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By Root 2279 0

fire, and others, squatting on their heels or sitting, are doing the same from the rooftop and the bell tower of Santo Antônio. Amid the little groups of sharpshooters of the Catholic Guard firing from the barricades surrounding the Sanctuary, he spies Big João. All that suddenly uplifts his heart, fills him with faith, banishes the panic that has mounted from the soles of his feet on hearing Abbot João say that the soldiers are bound to get through the trenches down below, that there is no hope of stopping them there. Without losing any more time, he shouts to the swarms of women, children, and old men, ordering them to begin tearing down all the dwellings on the corners of São Crispim, São Joaquim, Santa Rita, Santo Tomás, Espírito Santo, Santa Ana, São José, so as to turn all that section of Belo Monte into an inextricable maze. He takes the lead, using his rifle butt as a battering ram. Making trenches, erecting barricades means constructing, organizing, and those are things that Antônio Vilanova is better at than making war.

Since all the rifles, cases of ammunition, and explosives had been taken away, the general store seemed to have tripled in size. The huge empty space made the nearsighted journalist feel even more lonely. The shelling made him lose all sense of time. How long had he been shut up here in the storeroom with the Mother of Men and the Lion of Natuba? He had listened to the Lion read the paper about the plans for attacking the city with a gnashing of teeth that still hadn’t stopped. Since then, the night must have gone by, day must be dawning. It wasn’t possible that the cannonading had been going on for less than eight, ten hours. But his fear made each second longer, made the minutes stop dead. Perhaps not even an hour had gone by since Abbot João, Pedrão, Pajeú, Honório Vilanova, and Big João had left on the run, on hearing the first explosions of what the paper had called “the softening-up.” He remembered their hasty departure, the argument between the men and the woman who wanted to go back to the Sanctuary, how they’d obliged her to stay behind.

Nonetheless, all that was encouraging. If they’d left these two intimates of the Counselor’s in the store, it meant that they were better protected here than elsewhere. But wasn’t it ridiculous to think of safe places at a time like this? The “softening-up” was not a matter of shooting at specific targets; it involved, rather, blind cannon salvos whose purpose was to cause fires, destroy dwellings, leave corpses and rubble strewn all over the streets, thereby so badly demoralizing the townspeople that they would not have the courage to stand up to the soldiers when they invaded Canudos.

“Colonel Moreira César’s philosophy,” he thought to himself. What idiots, what idiots, what idiots. They hadn’t the slightest notion of what was happening here, they hadn’t the least idea of what these people were like. The only one who was being softened up by the interminable barrage of the pitch-dark city was himself. He thought: “Half of Canudos must have disappeared, three-quarters of Canudos.” But thus far not a single shell had hit the store. Dozens of times, closing his eyes, clenching his teeth, he thought: “This is the one, this is the one.” His body bounced up and down as the roof tiles, the sheets of galvanized tin, the wooden planks shook, as that cloud of dust rose amid which everything appeared to shatter, to tear apart, to fall to pieces over him, under him, around him. But the store remained standing, holding up despite being rocked to its foundations by the explosions.

The woman and the Lion of Natuba were talking together. All he could hear was the murmur of their voices, not what they were saying. He pricked up his ears. They had not said one word since the beginning of the shelling, and at one point he thought that they’d been hit by the bullets and that he was keeping vigil over their dead bodies. The cannonade had deafened him; he could hear a loud bubbling sound, tiny internal explosions. And what about Jurema? And the Dwarf? They had gone in