The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [313]
“They’ve gotten used to the idea; they don’t even notice any more,” Antônio Vilanova thinks to himself. But the first time that Abbot João tried to persuade the jagunços to wear soldiers’ uniforms to disguise themselves he had very nearly had a rebellion on his hands. The proposal left Antônio himself with a taste of ashes in his mouth. The thought of putting on the very symbol of everything that was wicked, heartless, and hostile in this world turned his stomach, and he understood very well why the men of Canudos should violently resist dying decked out as dogs. “And yet we were wrong,” he thinks. “And, as usual, Abbot João was right.” For the information that the valiant “youngsters” who stole into the camps to let ants, snakes, scorpions loose, to throw poison in the troops’ leather canteens, could never be as accurate as that of full-grown men, especially those who had been let out of the army or had deserted. It had been Pajeú who had solved the problem, in the trenches of Rancho do Vigário one night when they were having an argument, by turning up dressed in a corporal’s uniform and announcing that he was going to slip through the enemy lines. Everyone knew that Pajeú of all people would not get through unnoticed. Abbot João asked the jagunços then if it seemed right to them that Pajeú should sacrifice his life so as to set them an example and rid them of their fear of a few rags with buttons. Several men from Pajeú’s old cangaço then offered to disguise themselves in uniforms. From that day on, the Street Commander had no difficulty sneaking jagunços into the camps.
After a few hours, they halt to rest and eat. It is beginning to get dark, and they can just make out O Cambaio and the jagged Serra da Canabrava standing out against the leaden sky. Sitting in a circle with their legs crossed, the jagunços open their sacks of woven rope and take out handfuls of hardtack and jerky. They eat in silence. Antônio Vilanova feels the tiredness in his cramped, swollen legs. Is he getting old? It’s a feeling he’s begun to have in these last months. Or is it the tension, the frantic activity brought on by the war? He has lost so much weight that he has punched new holes in his belt, and Antônia Sardelinha has had to take in his two shirts, which fitted him as loosely as nightshirts. But isn’t the same thing happening to all the men and women in Belo Monte? Haven’t Big João and Pedrão, those two sturdy giants, become as skinny as beanpoles? Isn’t Honório stoop-shouldered and gray-haired now? And don’t Abbot João and Pajeú look older, too?
He listens to the roar of the cannon, toward the north. A brief pause, and then several cannon reports in a row. Antônio and the jagunços leap to their feet and set off again, loping along in long strides.
They approach the city by way of O Taboleirinho, as dawn is breaking, after five hours during which the rounds of cannon fire have followed one upon the other almost without a break. At the water source, where the first houses are, they find a messenger waiting to take them to Abbot João. He is in the trenches at Fazenda Velha, now manned by twice as many jagunços as before, all of them with their finger on the trigger of their rifle or their long-barreled musket, keeping a close watch on the foothills