The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [341]
“And you…you were happy,” the baron said. Might this man not be even loonier than he had always seemed to him to be? Wasn’t all this most probably just a bunch of tall tales?
“They saw them arriving, spreading out over the hills, occupying, one after the other, all the places by way of which they could slip in or out before. The cannons began to bombard them around the clock, from the north, the south, the east, the west. But as they were too close and might kill their own men, they limited themselves to firing on the towers. Because they still hadn’t fallen.”
“Jurema? Jurema?” the baron exclaimed. “The little girl from Calumbi brought you happiness, made you a spiritual convert of the jagunços?”
Behind the thick lenses, like fish in an aquarium, the myopic eyes became agitated, blinked. It was late, the baron had been here for many hours now, he ought to get up out of his chair and go to Estela, he had not been away from her this long since the tragedy. But he continued to sit there waiting, itching with impatience.
“The explanation is that I had resigned myself,” the baron heard him say in a barely audible voice.
“To dying?” he asked, knowing that it was not death that his visitor was thinking about.
“To not loving, to not being loved by any woman,” he thought he heard him answer, for the words were spoken in an even less audible voice. “To being ugly, to being shy, to never holding a woman in my arms unless I’d paid her money to do so.”
The baron sat there flabbergasted. The thought flashed through his mind that in this study of his, where so many secrets had come to light, so many plots been hatched, no one had ever made such an unexpected and surprising confession.
“That is something you are unable to understand,” the nearsighted journalist said, as though the statement were an accusation. “Because you doubtless learned what love was at a very early age. Many women must have loved you, admired you, given themselves to you. You were doubtless able to choose your very beautiful wife from any number of other very beautiful women who were merely awaiting your consent to throw themselves in your arms. You are unable to understand what happens to those of us who are not handsome, charming, privileged, rich, as you were. You are unable to understand what it is to know that love and pleasure are not for you. That you are doomed to the company of whores.”
“Love, pleasure,” the baron thought, disconcerted: two disturbing words, two meteorites in the dark night of his life. It struck him as a sacrilege that those beautiful, forgotten words should appear on the lips of this laughable creature sitting all hunched over in his chair, his legs as skinny as a heron’s twined one around the other. Wasn’t it comical, grotesque, that a little mongrel bitch from the backlands should be the woman who had brought such a man as this, who despite everything was a cultivated man, to speak of love and pleasure? Did those words not call to mind luxury, refinement, sensibility, elegance, the rites and the ripe wisdom of an imagination nourished by wide reading, travels, education? Were they not words completely at odds with Jurema of Calumbi? He thought of the baroness and a wound opened in his breast. He made an effort to turn his thoughts back to what the journalist was saying.
In another of his abrupt transitions,