The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [273]
The last one to leave turned to the Sardelinha sisters and said: “You’d best go back to Belo Monte. We can’t hold out much longer. There are too many of them, and we’ve no bullets left.”
After a moment’s hesitation, instead of heading for the pack mules, the women also began scrambling up the mountainside. Jurema scarcely knew what to make of it. They were not going to war because they were madwomen; their men were up there, and they wanted to know if they were still alive. Without another thought, she ran after them, shouting to the nearsighted man—standing there petrified, his mouth gaping open—to wait for her.
As she clambered up the slope she scratched her hands and twice she slipped and fell. It was a steep climb; her heart began to pound and she found herself short of breath. Up above, she saw great ocher, lead-colored, orange-tinted clouds that the wind drove together, drove apart, drove together again, and along with scattered gunfire, close at hand, she could hear unintelligible shouts. She crawled down a slope without stones, trying to see. She came upon two big rocks leaning against each other and peered out from behind them at the clouds of dust. Little by little she was able to see, intuit, guess. The jagunços were not far off, but it was hard to make them out because they blended in with the slope. She gradually located them, curled up behind boulders or clumps of cacti, or hiding in hollows with only their heads peeking out. On the slopes opposite, whose broad outlines she managed to make out in the dust, there were also many jagunços, spread out, buried in the dirt, shooting. She had the impression that she was about to go deaf, that the earsplitting gunfire was the last thing she would ever hear.
And at that moment she realized that the dark spot, like a thicket, that the slope turned into fifty yards down was soldiers. Yes, there they were: a splotch climbing farther and farther up the mountainside, in which there were glints, bright spots, reflections, little red stars that must be rifle shots, bayonets, swords, and glimpsed faces that appeared and disappeared. She looked to both sides, and on the right the splotch had now climbed as high as the place where she was. She felt her stomach writhe, retched, and vomited across her arm. She was alone in the middle of the slope and that tide of uniforms was about to flood over her. Without thinking, she let herself slide, sitting down, to the nearest nest of jagunços: three sombreros, two leather ones and one straw one, in a hollow. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” she shouted as she slid. But not one of them turned around to look at her as she leapt into the hole protected by a parapet of stones. She then saw that two of the three men inside were dead. One of them had been hit by a projectile that had turned his face into a vermilion blob. He was lying in the arms of the other one who was dead, his eyes and mouth full of flies. They were holding each other up like the two big rocks behind which she had hidden herself. After a moment, the jagunço who was still alive looked at her out of the corner of one eye. He was aiming with his other eye closed, calculating before shooting, and with each shot the rifle recoiled and hit him in the shoulder. Without halting his fire, he mumbled something. Jurema did not understand what he said. She crawled toward him, to no avail. The buzzing in her ears was still the only thing she could hear. The jagunço motioned to her, and she finally realized that he wanted the pouch that was lying next to the dead body without a face. She handed it to him and saw the jagunço, sitting with his legs crossed, clean the barrel of his rifle and calmly