The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [259]
The night he leaves Canudos, at the head of three hundred armed men—many more than he has ever been in command of before—Pajeú orders himself not to think about the woman. He knows how important his mission is, as do his comrades, chosen from among the best walkers in Canudos (because they are going to have to go a long way on foot). As they pass the foot of A Favela they halt for a time. Pointing to the spurs of the mountainside, barely visible in the darkness alive with crickets and frogs, Pajeú reminds them that it is up there that the soldiers are to be drawn, driven, surrounded, so that Abbot João and Big João and all those who have not headed off to Jeremoabo with Pedrão and the Vilanovas to meet the troops coming from that direction can shoot at them from the neighboring hills and plateaus, where the jagunços have already taken up their positions in trenches full of ammunition. Abbot João is right; that is the way to deal that accursed brood a mortal blow: push them toward this bare slope. “Either the soldiers fall in the trap and we tear them to pieces, or we fall,” the Street Commander has said. “Because if they surround Belo Monte we won’t have either the men or the arms to keep them from entering. It depends on you, boys.” Pajeú advises the men to hoard the ammunition, to aim always at those dogs who have stripes on their sleeves, or have sabers and are mounted on horseback, and to keep out of sight. He divides them up into four groups and arranges for everyone to meet the following day at dusk, at Lagoa da Laje, not far from Serra de Aracati, where, he calculates, the avant-garde that left Monte Santo yesterday will be arriving about then. None of the groups must fight if they run into enemy patrols; they must hide, let them go on, and at most have a tracker follow them. No one, nothing must make them forget their one responsibility: drawing the dogs to A Favela.
The group of eighty men that remains with him is the last to set out again. Headed for war again. He has gone off in the night like this so many times since he reached the age of reason, hiding out so as to pounce or keep from being pounced on, that he is no more apprehensive this time than he was the others. To Pajeú that is what life is: fleeing an enemy or going out to meet one, knowing that before and behind, in space and in time, there are, and always will be, bullets, wounded, and dead.
The woman’s face steals once again—stubbornly, intrusively—into his mind. The caboclo tries his best to banish the image of her pale cheeks, her resigned eyes, her lank hair dangling down to her shoulders, and anxiously searches for something different to think about. At his side is Taramela, a short, energetic little man, chewing on something, happy to be marching along with him, as in the days of the cangaço. He suddenly asks him if he has with him that egg-yolk poultice that is the best remedy against snake bite. Taramela reminds him that when they were separated from the other groups he himself handed round a bit of it to Joaquim Macambira, Mané Quadrado, and Felício. “That’s right, I did,” Pajeú says. And as Taramela looks at him, saying nothing, Pajeú wonders aloud whether the other groups will have enough tigelinhas, those little clay lamps that will allow them to signal to each other at a distance at night if need be. Taramela laughs and reminds him that he himself has supervised the distribution of tigelinhas at the Vilanovas’ store. Pajeú growls that his forgetfulness is a sign that he’s getting old. “Or that you’re falling in love,” Taramela teases. Pajeú feels his cheeks burn, and the memory of the woman’s face, which he has managed to drive out of his mind, comes back again. Feeling oddly abashed, he thinks: “I don’t know her name, or where she’s from.” When he gets back to Belo Monte, he’ll ask her.
The eighty jagunços walk behind him and Taramela in silence, or talking so quietly