The War Of The End Of The World by Mario Vargas Llosa Page A

the entire town, exactly like the itinerant storytellers or Pedrim the Giant, the Bearded Lady, or the Man without Bones of the Gypsy’s Circus. But Maria Quadrado never went near the groups of disciples that formed about these outlandish preachers.
    For that reason, the townspeople were surprised one day to see Maria Quadrado heading for the cemetery, around which a group of volunteers had begun to build a wall, having been impelled to do so by the exhortations of a dark-skinned, long-haired man dressed in dark purple who, arriving in town that morning with a group of disciples (among whom there was a creature, half human and half animal, that galloped along on all fours), had reproved them for not even taking the trouble to erect a wall around the ground in which their dead had been laid to rest. Was it not fitting and proper that death, which permitted man to see the face of God, should be venerated? Maria Quadrado silently joined the people who were collecting stones and piling them up in a sinuous line enclosing the little crosses scorched by the sun, and began to help. She worked shoulder to shoulder with them till sunset. Then she lingered on in the main square beneath the tamarinds, along with the group that gathered to listen to the dark-skinned man. Although he mentioned God and said that it was important for the salvation of a person’s soul that that person destroy his or her own will—a poison that gave everyone the illusion of being a little god who was superior to the other gods round about him—and put in its place the will of the Third Person, the one that built, the one that labored, the Industrious Ant, and things of that sort, he spoke of these things in clear language, every word of which they understood. His talk, while religious and profound, seemed like one of those pleasant after-dinner chats that families had together outside in the street as they enjoyed the evening breeze. Maria Quadrado stayed on in the square, all curled up in a ball, listening to the Counselor, not asking him anything, not taking her eyes off him. When the hour grew late and the townspeople still there in the square offered the stranger a roof over his head for his night’s rest, she, too, spoke up—everyone turned round to look at her—and timidly offered him her cave. Without hesitating, the gaunt man followed her up the mountainside.
    For as long as the Counselor remained in Monte Santo, giving counsel and working—he cleaned and restored all the chapels on the mountain, built a wall of stones along either side of the Via Sacra—he slept in Maria Quadrado’s cave. Afterward people said that he didn’t sleep, and that she didn’t either, that they spent the night talking of things of the spirit at the foot of the little multicolored altar, while others claimed that he slept on the straw pallet as she watched over his sleep. In any event, the truth was that Maria Quadrado never left his side for a moment, hauling stones with him in the daytime and listening to him with wide-open eyes at night. Nonetheless, the whole town was surprised the morning it discovered that the Counselor had left Monte Santo and that Maria Quadrado had joined his followers and gone off with him.
     
    In a square in the upper town of Bahia there is an old stone building, decorated with black-and-white seashells and surrounded, as prisons are, by thick yellow walls. As some of my readers may already have surmised, it is a fortress of obscurantism: the Monastery of Our Lady of Mercy. A monastery of Capuchins, one of those orders famous for the subjugation of the spirit that they practice and for their missionary zeal. Why do I speak to you of a place which in the eyes of any libertarian symbolizes what is odious? In order to inform you of what I learned when I spent the entire afternoon inside it two days ago.
    I did not go there to explore the terrain with a view to bringing to it one of those pedagogically violent messages that in the opinion