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“I now know that at that moment only nine cannons were bombarding Canudos and that they never shot more than sixteen rounds at a time,” the nearsighted journalist said. “But it seemed as if there were a thousand of them that night, as if all the stars in the sky had begun bombarding us.”

The din made the sheets of corrugated tin on the roof of the store rattle, the shelves and the counter shake, and they could hear buildings caving in, falling down, screams, feet running, and in the pauses, the inevitable howling of little children. “It’s begun,” one of the jagunços said. They went outdoors to see, came back in, told Maria Quadrado and the Lion of Natuba that they wouldn’t be able to get back to the Sanctuary because the only way there was being swept with cannon fire, and the journalist heard the woman insist on going back. Big João finally dissuaded her by swearing that the moment the barrage let up he would come and take them back to the Sanctuary himself. The jagunços left, and he realized that Jurema and the Dwarf—if they were still alive—were not going to be able to get back from Rancho do Vigário to where he was either. He realized, in his boundless fear, that he would have to go through the coming attack with no one for company except the saint and the quadrumanous monster of Canudos.

“What are you laughing at now?” the Baron de Canabrava asked.

“Something I’d be ashamed to own up to,” the nearsighted journalist stammered. He sat there lost in thought and then suddenly raised his head and exclaimed: “Canudos changed my ideas about history, about Brazil, about men. But above all else about myself.”

“To judge from your tone of voice, it hasn’t been a change for the better,” the baron murmured.

“You’re right there,” the journalist said, lower skill. “Thanks to Canudos, I have a very poor opinion of myself.”

Wasn’t that also his own case, to a certain degree? Hadn’t Canudos turned his life, his ideas, his habits topsy-turvy, like a hostile whirlwind? Hadn’t his convictions and illusions fallen to pieces? The image of Estela, in her rooms upstairs, with Sebastiana at her side in her rocking chair, perhaps reading aloud to her passages from the novels that she had been fond of, perhaps combing her hair, or getting her to listen to the Austrian music boxes, and the blank, withdrawn, unreachable face of the woman who had been the great love of his life—the woman who to him had always been the very symbol of the joy of living, beauty, enthusiasm, elegance—again filled his heart with bitterness.

With an effort, he seized on the first thing that passed through his mind. “You mentioned Antônio Vilanova,” he said hurriedly. “The trader, isn’t that right? A moneygrubber and a man as calculating as they come. I used to see a lot of him and his brother. They were the suppliers for Calumbi. Did he become a saint, too?”

“He wasn’t there to do business.” The nearsighted journalist had recovered his sarcastic laugh. “It was difficult to do business in Canudos. The coin of the Republic was not allowed to circulate there. It was the money of the Dog, of the Devil, of atheists, Protestants, Freemasons, don’t you see? Why do you think the jagunços made off with the soldiers’ weapons but never with their wallets?”

“So the phrenologist wasn’t all that crazy, after all,” the baron thought. “In a word, thanks to his own madness Gall was able to intuit something of the madness that Canudos represented.”

“Antônio Vilanova wasn’t someone who went around continually crossing himself and beating his breast in remorse for his sins,” the nearsighted journalist went on. “He was a practical man, eager to achieve concrete results. He was constantly bustling about organizing things—he reminded you of a perpetual-motion machine. All during those five endless months he took it upon himself to ensure that Canudos had enough to eat. Why would he have done that, amid all the bullets and dead bodies? There’s no other explanation: the Counselor had struck some secret chord within him.”

“As he did you,” the baron said. “He barely missed making