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“To Cumbe, to Jeremoabo, anywhere,” the Dwarf insisted, tugging at her skirt.

“And which way is it to Cumbe, to Jeremoabo?” Jurema murmured. “Do we have any idea? Do you know?”

“It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter!” the Dwarf yelped, pulling at her. “Didn’t you hear the jagunços? They’re going to fight here, there’s going to be shooting here, we’re going to be killed.”

Jurema rose to her feet and took a few steps toward the mantle of woven grass that the jagunços had put over her when they rescued her from the soldiers. It felt damp. She threw it over the corpses of the guide and the stranger, trying to cover the parts of their bodies that had been battered worst: their torsos and their heads. Then, suddenly determined to overcome her apathy, she set out in the direction that she remembered seeing Pajeú take off in. She immediately felt a chubby little hand in her right hand.

“Where are we going?” the Dwarf asked. “And what about the soldiers?”

She shrugged. The soldiers, the jagunços: what did she care? She had had enough of everything and everybody, and her one desire was to forget everything she’d seen. As they walked on, she gathered leaves and little twigs to suck the sap from them.

“Shots,” the Dwarf said. “Shots, shots.”

It was heavy fire. In a few seconds the din filled the dense, serpentine caatinga, which seemed to multiply the bursts and volleys. But not a single living creature was to be seen anywhere about: only rising ground covered with brambles and leaves torn off the trees by the rain, mud puddles, and thickets of macambiras with branches like claws and mandacarus and xiquexiques with sharp thorns. She had lost her sandals at some point during the night, and though she had gone about barefoot for a good part of her life, she could feel how badly cut and bruised her feet were. The hillside grew steeper and steeper. The sun shone full in her face and seemed to mend her limbs, to bring them back to life. She realized that something was up when the Dwarf’s fingernails dug into her flesh. Some four yards away a short-barreled, wide-mouthed blunderbuss was aimed straight at them, held in the hands of a man from the vegetable kingdom, with bark for skin, limbs that were branches, and hair that was tufts of grass.

“Clear out of here,” the jagunço said, poking his face out of his mantle. “Didn’t Pajeú tell you that you should go to the Jeremoabo entrance?”

“I don’t know how to get there,” Jurema answered.

“Shh, shhh,” she heard voices say at this moment, as though the bushes and the cacti had started to speak. Then she saw men’s heads appear amid the branches.

“Hide them,” she heard Pajeú order, without being able to tell where his voice was coming from, and felt herself being shoved to the ground, crushed beneath the body of a man who whispered to her as he enveloped her with his mantle of woven grasses: “Shhh, shhh.” She lay there motionless, with her eyes half closed, stealing cautious glances. She could feel the jagunço’s breath in her ear and wondered if the same thing had happened to the Dwarf as had happened to her. She spied the soldiers. Her heart skipped a beat on seeing how close they were. They were marching in a column, two abreast, in their trousers with red stripes and their blue tunics, their black boots and their rifles with naked bayonets. She held her breath, closed her eyes, waiting for the shots to ring out, but as nothing happened, she opened them again and the soldiers were still there, passing by them. She could see their eyes, feverish with anxiety or bloodshot from lack of sleep, their faces, undaunted or terrified, and make out a few scattered words of what they were saying. Wasn’t it incredible that so many soldiers should pass by without discovering that there were jagunços so close that they could almost touch them, so close that they were almost stepping on them?

And at this moment a great blinding flash of exploding gunpowder filled the caatinga, reminding her for a second of the fiesta of Santo Antônio, in Queimadas, when the circus came to town and