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“It happened during the terrible month of August,” the nearsighted journalist said, looking away. “In July, the jagunços had stopped the soldiers, right there inside the city. But in August the Girard Brigade arrived. Five thousand more men, twelve more battalions, thousands of additional weapons, dozens of additional cannons. And food in abundance. What hope was there for the jagunços then?”

But the baron didn’t hear him.

“Jurema?” he said again. He could see the visitor’s glee, the delight he took in avoiding answering him. And he also noted that his joy, his happiness was due to the fact that he had mentioned her name, thereby attracting the baron’s interest, so that now the baron would be the one who would oblige his visitor to speak of her. “The wife of Rufino, the guide from Queimadas?”

The nearsighted journalist didn’t answer him this time either. “In August, moreover, the Minister of War, Marshal Carlos Machado Bittencourt, came in person from Rio to put an end to the campaign,” he went on, amused at the baron’s impatience. “We didn’t know that in Canudos. That Marshal Bittencourt had installed himself in Monte Santo, organizing the transport, the provisioning, the hospitals. We didn’t know that army volunteer doctors, volunteer medical aides, were pouring into Queimadas and Monte Santo. That it was the marshal himself who had sent the Girard Brigade. All that, in August. It was as though the heavens had opened to send a cataclysm down on Canudos.”

“And in the middle of this cataclysm you were happy,” the baron murmured, for those were the words his nearsighted visitor had used. “Is that the Jurema you mean?”

“Yes.” The baron noted that his visitor was making no secret of his happiness now; his voice was filled with it, and it was making his words come pouring out. “It’s only right that you should remember her. Because she often remembers you and your wife. With admiration, with affection.”

So it was the same one, that slender, olive-skinned girl who had grown up in Calumbi, in Estela’s service, whom the two of them had married to the honest, persevering worker that Rufino had been at that time. He couldn’t get over it. That little half-tamed creature, that simple country girl who could only have changed for the worse since leaving Estela’s service, had also played a role in the destiny of the man before him. Because the journalist’s literal words, inconceivably enough, had been: “But, in fact, it was when the world began to fall apart and the horror had reached its height that, incredible as it may seem, I began to be happy.” Once again the baron was overcome by the feeling that it was all unreal, a dream, a fiction, which always took possession of him at the very thought of Canudos. All these happenstances, coincidences, fortuitous encounters, made him feel as though he were on tenterhooks. Did the journalist know that Galileo Gall had raped Jurema? He didn’t ask him, staggered as he was at the thought of the strange geography of chance, the secret order, the unfathomable law of the history of peoples and individuals that capriciously brought them together, separated them, made them enemies or allies. And he told himself that it was impossible for that poor little creature of the backlands of Bahia even to suspect that she had been the instrument of so many upheavals in the lives of such dissimilar people: Rufino, Galileo Gall, this scarecrow who was now smiling blissfully at the memory of her. The baron felt a desire to see Jurema again; perhaps it would do the baroness good to see this girl toward whom she had shown such affection in bygone days. He remembered that Sebastiana had felt a veiled resentment toward her for that very reason, and recalled how relieved she had been to see her go off to Queimadas with Rufino.

“To tell the truth, I didn’t expect to hear you speak of love and happiness at this point,” the baron murmured, stirring restlessly in his chair. “Certainly not with regard to Jurema.”

The journalist had begun talking about the war again.