The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [252]
At this time of day the streets of Queimadas are not the teeming anthill of uniforms, the sample collection of all the accents of Brazil that they turn into at night, when officers and men pour out into them to chat together, to strum guitars, to listen to songs from their villages, to enjoy a few sips of cane brandy that they have managed to come by at exorbitant prices. Here and there he comes across knots of soldiers with their blouses unbuttoned, but he does not spy a single townsman as he makes his way to the main square, with towering ouricuri palms that are always swarming with birds. There are hardly any townspeople around. Except for a handful of cowhands here and there, too elderly, ailing, or apathetic to have left, who stand looking out with undisguised hatred from the doorways of the houses they are forced to share with the intruders, everyone else in Queimadas has gradually taken off.
At the corner on which there stands the boarding house of Our Lady of Grace—on the fac$$$de of which is a sign that reads: “Entry forbidden unless shirts are worn”—Lieutenant Pires Ferreira recognizes, his face a blur in the blinding sunlight, Lieutenant Pinto Souza, an officer attached to his battalion, coming his way. He has been here only a week, and still has the high spirits of those recently arrived in town. They have made friends with each other and fallen into the habit of whiling away their evenings together.
“I’ve read the report you wrote about Uauá,” Pinto Souza says, falling in step with him as he heads for the camp. “What a terrifying experience.”
Lieutenant Pires Ferreira looks at him, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare with one hand. “For those of us who survived it, yes, no doubt. For poor Dr. Antônio Alves dos Santos especially,” he says. “But what happened in Uauá is nothing by comparison with what happened to Major Febrônio and Colonel Moreira César.”
“I don’t mean the dead, but what you report about the uniforms and the arms,” Lieutenant Pinto Souza explains.
“Oh, I see,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira murmurs.
“I don’t understand it,” his friend exclaims in consternation. “The officers of the General Staff haven’t done anything.”
“The same thing happened to the second and third expeditionary forces as happened to us,” Pires Ferreira says. “They, too, were defeated not so much by the jagunços as by the heat, the thorns, and the dust.”
He shrugs. He wrote that report just after his arrival in Juazeiro following the defeat, with tears in his eyes, hoping that the account of his experiences would prove useful to his comrades-at-arms. He explained, with a wealth of detail, how the uniforms had been reduced to tatters by the sun, the rain, and the dust, how flannel jackets and woolen trousers had turned into poultices and been torn to ribbons by the branches of the caatinga. He told how the soldiers lost their forage caps and boots and had to go barefoot most of the time. But above all he was explicit, scrupulous, insistent with regard to the subject of weapons: “Despite its magnificent precision, the Mannlicher very frequently misfires; a few grains of sand in the magazine are enough to prevent the bolt from functioning. Moreover, if many shots are fired in rapid succession, the heat expands the barrel and the magazine then shrinks in size and the six-cartridge chargers cannot be introduced into it. The extractor jams from the effect of the heat and spent cartridges must be removed by hand. And finally, the breech is so delicate that it breaks apart at the first blow.” He not only has written this;