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By Root 2277 0

of all the huts in Ipupiará, as surprised by this apparition as she was. She saw six armed riders: she could tell, by the way they were dressed and by the clearly visible brand of the same hacienda on the flanks of all their horses, that they were capangas and not cangaceiros or Rural Police. The one riding in front—a man dressed in leather—dismounted and the Bearded Lady saw him head her way. Jurema had just sat up on her blanket. The Bearded Lady saw her face turn deathly pale and her mouth gape open. “Is that your husband?” she asked Jurema. “It’s Caifás,” the young woman said. “Has he come to kill you?” the Bearded Lady asked insistently. But instead of answering her, Jurema crawled out from under the tent on all fours, stood up, and walked over to the capanga, who stopped dead in his tracks. The Bearded Lady felt her heart begin to pound, thinking that the man dressed in leather—a swarthy, bonyfaced man with cold eyes—was about to strike her, kick her, and maybe plunge his knife into her, and then walk over and plunge it into the back of the redheaded man, whom she could hear tossing about in the wagon. But the man didn’t hit her. Quite the contrary: he removed his sombrero and greeted her in an obviously polite and respectful manner. From astride their horses, the five men watched this dialogue that for them, as for the Bearded Lady, was merely lips moving. What were the two of them saying to each other? The Dwarf and the Idiot had awakened and were also watching. After a moment, Jurema turned around and pointed to the wagon where the wounded stranger was sleeping.

With the young woman following after him, the man in leather walked over to the wagon and poked his head underneath the canvas. The Bearded Lady then saw him gaze indifferently at the man, who, asleep or awake, was still talking with his ghosts. The leader of the capangas had the dead-calm eyes of those who are used to killing, the same look that the Bearded Lady had seen in the eyes of the bandit Pedrão that time that he’d beaten the Gypsy in the fight and killed him. Her face deathly pale, Jurema waited for the capanga to finish his inspection. He finally turned to her, said something to her. Jurema nodded and the man then signaled to his men to dismount. Jurema came over to the Bearded Lady and asked her for the shears. As she searched about for them, the Bearded Lady whispered: “Is he going to kill you?”

“No,” Jurema answered. And with the pair of shears that had belonged to Dádiva in her hand, she climbed into the wagon. Leading their horses by the reins, the capangas headed for the Ipupiará store, whereupon the Bearded Lady, followed by the Dwarf and the Idiot, went to see what Jurema was up to.

Kneeling alongside the stranger—there was barely room for the two of them in the small space—Jurema was shearing him down to his very scalp, holding his bright-red locks in one hand and the squeaking scissors in the other. There were dried bloodstains, tears, dust, bird droppings on Galileo Gall’s black frock coat. He was lying on his back, amid multicolored pieces of cloth and boxes, hoops, lampblack, pointed hats with half-moons and stars. His eyes were closed, he had a growth of beard on which there was also dried blood, his boots had been removed and his long toes with dirty nails were poking out of the holes in his socks. The wound in his neck disappeared from sight beneath a bandage and the healer’s herbs. The Idiot burst out laughing, and though the Bearded Lady dug her elbows into his ribs, he went on whooping. Beardless, skinny as a rail, his eyes blank, his mouth open and a thread of spittle hanging from his lips, he writhed with laughter. Jurema paid no attention to him, but the stranger opened his eyes. His face contorted in surprise, pain, or terror at what was being done to him, but he was so weak he was unable to sit up and simply lay there tossing about and uttering one of those sounds that the circus people found incomprehensible.

It took Jurema a long while to finish her task—so long that, before she was done, the capangas had had time