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By Root 2018 0

he had come to feel such intense jealousy that it kept him awake nights on seeing the camaraderie, the inviolable intimacy that existed between the two women. He went back to the dining room, and saw through a window that the night sky was covered with clouds that hid the stars. He remembered, smiling, that because of his feelings of jealousy he had one day asked Estela to dismiss Sebastiana; the argument that had ensued had been the most serious one of their entire married life. He entered the dining room with the vivid, painful image, still intact, of the baroness, her cheeks on fire, defending her maidservant and repeating over and over that if Sebastiana left, she was leaving, too. This memory, which had long remained a spark setting his desire aflame, moved him to the depths now. He felt like weeping. He found his friends absorbed in conjectures as to whether what he had read to them could possibly be true.

“A braggart, a dreamer, a rascal with a lively imagination, a first-rate confidence man,” Colonel Murau was saying. “Even heroes in novels don’t have that many adventures. The only part I believe is where he tells about the agreement with Epaminondas to take arms to Canudos. A smuggler who invented that story about anarchism as a pretext and a justification.”

“A pretext and a justification?” Adalberto de Gumúcio bounced up and down in his chair. “An aggravating circumstance, rather.”

The baron sat down next to him and tried to take an interest in the discussion.

“Does attempting to do away with property, religion, marriage, morality impress you as being a mitigating circumstance?” Gumúcio said, pressing his point. “That’s far more serious than trafficking in arms.”

“Marriage, morality,” the baron thought. And he wondered if Adalberto would have permitted in his home as intimate a relationship as that between Estela and Sebastiana. His heart sank again as he thought about his wife. He decided to leave the following morning. He poured himself a glass of port and took a long sip of it.

“I’m inclined to believe that the story is true,” Gumúcio said. “Because of the natural way in which he tells of all those extraordinary things—the escapes, the murders, his voyages as a freebooter, his sexual abstinence. He doesn’t realize that there is anything out of the ordinary about them. This makes me think that he really experienced them and that he believes the horrendous things he says against God, the family, and society.”

“There’s no doubt that he believes them,” the baron said, savoring the sweetish afterglow left by the port. “I heard him tell them many times, at Calumbi.”

Old Murau filled their glasses again. They had not drunk during dinner, but after the coffee their host had brought out this decanter full of port that was now nearly half empty. Was drinking till he fell into a stupor what he needed to keep his mind off Estela’s health? the baron wondered.

“He confuses reality and illusion, he has no idea where the one ends and the other begins,” he said. “It may be that he recounts those things in all sincerity and believes every word. It doesn’t matter. Because he doesn’t see them with his eyes but through the filter of his ideas, his beliefs. Don’t you recall what he says about Canudos, about the jagunços? It must be the same with all the rest. It’s quite possible that to him a street fight among ruffians in Barcelona or a raid on smugglers by the police in Marseilles is a battle waged by the oppressed against the oppressors in the war to shatter the chains binding humanity.”

“And what about sex?” José Bernardo Murau said: his face was congested, his little eyes gleaming, his tongue thick. “Do you two swallow that story about his ten years of chastity? Ten years of chastity to store up energy to be released in revolution?”

His tone of voice was such that the baron suspected that at any moment he would begin to tell off-color stories.

“What about priests?” he asked. “Don’t they live in chastity out of love of God? Gall is a sort of priest.”

“José Bernardo judges men by his own example,” Gumúcio joked, turning