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“Here’s Queluz, sir,” he hears Captain Oliveira say.

Now, now. The officers step aside to allow him to present himself before the commanding officer of the First Brigade. Colonel Medeiros looks at him, rises to his feet. Queluz sees—his heart is pounding in his chest—the colonel’s face relax, notes that he is trying his best to smile at him. Queluz smiles back at him, gratefully.

“So you’re the one who captured him?” the colonel asks.

“Yes, sir,” Queluz answers, standing at attention.

“Finish the job,” Medeiros says to him, holding his sword out to him with an energetic gesture. “Put his eyes out and cut his tongue off. Then lop his head off and throw it over the barricade, so those bandits who are still alive will know what awaits them.”

[VI]

When the nearsighted journalist finally left, the Baron de Canabrava, who had accompanied him to the street, discovered that it was pitch-dark outside. On coming back into the house, he stood leaning against the massive front door with his eyes closed, trying to banish a seething mass of violent, confused images from his mind. A manservant came running with an oil lamp in his hand: would he like his dinner reheated? He answered no, and before sending the servant to bed he asked him whether Estela had eaten dinner. Yes, some time ago, and then she had retired to her room.

Instead of going upstairs to her bedroom, the baron returned to his study like a sleepwalker, listening to the echo of his footsteps. He could smell, he could see, floating like fluff in the stuffy air of the room, the words of that long conversation which, it now seemed to him, had been not so much a dialogue as two monologues running side by side without ever meeting. He would not see the nearsighted journalist again, he would not have another talk with him. He would not allow him to bring to life yet again that monstrous story whose unfolding had involved the destruction of his property, his political power, his wife. “Only she matters,” he murmured to himself. Yes, he could have resigned himself to all the other losses. For the time he had left to live—ten, fifteen years?—he possessed the means to do so in the manner to which he was accustomed. It did not matter that this style of life would end with his death: he had, after all, no heirs whose fortunes he should be concerned about. And as for political power, in the final analysis he was happy to have rid himself of that heavy load on his shoulders. Politics had been a burden that he had taken upon himself because there was no one else to do so, because of the vast stupidity, irresponsibility, or corruption of others, not out of some heartfelt vocation: politics had always bored him, wearied him, impressed him as being an inane, depressing occupation, since it revealed human wretchedness more clearly than any other. Moreover, he harbored a secret resentment against politics, an absorbing occupation for which he had sacrificed the scientific leanings that he had felt ever since he was a youngster collecting butterflies and making herbariums. The tragedy to which he would never be able to resign himself was Estela. It had been Canudos, he thought, that stupid, incomprehensible story of blind, stubborn people, of diametrically opposed fanaticisms, that had been to blame for what had happened to Estela. He had severed his ties to the world and would not reestablish them. He would allow nothing, no one to remind him of this episode. “I will have them give him work on the paper,” he thought. “As a proofreader, a court reporter, some mediocre job that’s tailor-made for a mediocrity like him. But I won’t receive him or listen to him again. And if he writes that book about Canudos—though naturally he won’t—I shall not read it.”

He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a glass of cognac. As he warmed the drink in the palm of his hand, sitting in the leather easy chair from which he had set the course of politics in the state of Bahia for a quarter of a century, the Baron de Canabrava listened to the harmonious