The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [363]
He had not banished it from his mind: it was there again. But the image that had loomed up, vivid and threatening, before his eyes was not something that he had heard from the lips of his visitor. It had happened when neither that nearsighted man nor the little servant girl from Canudos who was now his woman, nor the Dwarf, nor any of the survivors of Canudos, was any longer about. It was old Colonel Murau who had told him about it, over a glass of port, the last time they had seen each other here in Salvador, something that Murau had heard in turn from the owner of the Formosa hacienda, one of the many burned to the ground by the jagunços. The owner had stayed on at the hacienda, despite everything, out of love for his land, or because he didn’t know where else to go. And he had stayed on there all through the war, eking out a living thanks to the commercial deals he arranged with the soldiers. When he learned that the war was all over, that Canudos had fallen, he hurriedly made his way up there with a bunch of peons to lend a hand. When they sighted the hillsides of the former jagunço citadel, the army had gone. While still a fair distance away—Colonel Murau recounted, as the baron sat there listening—they had been dumfounded by a strange, indefinable, unfathomable sound, so loud it shook the air. And the air was filled, as well, with a terrible stench that turned their stomachs. But it was only when they made their way down the drab, stony slope of O Poço Trabubu and discovered at their feet what had ceased to be Canudos and become the sight that greeted their eyes, that they realized that the sound was that of the flapping wings and pecking beaks of thousands upon thousands of vultures, of that endless sea of grayish, blackish shapes covering everything, devouring everything, gorging themselves, finishing off, as they sated themselves, what neither dynamite nor bullets nor fires had been able to reduce to dust: those limbs, extremities, heads, vertebras, viscera, skin that the conflagration had spared or only half charred and that these rapacious creatures were now crushing to bits, tearing apart, swallowing, gulping down. “Thousands upon thousands of vultures,” Colonel Murau had said. And also that, stricken with terror in the face of what seemed like a nightmare come true, the owner of the hacienda of Formosa and his peons, realizing that there was nobody left to bury, since the carrion birds were doing their work, had left the place on the run, covering their mouths and holding their noses. The intrusive, loathsome image had taken root in his mind and refused to go away. “The end that Canudos deserved,” he had answered before forcing old Murau to change the subject.
Was this what was troubling him, making him anxious, setting his every nerve on edge? That swarm of countless carrion birds devouring the human rot that was all that was left of Canudos? “Twenty-five years of dirty, sordid politics to save Bahia from imbeciles and helpless idiots faced with a responsibility that they were incapable of assuming, the end result of which was a feast of vultures,” he thought to himself. And at that moment, superimposed on the image of the hecatomb, there reappeared the tragicomic face, the laughingstock with the watery crossed eyes, the scarecrow frame, the overprominent chin, the absurdly drooping ears, speaking to him of love, of pleasure in a fervent voice: “The greatest thing in all this world, Baron, the one and only thing whereby man can discover a measure of happiness, can learn what the word happiness means.” That was it. That was what was troubling him, upsetting him, causing him such anguish. He took