The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [272]
When she awoke, the nearsighted man, at her feet, looked at her the way the Idiot from the circus had. Two jagunços were drinking from one of the earthen jugs, surrounded by the women. She rose to her feet and went to see what was happening. The Dwarf had not come back, and the gunfire was deafening. The jagunços had come to get more ammunition; they were so tense and exhausted they could barely speak: the pass was crawling with atheists, who were dropping like flies every time they tried to take the mountainside. They had charged twice, and each time they had been pushed back before they were even halfway up the slope. The man speaking, a short little man with a sparse beard sprinkled with white, shrugged: the only thing was, there were so many of them that there was no way to force them to withdraw. What was more, the jagunços were beginning to run out of ammunition.
“And what will happen if they take the slopes?” Jurema heard the nearsighted man stammer.
“They won’t be able to stop them in Trabubu,” the other jagunço said in a hoarse voice. “There are almost no men left there. They’ve all come here to give us a hand.”
As though that had reminded them of the need to leave immediately, the two men murmured. “Praised be the Blessed Jesus,” and Jurema saw them scale the rocks and disappear. The Sardelinha sisters said that the food should be reheated, since more jagunços would be turning up at any moment. As she helped them, Jurema felt the nearsighted man tremble as he clung to her skirts. She sensed how terrified, how panicked he was at the thought that all of a sudden uniformed men might spring out from amid the rocks, shooting and bayoneting anyone who got in their way. In addition to the rifle fire, there was cannonading; each time a shell landed, it was followed by an avalanche of stones that roared down the mountainside. Jurema remembered her poor son’s indecision all these many weeks, not knowing what to do with himself, whether to stay or try to get away. He wanted to leave, that was what he yearned to do, and as they lay on the floor of the store at night, listening to the Vilanova family snore, he told her so, trembling all over: he wanted to get out of there, to escape to Salvador, to Cumbe, to Monte Santo, to Jeremoabo, to a place where he could find help, where he could get word to people who were his friends that he was still alive. But how to get away if they had forbidden him to leave? How far could he get all by himself and half blind? They would catch up with him and kill him. In these whispered dialogues in the dark of the night, he sometimes tried to persuade her to lead him to some hamlet where he could hire guides. He would offer her every reward conceivable if she helped him, but then a moment later he would correct himself and say that it was madness to try to escape since they would find them and kill them. As he had once trembled with fear of the jagunços, he now trembled with fear of the soldiers. “My poor son,” she thought. She felt sad and disheartened. Would the soldiers kill her? It didn’t matter. Was it true that when any man or woman of Belo Monte died, angels would come to carry off their soul? True or not, death in any event would be a repose, a sleep with no sad dreams, something not as bad as the life that she had been leading after what had happened in Queimadas.
All the women suddenly looked up. Her eyes followed to see what they were watching: ten or twelve jagunços leaping down the slope from the crest. The cannonade was so heavy that it seemed to Jurema that shells were bursting inside her head. Like the other women, she ran to meet the men and heard them say that they needed ammunition: they had none left to shoot back with and were in a desperate rage. When the Sardelinha sisters answered, “What ammunition?” since the last case of it had been carried off by the two jagunços a while before, the men looked at each other and one of them spat and stamped