The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [298]
On his return to the store from one of his trips outside, the Dwarf found Jurema and the blind man talking with Father Joaquim. Since their arrival, months before, they had never once been alone with him. They would often see him standing at the Counselor’s right in the tower of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus reciting Mass, leading the multitude in reciting the Rosary in the church square, in processions, surrounded by a ring of Catholic Guards, and at graveside services, chanting the prayers for the dead in Latin. They had heard that his disappearance meant that he was off on travels that took him all over the backlands, doing errands for the jagunços and bringing them the things they needed. After war broke out again, he could often be seen in the streets of Canudos, in the Santa Inês quarter in particular, on his way to confess and give the last sacraments to those on their deathbeds in the Health Houses. Although he had run into him several times, the Dwarf had never had a conversation with him; but on seeing the Dwarf come into the store, the little priest had held out his hand and spoken a few kindly words to him. The curé was now perched on a milking stool, and sitting cross-legged in front of him were Jurema and the nearsighted man.
“Nothing is easy, not even what seems to be the easiest thing in the world,” Father Joaquim said to Jurema, in a discouraged tone of voice, clucking his cracked lips. “I thought I’d be bringing you great joy. That this time I would be received in people’s houses as a bearer of glad tidings.” He paused and wet his lips with his tongue. “And all I do is visit houses with the holy oils, close the eyes of the dead, watch people suffer.”
The Dwarf thought to himself that the curé had aged a great deal in the last few months and was now a little old man. He had almost no hair left and his tanned, freckled scalp now showed through the tufts of white fuzz above his ears. He was terribly thin; the neck opening of his frayed cassock faded to a dark blue bared his protruding collarbones; the skin of his face hung down in yellow folds covered with a milky-white stubble of beard. His eyes betrayed not only hunger and old age but also immense fatigue.
“I won’t marry him, Father,” Jurema said. “If he forces me to, I’ll kill myself.”
She spoke in a calm voice, with the same quiet determination as on that night when she had talked with them, and the Dwarf realized that the curé of Cumbe must have already heard her say the same thing, for he did not look surprised.
“He’s not trying to force you,” he mumbled. “It’s never once entered his mind that you would refuse him. Like everyone else, he knows that any woman in Canudos would be happy to have been chosen by Pajeú to form a home and family. You know who Pajeú is, don’t you, my girl? You’ve surely heard the stories people tell about him?”
He sat there staring down at the dirt floor with a regretful look on his face. A little centipede crawled between his sandals, through which his thin yellowish toes, with long black nails, peeked out. Instead of stepping on it, he allowed it to wander off and disappear among the rows of rifles lined up one next to the other.
“All those stories are true, or, rather, they fall short of the truth,” he added, in a dispirited tone of voice. “The violent crimes, the murders, the thefts, the sackings, the blood vengeances, the gratuitous acts of cruelty, such as cutting off people’s ears, their noses. That whole life of hell and madness. And yet here he is, he too, like Abbot