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“He wept?” he heard a voice say as though from the next world, that voice he knew so well, always frightened, yet at the same time curious, prying, meddlesome. “Listening to the story of Robert the Devil?”

Yes, he had wept. At one point or another, perhaps at the moment when he was committing his worst massacres, his worst iniquities, when, possessed, impelled, overpowered by the spirit of destruction, an invisible force that he was unable to resist, Robert plunged his knife into the bellies of pregnant women or slit the throats of newborn babes (“Which means that he was from the South, not the Northeast,” the Dwarf explained) and impaled peasants and set fire to huts where families were sleeping, he had noticed that the Street Commander’s eyes were gleaming, his cheeks glistening, his chin trembling, his chest heaving. Disconcerted, terrified, the Dwarf fell silent—what mistake had he made, what had he left out?—and looked anxiously at Catarina, that little figure so thin that she seemed to occupy no space at all in the redoubt on Menino Jesus, where Abbot João had taken him. Catarina motioned to him to go on.

But Abbot João didn’t let him. “Was what he did his fault?” he said, transfixed. “Was it his fault that he committed countless cruelties? Could he do otherwise? Wasn’t he paying his mother’s debt? From whom should the Father have sought retribution for those wicked deeds? From him or from the duchess?” His eyes were riveted on the Dwarf, in terrible anguish. “Answer me, answer me.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” the Dwarf said, trembling. “It’s not in the story. It’s not my fault, don’t do anything to me, I’m only the one who’s telling the story.”

“He’s not going to do anything to you,” the woman who seemed to be a wraith said softly. “Go on with the story, go on.”

He had gone on with the story, as Catarina dried Abbot João’s eyes with the hem of her skirt, squatted at his feet and clasped his legs with her hands and leaned her head against his knees so as to make him feel that he wasn’t alone. He had not wept again, or moved, or interrupted him till the end, which sometimes came with the death of Robert the Saint become a hermit, and sometimes with Robert placing on his head the crown that had become rightfully his on discovering that he was the son of Richard of Normandy, one of the Twelve Peers of France. He remembered that when he had finished the story that afternoon—or that night?—Abbot João had thanked him for telling it. But when, at what moment exactly had that been? Before the soldiers came, when life was peaceful and Belo Monte seemed the ideal place to live in? Or when life became death, hunger, holocaust, fear?

“When was it, Jurema?” he asked anxiously, not knowing why it was so urgent to situate it exactly in time. Then, turning to the nearsighted man: “Was it at the beginning or the end of the performance?”

“What’s the matter with him?” he heard one of the Sardelinha sisters say.

“Fever,” Jurema answered, putting her arms around him.

“When was it?” the Dwarf asked. “When was it?”

“He’s delirious,” he heard the nearsighted man say and felt him touch his forehead, stroke his hair and his back.

He heard him sneeze, twice, three times, as he always did when something surprised him, amused him, or frightened him. He could sneeze if he wanted to now. But he had not done so the night they had escaped, that night when one sneeze would have cost him his life. He imagined him at a circus performance in a village somewhere, sneezing twenty, fifty, a hundred times, as the Bearded Lady farted in the clown number, in every imaginable register and cadence, high, low, long, short, and it made him feel like laughing too, like the audience attending the performance. But he didn’t have the strength.

“He’s dropped off to sleep,” he heard Jurema say, cradling his head in her lap. “He’ll be all right tomorrow.”

He was not asleep. From the depths of that ambiguous reality of fire and ice, his body hunched over in the darkness of the cave, he went on listening to Antônio the