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“Did you ever find out what happened to him?”

“He died somewhere not very far from Canudos,” the journalist answered. “I saw a lot of him, before all this. In ‘The Fort,’ a tavern in the lower town. He was a great talker, a picturesque character, a madman; he felt people’s heads, he prophesied vast upheavals. I thought he was a fraud. Nobody would have guessed that he would turn out to be a tragic figure.”

“I have some papers of his,” the baron said. “A sort of memoir, or testament, that he wrote in my house, at Calumbi. I was to have seen that it got to some fellow revolutionaries of his. But I wasn’t able to. It’s not that I wasn’t willing to, because I even went to Lyons to do as he’d asked.”

Why had he taken that trip, from London to Lyons, to hand Gall’s text over personally to the editors of L’Etincelle de la révolte? Not out of affection for the phrenologist, in any event; what he had felt for him in the end was curiosity, a scientific interest in this unsuspected variety of the human species. He had taken the trouble to go to Lyons to see what those revolutionary comrades of his looked like, to hear them talk, to find out whether they were like him, whether they said and believed the same things he did. But the trip had been a waste of time. The only thing he was able to find out was that L’Etincelle de la révolte, a sheet that appeared irregularly, had ceased publication altogether some time before, and that it had been put out by a small press whose owner had been sent to prison for printing counterfeit bills, some three or four years earlier. It fitted Gall’s destiny very well to have sent articles to what might well have been ghosts and to have died without anyone he’d known during his life in Europe ever finding out where, how, and why he died.

“A story of madmen,” he muttered. “The Counselor, Moreira César, Gall. Canudos drove all those people mad. And you, too, of course.”

But a thought made him shut his mouth and not say a word more. “No, they were mad before that. It was only Estela who lost her mind because of Canudos.” He had to keep a tight rein on himself so as not to burst into tears. He didn’t remember having cried as a child, or as a young man. But after what had happened to the baroness, he had wept many a time, in his study, on nights when he couldn’t sleep.

“It’s not so much a story of madmen as a story of misunderstandings,” the nearsighted journalist corrected him again. “I’d like to know one thing, Baron. I beg you to tell me the truth.”

“Ever since I left politics, I almost always tell the truth,” the baron murmured. “What is it you’d like to know?”

“Whether there were contacts between the Counselor and the monarchists,” he answered, watching the baron’s reaction closely. “I don’t mean the little group who missed the Empire and were naïve enough to proclaim that fact in public, people such as Gentil de Castro. I’m talking about people like you and your party, the Autonomists, the monarchists through and through who nonetheless hid that fact. Did they have contacts with the Counselor? Did they encourage him?”

The baron, who had listened with a look of cynical amusement on his face, burst out laughing. “Didn’t you find out the answer to that in all those months in Canudos? Did you see any politicians from Bahia, São Paulo, Rio among the jagunços?”

“I’ve already told you that I didn’t see much of anything,” the unpleasant voice answered. “But I did find out that you had sent maize, sugar, livestock from Calumbi.”

“Well then, you doubtless also know that I did so against my will, that I was forced to do so,” the baron said. “All of us landowners in the region had to, so that they wouldn’t burn our haciendas down. Isn’t that how we deal with bandits in the sertão? If you can’t kill them, you buy them off. If I’d had the least influence on them, they wouldn’t have destroyed Calumbi and my wife would be of sound mind. The fanatics weren’t monarchists and they didn’t even know