Read Online The War Of The End Of The World by Mario Vargas Llosa - Free Book Online
Authors: Mario Vargas Llosa
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He spent so many hours, by day and by night, wandering about the labyrinthine streets of Salvador that he might well have been taken for someone in love with the city. But what Galileo Gall was interested in was not the beauties of Bahia; it was, rather, the spectacle that had never ceased to rouse him to rebellion: injustice. Here, unlike Europe, he explained in his letters to Lyons, there were no segregated residential districts. “The mean huts of the wretched lie side by side with the tiled palaces of the owners of sugar plantations and mills, and ever since the drought of fifteen years ago that drove thousands of refugees here from the highlands, the streets teem with children who look like oldsters and oldsters who look like children, and women who are broomsticks, and among this multitude the scientist can easily identify all manner of physical afflictions, from those that are relatively harmless to those that are terrifyingly severe: bilious fever, beriberi, dropsy, dysentery, smallpox.”
“Any revolutionary whose convictions as to the necessity of a major revolution are wavering”—he wrote in one of his letters—“ought to take a look at what I am seeing in Salvador: it would put an end to all his doubts.”
[III]
When, weeks afterward, it became known in Salvador that in a remote town called Natuba the brand-new Republic’s tax decrees had been burned, the government decided to send a squad of Bahia State Police to arrest the troublemakers. Thirty police officers, in blue-and-green uniforms and kepis still bearing the insignia of the monarchy that the Republic had not yet had time to change, set out, first by train and then on foot, on the arduous journey to this place that for all of them was no more than a name on a map. The Counselor was not in Natuba. The sweating police officers questioned the municipal councillors and the inhabitants of the town before taking off in search of this rebel whose name, popular name, and legend they would bring back to the coast and spread in the streets of Bahia. Guided by a tracker from the region, their blue-and-green uniforms standing out in the radiant morning light, they disappeared into the wilds on the road to Cumbe.
For another week they followed the Counselor’s trail, going up and down a sandy, reddish-colored terrain, with scrub of thorny mandacarus and famished flocks of sheep poking about in the withered leaves. Everyone had seen him pass by, the Sunday before he had prayed in this church, preached in that public square, slept alongside those rocks. They finally found him, seven leagues from Tucano, in a settlement called Masseté, a cluster of adobe huts with round roof tiles in the spurs of the Serra de Ovó. It was dusk; they caught sight of women with water jugs on their heads, and heaved a sigh of relief that their search was nearly over. The Counselor was spending the night with Severino Vianna, a farmer who had a maize field a kilometer outside the settlement. The police trotted out there, amid juazeiro trees with sharp-edged branches and thickets of velame that irritated their skin. When they arrived, in near-darkness, they saw a dwelling made of palings and a swarm of amorphous creatures crowded around someone who was doubtless the man they were looking for. No one fled, no one began yelling and shouting on spying their uniforms, their rifles.
Were there a hundred of them, a hundred fifty, two hundred? There were as many men as women, and the majority of them, to judge from the garments they were wearing, appeared to have come from the poorest of the poor. In the eyes of all of them—so the police officers who returned to Bahia were later to tell their wives, their sweethearts, the whores they slept with, their buddies—was a look of indomitable determination. But in reality they did not have time to observe them or to identify the ringleader, for the moment the sergeant in
He spent so many hours, by day and by night, wandering about the labyrinthine streets of Salvador that he might well have been taken for someone in love with the city. But what Galileo Gall was interested in was not the beauties of Bahia; it was, rather, the spectacle that had never ceased to rouse him to rebellion: injustice. Here, unlike Europe, he explained in his letters to Lyons, there were no segregated residential districts. “The mean huts of the wretched lie side by side with the tiled palaces of the owners of sugar plantations and mills, and ever since the drought of fifteen years ago that drove thousands of refugees here from the highlands, the streets teem with children who look like oldsters and oldsters who look like children, and women who are broomsticks, and among this multitude the scientist can easily identify all manner of physical afflictions, from those that are relatively harmless to those that are terrifyingly severe: bilious fever, beriberi, dropsy, dysentery, smallpox.”
“Any revolutionary whose convictions as to the necessity of a major revolution are wavering”—he wrote in one of his letters—“ought to take a look at what I am seeing in Salvador: it would put an end to all his doubts.”
[III]
When, weeks afterward, it became known in Salvador that in a remote town called Natuba the brand-new Republic’s tax decrees had been burned, the government decided to send a squad of Bahia State Police to arrest the troublemakers. Thirty police officers, in blue-and-green uniforms and kepis still bearing the insignia of the monarchy that the Republic had not yet had time to change, set out, first by train and then on foot, on the arduous journey to this place that for all of them was no more than a name on a map. The Counselor was not in Natuba. The sweating police officers questioned the municipal councillors and the inhabitants of the town before taking off in search of this rebel whose name, popular name, and legend they would bring back to the coast and spread in the streets of Bahia. Guided by a tracker from the region, their blue-and-green uniforms standing out in the radiant morning light, they disappeared into the wilds on the road to Cumbe.
For another week they followed the Counselor’s trail, going up and down a sandy, reddish-colored terrain, with scrub of thorny mandacarus and famished flocks of sheep poking about in the withered leaves. Everyone had seen him pass by, the Sunday before he had prayed in this church, preached in that public square, slept alongside those rocks. They finally found him, seven leagues from Tucano, in a settlement called Masseté, a cluster of adobe huts with round roof tiles in the spurs of the Serra de Ovó. It was dusk; they caught sight of women with water jugs on their heads, and heaved a sigh of relief that their search was nearly over. The Counselor was spending the night with Severino Vianna, a farmer who had a maize field a kilometer outside the settlement. The police trotted out there, amid juazeiro trees with sharp-edged branches and thickets of velame that irritated their skin. When they arrived, in near-darkness, they saw a dwelling made of palings and a swarm of amorphous creatures crowded around someone who was doubtless the man they were looking for. No one fled, no one began yelling and shouting on spying their uniforms, their rifles.
Were there a hundred of them, a hundred fifty, two hundred? There were as many men as women, and the majority of them, to judge from the garments they were wearing, appeared to have come from the poorest of the poor. In the eyes of all of them—so the police officers who returned to Bahia were later to tell their wives, their sweethearts, the whores they slept with, their buddies—was a look of indomitable determination. But in reality they did not have time to observe them or to identify the ringleader, for the moment the sergeant in
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