The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [337]
As the problem of provisions takes on critical proportions, General Oscar and his staff send out the gaucho lancers—who have never belied their fame as great cowboys—and the Twenty-seventh Infantry Battalion to get food “wherever and however you can,” for hunger is both sapping the troops’ strength and undermining their morale. The lancers return at nightfall with twenty head of cattle, and the general forbears to ask them where they got them; they are immediately butchered and the meat is distributed among the men at A Favela and in the “black line.” The general and his adjutants order steps to be taken to improve communications between the two camps and the front. Safe routes are laid out with sentry posts all along them and the barricade is further reinforced. With his customary energy, the general also prepares to evacuate the wounded. Stretchers and crutches are made, the ambulance wagons are repaired, and a list of those who are to be evacuated is drawn up.
He sleeps that night in his hut on A Favela. The following morning, as he is taking his breakfast coffee and cornmeal biscuits, he realizes that it is raining. Dumfounded, he observes the miracle. It is a torrential rain, accompanied by a howling wind that drives the swirling downpour of muddy water this way and that. When he goes out with heartfelt rejoicing to get himself soaked to the skin, he sees that the entire camp is out splashing about in the rain and the mud, in wild excitement. It is the first rain in many months, a real blessing after these weeks of infernal heat and thirst. All the corps are storing the precious liquid in every container they can lay their hands on. He tries to see through his field glasses what is happening in Canudos, but there is a heavy fog and he is unable to make out even the towers. The downpour doesn’t last long; a few minutes later a dust-filled wind is blowing once more. He has thought many times that, when this is all over, he will always have an indelible memory of these continuous, depressing winds that constrict one’s temples. As he removes his boots so that his orderly can scrape the mud off them, he compares the dreariness of this landscape, without a bit of green, without a single flowering bush or shrub, with the luxuriant vegetation that surrounded him in O Piauí.
“Who would ever have thought that I’d miss my garden?” he confesses to Lieutenant Pinto Souza, who is drawing up the order of the day. “I never understood my wife’s passion for flowers. She would cut them back and water them all day long. It struck me as a form of sickness to be that fond of a garden. But now, in the face of this desolation, I understand.”
All the rest of the morning, as he hears reports from various subordinates and assigns them their duties, his mind is constantly on the blinding, suffocating dust. It is impossible to escape this torture even inside the barracks. “When you don’t eat dust with your barbecued meat, you eat your barbecued meat with dust. And always seasoned with flies,” he thinks.
A fusillade at dusk rouses him from his philosophical reverie. A band of jagunços—popping up out of the ground as though they had tunneled under the “black line”—suddenly rushes a crossarm of the barricade, intending to cut it off. The attack takes the soldiers by surprise