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By Root 2250 0

block off the road to Canudos. Several of them recognize him and intercede with the others on his behalf: after a time they let him continue on his way. He heads north via a shortcut, and after walking only a little way, he hears a rifle report. He realizes from the dust suddenly raised at his feet that they are shooting at him. He throws himself on the ground, crawls along, locates his attackers: two guards crouching on a rise. They shout to him to throw down his carbine and knife. He leaps up and runs as fast as he can in a zigzag line toward a dead angle. He arrives at this safe spot unhurt, and from there manages to put distance between himself and the guards by darting from rock to rock. But he loses his bearings, and when he is certain that he is no longer being followed, he lies down to rest. He is so exhausted that he sleeps like a log. The sun puts him on the right track to Canudos. Groups of pilgrims flowing in from all directions flock down the muddy trail that a few years before was used only by droves of cattle and poverty-stricken traders. At nightfall, camping among pilgrims, he hears a little old man covered with boils who has come from Santo Antônio tell about a circus show he has seen there. Rufino’s heart pounds madly. He lets the old man talk without interrupting him and a moment later he knows that he has picked up the trail.

He arrives in Santo Antônio in the dark and sits down alongside one of the pools along the banks of the Massacará to wait for daylight. He is so impatient he is unable to think. With the sun’s first rays, he begins to go from one little house to the next, all of them identical. Most of them are empty. The first villager he comes across shows him where to go. He enters a dark, foul-smelling interior and halts till his eyes adjust to the dim light. He begins to make out the walls, with lines and scrawls and a Sacred Heart of Jesus scratched on them. There are no pictures or furniture, not even an oil lamp, but there is something like a lingering memory of these things that the occupants have carried away with them.

The woman is lying on the floor and sits up on seeing him enter. Round about her are bits of colored cloth, a wicker basket, and a brazier. In her lap is something that he has difficulty recognizing. Yes, it’s the head of a snake. The tracker now notices the fuzz that darkens the woman’s face and arms. Between her and the wall is someone lying stretched out; he can see half the person’s body and his or her feet. He catches a glimpse of the grief that fills the eyes of the Bearded Lady. He bends down and respectfully asks her about the circus. She continues to look at him without seeing him, and finally, dejectedly, she hands him the cobra: he can have it to eat if he likes. Squatting on his heels, Rufino explains to her that he hasn’t come to take food away from her but to find out something. The Bearded Lady talks to him about the dead one. He’d been dying by inches and the night before he breathed his last. He listens to her, nodding. She reproaches herself, she is filled with remorse, perhaps she should have killed Idílica before and given her to him to eat. If she’d done that, would it have saved him? She herself says no. The cobra and the dead man had shared her life ever since the beginnings of the circus. Memory brings back to Rufino images of the Gypsy, of Pedrim the Giant, and other performers he saw as a child in Calumbi. The woman has heard that if dead people aren’t buried in a coffin they go to hell; this fills her with anguish. Rufino offers to make a coffin and dig a grave for her friend. She asks him point-blank what he wants. His voice trembling, Rufino tells her. The stranger? the Bearded Lady repeats. Galileo Gall? Yes, him. Some men on horseback took him away as they were leaving the village. And she speaks again of the dead man, she couldn’t drag him any farther, it was too hard, she’d decided she’d rather stay behind and care for him. Were they soldiers? Rural Police? Bandits? She doesn’t know. The ones who cut off his hair in Ipupiará? No, it wasn