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By Root 2147 0

’s choicest estate, informed him that it would not buy so much as a handful of salt from him. Thinking to profit from bad times, Antônio had buried seed grain in wooden boxes wrapped in canvas in order to sell it when scarcity drove the price sky-high. But the disaster took on proportions that exceeded even his calculations. He soon realized that if he didn’t sell the seed he had hoarded immediately, there wouldn’t be a single customer for it, for people were spending what little money they had left on Masses, processions, and offerings (and everyone was eager to join the Brotherhood of Penitents, who wore hoods and flagellated themselves) so that God would send rain. He unearthed his boxes then: despite the canvas wrapping, the seeds had rotted. But Antônio never admitted defeat. He, Honório, the Sardelinha sisters, and even the children—one of his own and three of his brother’s—cleaned the seed as best they could and the following morning the town crier announced in the main square that through force majeure the Vilanova general store was selling its seed on hand at bargain prices. Antônio and Honôrio armed themselves and posted four servants with clubs in plain sight outside the store to keep buyers from getting out of hand. For the first hour, everything went well. The Sardelinha sisters handed out the seed at the counter while the six men held people back at the door, allowing only ten people at a time to enter the store. But soon it was impossible to control the mob, for people finally climbed over the barrier, tore down the doors and windows, and invaded the place. In a few minutes’ time, they had made off with everything inside, including the money in the cashbox. What they were unable to carry off with them they reduced to dust.

The devastation had lasted no more than half an hour, and although their losses were great, nobody in the family was injured. Honorio, Antônio, the Sardelinha sisters, and the children sat in the street watching as the looters withdrew from what had been the best-stocked store in the city. The women had tears in their eyes and the children, sitting scattered about on the ground, looked numbly at the remains of the beds they had slept in, the clothes they had worn, the toys they had played with. Antônio’s face was pale. “We have to start all over again,” Honório murmured. “Not in this city, though,” his brother answered.

Antônio was not yet thirty. But the ravages of overwork, his exhausting travels, the obsessive way in which he ran his business, made him look older. He had lost a lot of hair, and his broad forehead, his little chin beard, and his mustache gave him the air of an intellectual. He was a strong man, somewhat stoop-shouldered, with a bowlegged walk like a cowhand’s. He never showed any interest in anything but business. While Honório went to fiestas and was not unwilling to down a little glass of anisette as he listened to a cantador or chatted with friends plying the São Francisco at the helm of boats on which bright-colored figureheads were beginning to appear, Antônio had no social life. When he wasn’t off somewhere on his travels, he stayed behind the counter of the store, checking the account books or thinking up new lines of business to go into. He had many customers but few friends, and though he turned up on Sundays at the Church of Our Lady of the Grottoes and occasionally was present at the processions in which the flagellants of the Brotherhood mortified their flesh in order to aid souls in purgatory, he was not thought of as someone possessed of extraordinary religious fervor. He was a serious, serene, stubborn man, well equipped to confront adversity.

This time the Vilanova family’s peregrination through a region brought low by hunger and thirst was longer than the one they had undertaken a decade before as they fled from the smallpox epidemic. They soon were left without animals. After an encounter with a band of migrants that the two brothers had to drive off with their rifles, Antônio decided that their five pack mules were too great a temptation for the starving