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By Root 2064 0

“Wake up, it’s already light, let’s try to find the road to Cumbe.” He finally locates them, between his legs, unbroken. He cleans them, stands up, stammers “All right, all right,” and as he puts his glasses on and the world comes into focus he sees the Dwarf: a real one, as small as a ten-year-old boy but with a face furrowed with wrinkles. He is holding the hand of a woman of indeterminate age, with her hair falling round her shoulders, so thin she seems nothing but skin and bones. Both of them are covered with mud, their clothes are in tatters, and the nearsighted journalist wonders whether he too, like the two of them and the robust little curé who has begun walking determinedly in the direction of the rising sun, gives the same impression of disarray, forlornness, vulnerability. “We’re on the other side of A Favela,” Father Joaquim says. “If we go this way we should come out onto the trail to Bendengó. God grant there won’t be any soldiers…”

“But there will be,” the nearsighted journalist thinks. “Or else jagunços. We’re not anything. We’re in neither the one camp nor the other. We’re going to be killed.” He walks along, surprised that he isn’t tired, seeing in front of him the woman’s scrawny silhouette and the Dwarf hopping along after her so as not to fall behind. They go on for a long time in that order, not exchanging a word. In the sunny dawn they hear birds singing, insects buzzing, and a confusion of many sounds, indistinct, dissimilar, growing louder and louder: isolated shots, bells, the wail of a bugle, an explosion perhaps, human voices perhaps. The little priest wanders neither right nor left; he appears to know where he is going. The caatinga begins to thin out, dwindling down to brambles and cacti, and eventually turns into steep, open country. They walk along parallel to a rocky ridge that blocks their view on their right. Half an hour later they reach the crest line of this rocky outcropping and at one and the same time the nearsighted journalist hears the curé’s exclamation and sees the cause of it: soldiers, almost on top of them, and behind them, in front of them, on either side of them, jagunços. “Thousands,” the nearsighted journalist murmurs. He feels like sitting down, closing his eyes, forgetting everything. “Jurema, look, look!” the Dwarf screeches. To make himself less visible against the horizon, the priest falls to his knees, and his companions also squat down. “We’ve ended up right in the middle of the battle,” the Dwarf whispers. “It’s not a battle,” the nearsighted journalist thinks. “It’s a rout.” The spectacle unfolding on the hillside below makes him forget his fear. So they didn’t heed Major Cunha Matos’s advice; they didn’t retreat last night and are doing so only now, as Colonel Tamarindo wished.

The masses of soldiers swarming over a wide area down below, in no order or formation, bunched together in places and in others spread far apart, in utter chaos, dragging the carts of the medical corps behind them and carrying stretchers, with their rifles slung over their shoulders any which way, or using them as canes and crutches, bear no resemblance whatsoever to the Seventh Regiment of Colonel Moreira César that he remembers, that highly disciplined corps, scrupulous in dress and demeanor. Have they buried the colonel up there on the heights behind them? Are they bringing his mortal remains down on one of those stretchers, one of those carts?

“Can they have made their peace with each other?” the curé murmurs at his side. “An armistice perhaps?”

The idea of a reconciliation strikes him as unthinkable, but it is quite true that something bizarre is happening down there below: there is no fighting. And yet soldiers and jagunços are very close to each other, closer and closer by the moment. His myopic, avid gaze leaps, as in some wild dream, from one group of jagunços to another, that indescribable mass of humanity in outlandish dress, armed with shotguns, carbines, clubs, machetes, rakes, hunting crossbows, stones, with bits of cloth tied round their heads, that seems to be the embodiment