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“No, I haven’t,” Abbot João conceded. “I didn’t choose you so as to do you one, or to do you any harm either. I chose you because you’re the best man. Go to Belo Monte and get to work.”

“Praised be Blessed Jesus the Counselor,” the black said. He got up from the rock he was sitting on and started off across the stony ground.

“Praised be He,” Abbot João said. A few seconds later he saw the ex-slave break into a run.

“In other words, you were untrue to your duty, twice,” Rufino says. “You didn’t kill him the way Epaminondas wanted you to. And you lied to Epaminondas, leading him to believe he was dead. Two times.”

“Only the first time is really serious,” Caifás says. “I handed his hair and a corpse over to him. It was somebody else’s dead body, but neither he nor anybody else could tell that it was. And the foreigner will be a corpse soon, if he isn’t one already. So that’s a minor fault.”

On the reddish bank of the Itapicuru, opposite the one the Queimadas tanneries are on, that Saturday, like every other Saturday, stalls and stands have been set up where vendors from all over the region are hawking their wares. Discussions between buyers and sellers rise above the sea of heads, bare or topped with black sombreros, that dot the marketplace, and mingle with the din of whinnying horses, barking dogs, screaming children, and roistering drunkards. Beggars appeal to people’s generosity by exaggerating the contortions of their maimed and crippled limbs, and minstrels accompanying themselves on guitars stand in front of little knots of people, reciting love stories and tales of the wars between Christian crusaders and unbelievers. Shaking their skirts, their arms covered with bracelets, gypsy women, young and old, tell fortunes.

“Anyway, I’m grateful to you,” Rufino says. “You’re a man of honor, Caifás. That’s why I’ve always respected you. That’s why everybody respects you.”

“What’s a person’s greatest duty?” Caifás says. “Toward his boss or toward his friend? A blind man could have seen that I was obliged to do what I did.”

They walk on side by side, very gravely, indifferent to the colorful, motley throng, the chaotic atmosphere round about them. They rudely push their way through the crowd, forcing people aside with one glaring look or a shove of their shoulders. Every so often someone standing behind a counter or inside a canvas-covered stall greets them, and both of them return the greeting so curtly that no one approaches them. As if by tacit agreement, they head for a place where drinks are being sold—wooden benches, plank tables, an arbor—with fewer customers in it than in the others.

“If I’d finished him off there in Ipupiará I’d have offended you,” Caifás says, as though putting into words something he has long been mulling over in his mind. “By keeping you from avenging the blot on your honor.”

“Why did you go there to kill him in the first place?” Rufino interrupts him. “Why at my house?”

“Epaminondas wanted him to die there,” Caifás answered. “Neither you nor Jurema was to be killed. My men died so as to keep her from getting hurt.” He spits in the air past an eyetooth, and stands there thinking things over in his mind. “Maybe it was my fault they died. It didn’t occur to me that he might defend himself, that he knew how to fight. He didn’t look the type.”

“No,” Rufino agrees. “He didn’t.”

They sit down and pull their chairs closer together so as to talk without being overheard. The woman waiting on them hands them two glasses and asks if they’ll have cane brandy. Yes. She brings a half-full bottle, the guide pours the two of them a drink, and they down it without offering a toast. Then Caifás takes a turn filling the glasses. He is older than Rufino, and his eyes, with their fixed stare, are dull and lifeless. He is dressed all in leather, as always, from head to foot.

“She was the one who saved him?” Rufino finally says, lowering his eyes. “She was the one who grabbed your arm?”

“That’s how I realized