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By Root 1977 0

BRAZIL, A STRONG NATION and with the name of Epaminondas Gonçalves. But in his room in the Our Lady of Grace boarding house, Galileo Gall is not thinking of the political celebration taking place outside with great pomp and ceremony in the stifling heat of midday, but of the contradictory aptitudes that he has discovered in Rufino. “It’s a most unusual combination,” he thinks. Orientation and Concentration are closely akin, naturally, and it would be quite usual to find them in someone who spends his life wandering all over this immense region, guiding travelers, hunters, convoys, serving as a courier, or tracking down lost cattle. But what about Imaginativeness? How to account for the propensity for fantasy, delirium, unreality, typical of artists and impractical people, in an individual in whom everything points to the materialist, to the man with his feet on the ground, to the pragmatist? Nonetheless, that is what his bones indicate: Orientivity and Concentrativity, Imaginativeness. Galileo Gall discovered it almost the very first moment that he was able to palpate the guide. He thinks: “It’s an absurd, incompatible combination. How can a person be at one and the same time the soul of modesty and an exhibitionist, miserly and prodigal?”

He is leaning over a pail washing his face, between partition walls covered with graffiti, newspaper clippings with pictures of an opera performance, and a broken mirror. Coffee-colored cockroaches appear and disappear through the cracks in the floor and there is a little petrified lizard on the ceiling. The only furniture is a broken-down bed with no sheets. The festive atmosphere enters the room through a latticed window: voices amplified by a loudspeaker, clashes of cymbals, drumrolls, and the jabbering of kids flying kites. Someone is alternating attacks on the Bahia Autonomist Party, Governor Luiz Viana, the Baron de Canabrava, and praise for Epaminondas Gonçalves and the Progressivist Republican Party.

Galileo Gall goes on washing himself, indifferent to the hubbub outside. Once he has finished, he dries his face with his shirt and collapses on the bed, face up, with one arm under his head for a pillow. He looks at the cockroaches, the lizard. He thinks: “Silence against impatience.” He has been in Queimadas for eight days now, and although he is a man who knows how to wait, he has begun to feel a certain anxiety: that is what has led him to ask Rufino to let him palpate his head. It was not easy to talk him into it, for the guide is a mistrustful sort and Gall remembers that he could feel as he palpated him how tense the man was, all ready to leap on him. They have seen each other every day, understand each other without difficulty now, and to pass the time as he is waiting, Galileo has studied his behavior, taking notes on him: “He reads the sky, the trees, the earth, as though they were a book; he is a man of simple, inflexible ideas, with a strict code of honor and a morality whose source has been his commerce with nature and with men, not book learning, since he does not know how to read, or religion, since he does not appear to be a very firm believer.” All of this coincides with what his fingers have felt, except for the Imaginativeness. In what way does it manifest itself, why has he failed to notice any of its signs in Rufino in these eight days, either while he was making a deal with him to guide him to Canudos, or in Rufino’s shack on the outskirts of town, or in the railway station having a cool drink together, or walking from one tannery to another along the banks of the Itapicuru? In Jurema, the guide’s wife, on the other hand, this pernicious, anti-scientific inclination—to leave the domain of experience to immerse oneself in phantasmagoria, in daydreaming—is obvious. For despite the fact that she is very reserved in his presence, Galileo has heard Jurema tell the story of the wooden statue of St. Anthony that is on the main altar of the church in Queimadas. “It was found in a cave, years ago, and taken to the church. The next day it disappeared and turned up again