening to the sounds of Canudos, near and far. They can lie that way for hours and these are perhaps the most profound moments of the life they share.
“At that time I hated you as much as you used to hate Custódia,” Catarina murmurs.
Mirandela, a village of Indians herded together there in the eighteenth century by the Capuchin missionaries of the Massacará mission, was a strange enclave in the backlands of Canudos, separated from Pombal by four leagues of sandy ground, dense and thorny scrub impenetrable in places, and air so burning hot that it chapped people’s lips and turned their skin to parchment. Since time immemorial the village of Cariri Indians, perched on top of a mountain, in rugged country, had been the scene of bloody fights—sometimes turning into veritable massacres—between the Indians and the whites of the region for the possession of the best pieces of land. The Indians lived grouped together in the village, in scattered cabins around the Church of the Ascension of Our Lord, a stone building two centuries old, with a straw roof and a blue door and windows,