A vacant, remorseful feeling crept inside Pêro like an animal skulking off to the forest to die — alone. Nothing was fixed, nothing secure. Before him, an undirected quest of what to do with his life closed in on him. He at the bottom of a moat, water filling in, blurring his vision, drowning him, cutting him off from the light in the sky, the air, the world. Although he rested back-to-back with Jawoli and Kujaguo he sensed a distinct distance between them, protective walls he’d swiftly put up around his heart.
The cart meandered its way down a small tributary in an alluvial-like floodplain of debris that eventually deposited them near the Mocambo. Rubble still blocked the uphill ascent to the Fabrica.
Each man carefully retrieved to carry on foot, a faded rose madder-clothed bundle
