Captains of the Sands Read Online Free PDF Page A

Sea and that the Professor is eating his eyes out with so much reading of those books with small print. Big João goes over to where the Professor is, although he always sleeps by the warehouse door, like a mastiff, his knife near his hand to avoid any surprise.
    He walks among the groups chatting, among the children sleeping, and comes over by the Professor. He squats down beside him and stays there watching the other’s attentive reading.
    João José, the Professor ever since the day he’d stolen a story book from a bookcase in a house in Barra, had become an expert in such thefts. He never sold the books, however, piling them up in a corner of the warehouse, covered with bricks so the rats wouldn’t chew them. He read them all with an anxiety that was almost a fever. He liked to know things and he was the one who on many nights told the others stories about adventurers, men of the sea, historical and legendary figures, stories that made those lively eyes extend out to sea or up to the mysterious hillsides of the city in an urge for adventure and heroism. João José was the only one among them who did any reading and yet he’d only spent a year and a half in school. But his daily practice in reading had awakened his imagination completely and he may have been the only one who had a certain awareness of the heroic side of their lives. That knowledge, that vocation for telling stories, made him respected among the Captains of the Sands, even though he was frail, thin, and sad, his dark hair hanging over squinting myopic eyes. They’d nicknamed him Professor because in one stolen book he’d learned to do magic tricks with handkerchiefs and coins and also because when he told the stories he’d read and many he’d invented, he would weave a great and mysterious magic spell that transported them to many different worlds and he made the eyes of the Captains of the Sands shine as only thestars in the Bahia night could shine. Pedro Bala never made a decision without consulting him and several times it was the Professor’s imagination that created the best plans for a robbery. No one knew, however, that one day, years later, he would be the one to tell with descriptions that would amaze the nation the story of these lives and many other stories of men who struggled and suffered. Perhaps the only one who knew it was Don’Aninha, priestess of the temple of the Cross of Oxó of Afoxê, because Don’Aninha knows everything that Iá tells her by means of a game with seeds on a stormy night.
    Big João spent a long time watching the reading. Those letters didn’t say anything to the black boy. His look went from the book to the flickering light of the candle and from that to the Professor’s uncombed hair. He finally got tired and asked in a full, warm voice:
    “Nice, Professor?”
    The Professor took his eyes off the book, laid his slim hand on the shoulder of the black boy, his most ardent admirer:
    “A crazy story, Big Boy.” His eyes were shining.
    “About sailors?”
    “It’s about a black man like you. A real he-man black.”
    “Will you tell it to me?”
    “I’ll tell it to you as soon as I finish reading it. You’ll see that only a black man…”
    And he turned his eyes back to the pages of the book. Big João lighted a cheap cigarette, silently offered another to the Professor, and squatted smoking as if standing guard over the other’s reading. Throughout the warehouse there was a sound of laughter, conversation, shouts. Big João could easily make out Legless’s voice, shrill and nasal. Legless talked loud, laughed a lot. He was the spy of the group, the one who knew how to worm his way into the house of a family for a week, passing himself off as a good boy who’d lost his parents to the aggressive immensity of the city. Lame, his physical defect had given him the nickname. But it also gave him the sympathy of any mother who saw him at her door, humble and woe-begotten, asking for a little something