The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [336]
That day passes uneventfully on the “black line,” inside of which—the commanding officer of the expedition thinks to himself—it will be the usual routine till the reinforcements arrive: scattered gunfire from one or the other of the two dark, glowering barricades challenging each other, tourneys of insults flying back and forth above the walls without the objects of the insults ever seeing the insulters’ faces, and the salvos of cannon fire against the churches and the Sanctuary, brief now because the shells are running out. The troops’ food supplies are nearly gone; there are barely ten animals left to butcher in the pen erected behind A Favela, and they are down to the last few sacks of coffee and grain. The general orders the troops’ rations reduced by half, though they are already meager.
But late that afternoon General Oscar receives a surprising piece of news: a family of jagunços, numbering fourteen people, voluntarily surrenders at the camp on A Favela. This is the first time since the beginning of the campaign that such a thing has happened. The news raises his spirits tremendously. Despair and privation must be undermining the cannibals’ morale. He himself interrogates these jagunços at the camp on A Favela. The family consists of three decrepit elders, an adult couple, and rachitic children with swollen bellies. They are from Ipueiras and according to them—their teeth chatter with fear as they answer his questions—they have been in Canudos only a month and a half; they took refuge there not out of devotion to the Counselor but out of panic on learning that a huge army was heading their way. They have made their escape from Canudos by leading the bandits to believe that they were going out to help dig trenches at the Cocorobó exit, which they in fact did do until evening, when, taking advantage of a moment when Pedrão wasn’t watching, they slipped away. It has taken them a day to make their roundabout way to A Favela. They tell General Oscar everything they know about the situation in the bandits’ lair and offer a somber picture of what is happening there, even worse than he had supposed—near-starvation, dead and wounded lying everywhere, widespread panic—and assure him that people would surrender if it weren’t for cangaceiros like Big João, Abbot João, Pajeú, and Pedrão, who have sworn to kill every last relative of anyone who deserts. The general nonetheless takes what they tell him with a grain of salt: they are so obviously frightened nearly to death that they would come up with any sort of lie to gain his sympathy. He gives orders for them to be shut up in the cattle pen. The lives of all those who, following this family’s example, voluntarily give themselves up are to be spared. His officers are as optimistic as he is: some of them predict that the enemy redoubt will collapse from within before the army reinforcements arrive.
But the following day the troops suffer a cruel reverse. A hundred and fifty head of cattle coming from Monte Santo fall into the hands of the jagunços in the most stupid way imaginable. Being overly cautious, in order to keep from falling into the trap of guides who have been conscripted into the army against their will in the sertão and who almost always prove to be on the side of the enemy when the troops are ambushed, the company of lancers herding the cattle along have relied solely on the maps drawn up by the army engineers. Luck has not been with them. Instead of taking the road via Rosário and As Umburanas, which leads to A Favela, they have veered off down the trail via O Cambaio and O Taboleirinho and