The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [383]
But before allowing anyone to offer an explanation, he gives his officers a dressing down: “So then, my orders have not been obeyed! Instead of searching for the outlaw, you’ve let the men get into a fight! Didn’t I give orders that there were to be no fights?”
But his orders have been obeyed to the letter. Patrols of Bahia police had been out scouring Canudos till the general had ordered them to withdraw so that the demolition squads could get to work. The incident had involved, in fact, one of these very patrols out searching for the corpse of Abbot João, three Bahians who had followed the barricade between the cemetery and the churches down to a depression that must at one time have been the bed of a little stream or an arm of the river and is one of the places where the prisoners who have been captured are being held, a few hundred people who are now almost exclusively women and children, since the men among them have had their throats slit by the squad led by Second Lieutenant Maranhão, who is said to have volunteered for his mission because several months ago the jagunços ambushed his company, leaving him with only eight men alive and unharmed out of the fifty under his command. The Bahia police came down there to ask the prisoners if they knew what had become of Abbot João, and one of the men recognized, among the group of prisoners, a woman from the village of Mirangaba who was a relative of his. On seeing him embrace a jagunça, Lieutenant Maranhão began hurling insults at him and saying, pointing a finger at him, that this was proof that the Bandit-Chaser’s police, despite the republican uniforms they were wearing, were traitors at heart. And when the policeman tried to protest, the lieutenant, in a fit of rage, knocked him to the ground with one blow of his fist. He and his two buddies were then driven off by the gauchos in the lieutenant’s squad, who kept yelling after them from a distance: “Jagunços!” They had returned to camp trembling with rage and stirred up their buddies, who for an hour now have been seething and champing at the bit to go avenge these insults. This was what awaited Colonel Geraldo Macedo: an incident, exactly like twenty or thirty others, that had come about for the same reason and involved almost word for word the same insults.
But this time, unlike all the others, when he has calmed his men down and at most presented a complaint to General Barbosa, the commanding officer of the first column, to which the Bahia Police Volunteer Battalion is attached, or to the Commander of the Expeditionary Forces, General Artur Oscar, if he regards the incident as an especially serious one, Geraldo Macedo feels a curious, symptomatic tingle, one of those intuitions to which he owes his life and his gold braid.
“That Maranhão isn’t someone worthy of respect,” he comments, rapidly licking his gold tooth. “Spending his nights slitting the throats of prisoners isn’t really a job for a soldier but for a butcher, wouldn’t you say?”
His officers remain silent, standing there looking at each other, and as he speaks and licks at his gold tooth, Colonel Macedo notes the surprise, the curiosity, the satisfaction on the faces of Captain Souza, Captain Jerônimo, Captain Tejada, and First Lieutenant Soares.
“I therefore am of the opinion that a gaucho butcher cannot take upon himself the privilege of mistreating my men, or of calling us traitors to the Republic,” he adds. “He is duty-bound to show us respect, wouldn’t you say?”
His officers stand there motionless. He knows that at this moment they have mixed feelings: joy at what his words hint at, and anxiety.
“Wait here for me. No one is to set foot outside this camp,” he says, starting to walk off. And as his subordinates speak up in protest and demand to accompany him, he stops them short: “Stay here. That’s an order. I intend to settle this matter by myself.”
He has no idea what he