The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [257]
The baron burst out laughing. “He wanted to fight a duel,” he thought. “The one thing that occurred to him was to challenge Epaminondas Gonçalves to a duel from Rio. As the mob was searching for him to lynch him, he was thinking of seconds dressed in black, of swords, of duels to end only with the drawing of first blood or death.” He laughed till tears came to his eyes, and the nearsighted journalist stared at him in surprise. As all that was happening, the baron had been journeying to Salvador, admittedly stunned by Moreira César’s defeat, though at the same time able to think only of Estela, to count how many hours it would be before the doctors of the Portuguese Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine could put his mind at ease by assuring him that it was a crisis that would pass, that the baroness would once again be a happy, lucid woman, full of life. He had been so dazed by what was happening to his wife that his memories of the events of recent months seemed like a dream: his negotiations with Epaminondas Gonçalves and his feelings on learning of the vast national mobilization to punish the jagunços, the sending of battalions from all the states, the forming of corps of volunteers, the fairs and the public raffles at which ladies auctioned off their jewels and locks of their hair to raise money to outfit new companies about to march off to defend the Republic. He felt once again the vertigo that had overtaken him on realizing the enormity of all that had happened, the labyrinth of mistakes, mad whims, barbarities.
“On arriving in Rio, Gentil de Castro and Afonso Celso slipped to the house of friends, near the São Francisco Xavier Station,” the Viscount de Ouro Preto added. “My friends took me there out of sight and out of the hand of the mobs that were still in the streets. It took some time for all of us to persuade Gentil de Castro that the only thing left for us to do was flee Rio and Brazil at the earliest possible moment.”
It was agreed that the group of friends would take the viscount and the colonel to the station, their faces hidden by their capes, arriving seconds before six-thirty in the evening, the hour of the departure of the train to Petrópolis. Once they had arrived there, they were to remain on a hacienda while arrangements were being made for their flight abroad.
“But fate was on the side of the assassins,” the viscount murmured. “The train was half an hour late. That was more than enough time for the group of us, standing with our faces hidden in our capes, to attract attention. Demonstrators running up and down the platform shouting ‘Long life to Marshal Floriano and death to the Viscount de Ouro Preto’ started toward us. We had just climbed onto the train when a mob armed with revolvers and daggers surrounded us. A number of shots rang out just as the train pulled out. All the bullets hit Gentil de Castro. I don’t know why or how I escaped with my life.”
The baron pictured in his mind the elderly man with pink cheeks, his head and chest riddled with bullets, trying to cross himself. Perhaps meeting his death in that way would not have displeased him. It was a death befitting a gentleman, was it not?
“That may well be,” the Viscount de Ouro Preto said. “But I am certain that his burial didn’t please him.”
He had been buried secretly, on the advice of the authorities. Minister Amaro Cavalcanti warned the family that, in view of the agitation in the streets, the government could not guarantee their security if they tried to hold an elaborate graveside ceremony. No monarchist attended the burial rites and Gentil de Castro was taken to the cemetery in an ordinary carriage, followed by a coach bearing his gardener and two nephews. The latter did not allow the priest to finish the prayers for the dead, fearing that the Jacobins might appear at any moment.
“I see that the death of that man, there in Rio, moved you deeply.” The nearsighted journalist’s voice had once again roused him from his thoughts. “Yet you’re not moved at all by the other deaths. Because