The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [330]
“I don’t want to die,” he said slowly and distinctly, unable, he realized, to shed a single tear.
“If you like, sir, we’ll make a pact,” the Lion of Natuba said in a calm voice. “We made one with Mother Maria Quadrado. But she won’t have time to get back here. Would you like us to make a pact?”
The nearsighted journalist was trembling so badly that he was unable to open his mouth. Below the heavy gunfire he could hear, like a peaceful, quietly flowing melody, the bells and the regular counterpoint of Ave Marias.
“So as not to die by the knife,” the Lion of Natuba explained. “A knife plunged into a man’s throat, slitting it the way you cut an animal’s throat to bleed it to death, is a terrible insult to human dignity. It rends one’s soul. Would you like us to make a pact, sir?”
He waited for a moment, and since there was no answer, he explained further: “When we hear them at the door of the Sanctuary and it’s certain that they’re going to get inside, we’ll kill each other. Each of us will hold the other’s mouth and nose shut till our lungs burst. Or we can strangle each other with our hands or the laces of our sandals. Shall we make a pact?”
The fusillade drowned out the Lion of Natuba’s voice. The nearsighted journalist’s head was a dizzying vortex, and all the ideas that rose within him like sputtering sparks—contradictory, threatening, lugubrious—made his anxiety all the more acute. They sat there in silence, listening to the shots, the sound of running footsteps, the tremendous chaos. The light was dying fast and he could no longer see the scribe’s features; all he could make out was the dim outline of his hulking, hunchbacked body. He would not make that pact with him, he would not be able to carry it out; the moment he heard the soldiers he would start shouting I’m a prisoner of the jagunços, help, save me, he would yell out Long live the Republic, Long live Marshal Floriano, he would fling himself on the quadrumane, he would overpower him and turn him over to the soldiers as proof that he wasn’t a jagunço.
“I don’t understand, I don’t understand. What sort of creatures are you all anyway?” he heard himself say as he clutched his head in his hands. “What are you doing here, why didn’t all of you flee before they had you surrounded? What madness to wait in a rat trap like this for them to come kill you all!”
“There isn’t anywhere to flee to,” the Lion of Natuba answered. “That’s what we kept doing before. That’s why we came here. This was the place we fled to. There’s nowhere else now—they’ve come to Belo Monte, too.”
The gunfire drowned out his voice. It was almost dark now, and the nearsighted journalist thought to himself that for him night would fall sooner than for the others. He would rather die than spend another night like the last one. He had a tremendous, painful, biological need to be near his two comrades.
In a fit of madness, he decided to go look for them, and as he stumbled to the door he shouted: “I’m going to look for my friends. I want to die with my friends.”
As he pushed the little door open, fresh, cool air hit his face and he sensed—mere blurred shapes in the cloud of dust—the figures of the men defending the Sanctuary sprawled out on the parapet.
“Can I leave? Can I please leave?” he begged. “I want to find my friends.”
“Come ahead,” a voice answered. “There’s no shooting just now.”
He took a few steps, leaning against the barricade, and almost immediately he stumbled over something soft. As he rose to