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By Root 2046 0

vain to Fazenda Velha to take food to Pajeú, since as they were going out there he was coming back to the meeting in the store. Were they still alive? A sudden wave of affection, aching loneliness, passionate concern washed over him as he imagined them in Pajeú’s trench, cringing beneath the shells, surely missing him as much as he missed them. They were part of him and he was part of them. How was it possible for him to feel such a great affinity, such boundless love for those two beings with whom he had nothing in common, whose social background, education, sensibility, experience, culture were in fact altogether different from his? What they had been through together for all these months had forged this bond between them, the fact that without ever imagining such a thing, without deliberately seeking it, without knowing how or why, through the sort of strange, fantastic concatenation of cause and effect, of chance, accident, and coincidence that constitute history, the three of them had been catapulted together into the midst of these extraordinary events, into this life at the brink of death. That was what had created this tie between them. “I’m never going to be separated from them again,” he thought. “I’ll go with them to take food to Pajeú, I’ll go with them to…”

But he had the feeling that he was being ridiculous. After this night, would their daily routine be exactly the same as in the past? If they lived through this bombardment, safe and sound, would they survive the second part of the program that the Lion of Natuba had read aloud? He could already see in his mind the dense, solid lines of thousands and thousands of soldiers coming down from the mountaintops with bayonets fixed, pouring down all the streets of Canudos, and felt a cold blade in the thin flesh of his back. He would shout to them to tell them who he was and they wouldn’t hear him, he would shout to them “I’m one of you, a civilized person, an intellectual, a journalist,” and they wouldn’t believe him or understand him, he would shout to them “I have nothing to do with these madmen, with these barbarians,” but it would be useless. They wouldn’t give him time to open his mouth. Dying as a jagunço, amid the anonymous mass of jagunços: wasn’t that the height of the absurd, the flagrant proof of the innate stupidity of the world? He missed Jurema and the Dwarf with all his heart, he felt an urgent need to have them close at hand, to talk to them and listen to them.

As though both his ears had suddenly become unstopped, he heard, very clearly, the voice of the Mother of Men: there were faults that could not be expiated, sins that could not be redeemed. In that hard, resigned, tormented voice full of conviction was a suffering that seemed to come from the depths of time itself. “There’s a place in the fire waiting for me,” he heard her repeat. “I can’t close my eyes to that, my child.”

“There is no crime that the Father cannot pardon,” the Lion of Natuba answered promptly. “Our Lady has interceded in your behalf and the Father has forgiven you. Don’t torture yourself, Mother.”

That was a voice with a good timbre, steady, fluent, full of the music of the heart. The journalist thought to himself that that normal, lilting voice always seemed to belong to a strong, handsome man, standing straight and tall, not to the man who was speaking.

“He was tiny, defenseless, a tender little newborn lamb,” the woman chanted. “His mother’s milk had dried up; she was a wicked woman who’d sold her soul to the Devil. Then, on the pretext that she couldn’t bear to see him suffer, she stuffed a skein of wool in his mouth. It’s not a sin like the others, my child. It is the unpardonable sin. You’ll see me burning in hell forever.”

“Don’t you believe the Counselor?” the scribe of Canudos said consolingly. “Doesn’t he speak to the Father? Hasn’t he said that…?”

A deafening explosion drowned out his words. The journalist’s body went rigid and he closed his eyes and trembled as the whole building shook, but the sound of the woman’s voice lingered on as he associated what