The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [370]
“And the Counselor? What about the Counselor?” he hears a voice say, almost in his ear. “Is it true that he’s gone to heaven, that the angels bore him away with them?”
The deeply wrinkled face of the old woman lying on the ground has only one tooth in its mouth and eyelids glued shut with a gummy discharge. She does not appear to be injured, simply utterly exhausted.
“Yes, he’s gone to heaven,” the Lion of Natuba says, nodding his head, with the clear perception that this is the very best thing he can do for her at this moment. “The angels bore him away.”
“Will they come to take my soul with them, too, Lion?” the old woman whispers.
The Lion nods again, several times. The little old woman smiles at him and then lies there immobile, her mouth gaping open. The shooting and the screaming coming from the direction of the fallen Church of Santo Antônio suddenly grow louder and the Lion of Natuba has the feeling that a hail of shots grazes his head and that many bullets embed themselves in the sandbags and barrels of the parapet behind which he has taken cover. He continues to lie there stretched out flat on the ground, his eyes closed, waiting.
When the din dies down a bit, he raises his head and spies the pile of rubble left when the bell tower of Santo Antônio collapsed two nights before. The soldiers are here. His chest burns: they are here, they are here, moving about among the stones, shooting at the Temple of the Blessed Jesus, riddling with bullets the multitude that is struggling in the doorway and that at this moment, after a few seconds’ hesitation, on seeing them appear and finding itself being shot at, comes rushing out at them, hands outstretched, faces congested with wrath, indignation, the desire for vengeance. In seconds, the esplanade turns into a battlefield, with hand-to-hand fighting everywhere, and in the cloud of dust swirling all round the Lion of Natuba he sees pairs and groups grappling with each other, rolling over and over on the ground, he sees sabers, bayonets, knives, machetes, he hears bellows, insults, cries of “Long live the Republic,”
“Down with the Republic,”
“Long live the Counselor, the Blessed Jesus, Marshal Floriano.” In the crowd, in addition to the oldsters and the women, there are now jagunços, men of the Catholic Guard who continue to pour onto the esplanade from one side. He thinks he recognizes Abbot João and, farther in the distance, the bronze-skinned figure of Big João, or perhaps Pedr$$$o, advancing with a huge pistol in one hand and a machete in the other. The soldiers are also on the roof of the church that has caved in. They are there where the jagunços were, raking the esplanade with gunfire from the walls with their bell tower fallen in; he sees kepis, uniforms, leather cartridge belts up there. And he finally realizes what it is that one of them—suspended in empty air almost, up on the sheared-off roof above the façade of Santo Antônio—is doing. He is putting up a flag. They have raised the flag of the Republic over Belo Monte.
He is imagining what the Counselor would have felt, said, if he had seen that flag fluttering up there, already full of bullet holes from the round after round of shots that the jagunços immediately fire at it from the rooftops, towers, and scaffoldings of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus, when he spies the soldier who is aiming his rifle at him, who is shooting at him.
He does not crouch down, he does not run, he does not move, and the thought crosses his mind that he is one of those little birds that a snake hypnotizes in a tree before devouring it. The soldier is aiming at him and the Lion of Natuba knows by the jerk of the man’s shoulder from the recoil of his rifle that he has fired the shot. Despite the blowing dust, the smoke, he sees the man’s beady little