The War Of The End Of The World by Mario Vargas Llosa Read Free Book Online

the explanations several times is again heard: “How many dead and wounded were there in all, Lieutenant? In your company and among the outlaws?”
    “Ten dead and sixteen wounded among my men,” Pires Ferreira replies with an impatient gesture. “The enemy had at least a hundred casualties. All this is noted in the report that I gave you, sir.”
    “I’m not a member of the commission. I’m a reporter from the Jornal de Notícias , in Bahia,” the man says.
    He does not resemble the government officials or the doctor in the white smock with whom he has come here. Young, nearsighted, with thick eyeglasses. He does not take notes with a pencil but with a goose-quill pen. He is dressed in a pair of trousers coming apart at the seams, an off-white jacket, a cap with a visor, and all of his apparel seems fake, wrong, out of place on his awkward body. He is holding a clipboard with a number of sheets of paper and dips his goose-quill pen in an inkwell, with the cork of a wine bottle for a cap, that is fastened to the sleeve of his jacket. He looks more or less like a scarecrow.
    “I have traveled six hundred kilometers merely to ask you these questions, Lieutenant Pires Ferreira,” he says. And he sneezes.

    Big João was born near the sea, on a sugarcane plantation in Recôncavo, the owner of which, Sir Adalberto de Gumúcio, was a great lover of horses. He boasted of possessing the most spirited sorrels and the mares with the most finely turned ankles in all of Bahia and of having produced these specimens of first-rate horseflesh without any need of English studs, thanks to astute matings which he himself supervised. He prided himself less (in public) on having achieved the same happy result with the blacks of his slave quarters, so as not to further stir the troubled waters of the quarrels that this had aroused with the Baron de Canabrava and with the Church, but the truth of the matter was that he dealt with his slaves in exactly the same way that he had dealt with his horses. His method was ruled by his eye and by his inspiration. It consisted of selecting the most lively and most shapely young black girls and giving them as concubines to the males that he regarded as the purest because of their harmonious features and even-colored skins. The best couples were given special food and work privileges so as to produce as many offspring as possible. The chaplain, the missionaries, and the hierarchy of Salvador had repeatedly reproved him for throwing blacks together in this fashion, “making them live together like animals,” but instead of putting an end to such practices, these reprimands resulted only in his engaging in them more discreetly.
    Big João was the result of one of these combinations arranged by this great landowner with the inclinations of a perfectionist. In João’s case the product born of the mating was undeniably magnificent. The boy had very bright, sparkling eyes and teeth that when he laughed filled his round blue-black face with light. He was plump, vivacious, playful, and his mother—a beautiful woman who gave birth every nine months—suspected that he would have an exceptional future. She was not mistaken. Sir Adalberto de Gumúcio became fond of him when he was still a baby crawling on all fours and took him out of the slave quarters to the manor house—a rectangular building, with a hip roof, Tuscan columns, and balconies with wooden railings that overlooked the cane fields, the neoclassic chapel, the sugar mill, the distillery, and an avenue of royal palms—thinking that he could be a servant boy for his daughters and later on a butler or a coachman. He did not want him to be ruined at an early age, as frequently happened with children sent out into the fields to clear land and harvest sugarcane.
    But the one who claimed Big João for herself was Miss Adelinha Isabel de Gumúcio, Master Adalberto’s unmarried sister, who lived with him. She was slender and small-boned, with a little