The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [248]
The nearsighted journalist stood up too, and on noting that she had begun walking—a slight little figure, with her hair hanging and her blouse in tatters, whom he could see in his mind’s eye—he followed along after her. The Dwarf came scrambling along at his side, his head at the height of his elbow.
“They’re scrawnier than we are,” he heard the Dwarf mutter. “Do you remember Cipó, Jurema? There are even more human wrecks here. Have you ever seen so many people who are one-armed, blind, crippled, palsied, albinos, so many who are missing ears, a nose, hair, so full of scabs and blotches? You haven’t noticed, Jurema. But I have. Because here I feel normal.”
He laughed merrily, and the nearsighted journalist heard him whistle a happy tune for some time as they walked along.
“Will they give us maize flour again today?” he asked all of a sudden in an anxious voice. But he was thinking of something else, and added bitterly: “If it’s true that Father Joaquim has gone off somewhere, we don’t have anybody who’ll help us now. Why did he do that to us? Why did he abandon us?”
“Why wouldn’t he abandon us?” the Dwarf said. “What are we to him? Did he know us? Be grateful that we have a roof over our heads at night to sleep under, thanks to him.”
It was true, he had helped them; thanks to him, they had a roof over their heads. It was surely thanks to his intercession that the morning after they had slept out in the open all night, as they were waking up with all their bones and muscles aching, a powerful, efficient-sounding voice, which appeared to belong to the solid bulk, the bearded face above them, had said: “Come on, you can sleep in the storehouse. But don’t leave Belo Monte.”
Were they prisoners? Neither he nor Jurema nor the Dwarf asked any questions of this man with the commanding air who, with a simple phrase, took over their lives. Without another word he took them to a place the nearsighted journalist sensed was vast, dark, warm, and chock-full of things, and before disappearing—without questioning them as to who they were, or what they were doing there, or what they wanted to do—told them once more that they could not leave Canudos and warned them not to touch the arms. The Dwarf and Jurema explained to him that they were surrounded by rifles, powder, mortars, sticks of dynamite. He realized that these were the arms that had been seized from the Seventh Regiment. Wasn’t it absurd that they were going to sleep there in the middle of all these spoils of war? No, life had ceased to be logical, and therefore nothing was absurd. It was life: one had to accept it as it was or kill oneself.
He had had the thought that, here, something different from reason governed things, men, time, death, something that it would be unfair to call madness and too general to call faith, superstition, ever since the night on which he had first heard the Counselor, immersed in that multitude which, as it listened to the deep, booming, strangely impersonal voice, had taken on a granite immobility, amid a silence one could touch. More than by the man’s words and his majestic voice, the journalist was struck, stunned, overwhelmed by that stillness, that silence in which they listened to him. It was like…it was like…He searched desperately for that similarity with something that he knew lay stored in the depths of his memory, because, he was sure, once it came to the surface it would explain what he was feeling. Yes: the candomblés. Sometimes, in those humble huts of the blacks of Salvador, or in the narrow streets behind the Calçada Railroad Station, attending the frenetic rites of those sects that sang in forgotten African languages, he had caught a glimpse of an organization of life, a collusion of things and men, of time, space, and human experience as totally devoid of logic, of common sense, of reason, as the one which, in that rapidly falling darkness that was beginning to blur people’s silhouettes, he perceived in these creatures who were being given comfort, strength, and a sense of roots by that deep, cavernous hoarse voice,