The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [307]
Captain Alfredo Gama used to talk a lot about the bell ringer. Several times he had caught sight of him climbing up to the belfry of the little chapel. He said that he was an insignificant, imperturbable little old man, swinging back and forth pulling on the clapper, indifferent to the fusillade from the soldiers in answer to the bells. Dr. Gama had told him that knocking down those defiant bell towers and silencing that provoking bell ringer is the obsessive ambition of all the artillerymen up there on the Alto do Mário, and that all of them shoulder their rifles to take aim at him at the hour of Angelus. Haven’t they been able to kill him yet, or is it a new bell ringer?
“What I’m going to ask you is not the product of despair,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira says. “It is not the request of a man who has lost his reason.”
His voice is firm and calm. He is lying completely motionless on the blanket separating him from the stony ground, with his head resting on a pillow of straw, and the bandaged stumps of his arms on his belly.
“You mustn’t despair,” Teotônio says. “You’ll be among the very first to be evacuated. The moment the reinforcements arrive and the convoy heads back, they’ll take you in an ambulance cart to Monte Santo, to Queimadas, to your home. General Oscar promised as much the day he visited the field hospital. Don’t despair, Manuel da Silva.”
“I beg you in the name of what you respect most in this world,” Pires Ferreira’s mouth says, in a low, firm voice. “In the name of God, your father, your vocation. Of that fiancée to whom you write verses, Teotônio.”
“What is it you want, Manuel da Silva?” the young medical student from São Paulo murmurs, turning his eyes away from the wounded man, deeply upset, absolutely certain what the words he is about to hear will be.
“A bullet in the head,” the firm, quiet voice says. “I beg you from the depths of my soul.”
He is not the first to have begged him to do such a thing and Teotônio knows that he will not be the last. But he is the first to have begged him so serenely, so undramatically.
“I can’t do it when I’ve no hands,” the man in bandages explains. “You do it for me.”
“A little courage, Manuel da Silva,” Teotônio says, noting that he is the one whose voice is charged with emotion. “Don’t ask me to do something that’s against my principles, against the oath of my profession.”
“One of your aides, then,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira says. “Offer them my wallet. There must be some fifty milreis in it. And my boots, which don’t have any holes in them.”
“Death may be worse than what has happened to you already,” Teotônio says. “You’ll be evacuated. You’ll recover, you’ll come to love life again.”
“With no eyes and no hands?” he asks quietly. Teotônio feels ashamed. The lieutenant’s mouth is half open. “That isn’t the worst part, Teotônio. It’s the flies. I’ve always hated them, I’ve always been revolted by them. And now I’m at their mercy. They walk all over my face, they get in my mouth, they crawl in under the bandages to my wounds.” He falls silent.
Teotônio sees him run his tongue over his lips. He has been so moved at hearing these words from this exemplary patient that it hasn’t even occurred to him to ask the aides for the canteen of water to quench the wounded man’s thirst.
“It has become a personal matter between the bandits and me,” Pires Ferreira says. “I don’t want them to get away with this. I won’t allow them to have turned me into this creature before you, Teotônio, I refuse to be a useless monster. Ever since Uauá, I’ve known that something tragic crossed my path. A curse, an evil spell.”
“Would you like some water?” Teotônio says gently.
“It’s not easy to kill yourself when you have no hands and no eyes,” Pires Ferreira goes on. “I’ve tried hitting my head against the rock. It didn’t work. Nor does licking the ground, because there aren’t any stones the right size to swallow, and…”
“Be quiet, Manuel da Silva,” Teotônio says, putting his