The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [269]
From where he is standing, Pajeú can see, very close by, the range of hills of A Favela, and beyond them, Monte Mário. Those hills, gray and ocher, have now turned bluish, reddish, greenish, and are moving, as though they were infested with larvae.
“They’ve been coming up for three or four hours now,” old Macambira says. “They’ve even gotten the cannons up. And A Matadeira, too.”
“Well then, we’ve done what we had to do,” Pajeú says. “So let’s all go now to reinforce O Riacho.”
When the Sardelinha sisters asked her if she wanted to go with them to cook for the men who were waiting for the soldiers in Trabubu and Cocorobó, Jurema said yes. She said it mechanically, the way she said and did everything. The Dwarf reproached her for it and the nearsighted man made that noise, halfway between a moan and a gargle, that came from him every time something frightened him. They had been in Canudos for more than two months now and were never apart.
She thought that the Dwarf and the nearsighted man would stay behind in the city, but when the convoy of four pack mules, twenty porters, and a dozen women was ready to leave, both of them fell in alongside her. They took the road to Jeremoabo. No one was bothered by the presence of these two intruders who were carrying neither weapons nor pickaxes and shovels for digging trenches. As they passed by the animal pens, now rebuilt and full once more of goats and kids, everyone began singing the hymns that people said had been composed by the Little Blessed One. Jurema walked along in silence, feeling the rough stones of the road through her sandals. The Dwarf sang along with the others. The nearsighted man, concentrating on seeing where he was stepping, was holding to his right eye the tortoiseshell frame of his glasses, to which he had glued little shards of the shattered lenses. This man who seemed to have more bones than other people, to stagger about in a daze, holding this artifact made of slivers up to his eye, who approached persons and things as though he were about to bump into them, at times kept Jurema from dwelling on her unlucky star. In the weeks during which she had been his eyes, his cane, his consolation, she had thought of him as her son. Thinking of this gangling beanpole of a man as “my son” was her secret game, a notion that made her laugh. God had brought strange people into her life, people she never dreamed existed, such as Galileo Gall, the circus folk, and this pitiful creature alongside her who had just tripped and fallen headlong.
Every so often they would run into armed groups of the Catholic Guard in the scrub on the mountainsides and stop to give them flour, fruit, brown sugar, jerky, and ammunition. From time to time messengers appeared, who on spying them stopped short to talk with Antônio Vilanova. Rumors spread in whispers through the convoy after they had gone on. They were always about the same thing: the war, the dogs that were on their way. She finally pieced together what had been happening. There were two armies approaching, one of them by way of Queimadas and Monte Santo and the other by way of Sergipe and Jeremoabo. Hundreds of jagunços had taken off in those two directions in recent days, and every afternoon, during the counsels, which Jurema had faithfully attended, the Counselor exhorted his flock to pray for them. She had seen the anxiety that the imminent threat of yet another war had aroused. Her one thought was that, because of this war, the robust, mature caboclo, the one with the scar and the little beady