The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [325]
He wailed at the top of his lungs, curled up in a ball, clutching the Mother of Men with both his hands, stammering, bemoaning his wretched fate and his misfortunes, pouring out in a torrent, slavering and sobbing, his bitterness and his desperation, present and past, the disillusionments of his lost youth, his emotional and intellectual frustration, speaking to her with a sincerity he had never before been capable of, not even with himself, telling her how miserable and unhappy he felt because he had not shared a great love, not been the successful dramatist, the inspired poet that he would have liked to be, and because he knew now that he was about to die even more stupidly than he had lived. He heard himself say, between one panting breath and another: “It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair.” He realized that she was kissing him on the forehead, on the cheeks, on the eyelids as she whispered sweet, tender, incoherent words to him, as one does to newborn babies to enchant them and make them happy just by the sound of them…And in fact he felt great comfort, wondrous gratitude toward those magic words: “My little one, my little son, little baby, little dove, little lamb…”
But they were abruptly brought back to the present, to violence, to the war. The earsplitting explosion that tore the roof away suddenly left them with the sky overhead, the beaming sun, clouds, the bright morning air. Splinters, bricks, broken roof tiles, twisted wire were flying in all directions, and the nearsighted journalist felt pebbles, clods of dirt, stones hit a thousand places on his body, face, hands. But neither he nor the woman nor the Lion of Natuba was knocked down as the building collapsed. They stood there clutching each other, clinging to each other, and he searched frantically through his pockets for his monocle painstakingly assembled from bits of glass, thinking that it had been reduced to shards again, that from now on he would not be able to count on even this scant aid. But there it was, intact, and still holding tight to the Superior of the Sacred Choir and the Lion of Natuba, he managed little by little to see, in distorted images, the havoc caused by the explosion. In addition to the roof, the front wall had also caved in, and except for the corner that they were in, the store was a mountain of rubble. Beyond the fallen wall he could vaguely make out piles of debris, smoke, silhouettes running.
And at that moment the place was suddenly filled with armed men, with armbands and blue headcloths; among them he could make out the massive bulk of Big João, naked to the waist. As the nearsighted journalist, his eye glued to the monocle, stood watching the men embrace Maria Quadrado, the Lion of Natuba, he trembled: they were going to take them away with them and he would be left all by himself in these ruins. He clung to the woman and the scribe, and past all sense of shame, all scruples lost, he began to whine to them not to leave him, to implore them, and the Mother of Men dragged him off by the hand after the two of them when the huge black ordered everyone out of there.
He found himself trotting along in a world turned topsy-turvy, a chaos of clouds of smoke, noise, mountains of debris. He had stopped weeping, all his senses focused now on the perilous task of skirting obstacles, of keeping from tripping, stumbling, falling, letting go of the woman. He had gone up Campo Grande dozens of times, heading for the square between the churches, and yet he recognized nothing: walls caved in, holes, stones, all manner of things scattered about everywhere, people scurrying in all directions, shooting, fleeing,