The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [271]
“I didn’t count them.” Pedrão guffawed. “Why should I have, if we’re going to kill all of them?”
There was another wave of laughter. On the heights, it was beginning to get light.
“The women had best leave here,” Honório Vilanova said.
Like his brother, he was wearing boots and carrying a pistol as well as a rifle. In their dress, their speech, and even their physical appearance, they seemed to Jurema to be quite different from the other people in Canudos. But no one treated them as though they were any different.
Forgetting about the nearsighted man, Pedrão motioned to the women to follow him. Half the bearers had already gone up the mountainside, but the rest were still there, with their loads on their backs. A red arc was rising behind the slopes of Cocorobó. The nearsighted man stayed where he was, shaking his head, when the convoy set out to take up positions amid the rocks behind the combatants. Jurema took him by the hand: it was soaking wet with sweat. His glassy, unfocused eyes looked at her gratefully. “Let’s go,” she said, tugging at him. “They’re leaving us behind.” They had to wake the Dwarf, who was sleeping soundly.
As they reached a sheltered hillock near the crest, the advance guard of the army was entering the pass and the war had begun. The Vilanovas and Pedrão disappeared, and the women, the nearsighted man, and the Dwarf stayed behind amid the weathered rocks, listening to the gunfire. It seemed to be scattered and far off. Jurema could hear the shots on the right and on the left, and she thought to herself that the wind must be carrying the sound away from them, for from there it was very muffled. She could not see anything; a wall of mossy stones hid the sharpshooters from sight. The war, despite being so close, seemed very far away. “Are there many of them?” the nearsighted man stammered. He was still clutching her hand tightly. She answered that she didn’t know and went to help the Sardelinha sisters unload the pack mules and set out the earthen jars full of water, pots full of food, strips of cloth and rags to make bandages, and poultices and medicines that the apothecary had packed in a wooden box. She saw the Dwarf climbing up toward the crest. The nearsighted man sat down on the ground and hid his face in his hands, as though he were weeping. But when one of the women shouted to him to gather branches to make an overhead shelter, he hastily rose to his feet and Jurema saw him set to work eagerly, feeling all around for stems, leaves, grass, and stumbling back to hand them to the women. That little figure moving back and forth, tripping and falling and picking himself up again and peering at the ground with his outlandish monocle, was such a funny sight that the women finally began pointing at him and making fun of him. The Dwarf disappeared amid the rocks.
Suddenly the shots sounded louder, closer. The women stood there not moving, listening. Jurema saw that the crackle of gunfire, the continuous bursts had instantly sobered them: they had forgotten all about the nearsighted man and were thinking of their husbands, their fathers, their sons who were the targets of this fire on the slope opposite. The shooting dazed her but it did not frighten her. She felt that this war did not concern her and that the bullets would therefore respect her. She felt such drowsiness come over her that she curled up against the rocks, at the Sardelinha sisters’ side. She slept though not asleep, a lucid sleep, aware of the gunfire that was shaking the mountain slopes of Cocorobó, dreaming twice of other shots, those of that morning in Queimadas, that dawn when she had been about to be killed by the capangas and the stranger who spoke in some odd language had raped her. She dreamed that, since she knew what was going to happen, she begged him not to do it because that would