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By Root 2146 0

human hordes wandering about the backlands. He therefore sold four of them in Barro Vermelho for a handful of precious stones. They butchered the last remaining one, had themselves a banquet, and salted down the meat left over, which kept them alive for a number of days. One of Honôrio’s sons died of dysentery and they buried him in Borracha, where they had set up a shelter, in which the Sardelinha sisters offered soup made from Spanish plums, rock cavy, and yellow lupine. But they were unable to hold out very long there either, and wandered off again toward Patamuté and Mato Verde, where Honório was stung by a scorpion. When he was better, they continued on south, a harrowing journey of weeks and weeks during which the only things they came upon were ghost towns, deserted haciendas, caravans of skeletons drifting aimlessly, as though hallucinated.

In Pedra Grande, another of Honôrio and Assunção’s sons died of nothing more serious than a head cold. They were in the midst of burying him, wrapped in a blanket, when, enveloped in a cloud of red-colored dust, some twenty men and women entered the village—among them a creature with the face of a man who crawled about on all fours and a half-naked black—most of them nothing but skin and bones, wearing threadbare tunics and sandals that looked as though they had trod all the paths of this world. Their leader was a tall, dark man with hair that fell down to his shoulders and quicksilver eyes. He strode straight over to the Vilanova family, and with a gesture of his hand stopped the brothers, who were already lowering the corpse into the grave. “Your son?” he asked Honôrio in a grave voice. The latter nodded. “You can’t bury him like that,” the dark-skinned, dark-haired man said in an authoritative tone of voice. “He must be properly interred and sent upon his way so that he will be received at heaven’s eternal feast of rejoicing.” And before Honório could answer, he turned to those accompanying him: “Let us give him a decent burial, so that the Father will receive him in exaltation.” The Vilanovas then saw the pilgrims come to life, run to the trees, cut them down, nail them together, fashion a coffin and a cross with a skill that was proof of long practice. The dark man took the child in his arms and laid him in the coffin. As the Vilanovas filled the grave with earth, the man prayed aloud and the others sang hymns of blessing and recited litanies, kneeling round about the cross. Later, as the pilgrims were about to leave after resting beneath the trees, Antônio Vilanova took out a coin and offered it to the saint. “As a token of our thanks,” he insisted, on seeing that the man was refusing to accept it and contemplating him with a mocking look in his eyes. “You have nothing to thank me for,” he said finally. “But you would be unable to pay the Father what you owe him even with a thousand coins such as this one.” He paused, and then added gently: “You haven’t learned to count, my son.”

For a long time after the pilgrims had departed, the Vilanovas remained there, sitting lost in thought around a campfire they had built to drive away the insects. “Was he a madman, compadre?” Honôrio asked. “I’ve seen many a madman on my travels and that man seemed like something more than that,” Antônio answered.

When the rains came again, after two years of drought and disasters, the Vilanovas had settled in Caatinga do Moura, a hamlet near which there was a salt pit that Antônio began to work. All the rest of the family—the Sardelinha sisters and the two children—had survived, but Antônio and Antônia’s little boy, after suffering from gummy secretions round his eyes that made him rub them for days on end, had gradually lost his sight and though he could still distinguish light from dark he was unable to make out people’s faces or tell what things around him looked like. The salt pit turned out to be a good business. Honôrio, the women, and the children spent their days drying the salt and preparing sacks of it, which Antônio then went out to sell. He had made himself a cart, and went about