A few took off, but everybody was caught.

HE GOES BAREFOOT LIKE AN INDIAN AND EATS WITH HIS HANDS

There was talk that he’d been a general in Napoleon’s Grande Armée, but when they saw him in the flesh, well, it was difficult to believe.

He was known as Miguel now (no longer Michel) and he owned a cocoa plantation near Itacaré, south of the Rio de Contas. Trade had been lucrative, the years favourable, his hand in the business as natural as it once had been upon his sword. Upset on occasion by weather or war, sometimes both, but such was life. He drank it all down, deep. Often, as he lay in a hammock and stared up into the flickering leaves, the bright sky beyond, he’d try to trace the course of his life, pairing off sequences and events that had led to this moment, to this hammock, this glimpse of endless tropical sky. If not for the Portuguese, no arrest; if not for his arrest, no Curado; if not for Curado, no Marta et cetera. He’d reach back through his mind, hold the course, and yet was unsure as to what exactly he was searching for. Some action authored by his will, not another’s? Possibly (yes, that was it). Hours in the hammock, he only ever arrived at Bonaparte.

Miguel, when he could, went swimming. He’d learned how at the age of fifty-two and discovered a great love of the water, the breaking surf. He also drew and painted, pictures of Marta and the children, the forest leaning over the sand, Indians and Negroes poling the river on their rafts (though paper was difficult to come by). He was short and bald, with a long, rough beard that had turned completely white from age and salt. His stomach had grown large and round and he wore loose, white linen shirts unbuttoned to his navel, and breeches that revealed his handsome, robust calves. One of Napoleon’s generals? No, sir, it was just too much to believe.