The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [308]
“Are you going to help me? I beg you in the name of our friendship. A friendship born here is something sacred. Are you going to help me?”
“Yes,” Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti whispers. “I’m going to help you, Manuel da Silva.”
[IV]
“His head?” the Baron de Canabrava repeated. He was standing at the window overlooking the garden; he had walked over to it on the pretext of opening it because the study was growing warmer and warmer, but in reality he wanted to locate the chameleon, whose absence worried him. His eyes searched the garden in all directions, looking for it. It had become invisible again, as though it were playing a game with him. “They decapitated him. There was an article in The Times about it. I read it, in London.”
“They decapitated his corpse,” the nearsighted journalist corrected him.
The baron went back to his armchair. He felt distressed, but nonetheless found that what his visitor was saying had attracted his interest once again. Was he a masochist? All this brought back memories, scratched the wound and reopened it. Nevertheless, he wanted to hear it.
“Did you ever find yourself alone with him and talk to him?” he asked, his eyes seeking the journalist’s. “Were you able to gather any impression of what sort of man he was?”
They had found the grave only two days after the last redoubt fell. They managed to get the Little Blessed One to tell them where he was buried. Under torture, naturally. But not just any torture. The Little Blessed One was a born martyr and he would not have talked had he been subjected to such ordinary brutalities as being kicked, burned, castrated, or having his tongue cut off or his eyes put out—because they sometimes sent jagunço prisoners back that way, without eyes, a tongue, sex organs, thinking that such a spectacle would demoralize those who were still holding out. It had precisely the opposite effect, of course. But for the Little Blessed One they hit upon the one torture that he was unable to withstand: dogs.
“I thought I knew all the leaders of that band of villains,” the baron said. “Pajeú, Abbot João, Big João, Taramela, Pedrão, Macambira. But the Little Blessed One?”
Dogs were another matter. So much human flesh, so many dead bodies to feast on during the long months of siege, had made them as fierce as wolves and hyenas. Packs of bloodthirsty dogs made their way into Canudos, and doubtless into the camp of the besiegers as well, in search of human flesh.
“Weren’t those packs of dogs the fulfillment of the prophecies, the infernal beasts of the Apocalypse?” the nearsighted journalist muttered, clutching his stomach. “Someone must have told them that the Little Blessed One had a particular horror of dogs, or rather of the Dog, Evil Incarnate. They no doubt confronted him with a rabid pack of the beasts, and faced with the threat of being dragged down to hell in pieces by the Can’s messengers, he guided them to the place where he’d been buried.”
The baron forgot the chameleon and Baroness Estela. In his mind, raging packs of mad dogs pawed through heaps of corpses, buried their muzzles in bellies gnawed by worms, sank their fangs in skinny kneecaps, fought, snarling, over tibias, spines, skulls. In addition to ravaging the dead, other packs suddenly descended on villages, hurling themselves upon cowherds, shepherds, washerwomen, in search of fresh flesh and bones.
They might have guessed that he was buried in the Sanctuary. Where else could they have buried him? They dug where the Little Blessed One told them to and at a depth of some ten feet—that deep—they found him, dressed in his dark purple tunic and rawhide sandals, with a straw mat wrapped around him. His hair had grown and was wavy: this is what is stated in the notarized certificate of exhumation. All the top army officers were there, beginning with General Artur Oscar, who