The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [351]
She opened her eyes and continued to feel happy, as she had all that night, the day before, and the day before that, a succession of days that were all confused in her mind, till the evening when, after believing that he’d been buried beneath the rubble of the store, she found the nearsighted journalist at the door of the Sanctuary, threw herself into his arms, heard him say that he loved her, and told him that she loved him, too. It was true, or, at any rate, once she’d said it, it began to be true. And from that moment on, despite the war closing in around her and the hunger and thirst that killed more people than the enemy bullets, Jurema was happy. More than she could ever remember having been, more than when she was married to Rufino, more than in that comfortable childhood in the shadow of Baroness Estela, at Calumbi. She felt like throwing herself at the feet of the saint to thank him for what had happened to her life.
She heard shots close by—she had heard them in her sleep all night long—but she had not noticed any of the activity in the Menino Jesus, neither the running footsteps and cries nor the frantic hustle and bustle as people lined up stones and sacks of sand, dug trenches, and tore down roofs and walls to erect parapets such as had gone up everywhere in these last weeks as Canudos shrank in size in all directions, behind successive concentric barricades and trenches, and the soldiers captured houses, streets, corners one by one, and the ring of defenses came closer and closer to the churches and the Sanctuary. But none of this mattered: she was happy.
It was the Dwarf who discovered this abandoned house made of wooden palings, wedged in between other bigger dwellings, on Menino Jesus, the little street that joined Campo Grande, where there was now a triple barricade manned by jagunços under the command of Abbot João himself, and the zigzag street of Madre Igreja, which as the ring around Canudos tightened had now become the outer limit of the city to the north. The blacks of the Mocambo, which had been captured, and the few Cariris of Mirandela and Rodelas who had not been killed had fallen back to that sector. Indians and blacks now lived together side by side, in the trenches and behind the parapets of Madre Igreja, along with Pedrão’s jagunços, who had gradually withdrawn there in turn after stopping the soldiers in Cocorobó, in Trabubu, and at the corrals and stables on the outskirts of Canudos. When Jurema, the Dwarf, and the nearsighted journalist came to stay at this little house, they found an old man sprawled out dead on top of his blunderbuss, in the shelter that had been dug in the only room in the dwelling. But they had also found a sack of manioc flour and a pot of honey, which they had husbanded like misers. They hardly ever went out, except to carry off corpses to some dry wells that Antônio Vilanova had turned into ossuaries, and to help erect barricades and dig trenches, something that took more of everyone’s time than the fighting itself did. So many excavations had been made, both inside and outside the houses, that a person could very nearly go from any one place to another in what was left of Belo Monte—from house to house, from street to street—without ever coming up to the surface, like lizards and moles.
The Dwarf stirred at her back. She asked him if he was awake. He did not answer, and a moment later she heard him snoring. All three of them slept, one against the other, in the dugout shelter, so narrow they barely fit into it. They slept in it not only because bullets easily pierced the walls of wooden pickets and mud but also because at night the temperature went way down and their bodies, weakened by their forced fastings, shook with cold. Jurema looked closely at the face of the nearsighted journalist, who was curled up against her breast, fast asleep. His