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By Root 1940 0

any questions as to what’s happened, how it happened, why he’s still here, so calm, so impassive, so unexpressive, waiting—for what?—and he tells himself once more that the people in these parts are strange, impenetrable, inscrutable, reminding him of Chinese, of Hindustanis. Caifás is a very skinny, bony, bronze-skinned man with prominent cheekbones and wine-dark eyes that are disconcerting because they never blink, whose voice is quite unfamiliar to him, since he scarcely opened his mouth all during the trip back and forth that he made with him, sitting directly alongside him, and whose leather vest and pants, reinforced in the seat and the legs with strips of leather as well, and even his rope sandals appear to be part of his body, a tough additional skin, a crust. Why has his arrival so disconcerted Jurema? Is it because of what has happened between the two of them a few hours before? The little woolly dog appears from somewhere and leaps and gambols and plays about at Jurema’s feet, and at that moment Galileo Gall notices that the chickens in the room have all disappeared.

“I saw only three of them. The one who escaped took the arms off with him,” he says, smoothing his disheveled red hair. “Epaminondas must be told of this as soon as possible; it might be dangerous for him. Can you take me to his hacienda?”

“He’s not there any more,” Caifás says. “You heard him yesterday when he said he was about to leave for Bahia.”

“That’s true,” Gall says. There is no getting round it; he, too, will be obliged to go back to Bahia. He thinks: “The soldiers are already here.” He thinks: “They’re going to come looking for Rufino, they’re going to find the dead men, they’re going to find me.” He simply must leave, shake off this lassitude, this drowsiness that has overcome him. But he doesn’t move.

“Perhaps they were enemies of Epaminondas’s, Governor Luiz Viana’s people, the baron’s,” he murmurs, as though speaking to Caifás, though he is really talking to himself. “Why didn’t the National Guard come, then? Those three men weren’t gendarmes. They could have been brigands, who might have wanted the arms for their depredations, or in order to sell them.”

Jurema is still standing motionless with her head down, and not three feet away from him is Caifás, still calm, quiet, impassive. The little dog leaps about, panting.

“What’s more, there’s something strange about this whole thing,” Gall says, thinking aloud. And to himself: “I must hide out till the soldiers leave and then go back to Salvador”—reflecting at the same time that Major Brito’s expedition is already there, less than two kilometers away, that it will proceed to Canudos and no doubt put an end to this outbreak of rebellion in which he thought he saw, or fondly believed he saw, the seeds of a revolution. “They weren’t only after arms. They also were out to kill me, there’s no doubt of that. And that I don’t understand at all. Who could possibly want to kill me here in Queimadas?”

“I could, sir,” he hears Caifás say, in the same toneless voice, as he suddenly feels the knife edge at his throat, but his reflexes are, have always been, very fast, and he has managed to throw his head back, to step a few millimeters away just as the man dressed in leather has leapt upon him, and his knife, instead of burying itself in his throat, misses its mark and wounds him farther down, to the right, where his neck and his shoulder meet, producing in his body a sensation that is more one of cold and surprise than of pain. He has fallen to the floor and is touching the wound, noting that blood is pouring out between his fingers, his eyes opened wide, staring spellbound at the man with the biblical name dressed in leather, whose expression, even now, has not changed, except perhaps for the pupils of his eyes, opaque before and now gleaming brightly. He is holding the bloody knife in his right hand and a small pearl-handled revolver in his left. Leaning over him, he aims it at Galileo’s head, offering him more or less of an explanation as he does so: “I’m acting on orders from Colonel Epaminondas