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By Root 1933 0

nor the pellet for killing birds, nor the knife wound: it was a sickness. Because he had begun to feel that something was wrong with him even before the attack by the man dressed in leather, when he was on that hacienda with Epaminondas Gonçalves; whatever it was had been secretly eating away at some organ and spreading through the rest of his body. He was ill, not badly wounded. Something else new in your life, old pal. He thought: “Fate wants to complete your education before you die by subjecting you to experiences you’ve never had before.” First a rapist and then sick! Because he could not recall ever having been ill, even in earliest childhood. Wounded, yes, a number of times, seriously so that time in Barcelona. But sick: never. He had the feeling that he was about to fall into a faint at any moment. Why this senseless effort to go on thinking? Why this intuition that as long as he kept thinking he would remain alive? He was suddenly aware that Jurema had gone. He listened, terrified: he could still hear the sound of her breathing, to his right. He could no longer see her because the fire had gone out altogether.

He tried to raise his spirits, knowing that it was useless, murmuring that adverse circumstances spurred the true revolutionary on, telling himself that he would write a letter to L’Etincelle de la révolte pointing out the analogy between what was happening in Canudos and Bakunin’s address to the watchmakers and craftsmen of La Chaux-de-Fonds and the valley of Saint-Imier, in which he maintained that it was not in the most highly industrialized societies that great uprisings would take place, as Marx had prophesied, but in backward, agrarian countries, whose miserable peasant masses had nothing to lose—Spain, for instance, Russia, and, why not? Brazil, and he roused himself to reprove Epaminondas Gonçalves in his mind: “Your hopes are going to be thwarted, you bourgeois. You should have killed me when I was at your mercy, on the terrace of the hacienda. I’ll get well. I’ll escape.” He would get well, he would escape, the young woman would guide him, he would steal a mount and would fight in Canudos against what you represented, you bourgeois: selfishness, cynicism, greed, and…

II

[I]

The heat has not let up as the evening shadows have fallen, and unlike other summer nights, there is not so much as the breath of a breeze. Salvador is burning up with the heat in the darkness. It is now pitch black, since at midnight, by municipal ordinance, the gaslights on the street corners go out, and the lamps in the houses of night owls have also gone out some time ago. Only the windows of the Jornal de Notícias, up there on the heights of the old city, are still lit, and their brightness makes the fancy Gothic lettering of the name of the newspaper on the windowpanes of the front office even more indecipherable.

Outside the door is a calash, and horse and coachman are both dozing. But Epaminondas Gonçalves’s henchmen are awake, smoking, as they lean their elbows on the wall above the escarpment next to the newspaper office. They are talking together in a half whisper, pointing to something down below, there where the massive bulk of the Church of Nossa Senhora de Conceição da Praia and the fringe of foam along the reef are just barely visible in the darkness. The mounted police patrol has passed by on its rounds a while before and will not be back that way till dawn.

Inside, all by himself in the combination copy room and office, is that young, thin, ungainly journalist whose thickened eyeglasses to correct his nearsightedness, his frequent fits of sneezing, and his insistence on writing with a goose-quill pen instead of a metal one make him the laughingstock of the office staff. Leaning over his desk, his ugly head bathed in the halo of light from the little lamp, in a posture that makes him hunch over the desk at an awkward angle, he is writing rapidly, stopping only to dip his pen in the inkwell or to consult a small notebook, which he raises up so close to his eyeglasses that it almost touches them.