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By Root 1939 0

mixtures of races and cultures, by its social and political effervescence, by the fact that it was a society in which Europe and Africa and something else he had never encountered before were intimately commingled. He decided to stay. He could not set up in practice as a doctor since he had no medical degree, and therefore he earned his living, as he had before in other places, by giving lessons in various languages and doing odd jobs. Though he wandered all over the country, he always came back to Salvador, where he could be found at the Livraria Catilina, in the shade of the palm trees of the Mirador of the Sorrowful, or in the sailors’ taverns in the lower town, explaining to anyone with whom he struck up a conversation that all virtues are compatible if reason rather than faith is the axis of life, that not God but Satan—the first rebel—is the true prince of freedom, and that once the old order was destroyed through revolutionary action, the new society, free and just, would flower spontaneously. Although there were some who listened to him, in general people did not appear to pay much attention to him.

[II]

At the time of the great drought of 1877, during the months of famine and epidemics that killed half the men and animals in the region, the Counselor was no longer journeying alone; he was accompanied, or, rather, followed (he scarcely appeared to be aware of the human trail tagging along after him) by men and women who had abandoned everything they had to go off with him, some of them because their souls had been touched by his counsel and others out of curiosity or mere inertia. Some of them remained in his company part of the way, and a very few seemed determined to remain at his side forever. Despite the drought, he journeyed on, even though the fields were now strewn with the carcasses of cattle that the vultures pecked at and half-empty towns greeted him.

The fact that it did not rain once all during the year 1877, that the rivers dried up and countless caravans of migrants appeared in the scrublands, carrying their few miserable belongings in canvas-covered carts or on their backs as they wandered about in search of water and food, was perhaps not the most terrible thing about that terrible year. If not, it was perhaps the brigands and the snakes that suddenly appeared everywhere in the backlands of the North. There had always been men who came onto the haciendas to steal cattle, had shootouts with the capangas—the hired thugs—of the landowners, and sacked remote villages, outlaws whom flying brigades of police periodically came to the backlands to hunt down. But with the famine the gangs of outlaws multiplied like the biblical loaves and fishes. Voracious and murderous, they fell on towns already decimated by the catastrophe to seize the inhabitants’ last remaining food, their household goods and clothing, drilling anyone full of holes who dared to cross them.

But never did they offend the Counselor, by word or by deed. They would meet up with him on the desert trails, amid the cactuses and the stones, beneath a leaden sky, or in the tangled scrub where the underbrush had withered and the tree trunks were beginning to split. The outlaws, ten, twenty cangaceiros armed with every sort of weapon capable of cutting, piercing, perforating, tearing out, would catch sight of the gaunt man in the purple tunic whose icy, obsessive eyes swept over them with their usual indifference for the space of a second before he went on doing exactly the same things as always: praying, meditating, walking, giving counsel. The pilgrims would pale on seeing the cangaço—the band of outlaws—and huddle together around the Counselor like chicks around the mother hen. The brigands, noting their extreme poverty, would go on their way, but sometimes they would halt on recognizing the saint, whose prophecies had reached their ears. They did not interrupt him if he was praying; they waited till he deigned to note their presence. He would finally speak to them, in that cavernous voice that unfailingly found the shortest path to their