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By Root 2230 0

sense, reason, or sheer instinct would have allowed her to draw from the spectacle: the little streets, which had once been stretches of dirt and gravel and were now seesaws riddled with shell holes, strewn with the debris of objects blown to bits by the bombs or torn apart by the jagunços to build parapets; the creatures lying about on the ground, who could scarcely be called men or women any more, since they had no features left on their faces, no light left in their eyes, no strength left in their muscles, yet through some perverse absurdity were still alive. Jurema saw them and did not realize that they were there, for they were scarcely distinguishable from the corpses that the old men had not yet had time to come get, the only difference between them being the number of flies swarming over them and the intensity of the stench they were giving off. She saw and yet did not see the vultures that were hovering above them and from time to time also being killed by the bullets, and the children with the blank faces of sleepwalkers poking about in the ruins or chewing on clods of dirt. They had run a long way, and when they finally stopped, she had to close her eyes and lean against the nearsighted journalist till the world stopped going round and round.

The journalist asked her where they were. It took Jurema some time to realize that the unrecognizable place was São João, a narrow lane between the jumble of little houses around the cemetery and the back of the Temple under construction. There were holes and rubble everywhere, and a crowd of people were frantically digging, filling sacks, drums, boxes, barrels, and casks with dirt and sand, and dragging beams, roof tiles, bricks, stones, and even carcasses of animals to the barrier that was going up there where before a picket fence had marked off the cemetery. The shooting had stopped, or else Jurema’s ears had been so deafened that they could no longer distinguish it from the rest of the din. As she was telling the nearsighted journalist that Pajeú wasn’t there, though both Antônio and Honório Vilanova were, a one-eyed man roared at them, asking what they were waiting for. The nearsighted journalist sat down on the ground and began scratching about. Jurema brought him an iron bar so he could do a better job of it. And then she plunged once again into the routine of filling gunnysacks, carrying them wherever she was told to, and taking a pickax to walls to get stones, bricks, roof tiles, and beams to reinforce the barrier, already several yards tall and wide. From time to time, she went to where the nearsighted journalist was piling up sand and gravel, to let him know that she was close at hand. She did not even notice that the shooting started again, died down, stopped, and then began yet again behind the stout barricade, nor that every so often groups of old men passed by, carrying wounded to the churches.

At one point a group of women, among whom she recognized Catarina, Abbot João’s wife, came by and handed her some chicken bones with a little skin on them and a dipper full of water. She went to share this gift with the journalist and the Dwarf, but they, too, had been given the same rations. They ate and drank together, happy and yet disconcerted by this repast, knowing that the food supplies had long since given out and it was understood that the few remaining scraps were reserved for the men staying day and night in the trenches and the towers, their hands covered with powder burns and their fingers callused from shooting so much.

She had just gone back to work after this pause when she happened to look at the tower of the Temple of the Blessed Jesus and something caught her eye. Beneath the heads of the jagunços and the barrels of rifles and shotguns peeking out from the parapets on the rooftop and the scaffoldings, a little gnome-like figure, bigger than a child but smaller than an adult, had been left hanging suspended in an absurd posture on the little ladder that led up to the bell tower. She recognized him: it was the bell ringer, the little old man who