EPILOGUE
The only rule in a journey is: never come back just like you left. Come back different.
ANNE CARSON
Bartolomeu put most of the candles out as usual, plunging the large room into an overwhelming twilight. He took some time, as life had started tiring him and had weakened especially his sight.
However, he had been able to identify his last customer, who was sitting aside behind one of the tables crowding the Pàssaro do Mar.
Woodes Rogers was staring at the empty jug in front of him. Time had gone by for him too: an incipient baldness had thinned his hair, which used to be brown; deep wrinkles of the kind showing the hard life conditions of a man were lining his face like meridians and parallels on an old nautical map, mingling with the cobweb of scars disfiguring his left cheek
