ask him about Queimadas and all of them want to know if he has seen soldiers and what news he has of the war. Sitting down beside them, he tells them everything he knows, and asks about people in Ipupiará. Some of them have died, others have left for the South to make their fortune, and two families have just gone off to Canudos. When darkness has fallen, Rufino and the old men go into the store to have a little glass of cachaça. The stifling heat has now died down to a pleasant warmth. With the appropriate circumlocutions, Rufino now broaches the subject that they all knew the conversation would lead to sooner or later. He employs the most impersonal turns of speech to question them. The old men listen to him without feigning surprise. They all nod their heads and speak in turn. Yes, it has passed this way, more a ghost of a circus than a real one, so wretched-looking it was hard to believe that once upon a time it had been that sumptuous caravan led by the Gypsy. Rufino listens respectfully as they recall the circus shows of the old days. Finally, when there is a pause, he leads the conversation back round to where it began, and this time, as though they had decided that the proprieties had now been observed, they tell him what he has come to learn or confirm: how long it camped just outside the town, how the Bearded Lady, the Dwarf, and the Idiot earned their daily bread by telling fortunes, reciting stories, and putting on clown acts, how the stranger went around asking wild questions about the jagunços, how a band of capangas had come to cut off his red hair and steal the corpse of the father who had killed his children. He does not ask, nor do they mention the other person who was neither a circus performer nor a stranger. But this eminently present absent person haunts the conversation each time someone touches on the subject of how the wounded stranger was cared for and fed. Are they aware that this specter is Rufino’s wife? They surely know or sense this, as they know or sense what can be said and what must be left unsaid. At the end of the conversation, almost by chance, Rufino finds out which direction the circus people were headed when they left. He sleeps in the store that night, on a pallet that the owner offers him, and leaves at dawn at his steady trot.
Neither picking up nor slowing his pace, Rufino traverses a landscape where the only shadow is that of his body, following him at first and then preceding him. With a set expression on his face and half-closed eyes, he makes his way along without hesitating, despite the fact that drifting sand has covered the trail over in places. Night is falling as he arrives at a hut overlooking a sowed field. The tenant farmer, his wife and half-naked kids welcome him as though he were an old friend. He eats and drinks with them, giving them news of Queimadas, Ipupiará, and other places. They talk of the war and the fears it arouses, of the pilgrims who pass by on their way to Canudos, and speculate on the possibility that the world is coming to an end. Only then does Rufino ask them about the circus and the stranger with all his hair lopped off. Yes, they passed by there and headed on toward the Serra de Olhos D’Agua on their way to Monte Santo. The wife remembers best of all the skinny man with no hair and yellowish eyes, who moved like an animal without bones and kept bursting out laughing for no reason at all. The couple find Rufino a hammock to sleep in and the next morning they fill his knapsack, refusing to accept payment.
For a good part of the day, Rufino trots along without seeing anyone, in a landscape cooled by thickets full of flocks of jabbering parrots. That afternoon he begins to come across goatherds, with whom he stops to talk from time to time. A little beyond the Sítio das Flores—the Flower Place, a name that strikes him as a joke since there is nothing to be found there but stones and sun-baked earth—he turns off and heads for a wayside cross fashioned from tree trunks that is surrounded by ex-votos in the form of little carved wooden figurines.