The Relic E-Book

Eça De Queiroz

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus European Classics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 500

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Teodoric goes in search of a relic in the holy Land to please his aunt. Teodorico Raposo, the novel's anti-hero, is a master of deceit; one minute feigning devotion in front of his rich, pious aunt, in order to inherit her money, the next indulging in debauchery. Spurred on by the desire to please his aunt, and in order to get away from his unfaithful mistress, he embarks on a journey to the Holy Land in search of a holy relic. The resulting fiasco is a masterpiece of comic irony as religious bigotry and personal greed are mercilessly ridiculed.

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers. She won the 1992 Portuguese Translation Prize for The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, and her translations of Eca de Queiroz’s novels The Relic (1996) and The City and the Mountains (2009) were shortlisted for the prize; with Javier Marias, she won the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for A Heart So White, and, in 2000, she won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Jose Saramago’s All the Names. In 2008 she won the Pen Book-of-the Month-Club Translation Prize and The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Maias by Eca de Queiroz.

She has translated the following books for Dedalus: The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui and The River by Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio, Lucio’s Confession and The Great Shadow by Mario de Sa-Carneiro, The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy (with Annella McDermott), The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy (eds. Eugenio Lisboa and Helder Macedo), Spring and Summer Sonatas and Autumn and Winter Sonatas by Ramon del Valle-Inclan, and, by Eca de Queiroz: The Mandarin, The Relic, The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers, The Crime of Father Amaro, Cousin Bazilio, The Maias, The City and the Mountains and Alves & Co.

Margaret Jull Costa is currently translating The Mystery of the Sintra Road by Eca de Queiroz.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The translator would like to thank Dr Eugénio Lisboa and Ben Sherriff for all their help and advice.

Over the sturdy nakedness of truth

the diaphanous cloak of fantasy.

INTRODUCTION

Eça de Queiroz was born in 1845, the illegitimate son of a magistrate. His parents did not marry until Eça was four years old and his father only acknowledged him as his legal heir shortly before Eça’s own marriage in 1886. His parents’ marriage was not a love match and his mother and father were always cold and distant figures in Eça’s life.

Whilst at university in Coimbra, Eça participated in the student struggles and debates of the time and, along with his contemporaries, was influenced by writers such as Hegel, Proudhon and Darwin and, in particular, by the great Portuguese writer and thinker Antero de Quental. After a brief period working as a lawyer in Lisbon, Eça became the youthful editor of a provincial newspaper in Évora and completed his move from Romanticism to Realism. Although he wrote articles in praise of traditional skills and customs, the reality of provincial life proved rather too real for him and he soon escaped Portugal altogether on a trip to the Near East with his best friend and future brother-in-law, Manuel de Resende, taking in Egypt (a country that had an enormous impact on him) and Palestine. From 1870 onwards, after his return from his travels, Eça worked abroad in various diplomatic posts in Havana, Bristol, Newcastle and, finally, Paris.

In 1876 he published O crime do Padre Amaro (The Sin of Father Amaro) and, in 1878, O primo Basílio (Cousin Bazílio). The Brazilian novelist, Machado de Assis, accused him of plagiarising Zola and of being incapable of creating anything but cardboard characters. Eça was wounded by this criticism but it only echoed his own doubts about his abilities as a novelist. He was in fact suffering something of a crisis in his work. He was concerned that living so far from Lisbon and the subject matter of his novels might be having an adverse effect on his writing. It was possibly as an escape from the problem that Eça ventured into fantastic literature with O Mandarim (The Mandarin) (1880) and A Relíquia (The Relic) (1887). The former was a reworking of a tale already told by Henri Monnier but The Relic was very much his own – giving him the chance not only to draw on his experiences as a traveller in the Near East (he wrote a detailed diary which was published posthumously as O Egipto), to attack the religious and social hypocrisy of his age and to debunk what he considered to be the Christian myth, but also to use fantasy and the imagination to discuss real moral dilemmas.

Although subsequently Eça only returned to fantasy in short stories, writing these two novels seems to have had a liberating effect as regards both style and subject matter. The Relic also coincided with his marriage to Emilia de Resende (a marriage not dissimilar to that between Teodorico and Jesuína in The Relic – not a love match exactly, but based on a mixture of mutual respect and convenience) and a posting to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1900. He soon grew disillusioned with Paris and with French culture in general, taking almost no part in the literary life there. But, curiously enough, that disillusion also finally freed him from his subjugation to French culture and ideas. His greatest novel Os Maias (The Maias), the portrait of a family and a class in decline, was also written at this time. In it he returns to his attack on the hypocrisy and sterility of Portuguese life but his writing is enriched by the stylistic freedoms he found in The Relic.

His last book, A cidade e as serras (The City and the Mountains), published the year after his death, was written in praise of the simple rustic life as opposed to the falseness of the city. Although a delightful book, it is a million miles from the acerbic wit and vision of his other novels.

The Relic was first published in serial form in the Gazeta das Notícias of Rio de Janeiro in 1887 and in book form that same year. He entered it for a competition held by the Academy in Lisbon knowing that he stood not a ghost of a chance of winning, but eagerly looking forward to the jury’s reaction to his anti-hero Teodorico Raposo. He was not disappointed. The book received not a single vote from the jury, whose spokesman, Pinheiro Chagas – a Romantic author and a devout Catholic – explained their decision in trenchant terms. He said that a vulgar hypocrite like Teodorico, the book’s hero, could never have dreamed the dream that forms the central part of the novel; the person who goes to sleep is Teodorico, but the person who has the dream is Eça. To some extent Eça agreed with this verdict, but felt that fantastic fiction granted the author full poetic licence ‘to place in the heart of a concierge all the idealism of an Ophelia and to have a peasant speak with the majesty of a Bossuet’. Subsequent critics decried it as lacking both good sense and good taste whilst others described it as the book with everything: farce/epic, belly-laughs/tears, picaresque/the sublime, parody/history. Generally though, it tends to have been considered one of Eça’s less successful works: a rather slight, flawed sally into fantastic literature, a view conditioned perhaps by the reader’s expectations of a typical Eça novel.

Both The Mandarin and The Relic are very different from his realist novels of social comment and satire. Both books, notably the latter, are really the first examples of the picaresque in Portugal. The pícaro, an amoral rogue living on his rather limited wits, is not so far from Eça’s description of his ideal character: a man without an ounce of character or intelligence. Both novels also accord with M.H. Abrams’ definition of the picaresque as being ‘realistic in manner, episodic in structure and usually satiric in aim’. By venturing into the picaresque Eça gave himself licence to be as stereotypical as he pleased, while the use of the first-person narrator freed him from the constraints of being the all-seeing author. The pícaro is very often an orphan (as Teodorico is) with no real moral centre or integrated sense of self. He becomes what the world wants him to be, status in society being gained only by his own astuteness. Duplicity and dissimulation are second nature to him. Thus, Teodorico falls easily into the double life required of him if he is to inherit his aunt’s millions without giving up any worldly pleasures.

One of the main criticisms levelled at the novel is that it lacks coherence, mainly because the central panel of the triptych – the journey via dream into ancient Jerusalem – uses a language and evinces an aesthetic wonderment which a Philistine like Teodorico could never aspire to; whilst the central panel is written in the style of Flaubertian exoticism, the flanking panels are in the naturalist/realist mould of social observation and satire. This hardly seems a problem: Teodorico is still Teodorico. Though filled with wonderment at the beauties of the Temple, he remains utterly at the mercy of his own libido and manifests a very modern disgust for some of the customs he witnesses and a certain amount of unthinking anti-Semitism. He continues, in short, to be a man of his time and to play Wooster to Topsius’ learned Jeeves.

There is also a satisfying duplicity, or rather doubleness, in the novel. There are two Jerusalems: the late nineteenth-century one, which was as profound a disappointment to Eça when he visited it as it is to Teodorico (Eça described it as a ‘dark, low, miserable place’) and the Jerusalem of Jesus’ time with all the dazzling beauty of the Temple. There are also two sets of two Teodoricos: the supine pietist and the frustrated sensualist; and the Teodorico of the prologue – now a valued member of society, full of windy rhetoric – and the Teodorico hustling his way through the novel, skidding along the edges of social acceptability. There are also two Passions – Christ’s and Teodorico’s – and two relics – Mary’s nightdress (profane) and the crown of thorns (bogus sacred). Although the nightdress should have led to ruin and the crown of thorns to great wealth, in fact it is the profane relic that leads indirectly to Teodorico’s eventual re-encounter with Crispim, his fortunate marriage to Jesuína and acceptance into the bourgeois fold.

Like The Mandarin, the novel eschews any neat moral. Although Teodorico initially continues his life of lies through the sale of fake relics and only achieves the wealth and social status he craves through honesty and the rejection of hypocrisy, when pondering the reasons for his failure to inherit his aunt’s fortune, his conclusion is a surprising one. He realises that, at the critical moment, he lacked both the quickness of wit and the imagination to lie, the very qualities which Teodorico perceives as being the basis of all human knowledge and religion, the same qualities, for example, shown by Joseph of Arimathea (in Eça’s version of events) when deciding what to do with Jesus’ body and thereby creating the myth that provided the foundation of Christianity.

It was precisely the combination of this rejection of any conventional moral focus and his rewriting of Christianity as a myth based on a well-intentioned lie that brought Eça and The Relic into disfavour with the more Catholic writers of the time. Quite apart from placing Christ’s divinity in doubt, it was considered heretical to have an immoral ne’er-do-well like Teodorico witnessing and describing the Passion.

In his attack on suffocating provincialism, Eça shows himself to be in the tradition that began with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in 1857 and reached a high point with Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1914. What is special about Eça’s assault on the hypocrisies of his day, however, is his style, which blends sprightly good humour with lyrical description, and, above all, his enduring ability to make us laugh.

Margaret Jull Costa

During the summer holidays I spent at my villa, the Quinta do Mosteiro (the former country seat of the Counts of Lindoso), I decided to write a memoir of my life which contains – or at least so I and my brother-in-law Crispim believe – a clear and potent lesson for this century so overly preoccupied with the ambiguities of Intelligence and so troubled by concerns about Money.

In 1875, on the eve of St Anthony, my whole being was shaken by the bitterest of disappointments: around that time my aunt, Dona Patrocínio das Neves, bade me leave our home in Campo de Santana to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Within those holy city walls, on a blazing hot day in the month of Nisan, when Pontius Pilate was still the procurator of Judaea, Aelius Lamma the imperial legate in Syria and J. Kaiapha the supreme pontiff in Rome, I was witness, by some miracle, to scandalous events. When I returned to Portugal a great change took place in my life both materially and morally.

These events – as rare and lofty in the life of a mere university graduate as tall, leafy cork oaks full of sun and murmurous shade might be in a field of scythed grass – are what I wish to recount here, soberly and sincerely, while swallows fly about my roof and clumps of red carnations perfume my orchard.

This journey to the lands of Egypt and Palestine will always constitute the supreme glory of my career and I would very much like to leave a solid yet elegant monument to it in the world of Letters, for Posterity. However, writing, as I am today, out of peculiarly spiritual motives, I would not want these personal jottings to resemble some Picturesque Guide to the Orient. That is why (despite the promptings of vanity) I have omitted from this manuscript any succulent, glowing accounts of ruins and local customs.

Furthermore, the land of the Gospels that so fascinates the more sensitive among us is far less interesting than my own arid homeland, the Alentejo. Nor indeed do I think that lands favoured by a Messianic presence necessarily gain thereby in grace or splendour. I have not had the opportunity to visit the holy places of India where the Buddha lived – the groves of Migadaia, the hills of Velluvani, or that sweet valley of Rajagaha upon which the loving eyes of the perfect Master were gazing when a fire broke out amongst the reeds and He taught, in a simple parable, how ignorance is a fire that devours man, a fire fed by the deceptive sensations of Life which are fed in turn by the deceptive appearances of the World. Nor have I visited the cave of Hira or the holy sands between Mecca and Medina so often crossed by Mohammed, the Excellent Prophet, slow and thoughtful on his dromedary. However, from the fig trees of Bethany to the silent waters of Galilee, I am well acquainted with all the places wherein dwelled that other divine Intermediary, full of tenderness and dreams, whom we call Jesus Our Lord, and there I found only brutality, aridity, squalor, desolation and rubble.

Jerusalem is an Arab town crouched behind city walls the colour of mud, full of filthy alleyways stinking to high heaven and filled by the constant pealing of sad bells.

The Jordan, a thread of feeble, muddy water dawdling along through desert lands, hardly bears comparison with that clear, sweet river Lima that runs past the villa here, bathing the roots of my alder trees. And yet, these sweet Portuguese waters never flowed about the knees of a Messiah, were never brushed by the wings of armed and glittering angels bearing warnings from the All High from Heaven to Earth!

However, since there are certain insatiable spirits who, reading of a journey through the land of the Scriptures, long to know everything about it from the size of the stones to the price of beer, I recommend the vast and illuminating work written by my companion on the pilgrimage, Topsius, a German doctor from the University of Bonn and a member of the Imperial Institute of Historical Research. It consists of seven dense volumes in quarto, printed in Leipzig, and bears the elegant and profound title: An Annotated Walk Around Jerusalem.

On every page of this comprehensive guide, the learned Topsius speaks of me with a mixture of admiration and regret. He always refers to me as ‘the illustrious Lusitanian nobleman’ and the nobility of his travelling companion, whom he traces back to the Barcas family, clearly fills the erudite plebeian with delicious pride. Indeed, in these weighty tomes, the enlightened Topsius goes a step further and places utterly fictitious words on my lips and in my head – sayings and opinions that positively brim with pious credulity – purely so that he may rebut and demolish them with due wisdom and fluency. He says, for example: ‘Standing before such and such a ruin, dating from the time of the Crusade of Godfrey, the illustrious Lusitanian nobleman claimed that Our Lord, when out walking one day with St Veronica … ’ and then unfolds the solemn and ponderous arguments he employed to enlighten me. Since, however, the harangues he attributes to me are in no way inferior in their wise profligacy and theological arrogance to those of Bossuet, I refrained from commenting in the note I wrote to the Cologne Gazette on the tortuous artifice employed by sharp German wit in order to garland itself with triumph at the expense of the doltish faith of the South.

There is, however, one point in his book which I cannot allow to pass without a robust reply. And that is the learned Topsius’ allusion to the two brown paper packages which accompanied and greatly preoccupied me throughout my pilgrimage from the backstreets of Alexandria to the slopes of Mount Carmel. In the verbose style that characterises his academic eloquence, Dr Topsius says: ‘The illustrious Lusitanian nobleman carried in them the remains of his ancestors which he himself had gathered together before leaving the sacred soil of his fatherland and his ancient, turreted family home.’ This is a downright lie and deserves to be condemned as such. Why should he wish erudite Germany to believe that I travelled the land of the Gospels carrying with me the bones of my ancestors wrapped up in a brown paper parcel?

No other imputation could displease or discomfit me more. Not because he reveals me to the Church as a frivolous profaner of domestic graves (the fulminations of the Church weigh less on me – as a knight commander and a landowner – than the dry leaves that occasionally fall upon my parasol from some dead branch above me); nor because the Church, once it has pocketed its fee for burying a bundle of bones, cares whether they lie forever beneath the rigid peace of an eternal marble slab or go rattling about inside the soft folds of a brown paper parcel; but because Topsius’ statement discredits me in the eyes of the Liberal Bourgeoisie. For in these times of Semitism and capitalism, the good things in life – everything from jobs in banks to ecclesiastical benefices – are entirely in the gift of the omnipresent and omnipotent Liberal Bourgeoisie. I have children, I have ambitions. Now, the Liberal Bourgeoisie is happy to welcome and, indeed, assimilate with alacrity a gentleman with ancestors and a family seat – he is the precious, old wine that will purify the coarse, new wine – but, quite rightly, it has nothing but contempt for the graduate, one of the genteel poor, who strolls past it, proud and intrepid, with his hands weighed down with the bones of ancestors, like some silent rebuke to the ancestors and bones that the Bourgeoisie itself lacks.

That is why I would suggest to the learned Topsius (who, with his penetrating spectacles, actually saw the parcels being wrapped, the first in Egypt, the second in Canaan) that in any subsequent edition of his book he should free himself from chaste, academic scruples and narrow-minded, philosophical concerns and reveal to scientific and sentimental Germany alike the true contents of those two brown paper parcels as frankly as I do to my fellow countrymen in these pages written at leisure on my holidays, pages in which Reality reigns supreme, sometimes halting and hampered by the heavy vestments of History, sometimes skipping free beneath the colourful mask of Farce!

CONTENTS

Title

About the Translator

About the Book

Acknowledgements

Quote

Introduction

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Copyright

I

My grandfather was Father Rufino da Conceição, graduate in Theology, author of a devout Life of St Filomena and prior at Amendoeirinha. My father, a protégé of Our Lady of the Assumption, was called Rufino da Assunção Raposo and he lived in Évora with my grandmother, Filomena Raposo, nicknamed ‘the Dumpling’, a confectioner who lived in Rua do Lagar dos Dízimos. Papa had a job in the post office and amused himself writing articles for O Farol do Alentejo, the local newspaper. In 1853, a famous cleric, Dom Gaspar de Lorena, Bishop of Khorazin (which is in Galilee) came to Évora to celebrate the feast of St John. He stayed at Canon Pita’s house, where Papa often used to go in the evenings and play his guitar. Out of courtesy to the two priests, Papa published a report in O Farol, laboriously gleaned from The Clergyman’s Treasury, congratulating Évora on ‘its great good fortune to be sheltering within its walls that eminent prelate, Dom Gaspar, shining light of the Church and a renowned pillar of sanctity’. The Bishop of Khorazin cut out this article from O Farol and placed it between the pages of his breviary. And he began to find everything about Papa pleasing, from his spotlessly clean linen to the melancholy grace with which he sang the ‘Ballad of Count Ordonho’, accompanying himself on the guitar. But when he found out that this same Rufino da Assunção Raposo, with his dark good looks and pleasant manner, was the godson of old Rufino da Conceição with whom he had studied at the São José seminary and moved in the same theological circles at university, his affection for Papa knew no bounds. Before leaving Évora, the bishop gave him a silver watch and it was through the bishop’s influence, after a few slothful months’ apprenticeship at the customs house in Oporto, that Papa was named director of the customs house in Viana, an appointment that caused considerable scandal.

When Papa reached the soft, fertile plains of Entre Minho e Lima the apple trees were just coming into blossom and that same July he met a gentleman from Lisbon, Knight Commander G. Godinho, who was spending the summer with his two nieces in a riverside villa called Quinta do Mosteiro, the former home of the Counts of Lindoso. The elder of these two ladies, Dona Maria do Patrocínio, wore dark glasses at all times and, every morning, accompanied by a liveried servant, would ride down to the city on a donkey in order to hear mass at the church in Santana. The other lady, Dona Rosa, was a plump brunette, who played the harp, knew by heart the words of ‘Love and Melancholy’ and would spend hours by the water’s edge, her white dress sweeping the grass, making nosegays of wild flowers beneath the shade of the alder trees.

Papa became a frequent visitor to Quinta do Mosteiro. An officer from the customs house would carry his guitar for him and, whilst the Knight Commander and another friend of the house, Dr Margaride, a magistrate, sat absorbed in a game of backgammon and Dona Maria do Patrocínio was bent in prayer over her rosary, Papa would sit on the verandah by Dona Rosa’s side, gazing at the moon, round and white above the river, and in the silence, he would gently pluck the strings of his guitar and sing of the sorrows of Count Ordonho. At other times he too would play backgammon and Dona Rosa, a flower in her hair, a book lying neglected in her lap, would sit at her sister’s feet and Papa, shaking the dice, would feel the promising caress of her long-lashed eyes.

They got married. I was born one Good Friday evening but Mama died even as the rockets were exploding in the joyous Easter morn. She lies in the cemetery in Viana do Castelo, in a grave overgrown with gillyflowers, by a path near the wall, in the damp shade of the weeping willows, where she liked to walk on summer evenings, all dressed in white, with the shaggy little puppy she called Traviata.

The Knight Commander and Dona Maria never returned to Quinta do Mosteiro. I grew up and caught all the usual childhood illnesses. Papa grew fatter and his guitar slept, forgotten, in a corner of the living room, inside its green baize case. One very hot July day, my maid Gervásia dressed me in my heavy black cotton suit and Papa put a black crepe band around his straw hat. We were in mourning for Knight Commander G. Godinho, whom Papa often used to refer to under his breath as ‘that old rogue’.

Later, one night during Carnival, Papa died suddenly of a stroke, as he was coming down the stone steps of our house dressed in a bear costume ready to go to a dance being held by the Macedo sisters.

I was seven at the time and I remember seeing in our courtyard the next day a tall, stout lady, wearing an ornate mantilla of black lace, sobbing over the bloodstains left by Papa, which no one had washed away and which had dried on the stones. An old woman was waiting at the gate, hunched inside her woollen cape, praying.

The windows at the front of the house were shut. On a bench in the dark corridor stood a flickering candle in a brass holder, giving off the guttering, smoky light of a candle in a chapel. The wind was blowing hard and it was raining. Through the kitchen window, while Mariana snivelled and fanned the fire, I saw a man crossing the Largo da Senhora da Agonia bearing Papa’s coffin on his shoulder. In the high, cold hills, the little chapel of Our Lady, with its black cross, looked sadder than ever, white and naked amongst the pines, almost lost in the mist, and beyond, amongst the rocks, a heavy winter sea endlessly rolled and moaned.

That night, in the room where she did the ironing, my maid Gervásia wrapped me in a woollen petticoat and sat me on the floor. From time to time, outside in the corridor, I would hear the creaking boots of João, the customs officer, who was fumigating the house with lavender. The cook brought me a slice of sponge cake. I fell asleep and dreamed I was walking along the banks of a clear river, whose ancient poplars seemed possessed of souls that sighed and with me walked a naked man with two wounds in his feet and two wounds in his hands, Jesus Christ Our Lord.

After some days had passed, I was woken up one morning by the sun shining full on my bedroom windows so that they glittered prodigiously, as if presaging some holy event. Beside my bed stood a plump, smiling figure, who was gently tickling my feet and calling me ‘little rascal’. Gervásia told me the man’s name was Senhor Matias and that he was going to take me a long way away to Aunt Patrocínio’s house. And Senhor Matias, a pinch of snuff halfway between snuffbox and nose, looked shocked at the holes in the socks Gervásia was putting on my feet. They wrapped me in Papa’s grey cloak. João, the customs officer, picked me up and carried me in his arms as far as the street door where a litter was waiting; it had curtains made out of oilcloth and was drawn by two mules.

We then set off down long roads. Even when I slept, I was aware of the slow ringing of the bells round the mules’ necks and, every now and then, Senhor Matias, sitting opposite me, would stroke my face and say: ‘There now.’ One evening, as it was growing dark, we came to a sudden halt in a deserted place where there was a bog. The mule driver was furious and swore loudly, brandishing a flaming torch. We were in the middle of a pinewood, black and doleful, that murmured all about us. Senhor Matias grew pale, took his watch out of his pocket and hid it in the top of one of his boots.

One night, we crossed a city where streetlamps in the form of open tulips gave off a cheery light, strange and brilliant, unlike anything I had ever seen. Gonçalves, the waiter at the inn where we stopped knew Senhor Matias and after bringing us our steaks, he stayed with us, leaning casually on the table, a napkin over his shoulder, retailing gossip about the Baron and the Baron’s English ladyfriend. When we went up to our room, our way lit by Gonçalves, a tall, white-skinned woman pushed past us in the corridor with a loud rustle of pale silk and a rush of musky perfume. It was the Englishwoman. Lying in the iron bedstead, kept awake by the noise of the coaches, I thought about her as I said my prayers. I had never before been in close contact with such a beautiful body, with such a potent perfume. She was full of grace, the Lord was with her and she passed, blessed amongst women, in a rustle of pale silk. The next day we left in a large carriage that bore the King’s coat of arms and set off along a smooth road to the rhythmic trot, heavy and ponderous, of four sturdy horses. Now and then Senhor Matias, his slippers on his feet and taking a pinch of snuff, would tell me the name of some hamlet we passed, which was huddled around an old church in the cool of a valley. Sometimes, as evening fell, the windows of a quiet house on a hillside would glitter with the brilliance of new gold. The coach would pass by, leaving the house asleep amongst the trees; I would see Venus shining through the steamed-up windows of our coach. In the depths of the night, a bugle would sound and we would ride into a sleeping town, thundering along its paved streets. At the door of the inn, dim lanterns would be swaying silently. Above, in a cosy room, the table would be set with knives and forks and steaming soup tureens; unkempt, yawning travellers would pull off their thick woollen gloves. In a daze, not even hungry, I would drink my chicken soup beside Senhor Matias who always seemed to know at least one of the waiters who would ask him how he was and how things in government were going.

At last, one drizzly Sunday morning, we reached a large house standing in a muddy square. Senhor Matias told me this was Lisbon and, wrapping me in my cloak once more, he sat me down on a bench at the back of a damp room full of luggage and massive iron scales. A bell was slowly tolling for mass. A group of soldiers passed by the door, their guns beneath their oilskin capes. A man took charge of our trunks and we got into a carriage where I fell asleep on Senhor Matias’ shoulder. When he set me down on the ground again, we were in a gloomy courtyard, strewn with gravel, with black-painted benches. On the steps sat a fat girl whispering to a man wearing a scarlet surplice who was clutching a poor-box in his arms.

The girl was Vicência, Aunt Patrocínio’s maid. Senhor Matias chatted to her as he went up the steps, leading me tenderly by the hand. In a room lined with dark wallpaper, we met a very tall, thin lady, dressed in black, with a heavy gold chain around her neck. A purple scarf tied beneath her chin formed a lugubrious hood about her head and, in the depths of the shadow it cast, I caught the black glint of a pair of dark glasses. Behind her, on the wall, an image of Our Lady of Sorrows was watching me, her breast pierced by swords.

‘This is your Auntie,’ Senhor Matias said to me. ‘You must love her and always do as she tells you.’

Slowly, reluctantly, she lowered her greenish, sunken-cheeked face to mine. I felt the vague brush of a kiss, cold as stone. My aunt recoiled at once, furious.

‘Good gracious, Vicência! How dreadful! I think someone’s put oil on his hair!’

Frightened, my lower lip already trembling, I looked up at her and mumbled:

‘Yes, they did, Auntie.’

Then Senhor Matias praised my character, my courage on the journey and how cleanly I had eaten my soup at table in the inns we had stopped at.

‘Just as well,’ my aunt grunted. ‘Considering what I’m doing for him, any bad behaviour on his part really would be the last straw. Go on, Vicência, take him inside. Wash the sleep out of his eyes and see if he knows how to make the sign of the cross.’

Senhor Matias gave me two resounding kisses and Vicência led me into the kitchen.

That night they dressed me in my velvet suit and Vicência, wearing a clean apron and looking very serious, led me by the hand into a room hung with curtains made from scarlet damask, where the table legs were golden like the pillars of an altar. My aunt was sitting in the middle of the sofa, wearing a black silk dress and black lace covering her hair; her fingers glittered with rings. By her side, on golden chairs, two clerics sat talking. One of them, plump and smiling, with prematurely white curly hair, opened his arms to me in a fatherly manner. The other, dark and sad-looking, merely mumbled: ‘Good evening’. And from the table, where he was leafing through a large book of prints, a small man with a clean-shaven face and a huge collar gave an embarrassed bow that sent his pince-nez sliding down his nose.

Each of them gave me a tentative kiss. The sad priest asked me my name, which I pronounced ‘Tedrico’. The affectionate one, revealing a set of perfect teeth, said I should separate the syllables and say Te-o-do-ri-co. Then they commented on my resemblance to Mama, especially round the eyes. My aunt sighed and gave thanks to our Lord that I looked nothing like my father. And the fellow with the huge collar shut the book he was reading, put away his pince-nez, and enquired timidly whether I missed Viana do Castelo. Terrified, I murmured:

‘Yes, Auntie.’

Then the older, plumper priest took me on his knee and told me I must fear God, be very quiet around the house, and always obey my Auntie.

‘You haven’t got anyone else but your Auntie now. You must always do what your Auntie tells you.’

Shyly I repeated:

‘Yes, Auntie.’

My aunt ordered me brusquely to remove my finger from my mouth. Then she told me to go straight down the corridor back to the kitchen, to Vicência …

‘And when you pass the chapel, where you see a light and a green curtain, kneel down and make the sign of the cross.’

I didn’t make the sign of the cross, but I did peer behind the curtain. I found my aunt’s chapel truly dazzling. The walls were all lined with purple silk, with painted panels set in flowery frames, touchingly depicting the works of our Lord. The lace on the altar cloth brushed the carpeted floor; the saints carved in ivory and wood, with gleaming haloes, inhabited a little wood of violets and red camellias. Two fine silver salvers, leaning against the walls like holy shields, glinted in the light from the wax candles, and raised up on his blackwood cross, beneath a canopy, was our Lord Jesus Christ, burnished and golden.

I went slowly over to the green velvet cushion placed before the altar and still bearing the imprint of my aunt’s pious knees. I raised my sweet, dark eyes up to the figure of the crucified Jesus. And I thought that Heaven must be like that, that all the angels and saints, Our Lady and Our Father, must be made out of gold, studded perhaps with precious stones, and that it was their brilliance that gave us the light of day and the stars were the light that glanced off the precious metals, glinting through the black veils in which the holy love of men wrapped them at night when it was time to sleep.

After tea, Vicência put me to bed in a small room next to hers. She made me kneel down in my nightshirt, put my hands together and raise my face to Heaven. Then she dictated the prayers that I should say for my aunt’s health, my Mama’s peace and tranquillity and for the soul of a certain Knight Commander, who was very good, very holy and very rich and whose name was Godinho.

I was barely nine years old when my aunt had shirts and a black suit made for me and placed me, as a boarder, at the Colégio dos Isidoros, which at the time was in Santa Isabel.

Within the first few weeks I had embarked on a warm, affectionate friendship with a boy called Crispim, who was older than me, and was the son of Teles, the owner of Crispim & Co., the textile mill in Pampulha. Crispim assisted at mass on Sundays and, with his long, golden hair, looked as gentle as an angel when he knelt at the altar. Sometimes he would grab hold of me in the corridor and plant voracious kisses all over my face, which at the time was soft and girlish. At night, in the study room, at the table where we would sit leafing through the sleepy pages of dictionaries, he would scribble notes to me in pencil, calling me ‘his idol’ and promising me presents of boxes of steel-nibbed pens.

Thursday was the day set aside for the unpleasant task of washing our feet. And three times a week grubby Father Soares would come, toothpick in mouth, to question us about doctrine and to tell us about the life of our Lord.

Then they took him and dragged him to the house of Caiaphas … Hey, you, the one on the end of the bench, who was Caiaphas? Wrong. Wrong again! No, that’s not right either! You dimwits. He was a Jew, one of the very worst. Now, they say that in a certain very barren place in Judaea there grows a tree covered in thorns, so ugly it would make your flesh creep …’

The bell for the break would ring and we would all simultaneously slam shut our books on Christian doctrine.

Due to its proximity to the latrines, an unpleasant smell pervaded the gloomy, gravelled playground and the older boys’ chief delight was to sit passing round a cigarette in a room on the ground floor where, on Sundays, we were taught mazurkas by the old dancing master, Cavinetti, who wore pumps and curled his hair.

Each month, Vicência, in cloak and scarf, would come to meet me after mass to carry me off to spend a Sunday with my aunt. Before I left, Isidoro Junior would always examine my ears and fingernails. Often he would give me a furious soaping in his own basin, muttering under his breath: ‘filthy little swine’. Then he would take me to the door, pat me on the head, call me ‘his dear little friend’ and ask Vicência to send his respects to Senhora Dona Patrocínio das Neves.

We lived in Campo de Santana. When I walked down the Chiado, I would stop outside a shop selling prints and gaze upon a picture of a young woman, blonde and languid, with bare breasts, reclining on a tigerskin and holding in the tips of her fingers, finer even than Crispim’s, a heavy pearl necklace. The paleness of her naked skin made me think of the Baron’s English ladyfriend and I would smell once more the perfume that had so troubled me in the corridor at the inn, scattered now along the sunny street amongst the silk dresses of the grave, elegant ladies heading for mass at Rua do Loreto.

At home, my aunt would hold out her hand for me to kiss and I would spend the morning leafing through volumes of A Panorama of the Universe in her sitting room where there was a striped sofa, a fine blackwood wardrobe and coloured lithographs of affecting scenes from the purer than pure life of her favourite saint, the patriarch St Joseph. With her purple scarf pulled well down over her forehead, my aunt would sit at the window poring over a large accounts book, a blanket tucked round her feet.

At three o’clock she would close the book, peer out at me from the shadows cast by her headscarf and start questioning me about doctrine. Eyes lowered, I would say the creed and list the Ten Commandments, all the time aware of the smell she gave off, the bittersweet odour of snuff and formic acid.

On Sundays the two clerics came to dine with us. The one with curly hair was Father Casimiro, my aunt’s proctor. He would smile and hug me, invite me to decline arbor, arboris, currus, curri and affectionately declare me to be ‘a boy of great talent’. The other ecclesiastical gentleman would praise the Colégio dos Isidoros as being a splendid educational establishment whose peer was not to be found even in Belgium. His name was Father Pinheiro. He seemed to me to grow ever darker, ever sadder. Every time he passed a mirror, he would stick out his tongue and stand there studying it, a look of suspicion and terror on his face.

At dinner, Father Casimiro would always congratulate me on my healthy appetite.

‘Go on, have another mouthful of this veal stew. Boys should be well-fed and contented!’

And Father Pinheiro would pat his stomach and say:

‘Ah, happy days, when one wasn’t afraid to risk a second helping of veal!’

He and my aunt would then discuss their various ailments. Father Casimiro, his face slightly flushed, his napkin tied about his neck, with plate piled high and glass brimming, would smile at me beatifically.

When the gaslamps amongst the trees in the square began to glow, Vicência would put on her old plaid shawl and take me back to school. At that hour, on Sundays, the fellow with the clean-shaven face and huge collar would arrive. He was Senhor José Justino, secretary to the Brotherhood of St Joseph and my aunt’s notary, with an office in the Praça de São Paulo. In the courtyard, where he would already be taking off his coat, he would chuck me under the chin and ask Vicência about Senhora Dona Patrocínio’s health. Then he would go up the steps and we would close the heavy door behind us. And I would breathe a sigh of relief, for that big house with its red damasks, innumerable saints and its churchy smell depressed me.

Along the way, Vicência would talk to me about my aunt, who, six years before, had plucked her from the poorhouse. Thus I learned that my aunt had problems with her liver, that she always kept large quantities of gold coins in a green silk bag and that Knight Commander Godinho, her and my own mother’s uncle, had left her two hundred contos in the form of property, investments, the Quinta do Mosteiro near Viana, as well as silver and porcelain from India … Auntie was very rich! I must always be good and always please her!

At the school door Vicência would say ‘Goodbye, my love’ and give me a big kiss. Often at night, clutching my pillow to me, I would think of Vicência and of her arms, plump and white as milk, which I had seen when she rolled up her sleeves. And thus there grew up in my heart a chaste passion for Vicência. One day in the playground, a boy, who already sported an incipient beard, called me ‘a sissy’. I invited him to meet me in the latrines and, with one fearful blow, I bloodied his whole face. I became an object of fear. I smoked cigarettes. Crispim had since left the school and my sole ambition then was to learn how to fence. One day, my noble love for Vicência suddenly disappeared, almost without my noticing, like a flower one drops in the street.

And so the years passed: towards Christmas the stove would be lit in the refectory and I would put on my wool-lined greatcoat with its astrakhan collar; the swallows would arrive in the eaves and, in my aunt’s chapel, perfuming Christ’s golden feet, instead of camellias, there would be armfuls of the first red carnations of the season; then it would be the time for seabathing and Father Casimiro would send my aunt a basket of grapes from his farm in Torres … I began studying Rhetoric.

One day, our good proctor told me that I would not be going back to school, but would instead complete my secondary education in Coimbra, in the house of a Dr Roxo, teacher of theology. New linen was prepared for me. Written on a piece of paper, my aunt gave me a prayer to St Luís Gonzaga, patron saint of all studious youths, to whom I was to pray every day, asking him to preserve in my body a shining chastity and in my soul the fear of the Lord. Father Casimiro accompanied me to that gracious city, where Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, slumbers.

I took an instant dislike to Dr Roxo. I led a harsh and cloistered life in his house and it was a cause of ineffable joy to me, when, in my first year of studying Law, that unpleasant cleric died a miserable death from anthrax. I moved into far more congenial lodgings with the Pimenta family. And, immediately and quite immoderately, I discovered all of life’s freedoms and potent pleasures. I never again mumbled that presumptuous prayer to St Luís Gonzaga or bent my manly knee before a holy image wearing a halo on its head. I got roaring drunk at Camelas and proved my strength by bloodily defeating a bruiser from the Trony. I sated my carnal desires with delicious love affairs at Terreiro da Erva; I wandered in the moonlight, wailing out fados; I used a cane; and when my beard grew dense and black I proudly accepted the nickname ‘Raposão’ – the Big Fox. Nevertheless, every fortnight, in my best handwriting, I would write my aunt a humble, pious letter, in which I would tell her how difficult my studies were, how modest my habits, about my copious prayers and stringent fasts, the sermons with which I sustained myself, the sweet unburdenings of my soul to the Heart of Jesus in the evenings in the cathedral and the novenas with which I salved my soul in Santa Cruz during the quiet hours of my free days.

Consequently the summer months spent in Lisbon proved excruciating. I could not go out, not even to get my hair trimmed, without having slavishly to beg permission from my aunt. I didn’t dare smoke a cigarette after coffee. I had to return virginally home as soon as night fell and, before going to bed, had to spend a long time in the chapel praying with my aunt. I had condemned myself to this detestable life of devotion!

‘Do you say your rosary when you’re studying?’ my aunt would ask me coldly.

And I would smile abjectly and say:

‘Of course I do! I can’t get to sleep if I haven’t!’

The Sunday gatherings continued. Father Pinheiro, sadder than ever, was complaining now not only about his heart but also about his bladder. And there was another regular guest, an old friend of Knight Commander Godinho, a faithful visitor to the Neves household, Dr Margaride, the one who was the public prosecutor in Viana and later the judge in Mangualde. Made wealthy by the death of his brother, Abel, who had been the secretary of the Patriarchal Council, the doctor, weary of lawsuits, had retired and now lived a life of leisure, reading the newspapers, in a house he owned in Praça da Figueira. Since he had known my father and had often visited him at the Quinta do Mosteiro, he treated me from the start with a mixture of authority and informality.

He was a stout, rather solemn man, already completely bald, with a large, pale face in which the most striking feature were his thick, coal-black eyebrows. The moment he entered my aunt’s living room, and no sooner was he through the door, than he would impart to us news of some great catastrophe: ‘Haven’t you heard? There’s been a terrible fire in the Baixa!’ In fact, it would turn out to have been nothing more serious than a chimney on fire. But, as a young man, Dr Margaride, in an access of sombre imagination, had written two tragedies, which had left him ever after with a morbid taste for exaggeration and a desire to shock. ‘I’m the only one,’ he would say, ‘who has a true appreciation of the grandiose.’

And, as he terrified my aunt and the two priests with some new tale, he would always take a large pinch of snuff.

I liked Dr Margaride. He had known my father in Viana do Castelo and so had often heard him play his guitar and sing the ‘Ballad of Count Ordonho’. They had spent whole evenings together wandering poetically by the water’s edge at the Quinta do Mosteiro whilst Mama sat in the shade of the alder trees making nosegays of wild flowers. And he it was who sent me the traditional gift of almonds as soon as I was born as night fell on Good Friday. More than that, he would speak openly to my aunt – even in my presence – in praise of my intellect and my discreet manners.

‘Our Teodorico, Dona Patrocínio, is a young man any aunt could be proud of. In him, dear lady, you have found another Telemachus!’

And I would blush modestly.

Now one day in August, as I was walking with him in the Rossio, I first made the acquaintance of a relative of ours, a distant relative, a cousin of Knight Commander G. Godinho. Dr Margaride introduced us, saying only: ‘This is Xavier, your cousin, a young man of great gifts.’ He was a grubby fellow with a blonde moustache, who had once been an elegant gentleman, but had wildly squandered the thirty contos inherited from his father, the owner of a rope factory in Alcântara. Just months before he died of pneumonia, Knight Commander G. Godinho had, out of charity, given him a job at the Secretaria da Justiça with a salary of twenty milréis a month. Xavier was now living in a tenement in Rua da Fé with a Spanish woman called Carmen and her three children.

I went there one Sunday. It was almost bare of furniture. The one and only washbasin was fixed in the broken wicker seat of a chair. Xavier spat blood all morning. And Carmen, dishevelled and in slippers, her wine-stained cotton dressing gown dragging along the floor, was sullenly walking up and down the room rocking a child swathed in rags, its head badly cut.

Xavier, who right from the start addressed me as ‘tu’, lost no time in broaching the subject of Aunt Patrocínio. She was his one hope in the midst of all that gloomy poverty. As a servant of Jesus and the owner of so much property, she could not allow a relative, a Godinho, to waste away in that hovel, with no sheets, no cigarettes, with ragged children all around crying for a bit of bread. What would it cost Aunt Patrocínio to set him up, as the State already had done, with a little allowance of twenty milréis?

‘You’re the one who should talk to her, Teodorico! You’re the one who should tell her … Look at those children. They haven’t even got any socks. Come here, Rodrigo, and talk to your Uncle Teodorico. Tell him what you had for lunch today? A mouthful of stale bread! With no butter or anything! That’s what our life is like, Teodorico. You’ve no idea how hard it is!’

Touched, I promised to speak to my aunt.

Speak to her! I did not even dare tell my aunt that I knew Xavier and had gone to that filthy hovel inhabited by a scrawny Spanish woman steeped in sin.

And so, in order that they should not witness my ignoble terror of my aunt, I did not return to Rua da Fé.

Towards the middle of September, on the day of the Birth of Our Lady, I learned through Dr Barroso that my cousin Xavier was near death and wanted to speak to me in private.

Somewhat irritated, I went there that same evening. You could smell the fever on the stairs. Carmen was sobbing in the kitchen, talking to another very thin Spanish woman, who was wearing a black mantilla and a sad, skimpy camisole in cherry-red satin. On the floor, the children were scraping out a casserole dish. And in the bedroom Xavier lay coughing his lungs out, a blanket wound about him, a bowl at his head full of gobbets of blood.

‘You came then.’

‘What’s happened, Xavier?’

Using an expletive, he told me that he was ruined. And lying back, his dry eyes glittering, he spoke to me about my aunt. He had written her a beautiful, heartrending letter; the cruel creature had not even replied. So now he intended putting an advertisement in the Jornal de Notícias, a plea for alms, which he would sign: ‘Xavier Godinho, cousin of the wealthy Knight Commander G. Godinho’. He wanted to see if Dona Patrocínio das Neves would allow a relative, a Godinho, to beg publicly like that in a newspaper.

‘But I need your help to soften her heart! When she reads the advertisement, describe to her the poverty we live in. Appeal to her generous side. Tell her it’s shameful to allow a relative, a Godinho, to die in penury. Tell her that tongues are already wagging! I’ve had some soup today, but that’s only thanks to Lolita, one of Benta Bexigosa’s girls, who gave us four coroas. You see how low I’ve sunk!’

Deeply affected, I rose to my feet.

‘You can count on me, Xavier.’

‘Look, if you’ve got five tostões to spare, give them to Carmen.’

I gave them to her and left, swearing solemnly, in the name of the Godinhos and in the name of Jesus, that I would speak to my aunt!

After lunch the next day, toothpick in mouth, my aunt was languidly unfolding the Jornal de Notícias. Xavier’s advertisement was obviously the first thing she saw, for she stared for a long time at the corner of page three where it gleamed blackly: distressing, shaming, terrifying.

At that moment, I seemed to see turned towards me, set against the stark backdrop of the hovel they lived in, Xavier’s sad eyes, Carmen’s sallow face bathed in tears, the children’s thin little hands held out in expectation of a crust of bread. And each of those poor, unfortunate beings anxiously awaited the words I was about to address to my aunt – forthright, moving words that would surely save them and give them their first taste of meat in that whole wretched summer. I opened my mouth. However, my aunt was already muttering something, leaning back in her chair, smiling a fierce little smile as she did so:

‘They’ll just have to put up with it. That’s what happens to people who lose their fear of God and get themselves involved with drunken sluts. He shouldn’t have frittered all his money away on loose living. Frankly, any man who ruins himself over a woman, any man who’s a skirt-chaser, is a lost cause in my opinion. He forfeits both God’s forgiveness and mine. Let him suffer, let him suffer just as our Lord Jesus Christ suffered.’

I lowered my head and murmured:

‘Nor have we yet suffered enough. You’re quite right, Auntie. He should never have got himself involved with that woman!’

She stood up and gave thanks to the Lord. I went to my room and locked myself in, trembling, my aunt’s words, chilling and threatening, still echoing in my head, my aunt, for whom any man who got himself entangled with women was a lost cause. I had got involved with women in Coimbra, at the Terreiro da Erva. I had documentary evidence of my sins in my trunk, a photograph of Teresa dos Quinze, a silk ribbon and a letter, the sweetest of them all, in which she called me ‘her soul’s one true love’ and asked if I could lend her eighteen tostões! I had sewn these relics into the lining of a woollen waistcoat, fearing my aunt’s incessant rummagings amongst my underwear. But there they were, in the trunk to which she had the key, a cardboard-hard lump inside the waistcoat on which, any day now, her suspicious fingers might well alight. And then, in the eyes of my aunt, I would be as good as dead.

Very slowly I opened the trunk, unstitched the lining of the waistcoat, took out Teresa’s delicious letter, the ribbon still impregnated with the smell of her skin, and the photograph of her wearing a mantilla. Out on the balcony, I mercilessly burned it all, the sweet words, the sweet face, and desperately swept the ashes of my love out into the courtyard.

I didn’t dare go back to Rua da Fé that week. Then, one drizzly day, I did return, hunched beneath my umbrella, as it was growing dark. Seeing me staring up at the dead, black windows of the hovel, a neighbour told me that Senhor Godinho, the poor man, had been carried away to hospital on a stretcher.

Sadly, I went down the Passeio steps. And in the damp evening, I collided with another umbrella and heard someone gaily call out my Coimbra nickname:

‘Raposão!’

It was Silvério, known as Rinchão (or Woodpecker), my fellow student and lodger in the Pimenta household. He had been spending that month in the Alentejo with his uncle, the famously wealthy Baron de Alconchel. And now that he was back, he was on his way to see a certain Ernestina, a little blonde girl who lived in Salitre in a pink house with roses growing over the verandah.

‘Do you want to come along, Raposão? There’s another pretty young thing there too, Adélia. What, you don’t know Adélia? Well, come and meet her then. She’s quite a girl!’

It was a Sunday, the night my aunt’s friends came to supper; I had to be home at eight o’clock on the dot. I scratched my beard indecisively. Rinchão launched into a description of Adélia’s white arms and I fell into step beside him, pulling on my black gloves.

Armed with a packet of cakes and a bottle of Madeira, we found Ernestina sewing elastic into a pair of serge gaiters. And, languidly smoking a cigarette, stretched out on a sofa, was Adélia, wearing only a dressing gown and a white underskirt, her slippers lying where they had fallen on the carpet. I sat down next to her, dumb with desire, my umbrella clasped between my knees. Only when Silverio and Ernestina ran off into the kitchen, their arms about each other, to fetch some glasses for the Madeira wine, could I bring myself to ask Adélia blushingly:

‘And where are you from?’

She was from Lamego, she said. Engulfed once more by shyness, I could only stammer out some remark about how depressing this rainy weather was. She politely asked me for another cigarette, addressing me as ‘sir’. I appreciated her good manners. The long sleeves of her dressing gown fell back to reveal arms so white and soft that were one to die whilst in their embrace, death itself would seem delicious.

I held out to her the plate on which Ernestina had arranged the cakes. She asked my name and told me she had a nephew called Teodorico and that one remark was like a strong, subtle thread which she unwound from her own heart and wound about my own.

‘Why don’t you put your umbrella over there in the corner, sir?’ she said, laughing.

The piquant gleam of her small teeth caused a compliment to bloom inside me.

‘Because I can’t bear to leave your side, not even for an instant.’

She stroked my neck very slowly. Dazed with pleasure, I finished off the Madeira wine she had left in her glass.

Ernestina was in poetic mood and lay nestled on Rinchão’s lap singing a fado. Then Adélia turned languidly towards me and drew my face close to hers; our lips met in the most serious, most passionate, most profound kiss that had ever stirred my being.

At that sweetest of moments, a hideous clock with a moon face, which seemed to be spying on me from the marble top of a mahogany table, from between two vases bereft of flowers, began to strike ten o’clock in nasal, ironic, phlegmatic tones.