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By Root 2171 0

sitting on the floor with his knees doubled up and his chin resting on one of them, speaking as though the baron weren’t there. It was early in the afternoon and the study was filled with sunlight, so warm it made one drowsy, filtering through the lace curtains of the window overlooking the garden. The baron had become used to the journalist’s habit of suddenly changing the subject without warning, in obedience to his own urgent inner promptings, and was no longer bothered by a conversation with him that proceeded by fits and starts, intense and sparkling for a time, then bogged down in the long empty periods that ensued when he, or the journalist, or both, lapsed into silence to reflect or remember.

“The press correspondents,” the nearsighted journalist explained, contorting himself in one of his unpredictable movements that made his skeleton-like frame shake all over and appeared to make each one of his vertebrae shudder. His eyes blinked rapidly behind his glasses. “They could see and yet they didn’t see. All they saw was what they’d come to see. Even if there was no such thing there. It wasn’t just one or two of them. They all found glaring proof of a British-monarchist conspiracy. How to explain that?”

“People’s credulity, their hunger for fantasy, for illusion,” the baron said. “There had to be some explanation for the inconceivable fact that bands of peasants and vagabonds routed three army expeditions, that they resisted the armed forces of this country for months on end. The conspiracy had to exist: that’s why they invented it and why they believed it.”

“You should read the dispatches my replacement sent back to the Jornal de Notícias,” the nearsighted journalist said. “The one sent up there as a correspondent when Epaminondas Gonçalves thought I was dead. A good man. Honest, with no imagination, no passionate biases, no convictions. The ideal man to provide an impassive, objective version of what happened up there.”

“They were dying and killing on both sides,” the baron murmured, gazing at him with pity. “Are impassivity and objectivity possible in a war?”

“In his first dispatch, the officers of General Oscar’s column come upon four fair-haired observers in well-cut suits mingled with the jagunços,” the journalist said slowly. “In the second, General Savaget’s column finds among the dead jagunços an individual with white skin, blond hair, an officer’s leather shoulder belt, and a hand-knitted cap. No one can identify his uniform, which has never been worn by any of this country’s military units.”

“One of Her Gracious Majesty’s officers, no doubt?” The baron smiled.

“And in the third dispatch he quotes the text of a letter, found in the pocket of a jagunço taken prisoner, which is unsigned but written in an unmistakably aristocratic hand,” the journalist went on, not even hearing his question. “Addressed to the Counselor, explaining to him why it is necessary to reestablish a conservative, God-fearing monarchy. Everything points to the fact that the person who wrote that letter was you.”

“Were you really so naïve as to believe everything you read in the papers?” the baron asked him. “You, a journalist?”

“And there is also the dispatch of his about signaling with lights,” the nearsighted journalist went on, without answering him. “Thanks to such signals, the jagunços were able to communicate with each other at night over great distances. The mysterious lights blinked on and off, transmitting a code so clever that army signal corps technicians were never able to decipher the messages.”

Yes, there was no doubt about it, despite his bohemian pranks, despite the opium, the ether, the candomblés, there was something ingenuous and angelic about him. This was not strange; it was often the case with intellectuals and artists. Canudos had changed him, naturally. What had it made of him? An embittered man? A skeptic? A fanatic, perhaps? The myopic eyes stared at him intently from behind the thick lenses.

“The important thing in these dispatches are the intimations,” the metallic, incisive, high-pitched voice said.