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“Not for anything in the world.” Murau laughed. “Isn’t it stupid to give up one of the few compensations life has to offer?”

One of the tapers in the candelabrum began to sputter and give off a little cloud of smoke, and Murau rose to his feet to blow it out. While he was up, he poured all of them another glass of port, leaving the decanter completely empty.

“During all those years of abstinence he must have accumulated enough energy to cover a she-donkey and leave her pregnant,” he said, his eyes aglow. He gave a vulgar laugh and staggered over to a buffet to get out another bottle of port. The remaining tapers in the candelabrum were going out and the room had grown dark. “What does the guide’s wife, the woman who caused him to renounce chastity, look like?”

“I haven’t seen her for some time,” the baron said. “She was a little bit of a thing, docile and timid.”

“A good behind?” Colonel Murau said thickly, raising his glass to his lips with a trembling hand. “In these parts, that’s the best thing they’ve got. They’re weak little things and they age fast. But they all have first-class asses.”

Adalberto de Gumúcio hurriedly changed the subject. “It’s going to be hard to make a peace pact with the Jacobins as you suggest,” he remarked to the baron. “Our friends won’t want to work with those who have been attacking us for so many years.”

“Of course it’s going to be hard,” the baron answered, grateful to Adalberto for bringing up another subject. “Above all, persuading Epaminondas, who thinks he’s won. But in the end they’ll all realize that there’s no other way. It’s a question of survival…”

He was interrupted by the sound of hoofbeats and whinnies very close by and, a moment later, by loud knocking at the door. José Bernardo Murau frowned in irritation. “What the devil is going on?” he grumbled, struggling to his feet. He shuffled out of the dining room, and the baron filled their glasses again.

“You drinking: that’s something new, I must say,” Gumúcio commented. “Is it because Calumbi was burned down? That’s not the end of the world, you know. Just a temporary setback.”

“It’s on account of Estela,” the baron said. “I’ll never forgive myself. It was my fault, Adalberto. I asked too much of her. I shouldn’t have taken her to Calumbi, just as you and Viana warned me. It was selfish, stupid of me.”

They heard the bolt of the front door slide open, and men’s voices.

“It’s a passing crisis that she’ll soon recover from,” Gumurio said. “It’s absurd of you to blame yourself.”

“I’ve decided to go on to Salvador tomorrow,” the baron said. “It’s more of a risk keeping her here, without medical attention.”

José Bernardo Murau reappeared in the doorway. He seemed to have sobered up all of a sudden, and had such an odd expression on his face that Gumúcio and the baron hurried to his side.

“News of Moreira César?” The baron took him by the arm, trying to bring him back to reality.

“Incredible, incredible,” the old cattle breeder muttered, as though he’d just seen ghosts.

[VII]

The first thing the nearsighted journalist notices in the early dawn light as he shakes the crusted mud off himself is that his body aches more than it did the evening before, as though he had received a terrible beating during his sleepless night. Secondly, the feverish activity, the movement of uniforms that is taking place without any orders being given, in a silence that is a sharp contrast to the sound of cannon fire, bells, and bugles that has assailed his ears all night long. He throws his big leather pouch over his shoulder, tucks the portable writing desk under his arm, and, with pins and needles in his legs and the tickle of an imminent sneeze in his nose, begins to climb the slope toward Colonel Moreira César’s tent. “The humidity,” he thinks, overcome by a fit of sneezing that makes him forget the war and everything save those internal explosions that bring tears to his eyes, stop up his ears, dizzy his brain, and turn his nostrils into anthills.