The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [345]
A hand tugs at him from the floor. He looks down and sees the Lion of Natuba’s huge, anxious, bright eyes gazing up at him from amid a jungle of long, tangled locks. “Is he going to live, Little Blessed One?” There is so much anguish in the voice of the scribe of Belo Monte that the Little Blessed One feels like crying.
“Yes, yes, Lion, he’s going to live for us, he’s going to live a long time still.”
But he knows that this is not true; something deep inside him tells him that these are the last days, perhaps the last hours, of the man who changed his life and those of all who are in the Sanctuary, of all who are giving their lives there outside, fighting and dying in the maze of caves and trenches that Belo Monte has now turned into. He knows this is the end. He has known it ever since he learned, simultaneously, that Fazenda Velha had fallen and that the Counselor had fainted dead away in the Sanctuary. The Little Blessed One knows how to decipher the symbols, to interpret the secret message of the coincidences, accidents, apparent happenstances that pass unnoticed by the others; he has powers of intuition that enable him to recognize instantly, beneath the innocent and the trivial, the deeply hidden presence of the beyond. On that day he had been in the Church of Santo Antônio, turned since the beginning of the war into a clinic, leading the sick, the wounded, the women in labor, the orphans there in the recitation of the Rosary, raising his voice so that this suffering, bleeding, purulent, half-dead humanity could hear his Ave Marias and Pater Nosters amid the din of the rifle volleys and the cannon salvos. And just then he had seen a “youngster” and Alexandrinha Correa come running in at the same time, leaping over the bodies lying one atop the other.
The young boy spoke first. “The dogs have entered Fazenda Velha, Little Blessed One. Abbot João says that a wall has to be erected on the corner of Mártires, because the atheists can now pass that way freely.”
And the “youngster” had barely turned around to leave when the former water divineress, in a voice even more upset than the expression on her face, whispered another piece of news in his ear which he immediately sensed was far more serious still: “The Counselor has been taken ill.”
His legs tremble, his mouth goes dry, his heart sinks, just as on that morning—how long ago now? Six, seven, ten days? He had to struggle to make his feet obey him and run after Alexandrinha Correa. When he arrived at the Sanctuary, the Counselor had been lifted up onto his pallet and had opened his eyes again and gazed reassuringly at the distraught women of the Choir and the Lion of Natuba. It had happened when he rose to his feet after praying for several hours, lying face down on the floor with his arms outstretched, as always. The women, the Lion of Natuba, Mother Maria Quadrado noted how difficult it was for him to get up, first putting one knee on the floor and helping himself with one hand and then the other, and how pale he turned from the effort or the pain of remaining on his feet. Then suddenly he sank to the floor once again, like a sack of bones. At that moment—was it six, seven, ten days ago?—the Little Blessed One had a revelation: the eleventh hour had come for the Counselor.
Why was he so selfish? How could he fail to rejoice that the Counselor would be going to his rest, would ascend to heaven to receive his reward for what he had done on this earth? Shouldn’t he be singing hosannas? Of course he should be. But he is unable to; his soul is transfixed with grief. “We’ll be left orphans,” he thinks once again. At that moment, he is distracted by a little sound coming from the pallet, escaping from underneath the Counselor. It is a little sound that does not make the saint’s body stir even slightly, but already Mother Maria Quadrado and the devout women hurriedly surround the pallet, raise his habit, clean him, humbly collect what—the Little Blessed One thinks to himself—is not excrement, since excrement is dirty and impure and nothing that comes from his body can