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By Root 2276 0

are being handed out ears of green maize, without salt, and the soldiers the feed for the horses—food is fetching fantastic prices: a quarter of a goat is going for thirty and forty milreis, a loaf of hard brown sugar for twenty, a cupful of manioc flour for five, an imbuzeiro root or a “monk’s head” cactus with edible pulp for one and even two milreis. The cigars known as fuzileiros are bringing a milreis, and a cup of coffee, five. And, worst of all, he, too, has succumbed to this trafficking. Driven by hunger and his craving for tobacco, he has been spending all the money he has, paying five milreis, for instance, for a spoonful of salt, a commodity he has never before realized a person could miss that badly. What disgusts him most of all is knowing that a good part of these things that are being trafficked have been come by dishonestly, either stolen from the column’s quartermaster stores or as thefts of thefts…

Isn’t it surprising that in circumstances such as these, when they are risking their lives at every second, in this hour of truth that should purify them, leaving within them only what is most lofty and most noble, they should give proof of such a base urge to make deals and accumulate money? “It is not what is most sublime, but what is most sordid and abject, the hunger for filthy lucre, greed, that is aroused in the presence of death,” Teotônio thinks. His image of humanity has abruptly darkened in these past weeks.

He is roused from his thoughts by someone weeping at his feet. Unlike the others, who are openly sobbing, this one is weeping in silence, as though ashamed of his tears. He kneels down beside him. The man is an old soldier who has found his itching unbearable.

“I’ve been scratching myself, sir,” he murmurs. “I don’t give a damn any more whether it gets infected—or whatever, Doctor.”

He is one of the victims of that diabolical weapon of those cannibals that has eaten away the epidermis of a fair number of patriots: the ants known as caçaremas. At first it appeared to be a natural phenomenon, simply a terrible misfortune that these fierce insects which perforate the skin, produce rashes and a hideous burning sensation, should leave their nests in the cool of the night to attack sleeping men. But it has been discovered that their anthills, spherical structures built of mud, are being brought up to the camp by the jagunços and smashed there so that the savage swarms thus let loose wreak their cruel havoc on sleeping patriots…And the ones the cannibals send creeping into the camp to deposit the anthills there are mere youngsters! One of them has been captured: young Teotônio has been told that the “little jagunço” struggled like a wild beast in his captors’ arms, insulting them like the most foul-mouthed ruffian imaginable…

On raising the old soldier’s shirt to examine his chest, Teotônio finds that what yesterday were black-and-blue spots are now a huge bright-red patch with pustules teeming with activity. Yes, the ants are there, reproducing, burrowing under his skin, gnawing the poor man’s innards. Teotônio has learned to dissimulate, to lie, to smile. The bites are better, he tells the soldier, he must try not to scratch himself. He gives him half a cup of water with quinine to drink, assuring him that this will lessen the itching.

He continues on his rounds, imagining the youngsters whom those degenerates send into the camp at night with the anthills. Barbarians, brutes, savages: only utterly depraved people could pervert innocent children as they have done. But young Teotônio’s ideas about Canudos have also changed. Are they really monarchists bent on restoration? Are they really working hand in glove with the House of Bragança and former slaveowners? Is it true that those savages are merely a tool of Perfidious Albion? Although he hears them shouting “Death to the Republic,” Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti is no longer so sure of all this. Everything has become confused in his mind. He expected to find English officers here, advising the jagunços, teaching them how to handle the completely modern,