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By Root 2224 0

to go to the store, hear the story of the children murdered by the madman, and go to the cemetery to commit a sacrilege that left the villagers of Ipupiará stupefied: namely, disinterring the corpse of the filicide, loading it, coffin and all, on the back of one of their horses, and carrying it off. Now they were back, standing a few yards away from the circus people, waiting. When Gall’s hair was all sheared off, and his skull covered with an uneven iridescence like red shot silk, the Idiot burst out laughing once again. Jurema gathered up the locks of hair that she had carefully laid in her lap, tied them in a bundle with the bit of string with which her own hair was fastened back, and then the Bearded Lady saw her search through the stranger’s pockets and take out a little pouch that he had told them contained money, in case they wanted to use it. With the shock of hair in one hand and the pouch in the other, she climbed down out of the wagon and headed past the circus people.

The leader of the capangas stepped forward. The Bearded Lady saw him take the stranger’s locks that Jurema handed him and, almost without looking at them, put them in his saddlebag. His motionless pupils were threatening, despite the fact that he addressed Jurema in a studiedly courteous, formal manner, picking at his teeth the while with his index finger. This time the Bearded Lady could hear what they said.

“He had this in his pocket,” Jurema said, holding out the pouch. But Caifás did not take it.

“I mustn’t,” he said, as though repelled by something invisible. “That belongs to Rufino, too.”

Not making the slightest objection, Jurema tucked the pouch in her skirts. The Bearded Lady thought that she was about to walk off, but looking Caifás straight in the eye, she asked him softly: “And what if Rufino’s dead?”

Caifás thought for a moment, without changing expression, without blinking. “If he’s dead, there will always be someone to avenge the dishonor done him,” the Bearded Lady heard him say, and she seemed to be hearing the Dwarf and his tales of knights and princes. “A kinsman, a friend. I myself, if necessary.”

“And what if your boss finds out what you’ve done?” she asked then.

“He’s only my boss,” Caifás replied self-assuredly. “Rufino’s more than that. He wants the stranger dead and the stranger’s going to die. Maybe from his wounds, maybe at Rufino’s hand. The lie is soon going to become the truth, and this hair is going to be that of a dead man.”

He turned his back on Jurema to mount his horse. Anxiously, she put one hand on the saddle. “Will he kill me, too?”

The Bearded Lady saw the man dressed in leather gaze down at her without pity and perhaps with a certain contempt. “If I were Rufino I’d kill you, because it’s your fault, too—perhaps more than his,” Caifás said from the back of his mount. “But since I’m not Rufino, I don’t know. He’ll know, though.”

He spurred his horse and the capangas rode off with their strange, stinking booty, in the same direction from which they had come.

As soon as the Mass celebrated by Father Joaquim in the Chapel of Santo Antônio was over, Abbot João went to the Sanctuary to get the crate full of things that he had asked the priest to bring. There was a question preying on his mind: How many soldiers are there in a regiment? He hoisted the crate onto his shoulder and strode rapidly across the uneven ground of Belo Monte, dodging the people who hurried over to ask if it was true that another army was coming. He answered yes, without stopping, leaping over the chickens, goats, dogs, and children in his way so as not to step on them. He reached the former hacienda steward’s house, now turned into a store, with his shoulder aching from the weight of the crate.

The crowd of people standing in the doorway moved aside to let him by, and inside Antônio Vilanova broke off whatever it was he was telling his wife Antônia and his sister-in-law Assunção and hurried across the room to join him. From its swing, a parrot kept frantically repeating: “Felicity! Felicity!”

“A regiment’s coming,” Abbot João