The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [51]
Among the few who managed to flee the town were the two Vilanova brothers. Their parents, their sister Luz Maria, a brother-in-law, and three nephews in the family were carried off by the epidemic.
After burying all these kinfolk, Antônio and Honório, strong youngsters, both of them fifteen, with curly hair and blue eyes, made up their minds to escape from the town. But instead of confronting the capangas with knives and bullets, as others had, Antônio, faithful to his vocation, persuaded them to look the other way—in exchange for a young bull, a twenty-five-pound sack of refined sugar, and another of raw brown sugar. They left by night, taking with them two girl cousins of theirs—Antônio and Assunção Sardelinha—and the family’s worldly goods: two cows, a pack mule, a valise full of clothes, and a little purse containing ten milreis. Antônio and Assunção were double first cousins of the Vilanova boys, and Antônio and Honório took them along out of pity for their helplessness, for the smallpox epidemic had left them orphans. The girls were scarcely more than children and their presence made their escape across country difficult; they did not know how to make their way through scrub forest and found thirst hard to bear. The little expeditionary force nonetheless managed to cross the Serra do Araripe, left Santo Antônio, Ouricuri, Petrolina behind them, and crossed the Rio São Francisco. When they entered Juazeiro and Antônio decided that they would try their luck in that town in the state of Bahia, the two sisters were pregnant: Antônio by Antônio, and Assunção by Honório.
The very next day Antônio began working for money, while Honório, with the help of the Sardelinha girls, built a hut. They had sold on the way the cows they had taken with them from Assaré, but they still had the pack mule left, and Antônio loaded a containerful of brandy on its back and went about the city selling it by the drink. He was to load on the back of that mule, and then on another, and later on others still, the goods that, in the months and years that followed, he peddled, at first from house to house and after that in the outlying settlements, and finally throughout the length and breadth of the backhands, which he came to know like the palm of his hand. He dealt in salted codfish, rice, beans, sugar, pepper, brown sugar, lengths of doth, alcohol, and whatever else people asked him to supply them with. He became the purveyor to vast haciendas and to poor sharecroppers, and his mule trains became as familiar a sight as the Gypsy’s Circus in the villages, the missions, and the camps of the backhands. The general store in Juazeiro, in the Praça da Misericôrdia, was run by Honôrio and the Sardelinha sisters. Before ten years had gone by, people were saying that the Vilanovas were well on their way to becoming rich.
At this point the disaster that was to ruin the family for the second time overtook them. In good years, the rains began in December; in bad ones, in February or March. That year, by the time May came round, not a single drop of rain had fallen. The volume of water in the São Francisco diminished by two-thirds and barely sufficed to meet the needs of Juazeiro, whose population quadrupled with the influx of migrants from the interior.
That year Antônio Vilanova did not collect a single debt owed him, and all his customers, both the owners of large haciendas and poor people of the region, canceled their orders for goods. Even Calumbi, the Baron de Canabrava