The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [297]
“Why didn’t you answer him?” the Dwarf heard the blind man say in an agitated voice. “He was terribly nervous, and was forcing himself to tell you all those things. Why didn’t you answer him? In the state he was in, his love might have turned to hatred, he might have beaten you, killed you, and us, too—didn’t you see that?”
He suddenly fell silent so as to sneeze, once, twice, ten times. By the time his sneezing fit had ended, the shooting had ended, too, and the nocturnal bumblebee was hovering round above their heads.
“I don’t want to be Pajeú’s wife,” Jurema said, as though it were not the two of them she was speaking to. “If he forces me to be, I’ll kill myself. The way a woman at Calumbi killed herself, with a xiquexique thorn. I’ll never be his wife.”
The nearsighted man had another sneezing fit, and the Dwarf felt panic-stricken: if Jurema died, what would become of him?
“We should have made our escape while we still had a chance to,” he heard the blind man moan. “We’ll never get out of here now. We’ll die a horrible death.”
“Pajeú said the soldiers would go away,” the Dwarf said softly. “From his tone of voice, he was convinced of that. He knows what he’s talking about, he’s fighting, he can see how the war is going.”
At other times in the past, the blind man argued with him: had he gone mad like all these poor deluded dreamers, did he, too, imagine that they could win a war against the Brazilian Army? Did he believe, as they did, that King Dom Sebastião would appear to fight on their side? But he said nothing now. The Dwarf was not as certain as the nearsighted man was that the soldiers were invincible. Hadn’t they been able to enter Canudos? Hadn’t Abbot João managed to steal their arms and their cattle? People said that they were dying like flies on A Favela, being shot at from all directions, without food, and using up the last of their ammunition.
Nonetheless, the Dwarf, whose nomad existence in the past made it impossible for him to stay cooped up and drove him out of doors despite the shooting, could see, in the days that followed, that Canudos did not have the air of a victorious city. He frequently came across someone lying dead or wounded in the streets; if there was heavy gunfire, hours would go by before they could be brought to the clinics, which were all located on Santa Inês now, near the Mocambo. Except for the times when he helped the medical aides transport them to these new Health Houses, the Dwarf avoided that section of town, for during the day the dead bodies piled up along Santa Inês—they could only be buried at night because the cemetery was in the line of fire—and the stench was overpowering, not to mention the moans and groans of the wounded in the Health Houses and the sad spectacle of the little old men, the disabled and infirm unfit for combat who had been assigned the task of keeping off the black vultures and the dogs from devouring the corpses swarming with flies. The burials took place after the Rosary and the counsels, which were held regularly each evening at the same hour once the bell of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus had called the faithful together. But they took place in the dark now, without the sputtering candles of the time before the war. Jurema and the nearsighted man always went with him to the counsels. But unlike the Dwarf, who then went out with the funeral processions to the cemetery, the two of them returned to the store once the Counselor had delivered his last words of the evening. The Dwarf was fascinated by these burials, by the curious concern of the families of