The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [355]
“He was from my village,” a woman who was working alongside Jurema said to her, pointing to the tower. “Chorrochó. He was a carpenter there, when the angel’s wings brushed him.”
She went back to her work, putting the bell ringer out of her mind, and forgetting about herself as well, she toiled away all afternoon, going every so often to where the journalist was. As the sun was setting she saw the Vilanova brothers running off toward the Sanctuary and heard that Pajeú, Big João, and Abbot João had also come by, running that way from different directions. Something was about to happen.
A little while later, she was leaning over talking to the nearsighted journalist when an invisible force compelled her to kneel, to fall silent, to lean against him. “What’s the matter, what’s the matter?” he said, taking her by the shoulder and feeling her all over. And she heard him shout at her: “Have you been wounded, are you wounded?” No bullet had struck her. It was just that all the strength had suddenly been drained from her body. She felt empty, without the energy to open her mouth or lift a finger, and though she saw leaning over her the face of the man who had taught her what happiness was, his liquid eyes opening wide and blinking, trying to see her better, and realized that he was frightened and knew that she ought to reassure him, she was unable to. Everything was far away, strange, make-believe, and the Dwarf was there, touching her, caressing her, rubbing her hands, her forehead, stroking her hair, and it even seemed to her that, like the nearsighted journalist, he was kissing her on the hands, the cheeks. She was not about to close her eyes, because if she did she would die, but there came a moment when she could no longer keep them open.
When she opened them again, she no longer felt so freezing cold. It was night; the sky was full of stars, there was a full moon, and she was sitting leaning against the nearsighted journalist’s body—whose odor, thinness, heartbeat she recognized at once—and the Dwarf was there too, still rubbing her hands. In a daze, she noted how happy the two men were on seeing her awake once again, and felt herself being embraced and kissed by them so affectionately that tears came to her eyes. Was she wounded, ill? No, it had been exhaustion: she had worked so hard for such a long time. She was no longer in the same place as before. While she was lying in a faint, the gunfire had suddenly grown heavier and the jagunços had come running from the trenches in the cemetery; the Dwarf and the journalist had had to carry her to this street corner so that the men would not trample her underfoot. But the soldiers had not been able to get past the barricade erected along São João. The jagunços from the cemetery trenches who had escaped with their lives and many who had come from the churches had stopped them there. She heard the journalist telling her that he loved her, and at that very moment the world blew up. Dust filled her nose and eyes and she found herself knocked flat on the ground, for the journalist and the Dwarf had been thrown on top of her by the force of the shock wave. But she was not afraid; she huddled beneath the two bodies lying on top of her, struggling to utter the necessary sounds to find out if they were all right. Yes, just bruised from the chunks of stone, wood, and other debris that had rained down on them from the explosion. A confused, frantic, many-voiced, dissonant, incomprehensible outcry roiled the darkness. The nearsighted man and the Dwarf sat