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By Root 2163 0

hanged in the prison in Salvador and Senhorita Adelinha’s remains were transferred to the neoclassic chapel of the plantation, but her murderer was not found, despite the fact that the Gumúcio family periodically raised the reward for his capture. And yet, after the Kid had run off, Big João had made no attempt to hide himself. A towering giant, half naked, miserable, eating what fell into the animal traps he set or the fruit he plucked from trees, he roamed the byways like a ghost. He went through the towns in broad daylight, asking for food, and the suffering in his face so moved people that they would usually toss him a few scraps.

One day, at a crossroads on the outskirts of Pombal, he came upon a handful of people who were listening to the words of a gaunt man, enveloped in a deep-purple tunic, whose hair came down to his shoulders and whose eyes looked like burning coals. As it happened, he was speaking at that very moment of the Devil, whom he called Lucifer, the Dog, Can, and Beelzebub, of the catastrophes and crimes that he caused in the world, and of what men who wanted to be saved must do. His voice was persuasive; it reached a person’s soul without passing by way of his head, and even to a being as addlebrained as Big João, it seemed like a balm that healed old and terrible wounds. João stood there listening to him, rooted to the spot, not even blinking, moved to his very bones by what he was hearing and by the music of the voice uttering those words. The figure of the saint was blurred at times by the tears that welled up in João’s eyes. When the man went on his way, he began to follow him at a distance, like a timid animal.

The two persons who came to know Galileo best in the city of São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos (called simply Bahia or Salvador) were a smuggler and a doctor; they were also the first to explain the country to him, even though neither of them would have shared the opinions of Brazil that the revolutionary expressed in his letters to L’Etincelle de la révolte (frequent ones during this period). The first of them, written within a week of his shipwreck, spoke of Bahia: “a kaleidoscope where a man with some notion of history sees existing side by side the social disgraces that have debased the various eras of humanity.” The letter referred to slavery, which, although abolished, nonetheless still existed de facto, since in order not to die of starvation, many freed blacks had returned to their former masters and begged them to take them in again. The masters hired on—for miserable salaries—only the able-bodied, so that the streets of Bahia, in Gall’s words, “teem with the elderly, the sick, and the wretched, who beg or steal, and with whores who remind one of those of Alexandria and Algiers, the most depraved ports on the planet.”

The second letter, written two months later, concerned “the infamous alliance of obscurantism and exploitation,” and described the parade each Sunday of wealthy families headed for Mass at the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Praia, with servants carrying prayer stools, candles, missals, and parasols so that the sun would not damage the ladies’ complexions; “these latter,” Gall wrote, “like the English civil servants in the colonies, have made whiteness a paradigm, the quintessence of beauty.” But in a later article the phrenologist explained to his comrades in Lyons that, despite their prejudices, the descendants of Portuguese, Indians, and Africans had mingled with each other quite freely in this land and produced a motley mixture of mestizos: mulattoes, mamelucos, cafuzos, caboclos, curibocas. And he added: “Which is to say, that many more challenges for science.” These human types and the Europeans who landed on its shores for one reason or another gave Bahia a variegated and cosmopolitan atmosphere.

It was among these foreigners that Galileo Gall—who at that time spoke only the most halting Portuguese—made his first acquaintances. In the beginning he lived in the Hôtel des Etrangers, in Campo Grande, but once he struck up a friendship with