• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Halfway down the mountainside, a slight little figure catches up with them, running hard. Big João puts his hand on the long, tangled locks.

“Did you take them to A Matadeira?” he asks the boy.

“Yes, I did,” he answers.

There is loud rifle fire behind them, as though the war was raging all over A Favela. The boy says no more and Big João thinks, yet again, of the strange habits of sertanejos, who would rather keep still than talk.

“And what happened to the Macambiras?” he finally asks.

“They were killed,” the boy says softly.

“All of them?”

“I think so.”

They have already reached no-man’s-land, halfway back to the trenches.

The Dwarf found the nearsighted man hunched over in a fold in the terrain of Cocorobó weeping as Pedrão’s men were withdrawing. He took him by the hand and guided him along among the jagunços hurrying back to Belo Monte as fast as they could, convinced that the soldiers of the second column, once they had broken through the Trabubu barrier, would attack the city. The following morning, as they were going along a trench in front of the goat pens, they came upon Jurema in the midst of a great throng: she was walking along between the Sardelinha sisters, prodding an ass loaded with panniers. Filled with emotion, the three of them embraced each other, and the Dwarf felt the touch of Jurema’s lips on his cheek. That night, as they lay on the floor of the store behind the barrels and boxes, listening to the gunfire raking Canudos without letup, the Dwarf told them that, as far as he could recall, that kiss was the very first one anyone had ever given him.

How many days was it that the cannons roared, rifles cracked, grenades exploded, blackening the air and chipping the towers of the Temple? Three, four, five? They wandered around the store, saw the Vilanova brothers and the others come in by day and by night, heard them talking together and giving orders, and didn’t have the least idea what was going on. One afternoon, as the Dwarf was filling little pouches and horns with gunpowder for the blunderbusses and flintlock muskets, he heard one of the jagunços say, pointing to the explosives: “I hope your walls are solid, Antônio Vilanova. Just one bullet could set all this off and blow the whole neighborhood to bits.” The Dwarf did not pass that on to his companions. Why make the nearsighted man more terrified than he already was? The things they had lived through together up here had made him feel an affection for the two of them that he had never felt even for the circus people with whom he got along best.

During the bombardment he went out twice, in search of food. Hugging the walls, like everyone else out in the streets, he went begging from door to door, blinded by the dust in the air, deafened by the gunfire. On the Rua da Madre Igreja he saw a child die. The little boy had come chasing after a hen that was running down the street flapping its wings, and after just a few steps his eyes opened wide and his feet suddenly left the ground, as though he had been yanked up by the hair. The bullet hit him in the belly, killing him instantly. He carried the dead body into the house that he had seen the boy run out of, and since there was no one there he left it in the hammock. He was unable to catch the hen. The morale of the three of them, despite the uncertainty and the death toll, improved once they had food again, thanks to the animals that Abbot João had brought back to Belo Monte.

Night had fallen, there was a letup in the barrage, the sound of prayers in the church square had died away, and they were lying awake on the floor of the store, talking together. All of a sudden, a silent figure appeared in the doorway, with a little clay lamp in its hands. The Dwarf recognized by the scar and the steely eyes that it was Pajeú. He had a shotgun over his shoulder, a machete and a dagger in his belt, and two cartridge belts across his shirt.

“With all due respect,” he murmured, “I would like you to be my wife.”

The