The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [380]
“You might say that you’ve been restored to life,” he heard Honôrio say—the Vilanova who spoke so rarely that, when he did, it seemed to be his brother.
“Perhaps so,” the Pyrotechnist answered. “But I wasn’t dead. Not even wounded. I don’t know. I don’t know that, either. There was no blood on my body. Maybe a stone fell on my head. But I didn’t hurt anywhere, either.”
“You fell into a faint,” Antônio Vilanova said. “The way people did in Belo Monte. They thought you were dead and that saved you.”
“That saved me,” the Pyrotechnist repeated. “But that wasn’t all. Because when I came to and found myself in the midst of all those dead, I also saw that the atheists were finishing off with their bayonets those who had fallen, or shooting them if they moved. Lots of them went right by me, and not one of them bent over me to see if I was dead.”
“In other words, you spent an entire day playing dead,” Antônio Vilanova said.
“Hearing them pass by, killing off those who were still alive, knifing the prisoners to death, dynamiting the walls,” the Pyrotechnist said. “But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the dogs, the rats, the black vultures. They were devouring the dead. I could hear them pawing, biting, pecking. Animals don’t make mistakes. They know who’s dead and who isn’t. Vultures, rats don’t devour people who are still alive. My fear was the dogs. That was the miracle: they, too, left me alone.”
“You were lucky,” Antônio Vilanova said. “And what are you going to do now?”
“Go back to Mirandela,” the Pyrotechnist said. “I was born there, I grew up there, I learned how to make skyrockets there. Maybe. I don’t know. What about you?”
“We’ll go far away from here,” the former storekeeper said. “To Assaré, maybe. We came from there, we began this life there, fleeing from the plague, as we’re doing now. From another plague. Maybe we’ll end up where it all began. What else can we do?”
“Nothing, I’m certain of that,” Antônio the Pyrotechnist said.
Not even when they tell him to hasten to General Artur Oscar’s command post if he wants to have a look at the Counselor’s head before First Lieutenant Pinto Souza takes it to Bahia does Colonel Geraldo Macedo, commanding officer of the Bahia Police Volunteer Battalion, stop thinking about what has obsessed him ever since the end of the war: “Has anyone seen him? Where is he?” But like all the brigade, regimental, and battalion commanders (officers of lesser rank are not accorded this privilege), he goes to have a look at the remains of the man who has been the death of so many people and yet, according to all witnesses, was never once seen to take up a rifle or a knife in his own hands. He doesn’t see very much, however, because they have put the head in a sackful of lime inasmuch as it is very badly decomposed: just a few shocks of grayish hair. He merely puts in an appearance at General Oscar’s hut for form’s sake, unlike other officers, who stay on and on, congratulating each other on the end of the war and making plans for the future now that they will be going back to their home bases and their families. Colonel Macedo’s eyes rest for a brief moment on the tangle of hair, then he leaves without a single comment and returns to the smoking heap of ruins and corpses.
He thinks no more about the Counselor or the exultant officers that he has left in the command