The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [331]
“We’ve been looking for you all day long,” the Dwarf said, his arms encircling the journalist’s legs. “All day long. What a blessing that you’re alive!”
“I don’t care now if I die either,” Jurema’s lips said beneath his. “This is the house of the Pyrotechnist,” General Artur Oscar suddenly exclaims. The officials who are reporting on the number of dead and wounded in the attack that he was given orders to halt look at him in bewilderment. The general points to some half-finished skyrockets, made of reeds and pegs held together with pita fiber, scattered about the dwelling. “He’s the one who prepares their fireworks displays for them.”
Of the eight blocks—if the jumbled piles of rubble can be called “blocks”—that the troops have taken in nearly twelve hours of fighting, this one-room hut, with a partition of wooden slats dividing it in two, is the only one that has been left standing, more or less. This is the reason why it has been chosen as general headquarters. The orderlies and officers surrounding the commandant of the expeditionary corps cannot understand why he is speaking of rockets just as the list of casualties after the hard day’s battle is being read off to him. They do not know that fireworks are a secret weakness of General Oscar’s, a powerful holdover from his childhood, and that in O Piauí he would seize on any sort of patriotic celebration as an excuse to order a fireworks display to be set off in the courtyard of the barracks. In the month and a half that he has been here, he has watched with envy, from the heights of A Favela, the cascades of lights in the sky above Canudos on certain nights when processions have been held. The man who prepares such displays is a master; he could earn himself a good living in any city in Brazil. Can the Pyrotechnist have died in today’s battle? As the general ponders that question, he also pays close attention to the figures being read off by the colonels, majors, captains who enter and leave or remain in the tiny room already enveloped in darkness. An oil lamp is lit, and a detail of soldiers piles sandbags along the wall facing the enemy.
The general completes his calculations. “It’s worse than I had supposed, gentlemen,” he says to the fan of silhouettes. He has a tight feeling in his chest, and can sense how anxiously the officers are waiting. “One thousand twenty-seven casualties! A third of our forces! Twenty-three officers dead, among them Colonel Carlos Telles and Colonel Serra Martins. Do you realize what that means?”
No one answers, but the general knows that all of them are perfectly aware that such a large number of casualties is tantamount to a defeat. He sees how frustrated, angry, astonished his subordinates are; the eyes of a number of them glisten with tears.
“Going on with the attack would have meant being completely wiped out. Do you understand that now?”
Because when, alarmed by the jagunços’ resistance and his intuition that casualties among the patriots were already heavy—along with the tremendous shock to him of the death of Telles and of Serra Martins—General Oscar ordered the troops to confine themselves to defending the positions they had already taken, the order was greeted with indignation by many of these officers, and the general feared that some of them might even disobey it. His own adjutant, First Lieutenant Pinto Souza, of the Third Infantry Corps, protested: “But victory is within our reach, sir!” It was not. A third of the troops hors de combat. An extremely high percentage, catastrophic, despite the eight blocks captured