The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [63]
All at once the tinkling of the sheep bells can be heard again outside, along with anxious barks at the door of the cabin and the whinnying of the mule. Gall is remembering the emissary from Canudos, the scar etched into his face, his strange calm, his indifference. Was it a mistake not to have told him about the arms? No, since he couldn’t show them to him at the time: he would not have believed it, he would have been even more mistrustful, it would have jeopardized the entire plan. The dog barks frantically outside, and Gall sees Jurema grab the stick that she has put the fire out with and walk quickly over to the door. His mind elsewhere, still thinking about the emissary from Canudos, telling himself that if he had known that the man was an ex-bandit it might have been easier to talk with him, he watches Jurema struggle with the heavy crossbar, lift it, and at that moment something subtle, a noise, an intuition, a sixth sense, chance, tells him what is about to happen. For when Jurema is suddenly thrown backward as the door is violently flung open—with a shove or a kick from outside—and the silhouette of the man armed with a carbine appears in the doorway, Galileo already has his revolver out and is pointing it at the intruder. The roar of the carbine awakens the chickens in the corner, which flutter about in terror as Jurema, who has not been hit by the bullet but falls to the floor nonetheless, lets out a scream. On seeing the woman at his feet, the assailant hesitates, and it takes him a few seconds to find Gall amid the panicked flutter of wings, so that by the time he trains the carbine on him, Galileo has already fired, looking at him with a stupid expression on his face. The intruder drops the carbine and reels back, snorting. Jurema screams again. Galileo finally reacts and runs toward the carbine. He leans over and grabs it, and then catches sight, through the doorway, of the wounded man writhing on the ground moaning, another man coming on the run with his carbine raised and shouting something to the wounded man, and beyond him a third man hitching the wagon with the arms to a horse. Barely taking aim, he shoots. The man who was coming running stumbles, rolls on the ground bellowing, and Galileo takes another shot at him. “There are two bullets left,” he thinks. He sees Jurema at his side, pushing the door, sees her close it, lower the crossbar, and slip to the back of the shack. He gets to his feet, wondering when it was that she fell to the floor. He is covered with dirt and drenched with sweat, his teeth are chattering, and he is clutching the revolver so tightly that his fingers ache. He peeks out through the palings: the wagon with the arms is disappearing in the distance in a cloud of dust, and in front of the cabin the dog is barking frantically at the two wounded men, who are creeping toward the sheepfold. Taking aim at them, he shoots the last two bullets left in his revolver and hears what seems to him to be a human roar amid the barking and the tinkling sheep bells. Yes, he has hit one of them: the two are lying motionless, halfway between the cabin and the animal pen. Jurema is screaming still and the chickens cackling madly as they fly about in all directions, overturn things, crash into the palings, collide with his body. He slaps them away and looks out again, to the right and the left. If it weren’t for those two bodies lying practically one atop the other, it would seem as though nothing had happened. Breathing hard, he staggers amid the chickens to the door. Through the cracks he glimpses the lonely countryside, the sprawling bodies. “They made away with the rifles,” he thinks. “I’d be worse off if I were dead,” he thinks. He pants, his eyes opened wide. Finally he lifts the crossbar