The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [361]
But, on entering Colonel Medeiros’s hut, Queluz immediately remembers all that. The face of the commanding officer of the First Brigade is about to explode with rage. He is not waiting at the doorway to congratulate him, as Queluz imagined he would be. He is sitting on a folding camp stool, heaping abuse on someone. Who is it he’s shouting at? At Pajeú. Peeking between the backs and profiles of the crowd of officers in the hut, Queluz spies the sallow face with the garnet-colored scar cutting all the way across it, lying on the ground at the colonel’s feet. He is not dead; his eyes are half open, and Queluz, to whom no one is paying the slightest attention, who has no notion why they have brought him here and who feels like leaving, tells himself that the colonel’s fit of temper is doubtless due to the distant, disdainful look in Pajeú’s eyes as he gazes up at him. It is not that, however, but the attack on the camp: eighteen men have been killed.
“Eighteen! Eighteen!” Colonel Medeiros rages, clenching and unclenching his teeth as though champing at a bit. “Thirty-some wounded! Those of us in the First Brigade spend the whole damned day up here scratching our balls while the Second Brigade fights, and then you come along with your band of degenerates and inflict more casualties on us than on them.”
“He’s going to burst into tears,” Queluz thinks. In a panic, he imagines that the colonel is going to find out somehow that he went to sleep at his post and let the bandits get past him without giving the alarm. The commanding officer of the First Brigade leaps up from his camp stool and begins to kick and stamp his feet. The officers’ backs and profiles block Queluz’s view of what’s happening on the ground. But seconds later he sees the jagunço again: the crimson scar has grown much larger, covering the bandit’s entire face, a featureless, shapeless mass of dirt and mud. But his eyes are still open, and in them that indifference that is so strange and so offensive. A thread of bloody spittle trickles from his lips.
Queluz sees a saber in Colonel Medeiros’s hands and he is certain that he is about to give Pajeú the coup de grâce. But he merely rests the tip of it on the jagunço’s neck. Total silence reigns in the hut, and Queluz finds himself in the grip of the same hieratic solemnity as the officers.
Finally Colonel Medeiros calms down. He sits back down on the camp stool and flings his saber on the cot. “Killing you would be doing you a favor,” he mutters in bitter rage. “You have betrayed your country, murdered your compatriots, sacked, plundered, committed every imaginable crime. There is no punishment terrible enough for what you have done.”
“He’s laughing,” Queluz thinks to himself in amazement. Yes, the caboclo is laughing. His forehead and the little crest of flesh that is all that is left of his nose are puckered up, his lips are parted, and his little slits of eyes gleam as he utters a sound that is undoubtedly a laugh.
“Do you find what I’m saying amusing?” Colonel Medeiros says, slowly and deliberately. But the next moment his tone of voice changes, for Pajeú’s face has turned rigid. “Examine him, Doctor…”
Captain Bernardo da Ponte Sanhueza kneels down, puts his ear to the bandit’s chest, observes his eyes, takes his pulse.
“He’s dead, sir,” Queluz hears him say.
Colonel Medeiros’s face blanches.
“His body’s a sieve,” the doctor adds. “It’s a miracle that he’s lasted this long with all that lead in him.”
“It’s my turn now,” Queluz thinks. Colonel Medeiros’s piercing little blue-green eyes are about to seek him out among the officers, find him, and he will hear the question he is so afraid of: “Why didn’t you give the alert?” He’ll lie, he’ll swear in the name of God and his mother that he did give it, that he fired warning shots and yelled out. But the seconds pass and Colonel Medeiros continues to sit there on the camp stool, contemplating the corpse