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“A nightmare,” he says. “They hung the ones they killed here in the trees. The urubus are pecking them to pieces. It makes your hair stand on end.”

“When did you leave him?” Rufino cuts him off abruptly.

“Yesterday evening,” Ulpino says. “He probably hasn’t budged. He was dead tired. And what’s more, he had no place to go. He not only lacks honor but endurance as well, and doesn’t have any idea how to find his bearings…”

Rufino grabs him by the arm and squeezes it. “Thanks,” he says, looking him straight in the eye.

Ulpino nods and frees his arm from Rufino’s grasp. The tracker runs back into the shack, his eyes gleaming. The Dwarf and Jurema rise to their feet in bewilderment as he rushes into the room. He unties Jurema’s feet but not her hands, and with swift, dexterous movements passes the same rope around her neck. The Dwarf screams and covers his face with his hands. But he is not hanging her, only making a loop in the rope so as to drag her along behind him. He forces her to follow him outside. Ulpino has gone. The Dwarf hops along behind. Rufino turns around to him. “Don’t make any noise,” he orders. Jurema stumbles on the stones, gets tangled in the brush, but doesn’t open her mouth and matches Rufino’s pace. Behind them, the Dwarf rambles on deliriously about the soldiers strung up on the trees who are being devoured by vultures.

“I’ve seen many awful things in my life,” Baroness Estela said, gazing down at the chipped tiles of the living-room floor. “There in the country. Things that would terrify people in Salvador.” She looked at the baron, balancing back and forth in a rocking chair, unconsciously keeping time with old Colonel José Bernardo Murau, his host, as he swayed back and forth in his. “Do you remember the bull that went mad and charged the children as they were coming out of catechism? I didn’t fall into a faint, did I? I’m not a weak woman. During the great drought, for example, we saw dreadful things, isn’t that so?”

The baron nodded. José Bernardo Murau and Alberto de Gumúcio—the latter had come from Salvador to meet the baron and baroness at the Pedra Vermelha hacienda and had been with them barely two hours—were trying their best to act as though it were an entirely normal conversation, but they could not hide how uncomfortable they were at seeing the baroness’s agitation. That discreet woman, invisible behind her impeccable manners, whose smiles served as an impalpable wall between herself and others, was now rambling on and on, carrying on an endless monologue, as though she were suffering from some malady that had affected her speech. Even Sebastiana, who came from time to time to cool her forehead with eau de cologne, was unable to make her stop talking. And neither her husband nor her host nor Gumúcio had been able to persuade her to go to her room to rest.

“I’m prepared for terrible catastrophes,” she went on, her white hands reaching out toward them beseechingly. “Seeing Calumbi burn down was worse than seeing my mother die in agony, hearing her scream with pain, giving her with my own hands the doses of laudanum that slowly killed her. Those flames are still burning here inside me.” She touched her stomach and doubled over, trembling. “It was as though the children I lost when they were born were being burned to cinders.”

She looked in turn at the baron, Murau, Gumúcio, begging them to believe her. Adalberto de Gumúcio smiled at her. He had tried to change the subject, but each time the baroness brought the talk round again to the fire at Calumbi.

He tried once more to take her mind off this memory. “And yet, my dear Estela, one resigns oneself to the worst tragedies. Did I ever tell you what Adelinha Isabel’s murder at the hands of two slaves was like for me? What I felt when we found my sister’s badly decomposed body, with so many dagger wounds in it that it was unrecognizable?” He cleared his throat as he stirred restlessly in his chair. “That is why I prefer horses to blacks. There are depths of barbarism and infamy