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The Health House on the Santa Ana slope was a madhouse. There was weeping and wailing on every hand, and Antônia Sardelinha, Catarina, and the other women who went there regularly to cook for the aged, the disabled, and the sick could scarcely move amid the crowd of relatives and friends of the injured who kept tugging at them and demanding that they attend to this victim or that. The injured were lying on the floor, one atop the other, and at times being stepped on. With the help of the water carriers, Antônio forced the intruders to leave, then had the men stand guard at the door while he went off to help treat the injured and bandage them. The shells had blown off fingers and hands, left gaping wounds in bodies, and one woman had had her leg ripped off. How can she still be alive, Antônio wondered as he gave her spirits to inhale. She must be suffering so terribly that one could only hope death would come take her as quickly as possible. The apothecary arrived as the woman was breathing her last in his arms. He had come, he said, from the other Health House, where there were as many victims as in this one, and immediately ordered that all the dead bodies, which he recognized at a single glance, be taken out to the henhouse. He was the one person in Canudos who had any sort of medical training and his presence calmed everyone. Antônio Vilanova found Catarina sponging the forehead of a boy wearing the armband of the Catholic Guard; a shell splinter had put out one of his eyes and slashed his cheek to the bone. He was clinging to her like a baby as she hummed softly to him.

“João gave me a message,” Antônio said to her. And he passed the cangaceiro’s words on to her. Catarina merely gave a little nod. This thin, sad, silent woman was a mystery to him. She was an obliging, devoted disciple, yet at the same time seemed withdrawn from everything and everybody. She and Abbot João lived on the Rua do Menino Jesus, in a little hut squeezed in between two wood houses, and they preferred to be by themselves. Antônio had seen them, many a time, walking together down by the little cultivated plots behind O Mocambo, deep in a conversation that never seemed to end. “Are you going to see João?” she asked him. “Maybe. What would you like me to tell him?”

“That if he suffers eternal damnation, I want to, too.”

Antônio spent the rest of the night setting up infirmaries in two dwellings on the road to Jeremoabo, after having moved their inhabitants to neighbors’ houses. As he and his aides cleared each place out and had wooden stands, cots, blankets, buckets of water, medicines, bandages brought, he was overcome with sadness once again. It had been such hard work to make this land productive again, to lay out and dig irrigation ditches, to break and fertilize this stony ground so that maize and beans, broad beans and sugarcane, melons and watermelons would grow in it, and it had been such hard work bringing goats and kids, raising them, breeding them. It had taken so much work, so much faith, so much dedication on the part of so many people to make these fields and pens what they were. And now the cannon fire was destroying them and soldiers were about to enter Canudos to destroy people who had gathered together there to live in the love of God and help each other since no one else had ever helped them. He forced himself to banish from his mind these thoughts that provoked in him that wrath against which the Counselor had so often preached. An aide came to tell him that the dogs were coming down the hillside.

It was dawn; there was a blare of bugles; the slopes swarmed with red-and-blue forms. Taking his revolver from its holster, Antônio Vilanova headed on the run to the store on Campo Grande. Just as he arrived he saw, fifty yards farther on, that ranks of soldiers had already crossed the river and were overrunning old Joaquim Macambira’s trench, firing in all directions.

Honório and half a dozen aides had barricaded themselves inside the store, behind barrels, counters,