The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian by E.F. Granell

Author:E.F. Granell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

CHAPTER 17

THE PEAKS OF SPAIN

“Don’t be a jinx!” Sargent Pablo muttered angrily, gritting his teeth.

He was outraged to hear that that was the end. A chubby sapper had said so as, with some help, he pushed a truck over the precipice. Somersaulting as it fell and dented itself against the granite cliffs, its racket muffled on the rough descent, until it piled up at the bottom of the abyss, with cannons, suitcases, boxes of dynamite, pontoons, filing cabinets and kitchens, thrown in before. The mountain’s gorge swallowed up all the equipment. Above, at the edge, soldiers and officers, teary-eyed, contemplated the fall in silence. Spellbound, they shivered from the wet wind and the snow, and the smoke from bonfires that buffeted them.

“No way is this the end! Nothing is lost!” Sargent Pablo roared suddenly. And he then explained that that was a diversion devised by the command. The enemies would thus believe themselves triumphant, and then, unawares, boom!, the Loyalist army would give them a beating, as sure as two and two are four!

The wound in the mountain never closed up, no matter how many munitions and utensils, metal and wood, cardboard boxes and cans, papers and bullets and bandoliers and flasks they fed it. The soldiers in the ranks and their officers, with full beards and piercing eyes, didn’t dare to look at each other. They took up the slow rhythm of their sacrifice with cries of pain and anguish, with sighs of blood, with …

“Who would have thought it!”

“Everything is lost.”

“The wind writhes as if poisoned.”

“They will only smash mallow and bulrushes.”

“Even the star shells are used up.”

“This is the end.”

“There’s nothing left to do.”

“Let them eat worms and hairy flies!”

“It was food while it lasted …”

“… which was only to die …”

“… to die covered in bile.”

“Lower the curtain and shut up.”

“What a prickly beginning!”

The military column trembled, with ragged fringes, frayed and shredded tassels, and heraldry of scars and bandages, on the edge of nothing, at the rim of the world. In front, debris and scrap-iron; behind, garbage and the sky; at their feet, the road that leads to the bowels of the earth, and above their heads, the dual war helmet of metal and night.

As if it were a vanishing point, the crevice of the massif that filled up with a thousand different things and a rain of horrifying signals, magnetized long rows of people, carriages, civilian and military groups, carts pulled by mules, ambulances, oxen, troop trucks, multi-colored rattletraps, covered wagons pulled by burros, broken families, dogs and roosters on the loose, children on foot, all transformed into an enormous paleness of eyes, children on old people’s backs, children on their mothers’ laps, children seated like Rodin’s Thinker, on piles of gravel with a switched-off red lantern on top; others, on towers of mattresses and cooking pots piled on a fragile wheelbarrow. Undulating or rectangular rows, dense or frayed, stuffed or diluted, composed of sickly couples stuck between dry leaves of Virginia tobacco; or

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