The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [62]
“Saint Vitus’s dance?” Gall says.
“People who can’t stay still,” Jurema explains. “People who go about dancing.”
The dog begins barking furiously once more. Jurema goes to the door of the cabin, opens it, and pushes him outside with her feet. They hear him barking outside, and once again, the tinkling of sheep bells. With a gloomy expression on his face, Galileo follows Jurema with his eyes as she walks back to the fire and pokes at the embers with a stick. A wisp of smoke drifts away in spirals.
“And besides, Canudos belongs to the baron and he’s always helped us,” Jurema says. “This house, this land, these sheep are ours thanks to him. You’re on the side of the jagunços, you want to help them. Taking you to Canudos is the same as helping them. Do you think the baron would like it if Rufino helps the thieves who stole his ranch from him?”
“I’m certain he wouldn’t like it,” Gall mutters sarcastically.
The sound of the sheep bells reaches their ears again, even louder now, and Gall rises to his feet and reaches the palings of the wall of the cabin in two strides. He takes a look outside: the trees, the clumps of underbrush, the patches of rock are beginning to stand out in the whitish expanse. The wagon is there outside, loaded with bundles wrapped in canvas the same color as the desert, and alongside it the mule, tethered to a stake.
“Do you believe that the Counselor has been sent by the Blessed Jesus?” Jurema says. “Do you believe the things he prophesies? That the sea will become backlands and the backlands a sea? That the waters of the Vaza-Barris will turn into milk and the ravines into maize couscous to feed the poor?”
There is not a trace of mockery in her words or in her eyes as Galileo Gall looks at her, trying to read in the expression on her face what she thinks of all the talk that she has heard secondhand. He is unable to tell: the thought crosses his mind that the long oval of her peaceful, burnished face is as inscrutable as that of a Hindustani or a Chinese. Or that of the emissary from Canudos with whom he talked in the tannery in Itapicuru. Then, too, it was impossible to know, by observing his face, what that taciturn man felt or thought.
“In people who are dying of hunger, instincts are ordinarily stronger than beliefs,” he murmurs after drinking the last drop of liquid in the bowl as he carefully scrutinizes Jurema’s reactions. “They may well believe nonsensical, ingenuous, stupid things. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is what they do. They have done away with property, marriage, social hierarchies; they have refused to accept the authority of the Church and of the State, and wiped out an army company. They have fought against authority, money, uniforms, cassocks.”
Jurema’s face is a blank; she does not move a muscle. Her dark, slightly slanted eyes gaze at him without a trace of curiosity, sympathy, surprise. She has moist lips that pucker at the corners.
“They have taken up the fight at the point where we abandoned it, though they are not aware that they have done so. They are bringing the Idea back to life,” Gall goes on, wondering what Jurema can be thinking of the words that she is hearing. “That is why I’m here. That is why I want to help them.”
He is panting for breath, as though he had been shouting at the top of his lungs. The fatigue of the last two days, and on top of it the disappointment that he has felt on discovering that Rufino is not in Queimadas, is beginning to overcome him again, and the thought of sleeping, stretching out, of closing his eyes is so irresistible that he decides to lie down under the cart for a few hours. Or could he perhaps sleep in here—in this hammock, for instance? Will Jurema think it shocking if he asks to do so?
“That man who came from there, the one the saint sent, the one you saw—do you