Captains of the Sands Read Online Free PDF Page B

that if anyone is spotted to run off somewhere else. Not to come back here.”
    He asked for a cigarette. Big João gave him one. Legless was already off looking for Lollipop. Pedro went in search of the Cat, he had something to talk to him about. He came back later, stretched out near the Professor. The latter returned to his book, over which he hunched until the candle burned out and the darkness of the warehouse enveloped him. Big João walked slowly to the door, where he lay down, the knife in his belt.
    Lollipop was thin and very tall, a tight face, half-yellowish, eyes sunken and deep, his mouth twisted and not given to smiles. Legless teased him first, asking if he was “saying his prayers,” then he got onto the subject of the hat-stealing and they decided they’d take a certain number of boys whom they chose carefully, marked out the zones of operation, and separated. Lollipop then went to his usual corner. He slept there invariably, where the warehouse walls form an angle. He’d arranged his things with loving care: an old blanket, a pillow he’d taken from a hotel once when he’d gone in carrying a traveler’s bag, a pair of pants he wore on Sundays along with a shirt of indefinite color but more or less clean. And fastened to the wall with small tacks two pictures of saints: a Saint Anthony carrying a Christ Child (Lollipop’s name was Antônio and he’d heard that Saint Anthony was Brazilian), and an Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, who had her breast run through with arrows and who had a withered flower beneath her picture. Lollipop picked up the flower, smelled it, saw it had lost its scent. Then he fastened it alongside the scapular he carried on his chest and from the pocket of the old jacket he wore he took a red carnation that he’d picked in a park, right under the nose of the guard, at that imprecise hour of dusk. And he put the carnation under the picture while he gazed at the saint with a fervent look. Then he knelt. The others had started up with a lot of raillery at first when they saw him on his knees praying. They got used to it, however, and nobody paid any more attention. He began to pray and his ascetic look became even more pronounced, his child’s face became paler and moresomber, he lifted his long, thin hands to the picture. His whole face had a kind of glow and his voice took on tonalities and vibrations that his companions didn’t recognize. It was as if he were out of the world, not in the old, rundown warehouse, but in some other land along with Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. His prayer, however, was simple and hadn’t even been learned from a catechism. He asked Our Lady to help him someday so he could enter that school in Sodré out of which men came transformed into priests.
    Legless came over to work out a detail of the hat business and since he’d seen him praying had a wisecrack all ready, a wisecrack that made him laugh just thinking about it and which would upset Lollipop completely, but when he got close and saw Lollipop praying, his hands uplifted, his eyes fixed nobody knew where, his face open in ecstasy (it was as if he were clothed in happiness), he stopped, the mocking laugh disappeared from his lips, and he stood looking at him half with fear, possessed by a feeling that had a touch of envy and a touch of despair in it.
    Legless was stock still, looking. Lollipop didn’t move. Only his lips showed a slow movement. Legless was in the habit of making fun of him, as of all the others in the group, even Professor, whom he liked, even Pedro Bala, whom he respected. As soon as anyone joined the Captains of the Sands he formed a bad opinion of Legless. Because he would immediately give him a nickname, laugh at some gesture of the newcomer, some phrase. He ridiculed everything, he was one of those who brawled the most. He even had a reputation for being mean. Once he did some terribly cruel things to a cat that had come into the warehouse. And one day he’d cut a