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“I see you’ve gotten yourself another escort besides the dwarf,” he heard the man say in a half-fawning, half-mocking tone of voice. “Well, see you later. Praised be the Blessed Jesus.”

Jurema didn’t answer and the nearsighted journalist stood there, his body tense, on the alert, expecting—he didn’t know why—a kick, a slap, spit in his face.

“These aren’t all,” said a voice different from the one that had been speaking, and after a second he realized that it was Abbot João. “There are more in the storeroom where the hides are.”

“These are enough,” the first man said, his tone of voice neutral now.

“No, they’re not,” Abbot João replied. “They’re not enough if eight or nine thousand men are coming. Even two or three times as many wouldn’t be enough.”

“That’s true,” the first voice said.

He heard them moving about in front of them and behind them, and guessed that they were fingering the rifles, hefting them, handling them, raising them to their eyes to see if the sights were properly lined up and the bores clean. Eight, nine thousand troops were coming?

“And besides, some of these can’t even be used, Pajeú,” Abbot João said. “See this one? The barrel’s twisted, the trigger’s broken, the breech is split.”

Pajeú? So the one who was there moving about, having a conversation with Abbot João, the one who had been talking to Jurema, was Pajeú. The two men were saying something about the Virgin’s jewels, speaking of someone named Dr. Águiar do Nascimento; their voices came and went along with their footsteps. All the bandits of the sertão were here; they’d all turned into fervent believers. How could that be explained? They walked past him and the nearsighted journalist could see two pairs of legs within reach of his hand.

“Do you want to hear the Terrible and Exemplary Story of Robert the Devil?” he heard the Dwarf ask. “I know it, I’ve told it a thousand times. Shall I recite it to you, sir?”

“Not now,” Abbot João answered. “But I’d be pleased to hear it some other day. Why do you call me sir, though? Don’t you know my name?”

“Yes, I know it,” the Dwarf murmured. “I beg your pardon…”

The sound of the men’s footsteps died away. The nearsighted journalist had been set to thinking: “The man who cut off ears and noses, the one who castrated his enemies and tattooed them with his initials. The one that murdered everyone in a village to prove he was Satan. And Pajeú, the butcher, the cattle rustler, the killer, the rogue.” They’d been right there next to him. He was dumfounded, and wanted badly to write.

“Did you see how he talked to you, how he looked at you?” he heard the Dwarf say. “How lucky you are, Jurema. He’ll take you to live with him and you’ll have a house and food on the table. Because Pajeú is one of those in charge here.”

But what was going to happen to him?

“There aren’t ten flies per inhabitant—there are a thousand,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira thinks. “They know nobody can kill them all. That’s why they don’t budge when the naïve newcomer tries to shoo them away.” They were the only flies in the world that didn’t move when a hand waved past within millimeters of them, trying to chase them away. Their multiple eyes looked at the miserable wretch, defying him. He could easily squash them, without the least bit of trouble. But what would be gained by such a disgusting act? Ten, twenty of them inevitably materialized in the place of the one crushed to death. It was better to resign oneself to their company, the way the sertanejos did. They allowed them to walk all over their clothing and dishes, leave their houses and food black with flyspecks, live on the bodies of their newborn babes, confining themselves to brushing them off the raw sugar lump they were about to bite into or spitting them out if they got into their mouths. They were bigger than the ones in Salvador, the only fat creatures in this country where men and beasts appeared to be reduced to their minimal expression.

He is lying naked on his bed at