The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [287]
At two in the morning a messenger from Joaquim Macambira awakens him. It is one of Joaquim’s sons, young and slender, with long hair, crouching patiently in the trench, waiting for Big João to rouse himself from his sleep. The boy’s father needs ammunition; his men have almost no bullets or powder left. With his tongue still thick with sleep, Big João explains that his men don’t have any left either. Have they had any news from Abbot João? None. And from Pedrão? The youngster nods: he and his men have had to fall back from Cocorobó they have no ammunition left and have had heavy losses. And they have not been able to stop the dogs in Trabubu either.
Big João feels wide awake at last. Does that mean that the army advancing by way of Jeremoabo is coming here?
“Yes,” Joaquim Macambira’s son answers. “Pedrão and all the men of his who aren’t dead are already back in Belo Monte.”
Maybe that is what the Catholic Guard should do: go back to Canudos to defend the Counselor from the attack that now seems inevitable if the other army is coming this way. What is Joaquim Macambira going to do? The youngster doesn’t know. Big João decides to go talk to the boy’s father.
It is late at night and the sky is studded with stars. After instructing his men not to budge from where they are, the former slave slips silently down the rocky slope, alongside young Macambira. Unfortunately, with so many stars out, he is able to see the dead horses with their bellies ripped open, being pecked at by the black vultures, and the body of the old woman. All the day before and part of the night he has kept coming across these officers’ mounts, the first victims of the fusillade. He is certain that he himself has killed a number of them. He had to do it, for the sake of the Father and Blessed Jesus the Counselor and Belo Monte, the most precious thing in his life. He will do it again, as many times as necessary. But something within his soul protests and suffers when he sees these animals fall with a great whinny, agonize for hour after hour, with their insides spilling out on the ground and a pestilential stench in the air. He knows where this sense of guilt, of committing a sin, that possesses him every time he fires on the officers’ horses comes from. It stems from the memory of the great care that was taken of the horses on the hacienda, where Master Adalberto de Gumúcio had instilled the veritable worship of horses in his family, his hired hands, his slaves. On seeing the shadowy bulks of the animals’ carcasses scattered about as he goes along the trail, crouching at young Macambira’s side, he wonders whether it is the Father who makes certain things that go back to the days when he was a sinner—his homesickness for the sea, his love of horses—linger so long and so vividly in his memory.
He sees the dead body of the old woman at the same time, and feels his heart pound. He has glimpsed her for only a few seconds, her face bathed in moonlight, her eyes staring in mad terror, her two remaining teeth protruding from her lips, her hair disheveled, her forehead set in a tense scowl. He has no idea what her name is, but he knows her very well; she came to settle in Belo Monte long ago, with a large family of sons, daughters, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and homeless waifs that she had taken in, in a little mud hut on the Coração de Jesus, a narrow back street. It was the first dwelling to have been blown to bits by the