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“I wrote down the Counselor’s every word,” he heard him say in his beautiful lilting voice. The words were addressed to him, an effort on the hunchback’s part to be friendly. “His thoughts, his evening counsels, his prayers, his prophecies, his dreams. For posterity. So as to add another Gospel to the Bible.”

“I see,” the nearsighted journalist murmured, at a loss for words.

“But there’s no more paper or ink left in Belo Monte and my last quill pen broke. What he says can no longer be preserved for all eternity,” the Lion of Natuba went on, without bitterness, with that calm acceptance with which the journalist had seen the people of Canudos face the world, as though misfortunes, like rainstorms, twilights, the ebb and flow of the tide, were natural phenomena against which it would be stupid to rebel.

“The Lion of Natuba is an extremely intelligent person,” the curé of Cumbe murmured. “What God took away from him in the way of legs, a back, shoulders, He made up for by way of the intelligence He gave him. Isn’t that so, Lion?”

“Yes.” The scribe of Canudos nodded, his eyes never leaving the nearsighted journalist. And the latter was certain that this was true. “I’ve read the Abbreviated Missal and the Marian Hours many times. And all the magazines and periodicals that people used to bring me in the old days. Over and over. Have you read a great deal too, sir?”

The nearsighted journalist felt so ill at ease that he would have liked to run from the room, even if it meant running right into the midst of the battle. “I’ve read a few books,” he answered, feeling ashamed. And he thought: “And I got nothing out of them.” That was something that he had discovered in these long months: culture, knowledge were lies, dead weight, blindfolds. All that reading—and it had been of no use whatsoever in helping him to escape, to free himself from this trap.

“I know what electricity is,” the Lion of Natuba said proudly. “If you like, sir, I can teach you what it is. And in return, sir, you can teach me things I don’t know. I know what the principle or the law of Archimedes is. How bodies are mummified. The distances between stars.”

But at that moment there was heavy gunfire from several directions at once, and the nearsighted journalist found himself thanking the battle that had suddenly silenced this creature whose voice, whose proximity, whose very existence caused him such profound malaise. Why was he so disconcerted by someone who simply wanted to talk, who so naïvely flaunted his talents, his virtues, merely to gain his warm fellow-feeling? “Because I’m like him,” he thought. “Because I’m part of the same chain of which he is the humblest link.”

The curé of Cumbe ran to the little door leading outside, threw it wide open, and a breath of twilight entered that revealed to the nearsighted journalist other of the Lion of Natuba’s features: his dark skin, the fine-drawn lines of his face, the tuft of down on his chin, his steely eyes. But it was his posture that left him dumfounded: the face hunched over between two bony knees, the massive hump behind the head, like a big bundle tied to his back, and the extremities appended to limbs as long and spindly as spider legs. How could a human skeleton dislocate itself, fold itself around itself like that? What absurd contortions were built into that spinal column, those ribs, those bones?

Father Joaquim and those outside were shouting back and forth: there was an attack, people were needed at a certain place. He came back into the room and the journalist could dimly make out that he was picking up his rifle.

“They’re attacking the barricades at São Cipriano and São Crispim,” he heard him stammer. “Go to the Temple of the Blessed Jesus. You’ll be safer there. Farewell, farewell, may Our Lady save us all.”

He ran out of the room and the nearsighted journalist saw Alexandrinha Correa take the lamb, which had begun to bleat in fright, in her arms. The devout disciple from the Sacred Choir